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notwocanoccupy --
[noun]:

A person who has the ability to be invisible

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

How to Quit Smoking

 

 

Posted by notwocanoccupy on August 23, 2005 at 11:23 PM as a stickied post | 9 worked

I don't think of myself as someone who's particularly easy to be swayed, but maybe I am. 

I've just arrived from my first trip since the pandemic started. My mom and I stayed in Sydney for two weeks, fulfilling a years-long promise to relatives that we would spend time with them. As always when I visit first-world nations, I couldn't help feeling a tinge of envy at how easy life seems to be for their citizens. You go into well-lit, accessible train stations, the buses tell you when they're arriving and which stop they're stopping at, people earn livable wages, the State helps them get their first home, school is free...you get the picture.

And when you have relatives in one of these countries, you get a closer account of just how good it is to live there. My cousin and his wife took us to some open house events, where realtors told us how easy it is to buy a home, to get settled...to become a citizen here. They told me I should move there, pack my life up here and set up shop in Sydney. A lovely, big, open, laidback metropolis. It all sounded so simple: I would fix my documents here, save a few bucks to live there for a year, study what needs to be studied, and just live. The outlook here is so positive, they said, the subtext being "unlike in the Philippines."

And what angered me is the fact that these people support the current President. And the last one. They used their overseas voting rights to vote these rephrensible criminals into office and they had the gall to be relieved that they don't live in the Philippines. I kept my mouth firmly shut, smiled, and just looked on as they brought out all the trinkets that should make me envious of them and their lives.

But I also thought, what's for me in the Philippines? Maybe patriotism is an empty virtue, a useless kind of love for something that will never love you back. Maybe it's time to get selfish. Maybe it's a put-your-mask-on-before-helping-others kind of thing. Maybe I don't need to be here anyway.

Crap. I wanted an entry about the trip but ended up with this. Sydney is beautiful. Getting a visa is a whole bunch of troublesome hoops, everything is expensive (when you're paid in pesos, I guess), but it's beautiful place. The Opera House is unreal up close. The Blue Mountains were really blue from Echo Point Lookout. The Rocks is filled with great coffee shops and art stores (from where I got some art supplies for N). Everything was a breeze. I didn't even need foreign currency as everything was cashless, only my debit card was enough. Then we landed in NAIA and spent an hour waiting for a tube to park in, lined up for half an hour at the immigration queues with no airconditioning and officers lazily and rudely directing us. Got our bags a full two hours after landing, then came out the arrival hall into a sea of sweaty people waiting for their relatives. We're home, I thought, as my brother wove into the crowd to retrieve our bags. The greatest compliment I could give is, there's really no place quite like it.

...

Posted by notwocanoccupy on May 27, 2023 at 02:26 PM | Series

I for sure thought I had lost 19 years' worth of written material and materiel about my life. But you're back, dear blog. And just in time for your 20th birthday.

I'll do a separate entry for a massive update on the past 9(!) months! 

...

Posted by notwocanoccupy on March 22, 2023 at 11:29 AM | 4 worked

I've taken to reading books during my twice-daily shuttle rides, instead of fiddling with my phone. I play one game of Sudoku, then as the bus rolls off, I stow away the phone and take out my book.

Yesterday, I kid you not, as the TV on the bus blared on about the victory of our country's Monster-in-Chief and his Murderous Spare Tire, I was reading a book about...alternate universes. The book wasn't fictional, though it was about fiction. Rather, about the history of how we write about fictional things, like time travel and alternate universes.

And it was at that moment that I wanted nothing more than to move to an alternate universe. One where we didn't elect such worthless people into the highest offices, where we didn't give them any power over us. 

One where I'm not...tired. One where this level of grief and exhaustion simply didn't exist. Because the right candidate won. Because the people finally elected a President worthy of the title.

The power of fiction.

-----------------------

Corrupt, psychopathic, cruel governance robs us of time. Time that should be spent on improving ourselves, time for pursuits that, well, we like to pursue. Under a transparent and accountable government, there's less time to worry if we're getting our fair share. There's no time to be suspicious if our rights as citizens are being trampled. 

I wanted my time back. After six years of the Duterte administration, after six years of keeping it accountable, six years of pursuing legal actions against its encroachment into our rights, I wanted time to myself. I wanted the government to be one less thing to worry about, to resist. I wanted a government I could trust. Yes, of course I will remain an active citizen, keep holding the new government accountable, but I also wanted to rest a little. I wanted to rest knowing that the Executive is not an enemy. I wanted to rest knowing that the President is an ally, an advocate for peasants, the urban poor, sexual and gender minorities, persons with disabilities, migrant workers, economic refugees, those who needed the government's protection the most.

So when, on May 10, I woke up to the news that it was a likely Marcos victory, the exhaustion that set in was deeply personal and overwhelmingly total. It took a while to realize that there was grief in there, too, because my tiredness felt like a blanket that covered everything else. I realized that not only would I have to keep resisting in the way I had since 2016, but I would have to resist harder. I would have to resist in ways that I haven't even begun to prepare for.

