This might be the best thing you can do today.

This post is sponsored by Philips.

Facebook gets people riled up. They move one icon slightly to the left and the whole internet is up in arms. We gotta set this town ablaze! We gotta write strongly worded status messages that we hope will get hundreds of likes and comments and, and, and, MAKE THEM CHANGE IT BACK.

Cuz dammit that icon belongs on the right.

But that’s not really the point. What I’m interested in is people. People gettin’ riled up. This is an emotional town filled with lots of emotional people. It’s who we are. And I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s powerful. I think it can get people to do things they wouldn’t normally do.

Like fight. Or march. Or forgive. Or laugh. (yes, some people don’t normally laugh, let’s just hug them.) We share and post a lot of things that make us feel.

This is what I have been seeing on my feeds of late. We feel angry. We feel injustice. We feel the inequality of the few VS the many. And unfortunately sometimes, we feel hopeless.

Everyday is the end of the world

This post is sponsored by Walnut Shoes.

One of the things that happen when you become a father is that you remember what it was like being a child. Some people though remain children throughout their adult life but we’re not gonna go there. Let’s just hug them.

Everyday that I’m with my boys, I try to see the world from their perspective, if not from their height. As adults, we live in the big world. With every person we meet, every friend we make, every new place we visit or country we travel to, we continue to stretch our world and make it bigger.

Heart failure

This post is sponsored by Philips Avent.

A few weeks ago my wife and I had a fight. It was our anniversary that day. Ouch, I know. 5 years of marriage and 2 kids later, it seemed like we had stopped moving forward. It’s more complicated than that of course. Marriage is a complicated beast. And most of the time, at least in our case, the things that complicate it are the things that are left unsaid.

My front door was an elevator

This post is sponsored by Avida Land, an Ayala Land company.

I grew up in a building. Back then it was gray and white. Now the façade is a pale green, a dubious color in my mind. It stands 8 stories high, tiny by today’s standards and has a 2-level basement where I learned to ride my skateboard down its ramps when no cars were passing through.

We were walled-in by offices inside buildings much higher than our own. Full of busy people doing busy things. But at night, the city became quiet. The people who came here during the day to work and eat retreated back into their cars and drove away. Night returned the city to the people who call this home. This was Makati in the 80s.

Moms on the Floor

Information for your eyeballs.

Mommy Mundo is having an event called Moms on the Floor. In it, moms (pregnant moms, new moms and moms of kids up to 6 years of age) learn new stuff like preparing for birth, learning how to play with your child, infant massage, prenatal yoga, and kids yoga.

Some people you just can't replace.

The wife and I have been talking a lot lately about our son's upcoming birthday party. Parties actually. Both our children's birthdays are mere days apart from each other. This will be our first joint birthday with them celebrating. My older son is turning 3 and my youngest is turning 1. 

Some guys don't like being involved in the details of party planning. They'd rather leave it to the wife. Normally, that's what I'd do. I'm not good with details, I'm more a broad strokes kind of guy. But ever since I married the missus, she's forcibly dragged persuaded convinced me that planning these things can actually be fun. 

My son the astronaut.

This post is sponsored by AXA Philippines.

My kid scares me sometimes. He tells me when he grows up, he wants to live on Mars. He dreams big. And I don’t know what our world will look like in 5 years, let alone 20 years. I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow scientists finally figured out faster-than-light space travel or jumping through wormholes or folding space and time.

These things almost seem inevitable. Science fiction eventually becomes science fact. It’s just a matter of when. And incidentally I’m still waiting for my personal jet-pack, step on it science!