Long ago, I saw my nothinguationship in P. Noval on a fateful but tepid night. I took it as a sign from the universe that we were meant to be together. I was with my friend Arwen when it happened. We were in a McDonalds, floor all sticky. If you overstay your welcome in a McDonalds, the smell of stale aerosolized grease and salt lingers on you even long after you have left the premises. I absolutely hated how it would reek. So I knew it was time to get my nutrition elsewhere. Even though I was McSaving a lot, it was unhealthy to live off of Mix & Matches for a week straight.

Arwen and I have always gone to Espana Boulevard at an ungodly hour because we listened to The 1975’s About You. I am The 1975, and she is the girl who sings for about 20 seconds before the final chorus. Friends who willingly put themselves out in the asscrack of night to aimlessly wander around with you are friends you should keep forever. We were only aimlessly wandering around because we were cruising for an organic encounter. We are romantics before we are perverts.

We were manifesting a quirky moreno by saying “quirky moreno” as fast as we could, like Bloody Mary. Say Quirky Moreno to affirm. Quirky moreno, quirky moreno, quirky moreno. Mo is re is no is kaleh. Isko Moreno, mayor of Manila, is not actually moreno. He is mestizo at most, my Wasian baddie George Clooney dupe. My heart broke into a million pieces when Isko Moreno was inaugurated into office and he closed off all the clubs and bars 200 meters away from universities; I really had no say in it because I wasn’t a registered Manila voter. So he is not moreno. He is a joy-leeching mestizo. Electoral politics makes me not believe in democracy sometimes. “Democracy” tells on itself eventually. “Democracy” sustains the illusion that the status quo can be changed fair and square, insulated from any malevolent external interference: propaganda machinery, dynasties, bureaucrat capitalism, features irremovable from the self-regenerating, self-serving purgatory. The first time I ever practiced my right to vote was during the 2022 Presidential elections and I did not feel heartbreak so much as dread weighing in when Marcos won by a landslide of 32 million votes. Marcos is moreno—chinito-moreno to be precise—and anything but quirky.

Anyway, quirky moreno, quirky moreno, quirky moreno, and a moreno did appear. He was also getting his nutrition from Mix & Matches.

I think I was attached to quirky moreno-nothinguationship because he studied journalism at UST, and I wanted to be a journalist myself. I wanted him to be mine so I could live vicariously through him, but I don’t think he was very literate. If anything, I was more literate than he was and ever will be. Literate-er. I look for traits in other people of which I think I am deficient in. I thought it to be a good reason to be in love. Love is sustenance. But he was the deficient one, no less fractured than I was. He should have been the one in love with me. There was a jarringly wide swag and literacy gap. He wanted to be a news anchor above anything else but you really need to have the mental dexterity to read off the teleprompters. No one can survive on charm forever.

A nothinguationship is someone you match with on Bumble with the hopes of making out with them at the very least, but the exchange turns out to be so disengaging and difficult that nothing substantial ever happens, hence Nothinguationship. He was never particularly interested in me and I thought it was a complete waste because he was 6’2”. I hear he calls me his ex, even though we never had a relationship in any real sense. I never fucked Wayne, I never fucked Drake. I would call him my ex too so I could dramatize our encounters and write about it like I am doing right now. I think physical desirability grants you the leverage to be pure evil. He was anyone’s dream man on paper: tall, dark, handsome, sexually frustrated, emotionally stunted, corrupt. He gave me enough attention to keep me hooked for 2 months, which then I think is my fault. I know when to stop pointing fingers, you see. But he also should have done away with me entirely either way just to be respectful. We are both at fault and maybe we could forgive each other when the time is right.

Weeks later, I saw him again on a bus. He had a buzzcut and I thought he looked kind of uncanny like a newborn duck. In that bus along Sta. Mesa, he texted me because he still had my number. He texted me to piss me off. I am currently friends with three separate girls from different eras of his life, all of whom have conflicting opinions of him. But I trust all of them unequivocally because I put good faith in the multifacetedness of people. I, too, contain multitudes so why cannot others as well? It doesn’t count as character assassination when you present all sides.

He was a faggot no doubt. But he was also from La Salle Green Hills which makes for a worse type of faggot because they think they’re too masc to like PinkPantheress or to simply indulge in pop divas. There is but a profound connection between music taste and gender expression: he is a broke loser pretending to be hot shit on his friend’s yacht, chest puffed up, arms crossed, in stories to Travis Scott or Kanye West. All-boys schools collectively have a deep obsession with becoming Kanye West or any other Black rapper. Quirky moreno was oscillating between Kanye West and Nate Archibald, who is White and fictional. Filipino metropolitan masculinity is like when you emulate the caricature of a Black American man. In light of this, I have asked my straight and straight-passing dudebro friends to teach me how to dap people up. The RICHBOYZ from La Salle Green Hills are an incarnation of everything I know so far about intersectionality: class, race, gender, sexuality, and what have you. They are the Avatar. They are economically-racially-sexually-ambiguous, alienated and barely distinguishable from the context they are in and borrow from. They have constituted a new mode of existence that supersedes all which came before.

***

The men who have come and gone in my life are not who they say they are. So I am not who I say I am in return. Our truest selves are lost in the flow of aether. There was this one guy who was from UP JMA—also a quirky moreno—and he didn’t like pop divas so much as the next person. Why do people spend their entire lives earnestly worshipping Ariana Grande when they could be worshipping Daniel Caesar and keshi? Such a divisive world we live in. I was like, so pick-me, and I mirrored his male gravitas. Because I really wanted to fuck, I told him what I thought he wanted to hear and that I liked music like a softboy likes Joji, wears compression shirts, buys Pop Mart figurines, posts low-exposure photo dumps. I was channeling my inner SoCal Asian. I was matching his freak.

He tried telling me a thing or two about improving the area of Binondo. He was reinventing gentrification by pointing at junctions and façades that badly needed refurbishing while we slurped down 150-peso xiaolongbaos. I wasn’t willing to pay more than 150 pesos for xiaolongbaos if he ever went and Siargao’ed the place. We need to put a stop to him.

He was the spitting image of well-kempt Pinterest ulzzangs and TikTok #fyp #blowthisup fitchecks, which made me a bit jealous of him. He had me beat in the swag gap. He was bisexual so that makes him half a faggot if we’re going by Punnett square logic. (A man who is half a faggot is still a faggot, as my good friend Paul would argue.) He talked in a low register, faggcentless in fact. To his credit, I thought it was hot and I really would have mistaken him for straight if he did not reciprocate my online advances of affection prior. I can never know if the dudebro voice was deliberate or natural. WWJBT? (What Would Judith Butler Think?) I gave it a try myself and it only strained my vocal cords. He then told me that he could have thought that I was straight because my Macbook wallpaper was a solid black tint; I honestly don’t know what he was expecting or what his thought process was. A black wallpaper isn’t gay nor straight. Girl, it’s literally nothing.

We ended things on a sour note because I projected too hard on him and decided that he was talking to other guys; he went to Cebu over the weekend and didn’t return my messages for almost three days after we fucked on a Thursday. He was actively posting on social media. It could be that I just had a wild imagination, or there were no ample cell towers in the sprawling metropolitan city of Cebu, or he was just not that into me. It would have made sense for him to not be that into me because his screen time was around 10 hours a day. I was so distraught and I wanted the text man to text me.

At my friend’s house party, seeking consolation, we learned that one of our other friends, J., had dated UP JMA quirky moreno before I did; We were one week apart, which makes us dick sisters. It was unfortunate for UP JMA quirky moreno because J. only confirmed his recursively negligent behavior as I got drunk off tequila rose by the kitchen island counter. UP JMA quirky moreno was plucking us off one by one, Freddy Kreugering us. In hindsight, it was a remarkable convergence of fate and I started believing in God more after that. Everything is interconnected.

J. and I sent him a video of us dapping each other up then flipping him off. It was dramatic, childish, admittedly uncalled for, but felt right in the moment. I gladly paid the price of getting the last laugh.

He was quick to reply but I was even quicker, empowered by three glasses of tequila rose. We were racing to get the first jump on the moral ascendancy. You shouldn’t have done that then I wouldn’t have done this, but you couldn’t really have known I would react this way, but at the same time you should have known. We were polarizing forces, twin flames. He was like, “Oh well I really liked you pa naman” and I felt ashamed of myself. I really had to sit with what I did, but I could have also been ghostlighted. I am trained to be skeptical about everything because I am a journalist. A day later, I had to ask him for a second chance and talk things out for realsies. It was not my best work but I like taking my chances and making sure I live without regret. I was in a battle with myself to become either a stone-cold bitch or needy parasocial talking stage. I now think twice about whether to self-destruct at a moment’s notice whenever I am not doted upon.

