valentine's days

commonplace page book

Notes on life. Started on Jan 28, 2025, and last written in 2 months, 2 weeks ago.

table of contents

  1. making friends
  2. Haikyuu life lessons 🌟
  3. Ninotchka Rosca
  4. home
  5. writing
  6. time
  7. love (or what is soon to be love)
  8. med school thoughts
  9. a running list of my favorite pastries (2025)
  10. Trigun life lessons
  11. boygenius
  12. Min Yoongi life lessons 🌟
  13. Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
  14. Love in the Time of Cholera
  15. things to remember 🌟
  16. Albert Camus
  17. you can do it!
  18. the canon of my soul

making friends

"It might be really hard, but I don't think there is a person in the world you can't eventually be friends with."

— Miyamura Izumi, Horimiya S1E9

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Haikyuu life lessons

"Even if we're not confident that we'll win, even if others tell us we don't stand a chance, we must never tell ourselves that."

— Sawamura Daichi

✦

"Do you really need a reason to not want to lose?"

— Hinata Shōyō

✦

"Talent is something you make bloom, instinct is something you polish."

— Oikawa Tooru

✦

"I don't think everyone has to like something before giving it a try. I don't think you need an unwavering will or lofty motive just to get started. Sometimes, things that you start on a whim end up becoming very important to you, too. To get started, I think you just need a little bit of curiosity."

— Shimizu Kiyoko

✦

"Is losing really a sign that you are bad? Or is it instead meant to be a trial? A test to see if, once you've been knocked down, you have the strength to stand back up again? If you stay down on your knees, then that really means you aren't good enough."

— Takeda Ittetsu

✦

"This time, I swear I'll make it count!"

— Hinata Shōyō

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"There are all kinds of pretty flowers that you'll never get to see unless you take the scenic route."

— Tanaka Saeko

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"Yes, you are not the best right now, but that means you have room to grow. What could be more fun and exciting than that?"

— Takeda Ittetsu

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"Why do you keep drawing random lines, telling yourself anything past them is impossible?...What bigger reason do you need than pride?"

— Yamaguchi Tadashi

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"Look that moment of despair right in the face and smash through it!"

✦

"Make a 'miracle' that's no miracle at all!"

— Ukai Keishin

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"All skills and talents are not meant to be had, they are meant to be shown. When you go out there and play the world, you give 'em hell. Okay?"

— Hibarida Fuki

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"Something you've practiced and practiced...something you've poured your heart into...can all just end one day, far faster and with far less fanfare than you'd expect. So what? Let it. It isn't like I'm expecting defeat. Nor am I counting on victory. A challenge lies before me. I want to take it on. That's all."

— Shimizu Kiyoko

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"Yesterday is gone. Yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. They've all been converted into muscle. What matters is this—what are we going to do today?"

— Miya Atsumu

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"The important things to keep in mind are 'what can I do next?' and 'what should I do next?' Focus on the play in front of you."

— Akaashi Keiji

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"Forget the envy. Forget the admiration. Those have no place here in the middle of a game."

— Akaashi Keiji

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"I get it! Being good means being free."

— Hinata Shōyō

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"It's not impossible, it's just hard!"

— Bokuto Kōtarō

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Ninotchka Rosca

"Aye; the truth. One is supposed to see it in darkness; but I saw it before the merciful night came. It is time; I tell myself that escape is impossible and, following the running footsteps of my sister to her room, I carry, like a cane before me, the inevitable."

— Ninotchka Rosca, Children of the War, from Stories of a Bitter Country

✦

"His death was reported extensively in newspapers—for it was one of those events mildly puzzling which made for sensation in his country. The echo of that gunshot—he died by his own hand and was found with the gun still gleaming with metallic wrath between his stiff blue fingers—rippled among those who knew him, passing in ever diminishing waves to the edge of that community in which he had moved, and beyond that, to the unsuspecting reader who found the suicide thrown on his breakfast table as an irritating question to which there could be no answer."

— Ninotchka Rosca, A Parable of Evil, from Stories of a Bitter Country

✦

"Guns killed only men but that which was in men themselves destroyed entire tribes and societies, removing from the memory of the succeeding ages, every trace of the epoch in which the ruins had been whole, the temples full and incense had clouded the fierce visages of the gods."

— Ninotchka Rosca, A Parable of Evil, from Stories of a Bitter Country

✦

"She trailed death around like perfume from her shoulders."

— Ninotchka Rosca, Our Apostle Paul, from Stories of a Bitter Country

✦

"One lived for death and died for immortality."

— Ninotchka Rosca, The Goddess, from Stories of a Bitter Country

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home

"...No matter which home I am going home to, I am always leaving another one behind. Some part of me is always absent. Missing the sights and smells of one as I go rushing to the other. Migrants, I think, are people who are never whole, never completely in one place. Ours is a fractured existence."

— Arlene J. Chai, The Last Time I Saw Mother

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writing

"The writer’s own life is now his richest material; he must study himself, shed all sense of pride and be naked to his own creative eye. He knows if he is his own critic that art is the most tyrannical and demanding mistress he has to serve with unblemished constancy."

— F. Sionil Jose, Our Roots, Our Rizal

influences

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time

all we have is time

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love (or what is soon to be love)

"For a time, we were silent. But we were still trying to look each other over, without making it too obvious, and whenever or eyes met, we smiled, liking what we saw."

— Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

Sa lahat ng oras
Ikaw ang pangarap

(In every moment
You are [my] dream)

— Sylvia La Torre - Kung Kita'y Kapiling (If I Am With You)

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med school thoughts

"Whenever I was sleepy, I slept. I got through med school like this."

— my aunt Dr. D, encouraging me about going to med school

✦

"We wear a lot of hats...In this country, we can't be just doctors."

— Dr. A

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a running list of my favorite pastries (2025)

In no particular order:

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Trigun life lessons

"LOVE AND PEACE!"

— Vash the Stampede

✦

"Your ticket to the future is always blank."

— Rem Saverem

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“No matter how heavy a cross you carry, you still deserve to eat, you still deserve to laugh.”

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boygenius

I can't hide from you
Like I hide from myself

I remember who I am
When I'm with you

— boygenius - True Blue

✦

If you rewrite your life, may I still play a part?

— boygenius - We're In Love

✦

There we were
Was anyone ever so young?

— boygenius - Anti-Curse

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Say you don't have to make it bad
Just 'cause you know how

— boygenius - Anti-Curse

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Min Yoongi life lessons

"I hope you don’t forget that giving up decisively also counts as courage."

— Agust D - Burn It ft. MAX

✦

"Those who don't have a dream, it's okay, it's okay if you don't have a dream. You just have to be happy."

— Min Yoongi

✦

"If you feel like you're going to crash then accelerate more, idiot."

— BTS - INTRO : Never Mind

✦

"May your trials end in full bloom."

— Agust D - So Far Away (Ft. SURAN)

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Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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Love in the Time of Cholera

By Gabriel García Márquez. Translated by Edith Grossman.

"He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: 'Only God knows how much I loved you.'"

✦

"One night she came back from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could be happy not only without love, but despite it."

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"He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past."

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"He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake."

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things to remember

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Albert Camus

"By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide."

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you can do it!

"Even a baby dragon can breathe fire!"

— Hassel, Pokemon Scarlet

✦

"I’m trying to tell you that you’ve got a whole world of stuff you might be good at, and you don’t have to impress anyone."

— kittebasu, the courtship ritual of the hercules beetle

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the canon of my soul

books

movies

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