Sleep or Die (Infographic)

Ever since I could remember, I've had trouble sleeping. Perhaps, it had something to do with my nightly woes as a kid:

a. I had an alcoholic of an uncle growing up. Hmmm, that sounds wrong - most of my uncles on both parental divide were alcoholics. In fact, I had five uncles who died under the influence…plus a first cousin and my paternal grandfather.

But I digress… This uncle is Dad's second cousin. He was always drunk and when he's blotto, he's disturbing the peace to say it mildly. You know when he's smashed - he's daring anyone to come out of their homes and fight him. That is, him and his bolo - a large, sharply pointed, single-edged knife that was the Filipino warrior's (and revolutionary's) favorite weapon. When he's on a bender, he gets really scary.

A Filipino bolo. Image by Lorenzo Lasco

I slept with my grandparents and every single night that he's wrecked and hollering for a fight, I can remember my wee 6-year-old body quaking in extreme terror. Not the fact that we're safe home, that our bedroom door is locked and all the lights in our room - including all lamps and candles, I kid you not - are blazing, could take away the terror. It was like my mind was locked into a continued state of fright, that it was the end of the world, and I knew that if he yelled all night long I'll be dead by morning. I never felt safe…and it'd be morning by the time I could get to sleep.

I started sleeping well at night only when he died - he got run over by a bus during one of his nightly rages. (The agony I went through lasted for many years, I think.) My grandparents, I knew, sighed heaps of relief. In my kiddie mind, I can only thank God. I know, bad of me, but I was young and he was the terrorist of my life. His passing stopped the waking nightmare that I always had every day.

New Year's Resolutions, 2014

It's 2014!  Happy new year everyone!

And of course, at the start of every New Year, there's the ubiquitous New Year's Resolution. I know, I know…I'm not good at keeping them but I'm going to draw up a list nonetheless. Committing them to paper or, in this case, putting it up on the Net might serve as impetus for me to strive to keep some of them, at least.

This year though, I'm going to keep it short. Five items max then cut it up to bite size pieces. So here goes something…

1. Lose weight.

Getting to a healthy weight is the all-time favorite new year's resolution of perhaps every adult tipping the overweight scale. Sad to say, this has been on my To Do list since I turned 30. (I found out that when women gets to the Big Three Oh, our bodies are fully matured. That means the extra calories that we ignored in our 20s which fueled our growth are no longer needed…they're making a beeline for our waists, hips and thighs, ugh!)

15 Inconsequential Things About Me...

...you might want to know.

Though I don't know why you'd want to, heh.

(A totally self-serving post, I know. But it might help you to get to know the, er, (usually) sane person behind this blog.)

that's me in my natural habitat

1. I’m obsessed with vegetable gardening—I particularly love growing Asian vegetables.

2. I received my driver's license when I was 35, and only after I got a Toyota Corolla (model '96) as a gift from a boss who got tired of me getting stuck in traffic. Before I could get to his confidential office, I had to wade through an hour and a half of EDSA traffic—a stretch of highway that’s actually a 20-minute drive (from house to office) sans the vehicular obstacle course.

image by taralets! photography

3. I’m terrified of lizards of any kind and size. Ditto with shrimp. Don’t ask why.