One of the most unsatisfying part of human life is school. Everyone hates school at some point in their life, even me who was a student who had lots of high grades, who loves learning, and who eventually had a job as a teacher. This is weird because it’s very human to want to learn. Human being love learning but school is shit. There are so many bad teachers even in the best private schools in the Philippines. Sometimes, it’s so unfathomable how these private schools can have such shitty teachers. In my experience, I went to two really prestigious private schools. I did have brilliant teachers, and I also had the teachers who were ok, and I guess it’s not a problem if there are teachers who are just ok, but it’s shocking how schools as prestigious as the ones I attended had such shitty teachers, especially when the tuition from these institutions are skyrocketing high. 

When I write this, I know I am being hypocritical because I have an anti-library. One of my worst vices is to splurge on books. I once read an article that said that it’s important to have an anti-library because in it lies the potential of what you want to be. For a long time I believed that, and it gave me an excuse to continue to hoard more books than I could ever have time to read.

I remember seeing a beggar when I was in a jeep. He was a little boy, probably 12 years old, wearing red shorts, sando, and a hooded gray jacket. He gave the passengers blank white envelopes and asked for money, but no one gave him anything. When he went down, it was raining, so he put on his hood on. Then, he said, “Happy birthday to me. Mga cooking ng ina ninyo lahat”. When he said that, I felt how dare he say that to us. We were not obligated to give him anything. That day I had just come from spending P700 on one meal at a Japanese restaurant, and I wasn’t even willing to share a single peso to this kid, on his birthday.

There’s a part in the book Black Swan Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb where it talked about music recording and it made me think that music recording is a capitalist construct that allows for the unfair dominance of certain artists which impoverishes other artists. The book made me think about this when it talked about how musicians who play live lose money because we can just opt to listen to a music recording. This has an impact on local artists who are playing in bars. Instead of listening to a local musician playing in the bar in the nearby street, we will listen to the music recording of an artist half way across the globe. In that way, this also facilitates cultural imperialism.