I attended a conference on Thursday and I was so busy chasing people and writing that I didn’t realize that time flew by so fast. I looked at my watch and it was already 5 pm. I had to transfer to Mitsukoshi mall to have dinner while editing more stories. I looked like an idiot there sitting on a small high chair and bar table, trying to balance my laptop, drink, and rice bowl.

I told my Japanese colleague, whose work I was editing, that I need to transfer to another venue before sending back his work because the conference that I attended has long ended. He was flabbergasted to learn that not only was I editing onsite, I also still had to write a time-sensitive report. He didn’t realize that editors also need to meet the story quota.

So there I was, gulping my rice bowl because it was already 6 pm in Manila, 7 pm in Tokyo so I needed to finish this thing. I remember why we journos always end up with indigestion.

Yesterday was tamer. My brain refused to work in the morning because it was so exhausted from the previous day so I tackled the editing duties and the rewrite/edit of an analytical piece in the afternoon. Which was a wise decision because the stuff I had to deal with required so much brain power.

So now I’m at the autoshop to have my brake shoe springs and brake drum replaced. Thank God for the coffee shop next door, I have somewhere to wait.

Thank you to all the neighborhood coffee shops that have sprung up like mushrooms everywhere. Five to ten years ago, there weren’t any place where we can sit and leisurely drink our beverages without having to wolf down complete meals. This coffee boom, not just in my hometown but the whole country, is sustaining dairy businesses like Carmen’s Best. In the last briefing of Metro Pacific, they shared that the diary business is propped up by the local coffee industry because Filipinos have become coffee shop lovers.

Well, I say coffee shop lovers because we are really coffee drinkers but we consume coffee at home. Batangas barako coffee, istatchu? In the provinces they even pour coffee over rice to eat at breakfast. What we didn’t have is the coffee shop/coffee house culture that others have, like in Vietnam and Italy. But we are slowly catching on.