Yes, I know, it’s already several days into the year, but I think it’s never too late to come up with your own New Year’s resolution, even if you’re several months late!

Here’s the story. After 2020 ended, I read my journal from start to finish, taking note of all the things I aspired to do at the start of the year, and what I actually accomplished, twelve months into the future. Surprisingly, I managed to cross off quite a lot of them.

Obviously, not all of them. Due to the pandemic, I pretty much had to give up on my resolution to “travel more often” and “go to the gym every week”. But since there was nothing I could do to change the situation, I decided that it didn’t really matter if I couldn’t accomplish several things due to covid.

In retrospect, though, 2020 was a very hard year. Adapting to working from home is one thing, but having to do the chores and keeping my sanity in check were not exactly easy. Which is why I’m planning to keep my 2021 resolution simple.

The theme of 2021 for me, would be “peace”.

Continue reading “My 2021 New Year’s Resolutions” →

To be honest, I never expected my next blog post to be written on the very last day of 2020.

I didn’t even plan to write anything a week ago, lest I’ll sound overly dramatic and emotional with all the reminiscence and rewind of everything that happened in 2020. I’ve seen enough posts about it. The same highlights; forest fire, corona virus outbreak, black lives matter, election, and a ton other things to name a few.

However, after much, much contemplation, I’ve come to realize that above all, 2020 had been an insurmountable obstacle in front of us–a mountain so high we thought we could never go past it, and yet we did. Maybe it’s the combination of all the bad things that happened this year (because, let’s face it, we’ve seen just about every bad things that could happen, happened in 2020). Or maybe it’s the fact that the year is ending, and we’re excited and giddy to welcome the new year, as if all our problems would just vanish the moment the clock strikes midnight.

Continue reading “Saying Goodbye to 2020” →

When I was a kid, my father almost always worked until very late every day. It baffled me to think that I never had a good, long, conversation with him until I hit puberty—not because we didn’t want to, but because he was never around, to begin with.

After all, he always went to work before I even woke up, and returned home after I fell asleep. And to be perfectly honest, I think there was a little part of me that resented him for that—for not being around when I wanted to talk to him about my day, or anything.

“I don’t have a choice,” he said one day, during one of the rare moments when he actually got to go home early. I remember it clear as day—the sky was dark, curtains were closed, and my mom had stored all our food in the fridge because that’s what she always did after I finished dinner; my dad never ate at home.

“What do you mean, you don’t have a choice?” I remember myself asking.

“No matter how tough the going gets, I need to work for this family. For you,” my dad replied.

“You mean for the money,” I retorted.

He didn’t deny anything. Instead, he looked at me, let out a long sigh, and gazed at our half-dilapidated, leaking ceilings for a good second or two, before continuing our conversation with a lower tone to his voice that almost resembled a whisper. “Yes, I do this for the money. But you have to remember where the money goes. It goes to our food. It goes to electricity so you can sleep comfortably with the AC on every night. It goes to your school tuition. It goes to our family—hence I do this for the family.”

“But families don’t run on money… right?” I remember my younger self asked him.

To be honest, I don’t really remember what he told me that night. Even after I asked my dad about it, he simply said that he already forgot, and proceeded to bombard me with other questions about how my life went, how was work, and so on. But as I try my hardest to paint a picture of that sliver of memory, I imagine my dad would most likely reply with something out of his wisdom bag—something that only a man who worked for money, and worked for a family, could ever have spoken.

Continue reading “Of Struggles, Reason to Fight, and Moon River” →