Essays from the Weekend

I suffered an acute ligament injury last week and now cannot walk without pain on my left leg. The doctor said it would take a month to a month and a half to heal. In the meantime, I have to wear a knee brace. I don’t have a knee brace yet and walking even a ten-foot distance makes me tear up from the pain/unsteadiness. Like every step is unsure and scares me. I led a very active lifestyle for the past year. For the past 6 or so months, I’ve been doing 3-4 HIIT workouts in a week, with brisk walking for the other days. I almost always close my exercise and activity rings on my Apple watch. I work out first thing in the morning and enjoy the day after. It’s like a safety ritual for me — I’ve worked out so it’s going to be a good day. The injury happened after my HIIT workout on Tuesday morning last week. It was a new move, like a duck walk but not just a duck walk, we were doing deep lunges while in a squat position. I felt strange then but also had the sense that it’s doable. Afterward...

Image from CBC.ca Well hello! I hope that you have had a great past two weeks.  Speaking of which, in case I haven’t said it yet, this site reflects purely personal views and thoughts of yours truly, and should not be attributed to any of the companies that I am or was affiliated with. This is a fully independent, non-profit site and none of these posts or the products in these posts are sponsored. Okay that’s done! Here are my notes for the past two weeks: (Image from Amazon.com) 1. Pronouns are important.   Late to the game but here’s why it's important to always indicate your pronouns (i.e. she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/their). Indicating your pronouns is a helpful way of being inclusive to trans people and the LGBTQ+ community. If everyone says what their pronouns are, trans people would have an easier time communicating theirs. Like living out your authentic self proudly — it makes it easier for everyone around you to live out theirs. (Image from reviewed.com) 2. F...

Image from Sports Illustrated I’ve never gotten into the world of sports (aside from must-watch high profile games/competitions like the Olympics) but athletes have always been fascinating to me. The way they train every day with such discipline, the way they push themselves and then take care of themselves when they recover after a game. The way they arrive at the game dressed so well and then on the court or on the field in their headphones, getting into their mental space to perform. The way they have pre-game and post-game rituals. The way they hire and rely on sports psychologists. They know the secrets to peak physical performance and peak rest. Makes one think — should we train like athletes for the daily things that we have to perform well, i.e. our corporate jobs? Glad to have stumbled across these articles today: Headspace’s Mindfulness and the Corporate Athlete of Today and Harvard Business Review’s The Making of a Corporate Athlete .  Sharing some of my notes so that I...

Hello! Haven’t gotten to write for the past two weeks because of a couple of major things to attend to which have been throwing my daily/weekly routines off-center. This is not even the weekend, yet here is an essay. It’s been a couple of months since I got my iPad Air 4, Apple Pencil 2, and Smart Keyboard Folio set-up. The verdict: best tech set-up ever. I now understand why so many software engineers/tech people declared the 11-inch Macbook Air “best computer ever” when it came out. It’s like a small laptop, but you can rip out the keyboard easily and it’s a tablet. So portable, so nice to type on, a true companion for your thoughts and daily personal operations. Like how Steve Jobs originally wanted to name Apple “Bicycle” instead because he envisioned the computer to be a bicycle for the mind. Easy to bring everywhere because of the 10.9 inch size and light weight. It’s been indispensable. Currently geeking out over putting together my home office. I’ll share when it’s ready. Inves...

  Image from Apple Once upon a time, a friend of mine, let’s call her Rachel, felt miserable because she got realized that she got sucked back into being hooked on social media for the past few days. She had been on a social media break for months. It felt liberating not feeling that strange and persistent impulse to reach for her phone and mindlessly scroll. It felt like she got a God-given time refund of a couple of free hours each day. It was peaceful. It was peak contentment.  Then she had her last day with her company, and, feeling a little sad she couldn’t say goodbye to her work friends in person, decided to add them on social media so that they could maybe keep a digital connection alive while they wait out delta before having drinks in person. She posted a picture to commemorate her last day too, her first post in almost a year. It had likes. Interesting. The feeling of wanting to check likes came back. People kept adding her. Pretty soon she found herself reaching fo...

