Two playdates in a row this week.

A progress from a few months. 

I asked if she had friends in school.

"I don't have any."

"Why?" 

"Because they don't want to play with me."

"How long is this going on?"

"Couple of days now after the spring break."

"Why do you think is happening?"

"I don't know. They want to play with other kids not, with me."

A wants to play with E. 

Al wants to play with Av.

"E, Av, and A are all nice to me but sometimes, they play with each other."

"So what do you do when you're not playing with anyone during recess."

"I just walk around." 


There must be one, or two, or three.

Sometimes, no takers but in generally, there must be one. 

If you want a playmate, play with older kids, younger kids, play with boys, play with a teacher, a class monitor or an intern, play with a board game or a toy that you can play alone.

Find something that will keep you occupied and interested. 

I didn't grow up with a lot of friends in school and in the neighborhood, but I tried to busy myself with play stuff I can do around the house and in our yard. Plus I have a sister and a younger brother just in case I find playing alone boring. 

I caught butterflies and dragonflies, severed their wings and release them with glee. I  destroyed  little plants that fold when touched and caught  insects and kept them inside a matchsticks box or hid them in a small empty bottle. I painted my nails purple from the nectar of the purple plants and I tried to climb an aratiles tree and take the biggest, juiciest red fruit as snack. The rest was sold by my grandfather in the market for 10 pesos. 

I shoot birds with a make-shift sling from a skinned shortened bark of a tree with a big rubber-band tied to each side and a small pebble as an ammo. I saw this from my older brother and his friends with big wooden slings shooting birds all over the place. And I thought, "why do they get to do all the fun stuff?"

Who needs a playmate if you can conjure some adventures without rules? 

You can quit anytime you want and there'll be no disputes for sure.

You get bruises and wounds and nobody to blame for.

Two playdates in a row this week but in no-friends-day, find your thing.

This week is seeding time. A sacred time for many farming families. 

Despite the cooler weather, farmers seed t and protect this time from any disruptions. Time to switch off the computers and phones, away from auction sales, vacations and mini-vacations, and going for mundane errands. They're skipping Church, missing family lunches and friend's invite for a game-board night for a good reason. 

We have our own problems. Rocks, rocks, rocks everywhere. I can't imagine the amount of rocks we have in our land. Rocks in the garden or as an ornament create a great ambience but not on the field. If anyone is counting, we have collected more rocks every year that we can take credit for. Rocks, anyone?

Any time can be sacred time if you really put your feet down with a capital C commitment.  

PUT A BIG X ON YOUR SCHEDULE. NOTHING AND NO ONE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DISRUPT!

I repeat, nothing and no one should be allowed to disrupt.

As my family points out, "Nothing moves this week except farming, meals, and sleep."

No rocks and machine and parts failure can derail. 
​
This writing will not be done without being strict about it. 

A lot of my outputs came from this regimen.

Protect your sacred time.

Or else, there's no harvest in the near future. 

We all need standards, that's why modern society works because of it. 

If you ride a plane, you want a competent and experienced pilot to fly the aircraft. And if you need a surgery, you'd better have that procedure with someone that has the competence and qualifications and experience of countless successful operations of similar nature.

Standards help our society be safe, healthy, and free from harm and danger and I can go on and on about how this is important that we continue to uphold standards in every imaginable field involving the public and our communities. 

If we have been let down by so-called expertise in the past few years especially during COVID, the alternative is  not a free-for-all free-fall. Free-for-all results in confusion and an opening for some malevolent actors to take the advantage of this confusion to sow more havoc. The alternative is more standards, more accountability for anyone or any thing that involves shaping or influencing policies, the public thought, and in particularly safety, wellness, and health involving the population. 

In different fields, standards are reviewed regularly and if found to be dated and ill-fitted for the current operational challenges and trends, are quickly readjusted. Professions conforming to standards are also evaluated based on the tenets and requirements of their practice. 

Nowadays, micro-influencers believe that with a camera and thousands of posts that they can tell you what to do with your life, health, finances, relationships, and careers. They're around to entertain and not qualified to dispense advice, if you're gullible enough to assume otherwise, you're doomed. 99% of these influencers are fake. They're not what you think they really are. And they're not accountable to anything or anyone except for the sheer goal of profits. 

Standards and a bit of gate-keeping is very important. We don't want influencers, late-night hosts, comedians, and celebrities giving instructions on how to conduct a war, adjust the national budget, and litigate a policy issue. And if you call them out of it, they would say, "What do I know, am just a ____. If you don't want that, just change the channel." 

Not easy when everyone pretends to be an expert, but no one what's to spend 10 years of studies and practicum and early failures to get that level of expertise. And everyone is also talking of the same thing, like the whole DEI issue that had gone overboard. I saw almost all black, indigenous, people of color professionals on LinkedIn become DEI experts in a span of few months talking about their pains, systemic racism, micro-aggression and wants society to pay them for their generational trauma. 

We, the people should put them in their place. 

That's why, Barbara Streisand was just asked by the audience, to 'just sing, please.'