And that’s all I can care to say about that, since I’ve already elaborated on it elsewhere, at length, multiple times.
This is year three of the pandemic. I live in a country that will probably suffer from this nonsense for a while yet. FML.
Tag Archives: lockdown for nothing
that dark time
I mean, I understand, okay? I know about wanting to see friends and family again, and we’d been doing so well, collectively, just at the start of December. I think. Everyone had been trying to make the best of a holiday season that kinda felt like a holiday season. I think that’s the kindest way of looking at it.
And it’s not easy to be kind right now because the very fucking immediate consequence of that holiday season is this. It’s a huge surge. It’s that case count suddenly skyrocketing. What happened? I have entire piles of friends who have just reported themselves positive for the virus. I just watched my workplace nearly empty out over the past week or so. I don’t want to leave my house even if I really do need to go and get the groceries.
We’re here. It’s the crush. It’s the worst surge possible.
And god, I feel like giving up on everything. I want to hide somewhere small and dark and deep. I feel caught in a bad place and I don’t know if it’s still a consolation that I live alone — does it matter? I have neighbors and some of them don’t really give a damn about keeping everyone else safe. They don’t even give a damn about keeping themselves safe — why would they care about all the rest of us? Why would they stop to think about collateral damage?
See, that’s the depth I’m in right now. I’m miserable, and I can’t make myself see any kind of good, and the fear that lives coiled around my neck tightens with every minute.
Not a good time to be alive right now, is it.
(And yes, because I anticipated it, of course this stupid useless idiot baseline JACKSHIT national govt won’t declare any kind of limitation of public movement because they don’t want to have to give out any kind of material or cash assistance. Greedy fucking pigs. Running on to three years of them getting rich and fat and sated and taking away the resources that rightfully belong to the citizens. FUCK THEM. VOTE THE MOTHERFUCKERS OUT. AND DON’T LET NEW ONES INTO POSITIONS EITHER!)
superlatives
There aren’t enough superlatives in the world to describe the feeling of being at a concert — virtually, in this case — and still feeling that love and that passion and that joy.
There aren’t enough reassurances to tell seven guys that, for those of us who were already fans before the pandemic, that we are here and we aren’t leaving. But they were made to feel it by practically an entire establishment. The same establishment that used the pandemic as a weapon against the guys who just wanted to perform and to meet with their fans and to make music. They used the pandemic to tell the guys their ARMY was made of bots.
I hope the guys were convinced that we were not bots. After last night, I hope they felt our presence. Because we have felt their presence all along, in these years of quarantine.
And yes, there aren’t enough expletives in the world to help me express how angry I am and disappointed I am that I can’t go to the concerts. I am stuck in this country because it has been mismanaged all throughout this pandemic. I cannot express how unfair the situation is. I am over-full of the anger that I need to point at everyone who just stood by, filled their pockets with money, and made us poorer and dumber and UNSAFE in these past two years.
I know what my goals for the future are: and they include superlatives, because I deserve them. They include expletives and banishment for the ones who were so venal and greedy and vicious. I know what I need to do, going forward. That’s my plan for the next year.
concert hangover
It isn’t just us, you know, who were looking for reasons to just keep on going, through the last 20something months.
It isn’t just us, the small and the ordinary and the relatively mortal.
Maybe I’m just buying a little too much into the hype, and I am gonna admit that I’m relying on on-the-fly translations. But the idea of BTS saying the things they did last night — that kind of was a way for me to see that they were human, that they were struggling. I know I write so much about surviving one day to another, it’s all in my journal and sometimes I even put those words on here. And then they came out and said it too.
After 20 months we are … no longer the same people. After the lockdowns, after too much isolation, after all the bungling and the sheer crass heartless (especially if we are talking about my country, because in the Philippines there is a lot of profits still to be made over millions of people dying without any kind of help or any kind of compassion from a worthless evil scumbag national govt). After all the ways we can be ugly to each other because we are all suddenly staring death in the face.
After the months of being forced away from the things we dream of , what are we? Who are we? I remember, all too vividly, that line from the book version of World War Z. Which I think people should read because there’s a lot of uncanny in it. So many predictions of the world going wrong and the small things that somehow managed to go right despite all the venality. It seems that in places and times like this we remember the good things as happening because they were a rebellion against the overwhelming bad.
What was said in World War Z was drawn from an idea of the Holocaust: that even those who lived through it were hurt and damaged by what they had been through, and that that kind of damage would never truly heal. Something like that. And that character concludes by saying, then no one survived their zombie apocalypse because it truly hit everyone and everything. The planet itself was changed by it.
Same here.
Same for BTS. Even if they didn’t get directly hit by covid-19 — they’re walking out of this one scarred by it. Which makes them much like you and me and everyone we know. And they were brave enough to say it out loud in their words.