Image from Headspace In the middle of mentally trying to survive the pandemic, a couple of big, probably lasting, realizations occurred: (a) kindness to yourself is a real thing to be done every day; and (b) “setting your intention” can be as straightforward as “still being okay at the end of the day”. Kindness to self was previously an alien subject to me. And silly. Why does one have to be intentional about being kind to yourself? It sounded like pure fluff and something that’s already automatic anyway, didn’t Nietzsche or somebody say that we are subconsciously acting out of self-interest underneath it all? What does this even mean, in practice? After months and months of being bombarded with the subject on Headspace, I realized that this means being self-aware enough to intentionally take care of yourself like how you would take care of a beloved parent, friend, partner. Making decisions about myself as if I’m another person I care about. Take a nap when I’m tired, not push myself ...

All you need for a home gym For general health, doctors tell us that one needs: (a) 30 minutes of cardio at least 5 times a week and (b) 2 to 3 times of strength training in a week. I wanted to establish a mindless, frictionless routine of getting the requisite cardio and strength sessions done in a week. My fitness goal will always and forever just be general health - no “gains” targets, no gimmicks, no fitness cults (though I would love to go back to group workouts with friends just for fun, like spinning and Lagree, when the circumstances allow). The 30-minute cardio requirement is a no-brainer thanks to my Apple watch (my best exercise motivator!). I just run for exactly 30 minutes when I wake up in the morning. Another thing already in my system is that most afternoons, I take a yoga class  from my favorite yoga teacher which helps with stress and anxiety and physical symmetry. The challenge for me is getting a consistent strength training regimen in. I think it’s essential in...

Photo attributed to pressureUA/istock Headlines this week: congressional probe sought on a COVID-19 research agency. A certain political tandem was announced. With all these fantastically outrageous news and the public outcry they regularly produce, Carrie Bradshaw couldn’t help but wonder: were we this annoyed pre-social media? I read somewhere just this week that posts and articles which have headlines and/or content that rile up readers generate good income. Logically, social media companies make good money from politically-annoyed people. More posts, more user engagement, more eyeballs, more clicks. Logically, if it makes money, there’s an incentive to encourage these kinds of content and to foster irascible characteristics in social media users. Perhaps it’s not too unreasonable to speculate that the more reactive, knee-jerk, denouncing posts you make on social media, the more you feed money into the machine, the more you do your part to keep it going. In other words, the angrier ...

  What a wonderful day it was yesterday to find out that Hidilyn Diaz earned the Philippines’ first Olympic gold medal! Let me break down this joy: 1. The first Filipino to get the gold is a Filipina! 2. In weightlifting, no less! She disregarded all the Filipina mothers’ advice that “ women shouldn’t lift weights, ang matres mo! ” She disregarded the pressure to conform to the Filipino conventions of what a woman should look like, what a woman should focus on. Hidilyn did Hidilyn and she embraced her strengths and unique qualities, conventions be damned. This is what it looks like when we embrace our true strengths and strive to be the best that we can be, without listening to what the rest of the world thinks. 3. Beating the world’s number 1 from China in the process, and the contestant from Kazakhstan too! Those countries are known for the strength of their athletes, and 4 foot 11 Hidilyn beat them! 4. She maxed out at 125kg in training but heroically managed the record-beating ...

  It was the strangest week. The weather. It has been gray and stormy for about 8 straight days? I don’t recall Manila being this gray. Reminds me of what I keep hearing about London, that it’s gray and cloudy most of the time, and the locals rejoice when the day is clear. It was the same we experienced in Denmark. I never understood why people declare a certain day “a beautiful day” when I was younger. In the Philippines, it’s either sunny or rainy. Sunny days don’t equal beautiful days, here. It’s just a normal day. When given a choice, I prefer gray and stormy myself. This week should have been a dream, then, but at some point it just crossed the threshhold to being worrisome. How much rain can our countrymen’s houses, dams, rivers, lakes, take? The nation still has a collective trauma over Ondoy and Yolanda, the superstorms which caused so much death and damage in the country.  The newspapers reported today that many crops have been destroyed and that’s the only thing I he...

