It is such a quiet night and to be totally honest, I'm quite drunk. I couldn't sleep and whenever I try to close my eyes, my surroundings start to turn and revolve like a lousy ride on a dead carnival.

I sat my ass back down and picked up my guitar. With just how much my consciousness permits, I tried to decently string in some rhythms and some melodies. My fingers hurt because of the lack of warm-up and all that. I say warm up but it's just some stretching of the fingers and popping up of my knuckles.

It has been a while since I have played some music for myself.

I tried to play some soft and slow songs at first and I was careful not to be too loud because it's around midnight here already. I just mumbled the words while I softly play with the strings of the guitar.

I'm pretty sure that it was in tune too. I used an iPhone app to manually tune it to the standard tuning. I don't have a perfect pitch, actually, I don't have ears for music too. I mean, I could discern if something is out of tune but I don't know how to specifically adjust what's wrong. I just know how something is wrong, I don't know how to really correct it.

While playing the guitar with some off-key and drunk vocals, I realized how valuable music is to our lives. I think that its impact is nothing to be whistled about.

To a country, for example, one of the first things a country should have or own is a national anthem. A national anthem sort of tells everyone everything we need to know about the country. It tells the listeners some important details about the country itself in a relaxing kind of way. A country's national anthem carries a huge sense of pride and freedom when it is played and heard across and beyond the lands.

In our country, the Philippines, music is an irrefutable fact of life. We sing all the time. We sing every single chance we get. We sing no matter what emotion we are feeling. There are songs that we can dance around and groove into. There are songs that we can sing to celebrate and commemorate things or events. We have songs we sing whenever we are sad or lonely, and even when we lay someone to his or her last resting place, there are songs to accompany them.

And maybe, if you are of the right age, you can ask your folks or grandparents how songs impacted their marriage. We used to have serenade deeply embedded in our culture of dating. A guy used to sing a song of deep appreciation to woo a girl. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think that serenade or Harana should still be a part of courtship.