Reinstalling Linux Ubuntu brings a flood of memories

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 dorm room in the year 2008?  I remember how excited I was then, intrigued by the concept of having a computer that looks and feels different. I had great fun upgrading to various versions. I wrote that playing around with the OS, specifically installing Wine, a layer over Ubuntu that allowed me to run Windows programs, gave me "the thrills."

This time, instead of waiting for my installation CD to arrive, I downloaded a 5 Gb file to the ThinkPad and, using a special program, converted my flash drive to an installation disk. The download took less than 10 minutes; today's internet connection is so fast compared to how it was -- oh my, here we go again -- seventeen years ago, when I had to wait for an entire day for the process to complete. 

I plugged in the installation hard drive as I rebooted the computer and pressed F12 repeatedly. The Ubuntu installation proceeded smoothly from there.

I did not realize the process of installing Ubuntu in an old, overused laptop would bring a flood of memories, many great ones for which I am extremely grateful. My Yakal dorm room and my bunk bed, my roommates, my old college life, my friends from Molecular Biology and the Dorm Christian Fellowship. Life was simple and uncomplicated. I could not have imagined what I would be 10 years after college graduation. I am way past that timestamp. It has been seventeen years, and God's goodness has run, and continues to run, after me.

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Busy weekend

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. 

You may access my slideset here. 

After lunch, I headed back home to prepare for a lecture with Prof. Marj Evasco's students in her graduate class at De La Salle University. My talk was "The Words We Leave Behind," which I came up with even before I finished the outline for that talk. I based my talk largely on Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, easily one of the best books I've read this year. Here's an excerpt.

Atul Gawande ends his book with chapters about his father who died of cancer. In the epilogue, one can sense that the author grappled with his reality and tried to make sense of the purpose of medicine, in general.

“Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and will always be.

“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.”

The graduate students were brilliant and kind. They asked probing questions after my talk. I'm certain my answers didn't do their inquiries justice, and I could have done better. For instance, Dr. Seann Tan-Mansukhani asked me about my fiction piece, Nap9, and why I chose to highlight male friendships. The story featured the bond between a scientist and his childhood friend Jim. I don't remember what I said in response, and when I watched the recording I fumbled, trying to piece together a coherent statement. What I wanted to say, I suppose, was that friendships are not required for survival but they make life bearable and meaningful. In my own readings, I don't encounter male friendships often. (Among my favorites is The Distance to Andromeda by Gregorio Brillantes: those two boys coming from after watching a film in cinema! Ah, it brings me to tears every time I read it.)  I was trying to remember C.S. Lewis's essay on Friendship in his book, The Four Loves. 

There were several questions about burnout, the ethics of writing about patients, the difference between being a student and teacher by way of learning, and what books have influenced my writing. They were questions which required deep answers, but there was no time and I was nervous. Les Samson did a great job moderating. Janelle Tanguin and Dr. China Castillo read excerpts of my works beautifully. Prof. Marj gave the closing remarks, reciting a poem by Robert Frost.

What a weekend!

 

Screenshots by Prof. Marj 

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I love this shaky photo: an aerial view of General Santos City at night. 

 

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The Words We Leave Behind: register for a free webinar

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 interests include precision medicine, global oncology, and medical humanities. His works have been published in the anthology From the Eyes of a Healer, the Cotabato Literary Journal, and the Journal of Patient Experience. Since 2004, he has been blogging regularly at bottledbrain.com.

Dr. Catedral will share his personal journey at the intersection of medicine and literature, reflecting on how storytelling and writing can illuminate the human experience of illness, healing, and care. Through this talk, participants will gain a deeper understanding of pathography as both a literary form and a means of processing the emotional and ethical complexities of health and illness.
#DLSU #Literature #GraduateSchool #Pathography

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Overheard at breakfast

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 book and pondering, looking into empty space, when a family of five took over the table next to ours. The children, in their early twenties, looked a lot like their parents. They were on the chunkier side of human anatomy, which explained the meals that would descend on their tables, like manna from heaven, but with many side dishes. They spoke to each other with tenderness and familiarity, if they were not looking at their phones. The big sister said she’d just have coffee; the kid brother told her to stop pretending. She must have listened to her brother, because daing na bangus with garlic rice emerged on her plate a few minutes later.

My mother at this time was tinkering with her phone—a busy game of Candy Crush. From our quiet table near the cash register, I listened with rapt attention to the family from Bulacan, curious as I was about the human condition. I heard worry and concern: their grandmother had an MRI. That was as far as I could make sense of the conversation. I did not know what the MRI was for, but the tone evoked a sobering seriousness. I realized, as I sipped my coffee, which Danielle so kindly brought to our table, that our existence is a mixture of joy and sadness, comfort and suffering, breakfasts and MRIs and blood tests. We, all of us, live in a broken world, full of its sadnesses and longings. Above us, in the patient floors and ICUs, were people getting better or fighting for their lives.

