Thank You for Everything, Dear Avanza. We’ll miss you.

February 10 2024, 0415 pm.

Dad finally sold his 10-year old Toyota Avanza to a rich family in San Antonio, Makati, looking for a car to customize.

That car took us a lot of places and served as a great vehicle for emergencies. It felt like asking someone else to be the owner of your dog because you were too old to care for it. In a lot of ways, it was that one car you were familiar with and couldn’t wait to ride because it felt like home.

Even sadder: my dad will be 65 this year and he’s driven and favored manual transmission since he was 18, despite owning two other automatic transmission cars.

It only dawned on me that the Avanza would be the last Manual car he’ll drive.

He had me take photos of it with him, he even hugged it. I saw him giving it one last wash and wipe and he was whispering something, perhaps he’s saying thank you and sorry.

Best friends

When the new owner got it out of the garage, he couldn’t help but look at it with such fondness and sadness. He was joking around and laughing it off when the new owner asked if he wanted to take one last picture, but I knew he just wanted to get it over with.

The car left our house and he didn’t take his eyes off it until it made a turn. He went inside, head down, deep sigh.

It was bound to be sold anyway, especially since he’s the only one who likes to drive stick here, so we thought might as well sell it while there’s still value. It was an “E” and we sold it for 250k.

It was a company car given to mom, but we inherited it when she retired.

It’s well maintained. It’s never been banged or hit by anything other than the occasional “gasgas” by bikers.

We always had it serviced and replaced with original parts done by a former Toyota mechanic for all 10 years. If not for the old style body, you wouldn’t think it was a decade old. This mechanic became a family friend and was our “middleman” for the sale.

I wanted to take remove this as remembrance, but dad said it would damage the dashboard. It was from Regina Rica and it’s about as old as the car. The new owners were also okay with it since they were Christian.

The good news is, we sold it to car lovers. They were planning on giving it a major makeover as a gift to their niece who’s about to start college in UP. So at the very least, it’s in good hands and is likely parked under a roof.

It would have been heartbreaking if we delayed the plan to sell it until the only buyers would be junkers or chop-chop mechanics.

Thank you, friend. I hope your new owner loves you as much as we do ❤

Goodbye, Pinoy Exchange.

Leaving my mark. Will keep it short.

I stumbled onto Pex back when I got banned on Ichiraku for using hacks on a dumb 2D game. I needed online friends, so I looked up “Pinoy forums” or something. I eventually settled with two:

PinoyUndeground and Pex.

PinoyUnderground (or PU) was like Pex, except it had a lot of illegal downloads for software and hacks. I also went to one of their annial EBs in Padi’s Point along Shaw, Blvd. way back in 2009. Idk what happened to the forums in 2010 because I was already glued to Pex. All I know is it eventually died when Facebook took over, but I digress.

Conan As A Late Night Host is Done! Thank You For The Memories!

Not much to say, really. I just love him and his team.

He was part of my childhood and was an inspiration to me to try and be funny all the time, so I am just sad yet also happy that he’s moving on to perhaps a format he prefers that would keep up with the times.

All those nights where I went to school half dead as a kid because I stayed up all night waiting for Conan was worth it! If I had chosen to play videogames instead of channel surfing to accidentally find him that one night in 1998, I would have never found this gem of a man.

Thank You Conan for the Nightly Laughs

Context: Conan announced that he’ll be leaving the late night format for a different show. I read about it a few months back, but he confirmed it on his YouTube channel a few weeks ago.

From TBS, he’ll move to HBO Max. He’s always been a master at improv and is always ahead of his time, so you know he’ll do really well. The only thing that can stop him now is his health, so I am just praying for good health even though I’m not that religious.

Every episode to celebrate his last month as a late night host has been great, with Bill Burr being one of the best ones. But I think what really made me feel emotional about him leaving is when he featured Paul Rudd, and how they reminisced about how Paul keeps bringing the same old clip to trick him for the last 28 years.

It’s just a rollercoaster of emotions

I also watched this livestream and I couldn’t help but finally do a blog about it.

Thanks for all the laughs!

