My name is Pio Verzola Jr., although most of close family and friends call me Jun.
Both my parents are natives of Abra province, although they’d settled down in Metro Manila, where all four of us siblings were born and raised. The family remained close to its Northern Luzon roots, though. That’s why I can speak Ilocano and a smattering of Kankanaey and northern Tinggian, apart from English, Tagalog-Pilipino, and a couple of top-secret languages.
I write. I read. I study. I draw and take pics. I dabble in Gimp, Audacity and video editing. Sometimes I play music on the piano, guitar, or whatever resonant surface is available. And, obviously, I maintain a website and test CMS software.
I love to travel to visit new places and meet new people, so long as they don’t harass me. I love to listen to the radio. (When I’m really relaxed I sing along, but never in the bathroom.) I rarely watch TV, which is funny because I once worked for a TV broadcast network. Sometimes I watch movies.
Let me see. What else do I do? Hmm. I try to squeeze the most out of life. I strive to learn new things everyday. I seek to pursue goals higher than my own self-interest, and to serve others–whether “these others” are the mass of humanity that ultimately has to make its own history, or the jeepney passenger riding next to me–in ways that resonate with them and also with a nameless something in me, deep inside.
If you want to know more, we can sit down for coffee sometime, so long as there are no neck-deep floods.