Love to your mothers.

This evening, I rummaged through stacks of family documents to find a paper my brother needs. This is always an unwelcome task because it means I have to leaf through my parents' files. I have to see their handwritings, their transcripts, their death certificates. Understandably, whenever I have to find something from this pile, I try to find it as quickly as I can, retrieve it, and just hide everything again.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the document right away and had to shuffle through every folder. I found our birth and baptismal certificates and my siblings' grade school report cards (for some reason, only theirs). There was also the "business proposal" my sister and I sent my parents when we were in college. We wanted to start a café and drafted the layout and made the menu. It was mostly made for fun and we deliberately made it look seriously professional as a joke. It was amazing that it was there filed away with the documents from their old businesses.

The most heartbreaking find for me was the printed emails. The summer I spent away from home to complete an OJT and a special project for a professor, I regularly sent emails to my family. I sent it to my brother's email but addressed it to everyone. Apparently, my brother printed the emails for my mother to read and she kept them. It was surreal to read my words. To me, they were not worth keeping. They were just inane words from this clueless kid who kept rambling about software projects, cool teleconferencing equipment, and laundry costs. Every email also seemed to have reassurances to my mother that I wear clean and decent clothes and that sneakers are allowed in the workplace. Her replies must have always been concerns about how I presented myself outside university.

Even now, almost five years of being totally on my own, I still hear my mother's words and reminders in my head. I am reminded of her in the little things she taught me -- like being polite to service staff or not making a mess in the kitchen when cooking. I feel her guidance in the more significant things as well. When I am forced outside my comfort zone, I seek courage in the thought that my mother would have wanted me to grow. When I feel like wallowing in depression, I would imagine my mother being disappointed at me for not making the most out of a very blessed life.

Her voice has become an extension of my conscience. She is no longer with me but I am still led by her upbringing. She gave so much of herself to us that twenty-seven years of being her daughter has provided me more than enough love and guidance to sustain me for the rest of my life. I will keep coming back to it, like a well that never runs dry.

If you are still able to actually hear your mother's voice not just in your head or in your memories, be grateful. I hope you find time to hug her or call her today.

Love to your mothers. Cheers.

Obsolescence

Buying the last print issue of Newsweek in the bookstore a few days ago (headlined appropriately with #lastprintissue) sent me and my friends into a retrospective mood. We're barely in our thirties, but we realize that we will belong to a generation that will have memories of things that will soon be obsolete.

It's not just printed magazines, of course. Although that reminded me of an assignment in grade school to cut out all kinds of graphs from newspapers and compile them in a folder. My father had subscriptions to Time, Newsweek, and Reader's Digest magazines when I was growing up. And there were always stacks of them in the house. So I took my scissors and cut through all the shiny pages of the magazines to get the colorful graphs. I ended up with a good thick compilation and a great grade for the assignment. I'm just not sure if my parents were thrilled with the mutilated pages.

Today, anyone can find great infographics in the interwebs, without the need to print and cut them out. Which is a good thing for the decrease of paper usage. Speaking of which, books are also being transitioned from dead trees to electronic media. How long has Powerbooks and Fully Booked been around? It feels recent, but it's probably been ten, fifteen years now? It may be wishful thinking, but I don't think physical books will go away that soon. You will always have those nothing-like-the-smell-of-books kind of people to buy them. But think of the how far the e-book industry has come. You can get almost any title you like in literally seconds through Amazon. I bought my nephew Dr. Seuss books like the ones we had as kids. But there's also an interactive app version of "The Cat in the Hat" in iOS, which I'm sure he enjoys more. Yeah, we didn't have that in the 80s.

My friends were particularly nostalgic about Kodak. Now that the company has gone bankrupt, it won't be long when the phrase "Kodak moment" will lose its meaning. I remember film photography at a time when there was no other choice but to buy 24 or 36 shots of film from a store, taking pictures and choosing your shots well, and then waiting for an hour to have the prints developed. Nothing like all the digital cameras we have now that we use to mindlessly take hundreds of pictures with for a single album. 

So I guess this part is as good a place as any to segue into digital media storage. It's amazing that some young people do not know what the "save" icon is. I read somewhere that a kid thought it was a washing machine. A washing machine! Zero concept on what a floppy disk is. We used to save one mp3 file into three of those. Now, even my trusty old 2GB thumb drive is sometimes not enough when I need to move files around. Makes me think of how life was so much simpler when I was buying a computer in college freshman year and can't imagine how I would be able to use up all of my 6GB HDD space.

I'm not a gamer and have never been, so I won't be able to reek nostalgia over old gaming consoles. My brother had an Atari when I was much younger. It was bulky, it had cartridges, a whole lot of wires. And that was pretty much all I remember of it. I have a Wii that I hardly use, and could also now be as obsolete as the Atari, for all I know. 

I'm sure I missed a lot of great transitions in history. Would've been cool to see the period where the world changed from black and white to color (Calvin's dad is awesome, lol). But this is actually an interesting time to be in. I reckon if I keep my iPod long enough, it would become a relic like cassette tapes.

In the meantime, kindly refrain from trespassing within my lawn's premises.