the perils of

I'm almost four weeks into my first ever job as a Doctor to the Barrio, and it's been an amazing ride so far. When I first found out about my assignment sometime in January, I was apprehensive. When you google Gigaquit, Surigao del Norte, there's not much information you can find. It's mostly just news articles about their recent spate of NPA attacks. As a baseline anxious person, I had a never-ending list of worries: What if I'm kidnapped? What if I'm killed? Or worse, what if there's no Internet??? I had no idea what I was getting into, and I would soon find out. 1. I'm a town celebrity - whether I like it or not. "Doctora, what's your complete name?" read the text from Gigaquit Municipal Health Officer, Dr. Roland Mira. Yup, I thought to myself, he's definitely making me a welcome tarp.  We'd never met in person before, but I'd heard much about him from mutual colleagues. A veteran doctor who'd spent most ...

Date: December 4, 2019 Time: 6:33 pm Mood: 9 out of 10 smiley faces I'm well into two months of unemployment and I'm getting better and better at it. I hit a low point a couple of weeks back where I felt so depressed and isolated, being shackled up in a tiny condo with nobody to talk to. But lately, I'm hardly ever bored. And these lovely things from my November are the reason why. TV & Movies Broadchurch. My dad recommended this British crime-mystery drama on Netflix and I'm hooked. The show is about the picturesque coastal town of Broadchurch, where nothing truly bad ever happens, until an eleven-year-old boy is murdered and the townspeople are shookt. It's pretty much your run-of-the-mill detective drama, but what makes it so compelling is how well-built the world is. Each of the characters feel tangible, and I found it so hard to walk away from their juicy secrets. Come for the mystery, stay for David Tennant's extremely Scottish accent...

I realize how strange it is that I never actually wrote about the things I wanted out of life in this blog. I guess it's because up until I saw  this video , I never really thought about it. I was always so certain of my future as a doctor, as an oncologist, but seeing how I'll still be stuck in med school while people like those guys in the video are off travelling and seeing sights and meeting new people - I'm not so sure what I want. Here's a question for you. If you were absolutely free to be anything you wanted to be, what would you be? (If you're thinking about leaving an answer in the comments section, by all means, please do.) Here are my answers: Traveller. Watching that video made me think about all the amazing places there are in this world, and about how incredibly vast and crazy and wonderful a place it is. And while the Philippines is easily one of the most beautiful spots on the planet, I can't help but feel I would have wasted what short time ...

I'm back! Now, where did I leave off? Oh yeah. Wednesday       I stayed up until 4 AM, thanks to the annoying errors in Adobe Premiere that kept popping up whenever I tried to export the file as a .avi. If there's one thing I learned from my previous experience editing videos, it's that if something can go wrong, it WILL go wrong. (And in hindsight, everything I had expected to fail did actually fail.)       So I spent the day with that fuzzy feeling you get in your brain whenever you lack sleep. I don't remember much of what happened that day, but I do recall myself extolling God when our chemistry teacher said that the quiz he had planned to give us that day would be moved to next Wednesday. PERFECTO. I guess Murphy's Law doesn't apply to everything after all.      When I got back to the dorm, I got a text from Deo congratulating me on getting the part of a donya in our Lit 14 play. I fussed because I'm a really terrib...