places I don’t know yet

….I hope this isn’t going to turn out to be a list of places I’ll never get to. I’m turning 40. I’m still holding out hope for a world that can still allow people to travel, even after all of these years of the virus.

The two important destinations that I really want to get to: Kyoto and Barcelona. I’m dreaming of specific places in those cities, too: I want to make it to the Pontocho district in Kyoto, so that I can observe the comings and goings of the geiko and the maiko and the townspeople who make their livelihood possible. I hope that this pandemic won’t completely kill off the flower and willow world. (I should look into what’s going on there in these past couple of years.) And in Barcelona is the only place of worship that I want to actually attend as such: Sagrada Família. I know that church is nearing its completion; I would like to get there somehow no matter its state.

Other places I’d like to properly see, having never been there thus: Vienna, even if one of the places that I would like to visit there is a place of morbid cold thoughts. I’ve been fascinated by the story of Empress Elisabeth of Austria for a while and I would like to pay my respects to her, where she’s been laid to rest. Seoul is on my list of course. Maybe I’ll be able to speak the language correctly by then, or at least sound like a tourist who made the effort.

I still want to go back to Singapore, but now it’s less because of the places that I want to visit, and it’s more because of the food that I want to eat, the people I want to see, and then putting those two ideas together. It kind of hurts that I haven’t been able to go out and eat with friends as often as I’d like, and this will soon have been going on for three years. I won’t risk them or myself as quickly; and right now with this whole omicron variant even the idea of eating with others al fresco doesn’t sit right with me. So I’ve scotched all plans for that again.

On the list of places that I would have liked to see again was Hong Kong — but that doesn’t seem like a smart idea now. I’d only be angered and saddened, maybe. I went there just before the handover to China and I had always wanted to see it as the democratic territory it still was at that time, but that’s kind of in the past now. I bitterly regret that I never had a chance to go back.

Of course I also want to travel within my own country: but again, I don’t think I should be bringing the bad stuff over. So for now, my thoughts of revisiting Baguio and Cebu will have to remain only nebulous. The same goes for places that I’ve never seen before, like La Union and the Batanes islands. I sort of wish I’d known that all of this was coming and then I would have probably thrown all my resources at traveling to these places, at least, if I couldn’t still have gone abroad at the time.

I can dream, I think, and I can keep working so that I can get to these places, but — again, all that will have to wait until we’ve all come to our senses and put this pandemic down for good.

I don’t honestly know when that’s gonna be.

I still want to find a place to hide

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.

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!)

hands

Yeah, well, I really didn’t want this entry to be something on the maudlin side. There’s enough drama surrounding me (by which I mean, wtf are my neighbors watching, is that healthy media to consume in this climate?), so maybe I should focus on somewhat better things. (Better is always a relative term; I suppose I’ve lived long enough that I hope I don’t have to specify that?)

I think the real gift that I got or gave myself this year was the option to spend these holidays completely alone. Like, I elected to not go to any family or friends gatherings, even though I did receive invitations. I said I wasn’t feeling up to it. I said I was otherwise already occupied.

And hey, I wasn’t even lying when I said I was gonna be doing something else. I spent both my 24th and 25th cooking. Is this the point where I admit that I’ve been especially keen on making food with sharp flavors all throughout this year? Of course there’s an underlying reason for that. And yes, it’s true that I’m interested in making Korean food because it’s good food! But also — the sharp flavors help me remind myself or reassure myself that I still have my sense of smell/taste intact. The fact that I need those two senses to be able to cook at all. If I can cook, if I can make these strongly-flavored dishes, then at least I know that my luck is still holding out.

Well, I call it luck. But that’s only because I can’t travel back in time, can’t I? I’ve suspected for a while that I might have caught a very mild case of SARS‑CoV‑2 way back at the beginning of 2020 — it must have gotten spread around my workplace at the time. I always was describing that office as a fucking Petri dish (yes, expletive included). Anyone who caught a cold would bring it in and then everyone would be sniffling and sneezing for a while. This was just before we started wearing masks on a daily basis.

I got my first rapid test in….June of that year? I can’t remember when I came back from my brief time WFH. I had one set of antibodies and not the other one, that’s the result I remember. Which made me think that since I really had not ventured out of the house from March to the end of May, I must have just gotten over it when I started the WFH period.

Again, I can’t turn back the hands of time; I can’t go and talk to myself and trace back the possible source of that small outbreak, if it had really been one. But maybe it’s enough. Maybe that plus the vaccines that I got and the booster that I’m going to have to start looking for will be enough.

