Elizabeth's English Lectures (CEO, A-listers Academy/ALA)

  I was a university student struggling financially.  I was an irregular student because I had to work my way through college. One day, as I sat on my chair, one of my prettiest classmates noticed me and we locked eyes for a brief moment. She was eating something. I could sense that she did   not want to share with me the whatever-it-was that she was eating,  but out of politeness, she smiled and offered me some. “This is yummy. I like it. What’s this?”, I asked timidly. “Chips Ahoy”, came the brief reply. There was a   grocery store outside our campus, and she informed me that she bought the yummy cookies there. I made a mental note to buy myself some, but I soon learned that the price was too steep for a self-supporting young person like me. I walked away from the store and made a mental note that one day in the future, I would make sure to be able to buy Chips Ahoy cookies anytime I wanted them. Fast forward April 2021. One day, one man came to my place to fix a piece of equ

  Long, long time ago, when this pesky Covid-19 still belonged to the super distant future, I was already collecting alcohol and disinfectants. I would happily spray alcohol on the doorknobs, on the table, on the kitchen counter, and just anywhere. I would collect bottles and bottles of alcohol in different sizes. My family and I, by the way, have this strange habit of buying the items that we love in big quantities and just store them somewhere in our small house. My niece collects toilet paper, my sister and mother collect pans, pots, spoons, and other utensils, another sister collects different kinds of chips and keeps them under her bed, etc. etc. etc.) A few days before my place, Metro Manila, was put on lockdown, hundreds of people flocked to grocery stores and drug stores to buy disinfectants and alcohol. I did not. I had enough supply. Haha. No doubt, all kinds of alcohol out there are effective germ-killers, but Green Cross Alcohol has always been my preferred brand. It

  ME= my long hair  (photo taken by: Riza A.G.  I love women with really short hair—especially if it’s so short that its fringes barely touch the nape. FOR ME, women who have short hair look so strong, determined, focused, driven. However, because of my build and the shape of my face,   and because my hair is too soft and very straight (it has no volume at all), I don’t look good in short hair. I once tried it, but I ended up looking like a mushroom---tall, thin, with something round on top. So I have no choice but to grow my hair long, because this is the only hairstyle that suits my features and my build, and I have learned to accept the fact that I can’t be like the women whose hairstyles I admire and adore. This is the hair I was born with, and so this is the hair that I love, love, love. Imagine all the time I spend and all the effort I exert to care for and style my hair. And in styling my hair, I, of course, need hair accessories. I don’t buy branded hair accessories. It

  I’m not into whitening products. So why did I choose this Kojic soap that claims to have whitening ingredients? First, the whitening ingredients in beauty soap, in my opinion (and this is just MY opinion), are not really effective. There are lots of whitening soap in my country, but I still see naturally tan people just like me everywhere, and I think this is a glorious sight. Second, I chose this bath soap because of its EXFOLIATING EFFECT. Yes, it has a whatever-it-is ingredient that makes the dead skin cells so easy to remove. I don’t even use any special equipment to exfoliate my dead skin cells. I just lather the soap all over my body, leave it there for three to five   minutes (while I clean my toenails and soles), I rinse, and I start exfoliating by rubbing my skin with my----fingers! Other similar products do not have this effect because they are so slippery on the skin. In order to remove dead skin cells, there has to be some friction between the skin and the equipment t