There’s nothing like drinking eggnog – or ice-cold beer, whichever you prefer – and eating food that will probably add more lbs and elevate your cholesterol level and blood pressure as you stare at your well-lit tree on a chilly Christmas night.
Cheers for the holidays, ladies and gents!
We went to Alay ng Puso and I didn’t pick up a single toddler and treated him like he was my pamangkin or cousin. Or as someone who’d infallibly affect my life in some way.
Caveat: To be able to read and appreciate this essay, you should be armed with the prerequisite knowledge of sarcasm and irony, the ability to acknowledge the absurdity of our government, and have a good set of balls and a backbone.
Facebook invaded the interwebs on February 2004 (and started eating its competition alive); it all started with a [then] Harvard sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg. The Philippines caught the Facebook bug only relatively recently, since Friendster Mad Cow was then the preferred spawn pool/watering hole/troll central/social website.
i never really knew her. she was just one of my many faceless classmates. all of our conversations were limited to heys and nods, except for that one time when i stayed in school to work on something for design class long after everybody else went home.
she was a member of the volleyball varsity. their practice had just finished and she was still towelling off some sweat from her face when she walked into the classroom. her seat was a couple of rows behind mine. after a few minutes spent in silence, she sat down beside me and started talking.
My dad is an amazing fount of interesting stories. Honestly, I’d hear much more if I had more patience to just sit and listen. The extra helping of patience is needed to hear some stories told over and over. Plus, dad is in the habit of bringing me coffee, sitting down, and start telling stories – regardless if I’m writing, playing games, talking to five people at once over chat or just lounging about. I’m sure I do and will do that too – tell stories over and over – so I don’t have the right to be annoyed or anything. Also, my tatay’s stories tend to meld into one another, and sometimes, there isn’t so much as a “It was a dark and stormy night” intro.
Tomorrow marks the end of Banned Books Week, a yearly celebration that started back in 1982 to counter calls for censorship. There have been several challenges to written works for any number of reasons like anti-ethnicism, sexual content, different political and religious viewpoints, violence, offensive language, and inappropriateness for the age group the book was released for, among others.
Umuulan nanaman. Parang may inang humahagulgol para sa mga nawala nyang anak. Malakas, maingay, at hindi matahan. Kung tutuusin, kung iiyakan ng Inang Kalikasan ang kanyang mga anak na puno, siguro kinain na ng dagat ng Pilipinas.
Ketsana, locally known as Typhoon Ondoy, was detected as early as last Wednesday, September 23. I don’t know meteorological jargon, but as far as I know, this one was supposed to be weak. In comparison to the two typhoons I remember, Milenyo (a Category 4 typhoon back in 2006, with lashing windspeeds of 215 kph, around 130 mph. For those of you who like twisted fun facts, this storm also hit the Philippines on the closing days of September and was the one that blew the roof clean off of our house.) and Rosing (a Category 5 that hit back in October 1995, it’s one of the strongest typhoons EVER. If you’re having a hard time visualizing it, jump into a wind tunnel, set the switch to 260 km/h – 160 mph – then stand there while you get pelted with debris.), Ondoy was only a relatively weak PAGASA Storm Signal 1 (30-60 kph). Little did we know though, that what Ondoy lacked in quality, it made up in quantity.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Philippines License.
