I love fried chicken legs and mashed potatoes. I love cameras and telephones and flat TVs. I love trees and strong winds. I love rainy days and Mondays and field days. I love Donna Cruz. I love every shade of green’s and brown’s but only of grape-juice purple. I love pens and papers, and songs and singings. I love theater as much as the cinemas. I love darkness. I love mornings and lazy 4 pm’s outside. I love the poetry of Psalms and the book of James and the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. I love Moms. I love kids confiding in me their secrets. I love teenage love stories. I love schools and cemeteries and abandoned park benches. I love old wooden chests. I love Rick Ashley’s ‘80’s hits. I love leaves and stars as symbols for anything. I love Sweet Valley High and Sidney Sheldon’s novels. I love shared tears and loud laughters. I love birthdays and birthday gifts.

I love goodbyes.

I love silences, aloneness, soliloquy’s, poems written and songs sung by Black artists. I love pictures and photographies. I love the square shape. I love water color arts. I love thoughtfulness and sensitivity and witty sense of humor. I love Ally McBeal, Dawson Leary, all of the Friends cast and each of the Camden’s 7th Heaven family members. I love jackets. I love shades and fashion statements and accessories and George Clooney. I love goodhearted people, brave people and honest people. I love windows, I love sunshine, I love mugs and I love Algebra. I love pianos and guitars and I love Carol Banawa and RJ Rosales along with them. I like eggs sunny side up and I love milk in my coffee better than the Coffeemate [ugh!]. I love sleeping, I love screaming, I love praying, I love evenly shaped nails and teeth. I love nude paintings, brunette hairs and plump, plump butts. I love bright orange bonnets and green Doritos and Nokia 3310’s. I love death as much as life, quadratic equations as much as odes and sonnets, remote controls as much as tissues. I love greeting cards and tons-of-garlic fried rice and roller coaster rides. I love the weirdest things, the weirdest people and the weirdest of ideas. I love tennis and I love swimming ‘cause I love sweating and I love water. I love the sound of March 11 spoken outloud and I love Titanic and Patch Adams and Popeye with Superman. I love huge hotdog pillows and I love fractions and I love heights and wings and neat handwritings. I love good grammar and Emily Dickinson.

I luuuvvv tutongs!

I love objective criticism, challenging tests and honest praises. Heck, I love problems! I love relief! I love “wala-lang� moments. I love the sense of accomplishment of having done something with excellence, compassion or gracefulness. I love ‘nabibitin’ [I look forward to the next].
I love poems recited quietly. I love sunflowers. I love chocolate-flavored anything but not the chocolate itself. I love ice cream time with friends, casual jamming time and clouds dreaming the life away. I love long lost wallets found with money still in it I’ve since forgotten I saved. And I love looking at a glass with half its content and say, “Ah, it’s still half-full.�

I love books, I love books, I love books. And did I say I love … books?! I love Jollibee Chickenjoys & McDonald vanilla milkshakes & KFC mashed potatoes & Dunkin’ Donuts choco butternuts. I love journals. I love huge fried shrimps. I love power ballads. I love Johnson&Johnsons regular colognes in regular, blue variant. I love Oprah. I love the letter ‘J’ and the number 99. I love looking at sleeping babies. I’d love to walk on seashore, dive from a plane and deep-swim with the fishes. I love giving love advices and tutoring students and see their eyes light up when understanding dawns like the sun rise. I love bullet trains and Ferris wheels and carousels. I love strangers. I love feistiness. I love the spoken Spanish. I love trying out new things and having the assurance that I can revert back to the old ways. I love washed jeans, used sneakers and smell of brand new shirts. And of course, I love the brilliance of either diamonds or ideas.

Yet you can take it all away but these three:

I love fierce embraces, long, long letters and soulful singing’s. They just take the cake! [Oh…, but too bad, I don’t love cakes!]








I hate dust. I hate rust. I hate the Russian language. I hate Sinigang Na Hipon’s, though I respect its rich flavored soup. I hate being inside the house between 5 to 7 pm. I hate Star Trek. I hate basketball. I hate animés. I hate Physics and Trigo and P.E,’s. I hate cold rice and left-over foods. I hate poorly lit rooms and stifling places and patay-malisyang faces. I hate coffee creams, plucked eyebrows and traffic. I hate Nokia 5110’s. I hate skin diseases and halitosis and microphones.

I hate pets [they die]. I hate beef [they’re coarse]. I hate falling in love [it sucks]. I hate crowds [they “agaw� my oxygen]. I hate tall chairs and strong perfume and thousand pieces puzzle. I hate the sound of slamming phones and doors. I hate my voice. I hate know-it-all people, pasaway people and dense people. I hate long queues. I hate short_____. I hate VHS tapes. I hate patis and tuyo and the ‘cheverly of whicheverlies!

I hate Batman and X-Men and boys pretending men. I hate maps and Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery and Mystica’s splits. I hate good letters given to me written by someone else just to impress me. I hate matatakaw’s, yes I hate P.G.’s! I hate frogs. I hate snakes. I hate rehearsed conversations and VCD with no audio. I hate trying-hard’s [they remind me of,… me!]. I hate fancy things poorly made. I hate it when Kuya Germs emcees. I hate paksiw na isda [I’d rather sleep]. I hate eating with bare hands; hence, I hate sea foods [unless you will unshell it for me]. I hate beer and cigarettes and night clubs. I hate Satan [he’s not fair & he doesn’t floss]. I hate lateness and broken promises that weren’t smoothed with apology. I hate false humility. I hate wars. I hate perfunctory kisses. I hate people who dispense advices quickly away when someone is just beginning to unload his problems and just wanted to be heard. I hate “square� human kinds, the ones who are,… well, never mind! I hate imported shampoos. I hate small talks and let’s-make-fun-of-someone chisms.
I hate cold drinks, tap water will do.
I hate forced I’m-sorry’s.
I hate pudpod, er, stubby fingernails and stingy contact lens and bawling babies with pooh-pooh’s, and too… yeah, I hate Winnie D’ Pooh.

About the Author: WILLIAM BIAGAN RAMOS is Pogie whose birthday is MARCH 11, and with just the sound of it makes him weeeeee....! kinda happy... He refuses to grow old & be boring... HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Mr. March 11!!!!