inklingfair I don’t enjoy writing about politics in the Philippines because (a) I find it exhausting (b) there are other things in my locus of concern that I’d rather spend what little free time I have on.
BUT. Normality is privilege — I always have to remind myself this. Our neighborhood is not of the sort that braces each night for police tokhang or staged drug busts. TRAIN does not affect me in a life-or-death way.
What does trouble me is the insidious way the Marcoses are creeping into the good graces of Filipinos — courting cultural/intellectual influencers (it pains me how that term has been dragged into the mud by the likes of Mocha Uson &co) and charming them into the “neither supporter nor detractor” space. I mean, it isn’t a New Thing (Bongbong in the Senate and nearly becoming Duterte’s vice president — banish that alternate universe). But in a world where Instagram photos show old monsters resurfacing out of nowhere like Gandalf the White, it’s infuriating.
Real life: Yesterday Amy got her first ID photo taken. In it she’s smiling toothily, looking slightly off-cam with a wisp of her hair standing on end. Last night (unrelated, but who knows, really?) she woke up sobbing about “building blocks” and random other things. It was a full hour before she calmed down and slept again. It was also the second night since our humidifier broke, but it’s been muggy lately so maybe we don’t really need to stress about that until after monsoon season. So went our late night home movie (it was Baby Driver, which was entertaining enough that we’ll try to finish it tonight).
The BIR “lost” documents I had filed two years ago changing my marital status and fark! — of course TRAIN affects me, now there are exactly zero tax exemptions for dependent children. Now I have to re-file the forms and hunt for the supporting documents. Let’s hope no one’s used the lost ones to create a fake me voting Bongbong into Malacañang in 2022.
In other news: Ursula K. Le Guin. It was in college, I think right before I shifted courses, when I discovered Earthsea for the first time in a second-hand bookshop. This was when everyone was Harry Potter crazy, and I was all “but there was Ged a long time ago, you see…” I loved The Tombs of Atuan and the idea of power residing in true names. The Left Hand of Darkness was the last book of hers I remember reading, and I couldn’t believe it was written half a century ago. She wrote so much light into me.
Photo by Kayle Kaupanger on Unsplash
