:: Tears of the Moon ::

:: Saturday, February 26, 2005 ::

We have tickets for the Jars of Clay concert!!! Yay!!!

And I got me a Palm Pilot. Palm Zire 72. With mp3/music player, camera/video recorder, an MS Outlook/Excel/Word/Powerpoint viewer.

Got Mom her tickets to go to the province, and gave her the budget for this month's groceries.

I will be on leave on Tuesday to watch Jars of Clay. I SO need it.

The Boss has appendicitis. I brought her to the ER yesterday coz she was in such pain she couldn't walk straight. :(

Chi and I went to the mall and we saw a stuffed toy store. They had a baby tigger stuffed toy on display and both Chi and I agreed it looked like our puppy. :(

Post-shift, I am heading out to The Manila Penn to have a sleepover with the four girl sups and our client. Kat (our boss) is at home with appendicitis, so she couldn't come. I wonder what we'll do tonight. Tomorrow I think Faye wants to check out some museums. Should be good.

:: D said @ 10:56 AM [+] ::
...

She wasn't even two months old, and she died yesterday.

Mom brought home a dalmatian puppy when she returned from her trip to the province. She was adorable, with big brown baby eyes, and very affectionate. The last dog I ever loved was Nippy, and that was when I was fifteen. It's been almost ten years since I've loved a dog. I felt that it would've been a good time to get serious about another dog. All the other dogs we've had since were just.. pets. Yeah, they were dogs we had for the house, but I never really loved, you know?

I even passed by the grocery this morning to buy dog food and doggie cookie things for training. I wanted to train another dog from the ground up. She was so pretty and affectionate and even tempered.

I hadn't even been home for five minutes when Mom screamed and ran to the backyard. Toby, our adult dog, mauled the baby. He bit her through the skull and then left her alone when he heard my mom coming. I think Toby got jealous because we're giving another dog all the attention.

Shit. Seems like all the dogs I've loved ended in tragedy. I didn't even have a name for her yet. :( What's awful is that we saw her struggling and spasming because of the brain damage. Mom and I cried, as we buried her in the backyard. Mom got a shovel and we picked a spot near the wall and we buried her. Bye bye, baby.

Toby knew he did something wrong because he hid himself in the garage right after. Mom and I are so mad at Toby.. at this point, the violence is just downright scary. We might have to put him to sleep.

I want to love another dog. Today, seeing the puppy die was just heartbreaking.

:: D said @ 10:55 AM [+] ::
...

Bastards.

Just when I thought we were a country where 'terror bombings' is considered a joke (puh-lease. The kinds of 'bomb threats' we get never gets carried out and if they are, we see pillboxes and firecrackers), we get this.

This kind of thing just tires everyone out. Filipinos are very conscious of how they are perceived in the global community (even if the rest of the world think we're second cousins to Malaysians). This is just plain annoying, especially since the peso has been doing so well in the past two days. I had been commuting to work during that time, using the exact same route where the bomb exploded.

Look, we're not a people used to putting bombs in public transports. Hell, we supposedly had a coup last year where some military guys took over a hotel and held camp there for a day but it never amounted to anyone firing a single shot. We had People Power where the military rolled through the highway and people crammed the space: no one was crushed and no one died. We just couldn't stomach it. When Estrada was in power, we got so fed up with his philandering and plunder that we went to the streets to the same shrine our parents went to for Marcos. Did Estrada kill anyone? No. The bastard took off on a boat and is still in house arrest.

We're not that kind of people.. not that kind of a nation. On one sense, that's great, because everything can be fixed with right common sense and conversation and debate. On the other hand, everything is 'all right' and no blood is shed. Sometimes I wonder that it might be good to have a civil war sometime, over some issue. As a nation, we've never had a Filipino vs Filipino showdown, brother against brother, father to son. Nothing violent like that. We've always had a common oppressor, or one person to fixate all our frustrations out on. But never having fought and killed over an ideal so precious that you're willing to take up arms and kill someone.

So, a terrorist killing like this is totally unfathomable. We are a country that's mostly Christian.. other faiths are a very small minority. Most Christians are Catholic.. in that sense, we value life greatly. We understand that life is not ours to take, but for a power greater than us. Which is why we don't have violent outbreaks, riots and bloodshed. Most of the premeditated killings made by groups here are mostly influenced by extremist Muslim groups (who are held by ideals) or kidnap-for-ransom groups (who are held by the promise of money). This incident is a shocker for everyone. This is an incident that holds everyone in dismay, and disgust over extremist Muslim groups.

It's frustrating that our country almost never gets international attention for good things (our economy, our currency, our government, our leaders never get any mention in global news) but gets headlined whenever some tiny, insignificant, feeling-disenfranchised, disgruntled group gets a stick up their ass about not getting their own way. They've been at our government for decades, fighting for 'independence', mainly because they think and do things 'differently than Christians'. Well, too bad that you're Muslim.

It's not even an issue if you're a Muslim or not - Malaysia has the East Timorese who is the minority Christian group over a predominantly Muslim country. What annoys me is that, while they may be Muslim, they haven't shown anything that proves to the government and the country that they can do well on their own. The region they want to call their own (the region they want to separate) is economically backward, has little to no opportunity for economic growth, intellectual capital, or the basic necessities for living. They don't hold influence in business, education, agriculture, politics.

So what do they have? They have links to other disgruntled idiots from across the world who share the same ideology and have contacts from there. They get funded to build their own bombs.

It's not even as if they're Filipino, you know? They just don't care, and that pisses me off.

:: D said @ 12:17 PM [+] ::
...

Neil -

I wonder what you were thinking of when you pulled the trigger. It didn't even really sink in until I saw your name on the black cloth outside the chapel. My knees started going weak as we walked up the stairs and the smell of funeral hit us. At first I was afraid of going near the coffin because I really didn't want to see you there. There in that fucking box, dead.

But you were, and I totally lost it when I saw you there. Dead. Gone.

What the fuck were you thinking, man?

It's true what they say when they said that the ones left behind are burdened with guilt. I don't know if you considered me one of your closer friends. There are other people in the choir and the community that I'm sure you were more comfortable hanging out with than me. We don't talk as much as you do with others.. But you're the guy version of me over here. Sometimes I wish you'd been a bum or an idiot, or just someone who wasn't active, you know? Could you have imagined the mess you left with your family? How messed up your brother's going to be, and your sister? The shock and vaccuum that it's left with the community? We're not nobodies here. People know you by face.

I guess if you're decided on going your way, no one could stop you, eh? Your mom even said that it looked like you prepared everything in advance - even the picture to use beside the coffin.

Sometimes I think if there was something someone could've done. I know there isn't any way for anyone outside your family who'd understand what led to it. Speculation abounds - some people think it was your girlfriend, some say it was money troubles, whatever. We won't really ever know. I wish though, that someone saw it coming.

I will miss you. Right now, I'm more pissed off/sad than missing you and sorry. I wish you were alive so I could whack you in the head and buy you lunch somewhere. Andy told me that when she heard about it she got pissed off too, but for entirely different reasons: she got annoyed that you went ahead of her. To which I gave her a pinch in the arm for even thinking that.

More than anything, I wish you were still alive.

Neil Santiago
March 6, 1982 - February 2, 2005

:: D said @ 3:18 PM [+] ::
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