What's mine is mine.

      You're not the boss of me. I don't have to answer to you or anybody else for that matter. This is my project. It was my project before you came along and got yourself in that position -- a position that was supposed to be mine. However, you being in that position doesn't give you the right to take this away from me. I've worked hard on this for months. You do not just go strutting around and taking it away. Tough luck for you, but I don't really care. So why don't you just stick your butt where it belongs and leave me alone?

past-due rant

      I have been patient. I did my job. I did more than what my job description stated. I did everything I could to make things work and let you have the spotlight. I didn't take credit for anything though I know I should've long long ago thinking it's just part of the job just let it go. But man, do you really push my buttons.
      You have been the most irresponsible, worthless, common senseless, idiotic, freeloader, pain-in-the-ass person I know. And you call yourself a leader? What kind of leadership did you do this past year? Closing remarks? Taking credit for our work? my work? Showing up when people can see you, pretending you've been working your ass off along with us? Galavanting with your stupid, greasy, non-combing looking boyfriend?!
      My friends have been telling me to stand up and say something to put you in your place. I've been taking advantage of my friends' kindness asking them for their help to make sure things go the way they are. I figured I'm too busy doing everybody else's job to find the time to cut your stupid throat with my words. That would have been time well spent, seeing you curl down on the floor drowning with shame.
      Up to the last minute, I didn't want to say anything. After all, I survived a whole year doing what I do. But this, now, this is the last straw. After days of discussion, conversation and decision. You're telling me this now?!? That I'm not gonna get my way?!? No, no, no. I'm not letting you off the hook this time. You cannot just wave your stupid title on our faces, my face and just get your way done... or not get my way done just because of some stupid technicality you brought up a day too late. A DAY. After all the bullshit you've put us through, you're telling me this now!?! What kind of idiotic stupid bullcrap irresponsible asshole mind do you have? Or do you even have one, 'coz you sure are acting like you don't have one.
      You're not gonna get through me this time. This is the last straw and you're not gonna get your way not even if I roll up and die right now. 'Coz if that's gonna happen, I'll make sure you go first.

My life's curse.

      To tell you the truth, although I always whine about so many little stuff, I actually am pretty happy about my life. I got awesome friends, great family and my parents give me pretty much everything I want and need. If there's one thing I would really complain about is my asthma.
      Asthma runs in both sides of both sides of my family. My Lola from my dad's mom's side died of asthma. My mom's dad had asthma and so does his sister. My cousins from both mom and dad side have asthma. And so on and so forth.. I still remember the "family nebulizer" that goes back and forth from house to house everytime one of us kids had asthma. lol
      But then, unlike my cousins and my Kuya who outgrew their asthma, I seem to be the only one who gets an asthma attack almost regularly. I first had to take steroids for my asthma when I was in Kinder II, then again when I was in Grade 3. At some point, I wasn't allowed to eat chocolates for they irritate my throat, therefore asthma. Two years ago, my cousins and I went swimming in Pansol, Laguna. In the middle of everything, I had this uber severe attack I had to take my inhaler twice or thrice before my breathing eased down. My cousins had a huge scare and only when I started drinking tequila and my breathing regulated that we kind of settled down.
    And now, my inhaler Seretide is steroids induced. This inhaler is usually sufficient to subdue my attacks. But then, there are times when I really cannot wait for the inhaler to take its effect and literally cannot breathe from coughing, so I resort to my ever reliable nebulizer.

      Just like now, my inhaler have run out and the Baygon stench in my room from earlier has not gone away yet. I couldn't breathe and my Kuya and I ended up going to the hospital to buy meds. Thank God for my ever so dependable nebulizer, now I have my life support.

      The last time I had an asthma attack before today, I ended up missing a whole week of class. I almost missed the LIS Congress. And that I guess is my only perpetual complain in life. I could've been allergic to strawberries or kiwi or something. But no, I have to have asthma for the entire span of my life.

Thoughts on China Drug Mule Execution

      Before you proceed, please don't judge me for my opinions. They're mine and I'm not imposing it on anyone. I will not however apologize for them.