Months passed and I saw him again in La Union by chance; it was my first time in La Union at all, mind you. Fate was teaching me one final lesson. (I was in La Union in the first place because my friends invited me to shoot for them, and also because they were going to borrow the mecha headphones I made back when I thought I was going to be a fashionista just in case the whole journalist-writer-filmmaker thing didn’t pan out. I have lived many lives already.) We were in Flotsam & Jetsam, in the smoking area, and I saw that UP JMA quirky moreno finally got his braces off. For that, I felt really proud of him. But I still gave him a real middle finger in the face for old time’s sake, and for shock value. His friends laughed and they asked me what really happened. I gave them an objective rundown of the events. They sighed because it really was a bad look to leave anyone hanging after hooking up. We could have been in love but he didn’t text me back. But maybe I was also insane for expecting anything more out of a two-week affair. I was just glad that people saw my point of view. It’s all in the past now.

I left La Union by bus. It was Sunday night and I had classes the very next morning. As I leaned against the glass window, which I would advise against because of germs, Burnout by Sugarfree bled through my earphones. I felt vaguely reminiscent of Carson and Dio, which is to say that none of the events that transpired were very I’m Drunk I Love You. I deserve to be cast by JP Habac in his next big feature film. I’m Drunk I Love You has done so much for La Union tourism.

I played Manila by Gloc-9 and Noel Cabangon when I knew we were fast approaching Cubao. Take me back in your arms, Manila, and promise me you’ll never let go. We were on the skyway, traveling 70 kilometers per hour. I let the inertia take me. The city looked beautiful from that vantage and I never felt happier seeing it.

It pays off to have friends from all walks of life. It’s even better when your friends are friends with the university athletes who can get you guestlisted, by which all means you’re spared from the labor of having to actually befriend anyone else. I just don’t think the athletes and I would have that much in common; I’d only ask about their protein intake.

That December, we got guestlisted for this party in BGC. The party was being had because the La Salle Green Archers had won that season’s UAAP men’s basketball championship. (A year later, I also sort of, incidentally, attended the UP Fighting Maroons afterparty at Clubhouse when they won the championship. I come from a long lineage of university-socialites.) It was invite-only, exclusive, supposedly. Exclusivity can easily get watered down in these instances where everyone else is also friends with the university athletes, and it provides some sort of license and entry for the nothing-in-common-with-the-athletes plus ones. I should be the only plus one ever. But all the drinks were going to be paid for, and we’re not the type of people to pass up on free stuff. A night out is a night out. Although, since I’m gay, I’m not particularly interested in basketball. I’m not really that committed to present as masc. I know the words to like, two Kendrick Lamar songs and that’s it.

I got shitfaced to Kendrick Lamar. When I came to, I was in a McDonalds at 5 am with my friends, faceplanted on the table, glasses snapped in half.

We partied with Kitty Duterte. This was before they put her dad on international tribunal for charges of crimes against humanity. Kitty was there because she was dating one of the Green Archers. It was exhilarating to be in the same room as her, although not in a groupie kind of way. I’d only ever feel that way towards Kitchie Nadal or Eugene Domingo. Whether Kitchie Nadal would want her own clout mob today is none of my concern and it’s entirely up to her. Kitchie Nadal, however, would be too grown and successful for that sort of worldly attachment.

Kitty looked like Kitty. And seeing Kitty (I think we are on a first-name basis) felt exhilarating because it was like seeing a real round cut diamond up close. Like seeing a gruesome road accident up close that you can’t seem to pull away no matter how fucked up it looks. I’m not saying she looked fucked up. I don’t think she looked fucked up. I never said that. In fact, she looked great. I was just so amused and fascinated to think I’d ever have that kind of proximity to authority.

A lot of my friends are connected to authority in their own little strange ways, brushed close enough to it. Some of them tell me about how they go to school with media nepo babies or with people whose families run political dynasties in far-flung provinces, which are often the type to sigh really loudly about how difficult public transportation is. They have reverse-engineered conspicuous consumption. Last year, I met these two students from Penn (yes, the Ivy League) and they told me they were in a Fil-Am club with the daughter of a big Filipino food conglomerate that produced my favorite chips. There was also this one guy I met in La Union whose name I can’t really remember; what I do remember is the fact that his godfather was one of the presidents. We are all six degrees of separation from someone very powerful and important. The question on my mind would now be: what would it take to see them up close without making it seem like you’re too desperate?

I would like to know how famous people could ever be friends with the rest of us normal people. This is assuming fame is tantamount to power. But now is not the time and place to get technical with the meanings of words. I try not to think about it but I do think about it. Perhaps everyone else does think about it. We are all thinking whether famous people can snuff out the bad faith in normal people. And I do think they can. They can. Their instinct is terrifyingly primal. They know what wanting looks like. So, when I find myself face-to-face with the ex-president’s daughter and my mind immediately fixates on how to breach the higher social strata, I find myself too stunned to actually do anything about it; I doubt that I’ll ever be able to pull it off without getting caught. Have you seen Gossip Girl? I can hardly blame famous people for their extreme guardedness because I wouldn’t want to end up on r/ChikaPH either.

Famous people would rather be friends with other famous people. This is a well-known fact because, believe it or not, they are also in search of familiarity no matter how untouchable they seem. They, too, are looking for someone to share the Same Ground with where there is nothing to lose, nothing to gain. Though actually, sometimes there is something to gain, but it’s nothing too substantial in the grand scheme of things, so it ends up being really nothing at all. I think it’s like when your friend buys you a bottle of water and the friendship just runs so deep that you never have to pay them back the 20 pesos. I wouldn’t want to be the type of person holds a measly 20 pesos against others.

If you ever thought of becoming friends with someone famous, it should have been at the point before their big breakout moment, preened by all the cameras and lights. The friendship feels justified and earned that way. Timing is everything. No one has to worry about who approached who with ulterior motives, or if the ulterior motives even existed in the first place. Once the window of time has passed, it’s no use to consider it any longer. Anything past that makes you a groupie.

I’m very interested in power and how it operates. I only recently came to terms with this when my friend pointed out how deeply interested I was in learning about Manila’s socialites and the social hierarchy. By the way he pointed it out, he could have very just well said that there was something totally and royally fucked up with me, acutely deprived of something.

I can never become a socialite because one has to be born into it. There are also fundamental distinctions between a socialite, an influencer, and a celebrity. They are too often conflated. You only have to remember that influencers will try to sell you a bunch of things online. Influencers can become celebrities; celebrities can easily become influencers. However, influencers are far removed from ever becoming socialites. Not anytime soon anyway. All socialites can become celebrities but not all celebrities can become socialites. The only exception is Kris Aquino, and she sits there hanging in the balance, facilitating the balance, preserving the balance. Kris Aquino is a personification of everything I know about theistic dualism.

It must be said though that becoming a box office hit doesn’t always afford you entry into every room, but it’s still better than no rooms at all. Socialites will go only so far as to politely invite you to high society as a spectacle, a Thing they discovered. They will talk about how talented you are, how you’re the next big thing, but never as equals. Or so I’ve heard. The problem right now is that I rely too much on anecdotes.

If you weren’t born into high society in this lifetime, maybe your grandkids will. You can get rich and powerful in this lifetime then your descendants can become Old Money in the distant future. This is the theory of relativity.

Anyway, my media org used to play this game during retreats: we would draw a relationship tree between two inconspicuously-linked people. The degrees of separation should be six or less. Pia Wurtzbach to Greta Thunberg. Marina Summers to Brad Pitt.

You can connect Charli XCX with Gloria Macapagal Arroyo because Charli XCX collaborated with Rita Ora. Then Rita Ora cameoed in Fast and Furious with Vin Diesel. Then Vin Diesel also starred with Dwayne Johnson. Then Dwayne Johnson portrayed Barack Obama one time on SNL. Then Barack Obama and Noynoy Aquino had that one meeting. Then Noynoy Aquino succeeded Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the presidency.

I implore all of you to find your own six degrees of separation and see a real round cut diamond up close.

I’m friends with this girl who, these days, I really only see at bars or wherever there is contraband in the immediate vicinity. We went to Benilde together. She was 2 years ahead of me, studied Theater Arts, and was good at her job in the soul-sucking org that we were in. I fucking hated that org because it was thankless and clique-y and I always needed to be praised for when I do good, but also because I feel like I could never build rapport with people who went to Japan bi-annually when I scorn at their lifestyles in private. I am against staying friends with people you talk shit about. Benilde is a high-end prestigious school that splintered off from La Salle so it should not have been any surprise then that my peers all went to New York, went on ski trips, knew what a soiree was, and never saw a Scholarship application form.

