The old wall clock.

Take this old Citizen wall clock, for instance. I remember we’ve had it since we’ve lived in Paranaque. It won’t surprise me if it dated back to our time living in Quezon City, since this one piece from our house has been one of the oldest things we have. It’s one of the constant things in my life, and it evokes memories of my childhood, being always up some wall, watching everything that happens in the busiest areas of our house (through the four last houses we’ve lived in, I remember it was almost always facing the dining and living rooms).

Stained glass kuneho.

We have a lot of these stained glass pieces displayed around the house, and we’ve had it since we lived in Ruby Street, Severina Diamond Subdivision, Paranaque. My dad had this small corner in the garage set up for his personal, creative projects, and coming up with stained glass art pieces was one of those. They were nice to have back then, but now, more than that, these pieces have become symbols of normality, a part of our family’s history. We used to sell some of these pieces (the materials used to build these pieces were not of low quality; my mom told me that we had to import glass just to make the finished products stand out and be of real value), but now, I doubt my parents would want to. They’ve been around for quite some time now and their collective sentimental value has shot up.

Old read.

Back in grade school, I used to read a lot of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I had a huge collection of these and much like collecting magazines, I didn’t want to skip a new issue. They were my childhood addiction, and I really treasured my collection, until they collected dust and yellowed with age. Still, I keep them in a space in my closet and I still occasionally pick one up to run through a story and see which ending it’ll lead me to.

I credit my love to read and write to this early fascination for CYOA books; years later, it led to many hours spent in the library, picking up random books and judging which literature’s good or bad. Whatever taste I have for literature now, this is the foundation upon which it is built. Simple, but everything has to start somewhere.

My shelf now.

Here’s how (part of) my shelf looks now, mostly collected from my college years to present. My favorite ones are the two thick Ayn Rand books, the Jason Bourne novels, The Godfather, and a handful of Robert Kiyosaki books (not seen here). I’ve decided about a year ago to buy at least one book every payday, and so far, I’m more or less able to keep up with that personal commitment. My latest buy is Jessica Zafra’s Twisted II: Spawn of Twisted, because I’ve been meaning to buy myself a copy for a while now and because local books are a lot cheaper than the others (I’m projecting that by the end of the month, I’ll be broke again).

Okay, sharing these tidbits of my personal history felt good. I ought to do this again sometime.

The rest of the photos can be seen here.