AT THE STOA

I started playing RAN Online when my best friends owned a computer shop back in 2009. I was late into the game relative to them, and I was amazed at how an archer can just do a somersault and have everything die within a 5-inch screen radius, and that with her underwear showing. I was partial to the swordsman, though, though I really can't tell you why (it might be because the swords were huge ). So I became a swordsman built with dexterity stats. Fast forward six months later and I was level 107, and ended up having an ice elemental sword in the game and UTI  in real life. I was still studying for my Master's then, too, and was enrolled in Thesis Writing I, with nothing to show for it two months already into the semester. I quit the game, got well, started my thesis, and finished the proposal for it within the remaining three months. I found RAN again ten years later, eight months ago. Things were different - the items were different, the dynamics were different, the playi...

I wake up at 8:00 AM, put some coffee on, and go to the backyard to have a smoke. I look at the sky and try to gauge what the rest of the day's weather will be like while I wait for the coffee to be ready. Today, and increasingly this month, morning skies are blindingly bright. Today's a good day for drying clothes, at the very least - and at the very best, it's a day for basking for a while and being grateful for waking up. I love mornings like these.  The coffee's ready, and I put out my smoke. Time to start the day. I head back inside the house to take a quick shower, sweep the floor if it's too dusty, and wash dishes if there are any. The light shines throughout the house, and I am glad the landlords chose to have the walls painted white instead of yellow or blue or green or whatever else. I sit at my desk, where the sun filters through the ill-fitting but strategically-placed-as-an-afterthought curtains. I look for transcription files to work o...

While I agree with  this  review in that Joker is "an excellently crafted film," and while it did add its disclaimer that every interpretation of the Joker is nearly as meaningful as every other since the character is so chimerical, I would disagree about the article's overall attempt at the situationalizing and grounding of the Joker's character in social inequality and the resulting mass discontent therefrom. I by no means am claiming expertise in the comic books or the movies featuring the Joker. What one gets from him, though, straight from the 1970's of his birthing onward to this decade, is that he is not an agent of anarchy; he is anarchy. The movie, while using the backdrop of 1970's Gotham socioeconomic unrest as the larger setting to his actions, also puts those same actions within the purview of his mental instability as an individual. This saves the movie from situationalizing the Joker on solely a statement against economic injustice, and m...

"Thursday is Virginia Woolf. Then it's Anaïs Nin. Then there's just enough time for a session with Sacajawea before it's morning, and I have to go to work in 1734." You might be forgiven for saying that that statement, out of context, is gibberish. Believe me, though - even in context, it makes the kind of convoluted sense only a work of Palahniuk can make. I'm late with my review of this thing - it was published in 2003. It's set in contemporary time, featuring a man working in a historical museum job reenacting the 18th century, who gets his kicks from attending sexaholics meetings, pretending to choke in restaurants and cashing in on the idea that people, needing to be heroes, will be forever responsible for a life they saved, in order to pay for the bills of his dementia-stricken mother, who used to be an anarchist and claimed that we have reduced the world to symbols. In his mother's hospital, his sexual escapades come to a weird turn when h...

The night comes with terrors, with shadow and darkness, and monsters untold. We have created artificial lights to illuminate our cities, to dispel the ancient fear of the world's darkness, to ward off being blind. The night holds secrets, cradling criminals and hookers, broken dreams, abandonment, and illicit trysts. It is the time of shady dealings, of gunshots in the dark, of stealing babes away from mothers, of pillaging villages and wartime desperation, and of utter hopelessness in prisons. The night is a time of silence, when we fully hear the great heartbeat of the city and the rumble of its arteries, the howls and songs of its citizens, the fatigue of the day slowly being replaced by the winding down of furious men and women whose hopes and resiliency are equaled only by the drudgery of the calendar going on and on in society running fast to its own oblivion. The night is a time for forgiveness, when we finally see our creator in the eyes and tell him we fo...

We recently moved to rent a new house, as the one we were staying at - which is still under construction - lost the battle to mold and its cousins. Maybe we can move back someday, when, or if, it becomes done. I am in love with the light in here, and most days, upon waking up, I just walk around basking in all the beams that find their way from the sun 93,000,000 miles away uninterrupted into the inside of the house. It's days and times like these when I have trouble sitting down in front of my computer and just working, as the entire house becomes illuminated with sunshine demanding to be inhaled, basked in, held. The light comes from the bay window, which is facing the house beside us...     and lands on the stairs, beside which rest my mold-infested books. They deserve a good airing and sunbathing, but the beams don't quite reach them. Ah, well. A little ambient light might be good enough. The light comes in from the window in front of the walkway to ...