Here’s my letter to him:

I remember tuning in to you for the first time on a Friday night at maybe 9 or 10 years old. This was 1998 or 1999, can’t recall. I was a fan of the Leno back then too, since I liked his brand of comedy. I was supposed to sleep after his show was done (I think it was 10:30 to 11:00 where I live), then your show came and I was a rebel and wanted to sleep late, so I watched you too.

The earliest skit I recall in those days was your “In the year 2000” skit, where you mentioned that in the future, we’ll have shoes worth $400 that will have AI technology. It will be so advanced that it will laugh at us for buying $400 shoes.

And boy, you were ALMOST on point a decade later, with all the hype on sneakers.

Anyway, I’ve since tried to catch you every now and then, but being a kid, I of course prioritized videogames and school work. It’s why I’m so glad you have a YouTube channel now; I get to watch many of the good stuff I missed. I’ve never stuck around another comedian like you, so I know you’ll do really well in whatever it is you’re trying.

I look forward to more Conan Travels, more office shenanigans, and just more Conan.

Thank you for all the laughs and anti-stress comedy you bring!

I used to love college math

Differential Calc, Integral Calc, Physical Chemistry, Geometry, and Statistics were some of my favorite subjects. Don’t get me wrong; I sucked at them, but there’s a different thrill about how one wrong decimal point or symbol can mean repeating the subject again next semester.

There was a time when you can show me an entire whiteboard’s length of math and I’d have the answer in less than five minutes, sometimes even without a calculator if the problem was simple enough.

In fact, one of my professors even noticed, during afternoon recitation, how I was able to answer math problems without even writing them down – solving it all inside my head. This professor would write a problem down and I’d be among the first ones to have their hands up to answer. At least, I’d be the first one who wasn’t shy about answering.

After class was over, she asked me about how I was able to do that. I said “I solve the numbers separately inside my head, and combine them afterwards.”

The best way I can describe it is it was a lot like playing with a Rubik’s Cube, but instead of following the rules of the Cube, you disassemble the damn thing and reassemble it with all the colored cubes on the same side. You would still arrive at the same answer, but your method would be unorthodox and would not be accepted in the actual tests, thus resulting to a few deducted points. I didn’t care back then, but sometimes I wish I did because maybe I would have gotten a medal or two.

Today, I see a math problem and I no longer recognize the symbols I once loved writing. I am more likely to type a simple, gradeschool equation in Google than mentally solve it, and quite frankly I don’t mind.

Nothing lasts forever, and that allows us to appreciate them while we still have the opportunity to do so. A world where nothing fades is a world where no one cares about anything or each other.

Learning Japanese through an app: 17 weeks

It’s 17 weeks since I started learning Japanese from an app and let me tell you, it helped me a lot during our vacation in Sapporo.

I was capable of reading labels (around 50%) without Google translate, I handled short conversations without panicking or looking up words, and I literally helped some tourists from Tokyo find their way to a train station going to a mountain view spot in complete Japanese.

I also Japanese’d my way with taxi drivers and train officers whether it was to describe Sapporo or the weather, or if the train is headed to the airport.

Granted, most of the Japanese I used were either in short bursts/phrases or child-level – plus the fact that when taxi drivers start talking to me in like really long sentences (to which I just respond with “okay” or soudesu ne…) – it just surprised me at how much I knew then compared to before I got started.

All this with a free phone app and 30 minutes a day. Imagine how far I could have gotten if I enrolled in formal schooling.

Bagong Dekada. Bagong Ikaw.

Malapit na namang matapos ang isang dekada. Kung di mo pa ginagawa, bitawan mo na.

Mahirap magdala ng mabigat na bagahe na hindi mo naman napapakinabangan lalo na at matagal nang nawala yung tunay nitong may ari.

Sa pagpasok ng bagong taon, travel light nalang tayo.

Puwede na ang backpack. Libre pa ang carry-on.

Mas masayang bumiyahe kung wala kang masyadong bitbit at maluwag mong nagagawa ang lahat ng gusto mo dahil magaan ang pakiramdam mo.

Huwag mo tularan yung mga taong kailangan dala ang buong bahay tuwing may pupuntahan.

Kung ang dala mo ay magpapaalala lang sa’yo ng parte ng buhay mo na nais mo nang kalimutan, bakit bumiyahe ka pa?