Happiness Grows

Everything happens for a Reason.
Friendships are tested.  Relations are tried.
In the end, we write our stories with each passing day.

And we can choose to be happy
without regretting the past.

Reconnected with Prince this month.  After quite some time of allowing fear, uncertainty and anger to cloud the channels of friendship, we all found ourselves learning to trust in happiness again.

Cheers to a renewed friendship.

Owning Your Valentine's Day Baduyness

Today is Valentine's Day, which is probably the best day for being Baduy. 

There's nothing to be ashamed of. The things that you do on any other day of the year may seem overly corny and cheesy to most, but today it's par for the course. A lot of people are being baduy today - you can see it with the numerous bouquets clutched tightly to their chests, the goofy grins as people wait for their loved ones and all the cheesy love songs.

But the key to being truly baduy isn't just doing what is expected. This is more than the "traditional" gestures and all that. What is more important is that you fully own your baduyness and make it your own. You need to rely on the things that are most important to you and your loved one and no one else. That's when it really counts.

Today is NetRunner Night

February 12 will always feel like a date that is far more important to me compared to Febraury 14, the infamous holiday, Valentine's Day. And the 12th is important since this represents an event that Tobie and I remember as NetRunner Night, which marks the very first time that Tobie and I had met-up in person. After months of chatting with one another on and off across various platforms and social media networks, we finally set a date for a friendly meet-up.

And that meet-up was to play the old Richard Garfield CCG, NetRunner. And it's nice to have a day like this to celebrate. I mean seriously, who else could have such a cool way to remember the very first time you met the person that you were going to fall in love with and eventually try to start a life with together? It just goes to show what common interests Tobie and I have, as somewhat peculiar and uncommon as they may be. And what better way for two geeks like us to finally find each other through a crazy, obscure card game, right?

And don't get me started on the geeky innuendo that we had going on that night. It didn't help that Runners "jack in" and some of the cards involved "worms" and "piledrivers".

And to celebrate NetRunner Night, I've dug up my original blog post about the night from the archives of my old blog, Beyond Dinobot Island. Here's the key excerpt for what it's worth. You can't really tell much about how I really felt after that night, but then the situation was rather complicated at the time...

Goodbye, O Bar Malate

Effective February 1, 2013, O Bar Malate finally closed its doors. And while O Bar Ortigas is still around, I can't deny that I feel a significant degree of sadness over seeing our old Malate haunt go.

Admittedly, it's not like Tobie and I had been going to this branch of the bar all that much - it's hard to get away from the fact that it's a heck of a lot more practical for us to go Ortigas given we're based in Quezon City. But still, Malate holds far too many memories for its passing to go by unfelt.

Tobie already shared a hodge-podge photo post of some great Malate memories on his queer blog. And this is me taking time to commemorate, in a way, the role that O Bar Malate played for us.