Hello world!

I’ve been struggling to find a way to channel all this idle energy to substantial endeavors, and I figured starting a blog would be an interesting activity. After all, I can only stare at the celing for so long.

Ever since this summer break has started, all I’ve been doing is frequently visit gossip blogs like Brian Gorrell’s and ohnotheydidnt. I’m not much of a gossip mongerer, but Manila society is interesting, and these days, I’m fascinated at how fast Miley Cyrus is becoming the next Britney Spears. Honestly, I think my brain cells are wasting away. I should be improving my French or learning how to cook or going to gym. I should be saving the world! But no-uh, I’m on my pretty ass, stalking exploring the cybernets.

I’ve been so restless lately because this is the first summer break I’m spending in Manila since I started college. Summer days and nights for the last two years were spent drinking in Davao with a few good friends. This break, however, marks my family’s official move to the city, and I’m feeling quite nostalgic about not being able to look forward to summers and Christmas vacations spent wandering about that quaint city I called home for so long.

Davao will always be my first love, and I never really realized it until Maxime stayed with my brothers for a week in my hometown to experience how I grew up. It made me a little lonely to hear him narrate all his little escapades in my city while I was here in Manila, slowly melting with the impossible heat. It’s a little heartbreaking to know that it will take me a while to go back and take spontaneous trips to Aling Foping’s or Atis and Calachuchi streets in Juna Subdivision. I’ve said goodbye to Davao when I decided to study in Manila, but it has never felt as real as it does now.

I’m usually not this attached to anything, but there is a certain mystic about Davao that makes it so hard for its residents to leave. Perhaps it’s the close proximity of everything to each other (it takes me around 45 mins. to get to the beach and around an hour to get to the bukid) or how people and things never seem to change no matter how long one has been gone, but there are just some things in Davao (like Php300 massages and Colasa’s barbeque) that can’t be enjoyed in Manila.

Most of my friends and I have left Davao to pursue our interests elsewhere, and we have lead different lives with our own sets of companions. Whenever all of us are in town, however, there is this magnetism, which I theorize to be collective nostalgia, that brings us together to reminisce about the good old days. Davao will always be Davao, and no amount of late-night partying or shopping in Manila or in any other place could compare to the city’s all too familiar small-city-big-city charisma.

If you’re living away from home too, what do you miss most about home?