This guy is 100% right. Ever since I started drawing and keeping a sketchbook, I began to see the beauty in ordinary things. I always think about how light and shadows fall on an object and how I would render it on paper. Instead of doom scrolling on my phone, I make my brain busy by thinking about how I could draw it and what colors I would use. My daughter once caught me staring at something and she asked me why. I said I was thinking of how I would draw that. She may have thought I was nuts.

I was like that when I was into photography—I was looking for the beauty in the mundane. I was always looking for a better angle, better way to frame a scene.

This is also the reason why I always carry a notebook in my bag. My passport size Travelers Notebook is where I keep my musings while waiting for my turn at the doctors’ clinic or at the bank. When a thing happens while I was standing in line, I always thought to myself how I would write it in my notebook.

It’s just like this blog. There’s no reason for me to continue blogging but I still do it because this is for myself. It’s lovely to chronicle my life this way because I can upload photos, videos and whatnot—like a scrapbook of my daily life. I don’t have to print photos to make a point. When I was writing about things that happened in a day when I was in high school, I had to write the news for that day (“Today Miriam Santiago lost to FVR”) and had to describe/lift passages from newspapers. I had to cut out photos to document the day properly. Now I can look back and see how I was in January 2021 and read how I was a different person back then. I’m still the same person and yet a different person, too.

So this reminds me I have to finish that sketch of that view from UCC. As this guy on the video said, it doesn’t have to be perfect and beautiful; what you’re doing on your sketchbook is for you. I always have to remember that.

So today is a little bit less brutal compared to yesterday. I only had to deal with three edits and rewrite my own story, which my boss had to return to me because she’s demanding so many things.

I rested a bit at lunch—that’s when the world suddenly went dark. It rained heavily.

It was so dark that it looked like it was already 6 in the evening.

It was conducive for a nap. I slept on my tummy because I was scrolling through my emails. I think I’m a half-panda; I could fall asleep anywhere.

In between edits, I took the car to the aircon shop to have its AC cleaned. It’s an annual thing so that the evaporator and condenser would not grow molds and smell bad. Tomorrow, I’m gonna have the auxiliary fans and belts checked and buy a new pair of Yokohama tires. I have to make sure that my car is in tip-top shape before our Pico de Loro holiday and for the rest of my vacation leave that I would be spending in my home province. I talked to my bestfriend while I was on the way home from grocery shopping tonight and checked if she would be free for an overnight stay in lake Caliraya. Ah, we have to schedule it the following weekend since she’s still busy computing grades—I almost forgot, it’s Hell Week = the week before the semester officially ends.

Mommy duty called. I had to fill our pantry with supplies again and this is the only big shop I will do for June because I have no time. The rest will just be top-ups of meat and vegetables in smaller marts because supermarkets are full on weekends.

I then found one little big girl playing with my phone while I was having dinner…

I have like 8,000 photos on my phone so I had to order a new SD card (500GB) because I would run out of space at the rate I’m snapping photos/my kids are snapping photos of themselves.