      This is probably my first post that concerns politics or current events whatsoever. But OMG I cannot take it anymore. This issue should've been done weeks ago, but it still bugs me everytime I see something related to it. My friend Jane posted on twitter a blog discussing the unethical treatment of the media regarding the China Drug Mule Execution. This blog cited a newspaper article written by the awesome Dean of the UP College of Law, Raul Pangalangan. Here follows his article
Drug mules: Even in grief, we are confused

    Even our unrequited prayers for the three executed Filipinos show that we fundamentally misunderstand the problem that we face. We were half-hearted in objecting to the death penalty. We called the drug mules OFWs when in fact they were not. We lump them together with Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan, and fail to discern the differences in their cases, or ask if we could have timely asked the Chinese courts to mitigate the penalty. Protest banners call for “Justice for Credo, Villanueva and Batain.” I’m sure the Chinese will say, “Well, that’s exactly what we gave them!”, and argumentatively our only rejoinder will be to impose our own standards of justice upon the Middle Kingdom.
    Of course we must grieve that three Filipinos, forced by poverty to serve as drug mules, have been executed in a foreign land. As a nation, we must ensure that our government reaches out to vulnerable Filipinos on trial before foreign courts and ensure that they have proper legal assistance. As a people, we must look inward as well, and ask ourselves why millions of our countrymen sacrifice so much just to give their families a decent life, while top dogs in government corporations reward themselves obscene sums and top generals leave office with million-peso “pabaons.” All these, while a passive nation led by its ombudsman looks the other way.
    In sum, we empathized viscerally but maybe our brains lagged behind our hearts. We need to reconcile our official position which is to plead for mercy, with our public rhetoric which is that of moral outrage. To start with, we should have been outraged at the death penalty itself. We were not, because deep down within the Filipino heart, we actually approve of it in the first place. Look at the historical record. We abolished capital punishment in the 1987 Constitution “unless, for compelling reasons involving heinous crimes, the Congress hereafter [restores] it.” And in 1993, restore it Congress did, as a facile response to the rise of kidnap for ransom gangs. In April 2001, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo effectively suspended the death penalty by automatically commuting all sentences. By 2003, Arroyo lifted the de facto moratorium. In early 2004, Pope John Paul II asked us to stop all executions, and Arroyo obliged. In June 2006, on the eve of Arroyo’s visit to the Vatican, she signed RA 9346 abolishing the death penalty once again. There have since been periodic attempts to restore the death penalty.
    For us, the death penalty debate has been mere political football, bereft of any deeply held moral consensus. And for the current football season, the death penalty argument would not have swayed the Chinese, who apparently have the highest rate of executions worldwide and, even worse, are instinctively resistant to international pressure. But handled well, we could have capitalized on the global consensus against the death penalty, the same consensus that we mobilized to save the life of Sarah Balabagan, the Filipina in the United Arab Emirates who stabbed and killed her employer who was raping her.
  Two, there is a stark difference between the cases of Contemplacion and Balabagan vis-à-vis the drug mules in China. For Contemplacion, accused of murder, we argued that she made her first confession without the benefit of counsel. For Sarah, a rape victim, we argued self-defense. In none of our pleas to China do we even plead the innocence of the convicted Filipinos. For the Xiamen and Shenzhen executions, the best we could muster is to fix the blame on the drug traffickers fronting as job recruiters, because the actual drug carriers were apparently complicit in the crime.
  Three, I sense an initial ambivalence by our government on the issue of drug mules on trial abroad. Did we earlier give them legal aid during their trial? Even after conviction, was there any room for the judges to mitigate the penalty? Was there any room for executive clemency for the executive branch to pardon or reduce the penalty? The one-month stay of execution gained by Vice President Jejomar Binay was a feat, because China is itself building up its “rule of law” institutions, and appeals from the political branches of the Philippines addressed to China’s judicial agencies were an uphill battle to start with. In other words, the execution of convicted drug traffickers is what we call “national treatment,” i.e., how China treats its own citizens similarly situated, and what we were asking for was special treatment for our nationals.
    Fourth, I am troubled by protest banners that call for “Justice for OFWs on death row.” Genuine OFWs must object to being lumped together with the drug mules. For certain they have similarities: the pressures of economic insecurity, their vulnerability in an alien land, the spirit of self-sacrifice for spouses, children and parents. But the similarities end the moment the drug mules carry contraband on their persons and enter the Naia. By putting them all in one basket, we expose bona fide OFWs to increased monitoring (paid for by increased regulatory fees) for crimes not of their own making, and to increased harassment abroad by hostile and predatory airport officials.
    Moreover, we confuse justice with mercy, or to be more precise, the Philippine brand with the Chinese brand of justice. We were surprised that in the Chinese Supreme Court, decisions can be final. We have been so used to eternal flip-flopping, the Filipino notion that due process of law means endless process. We also mistakenly thought that an unabashed plea for mercy unadorned by legal argument would suffice, and that human drama would trump legal doctrine as handily in China as it does in the Philippines.