I met a few people who were petibs like me. Middle-class, or in popular rhetoric, One Hospital Bill Away From Poverty. They say there’s only actually two classes: the owning class and the working class. Petibs are fence-sitters who think they’ll ever have a shot at flying first class. I loved being friends with petibs because they were simultaneously kanal and aircon, but mainly because I was like them. Best of both worlds. We were a half-liter of shembot to the huzzzzzz who otherwise needed to split the bill for three bottles of Cuervo at Clubhouse. Sometimes I feel guilty because I am not doing enough for the revolution and deep down I really want to live a lavish life on the beach but I don’t think I’ll ever do it at the expense of someone else. I want to be the first ethical billionaire.

Sometimes I can feel very defeatist and I’ll be like, Okay I think I’ll just play by the rules of the game. We should improve society somewhat yet I participate in society as well.

This girl, I think she was also petibs. I’ve never heard of her traveling outside of the country. But maybe she’s one of those petibs who hide the fact that they do have a little bit of money. Truth be told, I am terrified of her. I can never read her. She does not even post online unless she reposts story mentions. She is my complete opposite but I get a feeling that she is really not. I get a sisterly vibe from her. If I can remember correctly, she has brothers of her own; I wonder if she’d ever take me in her household.

I’m not that friendly with my own brothers. I have three older ones and none of them wanted to pursue a life in Manila. They bullied me a lot when I was younger, but I don’t think it really did any damage to me. Siblings are supposed to go through that playful tug-of-war phase that eventually blossoms into a lifelong unbreakable bond, but we just never had that. I don’t like them as people; I don’t think they like me as a person.

I have a tendency to be very parasocial with my friends. I like it when my friends are a little bit older than me, that way I can be bunso as fuck. I like being taken care of. It sounds really Freudian but I promise you it’s not anything deeply sexual. I am continuously looking for all the Kuya and Ate figures in the world because there came a point in my upbringing where I felt as though there was no mending the rift between me and my three brothers. We fought all the time. My mother thinks it’s because she and my father started earning money and we were able to live comfortably for a while. Money makes you apathetic and spoiled and vengeful. Money makes you fail to appreciate the nuclear family framework. She thinks if we had stayed poor we would have been one of those MMFF family films where they all lived amicably in a wooden ancestral house. Vice Ganda would swoop in and save the day and the film ends with a fiesta.

This girl I’m friends with has Uranus and Neptune in her 11th house. We are both Aries risings, which makes me feel like we share the same fate. She has a stellium in her 5th house while I, my 9th house. I read people’s astrology with recitation and a little bit of projection. I read what I think the interpretation should be based on the assigned meanings of the Zodiac, planets, and houses, and then how it would feel like if I myself had those placements. I projected: You have a hard time truly belonging anywhere because Uranus brings unexpected change in your friendships; Neptune makes you idealize and dream about a sense of community. I told her what she should feel like because that’s simply what I felt my entire life. We had almost the same exact chart. We both had Uranus and Neptune in our 11th house of Aquarius. She was my sister after all.

I think I have trouble trusting people or building anything deeper because I can never fully remove myself from the machinations of socioeconomic disparity. I am living under the apprehension that I should be prepared for the Oppression Olympics. This is not like a Nickelodeon show where I am Aang and I eventually become friends with Zuko and we see past what has torn our two nations apart. Real life is much more sinister. There is a hierarchy and the hierarchy wants to get even.

I write and think the way I do because I am preempting for when a faceless privileged intelligentsia online calls me a privileged intelligentsia. So most of the time I’m not really that honest with my own feelings and I tend to self-censor. I think about this certain account on Twitter, one of the many online personas I mold myself around, how they would have their way with me and burn me on the stake if I did not say the right things. But they will burn me on the stake either way because they’ll be angry at the fact that I’m too pussy to ever be brave with my own opinions. I am finding a cure for Chronic Contrarian Syndrome (CCS).

One of my friends who doesn’t like being called a Xaverian tells me I’m too concerned about how I’m perceived and that I subscribe too much to the teachings of Pierre Bourdieu. He is right. I have Neptune in my 11th house so my imagination is centered around social dynamics. Maybe being chronically online has poisoned my brain so much that I perceive things and people as lacking agency: you are either someone labeled pejoratively or someone on the right side of history.

I am split in half because I have an Apple ecosystem, which is like when your lobster is too juicy and your ass is too fat. My mother handed me down her iPhone 13, and she calls me from there to tell me We Don’t Have Money Anymore. I am typing this essay on the Macbook they bought for me when I was starting college and I didn’t understand any of the Home Credit forms then. I just knew that they would be paying like, 2000 pesos a month for the next few years. Now, I live in a nice condo where my family helps me with rent because family looks out for you; I can manage to pay my half because I have an honest job—take odd gigs here and there—so I can afford to not ask for grocery money. It’s just enough, more than enough, although it’s always in the back of my head that all of it is too good to be true and that the Reaper wants collateral. You have to suffer before you truly earn any moral weight.

I would not be here without my family so maybe I should visit every now and then when the traffic thins out. (Mom, I know you’re reading this because I know you’re subscribed to my Substack: I love you.)

I have the makings of a rich kid, the cadence of a rich kid, the sensibilities of a rich kid, and even though I would probably hate to be called a rich kid, and the people I find vexing are actual rich kids through and through, I know what I am. I am a rich kid who knows what a Scholarship Application form looks like. So it must be possible for me to be the first non-oxymoronal ethical billionaire. I am almost at the apex, fastening my hold, tightening it. I am doing everything in my power to keep me from hurtling down, pulverizing the earth, gouging out a me-shaped crater at the base of my residential building. I am that one scene in White Chicks where the two other white chicks find out they are about to become MC Hammer broke.

I think about the quote-unquote rich kids I have crossed paths with, in Benilde, in UPD, in Ateneo, in Makati. I think hard about whether they are actually Ramon Ang-hegemonic rich or just One-Hospital-Bill-Away-From-Poverty petibs like me. I think about my indignation towards them and if it alludes to anything about myself. Recognizing when you are projecting is truly an invaluable skill. You hate the Nicki wig but you wanna wear the Nicki wig? You hate the Nicki wig but you wear the Nicki wig. You can’t wear a Nicki wig but hate Nicki. I don’t like Nicki because she’s MAGA. These girls can’t see me like the Yeti. All these girls gassed like Getty. I am Miss Petibs.

You hate the rich but you’re kind of rich yourself, but at the same time you aren’t actually that rich at all, so you’re just a little bit rich enough that you’re conscious about the fact whether you’re now pretending to be poor because you can afford certain luxuries that others cannot. Count your blessings. Maybe the problem is that I look at money and I see black and white. When you’re in the Philippines, money comes in orange, red, purple, green, yellow, then blue. I like the color blue.

Do I not engender compassion and class consciousness because I get iced coffee every other day? Asceticism won’t save me. Or maybe it will.

I am writing all of this because writing has been what I have been good at. I believe my honesty will get me somewhere. I like posting essays online because people will analyze me for free and they’ll point out things I had missed even though I had gone under intense self-interrogation. I am looking for insights that will flip my world view. But my writing is too self-indulgent and I actually have to do something. So I will pick up a Renato Constantino book in honor of today.

I don’t think I’m trying to absolve myself by admitting to wrongdoing, although it should work like that in the court of law or in church confessionals. Self-awareness could really get blasé and it doesn’t feel very fulfilling. Someone else would rather enact justice themselves by driving a stake in your heart.

There is no good way for me to go about this without sounding incredibly moralizing or hypocritical. I will tell you though, the wrath of a teenager with an iPhone and access to Powerpuff Girls screencaps and timeless 90s chick flicks like Clueless was really something else. Essay writing has become my form of penance. This would be a shorter essay, you know, if I just admitted to being insecure and acne-ridden.

Over summer break, I worked a clerical job. Every chance I got to be alone with my phone, I mechanically opened Twitter and pondered on what exactly I should be mad about or poke fun at. Like I was some sort of salivating Pavlovian dog. I was destined for the writer’s room. I tweeted like I was skinny and toned at the beach catching island vibes, eternally pouting to some waist-snatching EDM Techno while the waves reflected the sun off my Miu Miu sunglasses, cigarette in one hand and Mojito in the other. I tweeted like I was in my executive office at Condé Nast headquarters waiting to strike down on some poor slouchy intern who doesn’t know any better than to incite my contempt and cruelty.

The principles of stand-up comedy could work just as well with internet shitposting. Transferable skills are really all the rage in this age and economy. A staunch sense of vindictiveness and well-timed wit is guaranteed to earn you some, if any, form of social currency. I’ve seen people build followings just by being Opinionated, Blunt, and Vocal about The Issues At Hand. A lot of the people I look up to are Opinionated, Blunt, and Vocal about The Issues At Hand. Becoming a wry iconoclast of everything fast-tracks you to stardom.

It doesn’t even have to be about politics or ideology; we can bicker about the banal, mundane stuff, how everyone’s unoriginal, apathetic, and chronically online.

