In this essay, I look back on a terrifying night when I began bleeding internally, lost consciousness, and was forced into an immediate confrontation with my own mortality. What began as months of work anxiety, AI dread, algorithmic fear, and abstract theorizing suddenly collapsed into something brutally physical: the body, blood, pain, fear, and the desperate wish for more time with the people I love.

In this episode, I’m unpacking an 8-day family trip to Shanghai, and the unease that follows me there as a Filipino, with the West Philippine Sea dispute always humming in the background between the Philippines and China. I talk about the city’s calm, clean sprawl; the quiet magic of The Bund with Oriental Pearl TV Tower across the river; and the strange ease of living through QR codes—Alipay, WeChat, DiDi—powered by an eSIM from Klook and navigation on Amap (plus Bing when I needed search). And yes: I tell the story of the Peking duck on Nanjing Road at Shanghai Guniang, then end on the harder question of what a city’s warmth can (and can’t) mean when governments still collide.

This episode is about the little crack in rational life we all carry: the part of us that still knocks on wood, buys the long-shot ticket, and refuses to believe reality is fully settled.

Using UFOs as the sharpest example—something seen, not easily explained—I trace how uncertainty becomes story, how certainty curdles into cynicism, and why a small openness to the absurd might be less a weakness than a way to stay free.