11/27/2019 ‒
Bare minimum

It was roughly four years ago when Manila hosted the APEC Leaders' Summit.

I remember that very well, but not because I was here as it happened. I was in Hong Kong for a work trip, on the very week that the government decided to implement a convoluted series of road closures to ensure that world leaders can move from hotel to venue and back quickly, at the expense of pretty much everybody else. I remember browsing through my social media feeds and seeing nothing but people complaining about being stuck in traffic for hours, getting home at almost midnight, all for the sake of impressing, perhaps, foreign dignitaries.

Well, I was affected too. These Hong Kong trips can be repetitive, so I know too well to take the evening Cathay Pacific flight back as the second day of the conference I'm attending (well, technically covering) winds down. But the government was also closing down the airport to allow world leaders to arrive (and leave) the country in an orderly fashion, at the expense of, well, pretty much everybody else. Our flight was bumped to three in the morning the following day, which meant a rare instance of me sleeping in the airport terminal, and an ever rarer instance of me sleeping in the plane itself - but not after watching Stellar on the in-flight entertainment system. I was starting to really get into K-pop, but that's another story.

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11/26/2019 ‒
Afternoon tea

Over the weekend Shalla and I did something we haven't done in a while: have tea.

No, milk tea doesn't count. If we're being honest, it's more likely that's water with tea flavoring and loads of sugar and, maybe, some milk. And pearls. And brown sugar. And whatever else they decide is a trend these days, like cream cheese.

No, tea at home doesn't count. In the past few months Shalla's shifted from coffee to tea before going to work, which meant we've both had to stock up on the essentials. She settled on a preference early on: English breakfast tea with two teaspoons of creamer and two teaspoons of sugar. (Teaspoons!) I just went along with it, but at least we both know that, one, we prefer Twinings, and two, it's disappointing how Rustan's does not carry it, or at least the 25-bag boxes of it. Surprisingly, SM does.

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11/20/2019 ‒
Infuriating: man who says he doesn't watch a lot of anime suddenly has a lot of opinions about Kimetsu no Yaiba

First off, yes, I do watch anime.

Some, not a lot. I wasn't really raised on them. I watched some as a kid, but only whatever was on television at the time, and not always the really action-y stuff. But then again, I was a kid. Doraemon was more appealing, but I did watch Yu Yu Hakusho. I can't claim to really remember everything now, though. "Isang daang porsyento ng aking lakas" is an exception.

On the other hand, Shalla was, so she's more likely to know her way around these things. When we started dating, she started exposing - re-exposing? - me to these shows, although I didn't gobble up all of them like I did when she started easing me towards K-pop. The few shows I did watch tend to be slice-of-life series - see, I didn't even know that term until a few years ago - so I'd be a bit more looped in on Tanaka-kun wa Itsumo Kedaruge (and how layered its humor is) and Sakamoto desu ga (not so layered) and, inevitably, Himouto! Umaru-chan.

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11/10/2019 ‒
Yes, go on

If there is one thing I regret about closing the other blog almost seven months ago, it's that I've cut off a steady, if inconsistent source, of affirmation.

Okay, that's stupid, right? Why would you look for affirmation from other people?

Someone said precisely that to me a few months back. Perhaps it's a mistake on my end, telling someone who's essentially a stranger that, yes, I do look to other people for affirmation. I mean, it's cool to say that you're not that kind of person, that you're the opposite of yours truly. No, you don't need other people to tell you that you're doing well. What matters is what you feel, and what you feel alone.

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