the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

At the risk of embarrassing myself with such a personal piece, here is my debut article for medium.com about my experience during my #lifewithoutsocialmedia . I know there's much to be improved, but I just wanted to put it out quickly rather than overthinking it and taking too long to publish -- so comments on how to write better are very welcome!

Haven't made any (edited) videos in awhile, so suddenly decided to make one out of some videos I took of Sahara that I thought were hilarious. Here's my YouTube description: The pigeons trying to nest outside my bedroom window drives Sahara so crazy, he often forgets his good sense. What drives ME crazy is that he often does this at 3 am, in the process destroying my window blinds and screen (before I learned my lesson) and waking me up several times in the night. Finally caught him on camera last week! My sweet revenge. This time it was a pigeon and her two babies. While before, the pigeons would fly away just seeing Sahara looking at them from the bed, now they don't even blink when he's clawing at them from behind the glass! This is the first time ever I've used my phone to edit a video, because I got rid of my Mac, and Windows 10 doesn't seem to come with a native video editor :P

For my last birthday retreat, because it was too much stress to go on my usual international trip, I stayed an entire weekend at a Catholic retreat house two miles from house to produce this:

In 2002, I wrote an  #essay for one of my Sun.Star columns titled "It Ain't Easy Being Brown" . In March 2016, I suddenly got requests from university students in different parts of the  #Philippines  to interview me about this essay for their class. The essay wasn't online and they had to ask me for a copy, so I have no idea how their teachers thought to assign it as a text. In October 2017, I was contacted by students from yet another school telling me that they had chosen the same essay to make a  #shortfilm  on for a school competition. Again, no idea how they got hold of it. But since my essays are  #autobiographical , it was basically a film based on my life. Sharing it now because it's just so hilarious 😂 especially their portrayal of my parents. It's so amazing what kids can do with the technology these days. This is the  #poster  they made for the film. You can read the (very short) essay first . And then watch the  #trilingua...