Image from NYT For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking a sort of course from Ateneo on how to be a global citizen. At least that’s what I’m telling myself the course is really about. So far, we have covered history (Philippine, Asian, Western), Philippine public policies and administration, Philippine culture. I’m also taking French classes from Verb Hive every Sunday.  It’s been an enjoyable experience so far, learning so much every weekend, but it’s demanding to keep up with the readings and lectures. Prior to this, I haven’t been into taking weekend classes. I just read a lot in my spare time, and that’s how I learn. Not that I don’t like the idea of taking classes; I do. But in Manila with the crazy traffic? It’s hard to show up to things. My close friends used to live in Muntinlupa and go to Makati every Saturday just to have German classes at the Goethe Institute. Imagine that drive. I’m too lazy to do it. Enter the pandemic. Extremely unfortunate turn of events. It comes wi...

Yesterday, I watched one of the great classic gay movies for the first time, But I’m A Cheerleader. I knew that conversion camps existed, but I had never given much thought as to how the experience would be. For those in the dark, conversion camps are where LGBTQ+-identifying/acting kids, boyish girls, and feminine boys are taken in attempts to convert them to be straight.  These conversion processes are reportedly extremely damaging to children’s mental health in the long run, not to mention unsuccessful, and it’s not hard to see why. There was (is?) an ex-gay movement promoting the notion that one’s gay or queer sexual orientation can be “cured” if you catch it early and then undergo conversion therapy (or just by sheer old willpower). There are many people claiming to be successful ex-gays on the internet. Most, if not all, are deeply Christian. I respect their choices and beliefs; I also think that children should be given the opportunity to make their own choices and beliefs. ...

I’m still shaken over the news of former President Noynoy Aquino’s passing. I admired the man and how he operated on pure integrity of character during his term. His appointees all seemed so principled, full of integrity, incorruptible. “Walang wangwang” - who could forget that, when people with connections didn’t really get ahead of the rest of us? The showstopping economic growth of the country? The “do the right thing” mentality that the government and the citizens rallied behind? I didn’t vote for him when he ran for president but he easily won me over, even though he was imperfect.   The Aquino nuclear family accomplished so much — his dad, incendiary opposition senator whose death sparked the EDSA People Power Revolution; his mom, who led the traumatized country out into a new democracy; and PNoy who again shone a light on the goodness of the Filipino people. The newspapers generally stop there but I’d like to add: Kris Aquino, the top individual taxpayer of the country for s...

Hi there! I wasn’t able to write this past weekend. I was too enthralled with where I was. Practically in a rainforest. I love looking at wild birds and there were many different birds where I went. I saw a hornbill (at least I think that’s what it’s called, it has a horn on its bill), lots of crows, a couple of mysterious blue birds. The whole weekend, I felt like I was in a Murakami novel. Many parked cars but no people around. Stray cats everywhere. Weird trees all around. Deserted, run-down, 60s style buildings. I’ll be writing about this place soon. It’s just on Airbnb. I just want to keep it to myself for a little while. There’s a fun video series on Youtube by GQ called 10 Things, where famous people like Shawn Mendes, Finneas, and Trixie Mattel list show and tell their 10 essentials. Here’s Dan Levy, whom I like: Noone asked me, but if I were to share my ten essentials: 1. Phone case wallet. A gamechanger. I used to worry about bringing my phone and my wallet all the time. Wit...

  I have a love-hate relationship with the news. I grew up seeing my dad read multiple newspapers every weekend. It was a habit that I wanted for myself too. It seems responsible to be on top of current events. I never did get into it consistently though. The news appeared to be constantly disappointing. It served me heartbreaking headline after heartbreaking headline, especially in the recent years.  Tim Ferriss gave me an idea back then that it was okay to stop reading the news in the name of focus and mental health. He said he didn’t read any news because there was no purpose in keeping up to date just for the sake of being up to date; and when there’s something we absolutely should know, the information makes its way to us somehow anyway. I subscribed to that worldview for a while, a little relieved that  Tim validated that. Then I subscribed to New York Times and only read that. It was foreign news, great writing, great drama, and it all seemed far-distanced from me,...