the last day of may

01 Jun, 2026

I just made myself a cup of coffee, sat down on my chair and now I have the rest of the afternoon essentially free. A few weeks ago, I read a post from gary online, What would you do if you didn't have to work? I want to share what happened to me this weekend, incl. the last day of may, and I recall that post because I think my weekend was well-rounded enough to perfectly reflect the days I want to have when I retire, mostly with the themes of home-making (cooking, mostly), doing nothing and everything with my wife, touching grass, friendships and community.

In 2025, I also committed a few posts to write about what I do on the weekends because even then and a few years ago, I already really have an idea about retirement and also set out, at least in my head, what's the endgame of me working and trading my time off for money. So weekends are really important to me and I am intentional on what I do on them, what I do off-work; and as I write this on a Monday after I've finished all my tasks for work and our apartment, it is the best time to reprise my little weekend series ~

🏳️‍🌈 Happy Pride month, btw, everyone ^^ 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩

happenings

• saturday
  • first ever breakfast & lunch on our new dining set
  • went to the mall with my friends from work
• sunday
  • morning walk with r
  • market and other life admin tasks
  • cooked my favorite soup
  • went to a pride event 🏳️‍🌈

This is like a post of posts. It is long because I have so much to say!

saturday

In part of our goal this year to slowly furnish our new apartment, me and r finally got our new dining set! We also have a bed frame and an ergonomic chair now :') We are coming to almost 3 years living together, first as students, then now as employees, so now that we have our own money, we are slowly investing to make our home more cozy and basically just eliminating the micro-stressors that has accumulated in the past 2 years.

These micro-stressors did not really factor in any friction between living together. I think we both understood then that we are not in any capacity to fully furnish our apartment then and me & r are highly self-sufficient individuals, raised by more than decent parents, that we spent the first years drinking room temp water & we had to prepare food that will not go bad because we did not have a fridge and we cleaned our space everyday because we only had rubber mats, a foldable mattress and a small table for a 3-in-1 dining, living and bedroom.

I know how this may look like to others, and yet labelling our situation as clad of micro-stressors I think is still a reach, because they did not really cause any significant stress to me, but there are definitely better ways or stuff that we just did not consider to do or have. I was still comfortable, stable and even then I thrived in university and work. So did r, so I treasure those times a lot and it always makes me feel nostalgic.

And now we have a fridge and a bed frame and a dining set and a big big window :D I am so happy. This makes me so, so happy. Everything in this new space, aside from hand-me-downs and the stuff I stole in my parents' home like tupperware and the like, me & r worked so hard for.

This is just one of those times I remember and say to myself that yes, it is supposed be this easy to be with somebody. For our breakfast I fried eggs, bought pandesal and r prepared her matcha and my coffee heehee. I cooked sinigang, with the rich and creamy soup. Always a well-loved dish in our home :)

my date with work friends

In the afternoon, I met my friends from work at the mall. My work friend a is leaving the company so we want to hangout on the weekend for once as a small despidida.

We went bowling, played billiards, the arcade basketball game, had coffee and of course we shit-talked our management. Since they are my first work friends and our job is also their first job (also hired around the same time as me) and we have roughly the same interests (better shown in a venn diagram since we are group of 4), I am optimistic that we would still talk even if we move on to different places. On the depth of our friendship, we've shared trauma from different times of our lives too many times to count. Then, the most important thing of all, I genuinely like them as people and love talking to them.

I guess this is why work friendships are tricky, no? And then now it will be put to the test because there is no more need to talk to each other at least 5 days a week. Is this the part where I will be let down? Or I can continue to be vulnerable to them after all, even when it is my time to leave? Only time will tell! But no matter, I had a great, super fun time with them. After the mall, we missed the last ride of the LRT and it bummed us but in a stroke of luck a bus came to take us to Taft right before it rained. I bought r 3 Krones from a Japanese bakery for her pasalubong.

sunday

In the morning, me and r went out to walk around a track near our home. I also attempted to do a cartwheel, on film, and it is a thousand miles away from a cartwheel. I'm too scared to raise my feet. We end up with 5-ish thousand steps after an hour then after a lil bit of rest we divide and conquered our weekend shopping for a restock of our pantry and freezer.

r went to the grocery store and me to the wet market - the former only a few minutes walk from us and the market being a jeep/train ride away. The reason for this divide and conquer is that we buy our meat/veggies/fruits at the market and the rest is at the store. I always do the market runs, sometimes with r, sometimes alone, since I mostly do the meal-planning and cooking. r also don't like to touch raw meat and that's just fine for me as I already have some trusted shops at the market - for my chicken and fish, mostly, and for my pork I almost always just choose a shop owned by a woman. This is my entry for the small ways to end the patriarchy.

I think our way of acquiring ingredients and meat is, compared to those of core countries, are especially nuanced. Enough so it created its own culture. I found a video to show to everyone what the markets look like and here's one of FEATR's videos on Market Heroes.

