The end of the day

THERE'S something about this photo that makes me sad and tired and comforted—a typical scene of Pedro Gil Street that one encounters after long, tiring moments at the hospital, a reminder that the day is almost over, and one can retire to one’s bed and read a good book or maybe have dinner with friends or go to church for Bible study. Every day ends, and regardless of how long it is, it comes to a full stop at some point.

Displaced: Outtakes from the AVR

THE SMELL of something burning brought us all out of the Second Year Call Room. I think it was a Thursday, and I was sleeping inside my dorm room when I got the text pass: vacate the call room now. It was later traced to a defective electrical wiring inside the bathroom. The Call Room has been declared a fire hazard.

Since the weekend we've been sleeping, rather comfortably, like refugees at the AVR Conference Room, where Mang Dan made a homey place for us to lounge around as we wait for the next referral.
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The case of the missing C

Taken near the PGH ER Kiosk, home of the affordable and delicious artery-clogging bacon, the object of desire of many of our breakfasts. Best heated in the callroom microwave for 2-3 minutes.

It's a relief that the sign doesn't read "No Parcking."

Jason in the house!

JASON Enriquez, my college roommate in Kalayaan Hall, still looks the same after all these years—save for the fact that he now sports more subcutaneous fat, his hair peppered with white strands of hair, his orbits barricaded by metallic frames that look comfortable on his face.

“Nearsightedness,” he told me. “Laging nasa harap ng computer.”

His fourth finger now bears a minimalist silver ring.

“How does being married feel like?” I asked.

“Masaya,” he said in perfect Tagalog.

He has been married for at least two years now, a ceremony I had missed because I was in the hospital, attending to my patients—a tragedy I have repeatedly come to accept. It wasn’t the only time something like it had happened.

I met Jason two nights ago, at 9 PM—a time of the day that, after all these years, he still remembers as the beginning of my descent into sleepiness. It was the only common time we had for his brief foray in Manila: a business trip in between which he planned to squeeze meeting family and friends before he goes back to Kyoto with his wife.
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Rainy nights

ON RAINY nights such as the ones we’ve had for the past days, I wish I were curled up in bed, reading a good book, the blues playing in the background¹. But routines are meant to be disrupted, especially with well-meaning, insistent friends.

True enough. A few days ago, friends from work insisted that we study elsewhere. The weather was perfect for walking—the winds were just beginning to howl, the clouds were starting to pile up on top of Manila Bay, the way crowds in concerts do before any singing happens. I wasn’t too tired, so I gave in.
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Sample post from Ulysses

Hello there¹. This seems like a vital issue that needs to be addressed immediately.

1. What is your problem, anyway? ↩︎

Redesigned with Bitter(ness)

YOU'LL notice that I've switched fonts. From Helvetica Neue, which I have enjoyed immensely, given its neat, modernistic feel; I've moved on to Bitter, developed by Huerta Typogràfica, an Argentinian foundry. I discovered it through Google Fonts. The site bears a tutorial on embedding the code to one's CSS. The transition took me less than 15 minutes.

I like how reminiscent it is of Caecilia, the font used in Kindle. Bitter is a beautiful slab serif-typeface. It looks contemporary but also academic, and isn't distracting at all. I hope it adds pleasure to your online reading experience here, assuming you haven't realized that you may have wasted your time.

A surplus of water

WE HAVE too much water in this country—a fact I’ve come to terms with after three days of almost-incessant rain in Manila. It’s something we forget: we have easy access to water, unlike, say, our friends in Syria or Ethiopia for whom water is, literally, life-giving.

Israel has just opened a new desalination plant, “the largest reverse-osmosis desal[ination] facility in the world and we are staring at Israel’s salvation. Just a few years ago, in the depths of its worst drought in at least 900 years, Israel was running out of water. Now it has a surplus. That remarkable turnaround was accomplished through national campaigns to conserve and reuse Israel’s meager water resources, but the biggest impact came from a new wave of desalination plants.”
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Miracles

MY BEDSIDE reading material is C. S. Lewis's Miracles, a short, albeit meaningful book about whether miracles are possible in the world. It's not a very easy, breezy book to read, but C. S. Lewis makes very strong arguments, dividing the world's thinkers into Naturalists and Supernaturalists. I admire his restraint and economy of words. I admire, too, the depth of his thinking, which, on the surface, seem simple but are actually profound. His analogies are funny, witty, and accessible.
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What I woke up to

View of the OPD Building.

Silver

I WOKE up to news of Hidilyn Diaz winning the country’s first silver Olympic medal after a 20-year drought. The sport is weightlifting, where she competed in the 53-kg division. She thanked God after her win. I had goosebumps. Onward, Hidilyn!

This is yet another proof that we need to focus our efforts on less popular sports, as opposed to basketball, our nation’s favorite past time. We’ve never really excelled in the sports arena—a combination of our natural physique that renders us at a disadvantage compared to our taller, bigger Caucasian counterparts; or our lack of resources for training because sports never gets the government funding it deserves; or perhaps we compete in the wrong sports events—but we’ve always been good at the arts and beauty pageants and Math quiz bees. I don’t know what my point is.
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Broken down

On the latter half of my Neurology rotation, all of the hospital's CT scan machines have broken down. They have all snapped after months of being overworked, their scheduled maintenance procedures interrupted by serious pleas of oily residents handling many patients at the brink of death: bleeding brains, complicated abdominal masses, and you know what. It couldn't have been more timely.

This breaking down of the machines could have been a metaphor for what I was going through at the time; I wasn't a machine, though, but I wondered how it would have felt to have a clone—there were so many things to be done. My rotation made me appreciate my friends who are training in Neurology: they must really love what they do to be able to do it excellently day in and out.
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