A Season of Thieves

I’ve been a victim of B&E. My apartment was ransacked and most of my gadgets taken even a couple of running shoes and my spikes.

Despite not being home when it happened, it wasn’t easy recovering. The constant paranoia, the unreasonable spike in anger, the violent tendencies. I have a large sword, a baseball bat, mace, a switch blade and a stiletto knife, strategically placed and hidden in my room. I constantly carry a thin long blade, a pen with metal casing and a pen knife where ever I go.

I hurry home at 5am, making the effort to go to work earlier than my shift in order to get home by 5am because of my paranoia.

Often I am glad when my parents visit cause there’s someone at the apartment while my sister and I are out working. Or when my sister’s boyfriend stays the night.

So you can see. I have not recovered. I am still a victim. And it unnerves me that I don’t mind being constantly on the look out, being angry and suspicious of the world.

I wish I could say that I am getting better, and I am seeing the world in a lighter image, that it isn’t such a dark place to live after all. But I don’t.

Recent incident has made it worse. I have friends who just went through the same shit I had or worse. Plus the fact that at least 3 months after the incident I was in a holdup situation on the jeepney I was riding from the bank back to my apartment. I was one of the lucky ones. Nothing was taken from me since I had a thin belt bag where I placed my cell phone and new ATM card and was hidden under my shirt. When the perpetrators asked me to show what’s in my pockets, all I could show them were 3 5-peso coins. The rest of the passengers had their phones taken as well as their wallets a watches.

The really thing that made it worse? The two guys who held us in “knife-point” entered the jeepney and pretended to have a friendly argument then all of a sudden sang a Christmas song, like kids on a caroling spree. Then when everyone was starting to get irritated with the off-tune singing, they held us at knife-point. Fucking hell. Talk about desperate, devastating and a freaking nightmare.

Even now, I have colleagues at work with the same complaint, that theft has been rising. One even commented that you wouldn’t be considered as a resident of the island if you haven’t experienced a B&E. I hate that. That it has become some sort of norm.

I am mad that no resolutions have been available, making me hate cops more.

I am home right now, with Rebel and Tinker. With Tinker barking at anything or anyone passing by our apartment. Yes. Tinker isn’t friendly. Should I decide to have him enroll on a dog training class, I’d enroll him on how to behave during walks and take down people. Dog owners might hate me for this train of thought, but I am glad Tinker isn’t friendly. I’d fucking congratulate him if he ever catches a thief and have the perpetrator bleeding all over the garage when I’d get home so he’d be ripe for some one on one time with my baseball bat.

Violent. Yes. But so is the fucking world.

 

 

Unpainted and Unmatched

A co-worker jokingly told me something that her husband said that she scolded him for. "Football is a third-world sport", which she explained why he's not into it.

I don't get the joke. Nor thus my funny-bone.

Was it too funny that I might have forgotten to laugh?

I am not entirely a stoic person. I can appreciate funny moments, laugh at most of my stupidities and blunders. I find watching comedy relaxing (specially from a long bout of criminal/forensic series or anime). And yet I don't get the bloody freaking joke.

It does not take a genius to tell that I am not a fan of discrimination, especially of race, religion, gender and economic status. Although I try to understand those that do.
Maybe understand is not the right word...tolerate? Like a filter in my mind...that I cannot breathe underwater...is in the same frequency as my tolerance of discrimination. I know it happens. Every day. I too have fallen under that cardinal sin, which is the reason why I am harsher with myself whenever I direct my self importance in a generalized direction...Pride is a set up for one hell of a fall.

I believe that discrimination is a choice. Of course there's always factors to consider why one is biased (so tame a word...deceptive as ever). However I see it as a choice. Like love, like fear, like anger...hate can be a  choice.

Yes. At some point, as I have chosen love, fear, anger, misery, happiness...as I have made choices upon choices, I too have chosen Hate.

I don't need to describe how it feels. How it too pulses through your veins. So in a way, I can see his choice.
In many ways I have criticized our country, it's political circus, it's poverty, it's social awareness, it's frequent clashes of religion, its domestic squabble. And yet I'm sure I am not the only one who feels pissed off hearing or knowing someone else took an aim at it...even when we know that a lot of foreigners find our country quite the cosmic joke.

I don't want to speak with the voice of Hate...so I give my gift. It is not Hate that moves me to say:

I don't need to change the color of my skin to be a racist, I don't need to be a man of faith to to be a bigot, I don't need the riches of the world to feel superior. I can be all of the above because I would choose to...it just happens, that I chose not to be.

I give you my pride...I am a woman with the blood of traitors and heroes running through my veins...I give you my Anger.I choose to be better than hate.