Monthly Archives: January 2021

Jan 23 2021
Blog

Full Disclosure

This post started with a mention of not eating pork in my #food channel on my video games guild slack.

I’ll be honest with you, I have never been to a Jollibee. I think I’ve had ships that pass in the night encounters where I saw one in a shopping mall or drove past one on my way someplace else.

It’s not that I didn’t know what it was. I remember my friends in the Old Neighborhood talking about it. Remarking on how weird or how good or how things are different, between Here and Over There. These were the friends whose families “went back home” to the Philippines once a year.

My parents decided that a Private Catholic School Education was more important, this is one of those sacrifices that they made. For reasons unknown to me then, but clearly financial in retrospect, I never went back “home” to the Philippines.

I forgot about Jollibee for a while and then I got to college. I was attending a Filipino Intercollegiate Networking Dialogue in Boston. Jollibee again.

Same conversations. Rumors of one opening stateside begin to circulate. I come back to DC and spread this news to other Filipinos, who in all honesty, get pretty excited about it.

I enter the workforce and three decades pass.

In the background of my life, Jollibee gains a foothold stateside.

In my #food channel a link pops up from one of my Filipino friends. Jollibee is opening up a half hour away.

Slowly a plan forms in my head. It’s weird that the plan involves multiple risk models, but this is the time during which we find ourselves.

And then, “A 46 Year Old Filipino Man Tries Jollibee For the First Time Ever”

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Jan 20 2021
Blog

For the first time in forever

Today is the first day in a long time that I’ve felt like singing. It’s been such a long time since I’ve felt like singing. What a terrible thing to write.

Today is also the first day in a long time that I’ve felt like being visible again.

Let me back up a bit.

Back when I decided to take a sabbatical from social media. I was just getting sick of reading everything over the course of the previous administration.

Every lie.

Every unjust, hurtful statement.

Every… you know, I’m going to be honest, this was just about every time anyone associated with the previous administration opened their mouth and said anything.

My personal reserves ran dry.

So I decided to take a break. I reviewed the last thing I remember posting. It was a picture on Instagram of a board game I played at a friend’s house. I ducked out, announced nothing, and decided to use that time differently.

I focused inward. I threw myself into personal non public slacks, private signal messages, and worked on building better relationships with my relatives and my found family.

Just about a year in, about a month before I was set to return, a pandemic happened.

A Pandemic. The kind of thing that happens in history books. The great plagues of yore. And even then, it’s only something I’ve read about. Surely we live in a time and age where we know how to handle these things because of science, and reason.

Now, 400,000 people are dead. Clearly, I was wrong. I was wrong about a lot of things. About my neighborhood, about America, about my career.

Time passed and life changed. In some ways better, in some ways worse, in a lot of ways different.

I thought I was going to make it to the second year, but well, here we are.

The first day in a long time that I’ve felt like singing, and it feels wonderful.