What I’m trying to say is that the traditional caricature of the mean girl is dead. The mean girl is ruled by Mars and Mercury, and is always trying to get the last word in, and is mad about other people trying to get the last word in.

So I am no longer mean; I am now jaded, or sly, or scornful. I no longer call people fat and ugly and inbred, or point out the traits and actions one would find irredeemable. Not to their face. Sometimes I just quote-retweet in private, mulling over how appalled I was. It doesn’t make sense to be confrontational with someone you don’t know, to tell them all these awful things upfront; but then I guess it doesn’t make any sense for any of it to happen in private in the first place either. I could have just put my phone down and spared myself the aneurysm. Your 20s are about resonating with those cursive Millennial wall-art maxims about the Golden Rule. Being kind is a choice as much as it is a duty. At some point the vitriol runs dry and you have to reassess where you really want to be in life.

People are really into being a hater because hate is the strongest force in the world that rivals love. You have to be armed to the teeth. Would you rather bring a Stinger or a Vandal to a gunfight? These days, I am an ethical hater which means I don’t resort to ad hominem or underhanded tricks. My vexation is largely sound and well-meaning.

I’ve built my following by drawing up hyperspecific quasi-anthropological profiles of the contemporary Manileño. People seem to really love it when you’re observant about rich people and their spiral wooden staircases. People love it when you’re observant and sardonic about anyone who’s not them. I’ve read something about how I could just be really thinking of one person when I make broad generalizations to pass off as sociocultural commentary. I owe people many subtweets.

I think people turn to contrarianism because participation in discourse feels good and enriching. I’m not saying this to be anti-intellectualist; I’m saying this because that’s what I’ve found true with myself. I always raise my hand at the end of colloquiums just so I can make a point to everyone else in the room that I have been listening intently and that I am thinking Otherwise. I thought people loved a good provocation. I can feel really Full-name-in-display-name-UP-Sablay-profile-picture-intelligentsia about it.

The term intellectual jakol is extremely hilarious to me because It Really Do Be Like That. The post-nut clarity leaves you vacant and it isn’t always depth-building. I’ve been studying metaphysics for quite some time, and by metaphysics, I mean astrology. I have my Sun in my 8th house, which means I find conflict addicting and exhilarating.

One time, I sat through this photojournalist’s seminar on the basics of photography, and at the end, I asked him what he thought of photojournalists that made a spectacle and a career out of poverty. I mean, how do you even deal with the moral logistics of pointing a camera at famine, going home, and giving it some good old Wong Kar Wai colorgrading? I was talking about the Afghan Girl, the Nat Geo cover. He told the entire room that the photojournalists themselves don’t really have a responsibility outside of taking photos. If they so happen to win Pulitzer prizes out of aestheticizing suffering, it’s up to the non-profits to follow up and help the famished to stop starving. We all have our own roles here on Earth.

We were dogpiling on him in our editorial group chat during the Q&A portion because what the actual fuck? But I can’t say that I didn’t feel smug after I vindicated him. I got his ass. But don’t get it twisted. I really did care about what we were talking about. The consequential feelings were purely incidental.

I convince myself that I am doing a good deed by adding to the conversation Because Someone Should Talk About These Things. But sometimes I really like being seen participating in an argument. We are all inherently performative if you think about it. I think both things can be true at the same time: I can care but I also want to win. The human condition.

I’m currently watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, although I’ve been getting ahead of the lore on the wikis: In The Legend of Korra, they can’t destroy good nor evil because both will always exist to complement one another. I’m enacting evil so someone can be the force of good, and that way, we uphold the cosmic equilibrium.

Katara wouldn’t be a mean girl. She’s protective and righteous and fights with a warrior’s resolve.

People fail to tread the line between sociocultural critic and asshole. Then again I think most critics are assholes. Most of them (and I say this loosely) think they’re doing the world a favor when probably they’re just miserable and projecting. I would know. I have been those things as well, once upon a time, so I’m probably right about my assumptions; I have the perspective. I am literally empirical data right now. Anecdotal fallacy can go fuck itself. I’m miserable and projecting about people who are miserable and projecting. We can all have a miserable-off and a projection-off.

If everyone adhered to the long list of logical fallacies I don’t think we’d have any interesting developments in conversation.

I believe that snarkiness is a superpower fuelled by a perpetual state of beef. Over the pandemic I really loved listening to Flo Milli. I could not stop listening to her because I was like, who the fuck was she fighting with all the time? I myself wasn’t particularly fighting with anyone back then, but I felt like her songs really applied to my life. If people were not able to exercise their birthright to hate, we would not have Hev Abi diss tracks. Imaginary opps are a necessary evil. Like I said, people are addicted to conflict. It’s like Fight Club, exactly like Fight Club.

One of my org advisers from college was mean and was a total bitch. B-I-C-T-H. She could run a totalitarian state if she wanted to, but I’m glad she doesn’t because there’s no telling what it will do to the geopolitical balance. You just don’t hand a knife to a potential serial killer when they’ve shown all the signs of becoming one. I think people like that know they’re total bitches. I can imagine that being the one to induce fear is extremely euphoric. I absolutely adore people like that. I think their refusal to be so easily pleased, to scowl on default, to never agree the first time around, is what constitutes their mystique and power and authority. It’s sometimes the type of person I’d like to become. The scowling really worked on me, it did. Because at some point I really wanted her approval and praise until she drunkenly brought up that I was a UPD reject out of spite. Then I was like, okay fuck you too then.

I wonder if they were profusely bullied in high school, so then it does make me feel a little bit sorry and empathetic for them. We all have our defense mechanisms. I’m just sad that I got the stinging end of it, but I promise to break the cycle of infliction.

So today, I am taking a long walk outside to clear my head and return to a softer version of myself. I hope people are able to look at me and tell me I remind them of a KakaoTalk mascot sticker. I want people to tell me, Oh my god you are literally Usagi from the hit franchise Chiikawa.

Anyone can become anything they want in Manila. And rightfully so. Because the exposure from all the vehicular pollution dissolves the fundamental structures of personhood, you are just malleable. It’s chemical decomposition in a sociological sense. The structural decay is opportune for neuroplasticity. Afterwards, you are allowed to build yourself back up using the most elementary, most uncomplex, and most stable components of a man.

I have chosen to embody a 6’2” Straight Mestizo from Ateneo like a rich girl from Ayala Alabang Village embodies middle class sensibilities in UPD. Ralph de Leon and Emilio Daez from Pinoy Big Brother carry the exact vibes which I am looking for in my 2026 vision board. I am creative-directing the rest of my life through the use of signals, symbols, vibes, consumerism, and irony to always mean otherwise and to mean what I am not. It is post-class drag, post-identity assemblage, calibrated towards a mutual almost-parasocial cosplay. The 6’2” Straight Mestizo from Ateneo is much less of a person but more of a consensus aesthetic of aspirational living.

The frictionlessness and amity of such a man is free lobotomy; the icepick through the brain is more than enough to cure my sociological dysphoria. I also want to have straight white teeth, and the urbane cadences of Private School rhetoric, and a future guaranteed because there is nothing else to be expected. Isn’t it just so sunny all the time?

Beauty is one thing, but all the vanity just gets to a point. Giving into physiognomy is callous, much less naive. This was never about only wanting to be transplanted into their pristine doll-like skins and Ralph Lauren polo shirts. I think there just is a certain almost doleful lack of excitement in their genteel exteriors, an absence of desperation, of which I’ve always wanted to inherit.

In Bulacan, my friend Julean has created a moral framework of being, a modern paradigm of duality. Like me, they also filter the world through signals, symbols, vibes, consumerism, and irony. Julean dreams of becoming the Sunnies eternal La Union lobotomy sunshine non-profit founder because urbanism is inhospitable and it gnaws at your soul. I am the exact opposite, and I have always believed that opposites attract. Julean is like my soulmate.

The proper nomenclature for it is the Issy metro corporate Legazpi Village Purveyr Fair raver. And I think I am just like that, close to it, because I am just so in love with the architecture of skyscrapers in general, and those brutalist art deco apartments in Makati. I think cities are electric. I could never keep up though because raves are like 2,500 pesos, to say nothing of 250-peso iced coffees with 10% service charge.

So I think I want to be Sunnies too. As much as I love cities, I also love the beach. I want to be sunshine-maxxing, Vitamin D-maxxing, Havaianas-maxxing. It’s a false dichotomy in the first place, and we’re suckers for those; The Sunnies eternal sunshine La Union lobotomy is the Hannah Montana wig for the Issy corporate raver, bankrolled back and forth 8 hours via NLEX, via parents.

Our house used to have a garden out on the east flank, and it bore these steel grill windows and a gate leading outside. From the east flank, the sunlight would come in and flood our house with all its glorious warmth. What sorts of plants we grew, I’ll never know. It would be nice to think we had bougainvilleas.

