March 2020

Reading Time: 2 minutes

[Content Warning]

Hello!

Around 12 hours ago, President Duterte announced a complete travel ban to and from Metro Manila, my home, to happen in 48 hours. 24 hours ago, I received an email saying that I should get out of campus by Sunday night. (My country is on lockdown, I wrote to them. Try to find a place to stay like family friends or an AirBNB. Nevermind that I am the only person in this building besides the facility superintendent.)

I have a fuckton of interviews that are postponed, delayed, or potentially cancelled. I’m not sure what I’m going to do this summer: I’m not sure if what I want to do in life is valid in the time of catastrophe anymore.

Feeling uncomfortable on some platforms since several people have been creating alternate accounts to follow me and act creepily even after I’ve blocked/distance them. Never expected that to happen to me but apparently it has. It’s discomforting and jarring.
One side of tech Twitter is talking about the implications of creation and entrepreneurship in this time. I am thinking about how I am going to afford groceries for the next months––and I am all fucking for creation.

My heart is bursting at how doomed the world is. As I’ve seen, the truly worst thing about this entire situation is how it upended our society–revealed how unprepared and polarizing it is. How healthcare is fucked. I want to believe this is a test of human resolve and that this will peak and then end and we can understand it: but the greatest conspirators are our own selves. This is not a new revelation.

I have not been eating a lot. One meal every two days since an awful midterm week last week. It’s strange walking into bookstores with an empty stomach, three product management books, and no certainty of whether I have a space to sleep in the next week in the midst of a university that asks its students upwards of 70,000 dollars a year. I actually self-harmed for the first time in years. The difference is that the validity of this seems more long-lasting (not that my previous ones weren’t). This one is of ire; much more than the Catholic heart compressed in the quiet home of Las Pinas. My self-destruction on my own terms seems more necessary than ever.

It’s not even the hurt of compressing my life into luggages. It’s how expendable it all is.

I think I deserved it all.

Take care,

Chia

March 13, 2020

February’s loved things

Reading Time: < 1 minute


Starting a series where I can document pieces of media that transform me, even for a bit.

The Past Is a Grotesque Animal by of Montreal

I saved a comment from YouTube’s audio-only playthrough of this song that just said: “have you ever felt every emotion at once?”

I’ve only ever listened to Cherry Peel-era of Montreal works, which took place a good decade before this song was released. Seeing comparisons to Car Seat Headrest’s Beach Life-in-Death drew me to Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? in the first place. (This is of Montreal’s 8th studio album.)

And wow, I can feel the influence, the reading off literary influences and hysterics to the clear psychedelic influences that punctuate the track. Kevin Barnes’ vocals aren’t particularly strong, but the composition of this piece is something else. It’s relentless and moving; you need to take this in with a serious listen to feel it enveloping you.

I took a walk a few blocks around downtown New Haven, trying to feel the grandness of this album and tell myself that I was worth it. I’ve never heard a breakdown orchestrated like this: as if everything bad has been renewed and transformed and is out to be defeated once more.

March 7, 2020

Making the choice of technology

Reading Time: 6 minutes

A reflection on how I knew I wanted to go into technology since I was a young girl, and why I’m not so sure of that career path anymore.

I’ve been having a bad job hunt. It is so bad that I feel like I’m genuinely in the worst state of mind I have ever been in, am dissociating more often, and feel like my self-improvement is simply feeding into this slate that has already run past its time.
Lately, I’ve been joking and telling people that I should just become a music journalist. I am likely better at writing than I am at design, though I’m really not too good at either. It seems like I know as much about the music industry than I do the design one, and it feels like I have a perspective to share about it. It feels like it’s something I genuinely want to do. This of course, won’t happen–but it’s sincerely the first time that something has even been at a stage for consideration and commitment: that you know, this is impractical and just as impossible to break into–but given the miracle, I wouldn’t mind doing it for the rest of my life. I think I know why.

When I was a young girl, I already knew that I was going to enter the field of tech. I just feared saying it.

(more…)

February 25, 2020