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[ESSAY] I love poetry. I always find a kind of therapeutic value to it, whether reading it or writing one, it feels like a warm bowl of chicken soup for the soul. For this essay, I want the space to breathe with fewer of my words and more of someone else’s. I want this time to also to empower the reader. I want to make it as if they are hearing their own voice in the lines, not mine.
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[ESSAY] Let me pose a question: is the ability to ask questions considered a skill? And if so, does true skill lie in asking the right ones? It wasn’t until I reach my post-grad studies that I realized that the true test of learning is not in what you can remember or memorize, but in the questions you are able to ask about it. In this essay, I reflect on how curiousity sustains everything there is in love and why asking questions is more than just a trivial habit but a skill and a discipline in itself.
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[ESSAY] It was the second semester of my junior-year in 2016 when, for the first time, I found myself separated from my four closest college barkada for a major group project in BIO19 (Animal Physio). For three full years, we had moved as one unit. Being together was the default. We chose the same classes when we could, sat in familiar clusters during lectures, and navigate every group works side-by-side. Together, we thrived on shared chaos, inside jokes, and haphazard teamwork that somehow worked despite the odds.
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[ESSAY] Some places stay with you long after you leave. For me, that place is the campus chapel at my university; the one that quietly kept me company through roughly three years of my post-grad life. At the heart of the University of the Philippines Diliman (UP Diliman) campus, stands a modernist sanctuary unlike any other nearby. Many parishioners fondly call the UP Chapel or the Parish of the Holy Sacrifice “the flying saucer.” Read here to learn more about its design, history, and why it’s one of my favorite spots to visit.
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[ESSAY] In this essay, I speak of the Muses not as distant, abstract figures summoned by the sheer labor of imagination; but as living, breathing presences. While literature named nine, I have met six. I will recount in the order I’ve met them: Uki, Pan, Sun, Ryu, Oni, and Red. To others, they might’ve seemed like ordinary human presences, unremarkable in the flow of daily rhythm, but to myself, each carries a quiet, transcendental power, in ways I am still learning to understand. This essay is, in some ways, an extended reflection on a thought I first shared in a tweet on X (formerly Twitter). Allow me to extend that narrative here and recollect my encounters with them, and how through their presence, I was transformed.
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[ESSAY] I celebrate with microbiome scientists, workers, and enthusiasts across the world, and the breathtaking work they do every day. At this day and age, microbiome science continues to push the boundaries of what it means to do science. In health, food, environment, and climate. But to work in this field is to live with complexity every day. Studying it requires humility before nature’s complexity. As I worked through my own thesis, I finally understood where the shortage in interest often comes from: the scale of it all can be overwhelming. We’ve come a long way but it’s still a looooong way to go.
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[PERSPECTIVE] My essay today is a critique of humanity—of our species, Homo sapiens, as a collective. This reflection has been long in the making. For years, I dismissed these thoughts as maybe just a passing phase, born out of the eccentricity of my then adolescent mind, perhaps even a product of overthinking. I assumed that, with time, fresh perspectives would shift them into something more charitable. Yet, the resentment and frustrations I held for ourselves only deepened over time in ways that bypass the rational mind and lingers beneath attempts at optimism. Here’s what I think: I am not proud to be human.
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[PERSPECTIVE] “Presumed straight until proven otherwise.” Or, “Heterosexual until proven guilty.” Has to be the most unkind, unnecessary, unsolicited remark I’ve ever heard to be thrown in casual conversations; as if sexuality in itself is inherently incriminating. I think there is something intrinsically flawed in the way heterosexuality is percieved as the only “natural” expression of being, as if it is the only authentic form of existence. This view seems to stem on the simple observation that most of the population happens to be “straight,” that’s why straight is the default sexuality. And because, it’s a statistically accurate assumption. Anything more than that is a defect. However, this thinking doesn’t really validate anything; if anything, it only creates distance. It is polarizing as it is dismissive, and shrinks the full range of human (or even biological) experience into an artificially narrow binary.
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[PERSPECTIVE] A seemingly contradictory phenomenon of the simultaneous prevalence of obesity and poverty in our population has taken hold across the world. Statistically, 2017 was reported to be the first year in a decade to record an alarming rise in the number of hungry people, according to the United Nations. Along with the rise in hunger, there has also been a continued aggressive rise in obesity. On the surface, this seems to be a highly unusual global phenomenon – an increase in global hunger with a simultaneous increase in global obesity. However, what is remarkable and counterintuitive is that the contradictory concepts between obesity and poverty can actually coexist within the same individual, family, or community – and practically a reality that is difficult to disentangle. Thus, it begs the question: how come we are both?
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[POETRY] Sharing this four-part poem I wrote years ago after visiting a place so vivid and pure it stole my heart in an instant. One moment I was simply gazing at a mountain peak, breathing in the stillness, and the next, my hands were furiously scribbling words I didn’t even know I had in me. I stared at them for a long while before it hit me—that I think I’d made poetry. I tucked it away and forgot about it. But now there’s this person, and as I read it again, I can’t help but wonder; maybe it was for him all along…