Further on the east flank, there lived an elderly couple and stood their woody ancestral house. And I remember they were teachers, or I must have thought they were teachers. Maybe it’s rude to assume old people are all teachers (but they are).

On the east flank, in the garden, I remember my mother and how young she looked and how she tended to everything. I remember her straw hat, and her pair of gray gloves, and dirt, and an overwhelming wash of green. It was humid and hot, and I was too small back then. But I was in the east flank, and the east flank contained the sun, and that was supposed to be it.

Soon enough, on the east flank, we had new neighbors. And I never knew what became of the elderly couple or where they went. I only knew that there was no longer a woody ancestral house and that things were going to change.

On the east flank, there came a fountain out on the terrace, and a 4-seat metal bench swing which always creaked. How it must have taught me about inertia. Although, I never did like the smell of rust on my hands.

On the east flank, there came a two-story orange house, and then the Wall. The demarcation. The boundary.

When our neighbors were settling, they bought a portion of our land, the garden. Things were going to change. It was one thing to take the garden but the Wall? I couldn’t have known they were going to seal us in. It’s a curse, just how neighborhoods are built. Everything’s stuck together. Our west flank was someone else’s east flank, so perhaps this was a way of getting even.

On the east flank, there was no longer a garden but a yellow-brick wall. We were Dorothy but none of us walked vertically. How it could have been to be able to defy gravity.

Our house used to have a garden out on the east flank, and it bore these steel grill windows and a gate leading outside. Used to. From inside, there still were steel grill windows and a gate. But they led nowhere.

The sun always rises in the East. So for a brief time as a child, sunlight flooded into our living room in the mornings. And then it didn’t anymore. But I will always remember how warm it was. It must have been. That was all.

I now live in a studio unit with big glass windows facing North. It’s all I ever wanted, although it can never be quite East. Still, nobody could build a wall high enough to block the sunlight.

My mother gave me a pair of gray gloves when I moved because I wanted to take care of a garden in the city. (These days, I just steal pothos cuttings from around Makati and propagate them in water.) I wondered if those were the same gloves I saw on that hot summer day. Only to find where the straw hat went.

I woke up one afternoon, and I saw how beautiful the sky was from where I laid. It was 6 p.m. and the beginning of March. Soon the days will be longer than the nights. I wondered, if during those brief interims when the day carries over into the night, when the sky is briefly orange and briefly purple and the city murmurs wearily along, could I stay there forever.

I wonder if the rest of my life could be like that.

I am kissing a cat.

I am begging people to stay.

I am at a party where everyone is from UPD and I cannot shake off the feeling of being less. But my friends were there and I held onto this sense of camaraderie between us.

I am at a pool.

Paris is descending to a black magic invasion.

I am on vacation with Girls' Generation

I have turned into a bug.

I was on a floating island. From the window, I could see lightning flashing in the clouds below.

I am back in my old high school.

My teeth aren't supposed to look like that.

I was watching an animated short film, and it had these rules about breathing under water.

I was in a beach house.

I’m not sure when it began, the very moment I felt as though parties were no longer sacred. I only know that it happened, and I suppose it happened slowly or all at once, between one song and the next.

It probably began on the dance floor, as all things do. The cosmic Egg, the myth of Yggdrasil tree, the nothing before the Big Bang. It began at the moment of expansion: sound and light and heat compressing then exploding. The dance floor is a point in genesis, the void in which all is corporealized and annihilated. You could be anything and you could also be nothing.

I’ve always held my breath on dance floors; I go to parties because I think something will happen to me, and I think I’ll become someone else, but I never do. I used to dance a lot, you know, for a brief time in my childhood. Had I only listened to myself then, had I only insulated myself from the world and all its ways to demean, and had I not worried incessantly how unpleasant I looked from the outside, I’m sure I would have loved it; I would have loved dancing.

There is a deep pit of failure I could never give a name to. If this is all it means to be young and free and beautiful, I only wish to have recognized it sooner. You’re supposed to recognize “it” while it’s happening. Parties have always broken my heart because I have always believed that when you dance, you are at the center of something, like when someone goes to a city and finds themself among many, many possibilities. And then when everyone has gone home, when the song has ended, when the staff has wiped the tables down, and when the dance floor has emptied, nothing has truly changed. You are exactly as you were before.

So I only know that it happened, and that I missed it.

Saturday morning, I left the house at around 10 a.m., smelling of sunscreen and linen, and hands smelling of key rust and Off lotion. For no particular reason, for this December back home, I needed a long walk uphill and down.

The sun is alive and it leers down on Earth severely. From a young age, I had always believed that it followed wherever you went, like one trails a colony of ants in the languor of afternoon. The sun casts its heat down my nape, prickling that small patch of skin as I trekked on. How profound that the sun is both a wellspring and a means to an end. Celestial bodies are no different from human ones in the many such ways that bodies do affect bodies: energy and matter traded in cause and effect. Laws of physics are laws of man. There are consequences for each action. How full moons drive people to the brim of emotion as tides ride high out at sea must be by design. As above, so below. The human body is made up of 70% water, give or take. Bodies, bodies, bodies.

While the sun usually feels fine on other parts of my body (and I do love the sun on my face), it’s the nape that’s extremely averse to heat. It’s much like finding out during foreplay you like being licked behind the ears but not so much down the crotch or navel. If I believed in religion enough, and if bodies were indeed made of clay, then perhaps not all make it out of the kiln equal. Once, in a pottery class I did not pay for, I learned about the problem with doing things half-assed. I was told that this avant-garde (I call things avant-garde in consolation), asymmetrical, thick-by-the-rim catchall would inevitably crack in the oven. It’s only in its infancy that it’s allowed to exist like that. After that, only room for perfection. The smallest cracks build tension. There is an allegory in that somewhere.

Uphill, the road is obnoxiously crowded and narrow. I am comforted by the fact that hometowns are not so different from the cities we long to escape to. Here, drivers are still dicks. There are too many dicks with cars. Cars have always made me sick and nauseous. I’m not sure if it’s from the bad car perfumes shaped like trees (they always smell so synthetic), but I eventually had to grow out of it like all children do when their motion sickness is a liability. Anyways, I don’t like cars. But I do love window seats.

The other day, my high school friends and I went out to the beach, and my friend Don, he had this fabulous red car with a sun roof. All cars should have sun roofs where I can simply stand and feel the wind against my face, going at 70 kilometers per hour. It feels so depraved and fashionable. At the beach, we paid 250 pesos each for our own cocktails. At that moment, it was as though we were still 16 and the coolest thing you could possibly do was sneak out and drink underage. But I don’t think I would have been such good friends with them at 16. To put it in such a way that does not martyr myself: before I became who I needed to become in Manila, I was simply excluded at a chance of a chipper high school clique. I simply was not someone you would pick to sneak out with and indulge in underage drinking at 16. Some things are better off as fantasy, I think. That’s the deal with teenage angst, the politics of belongingness. The deal with adulthood, however, is that everything pans out and it sifts out the rough clumps. Some hatchets need to be buried in order for me to enjoy a 4 p.m. afternoon breeze at sea mildly tipsy.

The street, the one our house stood on for 22 years, is the street where every few days, a funeral procession crosses in front. Here, there are allegories about life and death, between me and this town, how the smallest things seemingly pattern into odd symbolisms. I’ve been studying it, and who knows what sort of secret is at the center of it all. For example, I’m as old as our house. We moved there as soon as I was born. With the way that beginnings are, they should always feel poetic. A sunrise after a long night storm, a lone sprout in a downtrodden field, an infant in a new home. It must mean something.

Home is where the beginning and end is, the extremes. There are children here, can’t be older than 15. There are also mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles. But there is no one at home that is my age. There must be some sort of meaning in that, how we are destined to leave and perhaps all the same destined to return.

Driving straight ahead for two hours gets you to Mount Banahaw. One brief time in my childhood, we went up there for a picnic along the river. It was the first and last time I’ve ever gone, or that I really remember I had. You never really step in the same river twice. Though, I did step on horse shit on the way back and cried the entire ride back down. My father took me up there a few days ago, only up to where the asphalt ends. Further past is an environmentally protected zone, supposedly. My father, pissing on the side of the road, tells me about how San Miguel Corporation has its hands everywhere. We are a sort of Mesopotamia. Thirty minutes away from the sea, thirty minutes away from the mountains. Home always changes in ways that feel dreadful.

Smells, as I know them, have always been powerful conduits for remembering. Home has smelled so distinctly upsetting, and in equal parts, moving. The rancid smell of a dog, laundry detergent, wet soil, and if some houses would be so kind to open their windows just enough, tinolang manok. There are pockets in the city that smell exactly like that.

When I shot for a student film in Sampaloc, Manila, I remember feeling overwhelmed with familiarity, that places can have faces and bodies too. Houses and electrical poles in Manila hold themselves in this steely, unsettling posture. And they looked so familiar in a way that felt so unwelcome, like a fleeting stranger in the train resembling someone you once loved.

