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OhMyGosh! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis
In this collection of short, funny essays, a young writer takes a lighthearted view of various aspects of our burgis existence—from malling to our addiction to electronic gadgets and fastfood.
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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February 3, 2026
What does a Filipino book called OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! have to do with the heady Milan Kundena novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being? That’s what I wondered when I picked up this slim book at a bookstore in Tomas Morato, looking at the pocketable size and its (literally) cheeky cover.
I’ve read it now. And the answer is ‘next to nothing’. But I don’t mind. Well, I mind most of the time. Specifically, when a piece’s intertextuality amounts to nothing more than alluding to something cooler, so it can borrow its cred, instead of putting in the work to be cool on its own.
This book is decidedly cool. I sat down to read it at 10PM, thinking I could browse a bit to get sleepy. To my surprise, and my sleep schedule’s loss, OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! totally captivated me—it got me laughing out loud as I was flipping page after page after page. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down, and I finished all its 62 pages in about an hour.
Reading The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! feels easy in the way things usually do when you’re inside your own territory. I’m burgis, and April Timbol Yap is burgis, and she brings us together with this book to talk about Being Burgis. In these untitled essays (labeled only with numbers), Timbol Yap simulates burgis milieu during 2007, along the way giving casual, expressive commentary and rough anecdotal sketches.
Talking about her experiences with sexism, Essay 8 has me nodding along to Timbol Yap annoyedly retelling the times where she was underestimated and flat out ignored by male transport workers because she is a woman. Complaints about confidently wrong mechanics and scoffing drivers fall into the category of feminist refrain that’s familiar by now in 2026, along with the armchair sociology she rationalizes this phenomenon with. Small and a bit ideologically off-center in the grand scheme of things, but true to the experience of how it hurts.
Essay 5 is an abridged walkthrough of her career. We hear about how she had battled with math from undergrad all the way up to her first corporate job, how she used to dream about yuppiehood, and how her intrinsically carefree disposition eventually got her into getting a job in an entirely different field.
Timbol Yap’s greatest strength with this book is taking the little ways where our existence feels contrived and drawing humor out of it. From how each essay’s many topics feels disparate, you can guess that this isn’t trying to forward a new argument. If the essays have a discernible idea, it’s not a grand thesis but more so beliefs, and they need to introduction or explanation because they are the same beliefs as yours and mine. A Burgis Being.
The craft I appreciated in OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! is how enjoyable it is, making its journey funny, interesting, and snappy. Timbol Yap has that comic skill of pace and timing. Always moving quickly, each essay is like an accordion of light jabs, funny vignettes, and improvised coping mechanisms, concertinaed by Timbol Yap’s quippy voice.
The book’s sense of humor is most emblematic in Essay 6, an (unfortunately) which collects relatable reflections about the author’s introversion. Its millennial-ish posture is most indelible here: comparing oneself to “a frog” among “butterflies,” hyperbolically amplifying the pain of social interactions, and exaggerating a scheming edge in otherwise sensible life tips. That brand of humor might feel out of style, yet Timbol Yap’s voice makes it feel fresh—and unmistakably hers.
That, and the observations themselves are actually, like, interesting, and too real. Here, the set up is ‘You’re an introverted professional, and you’re surrounded by yappers in a collectivist, sociable culture like ours’, and then lets everyone have a turn at being the punchline, including the author herself.
That is the most important comedic element of the book. Being real, April Timbol Yap is a successful person by our societal standards, at the time of writing a young professional teaching at UP. But considering her target is the burgis condition, she doesn’t spare herself from being the butt of the joke. Unlike the new waves of personal essay collections from Manila-based yuppies, in here there’s no separating of the self as uniquely suffering, or existing in a plane above everyone else, as if by virtue of being the narrator one is also the main character of the universe. Rather, Timbol Yap is among us, a part of the Burgis, and she picks at her own brain for material more than anyone else.
This allows for her book’s validity to stay solid, even through the poorly landed opening piece. I’m referring to Essay 1, the only bad essay here. Structurally, it follows the same accordion-like format as the other essays, but it makes an insensitive and naive attempt to extrapolate personal observations to larger political ideas. I suspect it was meant as farce, yet it doesn’t quite succeed, coming across instead as out-of-touch commentary from an extremely sheltered person. Wondering aloud about the bathroom situation during loaded political events like the Nigerian war, World War II in the Philippines and Marcos-era guerilla wars, all the while glossing over the idea of people’s certain death, starvation, and displacement, made me cringe.
