Category: Life And Times
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Quarantine Journals: Frayed Nerves (Part 2)
This is part two of a two-part opinion piece on current events in the Philippines. While based on news taken from trusted sources, I make the disclaimer that this blog is NOT a news channel. Content on this blog (this article included) should be taken with a grain of salt. I do not intend to…
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Quarantine Journals: Frayed Nerves (Part 1)
This is part one of a two-part opinion piece on current events in the Philippines. While based on news taken from trusted sources, I make the disclaimer that this blog is NOT a news channel. Content on this blog (this article included) should be taken with a grain of salt. I do not intend to…
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Quarantine Journals: If Cats Disappeared From The World
The day Fully Booked announced that they would be open for deliveries within Metro Manila amid the community quarantine, I was already on their online store browsing for books. That’s how much I missed being inside a book store. Looking at book covers through a screen didn’t quite emulate the experience, especially when half the…
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Quarantine Journals: A Bibliophile’s Spending Habits
One tiny silver-lining I was looking forward to with the lockdown was the chance to save a little more cash as working from home everyday meant I’d be spared from much of my daily expenses. There’s the commute, which isn’t really much at face value since I use mostly public transportation and opt for Grab…
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Quarantine Journals: My Work From Home Setup
When quarantine kicked in, for some reason I had the vague notion we’d be back on the streets by August. I had no idea how terribly I’d underestimated the virus, and how confidently I’d overestimated my government’s willingness to address it. Now we’re well into August, and things still don’t bode well for us. Right…
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Quarantine Journals: Of MacBooks And Men
My old laptop, Caecilia, had served me well in the last seven years (yes, I name my favorite gadgets; let’s talk about that some other time). The machine I’d won through a writing contest towards the end of my high school career carried me through all four years of college and two and a half…
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Quarantine Journals: A Requiem For Caecilia
Our first computer was a desktop that my father and I bought piecemeal from various hardware stores around Baclaran back when I was seven or eight. This was in the early 2000’s, when we still bought those ISP cards to connect to the internet, and connection was nowhere near decent until around midnight – and…
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Quarantine Journals: The Unbearable Silence of Quarantine
The original deadline for the first instituted lockdown has passed, and when I’m writing this we are already on the second day of extended quarantine. And yet mass testing has only started – or is about to start – for several cities around the country. The quarantine may have bought us some time, but we’ve…
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Quarantine Journals: Thinking About Trolls
Who has a troll farm? I’m not pointing fingers. But the global consensus seems to be that they do exist, and they’re making significant waves politically in a world that’s becoming increasingly dependent on the internet. It’s only a matter of time before the concept enters our lexicon. The troll farms have come, and it…
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Quarantine Journals: Reading Albert Camus’s “The Plague” (Part 2)
Some dispatches from quarantine: it appears that countries around the world have taken note of China’s draconian measures towards containing the virus from its hotspot in Wuhan. Borders are closing. Communities are locked down. This quarantine has made hermits of us all. Unless, of course, we’re talking about the Philippines, whose politicians have so far…
Dominic Dayta 