It turns out you never really escape home, and I deeply believed in the power that leaving created distance. It does not.

The phrase ‘the hardest part about leaving home’ strikes me, and it lingers in my head for quite some time as though I am obliged to find an answer, to fill in the blanks, in the same way I am obliged to finish the food on my plate. People believe it to be emotionally arduous. All the sentimentalism. But truthfully, there is nothing hard about leaving home. Leaving home has always been the easiest thing to do.

The dread of going home is more than the ennui, the infinitesimal routines, the smallness of anything. I have turned 22, and each time I go back home to this town, I am once again 16, dim, and unchanging. I am once again that version of myself who never left home.

For the five days I have been back home, I have gotten these pangs of sadness and dread. They do go away. It’s the same dread you get realizing you will die. And then nothing, or maybe something. The coiling around your neck, the shortbreathedness, the futile need to do something about the inevitable. That god-awful feeling always sticks.

In the mornings, as soon as I wake up, I recognize the white crown molding bordering the ceiling and cream-yellow walls, sealing the room shut like excess caulk on a stainless kitchen sink. My body tightens up as if to brace for impact. The sound of a Toyota parking out front. The metallic gnashing of a titanium-and-mahogany gate opening and pivoting, brief like a gunshot. To fill in the rest of the blanks: the same aggrieved voices, finding something to pick apart, or to be angry about. So I am more than glad to leave, always. And somehow, still willing to come back.

Home will always be what I remember it to be. So I will try to remember how warm the sun feels uphill, how the messy electrical lines lead me around town like a map, how sitting in the back seat of our ISUZU and watching the sun follow me through the tinted windows feels like a game of tag.

I’ve been listening to this one VANO 3000 song: Running away is easy / it’s the living that’s hard. I always mishear “living” for “leaving.” Maybe they’re just the same thing.

Halfway through the first semester of my junior year at Benilde, it was Halloween. Although, it was not in the American white-picket-fence suburban neighborhood sort of spirit where there was door-to-door trick-or-treating (but perhaps the tradition does persist in the more exclusive enclaves of the city. It’s the same way that our ideas of Project X-esque house parties with red cups, underage drinking, and make-outs in the nice ivory marble bathroom exist only to those whose parents can afford international schools, Landers Grocery memberships, and the capacity to own a North Face puffer jacket in a tropical country. The most mundane American rituals, by some power, end up to be glamorous here, as if they had been on their merry way to Beverly Hills and decided to stay instead in BF Homes Parañaque). Halloween, in Metro Manila at least, meant orange pumpkins cut from cartolina, and cobweb awnings that are meant to be taken down in three days’ time so as to make way for Christmas.

I celebrate Halloween through a week-long ritual of driving myself to exhaustion. Traditions of course start with repetition; I can only hope to do it again and again for as long as I wish.

Last year, I attended four Halloween parties in a row, none of which I truly enjoyed. Parties always feel like they promise something—perhaps a revelation that finally means something, or a moment that would be Happening and holy—but it never comes. It’s a kind of forever almostness. Whatever glamor there was, or should be there, ends the moment you walk in.

I remember meeting and talking to a girl from Ateneo. Because I had told her I was studying Multimedia Arts, she told me in a return of polite conversation that she earned a creative writing degree only to end up in retail. I felt sorry for her, then afraid for myself.

This year, the morning after my DJ set for a Halloween party in Los Baños, I took a brisk 20-minute-in-the-rain walk inside UPLB to find a coffee shop a girl had recommended to me the night before. A 170-peso horchata from Likha made me feel like I was still back at “home” in Makati, so did the 205-peso chicken mayo from Seoul Kitchen.

The town had a certain smell to it, faintly familiar and faintly pastoral. I think everyone uses the same brand of fabric conditioner, or goes to the same laundromat. If I loved a university more than I loved the idea of cities, I would have reconned for (and gotten in) this campus. I thought graduating from Benilde last Monday would immediately absolve me of my bereavements from all these years but I guess I still am melancholic about it.

I ended this year’s Halloween at my friend’s condo. He has the kind of place with sleek marble counter tops, rubber Absolut Vodka coasters, and small (or big) novelty items that really serve no particular purpose to your life but somehow you’d wish you just had a bit more. I want to have things just because. Before that, I had stopped by Poblacion to see the Halloween street crawl. Like all things in my life, it was fun for the first thirty minutes before I grew weary and irritated.

By 4 a.m., I was too exhausted to walk back home so I had stayed the night. We ate pistachio cake because my friend’s mom had celebrated her birthday every day since the beginning of October. I wonder how it feels to be loved that much, and to eat that much cake. Hopefully things really do grace with age.

It is now the beginning of November and my birthday is in 25 days.

I talk, and write, of things that don’t matter anymore. So perhaps this, too, will not matter. My discernment lately tells me that not everything needs to matter, and some things just need to be lived.

Still, for as long as I can remember, I have always wanted a “big life,” whatever that means now; I think it’s an apartment with big glass windows (so urban!) or an acute sense of self.

I was trying to outgrow the smallness of where I came from, and I have been mistaking it for lack. Too much wanting can undo you, I realize. So I am now learning to remember what still holds.

in some millennium to come,
ivory starships will bear
our great¹⁰⁰-grandchildren
sailing through light-years
from a world beyond repair

what will they find, i wonder?
we, too, were once travelers

do men with horse heads live
in the heart of the milky way?
but perhaps here as well—
now and today

they are here
in the buffer between rain
and the sun in May

I am walking along Tordesillas Street as I write this. There must be a direct correlation between motor skills and verbosity. Next time, when someone asks me what my creative process entails, I’ll finally have a good media-trained answer.

I realize I do not want to be the kind of pained writer (or artist?) who ends up commodifying their own mental conflicts. What can I do? I’m already one foot in. But still, admittedly, it feels just as good to be heard. I would receive private messages, although not much, from young adults such as myself; “I know how it feels.” Aren’t we all just looking for that sort of rapport? I am comforted by the fact that I am not the only half-journalist, almost-journalist, who had to take up advertising or pre-med by way of compromise. I can’t be as unique even if I tried hard enough.

I watched a TikTok a few weeks back, when I first moved to Makati, which imposed a rather alarming and sobering moral dilemma. What will I ever make once I run out of grievances? I certainly don’t want to manufacture (I really like this word) more hurt for the sake of familiarity.

What I mean to say is, I want to romanticize the nice, warm things just as much.

It has been nine months since I made my New Year’s resolution to become alcohol sober, not that I had a drinking problem to begin with. I believe I’m in the process of reconfiguring where I want to be five years from now. The ever so glamorous party boy I’ve always dreamed of becoming since my days as an unsophisticated young probinsyano is on hold until further notice. What other euphemisms are there for “indefinitely?”

Five years from now, I will be a Senior-something, an Associate-something, a something-Head, or a something-Director. For now, it is my closely-guarded secret. I am self-redacting as an act of self-preservation; I am scared that if I share my dreams, they will be used against me in the court of law.

The defendant is found not-guilty on grounds of intoxication. Mens rea. So take certain words with a grain of Cuervo salt because it is simply the alcohol talking.

Five years from now, I will make for a good law student, if only I am lucky enough to finally make the qualifying exam.

I am currently thinking of all the ways that I’ll make it after graduating.

I’ve just finished a book I bought last July at Everything’s Fine, a charming bookstore in Salcedo Village where I spend some of my Saturdays at the pop-up street market shelling out some 300-odd pesos on chicken pad thai which I normally wouldn’t afford on a week’s worth of an undergraduate budget. Still, after a week of siomai rice—60 pesos all-in for 5 pieces beef, rice, and plastic baggies of garlic and soy sauce—nothing tastes and feels as good as the sultry barbecue-filled waft blowing all the way from Toledo Street. This is the fucking life.

Like many others here, I also want a picturesque brunch on benches which seemingly never vacate. People are like hawks. But I say it’s my turn to sit cross-legged with tupperwared meat and veggies on my lap for 20 minutes.

I do wonder long and hard whether these Salcedonians think that I am one of them. A more interesting theory: what if all of them are like me? Then, perhaps, I am indeed one of them in every theatrical sense. I hope to see them all of them backstage after the curtains.

But back to the book. It was an anthology of essays featuring Filipino queer authors on—you guessed it—queerness. Plus/+, at Iba Plus, Maramihan. The cover is a primarily orange optical illusion made up of crosses, making it appear as though it were animated.

I learned two things, neither of which are relevant to the premise of the book. First, I cannot read Filipino fast enough as I would with English. So I promise to read a lot more Filipino texts in the future so as to prove that I am not a victim of Western postcolonial hegemony. Peksman mamatay man.