To its credit, I think it was meant to show how the burgis’ indignant feelings about our shitty politics is never taken to anywhere actionable because their desire for comfort gets in the way. When you’re going to write comedy about other people, it's important to know how to take a joke yourself, and I’d like to think this first one was Timbol Yap getting ahead of it.
The lineage of Filipino burgis thinking and writing started a long time ago, and as technology, politics and social conditions changed, the medium through which it moves also changed. The type of person who could read and write the Solidaridad newspapers and the Noli Me Tangere books moved on to the faster, more diffused, more accessible multitude that is the social media formats of today.
OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! is an interesting point in time. In 2007, print’s editorial carefulness briefly overlapped with the beginning of cool flippance for the Americanized, media-saturated Filipino burgis. This book’s existence itself is interesting, because at some point, this type of off-hand, fast thinking stopped being formed for books, but just typed out in a few minutes to tweet. Timbol Yap’s dry, self-deprecating feign of casualness is avoidant in that Twitter user way. It's what first jumped out at me, that’s for sure, since it was immediately recognizable. In a way, that's what the title says: Yea, I'm educated enough to know Milan Kundena. Also, I'm so chill I would remix his title to invert what its saying for my own work.
But underneath that is the time taken to write this. To be this effortlessly funny, in a humor that you own rather than crowdsourced, it must correctly frame anecdotes for maximum pay-off, dig through the subconscious to check if it punches up or down, and spread around the feeling of blame so much that it basically evaporates. In short, it must be writing. I’m glad that Timbol Yap embraced her time and delivered what this thinking would look like when carried out with an artful patience instead of juiced-out clout-chasing.
Final Thoughts
OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! brought me back to Manila life for young professionals in 2007. It surprised me with how much being burgis has gotten more expensive, and how much people as people have stayed the same. April Timbol Yap’s comedic chops are markedly millennial-ish, at the same time snappy, well-timed and observant. A quick read that could go down smooth as a well-written and relatable book, or, if you’re up for it, a chance to reflect on our tendencies and limitations as a supposedly thinking class.
=====================================================================
Review to come. This would be a perfect 5 from sheer entertainment value and technique if not for the weird opening essay
I’ve read it now. And the answer is ‘next to nothing’. But I don’t mind. Well, I mind most of the time. Specifically, when a piece’s intertextuality amounts to nothing more than alluding to something cooler, so it can borrow its cred, instead of putting in the work to be cool on its own.
This book is decidedly cool. I sat down to read it at 10PM, thinking I could browse a bit to get sleepy. To my surprise, and my sleep schedule’s loss, OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! totally captivated me—it got me laughing out loud as I was flipping page after page after page. Once I started, I couldn’t put it down, and I finished all its 62 pages in about an hour.
Reading The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! feels easy in the way things usually do when you’re inside your own territory. I’m burgis, and April Timbol Yap is burgis, and she brings us together with this book to talk about Being Burgis. In these untitled essays (labeled only with numbers), Timbol Yap simulates burgis milieu during 2007, along the way giving casual, expressive commentary and rough anecdotal sketches.
Talking about her experiences with sexism, Essay 8 has me nodding along to Timbol Yap annoyedly retelling the times where she was underestimated and flat out ignored by male transport workers because she is a woman. Complaints about confidently wrong mechanics and scoffing drivers fall into the category of feminist refrain that’s familiar by now in 2026, along with the armchair sociology she rationalizes this phenomenon with. Small and a bit ideologically off-center in the grand scheme of things, but true to the experience of how it hurts.
Essay 5 is an abridged walkthrough of her career. We hear about how she had battled with math from undergrad all the way up to her first corporate job, how she used to dream about yuppiehood, and how her intrinsically carefree disposition eventually got her into getting a job in an entirely different field.
Timbol Yap’s greatest strength with this book is taking the little ways where our existence feels contrived and drawing humor out of it. From how each essay’s many topics feels disparate, you can guess that this isn’t trying to forward a new argument. If the essays have a discernible idea, it’s not a grand thesis but more so beliefs, and they need to introduction or explanation because they are the same beliefs as yours and mine. A Burgis Being.
