The month of August tends to be a nodal time of year for me. With the exception of my graduations from ADMU and MICA (which happened in March and May respectively), and last March’s jump, the momentous, life-changing transitions always seem to rock my existence just as August comes.

It was the August after my college graduation that I made the difficult decision to assert my independence and move out of my parents’ house to a tiny room in Parañaque, where I would spend three years of my life learning the ropes of subsistence living as a middle-class Filipino.

It was mid-August in my college freshman year that I first gave a rose to a girl — a girl who would suddenly leave me eight years later, in the same month.

August of two years ago, I left my web design position in MyPhilippines.com to seek my fortune in digital archiving. During the month-long lull between jobs, I decided to take Raffy’s advice and see what the big deal was about these things he called “blogs…”

Last August, after five months living and working in Washington, DC, I moved to the third floor of a creaky Baltimore rowhouse in Little Italy, rented from an Irish painter and art teacher. The deal: he would teach me to paint, I would teach him web design. (It never really pushed through, as life got in the way, what with a year of fulltime school and work taking up every waking hour, but I’ve showed him around some Dreamweaver, at least.)

And that’s how I’ve been living for the past eleven months: study three days a week, work the other two days. After graduating last May, it turned into work every weekday, entailing a daily rail commute between Baltimore and Washington which involved anywhere from one to four trains, two buses, and no small amount of walking between Little Italy and Dupont Circle. That three hour round trip is taxing, most especially the part where I have to deal with the tribulations of Baltimore public transit. I’m bone-weary, and it shows.

August is rolling around again, and all that’s about to change.