the girl from Samar
washed her own panties in a basin,
hung them on my electric fan to dry,
threw a slipper at my head when i laughed
and hit me square in the ear.
she grew up hauling water uphill,
typhoon every October tearing the roof off,
her dad out on a boat for three days
coming home with four fish and a fever.
so when i cooked her a shitty fried egg
she ate it as if i'd served her lobster in Makati.
said thank you twice.
kissed me with yolk on her lip.
compare this with the girl from Forbes Park
i dated for six weeks in a fit of stupidity,
who sent back a $100 steak
because the parsley looked sad.
sad parsley.
i swear to god.
her daddy paid for everything,
including her contempt.
she cried in his Fortuner over a ruined manicure
while a poor-kid tapped the window selling sampaguita.
give me the woman who knows the cold street.
she'll take your criticism and fix the thing.
in bed she fucks you with gratitude,
fights you with honor,
leaves the light off when she leaves.
because she knows what a light costs.
malamig ang kalsada. (the streets are cold)
i love this saying because it grounds me. three words, and suddenly i'm back on the pavement, looking at the bigger picture. it reminds me how thin the line is between a warm bed and a cold sidewalk, and it makes me grateful for the small things i used to walk past every day: the silence of the morning, the sun on my face, the peace that lives between 5 and 7am, before the city wakes up and starts asking for things.
malamig ang kalsada.
here's what it really means: no one cares. lie down on that street and die there, and the jeepneys will keep running. people will step over your body on their way to work. no one gives a fuck about you. truth is, they never did.
that sounds brutal, and it is. it's also the most freeing truth a man can hear, because the world's indifference is a gift. once you feel how cold it is, you become grateful and you become strong. accept that no one is coming, and you stop waiting. take care of yourself. stand on your own two feet. and never expect a handout. when someone offers one, push it away, because a handout trains you to wait, and waiting is how men end up face-down on cold streets.
malamig ang kalsada.
so you grind. you fight for your survival first, then for your family, then for the people around you who have less fight left in them than you do. the fighting never stops, because the cold never stops. and the day you think you've made it, the wind finds you again.
malamig ang kalsada.
maybe it's fear. good fear, the kind that sharpens you and keeps you awake at night for the right reasons. or maybe it's truth, a truth so cold it recalibrates your compass. comfort lies to you. it tells you there's time, that someone will catch you, that you can coast. the cold street tells you the truth, and the truth points north.
malamig ang kalsada.
women don't care about you either. a woman will admire a man for what he builds, and she'll leave him for what he refuses to build. so you fight. become competent. push further than you need to, because why wouldn't you? no one cares how tired you are. the world owes you zero. do it yourself.
malamig ang kalsada.
i don't trust anyone who doesn't know how cold the streets are. if you've never felt it, you're ungrateful and unappreciative, and you'll never work hard, let alone give your best to get a little better every single day. why would you? you've never seen what's waiting at the bottom.
women most of all. it's why i love promdi girls, women who grew up in the province, where life is harder. a woman who knows how cold the streets are is more grateful, more hardworking, more open to feedback, and more respectful, because she knows exactly what it costs to keep a family warm. now compare her to a girl who grew up rich. oh, man. those girls are ungrateful as fuck, spoiled bitches who can't be happy with anything you give them, because they've never once had to go without.
the same goes for my brothers. every man needs to know how cold the streets are. a man who's felt the cold will show up. he'll stay late, keep his word, and say thank you to the waiter. the cold taught him that.
rock bottom is a gift (experiencing the cold street) it grounds you and teaches you everything you need to learn about life: gratitude, discipline, humility, hunger. suffering is the greatest teacher there is, and it charges you everything. those who've never paid will spend the rest of their lives searching for a light they'll never find, because they're too afraid to walk through the dark to get to it.
1. gratitude: the cold sets the price of warmth
you'll never know what warmth is worth until you've gone without it.
a man who's always had a roof never looks up at it. he's never sat through a typhoon wondering if it'll hold. so he complains about the wifi, the traffic, the food, the woman. he thinks the world owes him everything, so everything disappoints him.
the man who's felt the cold sees the same world with new eyes. a hot shower feels like a luxury to him. quiet mornings become a blessing. and when a woman cooks for him, he treats it as a miracle, because to him it is one.
that's the hidden shit of suffering: the lower you've been, the more every inch above it is worth.
