A little background for any new readers and a reminder for old readers: I had a series of week retrospectives on this blog, an idea that was inspired by a Bible study ice breaker back from my campus ministry days. In these posts, I go over how I felt God was working in my life that week (How), a high from the week (Wow), a low (Pow), and a food item that I had from the week that I felt would be noteworthy. And so here begins the resurrection of yet another series on this blog.
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It’s me, hi. I’ve clearly abandoned this blog for quite some time, my last post being in January 2020 – yikes. That’s not to say that I haven’t tried to come back to this – I truly did. I’ve had a post sitting in my drafts for the better part of two years, but every time I sat down to try and finish and post it, I just couldn’t bring myself to. Why? Mostly writer’s block. But there were also those gnawing thoughts of “is anyone going to care” and “do I really want to share this.” Well I’m sitting down this evening, once again trying my hand at this thing that was a big part of my life for almost six years. Truthfully, I don’t know if I’ll keep up with this and post as regularly as I used to. But I can damn sure try. So here’s an attempt at resurrecting two things: this blog as a whole, and my Blogmas series in which I will attempt to write everyday in December until Christmas. Here we go.
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Happy New Year’s Eve Eve, everyone! The past several months have been nothing short of chaotic and tumultuous, and as a result, I’ve had to take a step back from blogging. Now that I’ve finally had a minute to breathe and let the dust settle, I wanted to come back and give an update on things that have been going on in my life, and what I’ve learned over the past several months.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another long-overdue blog post. I’ve just finished up my first year of graduate school (!!!), which means I can dedicate a bigger fraction of my attention to this blog. This past year has been such an incredible growing experience, both in the classroom and outside the classroom. Outside of school, it’s been a season of learning how to juggle and foster community in all of my social circles, how to find moments of rest amidst the chaos of this season, and how to keep myself from getting distracted from my walk with the Lord. As the title may suggest, the past several months have been nothing short of chaotic, and suffice it to say, I’ve struggled trying to find the constant I’ve previously found in Jesus Christ. Now that I’m out of the storm and can finally feel the dust settling, I’m back and I’m here to share with you all how the Lord has been working in my life amidst all of the chaos.
Hello, everyone. I’m back from my blogging hiatus (for now), and coming up for air from the grad school hole I’ve been buried in for the past four months. Because I spent the past four months doing nothing but reading, writing, researching, and annotating, bear with me if my next couple of posts are lacking in content. There has been a lot of reflecting since I finished up the semester a few days ago – which I will go into more detail on in an upcoming blog post, trust – but because my brain is still decompressing from the aforementioned reading, writing, researching, and annotating, I would like to ease myself back into writing before fully delving back into the #personal blog posts. To kick off this year’s Blogmas, I would like to revisit some goals I set for myself at the end of last year.
Recall this scenario. You’re at the tail end of your final year of college. You’re ripping your hair out as you eagerly finish your final papers and cram information into your brain in preparation for the last of your final exams of your undergraduate degree. You’re almost there and you can almost smell and feel the magnificent glory of finally walking across the stage at graduation. You can’t wait to be done with school, having dedicating almost two whole decades of your life so you can get to this moment right now. You can’t wait to start your full time job working in the field that you’ve dedicated your early adulthood studying. But then what? What happens when all of the excitement dies down and your life plateaus?
For the past few months, I’ve thrown myself down many rabbit holes, doing as much research as I could to find out more about my family history. I prepared myself for the inevitable dead ends I would encounter, and kept my expectations low in terms of what sort of information was available out there for me to find. On my dad’s side, I was able to go back six generations in my lineage, all the way back to two sets of my 4-times great grandparents (Atanacio Caybyab & Francisca Del Rosario, and Santiago Tuazon & Eduarda Gonzales). Though all I found was a long list of names in my paternal lineage, nothing can quite describe the feeling of being able to create that extensive family tree. There was something quite extraordinary about being able to see my ancestors’ names appear as I, their distant descendant, wrote each of them down one by one. Seeing that my research on my dad’s side of the family wouldn’t go any further, I began my research on my maternal lineage – and discovered a lot more than I ever expected.
I remember being told as a child that my maternal grandmother was born in Hawaii, and thinking how groundbreaking it was to find out that my family had roots in places other than the Philippines. Because my grandma and her siblings spent the first part of their lives in what was then an incorporated territory of the United States, I stumbled upon more documents on Ancestry than I could have ever imagined, and was able to piece together the narrative of how my relatives lived, and how that ultimately culminated into my existence.
Let me first preface this blog post by saying that I’ve never been big on new year’s resolutions. I believe that if you’re serious about making a positive change in your life, there’s no room for excuses, and there shouldn’t be any reason why you can’t begin working on yourself in the present, and constantly be working on yourself every single day. Being a goal-oriented person myself, and for the sake of challenging myself once the new year starts, I’ve made a list of things that I’ve been wanting to accomplish, things that I intend to seriously start working on in the new year.
Merry Christmas Eve everyone, and welcome to the final week of 2017. Every year, I usually compile a list of all the cool things that happened to me that year, and every year that I’ve done that, I felt like I would constantly be grasping at straws, desperately trying to find things groundbreaking enough to mention in a blog post. This past year was filled with so many incredible memories and growing moments, that I actually found it difficult to narrow down to just five highlights. After an hour-or-so-long stroll down memory lane, scrolling through my Facebook and Instagram feeds and camera roll, I was able to pick out several highlights from this year that truly stood out.
I have blogged every single day for the past three weeks, and it’s hard to believe that there’s only three days left of this series. Also, I was just on the road for majority of the day today, so forgive me if this post runs a little shorter and less coherent than the ones I’ve previously written. Here is a recap of this week.
tête-à-tête 