Escape the burning wait @thatfraudcassandra - Tumblr Blog

I wrote an Instagram caption once, back when I still fancied myself a writer, talking on tangent about being too much for people, about shrinking myself for those who deemed the room needed more of them and less of me in it. It was general and I didn’t really think anyone would read it, much less know who it was inspired by. Tita Sel followed me on Instagram, and a few days after that went up, she and her sister Tita By messaged me and asked if I wanted to meet for lunch. Over Italianni’s pasta, Tita Sel said she knew who I was writing about, and that she understood that specific brand of pain. Tita Sel had a way of clocking things like that before they were said plainly. She had a way of noticing and acting before things calcified.

She did that when she started paying for my education in high school. When she opened her doors to us when staying at home became too constricting. When RV had Covid in the early pandemic days and she checked on us regularly, asked if we needed anything. She showed up when she wasn’t required to, because that was what family did. She was the perfect villager, and when she got sick, she had entire villages shattering the ceilings with their prayers.

She lived for celebrations, always finding reason to be thankful, to have fun. She traveled extensively. She doted on her grandchildren like it was a full-time job. And what she had, she shared. She and her husband built a big house to accommodate our extended family, and she always said it was because Mommy and Daddy wished we continued the tradition of always being together for Christmas. She sponsored many travels—my dad even flew business class with Emirates—because she wanted her siblings to experience what she had. She never scrimped on anyone, and her pockets never ran dry, even when she was sick. Tita By told me the other day, before Tita Sel passed and after she found out my dad was diagnosed with a similar illness, “Ate bilhan natin si Kuya ng Supportan, hati tayo.” She was in the hospital, in unimaginable pain. And yet she was thinking of her brother. You can’t fathom that kind of selflessness.

The last night of the wake, one of my cousins who flew from the States was picked to speak on behalf of all the nephews and nieces during the final service. We were talking about what he was going to say, and I told him I always thought of Tita Sel as the glue that held everyone together. She always found ways to see family, to honor Mommy and Daddy by holding everyone close. That we were lucky enough we got to share her with her kids. She blurred the lines between immediate family and relatives—she did not have to, but she loved all her 9 nephews and nieces like we were hers. The last day of her wake, they literally had to break down the walls of the chapel to accommodate all the food, flowers, and the people who came in droves to celebrate her life. For days, we listened to stories of how she touched the lives of her friends, staff, clients, classmates. She was both a force and a source of comfort, and her village made sure her family knew it.

I was listening to a song by Lucy Dacus a few days ago and I caught the lyric, “how lucky are we to have so much to lose?” I think about Tita Sel, how her presence colored the lives of every single one of us, and I think about how lucky we all were to hurt this much, because it means we had something real, that we had so much to lose with her passing. Her absence filled every room we were in. But for many years, her presence filled them. How lucky were we?

#personal #grief #family #death #Spotify #eulogy #loss

I love coming back to Tumblr where everyone is like "I hate college!" or "There are no useless majors!" while I am here fuming over the latest HOA debacle.

Kids, it could be worse. You could be fighting with a neighbor over their trash or where they park their fugly car.

(To be fair, I was barely out of college when I joined Tumblr and I used to have problems like those, too. I'd kill to have boy--BOY, not husband--problems again)

(I also cleaned up my following list last night...what do you mean it's been 7 years since so-and-so last posted?? Still my safe space, though. I think I've been here for over 10 years and I will never shut this down)

#personal #meta #tumblr

And so...what?

That was it? I went in hoping for a rousing retelling of Leni's 2022 campaign, giving it the platform it needed for the audience to understand "why her?", and what went wrong. So we don't repeat it in 2028.

Instead what we got was a meandering, structureless, Maria Ressa-forward documentary. It never fully articulates why we're revisiting A Thousand Cuts here (though I did Google after that Ramona Diaz really intended this to be a companion piece).

Leni's campaign deserved the full scope of a political documentary, perhaps a la Knock Down the House. Something that chronicles her staggering uphill battle against a dynastic Goliath, her life behind the scenes, the principles and policies she propped her political career up on. Instead it was reduced to vignettes and campaign b-rolls, never providing a deeper insight into the movement. We get more of Maria tearing up at her book, getting that call about the Nobel prize, and Rappler journalists being stress-tested for the death of democracy. All worthy subjects, but maybe oddly hyper-focused here.

There is no deep dive of the woman who was to become Vice President, which I felt was such a missed opportunity. It never gives Leni the space to become a full character with her own arc - beyond her being a widow perhaps. It assumes we already know (and love) her, and that tells a lot about who this documentary was being made for. Not people we want to welcome into the cause. Not for those who asked “why her?” It perpetuates the echo chamber, the same one that turned people away from her and the cause. The very insularity that cost her an election, and the Filipinos a better version of…whatever parallel universe we’re in today. We don’t see the buildup to Leni’s story - why was she beloved? What prompted these grassroots campaigns, the bikers, the Miss Gay candidates, the theater folk? At the other end of the spectrum, why was she hated? Who was she up against?