Second, despite being a faithful Filipino citizen, I am also a mildly envious person. And I am afraid of admitting to this fact in writing. But, yes, I am envious of the prestigious educations, scholarships, fellowships, awards, and publication credentials of the contributors starting on Page 187.

But what would I know? The cover, after all, is still an optical illusion.

I have been taught that envy is a sin, a cardinal and deadly sin. So I should be grateful. So I should say grace. So, thank you, Lord, for the delicious chicken pad thai you have bestowed upon me on this blessed Saturday. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to study at an elite school, to be in the same classes as those who pay tuition in one fell swoop rather than three-part installments. But still, thank you, Lord, for bestowing me with a 100% merit scholarship in clutch.

I have been good enough, dear Lord. So in exchange, I would like all of this guilt to go away. Could You make an exception this time? I promise that envy breeds ambition. It is a sin I am more than willing to carry. If You let me keep this, it might just be my salvation.

In high school, math was one of the more troublesome subjects. Of course, I knew how to divide, multiply, subtract, add, at iba pa plus, maramihan. Though, I could never really get the hang of the symbols for less than (<) and greater than (>).

So I devised a little mnemonic. Think of it as Pac-Man: Small eats large.

7 < 9.

Seven ate nine, but seven is less than nine.

Weak eats strong.

I do not like math for I deem it to be too objective, too rigid, and too fatal. There is only but one answer. There are integers inherently greater or worth more than others. Even if we were to map out numbers on an infinitely extending line, considering infinity is indeed a possibility, there is always more and there is always less.

But say that infinity is incomprehensible, so we must concretize it. One to seven billion. The scale is still a scale.

So I am rewriting the laws of math as we speak. Seven is less than nine, yes, but I will make it so that seven will eat (<) nine.

Life update: one of my favorite phrases or terms these days is “social currency.” I’ve only held paper bills and coins all my life, so it was exciting to learn that I could buy things through the power of friendship.

Is social currency also subject to the laws of math? If so, how do we count it? What’s the exchange rate to Philippine Peso? Do you make monthly contributions through favors? Does the interest aggregate over years of effort?

It is Sunday and it is raining. I wanted to go to Legazpi for brunch today.

I am thinking of all the government IDs I have yet to apply for. My passport is all I have. But it is still Sunday, and all offices are closed. Tomorrow, Monday, is a holiday too. (Long weekend for all of us!)

I am dreading the application process on a rest day. What will I even need to bring?

A college diploma? A pleasing personality? 1 to 2 years experience? NBI clearance? A day pass at a rock-climbing gym? Backers? A creative portfolio? A TOR indicating you studied at the Big 4? Good teeth? A follow from a B-list model? A brand deal from a fast food chain? Proof of income? Instagram highlights of vacations in visa-restricted countries? An IELTS Band 9 score? Perfect attendance to every 2000-peso rave in Metro Manila? A birth certificate? A TikTok affiliate program?

Whatever, I’ll figure it out.

I was born at 2:11 PM on a Wednesday—the same year the United States invaded Iraq, and the same year Mariah Carey held a concert in BGC. I arrived crying into an incoherent world, one that is indifferent to both joy and pain. Hope, then disappointment, then laughter, then death.

After three boys, two miscarriages, and an imminent menopause, my parents had hoped for a girl. I was the final stretch. Perhaps this one. But there are no consolation prizes for no matter how hard you dream. Still, I am nothing short of a middle-class miracle, roughly 47% of Filipinos if we’re updated on the same sources.

And so I had become the youngest. The fourth boy. The “bunso.” The one given hand-me-downs. The one promised of inheriting a just and beautiful future. The one, perhaps, given a new toy, had it cost less than Php 150. If two’s a party, and three’s a crowd, what do you call four?

In true bunso fashion, I prided myself in “saving the best for last,” the same way that “last is not the least.” But to be last also means you’ll never get to be first.

There are a million secondhand metaphors to write with, about things a million others have already written before. It has always felt like I’ve arrived late to the rat race, but it’s a race I’ll join nonetheless.

The city doesn’t owe you anything, I’ve realized. You trade your dreams and stories like currency. Hopefully your ambition and earnestness earns you something—anything. Suppose that life is a huge PBB production. Suppose that God is watching. Suppose that your sob stories are tickets to stardom.

We still believe, maybe foolishly, that wanting it enough is enough. That if we keep proving how badly we want it, the universe will eventually say yes. But earnestness, I’ve learned, is often mistaken for desperation. But suppose that God is still watching and He is about to text BBS, your name, to 2366. Suppose that He has the power to save you.

In any Latin-script language, capitalizing words gives them importance. Names of celebrities. Cities. Prestigious colleges to apply to. God. We believe that they can change our lives; Capital(ization) can change our lives. We endow power in these things so foreign to us to begin with that we forget our own names follow the same conventions as well.

I can say that I write because it would probably pay well, if only some publisher would care to bind all of my essays and sell them for ₱500 paperback, or whatever the median price point for those are these days.

I can say that I write for glory. Truth be told, I have wet dreams of becoming the next Susan Sontag, or perhaps the next Renato Constantino. I write in my personal journal in a way that my descendants would find them posthumously, publishing them in my memory. Memoirs of Limmy, Volume I.

But no, I write for a pretty rancid reason. I write to explain myself.

I would have never made it on the debate club. I wouldn’t have done well in any sort of Model UN either. Public speaking—let alone speaking—is a skill, and affords a certain degree of empathy and trust with your audience. You have to assume that everyone listening is on the same page as you.

That is precisely why I write.

There is plenty opportunity to self-edit, to reiterate, to make the same point over and over again. If the reader fails to understand what I mean by their third reread of the paragraph, it’s completely on them. I write vividly and transparently as humanly possible. That’s why I fucking hate reading dense 20th century philosophy like the plague.

I write to over-explain. I write to be redundant. I write so I am heard and understood clearly, with no words misconstrued or taken out of context.

When my works are studied in a high school Literature or college Creative Writing class, I hope the students and teachers take my words for what they are. There are no underlying themes nor allegories nor genius metaphors alluding to Albert Camus and absurdism.

If only Artificial Intelligence were advanced enough to develop cognitive technology, I would finally be able to bluetooth people my exact stream of consciousness. But I guess I’ll have to settle with extremely uncanny images of eight-fingered people.

There are arguments I believe I would have won had they all been written down. If the world communicated through letters and run-on sentences in perfect 11pt Georgia, I would have less bridges burned. An essay-type parliamentary debate. An essay-type nighttime talk show with Boy Abunda. An essay-type screaming match with your loved ones.

Hopefully they all count towards my final grade.

So when you write and hit publish, it’s entirely your fault for whatever comes next. You had plenty of time and freedom to say what you wanted. You weren’t so incessantly interrupted when trying to get your point across.

But I hope, dear reader, that I won’t have to over-explain to you why I had to write this.

My mother needs new glasses, and I don’t mean that because her vision’s deteriorating. God, I hope not. It’s because her old ones broke. So we went to the only place we knew where money bought glasses best, Carriedo.

She’s always been graciously frugal, as most mothers are. “Kaya pa ‘yan. Sayang naman,” she would always tell me when I wanted or needed new things. We were incompatible the very moment she Caesareaned me out of her because I’ve never been the type of person to deny myself of anything; Any want is a need should it fulfill your soul. Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of needs should actually be one homogenous triangle. My mother thought it was stupid that I used to spend on K-pop albums when streaming was readily available. I was appalled because I thought that she would at least offer some degree of compassion and solidarity since she herself had bought the entire New Moon saga when we already had Robert Pattinson on DVD. I don’t think she even ever read the novels because the book spines never got creased. She just wanted to make a Robert Pattinson shrine. What is Robert Pattinson to her is Mingyu to me.

She’s selectively anti-consumerist because she’d never bat an eye when shelling out a few thousand pesos for several of those porcelain dishes on Facebook Marketplace when we had perfectly good plates. She never thought twice about spending on those bags or sundresses from SHEIN, which she always swears she’ll wear on her next beach trip but she never really does because she’s a career-oriented woman. It does make me think she’s a hypocrite sometimes, the best one I’ve ever known, but it’s ultimately her money anyway. I wouldn’t know the first thing about financial literacy.

During the pandemic, she picked up gardening as a hobby. Soon enough, she had become one of those women who stole plant shoots from just about anywhere. I later on adapted this habit from her; I myself would nick off pothos cuttings from storefronts around Salcedo. You should always do it about two inches below the node. We were a growing family of eco-kleptomaniacs. I don’t think it’s theft when we were only reversing deforestation, the ends justifying the means. We deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for our unwavering effort. My mother was no botanist but one thing was for sure: anything she wanted or she had put her mind to, she would get.

