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Showing posts from 2025

Light rain

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Rainy mornings on Sundays are the best.  It is a light rain, gently massaging the earth to wakefulness, but the relative darkness makes it hard for creatures like Paul to emerge out of their sleep. But I’ve been awake since 1 am. I squeezed in a few hours of naps, but my sleep was light that I could remember my dreams and even manipulate how they’d turn out. Dreaming is watching an original film for free. A good, satisfying, and restful sleep is one of God’s great gifts and clearly one of the most underrated pleasures of life. I wonder what our dog dreams about. At 6 am, when everyone at home is awake, and Manong had just brewed a fresh batch of coffee, I play “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus” on the piano. I’m reminded of the sorrows of the world. My mother’s uncle died yesterday due to complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was a smoker until weeks ago; his children never fell short of warning him against the dangers of cigarettes, but he lived a full life. He was a...

Reinstalling Linux Ubuntu brings a flood of memories

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Memories came back to me as I downloaded Ubuntu in my brother's Lenovo ThinkPad.  It was his old work computer, wiped of any traces of work-related memory, and reduced to the laptop's version of a tabula rasa. It runs on Windows, a fine operating system whose most current version feels foreign to me. (I think Windows reached its peak of elegance and user-friendliness with Windows 98.) This ThinkPad looks old but not that old. It bears scratches of use. I love this aesthetic: the gamit na gamit look. The Japanese may call it wabi-sabi, the  imperfection that comes with the natural cycle of decay.  I automatically decided to partition the hard drive to house both Windows and Linux operating systems. I still had the skill to do that many years later, like riding a bicycle.  I could think of no better Linux distribution than Ubuntu. Has it really been 17 years since the ISO disc had arrived in the mail , addressed to my UP Diliman ...

Busy weekend

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I gave back-to-back lectures over the weekend. Those speaking engagements don't happen all the time, but when they do, they often arrive in bulk. I could not say no to Dr. Kath Paras and Prof. Marj Evasco. On Saturday morning, I talked about cancer screening and prevention during Koronadal Internists Society's postgrad event in Marbel. The event was well-organized. The parking lot was full by the time I arrived. And I was 30 minutes early. I gave bite-sized information on cancer screening, based largely on the PHEX guidelines  to general practitioners, internists, and other doctors. Even I spotted a radiologist, my mother's friend, in the crowd. There were nurses, too. On the table next to ours were ICU nurses from Isulan. I shared the table with my schoolmates from Notre Dame, Carlo Non (pulmonary medicine), Mikey Lay (cardiology), and Ronald Jariol (internal medicine). The event organizers were so strict with time. I loved it. Dr. Tam Estacion did a wonderful job emceeing...

The Words We Leave Behind: register for a free webinar

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From the De La Salle University Department of Literature Facebook page : Join us for a compelling and insightful webinar titled The Words We Leave Behind, featuring Dr. Lance Catedral—medical doctor and winner of the Arturo Rotor Memorial Awards for Literature of the Philippine College of Physicians for fiction and creative nonfiction. This special session is part of the course LIT370: Pathography – Writing Illness to Wellness, and will take place on June 28, 2025 (Saturday), from 1:30 PM to 3:45 PM via Zoom. This webinar is FREE and open to the public. It is organized by the students of LIT370 (Term 3, AY 2024–2025) under Dr. Marjorie Evasco. Participants will also receive a digital certificate of attendance upon completion of the webinar. Register here: https://forms.gle/Ct5J6fVk62EJkfhWA Dr. Lance Catedral is an internist and medical oncologist from Koronadal City, South Cotabato. He completed his subspecialty training in medical oncology in 2020. His intere...

Overheard at breakfast

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Let’s begin with breakfast, my favorite meal of the day, which I also happen to skip the most. I was my mother’s companion on an overcast morning in Metro Manila. She had her blood drawn that morning. The test was not available in our hometown—already a city, but not yet big enough. Famished from her overnight fast, she asked if we could have breakfast right away. The hotel hospital cafeteria was at the end of the hallway, and we couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere else. It was only 6:30 am. The restaurants around the area were still closed—and for good reason. We ordered coffee and shared vigan longganisa with garlic rice, and cleansed our palates with toasted ensaymada. While waiting—the kind lady named Danielle warned us the kitchen would take 15 to 20 minutes to prepare our orders—I thought of how to craft a lecture for Prof. Marjorie Evasco's graduate class at the De La Salle University called Pathography: Writing Illness to Wellness (course code: LIT370M/D). I was reading a ...