2. responsibility: no one is coming
here's the truth most men spend their whole lives running from: no one is coming to save you.
the government won't. your father might already be gone. the girl definitely won't. the world will watch you drown and scroll past.
once you accept that, something shifts. the self-pity fades, and the weight settles on your shoulders where it belongs. your life becomes your job. the family becomes your duty. and your body, your money, your word are all yours to build or yours to waste.
that's why you refuse handouts. a handout feels kind, but it has a hidden cost: it trains you to wait. every dollar you didn't earn makes you a little softer and a little slower to get up the next time you fall. a man who earns his bread eats it with pride.
know the difference, though, between a handout and a hand up. a handout replaces your effort. a hand up rewards it: a lesson, a tool, a door held open for a man already walking toward it. refuse the first. accept the second. and when it's your turn to give, give the second.
responsibility grows as you do. first you fight for yourself. then you fight for your family. after that, it's the boys reading these emails at 1am who need one man to show them how it's done. the cold street makes you strong enough to carry other people too.
here’s your homework.
1. gratitude: a "cold day"
(seneca did this. in his letters to lucilius, he tells him to set aside a few days now and then to live on the scantiest food and the roughest clothes, and to ask himself: "is this the condition i feared?")
for one day this week, live on the bare minimum. plain rice and eggs. cold showers. walk or commute instead of booking a grab, spend zero dollars on comfort, and leave the phone in a drawer after dark.
that's the baseline. now make it yours. ask yourself which comforts you lean on without thinking, and cut those too. you know your soft spots better than i do.
the next morning, write down three things that suddenly feel warm. be specific. "my family" is too vague. "the sound of my mom frying garlic at 6am" is what you're after.
then be grateful for the cold itself. knowing how cold the streets are is what lets you see everything around you as a gift.
repeat it once a month. the cold wears off fast, and so does the gratitude.
2. responsibility: the "no one is coming" audit
take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle.
on the left, list every problem in your life you're waiting for someone else to fix: the raise you hope your boss gives you, the debt you hope disappears, the body you expect to change on its own, the relationship you want her to repair.
next to each one, on the right, write the first move you can make this week to fix it yourself. one move, small enough to finish in a day.
pick the one that scares you most and do it within 48 hours.
what the cold street really is
let me tell you what the cold street really is.
it's the oldest thing in the world. it was here before the malls, before the condos in BGC. every man who ever lived has stood on it. your father. his father. the fisherman in Samar coming home with four fish and a fever. all of them, out there in the dark, with the wind coming off the water.
and one day, every one of them lay down on it for the last time.
think about it. somewhere back there, a woman you've never met woke up at 4am to cook rice over a fire so her kids could eat before school. her husband carried sacks at the pier, so his son could sit in a classroom instead of beside him on the docks. they never saw you. your name was a hundred years away from existing. and still they walked the cold street every single day, so that one day, generations later, you could wake up under a roof and complain about the wifi.
you are the warmth they built.
sit with that. every comfort you've ever ignored was paid for by someone who froze for it. the bed you slept in, the language in your mouth, the blood keeping your heart going at 1am: all of it was carried here through typhoons, war, and hunger, by people who had every reason to quit and kept walking anyway.
that's what gratitude really is. a debt to the dead.
responsibility is how you pay it. you can never pay them back, because they're gone. the only way to settle what you owe is to pay it forward: stand in the cold yourself, so someone you'll never meet gets to be warm.
this is why you train when you're tired. it's why you keep your word when it costs you, refuse the handout, build the money, build the body, build the man. you were always a link in a chain, and the chain is older and longer than your whole life.
a hundred years from now, a kid will wake up warm somewhere with no idea who you were. your name will mean zero to him. this letter will be long gone. still, he'll eat because you worked, stand straight because you did, and keep his word because someone taught his father, who learned it from his father, who learned it from you.
that's the closest a man ever gets to living forever.
malamig ang kalsada. it always will be. the cold is permanent, and so is the fire you keep against it, if you keep it long enough to hand it to someone.
the girl from Samar leaves the light off because she knows what it costs. learn the price of the light. go earn it. then keep it burning for the ones coming after you, long after your own goes out.
which brings me to the kid. i have no son yet. if i ever do, this is what i'd leave him.
rules for a son i might have
kid, if you exist someday, read this at fifteen
and again at thirty when some woman has ruined you.
rules:
wake up before the city does.
eat what's on the plate and wash the plate.
hit the bag till your hands shake.
read books by dead men who cussed.
never borrow money from a cousin.
pay for her dinner, then let her decide the rest.
learn to make a woman laugh before you try to make her cum.
keep your word, especially when it costs you.
apologize to your mother, often, for things you got away with.
fight for your sisters with your fists if needed
and with your money always.
shake hands with the guy who has calluses.
buy taho from the taho man even when you hate taho.
tip the barker.
someday you'll sleep on a bench somewhere.
take your shoes off and put them under your head.
in the morning buy pandesal with whatever's left
and eat it slowly, walking.
you'll understand the rest of this list then.
call me after, if im around.
if im gone, find a sidewalk at 5 am,
read this out loud,
i'll hear you.
fuck the soft life.
go get the hard one.
its yours.
WIN