There comes a family resemblance after all. Over the years, I’ve dragged my parents around any talent or hobby I wanted. Dance, swimming, singing, piano, guitar. What I wanted or (temporarily) put my mind to, they paid for. Unfortunately, nothing stuck long enough and I occasionally feel guilty about the fact that they will never get their return on investment. I wonder if I would have become the next Hidilyn Diaz or Ely Buendia, only—and if only—had I been more intentional. I promised myself recently that I’ll never become the girl from Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.

In the summer I left for Manila, her plants died. Perhaps there’s some odd symbolism in that, but yes, they quite literally died. I’d only been the one watering her plants, not as consistently though, but I watered them nonetheless. She left the burden of botany to her precious, baby boy. Only if she’d been more intentional. Don’t start things you can’t finish.

She wants to repurpose her Ray-Ban sunglasses—use the golden frames, push out the black tints, and replace them with clear prescription ones. I was astonished by her ingenuity and I thought that maybe I got my smarts from her. I never asked her how bad her vision was. For reference, I have 20/400 vision. What more for a 50-something-year-old woman? I feel bad for not remembering her exact age but I think it’s only fair when she thought I was 21 when I was actually 22.

We found ourselves under Carriedo station. Rizal Avenue, for journalistic accuracy. It was over a phone call in late July that I told her she could get cheap glasses around the area. For the first time, I was the one guiding my mother. I knew something she didn’t already know, an advantage. I could be the one holding things over her.

In my first year in Manila, I tagged along with my ex-boyfriend who’d majored in Film for his finals. They shot a music video across the multiplicity of optical stores in the vicinity. It was a sort of Chekhov’s gun. I buried the image of the streets deep in the back of my mind, knowing it would be a surprise tool that would help me and my mother much later. My good-for-nothing ex-boyfriend was, in fact, not entirely good-for-nothing. I will give him credit where credit is due.

My mother wanted to get her glasses somewhere “nice,” which means she wanted to go somewhere air-conditioned. Good infrastructure means good service, and good service means good products. Maybe they’ll sell us X-ray vision goggles. Although I don’t think this is necessarily true because I’ve been to a bunch of these homey Mid-Century coffeehouses around the metro and their coffee would, more often than not, taste like absolute shit.

The Filipino is a natural copywriter. We were choosing between Eyedentity or Seen Zone. At this point, she was choosing based on how flippant the store names were. I was choosing based on Google Maps reviews.

She told me, stop using your phone. ‘Di ka ba natatakot na mahablot ‘yan? Manila is still a scary place. Everyone is out here to get you. I don’t know when was the last time I held my mother’s hand. As a child, she didn’t like it when I would cling onto her shirt or purse when we would go out shopping. So I’ve always kept a safe distance since then.

My mother has a lot of tendencies that would lead me to believe we would have been best friends, that is, considering, we disregard the metaphysical, philosophical, grandfather-paradoxical logistics of it all.

We talk shit about the same things. We talk shit about the same people. We want to go to the same Global North countries if visas weren’t such a pain in the ass to apply for. Boy-and-mother bonding. Had she been my age, I would have put her on my Close Friends list on Instagram. But since she isn’t, she gets to enjoy being not only my mother, but my follower.

I think she would’ve made for a great kolehiyala today. I would see her stories from time to time as my dad’s passenger princess. Windshield, stereo, and all. Instead of Kendrick Lamar or Hev Abi, she puts on Frank Sinatra or Queen as the piece de resistance. Give her a time machine, a half-charged burnt RELX, and a GVN bag strapped with charms from a hip flea market, I would never hear the end of her car-guy situationship rants.

I wasn’t the first in my family to dream of the city. When she was my age, she studied around Quezon City. A jeep ride away from the premier state university I wish I’d gotten into, only if Admissions saw that I came from a prestigious private high school in Mandaluyong that cost Php 130,000 a semester. Still, none of those things were or came true.

My mother had always told me, pedigree matters. So work hard. Keep the right appearances and people will treat you better. Work hard and the rest will come. Ganyan ang mundo talaga.

So I’d made a deal, a bargain—one she doesn’t know I made with her and my dad at all. Let me go to Benilde. It’s a good school. And maybe it’s out of our means to begin with. But I’ll try to make something of it, of myself. So far, I think I’ve held my end of the bargain. Barely. My writing has gotten me a merit scholarship. I always think my mother is wrong with a lot of things. Politics. Or religion. But this time she was right. Work hard, and indeed, and the rest will come.

I told her I wanted to get coffee at Escolta. She has to pay, of course. That’s what mothers do when they’re out shopping with their youngest. She was rambling on about how this-and-that building was the first shopping mall in the Philippines. Not only was my mother a botanist, but she was also a historian.

On the way there, I taught her to jaywalk. She told me we would’ve been caught back in her day.

Her eyes swelled up as soon as we got there. She looked like she reunited with a long-lost friend. She suddenly wanted me to take pictures of the street signs, as if we were on vacation in Europe.

She pointed to a decrepit building down the road. Syvel’s. It used to be a department store, she said. My mother excitedly told me how her own parents took her there to buy new clothes for her high school graduation. She used to go to Manila a lot as a child. I told her if we kept walking, we’d reach Binondo, Chinatown. And maybe we’d bump into my evil landlady. She tells me how scared she was of this street. To her, this street, Escolta, felt like it was going to swallow her whole, collapse on top of her.

But to me, this is the street where I got drunk during a block party. This is the street where I took the boy from UPD for our first date. My mother doesn’t know he made me cry for two months after. This is the street where my friends and I hang out and do photoshoots in.

Escolta doesn’t scare me, but it scared my mother.

We each both got coffees. Then, we shared a single dish of scrambled eggs and sourdough bread. We weren’t that hungry.

She tells me her childhood nickname was Rachel. Well, it was supposed to be her actual name, until she found out that my grandfather actually listed her name as Raquel. Her first identity crisis. She didn’t want to be Raquel. It was not chic. It wasn’t even Raquelle, like from Barbie’s Dreamhouse.

But like applying for visas, all types of bureaucracies are a pain in the ass to deal with. My grandmother thought it was too expensive to file paperwork to fix it, so Raquel it was. It was cheaper.

Apparently, pencil cases were only available in Manila. To simply own a pencil case made you rich in the 70s. She gloated big and hard the day she came to her elementary school in Candelaria with a pencil case of her own.

My mom has yet to get new glasses. I don’t think I need to replace mine anytime soon. But for some reason, I can see her more clearly. We really would have been best friends.

As they say, she’s just like me for real.

It’s not that I’m indecisive as a person—probably. Though in my defense, I’m usually a headstrong person. Finish things weeks ahead of time. It saves you the trouble of cramming. Initiate the groundwork in a group project. If nobody’s going to do it, then you (probably) should.

“Probably” is how life is at all.

And it becomes a sort of vengeance. Against whom or what exactly? I don’t know, the universe? God? The president? When you’re not guaranteed anything at all, why should you of all people, commit to anything?

“Probably” is my “fuck you” to a world that doesn’t give me certainty.

Tomorrow, my parents are coming to Manila to help me pack and move. But the kicker is: I still haven’t found an apartment in Makati that’s affordable enough. My lease is in Taft Avenue is up in a few days. Good three years spent here, by the way.

There are so many ways to metaphorize this situation but it’s essentially sending out a package without a return nor delivery address.

My landlady is a sly businesswoman with three kids. La Salle, Ateneo, CPA lawyer, BS Entrepreneurship, family-owned hardware store in Binondo, trips to Paris and Japan. She reminds me every time we meet to renew the lease in case I forget.

My mother says clean everything—we might not get our deposit back. “That’s how they get you. Php 2000 for general cleaning because of dust. Php 500 for the grease trap.” But clean anyways. Who knows, she might return the money.

I probably should have been more intent with documenting everything. Visual evidence is one surefire way to build a case, or in this case, to dispute the Php 1000 for the termite damage that’s already been there to begin with.

I wonder if this is how she’s managed to put her three kids through prestigious educations and afforded trips to Paris and Japan. By ripping off provincials like us.

I think it’s because I don’t like wasting time, or anything really. Everything needs to have an ROI. I’m a firm believer in “everything happens for a reason.” And it better be for a fucking good reason.

Earlier this year, I was offered a media team gig for Harvard Model UN in Manila. Php 150 per hour to take videos and photos of rich kids, whose tuition fees cost more than my rent, play out a glorified Dungeons & Dragons campaign in the most sanitized city in Metro Manila.

Unsurprisingly, five months later, I still haven’t gotten paid for it. Probably never will be. I got reimbursed for transportation and food, sure. But who knows what I might have done with that extra Php 2100?

I didn’t leave empty-handed, though. Social capital is just as good, I guess. That juicy “Harvard” heading on my CV is a consolation prize. But it’s a prize nonetheless.

Still, I like to believe that’s what landed me several internships. Me and Harvard? I can’t believe it either.

So I’ll probably try harder tomorrow. Maybe God’s feeling generous. Maybe I’ll get another consolation prize this time.