‘Can you read my mind?’

WHILE sorting through magazines and deciding which to keep or give, I began to notice that I was keeping the Vanity-Fair kind and not much of the Vogues and Harper’s Bazaars and Elles. Well, who knew? Haha. I’ve always been a reader and VF obviously have more to read but not exactly more to love when my brain could hardly absorb anything while trying to survive in this pandemic.

I now tend to unsend messages in Messenger especially those written without thinking so that they end up sounding like mumbles. Besides, I’ve been planning to deactivate my social media accounts which can be summed up with one—Facebook—since I don’t use the others—Instagram, et al. Although I don’t know if the “et al” is necessary there. Do I even have other social media accounts aside from FB and IG?

I stopped writing this column in July 2021 because I was always writing about Covid-19 and the pandemic and started to become depressed with those two topics. I had been using my smartphone for the longest time in writing columns, so convenient while in bed until that phone started falling on my face when I fell asleep while writing. Yes, my columns were that boring already, I fell asleep while writing them. So, I stopped writing. And reading became my only remaining coping mechanism.

The pandemic requires lots of coping mechanisms in case the writing goes pfft and reading stresses the eyes. But I have to refrain from sending sad messages to friends who I’m sure are also going through the worst of times in this pandemic although their FB posts and photos may prove otherwise. As a Spongebob meme says, “Just pretend you’re happy, and eventually you’ll forget you are pretending.”

I’m now using a laptop in writing this—better safe than sorry when it comes to smartphones causing bruises on my face. I hope the Wifi will stay this time since the mobile’s hotspot doesn’t seem to work for the laptop anymore unless it’s my low-tech brain again not able to connect with high-tech solutions.

The only way I can stop sending woe-is-me messages to friends is to resume writing this column where I can vent about whatever and release all that to the universe. I’m presuming, though, that aliens can already read my mind and don’t need this column to learn about what—or who—is bugging me.

There was a time when superheroes meant swooning over Superman and singing,

Can you read my mind?
Do you know what it is you do to me?
Don’t know who you are
Just a friend from another star.

Here I am, like a kid at the school
Holding hands with a god or a fool
Will you look at me, quivering
Like a little girl, shivering
You can see right through me.

Do you want me to sing pa more? Beer and tequila are required. Alcohol drowns inhibitions.

Well, those were the days. No pandemic, no Covid-19, and no social media for the Live blow-by-blow account. That “Superman” was released in 1978 when our superhero was Shaun Cassidy of “Hardy Boys.” Okay, Parker Stevenson, too. While the older generation was protesting against the Marcoses in the ‘70s, we, the younger ones then, were choosing Charlie’s Angel that best represented our unique quirks. I wanted to be Kate Jackson but another friend already had that “title,” so, I ended up as Farrah Fawcett. Don’t ask me why because I also had absolutely no idea. The millennials, of course, can’t relate to any of these.

When “Sex and the City” premiered in 1998, there was again another mad scramble for “Who am I?” We were then 20 years older, our taste in men had evolved by then from Shaun Cassidy to Brad Pitt, and there was the Samantha among us quietly putting a halo above her like-a-virgin thoughts.

17 years have passed since “Sex and the City” said goodbye in 2004, and it’s back. With a new title, “And Just Like That,” but without Samantha. Ho-hum. It would have been interesting to find out if the 50-something Samantha Jones is still behaving the same way.

Yup, there’s my favorite number again: 17. Hmmm.