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Lately I’ve been using three laptops. One for my full-time job, one for my freelance gigs, and one for my personal (and, I’d like to think, more creative) pursuits. The most powerful of the three is the newest, although I could tell right away when the IT guy handed it to me -- when I first visited my new place of employment -- that it wasn’t brand new. The second one might be significantly older than the first, but it still has enough juice to play old games with, and index books with, and listen to streaming music with -- I just have to leave it plugged in, because the battery has seen better days. The third one is the oldest, running on an ancient Pentium processor, but still better than the PC assigned to me many years ago when I used to work for a publishing company in the Philippines -- but that’s another (hilarious) story. When I fire up the first laptop, which I do every morning from Monday to Friday (but now, more increasingly, also during weekends), I feel a sense of dread. I...

It's been eight years now living here in Mexico City, but I still find it strange when I think about it. To be writing this at the dining table on my old laptop, feeling the chill of the early afternoon creeping in from a window opened ever so slightly. Unless you're living in Baguio City in the Philippines, it's not usually commonplace to write "chill" and "early afternoon" in a single sentence. Of all the things I miss from the Philippines, it's the humidity that has to be last on the list. It's the kind of humidity that's unrelenting, the kind that sticks to you wherever you go. There's no escaping it. Just like there's no escaping this feeling of strangeness that I mentioned to begin this blog post. If you told me twenty years ago that I'd be living here in Mexico City as a permanent resident with my Mexican wife -- and speaking passable Spanish at that! -- I wouldn't have believed you. I would have said you were bonkers. ...

Sporting events like the Olympics or the Southeast Asian Games should be a wake-up call to a lot of Filipinos. Our athletes bust their asses day in and day out in training; they do their jobs to the best of their ability. They do their jobs even without a guaranteed budget because the money that should be given to them are stolen by politicians. When are we going to demand that those useless pabigats and epals and sarap-buhays in Malacañang, in the Senate, in Congress, and in city halls all over the country do their jobs for a change? And, more importantly, not steal from the public coffers? What's worse is that these scumbags even have the audacity to steal the spotlight from our athletes when they win medals and bring pride and honor to the country. We demand a lot from our athletes. We should demand more from our public servants.

The reason why people on Facebook can't distinguish between real and fake news, why they think a parody or satire website is reporting legit factual stories, and why they can't read between the lines or understand sarcasm is because the only shit they've read -- have ever read in their sorry lives, and will likely only read until the fucking day they die -- is the shit they read on Facebook. A friendly tip if you're one of these dipshits: log off Facebook, delete your app, and start reading newspapers and books and even comics. Do that for years and years and years and years. When you think you're less stupid and are ready to come back to social media, then by all means, please, log in to your Facebook account again. But not before. You would have done the world a great service. Thank you.

This Jude Bacalso issue reminded me of an old column by the late Conrado de Quiros titled "Popoy," written way back in 2001. De Quiros wrote of the labor leader Filemon "Popoy" Lagman -- who was assassinated in 2001 -- during one of the most difficult years of the Cory presidency: "Some time during her term, Cory allowed the oil giants to raise oil prices despite widespread public perception that it was unjustified. The oil price increase swiftly triggered public protests, which snowballed into an entire movement called the Kilusang Rollback. Emboldened by this, and to 'raise the struggle to higher levels,' the NPA began stopping buses outside Metro Manila and burning them when their drivers refused to join the strike. As it turned out, the fires that consumed the buses consumed the protest movement as well. Overnight, the protest screeched to a halt. The bus burnings sparked angry protests from the public, the commuting masa above all." Lagman c...

Right around the middle of the Dallas Mavericks-Los Angeles Clippers series in the first round of the NBA playoffs, a friend, K, sent me a direct message. K said she'd started watching NBA basketball last season, and called herself "a basic Golden State Warriors fan." She said she really enjoyed how the defending champs Denver Nuggets played too, and wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the game. I looked forward to chatting about basketball with her, of course. I wouldn't call myself an expert on basketball, but I'm Filipino -- we are the biggest basketball fans outside the United States -- which means as a teen I've played a lot of backyard basketball in flip-flops during summer vacations under the scorching Philippine sun (even the power forward position despite only standing five feet five, LOL) and watched both the PBA and the NBA as early as I could remember, thanks to my basketball-crazed father. Those backyard basketball games in high school became...

Before I owned a cat (I've always been a dog person), I thought that this was common sense -- keeping cats indoors. (Unless we're talking about feral cats, though, who are exactly the ones we should be adopting and rescuing and keeping safe indoors.) I never knew that keeping cats indoors was ever a controversial take until I rescued Willow, and found out that there was this faction of cat owners who believe that cats deserve to roam the outdoors until they are tired and decide to go home on their own after a long day of hunting and/or feline fornication.  This, despite the fact that indoor cats live almost twice as long as their free-roaming counterparts. And never mind that cats, because they are still excellent hunters -- an instinct that domestication (ha!) miserably failed to completely stamp out -- are responsible for the deaths of endangered birds and small mammals. Those who support free roaming contend that indoor cats live long but boring lives, and what k...