I’ve been nursing a dry cough and a cold for more than a week now.
Before you get started, I don’t know if it’s Covid because I didn’t get tested. And even if it is, then it would be the umpteenth time for me to test positive since the pandemic started, and anyway almost everybody I know has the same symptoms.
As a result, I have been getting up early in the morning. Don’t ask me why. Someone must have reset my internal alarm clock because these past four days I have been waking up around 5:45 a.m.
For someone who prides himself in being a night owl for the past three decades, this is downright ludicrous, especially when you consider that I don’t go to bed until 1 a.m. at the earliest. That was okay when I normally saw the light of day around 10 a.m., but if you do the math, that means I have been surviving on less than five hours of sleep instead of at least eight hours.
Yes, it’s downright premature and exhausting.
But what else can I do? No matter how hard I try I can’t seem to go back to sleep.
So I’ve decided to become productive.
And by productive I don’t mean having dinfast, or reheating leftovers from the night before and pairing these with eggs or sausage or sardines or bread or whatever your usual breakfast fare is. I mean strolling to the Carbon Public Market which is less than half an hour away from where I live to check out the prices.
As you all know, I have been emotionally invested in “Oniongate” since the scandal broke out sometime in the latter part of October, or was it in November.
That was when the price of red onions skyrocketed from P80 per kilo to P700 per kilo.
And for someone who is accustomed to using generous helpings of onions in daily cooking, it came as quite a shock. I never thought I’d live to see the day I’d be scrimping on the edible bulb.
At the start of this year, the President decided to allow the importation of onions to address the problem. Of course, he could have done so much earlier, but someone must have advised him that it was better to time the arrival of the onions from abroad with the annual harvest in Luzon. That way prices would plunge and local growers would have no choice but to compete with the much cheaper alternative.
Oddly enough, the price of onions in Carbon fell by as much as P200 per kilo even before the shipment of imported ones arrived.
Fast-forward to last Friday morning.
I arrived at the market with a hint of a hangover only to discover that the cheapest red onions were selling for P300 per kilo.
An improvement, yes, but it doesn’t mean the nightmare is over. Of course, my perspective can still change as soon as I get that elusive good night’s sleep.