The national idea, the accepted national fact that Martial Law was a time of oppression across all fronts: physical, economic, moral--that is no longer case in this new world. Already, they have moved red-tagging efforts to include those who merely state that the Martial Law was an embarrassment to us as citizens. They're scrubbing history clean of their atrocities. If they can effect change in such a scale, think what they can do to human lives. Think how little regard they have for our lives.

That was the backdrop of my exhaustion. If the Duterte administration waged a war on rights, this looming presidency is looking to wage a war on history, on truth. And rights. Always, rights. Our rights. It seeks to control our rights by altering as it changes how we think of history.

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That was how I moved in those first few days post-May 9. Slow, unsteady, tired and ungraceful, furious but helpless, like I'm plumbing the depths of some pitch-black ocean, when all I really wanted was to rise to the surface and breathe. In so many ways I'm still in that ocean, still walking the ocean floor as a primitive creature would.

Except.

Except, now, bits of light filter in, pin-points that twinkle in and out, lighthouses in a storm. Already, organizations that never really rested, never even took time to take a breath, are resuming the work they have always done. The work that was done by those who came before us. I hold their tireless efforts like talismans. I listen to their voices they way I hold maps, carefully, observantly. 

They tell me that all of us are needed. This administration, with its naked thirst for power and wealth, will go after the most vulnerable of us, like other greedy administrations have. It will attempt to trample over the landless, keep the poor uneducated, the masses clueless. That's where we're needed.

If it takes away lands from peasants and indigenous peoples, we are needed there.

If it revises our history by bastardizing our education system, we are needed there.

If it abducts and kills and twists the law to its ends, we are needed there.

We are needed. We can recognize our exhaustion, rest when we need to, but we are needed. That's what they tell me.

For now, I will sit with my grief and my exhaustion, but I will also prepare. I will prepare to help.

...

Posted by notwocanoccupy on May 26, 2022 at 12:48 PM | Series

The real irony is that when there is too much going on in my life, that's when the blog goes through a dry spell. Obviously, it's not for a lack of anything to say; it's time that's in short resource.

Which is why my first entry of the year is published as the first quarter is ending.

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From January to now, I've changed jobs thrice. I know, I know, what kind of responsible 37 year-old (yes, I also turned a year older a few weeks back) changes jobs that quickly? But! In my defense, let me say this: we're in the midst of a pandemic, we're destroying our planet at a faster rate than ever, and we're at the precipice of electing one of the most morally, politically, emotionally, and personally unqualified candidates to our highest office. And we seem to be electing him on the basis of information that is manifestly and obviously false, proliferated by trolls hiding behind their computers. So, me changing jobs thrice? Not so big a deal at this point. 

But there is a sort of logical explanation to this (apart from what I just said). I might have mentioned this before, but the job I left early this year is for one of the country's constitutional commissions (independent of the Executive, I must add hehe). No sooner than when I left it in February, one of its offices offered me a position, and since I haven't really thought of where I'm going at that point (I know, that's the irresponsible part), I accepted.

I was just a month into that new position, happily adjusting, when one of my previous bosses contacted me and asked me to join him in yet another branch of government: the judiciary. He had been appointed recently, and wanted me to join his legal team. 

Here's where I explain why I had to join him and unfortunately let go of my position at the other office: joining the judiciary is one of my goals. Or rather, it gets me closer to my goal of practicing international law or joining international orgs. I thought my old job would help me with that (which is probably why I spent a good ten years in it), but it turns out that it's such a specialized branch of law that most orgs I applied to were really not interested in the knowledge I gained. I was feeling a bit dejected at one point, and was on the verge of accepting that I might just practice that branch of law for the rest of my life.

But then this opportunity came, to resolve cases from all specializations of law, I knew I had to grab it. Just this week, I've had to review tax, labor, criminal, and refugee cases. To say that I'm neck-deep in new and new-ish knowledge is a massive understatement.

Also, when news got around of my boss' appointment to the judiciary, my other boss immediately went to my office, poked her head in, and said, "He's gonna steal you from me, isn't he? I just know it." Then laughed. She was supportive; it is a promotion of sorts for me. So...here I am. Brave new world.

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I know I said we're at the precipice of electing *that* person to the presidency, but, there's still time. If we're still uncertain of who to elect, there is still time to research. I know time is a rare resource these days, and it is a privilege to even have the time to do it. But if we can scroll through social media, we *can* read articles.

I should be building up to this grand climax where I say that my candidate is the woman for the job, and she is; but also, I am saying that before you believe me or disbelieve me, we have time to read. We have time to digest information, check their accuracy, investigate their veracity.

There is time to think of consequences, too. What happens to what was stolen, if he is elected? What happens to unpaid taxes? What happens to government institutions that exist precisely to reckon with the fact that his family perpetrated unspeakable crimes against the country? What happens to our national consciousness and memory? We cannot permit ourselves to move on without accountability. We cannot move on when the perpetrators have not shown remorse, or even admitted to their crimes. We cannot move on as long as that family benefits from their crimes.

There's time to hold them accountable. There's time to vote mindfully.

...

Currently listening to: Happy Kid- Nada Surf
Posted by notwocanoccupy on March 31, 2022 at 07:43 AM | 2 worked
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