***
      The media kept on insisting that we Filipinos should sympathize with the 3 executed drug mules. And I get that they were Filipinos and they died. But why do we have to sympathize?!? They were criminals. More than anything, what this issue brought to the Filipino Nation was shame and disgrace.
ONE Why did they do it? Because they couldn't find a decent job in the Philippines to provide for their families. The Philippine Government could not provide decent jobs for its countrymen enough to have them stray away from crimes.
TWO They were not OFWs. Just like Dean Pangalangan said, it's a shame that they were likened to OFWs who work their asses off to provide for their families in the Philippines in a legal way. My brother will soon be leaving for Kuwait to work as a nurse and if I hear anyone say that those drugs mules were OFWs like my brother, I will probably punch him in the face or something. It's a disgrace to OFWs... or any Filipino for that matter who benefit from the Hard work of OFWs around the world.
THREE Why did this issue only come up when they were already sentenced to death? This issue should've been dealt with by the Philippine Government during the trial palang. If the government / media were going to get involved in this, they should've been there from the start. When they were arrested and presented to the court. Our government should have given them aid at every step of the way.
FOUR The government or anyone for that matter can ask China to bend their rules for them. A country's rules or any rules apply to everyone. No one has the right to make the rules work for them no matter what situation they are in. If you think about it, what if China repeals their decision on those 3 Filipinos? What would the rest of their country think of their government? How would the other Chinese people in death row think? Yes, we can plead but we cannot condemn China for not changing their mind.
FIVE This whole issue just gave the rest of the world a first row seat view of how skewe our justice system is. For the Filipino people to expect that the convicted drug mules can actually be "SAVED" from execution just shows how we belittle the whole justice system. Did we expect that China will bend their rules after VP Binay talks to them? Or did we expect that we can bribe our way through anything?
SIX The husband of one of the drug mules asked the Philippine Government to look after the education of their children. OMG. Your wife was a convicted criminal and you ask your country to look after your kids? Isn't it your responsibility to provide for your family? What are you doing in your life? And if Pres. Noynoy's administration sends those kids to school, he might as well send all those Muntinlupa prisoners' kids to school.
SEVEN The worst of all is how the media feasted on this issue like it was some celebrity divorce or something. First of all, they were convicted criminals and not some hardworking OFW who were abused. They are not alike and so we should not feel the same way towards them. They could have given the family some respect and privacy as they grieved for their loved ones. If I were one of the children of one of the drug mules, I could have punched the reporters who asked me how I felt about losing a parent. Of course I'm gonna feel sad. How else are they supposed to feel? All this uproar and misdirected sympathy is the media's fault. We cannot expect other countries to have the same faulty system as ours. Not because they hold on to their laws and principles does not give us the right to condone them. Not because we're the ones losing a fellow countrymen does it mean that we're the "dehado" side.

      Yes it is sad that they had to die. And that their lives were so miserable they were driven to illegal means just to provide for their families. But just like our parents used to say when were younger and get scolded when we did something wrong: "Kung ayaw mong mapalo, wag kang salbahe."