By Herman M. Lagon We all have them — those little things that poke at our patience until it wears dangerously thin. Maybe it’s the tita who cuts the line at the grocery. Or the beachgoer who treats the sand like their trash bin. To some, these may seem petty. But for those who value …
Impulses
Habits that hold the line
By Herman M. Lagon Productivity gets tossed around a lot — sometimes as a buzzword, sometimes as a pressure point. But at its core, as personal development blogger Celestine Chua (2022) and many like her remind us, it is not about doing more — it is about doing what matters. That hits harder when you …
The price of amathia
By Herman M. Lagon A quiet tension hangs over a community when policy meets the dinner table — where parents try to stretch a grocery list the way a rubber band threatens to snap. So when officials suggested last November that P500 could fund Noche Buena for a family of four, the silence felt sharper …
The lessons Queena left us
By Herman M. Lagon There are teachers who fill a schedule, and there are teachers who fill a life. Atenean Professor Queena Lee-Chua was the latter. News of her passing did not arrive like an announcement — it arrived like a pause. Former students sat quietly at their desks, scrolling through old lecture photos. Parents …
Party-list reform is long overdue
By Herman M. Lagon There are political questions that skim the surface, and there are those that land heavily because they mirror what many of us have long felt. After a coffee break with former co-teachers, a fellow educator quietly asked why the party-list system now feels like a reunion of familiar surnames rather than …
How P500 became a punchline
By Herman M. Lagon There is something oddly familiar about the uproar over the proposed P500 Noche Buena budget. Not the warm kind of familiar — like your mother’s handwritten spaghetti recipe or the way your father slices ham too thick. It’s the other kind. The kind you feel when an official says something so …
The Xavier within us
By Herman M. Lagon Every December 3, the world remembers a man who died on a small island off the coast of China — alone, sick and still yearning to serve. St. Francis Xavier never made it to the Chinese mainland. But his story did. More than 470 years later, his restless fire still speaks …
The vape trap reality
By Herman M. Lagon He was not asking for pity. Just 10 days before he died, former air force man Mohd Radzi recorded a six-minute video from his hospital bed, tubes everywhere, a clear bag collecting pus from his lungs. His message was painfully simple: “To the young generation, stop vaping. There’s still time and …
Violence vs. women ends here
By Herman M. Lagon The first thing I noticed this morning when I walked into ISUFST was not the usual chatter of teachers and staff rushing to their 8:00 a.m. reporting for duty, but the bright wash of orange across the hallways. Some wore shirts, others had orange overalls. It wasn’t just orange clothes. It …
Wealth without worth
By Herman M. Lagon There is a moment in every oath-taking ceremony when the room falls into a different kind of quiet — not because the program says so, but because someone says something that lands straight in the gut. At the recent induction of newly minted doctors at SMX, that moment came when the …