On the one hand: holidays in the Philippines and while the people who were hurt by the typhoon wonder about tomorrow’s shelter and tomorrow’s food, the idiots who swarm public places heedlessly (and who wear their masks all wrong) just traipse around like there isn’t even really a pandemic going on.

On the other hand: I know many people who are still taking precautions just for the hope of being able to see their loved ones. (It’s been almost two years, goddamnit.)

I don’t really believe it will be possible to go back to any kind of “normal” as we’d known it, after this. That’s just me being reasoning. I cannot expect “normal” from the before-times. I can remember it, certainly, but I don’t think it makes sense to expect it now. We’ll have to make something else and understand it as “normal” now.

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.

less of a post and more of a long-brewed thought

After all of this pandemic thing is said and done

How do you want to be remembered? Before, and during, and after.

Let me know about your thoughts.

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?

not quite tickled pink

But yes. Pink, suddenly. Nearly everywhere else online I’ve chosen to switch to pink, and I’m doing it to get into a fight, into a campaign, into a kind of — this is my part of the struggle for both the immediate future and the longer term.

Specifically this kind of pink. And I think I love that this pink was already there, as if waiting, as if someone knew it would be needed at some other point in the future?

That’s the cover to Map of the Soul: Persona, the 2019 EP from BTS, and it was the lead-in to the next year’s full-length Map of the Soul: 7. Not coincidentally, I became ARMY juuuuust before this one came out, in February 2019.

Here’s the intro — and yes, that’s my bias, that’s my leader, that’s RM dropping the mic right here.

So why pink? Because of things that happened in my country over the past two days. Because there are fights I’m getting into, the same fights that have been going on for a long time and they’re ramping up again. There’s a campaign to sign up for and do things with. There’s a conflict that’s been going on since 2015 and it’s been thrust back into the spotlight. There are women who have been recognized as leaders, who will continue to be leaders, who will be the faces of these ongoing fights.

I’m #ARMYforLENI. Please do not come at me for “politicization” because you and I both know that I am a Filipino citizen first and I also happen to be ARMY, and I intend to remain both as I campaign for Leni Robredo for next year’s presidential elections. I want to help her get to a position of being able to help. I want to be able to scrutinize what she does, how she helps, how she leads. I want to be able to survive the next couple of years, dammit, and the ARMY thing goes hand in hand with being a citizen.

And, I’m proud to say it, with the things that BTS themselves has been fighting for, from pre-debut. If you don’t believe me on that, or if you can’t, I invite you to listen to their work, and I will also ask you to pay attention to Leni’s work. It’s all worth getting into.

I’m also — entirely shaken by the fact that someone from my country has just been announced as a co-winner of a Nobel Prize. The Peace Prize, at that. What is really scrambling my emotions is who the laureate is, and why she was so honored. Again, this is a thing that goes back to somewhere in the vicinity of 2016. Her name is Maria Ressa and apparently her crime is to be a journalist, fearless and independent and unsilence-able, in the time of this monster of a current president of the Philippines.

A co-Nobel Peace Prize for the specific action of being a fearless and independent journalist who has borne far, far more than her share of slings and arrows and trollery from this corrupt, murderous, incompetent national government. (I don’t think it was an accident that I’m writing this portion of this blog post to BTS’s track “Am I Wrong”. My offline playlist is on shuffle, and it came on of its own accord, perhaps to keep me on track with what I am writing. Again, please, look that track up, and never never tell me they’re not politicized. I know that “Spring Day” is a song with political overtones. Yes, that “Spring Day”.)

I don’t honestly know if I can call this thing that has come up in my chest “hope”. It prickles too much. It goads and it feels like there is so much that needs doing, there is so much fighting up ahead, and I feel tired on the instant and know that I can feel tired, but have to pick myself back up and keep going, like BTS, like Leni, like Maria. People to emulate, I suppose. People to watch out for. I follow each of them for specific reasons. I want to achieve something in this world after their fashion. — That’s a small goal and a lofty one at the same time.

And for now, pink is the color that reminds me of all of this.

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.)

*sigh*
Emotionally manipulate ARMY into getting vaxxed.
What the hell kind of irrational awful thinking is this?
WHY ARE THERE PEOPLE WHO HATE HUMANITY IN THIS WAY? https://t.co/yIa9Wz2oFr

— pj⁷💜🌌✨ (@ninemoons42) September 25, 2021

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?