Pandemic shopping spree

Three of the more than 30 pens I have.

 I’ve never fancied myself as a collector of anything – except maybe random facts and anecdotes and, in my younger years, books.

And yet now I find myself with a collection of various items related to my interests – fountain pens, inks, ballpoint pens, watercolor sets, sketchbooks, notebooks, melodicas, and harmonicas. 

You turn gray – and then you dye

That’s my hair undyed.

Sometimes I dye my hair dark brown, its natural color before the gray strands started showing up. 

I’m not trying to hide my age. As I write this, I’m just two months into my 61st year.

I don’t mind being gray-headed – if my entire head were gray. But it’s still in its salt-and-pepper transition stage.

Milestone

My work-from-home setup.

I marked a milestone in my life at a bad time. I turned 60 on Nov. 17, 2021, in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At that age, you become more conscious about your health, and with a pandemic hanging over your head, you worry even more.

Holed up at home working

The INQUIRER.net office, on Mola Street in Makati, is so near to where I live — a quick walk of two blocks — that I’ve never taken the option allowed by management, under certain conditions, to work from home. 

Rain or shine, holiday or regular working day, I preferred the ritual of walking to the office and on the way grabbing some take-out food to eat at my work station as I started my 4 p.m.-to-1 a.m. shift.

From nearby stores, I would usually pick up any of the following — a dozen pork-shrimp siomai from Hen Lin or a Cheesy Beef Pinatubo from Jamaican Pattie or a spicy beef doner with cheese from Turks or a Baecon Ko burger from Frappe Connection or a two-piece fried chicken with Yangchao fried rice or panic canton from MarJim’s Chicken Corner — or in a rush, even some random items from 7-Eleven.

And after work, I would usually pop in at  Z Bar, just a few blocks from the office, for few beers — that is, if I get off work before the 4 a.m. closing time. Otherwise, I would walk a few more blocks down Kamagong Street to Tapadera, a 24-hour watering hole (except on Saturdays and Sundays when it’s closed).

Anyway. I wasn’t trying to impress the bosses with my insistence on being at the office. I was merely avoiding the obvious domestic distractions, which for me were mainly a bed beckoning for me to take a nap, which could easily stretch out to two hours, and a guitar teasing me into trying out a song I had just learned from a YouTube tutorial as if the other internet click-bait distractions weren’t enough.

The Black Death gave life to the Renaissance

It’s hardly an exaggeration: The Black Death — the bubonic plague that killed from 25 to 40 million people in the 14th century — had a big hand in triggering the cultural revolution that would come to be known as the Renaissance.

I came across this curious information in A History of Knowledge, a well-written book by Charles Van Doren.

The name should ring a bell if you’ve seen Quiz Show, a movie directed by Robert Redford about the rigging of the 1950s quiz show Twenty One.

Van Doren, played by Ralph Fiennes, was the contestant who unseated the show’s reigning champ Herbie Stempel, played by John Turturro. Stempel blew the whistle on the show’s producers, saying that they had asked him to throw the game in favor of Van Doren.

If you’re more of an egghead, you’d also know that Charles Van Doren’s father was the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren, played in the movie by Paul Scofield.

But enough of that other curiosity.