When I got home I organized the food, cleaned and had lunch. After that I dove into auditing my expenses while r poked stuff around on her new iPad and edited some of our videos. We've been talking a lot about filming our dates and our life together with the purpose of having our personal archive of experiences (not to be shared to the world...).

I think these discussions led me to think and better understand people who like to take pictures and videos. I always used to think it unauthentic and I was the kind of person who would question the act, but then it became some instances of stumbling upon me and r's old pictures and even a couple of videos I edited before for our monthsaries and I just... wanted to see more. I realized I've judged them so quickly just because I'm not like that. So that's a behavior I'm no longer adapting moving forward. I said all that and yet I've always loved film and taking videos, maybe I just don't like the front camera as much hahahaha

cooking my favorite food is a love letter to myself

A few weeks back r had questioned me about how do I show my love to myself. This conversation is brought by the fact that I don't like to shop and I struggle to want and then buy, while she is the opposite and always knows how to reward herself with buying the things she likes.

I don't even know what I like! I mean I do but the things I like are just not things. Jesus. Anyway, this is my answer then: cooking for me is how I show my love to myself. Yesterday, I did my second attempt of my favorite noodle soup dish which is chicken sotanghon. It's not that complicated of a dish, but any merienda food with noodles or pasta take some time preparing the ingredients and for me that's a labor of love, i.e: making my own fried garlic, chopping the vegetables and poaching the chicken then shredding it by hand. I like to think the components of fried garlic and green onions just make the dish, so I love to prep those even though frying garlic is a test of patience and can go bad really quickly. I also did the unlimited green onion hack for the first time, so hoping it goes well and I have more green onions TT They are my favorite ingredient in anything.

I ended up spending the afternoon preparing and cooking and cleaning for my favorite food with r as my sous-chef. By sous-chef I mean I need help with something and she does it. This is my definition of cooking together and I swear it's not hell...

pride salubong

After dinner me & r got ready to go out for a pride event that I found on Facebook. It is in a cafe and we had nothing to do that evening, so we decided to show up. It is also only a jeep away at an area we haven't gone to before. It is still the last day of May, so the event is named like that¹.

To be honest, we don't have a lot of experience in these communities or spaces. But I'd say if my life were a movie there'd still be a lot of gay rep if you know what I mean. I am around sapphics and gay men because of my friends but we come up so short if we talk about meeting members of the community in organized events like this one. So no surprises here - we absolutely don't know what to expect! But it still comforted me the the event would be in a cafe, so the first step we do is register, get our cute rainbow wristbands and order a drink. We didn't get to RSVP but we end up having a seat anyway when some others left because it kicked-off a bit later.

I have to tell you now about our first Pride event experience. It was 2024. In the QC Memorial Circle, where BINI was listed as a performer along with other big names and mind you, they had only released Pantropiko earlier that summer, so they were almost at the peak of their local stardom. There were so many people, all waiting for some sort of concert, and at first okay so it's giving a festival energy thing, but we were getting overwhelmed really quickly and it was so humid and literally there are so much people in what would have been an enormous space. It started to rain really hard after the sunset and everything went crazy when everyone wanted to get out of the park. Luckily there were no stampedes but it was so close. Me and r went home soaking wet and it was another battle, one we fought for tooth and nail, just to get on a bus and come home from QC to Taft. We didn't attempt going the next year because of this trauma TT But that time around I think they learned the lesson of not releasing a performers list pubmat before the event.

The night started with some games, an ice breaker and a quiz, all good, genuine fun. We laughed so hard, everyone was having a great time and even found ourselves talking and meeting others. It was a bit pretty scary to put yourself out there but god does it pay off, even if you're literally just in the space. I think it has a lot to do with how intimate they had set everything up in the cafe and how I don't know, I just feel it in my bones that I am safe there and I am loved and I'm with the love of my life, the love I've defended and fought hard for and I'm in a room full of people who understands :')

We watched performances! One queen who impersonates Mariah Carey, put her legs on my thighs as one of her bits in the performance asdfhakwjekahg I'm like wow. This is how it is. I don't think I'll forget about that and then we participated in some more games before we left because we still do have work tomorrow and can't stay up TT

All in all the event had moments that I know will stay with me for a long long time. Me and r both. While we recharge our social batteries I hope we come across more events like this one. I'm considering volunteering but will have to look into it because of the strict bed time me and r are already used to... Again there is always so much to learn, so much to do but knowing it will be for something that matters to you makes it all worth it and exciting and something to live for.

the last day of may

That wraps up my weekend ~ I am full of joy. I write this today on a Monday and I was able to because I worked from home today. It is gloomy now on June 1st and with r at work I can only conclude this to be so homophobic, kidding. If you've come this far thank you for reading the slices of my life - I am what the kids say are oversharingmaxxing.

I hope June is kind to you & me :) Happy Pride month !!! 🏳️‍🌈 Love love love love

Further reading: the first day of may

#2026 #life #pride