Jan 04 2009
Sheez… you can see by the title of this post that I’ve been attending way too many meetings. You see, during these meetings, when the direction of the discussions get out of the hand with heated debates and various digressions, someone raises a point of order to get everyone back on track. Perhaps, [...]
Aug 30 2008
Honey will not be caught dead watching a Filipino movie. But he is still in Cambodia and I and my three old friends had nothing to do one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago. Perfect timing. I can be as jologs as I want and I have a jolly-ogs good time. So [...]
Aug 25 2008
In my last week in Phnom Penh, Honey and I were driving to work on our usual route. On the way, we passed by the Royal Palace on our right while the great Bassac River (which connects to the Mekong River just a few miles away) was flowing serenely on our left over the [...]
Aug 06 2008
So six years of married life, all of those spent in Cambodia, and heaps and heaps of stuff, both junk and precious (mostly junk), managed to sprout out like mushrooms. And now that it’s time to go back to the Philippines, like turtles, we have to carry our entire home on our backs. [...]
Jul 06 2008
I went to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned sometime last week and then had a facial a day after that. Funny how there are so many parallels between dentists/clinics/dental appointments and facials/facial therapists/facial rooms. Consider this…
My dental cleaning took thirty minutes, my facial took forty minutes. My dentist and my facial [...]
May 18 2008
As if the stars in heaven were aligning themselves to outline my fate, in May 1970, Cambodia, the country where more than thirty years later I was destined to go for my first foreign posting, was all over the international news.
May 11, 1970 cover of Time Magazine
Mar 16 2008
So I missed my second anniversary of blogging on February 24. We were in Bangkok then and I was thinking more in the line of shoes and bags rather than kurokuros and blogs. No biggie, it’s just as well as my second year of blogging has been notable perhaps only because of its [...]
Feb 18 2008
Amidst this paradise in Sihanoukville, I see this woman carrying a tiny man by his underarms. The man is skeletal thin and is probably at the brink of death. He is too weak to even lift his head, much less to walk. Nearby, a little boy of probably not more than four [...]
Sep 13 2007
If Santa were real, how would he do his job in the Philippines?
How could he wear his red furry suit and his red furry hat,
When Christmases in the Philippines are unbelievably scorching hot?
How could he climb down the chimney, when Filipinos don’t even know what’s a chimney?
If he climbs through a window plank, he might [...]
Aug 21 2007
I am not a cell phone person. In fact, I would have gladly stuck it out with my old trusty cell phone appropriately named Scruffy (in Tagalog – Hampas-Lupa or Patay-Gutom) until it dies its last breath. Unfortunately, that is exactly what it did. It died its last breath. And with [...]
"We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter."
Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones
