The problem with unfollowing everyone who you disagree with, as we've all probably established by now, is that you end up being in your own custom-built echo chamber, where everybody agrees with you, and therefore, you can do nothing wrong.
Sure, say it's about keeping your sanity intact and your mental health in check, but it leads to you not having the full picture. Sure, you can say you're shutting out the negative, but you can't ever claim that you have a full understanding of what's going on, not if you only see the side of the story that clicks with your belief system.
The past year has been a clusterfuck, to say the least, and rightfully a huge chunk of the blame belongs to the government for squandering the many opportunities (and the surprising amount of goodwill bestowed upon it, at least in the early stages) it had to properly and decisively respond to the COVID-19 crisis. I mean, as I write this, on the first day of Metro Manila's return to the strictest form of everyone-finally-calls-it-a-lockdown, the situation is at its worst. Ten thousand new cases in one day, for the first time since the pandemic first struck. And it can only get worse from here, what with still no structures in place for proper tracing and testing, not to mention us somehow having cultivated a variant all our own. All the government has to say about this is, "see, it's your fault you're stubborn."
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I have riffed before on one of the first things Sir Doy, one of my college professors, said in class.
"Always use the present tense," he said in, I think, the first day of our introduction to film class. "Everything that happens on screen happens in the present tense."
He was talking specifically about how we should approach our term-long assignment, where we had to write "notes" on every film we decided to watch in the next thirteen weeks. That means both the films we watch for class, the films we to watch in between classes, and perhaps the films we watch on the weekend.
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In a sign of just how long we've been in this lockdown-not-lockdown-really-lockdown, we can't seem to agree on just when the anniversary is.
I personally mark it on the 13th. The day before, the president announced an imposition of "community quarantine" across Luzon. I spent the night packing my bag to head to the flat, and also chatting with a lot of people on Viber groups. "How does this impact logistics providers?" was the question I asked a high-ranking bureaucrat. It was all in a day's work.
Some are marking it today. Or should that be tomorrow? Wasn't it that, on the first day of quarantine, which was the 13th, everyone was so confused, and everything was so chaotic, that it seemingly compelled the president to make restrictions stricter? Suddenly, we were all working from home, and everything else that screamed "leisure" was closed.
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I can't believe I have an answer to this question, but the last time I watched live music was in December 2019.
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It was this time last year when Shalla was wrapping up her stint at Komiket Cavite.
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I've been blogging here for so long that I don't immediately understand how the people I've known through the years would be surprised that I still am blogging here.
In the last few months I've had at least two friends from college see my blog and say something along the lines of "the Upper Blog still exists?!" My initial answer would always be "I never stopped!" and then I remember that for the most part people have only seen my duplicate posts back when Facebook still had the notes function.
I also remember how I made this blog a part of my identity back when I was in college. Like, "Niko Batallones is a blogger" was virtually my logline in those three years. A bit idiotic in hindsight, considering how we really treat our writers - as workhorses who aren't capable of anything else - and also because nobody really reads these things. I've accepted that for the most part, although I get frustrated when I feel I've written a particularly strong essay and it gets little traction.
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