What does it mean to live in the year 2016?
Goodbye 2016!
If you ask me that question, I probably won’t be able to answer you that question. In fact, I probably won’t be able to give you even an adjective to describe how this outgoing year has treated me.
Sure, the year gave gave my life some ups and downs, but things happen that I either simply don’t like happening or otherwise.
Take this one for instance: The entire neighborhood where I spent 26 years of life in suddenly looked shorter as the roads got higher. All the trees, or at least what’s left of it, were cut down, the garden I have been tending to since 2002 have since been torn down and became a sidewalk. Whatever remnants of that garden that I’ve managed to salvage have been transferred to several pots of various shapes and sizes.
I’ve even managed a big pot of fertilizer soil for half a year now.
One line from a movie that got stuck on me was this: “Change is good”. But change is never always good, at leats not all the time. It’s really unfortunate but changes that are as life-changing as seeing the street you knew for years becoming radically different due to road elevation is something that way out of your control.
On the plus side, some changes have been nice. I moved to a new location for work, going form Quezon City to the much busier district of Makati. While the commute became more difficult, the actual work side of this has been really fruitful. I’ve been churning out nearly half a dozen or more movie commercials for a movie channel (that our cable doesn’t receive at the moment) and while that alone has its fair share of plus minuses, it’s been a rewarding experience at best.
For some reason though, in hindsight, I kinda do miss doing the stuff I did before where I only had to go to work to layout some subtitles to different teleseryes and talk shows, and spent hours sleeping in between shows.
Moving from work to the personal, a bunch of people I know from school and beyond have either gotten engaged or have just married. I was invited to two weddings this year, one I was supposed to go in as just a guest but I found myself becoming an emergency groomsman so that was fun.
The second one was that of someone I have long known since preschool and that was the point where I realized how far we have all come since those days of old.
One of my best friends got hitched earlier this month and that one I was taken by surprised. Another one from my circle is engaged although details on when they’ll have their wedding is still unclear so I’m waiting for that.
With that said, I’m not in a hurry to find someone for myself. I still have a lot of things that I wanna do. For one, I finally held on to that promise I made myself long ago of taking up Spanish-language classes. I don’t have a good hold on it just yet but I am making the effort to learn. In fact, I’m currently mastering a song whose lyrics are in Spanish.
Have I also mentioned that I got hit by the Eurovision bug so hard this year. I have watched the show in its entirety before last year but I fell for ESC so hard since May this year and it hasn’t gone down like a fever since then. I have been looking up posts about national and internal selections, host city biddings, post-Eurovision antics of past participants and more that I think I may have an addiction to all things ESC. It’s frakking crazy!
As for other topics such as the recent national elections and everything involving President Duterte, I’ll just let people who are writing eulogies to 2016 touch on them as I think enough have been said about them already so I don’t feel the need to do so myself.
All in all, it’s been a very interesting year. Not gonna say that it’s either good or bad. Just interesting.