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Things I’m grateful for, week 3/52
1. These comfy shorts that were ₱53 pesos each (around $1USD) 2. Catching up with a friend and remembering we met in person a year ago 3. Getting a box of cinnamon rolls as a gift from a friend. 4. Frozen grapes for snacking.
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Things I’m grateful for, week 2 of 52
1. Beef nilaga, mom’s side style. All comfort-y with the beef we buy from my dad’s side of the region. 2. Catching up with a good friend over video call. 3. Good bourbon. What are you grateful for this week?
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Things I’m grateful for, week 1/52
I will try and keep this up, and not be too dramatic about it. I am approaching this year with a ton of caution and hope. So here are a few things I’m grateful for the week for: 1. This guy, with the Goku hair. 2. The buns getting salad greens, kale and basil and random treats and them being happy about it. 3. Finally finding matchy comfortable cotton pajamas (and on sale). 4. Fresh sheets on the bed. What are you grateful for?
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You light up my life
I have been wanting to get one of these since we saw them more than 5 years ago. Thank goodness for small favors (and the randomness of shopee) that we’re now able to have this on the car, it feels a bit more like Christmas. This year is going to be so different in how we celebrate the holiday, and I use the term celebrate loosely. While we understand how lucky we are to have all members of the family still here this year (unlike millions of other families), it’s a significantly smaller table, and an incredibly quiet one as well. I have made my feelings about Christmas pretty clear. I love…
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Today has been hard. Here’s a bun photo to lighten today’s load.
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Dear Nanay
Dear Nanay, It looks like we’re going to miss All Saint’s weekend and your second death anniversary prayer/food gathering with the family. And Christmas. This is going to be my first Christmas without the rest of the family, as we’re being extra cautious and not doing any socializing without a vaccine. If anything else, your eldest is still paranoid as heck about health. It’s going to be difficult on top of an insane year and I remember when the lockdown was first announced, we discussed as cousins how we were going to keep you at home if you were still alive, and who would have to tell you the news.…
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I still don’t know what to say
What can we say after most of a year being in lockdown? The fear that it will be even longer still? The uncertainty of what we face in still unprecedented times? So I’ve been trying to get out of being in my head a lot of the time and listening to a better voice, one that used to be Anthony Bourdain. It’s been difficult trying to find solace in a man that died by suicide. However, just hearing him speak still gives me that sense of a friend who’s going through things too, but will always be willing to listen. So I will take his words, sent to David Chang…
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I think you should listen to Florence and the Machine’s Rabbit Heart today
Anyone who’s met me knows I am a crazy rabbit lady (my friend Marian Jo has mocked up collages even) but this is a whole different thing. I have been working by myself a lot, and when you work nights, the times are even quieter, and even though I use a friend’s music around 60% of the time while working, when I need to fill the quiet, I listen to songs I can sing to. I have been listening to Florence and the Machine’s Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up) lately. The lyrics are apt for a lot of things I’ve been thinking about: Life is so different since March that…
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I don’t know what to say.
We’re all living in a dystopian world, and we’re all having to deal with this apart from the people we’re living with. Somehow it doesn’t feel real. What’s happening to everyone in the world right now. And while I can genuinely call myself fortunate, my family is healthy, together and keeping each other in what these times can only call sane, you can’t help but feel for everyone else going through crap right now. I guess it’s the demonizing of other people that’s making it harder. Everyone is facing a kind of isolation but also trying to be there for each other. Where we used to just run to each…
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Of octopuses and grade school
There is a running joke between my grade school friends and I, that we all used to be pogi, and now we’ve grown out of it. It’s always jarring looking at photos of us from the time, where nobody had a haircut lower than our chins, where you couldn’t wear a skirt outside the uniform without being made fun of, and being girly was almost a dirty word. It took me a long time to change my perspective, and moving schools was the only way I could grow out my hair to the length it is now (it took me about 2 years, and I’ve never cut it above my…
