The World Doesn't Stop

Part of me has died and I mourn indefinitely.
Pseudo engagement rings and hypothetical kids be damned.
The love of my life is gone and I am paralyzed by impeding solitude.
I don't want to keep my hopes up because my hopes don't mean a damn thing
and my hopes are a memory of the life that I anticipated and the life that I no longer live.
But I cannot help but dream of a moment when this is vocalized as a big mistake.
Yes, I still love you. Yes, I'll come back to you.
But the desperation for reconciliation is one sided and pointless.
My heart breaks harder than it ever has and I doubt my ability to persevere
without my best friend and favorite person beside me.
I am selfish, I am sad, and I cannot.

Two for Two

I have made a fool of myself and continue to do so as I spill my broken heart onto the internet. For the past five and a half years, I have loved and grown and somehow managed not to be enough. Thirty-four seems too old to feel like this, although I know it happens to everyone. I am embarrassed for believing that 5.5 years was going to lead to marriage even after I reconsidered becoming a parent. You know detrimental me: giving everything I have to those I love without actually investing in myself. I end up with nothing except for heartache and the hard-earned knowledge of what to avoid in the future: single parents, younger people and in general, falling in love.

Kissing My Employee Discount Goodbye Forever

I guess I'm just going to use this blog as a place to post old quickie papers I wrote because I don't have the ability to post in the moment. I am never taking all upper division classes ever again...until I have to. In April, this Gap Kids ad went viral and I don't know why I read the comments section to anything. Because I'm secretly a drama queen? It is incredible to me that people really think that the above photos are the same pose. Let me break it down: little Black girl as arm rest is not standing in a power pose like little white girl as arm rest. No one cried foul about the black and white photo because little girls of color are already perceived as unladylike, they can't be organic bendy yogis. But I digress. People really believe that a two-term Black President equates to a post-racial society. If anything, white supremacy has become more overt and identical to the postbellum South. Anyway, here is a short essay that will possibly cement my inability to return to Gap Inc.:

Fall into the Crap

A week has passed since the Gap issued their “apology” for offending the Twitterverse with their ED by Ellen ad depicting the head of a Black girl’s as an armrest for a white girl. Having dedicated five years of my life to the Gap along with a lumbar strain that has since curbed my amateur bowling career, the viral nature of this story filled me with disbelief. While the Gap likes to pride itself as a progressive company, their non-apology (we’re sorry if you’re offended) speaks to lazy corporate management, lackadaisical public relations and unethical ad tactics. In an attempt to engage my former coworkers via Facebook in a conversation surrounding race representation and the historicity of Black stereotypes, the dominant discourse for defending the image in question as “not a race issue” was rationalized through reverse-racism theories, anecdotes by the vertically challenged, and the fact that the armrest and resting arm happen to be sisters through adoption. I am continually awed by the belief of a contemporarily post-racial society, or that white supremacy is only recognizable in white cone-shaped hoods with eye holes, by white nationalists with YouTube channels, and by observing the attendees of Donald Trump rallies. Upon realization that the dialogue was not going to evolve into focusing on the role that photographers, style directors and ad executives play in constructing body narratives, I stopped contributing to the conversation.

Forty-two pages into Between the World and Me, a specific passage made me mad again at the Gap and mad at the individuals who were unwilling to consider how racist the ad is: “’White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).” The disgruntled retail employee in me is finding difficulty in believing that the Gap is clever enough to pose a Black girl in the style of a somber lawn jockey among a trio of organic white yogis-in-training for a collection of clothing intended to empower girls as a sly nod at framing Black girlhood as subservience. This is the same Gap that published an article in the company’s monthly newsletter citing Kanye West’s name-dropping of the retail chain in the song “Spaceship” as a compliment. It is as if no one was available to review the lyrics before sending the final draft to the printer:

“If my manager insults me again, I will be assaulting him

After I fuck the manager up, then I’m gonna shorten the register up

Let’s go back, back to the Gap

Look at my check, wasn’t no scratch

So if I stole, wasn’t my fault

Yeah I stole, never got caught

Take me to the back and pat me

Askin’ me about some khakis

But let some black people walk in

I bet they show off their token blackie.”

Simultaneously, white supremacy’s pervasiveness in print media is to the extent that the un-woke consumer has grown accustomed to racist aesthetics. Whether it is Lebron James as King Kong to Gisele Bündchen on the cover of Vogue, or the calcification of Kerry Washington on the cover of Adweek: body autonomy for people of color is not a thing.