Halfway through Marcos Jr.’s term and a budding Duterte resurgence, this story becomes all the more important to tell. We need to remember what went wrong. The film follows a campaign that, in Diaz’s words, was “never seen before”, but she fails to translate the heart, the nuances. So for 113 minutes, things just…happen. But maybe that’s the point. That democracy is slow and unraveling, messy and nonlinear. I just hoped it told me something I didn’t already know.

#And so it begins #film #films #movie #movies #movies i’ve seen #movies i've seen #leni robredo #filipino #filipino politics #lenirobredo #opinion #ramona diaz

10 lessons I learned from Amazon

AKA things I don't have the heart to post on LinkedIn, so it'll go on my Tumblr instead

Working for a company that has a start-up mindset despite employing 3 million people has its upsides and drawbacks. And sometimes they mean the same thing. For example, you learn to be resourceful because there is no single way to doing things at Amazon. Everyone does their own thing, so you learn to adapt and be scrappy. A net positive, because you learn, but it's frustrating as hell.

The higher you are up the corporate ladder, the dumber you become at reading. Someone becomes a senior leader and he magically loses the ability to make sense of letters strung together, and when a phone tool award clearly says DO NOT EMAIL THE ADMINS, he will, in fact, email the admins and demand his phone tool award.

Silly little things like phone tool awards matter so much that people will fight tooth and nail to be given one, even when it has no real currency and no bearing to how people do work at Amazon.

There is always a pre-meeting prior to the real meeting, because we're all children and cannot be trusted to know to say the right thing at the actual meeting.

At Amazon, you are allowed to disrupt people's sleep for every non-issue and inconvenience plaguing your existence at the company. There is a paging mechanism (with a painful siren alarm to boot) which allows you to summon servants from their slumber by pressing a button, preferably going off at 3 in the morning for the full effect.

Everyone is required to read a document in meetings, after which people will need to comment on the doc and discuss them afterward, giving true meaning to "this could have been an email". Because, Jeff, you could have just forwarded the doc for us to read and mark up, and you could've scheduled a call if things need further discussion. But where is the fun in that?

Re-orgs are so frequent that I have had more managers than I have had years working for the company. And re-orgs are often done in a way that is disruptive to work, because there is no other way.

The more you weave Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles and use buzzwords like "Work backwards" or "It's always Day 1", the more chances you get of being inducted into their secret corporate cult.

You don't need to lift a finger. You just need to claim credit for someone else's work, et voila! Promotion.

They do stack-rank people, but don't disclose it. :)

#`personal

azulispector

the haunted body of a daughter

stoker // Blythe Baird // Brian Kershisnik's // ? // bojeck horseman // pink // lana del rey // sharp objects // f fitzgerald

Day 24: Your favorite superhero movie

#film #movies #films #movies i’ve seen #movie #movies i've seen #30 day film challenge #30 day movie challenge #avengers endgame #birds of prey #harley quinn #into the spider verse

Day 23: a film you fell asleep to

Sorry, Daisy

#twisters #daisy edgar jones #glen powell #film #movies #films #movies i’ve seen #movie #movies i've seen #30 day film challenge #30 day movie challenge

Day 22: A film that makes you giddy

Having (well, baking) her cake (well, pie) and eating it, too

#waitress #keri russell #film #movies #films #movies i’ve seen #movie #movies i've seen #30 day film challenge #30 day movie challenge

#ayoko na

Day 21: The first movie you remember watching in the cinema

Pocahontas, 1995

#film #movies #films #movies i’ve seen #movie #movies i've seen #30 day film challenge #30 day movie challenge #pocahontas

Day 20: A film with bad reviews that you liked

Letterboxd rating: 2.9xx/5

My rating: 4/5

Bad review 1:

2 stars

this could've been an email

Bad review 2:

2 stars

i'm sorry i just really couldn't care less about the relationships in this movie and didn't think the black mirror fingernail test made any sense or was even interesting. they cast three of the most talented actors working today: jessie buckley, riz ahmed, and jeremy allen white and then gave them basically nothing to do. i really just didn't get this but those three main performances at least kept me somewhat engaged.

Bad review 3:

2 stars

Attempt at a Charlie Kaufman conceit- a world in which a love test can determine a couple's short- and long-term viability- is about as flat and obvious as such a premise could be. (Turns out that love is more mysterious and malleable a thing! Who'd have quessed?) Wild that a film with these three actors could have so little juice.