I was sick for most of October, and because I was coughing incessantly, that meant IT WAS PEI PA KOA TIIIIIIME.

I like to joke that taking Pei Pa Koa when you have a cough or a sore throat is the best advice he ever gave me. Okay, I say “joke” but I’m … not really joking. We didn’t have the best relationship. It took me a couple of years after he died to really think about why that was: we were both pretty stubborn, he wasn’t around much and let my mother take care of us, I didn’t like the way he treated my mother and how he favored his siblings, and he probably really didn’t want to or was prepared to be a father and never learned along the way. That’s all fine now. There’s really not much I can do about stuff that happened a long time ago with a parent who died more than a decade ago.

So no, I don’t have very many warm memories of my father. But I do hang on to the few I have:

• him bringing me a box of cookies* that ended up becoming my favorite
• waking me up from a nap to tell me that we have Japanese corn for merienda
• him joking that he was just holding a piece of chalk when I chided him for smoking
• his excitement when he passed an important professional exam
• him thanking me for giving him what turned out to be one of his last meals
• his anticipation over delivering a speech pushing for automation in his workplace

None of them seem like a lot, but I imagine I would have seen more of those moments had we both taken the time to get to know each other better and stopped being so triggered by whatever the other one said. I know, the dead don’t care, but I’m still here and from time to time, I still wish things had been different.

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*Dare Ultimate Fudge Chocolate

There used to be a website called Sideblog.org, which allowed you to make extra blog posts on a miniblog that appeared on the sidebar of your site’s front page. All you needed to do was sign up and add a snippet of HTML code wherever you wanted theminiblog to appear. Thinking about it now, it seemed kind of like a precursor of the original Twitter, letting you share posts that didn’t deserve a full-length blog post.

Looking at Archive.org, it seems that Sideblog.org didn’t last that long (or maybe the site wasn’t crawled enough?), because the available version is from 2006. Feels like an idea that was ahead of its time, but I remember how nice it was to have a little space where I could just post things like “I’m hungry” or “Ugh” and not interrupt the flow of my main blog.

Sometimes, blogging makes one (and by one, I mean me) feel silly and self-conscious, or feel worried that writing about nothing or random things is too indulgent or self-centered, or just generally feel unworthy of having their voice heard because the world’s already loud enough with millions of opinions and do you really need to add to the noise?

And then tweets like these pop up

I've personally enjoyed the renaissance of blogging culture. Please write about your thoughts and your daily routines and your theories! I like to read original writing by all kinds of people, whether I agree or not https://t.co/0MzDw8ZhkI

— Grusha🕯 (@decadentquill) October 27, 2025

Write if you want to write. Don’t listen to nonsense like this. https://t.co/6f7i24mGLS

— Ozzy (@ozzyetomi) October 28, 2025

and remind you that, you know what? Just write what you want, you don’t even have to have an audience for it, and we’re all here for such a brief moment in time*, so make as much noise as you want.

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*Somehow, I always circle back around to the topic of mortality. Cannot be helped, what with my age and recent goings-on in people’s lives.

I have tons of good memories associated with taho: having it for a snack while walking around the UP Academic Oval, heading out with my mother and carrying insulated tumblers to buy taho from the guy just outside our village, enjoying a cup or two after a fun run, warm glasses of taho on cold mornings in Baguio—I could go on and on about it. Today brought another nice memory: My boyfriend bringing a cup of taho for me while I’m working.

Bringing back some posts from my old blog because looking back, I came up with some pretty nice stuff. Here’s one I posted a few years ago, featuring a by-no-means-complete list of birds you can see in Quezon City. You can also spot them in other parts of the Philippines, though.