blast from home

I’m trying to make it a habit to read the local news in Bacolod City, the great fire just recently and the Masskara festival with Barangay Taculing being crowned dance parade champions. The performance is on you tube and whoever feels homesick should just press play. Barangay Taculing would always feel like home. When we first moved to our resident in the late 70‘s, it seemed miles away from civilization, now it’s a nearby abode from just about anywhere.

There weren’t any malls in the City of Smiles when I was still a student, it’s different these days. It’s been spruced up a bit in the last few years. I love malls. But I hate being caught in the debate between Westfield and Mall of Asia. I’m not a Manila kind of gal. I try to speak Tagalog. However, I’m more at home in my Bacolodnon drawl. Speaking of malls, where was National Bookstore when I had all the energy to read the penguin classics? I have easy access to books in the present but my cravings for books written by Filipino authors remain an unsatiated yearning. I’m so grateful for the internet for hooking me up with the world. When my Lola Nellie was still alive and before the web enveloped our lives she would send me clippings from LA newspapers mostly about the Lakers. My grandmother and I wrote constantly. I was such an atrocious letter writer. Confound the self-esteem dilemma of adolescent and young adulthood, the same upheavals and imperfections, in existence in my very core until this time.