The so-called rotating blackout (yes, where I live, the blackouts are between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.).

“The rotating blackouts that hit this past week seemed to​ expose a deeper structural weakness in the country’s power system: heavy dependence on a small number of major power plants, shared fuel facilities and critical transmission corridors,” my brother explained to me when I had almost lost my mind, and definitely my cool in the heat of the night.

I mean, really, just as I am about to wind down from a long day doing stuff — yes, a blackout hits. Even Lexie, my little doggo, shuffles the whole time waiting for me to turn on the cooler air. Why do I know? She looks at me with puppy dog eyes and wonders whether I have lost my mind.

“No electricity,” I whisper to Lexie. “All we can do is ​​lie in bed and try to think cool thoughts.”

So, one night last week, I thought I had lost my mind. I opted to turn my thoughts to the reasons I still drive.

When I was in my early teens​, I made sure that I was able to sneak the car away and asked my dad’s driver to teach me how to drive my dad’s gigantic (I was little then) Chevy station wagon. Yes, we had a wagon​ because we are seven siblings, and we needed to fit in the car on the rare summer vacations we would take.

Today, with two of my siblings in the great beyond and my parents there as well, I still am that little girl who looks at cars, drives some of them, and, with much luck, gets to experience nice cars and write about the experience, too.

Lessons, lessons

Never judge the other car’s driver​.  

Yup, never judge a person by what he or she drives. I remember being told by a British car distributor that his first car was a Toyota. But he worked hard with​ the cars he loved and became the distributor of his favorite British car brand when he made it.

In contrast, I was once feeling good about myself, driving a Porsche Boxster test in the Autobahn in Germany — when in truth, at the time, I was driving a hand-me-down sedan in Manila.