The Reading Barrio Girl

11 May 2018 Payawin, Gubat, Sorsogon ...and it gets in the way of blogging! Honestly, I forget that I do  have this blog. Nobody even reads this except for a few people who found it by accident. I intended it that way, I'm not ready to announce it to the world. My day job and "day life" have a crazy schedule. Working in a virtual office setting is actually like being on call 24/7, especially if your teammates are in different time zones. Not that I am complaining, but blogging-wise, not a bleep in my crowded brain these days. But I love this current life. Gone where the days when I had to be a blog machine to earn a living. Perhaps when I'm old and gray I'll do that again just to keep the brain cells from hibernating. 

18 April 2017 Payawin, Gubat, Sorsogon, Philippines My late father always said that opportunities only knock once. And if you choose to ignore it, it will never come back again, ever. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- no wonder there is such a term. Last weekend was Easter Sunday and it made me reflect on  a few things. The resurrection of Christ exudes of a general theme along the lines of 'there must be suffering first before true joy is experienced', or something like 'new beginnings' and all that. It made me think of the choices I've made and how my life has turned because of those choices. My own realizations boiled down to one thing: opportunities. Opportunities that came my way that I didn't let pass. I took them all with eyes closed or with faith (whichever you wanna call it) that it was a choice made in pursuit of a life I've wanted, and more importantly, in pursuit of something that I knew would change my life for the better. So whateve...

26 January 2017 Payawin, Gubat, Sorsogon. Philippines A wise man once said, not everyone is given a second chance in life. But if you do, make sure you take your best shot at it. We all had our share of not-so-good times, when things seem to go down south all at once. First your personal life, and then your career and everything else in between. Sure I've had my share of those and I had it real bad. See I had this theory that if your personal life is a mess, your professional life will eventually go down the drain. How else can you function fully at work when you can't even sort out your personal life? It couldn't be more true, at least for me. Eventually things fell down like domino tiles in front of me. Then it was like drowning in a deep dark tunnel of mess. Murphy's law at its finest. When things go wrong, they really go very wrong. Then such a period would last until such time when you can at least come up for thin air and recover enough just to breathe....

31 October 2016 Payawin, Gubat, Sorsogon, Philippines In today's selfie age we can take thousands of photos instantly and publish them online any time of the day. Or we can just archive them in our devices and get back to them whenever we want. Worst, they can be buried in the archives forever. But I think the mind is a more powerful photographer. It takes photos that are never forgotten, of moments forever etched not only in our minds, but in our hearts as well. However, this ability to remember 'heart photos' can both be a gift and a curse, for there are moments we'd rather forget but we can't. Also there are life moments that we would like to progress and develop more, but they are already stucked for some reason. And that's even more frustrating. But you see, we still live in the same planet. It's not like we have to pass through a wormhole to get there. We could always just hop on a plane and see that place we always wanted to visit, or see th...

26 October 2016 Payawin, Gubat, Sorsogon, Philippines Dreams. Aspirations. Longings. We all had those, in several forms, throughout our lives. Dream job. Dream house. The perfect family. But even dream jobs have their downside and no family is perfect.  But we accept what we've been blessed with. After all, who are we to complain under this vast universe? If God can provide for mere birds and bees, humans can rest assured that they will be well provided as well. But then we never get everything we longed for. There is a 'rule' that we are given according to what we need and not what we want. But wanting something we don't have (yet) is a clear reminder of our human-ness. No matter how we made ourselves believe that we are just fine with what we have currently, with the status quo, something happens to remind us that we are not.  Then we start hoping again. But some things are just not meant to be, I suppose. Those that pass our way may be meant for us,...

October 20, 2016 Payawin, Gubat, Sorsogon, Philippines When I caught the blogging bug way back in 2004, I had nobody to talk to. Blogging became my therapy, at a time when my heart and mind were in turmoil and I was in my, should we just say, lowest of lows. But sending out your honest thoughts randomly out in the worldwide web without knowing who might read them brought me some kind of comfort; and in the process unloaded the burden somehow. Then writing online became a source of income, and I swear, it had its rewards! But some good things never last I suppose, the US economy crashed years later and Google changed its algorithm affecting page rankings. Eventually, all that brought the blogging moolah into an all time low. The rest, as they say, is now history. Since then, like some of my blogging contemporaries, we've all went back to the 'day job' and actually found legit writing and editing jobs. Today, while young folks (the millennials) are caught up in a worl...