Rotating Brownouts and Frustrating Burnouts

One afternoon, we went inside a restaurant that serves good Italian food. Instead of taking our orders, the kind waitress told us that at around 4 pm, there would be a power outage, and we might want to consider leaving. What on earth? I’m not sure if it was due to hunger or some weird sense of human rights that drove us to insist to still take our meals. Some pasta and pizza later, no brownout bothered us. To the server’s credit, there really were two-hour brownouts in the past week. One Thursday night, the room suddenly turned pitch black at around 9 pm. The night before that, my sister told me that power just returned when I got home around 10 pm. I came from Magsaysay where power was not interrupted. (Apparently, power went out when we left to go home.) I heard of restaurants announcing cancellation of scheduled activities due to these power interruptions. That type of inconvenience is quite bearable compared to the temperature that instantly intensifies across the atmosphere the minute the fan blades stop spinning, or the air conditioning cancels the cooling. We’re left with no choice but to sweat the couple of hours out. To whoever shuts the power down, thank you for not doing it in the middle of the day when heat is at its most tormenting.

This can be a serious health hazard. We’re not just talking about skin disease and sore eyes. According to my ai collaborator which took references from PSA, the leading causes of death in the Philippines are ischemic heart diseases, neoplasms / cancers, cerebrovascular diseases/strokes, pneumonia and diabetes mellitus. Surprise, surprise, all of these can be exacerbated by intense heat. Just in our neighborhood, there had been a handful of deaths in recent years and all of those point to cardiac arrests due to hypertension. Some of the victims were surprisingly young.

Last Sunday when I told a friend about the rotating brownouts, she just laughed it off, telling me that they had solar panels. That got me thinking. Maybe, each barangay could have a place powered by solar energy or a generator set, where residents with health risks could go to and stay during these extended power outages to prevent worsening health hazards due to the intense heat. Our neighbors with health problems could pass the time of the brownout there. (Maybe, they could watch TV, listen to music, play cards, play board games or gossip about the other neighbors.) Barangay governments could even do this during those day-long power outages which the power corporation has made into a monthly tradition of torture. Now, this would be real public service. What’s ’a few solar panels or a day’s worth of gasoline for a generator to prevent heart attack or stroke?

If you notice, I’d rather talk about brownouts over shots in the senate or incoming impeachment. Once again, according to my ai ally, opinions of Filipinos regarding this recent ruckus can be categorized to: support for the impeachment, support for Senator Bato and/or VP Duterte, or intense stress and exhaustion. Where do I stand there? I’ll take the last one and take it a notch further -intense stress and exhaustion leading to fatigue. I’ll let the legal experts debate on foreign overreach or jurisdiction of the ICC warrant of arrest. I give a toast to NBI agents who do their jobs and end up getting branded as kidnappers. I hope at the end of that mission, you get some vacation. I hope investigators employ forensics to determine who fired the shots and how a senator fled. I give another toast to the investigators. Take care of yourselves. You might get harassed. I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to an impeachment trial. What I’m sure of is I’ll be looking forward to tricks to trap the trial. Let’s have another toast to the house prosecution team. I truly admire the courage and valor in fighting this battle. I don’t want to be pessimistic and say that it’s a losing battle. Just go ahead and keep doing what’s right. On the other side, the senator-judges would believe they’re doing the right, impartial and patriotic thing. Do I really have to keep up with the news? Don’t glare at me for starting to be apathetic. Can I just sleep this off, and I’ll wake up when all these is over? Yes, yes. I’ll still check out what they do in the senate.

Hey, I heard that BTS becomes first K-pop, Asian group included in 'Icons' of Guinness World Records 2026. Now, that’s less stressful.

2 Timothy 2:23: "Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels."