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Katong officer sa NAIA nga nangawat og 300 dollars sa isa ka foreigner, unya gilamoy ang kwarta para dili masakpan -- that incident brings me back to a conversation I had with classmates back in my elementary days. Nagstorya mi sa akong mga classmate unsa among ganahan kuhaon nga kurso inig college. Kadaghanan nitubag og Customs Administration, para makapangawat -- para madato. Seriously, dili ni binuang. Kasagaran man gud kay naa sila'y kaila (pamilya, parente) nga taga Customs -- nga nangurakot, nangawat, unya nadato. What's troubling about all this is that every one of them answered like it's normal to steal, that to aspire to go into Customs means -- yes -- you MUST steal. If you don't, you're a fish out of water. Mike Ehrmantraut, the bent cop turned "cleaner" and hitman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, lost his son Matty, an honest cop -- who, ironically, idolized his father -- because the kid didn't want to take dirty money. Whe...

A loved one has told me several times that I might be bordering on being narcissistic, owing to the fact that whenever she asks me a question on any topic, after giving her an answer I always circle back to me -- my experiences, to be exact. I told her that that's the only way I can make sense of my answer, or think clearly, for that matter -- basing it on my own experience. I'm pretty confident that I'm not narcissistic; I just believe that there's wisdom to be gleaned from the personal.  Which is why I've always been drawn to writers of the personal essay, the memoir, epistolary novels in the form of journals, and to fictionists who write in the first person. That's why I'm drawn to blogging. So this is narcissism? So be it. 

I have a lot of artist friends -- graphic designers, illustrators, painters, calligraphers, photographers, architects, tattoo artists -- and I have a ton of respect for all of them and for what they do. In the case of the latter, I've ALWAYS tipped them on top of the actual price of the tattoo they quoted me -- almost always 15%, at least. I have 30 tattoos now (and counting), since I was first inked way back in 2017, spread over hours and hours of 14 painful sessions, and I've been fortunate enough to have been tattooed by a total of 10 talented artists, majority of them Filipino and Mexican, and a couple of Americans. The way I see it, I'm just borrowing their art, which they painstakingly inked onto its permanent canvas, my skin -- until I draw my last breath, that is, and the canvas and the art burns to ashes in an incinerator (I prefer to be cremated when the time comes). My point? Artists (any kind of artist, not just tattoo artists) aren't respected enough these ...

All these Filipino noontime-show hosts -- from TVJ to Vice Ganda to Willie Revillame, and now Paolo Contis -- seem to have a shared script whenever they're faced with criticism: "Gusto lang namin magbigay ng saya." This boilerplate answer makes them sound like the selfless heroes that they're not, especially since "magbigay ng saya" is actually newspeak for "we want you, the masa, to watch our program and of course keep on buying those canned goods and detergent and instant noodles and 3-in-1 instant coffee and 5-in-1 herbal tea etc., and buy them from that grocery chain owned by big-time smugglers so that these products and grocery chains keep advertising with us, while we earn millions by trying to 'entertain' you, regardless of the fact that we've dumbed down our show, which is what we believe is good-enough entertainment for you, but deep down we don't think it's really entertaining -- of course not -- but hey, we've already ...

I was always drawn to the personal essay, which has -- fairly or unfairly -- been regarded as inferior to the novel, the play, or the poem, the runt of the litter in literature. The form has frequently been dismissed as an exercise in self-indulgence and navel-gazing. It is also the perfect “anti-AI” literary device. You devour essay collections by E.B. White, Philip Lopate, and David Sedaris. You enjoy nonfiction by Joyce Carol Oates, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and George Orwell. You read essays by Filipino writers Conrado De Quiros, Jessica Zafra, Butch Dalisay, Simeon Dumdum, and Kerima Polotan-Tuvera. Why? You read those writers’ essays because you want a front-row seat to their experiences; you want to know their opinions, which might -- who knows? -- shape your own. You laugh out loud at Sedaris writing about his time working as an elf at Macy’s department store; you marvel at De Quiros’s wisdom as he deconstructs in a column why Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is...

In January of this year, I posted this on Instagram: Tl;dr: When I decided to move here to Mexico several years ago, I came prepared career-wise. I finished a one-year course to teach English as a foreign language before flying here, expecting to transition from writing to full-time teaching (I did my research, and majority of the expats living here in Mexico teach English at a language school or at a university). Sure, it was scary to think about, that I would have to turn my back on something that I have been doing professionally since I was 19, but I decided that I wouldn't mind the career change, if ever; it comes with the territory for someone who had already made up his mind to leave everything behind and immigrate. Many years later, I'm still pleasantly surprised that I stayed as a writer here in Mexico, doing what I've loved doing since leaving university, being fortunate enough to have landed writing jobs that have helped me grow not only professionally, but al...

These days I've been reminiscing about the good old days, and in this case the days where the Internet was already around but people didn't have smartphones yet. Or Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. You get the idea. In the Philippines back then Friendster was king. Quite a few were also into Myspace. But what reigned then were blogs: hosted on LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogdrive, TypePad, or Blogger -- like this one.  Social media in the form of Facebook and Myspace was already around, sure, but it wasn't as pervasive as social media is right now. And like I said, people didn't have smartphones yet, which, basically, is a pocket computer. I ranted on Facebook last year that Internet wasn't the problem -- that back then we already had social media, but we weren't glued to smartphones like we are now. To be able to access your Friendster or Myspace or Multiply account back then, you needed to fire up your desktop or laptop. And because you had to make time to act...