Lynette, 70

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The weekly newsletter. Maybe that's the better way to frame my posts in this blog—a weekly newsletter. I got the idea from Craig Mod who writes Ridgeline. I recently subscribed to it. Writing needs some exercise. If I languish far too long without posting, my writing muscles might atrophy.  So here goes. Tita Net (Lynette P. Catedral), my father's sister, died last week. She was 70. She had a severe case of dementia and died because of complications that resulted from it. Her body was cremated: a simple, clean affair that involved close family and friends.  She has left behind, on this side of eternity, her daughter, Charisse, who had the appearance of taking everything as-a-matter-of-factly, powering through the rituals of obtaining death certificates and ensuring that the caterers were paid and well-wishers properly entertained—the practical, logistical demands of funerals. Charisse's voice broke down when she gave the final eulogy, readi...

Down with fever, ceiling fan, and a puppy on the road

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I write this on a quiet Saturday morning, a conscious effort on my part to slow down because my body tells me so. I was—and still is—down with some flu yesterday. I am, by the grace of God, getting better. Last Friday I had to plow through rounds and clinic. I cancelled afternoon appointments so I could rest, the wisest thing I could do. My old Macbook Air is propped on the baul that doubles as a storage space and coffee table in the living room. I can feel—or imagine that I feel—the light breeze from the fan, a new fixture at home, installed yesterday by Efren, the electrician. When we first turned the fan on, we hardly felt anything. Then Neneng, who visits us twice or thrice a week for housekeeping, said, Basi baliktad ang elisi. We felt the air flowing when I changed the setting from counterclockwise (which brings the cold air down) to clockwise. But even at the strongest setting, the air the fan generates is soft as a whisper. Daw kusog pa utot ko sini, I told my mother, whose ide...

Once upon an island

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May 30, my parents’ wedding anniversary, a date on the calendar we still celebrate, seven years after Tatay has passed on. In my mind—in my family’s mind—Tatay’s memory is alive. We speak about him, in random circumstances. Over dinner, for example. And my faith tells me: he is alive, in the fellowship of saints in heaven, laughing and singing and feasting and supremely enjoying the presence of God. I imagine him looking down, saying, “Dali na kamo diri. Kadugay sa inyo.” But the last days of May found us in a plane, from General Santos, with a brief stopover to Manila that would take us to Busuanga. If you’d spotted us at NAIA, you would have noticed Manong and me, holding on to our mother in laughter, provoking her with random comments that got her riled up; or, more correctly, she holding on to us, complaining about her eyeglasses that still give her trouble with depth perception. She is adorable. She is getting older. We make most of our time to take her aro...

Tatay's 7th death anniversary

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And here we are, looking more and more like him each day, and becoming, in a sense, like him.

My song is love unknown

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I love hymns. I love visiting churches with hymnals. I remember the hymnals as sweet-smelling maroon hardbacks aged by by overuse, with some pages detached and the spines torn. My grandmother’s Alliance church in Polomolok had those. During singing, the pastor would announce the song number; the congregation would flip the hymnal; the pianist would play the first two lines; then everyone sang. It's not a stretch to claim that such formal liturgies have largely gone out of flavor. I’ve heard of churches that split up because half of the congregation did not approve of drums. Many churches choose a more contemporary style of congregational singing, which is not wrong in itself. But I have a problem with shallow songs, with extremely repetitive lyrics, and hardly any reference to Scripture. Alistair Begg wrote about this phenomenon :  H]ear our loss of focus on the gospel in our songs. This is no comment on musical styles and tastes, but simply an observation about the lyrical c...

Life happened

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I know. I don’t post here as often as I should. When I do, I hardly write anything at all. I post fillers: random photos of my daily grind; quotations from books and articles I like to commit to memory; summaries of my meditations; epiphanies and random links to miscellaneous items I hope to return to but don’t. When I scroll through my blog history, I’m surprised that I’d posted about a film I would have otherwise forgotten if I hadn’t written about it in the recent past. In the early days of this blog I wrote many entries each month. There were years when I’d post something daily. It was fun. Updating blogger.com was enmeshed in my routine as toothbrushing; my day wouldn’t be complete without it. And then I gradually skipped it. The short of it is: life happened. And the internet became a dangerous place. I became more mature and private, relishing the absence of web footprint, while the world—including my circle of family, friends, and acquaintances—was only discovering the joys ...