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Lynette, 70

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, reading her speech from her phone. We all listened with rapture and sadness. To be left behind, after all, is to feel alone. 

Tita Net has also left behind her only living sister, Tita Beb, the youngest of the Catedrals, and the aunt who resembles my youngest brother Sean in temperament. They're both scared of air travel, prone to worrying, and have a shared facial expression of lifting their eyebrows and protruding their eyes when surprised or angry.

Almost everyone who spoke in the eulogy alluded to Tita Net's return to Lord, like a prodigal daughter finding her way back to her Father's arms. I remembered that, despite the slow erosion of memory, the blank stares, and the profound sense of disorientation with regards to person, place, and time, Tita Net would immediately bow her head and pray the most personal address to God when we told her, "Mag-pray na ta bi." She clasped her hands tightly, or held on to the pair of hands nearest hers, and she would speak to God normally, like a person whose brain had no vascular infarcts. God was, in her final moments, her anchor, the very solid rock she stood on, despite her condition. She would gradually forget us, despite generous prodding ("Sino ako? Bata ako ni Dodoy. Si Lance Isidore. . . ") but she would know the next lines to the hymns.

How precious that memory is. We had been gradually losing her, but my faith tells me there will be a grand reunion of God's prodigal children soon. For now, we remember her and will miss her dearly.

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

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 idea it was to buy that fan.

Oh well.

The breeze is soporific. But I must resist sleep at all cost because I have patients to visit.


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Some housekeeping stuff—my cultural diet in past two weeks.

Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things and NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. 2025 is a great year for reading.

Department Q on Netflix—absolute gem. I must visit Edinburgh soon!

Russel Moore’s podcast with Andrew Peterson led me to get copies for Frederick Buecher’s books. 

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Spotted on the road in Marbel—a puppy, contemplating the meaning of life. 

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Once upon an island

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 around while she still can. I told her we can get her on a wheelchair, if the time comes when she wouldn’t be able to walk—a suggestion that riled her up and, therefore, cracked us up. If her friends were around, they’d tell us, amusingly, “Ginakulit niyo na naman si Nanay niyo.”

The plane was small. We descended on the island on a cloudy day. The turbulence didn’t bother Nanay. She said the plane reminded her of the flights she took when she had trained for dentistry in Cebu. During her time, the airport in Surallah was operational. Now the closest airport from Marbel is in GenSan, which is just as well: just an hour’s drive from home. But add that hour of land travel from home (Koroandal) to the Gensan airport, and the actual plane ride from Mindanao to Manila (1 hour, 45 minutes), and Manila to Busuanga (50 minutes), and the ride from Busuanga to the port (30 minutes), followed by the boat ride to the resort island (30 minutes), plus factor in the waiting times—and that would mean an entire day of traveling. We realize we live far away, in the cul-de-sac region of the country, right at the bottom of the archipelago. Our geography separates us from major national issues. Nobody hardly cares what happens in Metro Manila, except when the airports are not functioning, or when you have children studying there.

At the resort, where I write this now, we exist as we do in Koronadal. I told Nanay, “We brought Koronadal to Coron!” Nanay laughed on the opposite bed, joining the playful sounds of the fruit bats outside, relishing the cold of the airconditioned quarter, the thick curtains obscuring the calm sea. After her cancer treatment many years ago, she couldn’t stand the heat. She hides under the cover of darkness during the day and emerges out of her room at night. Which is why you will not see photos of her in the sea. Sun exposure feels like punishment for her. So Manong and I are left on our own, kayaking and swimming. A hospital staff asked if we’d be interested in snorkeling. We were, we said, but we wouldn’t see anything beneath. Manong has been egging me to get Lasik. Soon, I told him, soon. 

But I realize it’s this kind of vacation—the stationary, devoid-of-any-activity kind of getaway—that she loves. If Tatay were alive, he’d be the opposite: dragging his sons from sleep in the wee hours of the morning to observe the sunrise, saying good morning to the fishermen, making sure we hit the waters by dawn, and telling us, “Come, come, don’t be afraid,” as we wade far from the shore, in deeper waters. But Tatay would be there, our safety, his sturdy shoulders we can grab on to. 

 

I don't want to end with a somber tone but with a cheerful, grateful fact—that my parents are alive, only that each exists on opposite sides of eternity. Now let me go drag Nanay out of the room for some halo-halo. Tatay will have to wait, when we meet again. 

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