I also think that Gap Inc's P.A.C.E. program is a farce. Empowering women of the Global South while still utilizing sweat shops to produce mediocre clothing? Ok. Imperialism remixed with white liberal feminism at its finest. Well, there goes my chance to re-break my back for $10-something an hour. Bye, Felicia.

So what? Who cares?

Last semester, I took a course called "Vulnerable Black Masculinities." It was an awesome class taught by one of my favorite professors. Should a degree in being woke existed, VBM would be a required course. When I learn about Black history in the United States, I become inspired to interrogate the historicity of Filipinos in America and worldwide. How the F else does a Filipino-American deal with the Filipino diaspora? Anyway, I had to submit an article to a blog for one of my assignments. The website I submitted my article to is probably never going to publish it because the moment has passed and honestly, who cares about what an undergrad has to say about anything? So here it is:

Pacquiao is WACKiao: The Filiqueerno Navigation of Gay and Pinoy Pride.

by Nicole Espinosa

In preparation for the third Pacquiao vs Bradley match, I will not be making the pilgrimage to Las Vegas, as many Filipinos do, to monetarily and morally support arguably the most visible Filipino in transnational popular culture. This is partly because I already live in Las Vegas and I purposefully avoid The Strip — especially during fight nights. Additionally, I will not order the fight on pay-per-view and will not assemble with relatives or with other Filipinos in someone’s garage-turned-rec room to watch it.

My resignation from Team Pacquiao happened at least four years ago. As a queer Filipino-American, I cannot cheer for someone who has described the entire LGBTQIA community as being “worse than animals.” Let’s revisit the interview that first threatened Pacquiao’s earning capability in 2012: former Examiner.com contributor Granville Ampong fabricated a quote by Pacquiao citing Leviticus 20:13 in response to President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage. Ampong’s non-journalism aside, I was not the least bit surprised by Pacquiao’s alleged homophobia. Pacquiao has always presented himself as a God-fearing man. Having parents who were raised as devout Catholics, who then raised me as devout Mormons, I am more than familiar with the correlation between the Christian majority and anti-gay, anti-equality sentiment. Yet here we are four years later: the same passage from Leviticus posted to, and subsequently deleted from, Pacquiao’s official Instagram account. Pacquiao’s Nike endorsement had just been terminated and he apparently gave zero Fs about it.

“But he said ‘sorry.’” But I don’t care. Pacquiao’s half-apology doesn’t reflect the Christ-like attributes he so vehemently pretends to embody. “But he donates to charities.” But what’s the point of a hand out if you’re not helping people become self-sufficient and critically thinking members of society? I digress.

To throw in my own remix of Beyoncé’s “Formation:” I like my Pinoy nose with Lapu-Lapu nostrils. I love being Filipino and I cannot allow my Pinoy Pride to be defined by the scientifically inaccurate and religiously hypocritical comments made by an individual who embraces anti-intellectualism, has subjected himself to decades of head trauma, and has shown his inability to maintain the “sanctity” of marriage. I would implore other Filipinos who don’t agree with Pac-Man’s politics, but continue to rally for him as an athlete, to reconsider their decision to do so. He’s no José Rizal, but he also can’t be the only Filipino worth rooting for.

I wrote a (crappy) paper — we'll get to how crazy busy my semester was at another time, on the regression of the Filipino Race Man. I am fully aware of the absurdity of a) a race representative and b) a gendered race representative, but for the purpose of submitting an assignment worth a good chunk of my grade, I wrote about it. It boggles my mind that the Philippines just elected a bozo for a president. But when I think about the history of the Philippines — Spanish colonial rule, American colonial rule, World War II, plunder and oppression of the Marcos regime, it comes as no surprise that the #2 Philippine National Hero after José Rizal would be a stupid boxer. He literally has zero grasp on science or sociology. Again, I have to reiterate that Filipinos aren't the only perpetrators of anti-intellectualism: the GOP Presidential front runner is a misogynist, white supremacist and reality television "star."

There are Filipinos in the media and academia worth rooting for. People besides Rob Schneider, Jo Koy and Nicole Scherzinger. Coincidence that they're all mixed? I can't have a conversation about colorism just yet. I have pizza to eat. Later, hoes. Xoxo Gossip Girl.