You do not study for the test. You study to remember who you are when everything hurts. The Great Academic Coma It is over. The great intellectual massacre has ended. You close the laptop like a soldier coming home without a parade. Your medals are eye bags and coffee breath. The silence after midterm feels fake, like peace after a
Tag: resilience
The Fruit No One Asked For When life gives you lemons, the first instinct is to ask who the hell ordered fruit. Because honestly, no one wakes up hoping for another round of disappointment. No one says, “Yes, today I hope my plans implode, my savings vanish, and my patience erode.” But life doesn’t ask for your consent. It just
’Twas the night before midterms, the room was a mess,My desk was a battlefield, nothing was less.The coffee was cold, yet I brewed it again,Pretending that caffeine could nourish my brain. My notes were all scattered, my focus was gone,The outline I made was a joke all along.I’d planned to review, yet I just couldn’t start,For memes and regret fought
Not a Broadway Number Do You Hear the People Sing? is not theater in the Philippines. It is not performed on a stage. It is performed in the slums, in evacuation centers, in the lines at pawnshops and remittance centers. It is the anthem of people who were promised a better life by every administration and then handed crumbs. The
“A nation once poised to soar—grounded by the very hands entrusted to lift it.” Once upon a Republic, the Filipino Dream was real. Not the American kind with white picket fences and Disneyland tickets—but the Filipino kind: a home with hollow blocks that didn’t crumble in a typhoon, a job that didn’t require a passport, a country where your vote
I was supposed to be on a study break. You know, reviewing Azure firewall rules, maybe poking around Wireshark like a good future cybersecurity engineer. Instead… I went on YouTube.Big mistake. Huge. A video popped up: “Old Manila in the 1960s — A Glimpse of the Glory Days.” Cue vintage cars, clean streets, people in barong casually walking down Escolta,
During a study break — between subnetting practice and scripting firewall rules (because, yes, I’m trying to become a network and cybersecurity engineer) — I ended up scrolling through old photos of the Philippines. Escolta in its prime. Manila with actual public transport that worked. Filipinos dressed sharp, moving with purpose. It didn’t just feel nostalgic — it felt tragic.
Becoming a network and cybersecurity engineer sounds cool until you realize it mostly involves staring at broken things, talking to your devices like they’re sentient, and Googling the same command over and over because somehow, it still isn’t working. So why do I post about those failures? Because let’s face it—success is boring. “Look at me, I configured a switch