Look, there’s a nightmare to be had, from events like that, from what they’ve been forced to do: why would you want to look out into an audience that doesn’t exist? Or that sits quietly in darkness and doesn’t react to what you do on stage? When there were actual people filling seats in concert venues, k-music performers would be facing their worst fears to get a black ocean — no light-sticks and no audience participation in sight.
And BTS has already been the victim of malicious black ocean attacks, like attending shows as part of the performer line-up and the audience turned out their light-sticks when they took the stage. (Audiences full of not-their-fans, unfortunately. There weren’t enough ARMYs then yet to overwhelm the venues.)
So yeah. Black oceans. BTS knows what it’s like. This whole time of a pandemic must have felt like exactly that to them, prolonged, day by day suffocating, and don’t we know what that’s like too?
funny how time passes
Because my birthday happened in the middle of a work-week and I was kind of preoccupied with — work, home to rest, work, home to rest, that kind of cycle. But yes. I did turn 39 somewhere in that previous interval. And it was a very private and just-me affair; I hope no one at the office realized what I was really up to, with those fancy things that I’d brought in to eat.
So — what does that feel like, now? What has this world come to? I don’t want to talk about the sad and sorry and mucky state of my country right now. We’re descending further and further into madness and it shows, and madness shouldn’t be the case given what we have all lost at this point, and I have lost track of how much time this country has been bungled in just the course of this pandemic alone. We are still hurtling into the bad dark places. Why are we doing this to ourselves. Why can’t we seem to want to save — each other. Because I think that’s where the problem is at present, in my country. We’ve lost the plot, we don’t want to save each other.
And I myself have run out of curses to send to the palace by the river, occupied by the lowest scum of the low and their voices and their evil and their venality and …. well. I should hope that you understand what my point of view on those living things were. I refuse to call them people. Because they are not people.
Wanting to turn us into vile things, too.
So I can’t imagine wanting to — have a birthday party in these days.
I don’t want to think about turning 40 and still locked in like this.
And time passes and it is October, and I have survived this far, and so have you if you’re reading this. What helps you get through the days and years since January? What is keeping you — your version of sane? I have coping mechanisms, and I want to hear about yours. Tell me about something that made you smile in the past few days.
…on the other hand
Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what to make of people. Way to dash my mood to pieces. (Way to kind of stomp on the entry I just posted.)
I just pulled out an entire rage-thread. Wow. I wish I could say that I was surprised by people who could just say nonsense with their whole chests like that. I wish I could say I’m shocked but honey, I live in the Philippines. Or should I say, I’ve been imprisoned in the Philippines? I should not have to be spending a second birthday under some kind of incoherent senseless lockdown and yet.
Just. Well. That was a thread I made. That was a thing I did. I own it. That really was me.
Why are people awful?
escape hatch
and people wonder why I retreat so deeply into my chosen things, my fandom and my guys
it’s so difficult to live here in my beloved Philippines
it hurts
And that’s my life in a nutshell. I don’t know what you, the reader, knows about the Philippines right now. I don’t know if you know about the perfect storm of indifference, incompetence, and plain pure malice that is my entire country right now. Everyone in power seems invested in leaving us all stuck in this pandemic quagmire of the dead and the dying and the virus-choked. The Philippines is Dunning-Kruger land, and I don’t have any reason to think I’ll survive into my 40s, except that I am a contrary bitch and I want to live purely so I can take a proper booster shot and see BTS in concert.
Not here. Obviously. At this rate, I do not want them to come here ever again. They are not safe here.
I am not safe here. I haven’t been for at least the past six years.
I’ll never feel safe here again.
And that’s why I burrow into my headspaces and I refuse to tolerate the people who already are intolerant of me.
I’d rather escape into music and better dreams because my reality literally is out to kill me, one way or another.
So I make playlists, I am an imaginary DJ spinning in a club in the corners of my mind, because if I pulled the headphones off, if I turned the sounds off, I’ll fall in on myself.
Most days BTS is the only thing keeping me on an even keel and that’s not even any kind of exaggeration: the fact that they exist and they think of ARMY, is the reason why I haven’t simply given up on myself and on my small part of the world yet.
Sorry I didn’t really have anything else to say. I’m trying to hide from the bad news, the bad people, the bad thoughts.
Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe tomorrow someone will finally say, no not today.
cells
Nearly a full lockdown again in the morning, in a country where there aren’t enough vaccines, where idiots lead the pandemic response, and where we have to wear face shields which are fundamentally useless and might even make us more vulnerable to catching a virus.
Here the fuck we go again. And here’s the afternoon sky before we all gotta — close in somehow, hoping blindly against hope. (I don’t have any, today.)
No filters, no post-processing, just my phone camera and the angle of the view.
starting over every time 