As a child, the fondest memory I have of my mother was when I was about eight or nine years old. She took me to her workplace one day, and we passed by a tree that was overgrown with bougainvilla vines in full bloom. The wind picked up, and the flowers were carried by the wind, and they started to dance around the air before falling to the ground. I stopped, mesmerized, and looked up at the sky. She let me watch the flowers fall, and I looked at her, standing tall amidst all the flowers dancing through the air. After a few moments, she held her hand out and we continued to walk, careful not to step on the flowers that are now on the ground. As a teenager and a high schooler, I was her big problem. My sister was always responsible and was a good child - me, not so much. I would come home late from a friend's house where we would play the guitar or read magazines until 11:00 PM, and she would get angry at my hours. That continued on to college, but she still sent me to school, pro...

It started about seven years ago, when my mother felt a lump in her armpit. Maybe even before then. Of course, her being who she is, it wasn't until five years later until she told us, when she felt another lump on her right breast. She didn't tell us that, either. She is who she is, meaning, she considered pain more of a nuisance rather than anything else. That's why when her arm started developing lymphedema, she still continued doing everyday things for a long time. It developed gradually, over the course of three years - where it has now become more than a nuisance, but earlier, when it became more and more of a cause for worry, she went to see a clinic in Baguio City, the head doctor of whom ordered an ultrasound and x-ray. The doctor sat me and my mother down one appointment day and told us what it was. Metastatic breast cancer, maybe stage 3. My mother said she already knew what it was. My mother didn't cry. I don't remember if I did. I just remember...

We just got engaged today, and we smell like donuts. Let me explain. There's mold growing on the air in our bedroom. Being in Baguio, there's mold everywhere, but Tim has this idea that the mold we have is aging into yeast, (are they the same family? It doesn't matter. This theory is what counts.) and the yeast is rising into donuthood. (And the clincher of the theory is that we are now being taken over by the Mold People and slowly being mind-controlled into not cleaning anything because the smell is soooo pleasant. Our bathroom smells like a vanilla muffin.) Seriously, when we smell each other, we always say, "You smell like X donuts," wherein X is either strawberry, cinnamon, bavarian, et. al. We could sniff each other's collars all day, because dagnabbit, we do smell like X donuts. And we got engaged today. We shopped for a ring at around 4:00 in the afternoon, and ended up in the mall. All the PhP 473,939 rings are blinged to hell, so we settled ...

I've been playing Diablo since it came out and I was nay high. I remember the chunky graphics of the first game, and the hours I spent being a barbarian raiding everywhere I can get to and leaving piles of money on the church courtyard because.. I didn't have inventory space? I was afraid of losing it in the dungeons? I don't remember. I didn't have a chance to play Diablo II because I was busy picking up bad habits in college, and went straight to Diablo III on a secondhand PS3 (wizard level 68) and sometimes dicking around with my nephew's PS4 (monk level 65). I spent around 150 hours on that game, and now that my life partner thought it a good idea (bless 'im) to bring his Nintendo Switch to the Philippines while living with me, I have spent a good 70+ hours on it on the Switch with a character who Tim calls "Jizzlove" for its unpronounceable default Zdislav. Level 70 paragon 31, aw yiss. While playing adventure mode this evening I was mashi...

These two days before the new year has been a pear-shaped series of interesting pear-shaped things. Tim and I moved the trip to my sister's one day earlier for all the expected massive peopling in the bus stations the coming days. We embarked holding three healthy-looking bags. We went back home five days later holding four puffed up ones, one carrying the dirty clothes and a pair of combat boots. Don't ask. The new year celebration went well; it was the ensuing trip to Manila to get Tim's stamp on his visa extension and my nephew's computer rig that was eventful. We left for Manila with a healthy car. We went back two days later with one that's going to shut down any minute. Seems like an injector got blocked and the car can't go vroom-vroom very responsively. (I am an expert.) At least we got back safe and sound. We arrived in Manila early enough for Tim's visa extension, with several people ahead of us in a makeshift non-line. The sounds I heard from ...