The craft I appreciated in OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! is how enjoyable it is, making its journey funny, interesting, and snappy. Timbol Yap has that comic skill of pace and timing. Always moving quickly, each essay is like an accordion of light jabs, funny vignettes, and improvised coping mechanisms, concertinaed by Timbol Yap’s quippy voice.
The book’s sense of humor is most emblematic in Essay 6, an (unfortunately) which collects relatable reflections about the author’s introversion. Its millennial-ish posture is most indelible here: comparing oneself to “a frog” among “butterflies,” hyperbolically amplifying the pain of social interactions, and exaggerating a scheming edge in otherwise sensible life tips. That brand of humor might feel out of style, yet Timbol Yap’s voice makes it feel fresh—and unmistakably hers.
That, and the observations themselves are actually, like, interesting, and too real. Here, the set up is ‘You’re an introverted professional, and you’re surrounded by yappers in a collectivist, sociable culture like ours’, and then lets everyone have a turn at being the punchline, including the author herself.
That is the most important comedic element of the book. Being real, April Timbol Yap is a successful person by our societal standards, at the time of writing a young professional teaching at UP. But considering her target is the burgis condition, she doesn’t spare herself from being the butt of the joke. Unlike the new waves of personal essay collections from Manila-based yuppies, in here there’s no separating of the self as uniquely suffering, or existing in a plane above everyone else, as if by virtue of being the narrator one is also the main character of the universe. Rather, Timbol Yap is among us, a part of the Burgis, and she picks at her own brain for material more than anyone else.
This allows for her book’s validity to stay solid, even through the poorly landed opening piece. I’m referring to Essay 1, the only bad essay here. Structurally, it follows the same accordion-like format as the other essays, but it makes an insensitive and naive attempt to extrapolate personal observations to larger political ideas. I suspect it was meant as farce, yet it doesn’t quite succeed, coming across instead as out-of-touch commentary from an extremely sheltered person. Wondering aloud about the bathroom situation during loaded political events like the Nigerian war, World War II in the Philippines and Marcos-era guerilla wars, all the while glossing over the idea of people’s certain death, starvation, and displacement, made me cringe.
To its credit, I think it was meant to show how the burgis’ indignant feelings about our shitty politics is never taken to anywhere actionable because their desire for comfort gets in the way. When you’re going to write comedy about other people, it's important to know how to take a joke yourself, and I’d like to think this first one was Timbol Yap getting ahead of it.
The lineage of Filipino burgis thinking and writing started a long time ago, and as technology, politics and social conditions changed, the medium through which it moves also changed. The type of person who could read and write the Solidaridad newspapers and the Noli Me Tangere books moved on to the faster, more diffused, more accessible multitude that is the social media formats of today.
OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! is an interesting point in time. In 2007, print’s editorial carefulness briefly overlapped with the beginning of cool flippance for the Americanized, media-saturated Filipino burgis. This book’s existence itself is interesting, because at some point, this type of off-hand, fast thinking stopped being formed for books, but just typed out in a few minutes to tweet. Timbol Yap’s dry, self-deprecating feign of casualness is avoidant in that Twitter user way. It's what first jumped out at me, that’s for sure, since it was immediately recognizable. In a way, that's what the title says: Yea, I'm educated enough to know Milan Kundena. Also, I'm so chill I would remix his title to invert what its saying for my own work.
But underneath that is the time taken to write this. To be this effortlessly funny, in a humor that you own rather than crowdsourced, it must correctly frame anecdotes for maximum pay-off, dig through the subconscious to check if it punches up or down, and spread around the feeling of blame so much that it basically evaporates. In short, it must be writing. I’m glad that Timbol Yap embraced her time and delivered what this thinking would look like when carried out with an artful patience instead of juiced-out clout-chasing.
Final Thoughts
OhMyGod! The Incredible Lightness of Being Burgis! brought me back to Manila life for young professionals in 2007. It surprised me with how much being burgis has gotten more expensive, and how much people as people have stayed the same. April Timbol Yap’s comedic chops are markedly millennial-ish, at the same time snappy, well-timed and observant. A quick read that could go down smooth as a well-written and relatable book, or, if you’re up for it, a chance to reflect on our tendencies and limitations as a supposedly thinking class.
=====================================================================
Review to come. This would be a perfect 5 from sheer entertainment value and technique if not for the weird opening essay
January 17, 2013
It was a light and fun read. :D
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews