Hits
Work
Our World Oceans Day virtual celebration: Battle of the Brain Corals. This was so much fun to plan and execute, in partnership with PRRCFI.
Ongoing discussions with current and potential donors for waste management, youth empowerment, tech innovation, and shark conservation work.
The Philippines is worth diving for wallpaper. This and our other mobile and desktop wallpapers are available on our Dress Your Tech page.
Eats
I generally don't like sweets. Then these ECQ-born businesses were born: @bakesbyerk (the s'mores cookies were life-changing) and @goldencrubmnl (cranberry pecan banana bread is perfection - I didn't even like banana bread before!).
Buys
Storage organizers, my impulse purchases from Lazada.
A PhP699 ring light from Lazada with warm, white, and mixed lighting and adjustable brightness. The light in my home office / guest room wasn't meant to be bright enough for online meetings in the evening, and this makes all the difference.
Reads
The #BlackLivesMatter movement and its parallel campaigns (e.g., #BlackOutTuesday, #PullUpOrShutUp), the Anti-Terrorism Bill, and the guilty verdict on Maria Ressa's case have made me think a lot about performance activism. Do social media movements help and/or harm, and to what extend? How do we avoid confirmation bias as a society? How do we translate captions, black squares, and hashtags into policy and systemic change? This has been a constant line of questioning in my work too.
Here are some of my favorite reads:
"Honestly, I have never fully understood the endgame of stuff like this. What is it? Awareness? Solidarity? How does it ultimately help the people we say we stand with and for?"
"[But] reading books without living out the relational and the heart stuff just makes you a well-read racist."
"If you do choose direct action, be there for the entire process; and no, you don’t get to chair the discussion; you don’t get to be the media spokesperson. [...] What matters here is that you are not showing up with a sense of entitlement as to what you want to do."
"I’m empathetic to the reality that this has been a wake-up call for a lot of folks, but it can be challenging to separate the profound from the performative."
How to Participate in Politics (unsure when it was published but I read this in June)
"Think about voting not only as an expression of your beliefs but also as a choice with consequences."
Posts from @rallyandrise
Life
Making sushi bake! Masarap.
Seeing my cousins briefly for the first time since February. Nakakabuhay.
Moving Egg with me to my apartment. When I looked for a place to move into two years ago, I wanted it to be pet-friendly because I wanted to move Egg here one day. Pre-pandemic, I traveled too often to have her here. Now we're inseparable.
Misses
Cancel culture. While I agree that there are some people who deserve to be cancelledt (e.g., Harvey Weinstein), there should be levels. Not everyone who says/does something wrong should be cancelled immediately. My friends and I came up with these levels: Call out, Cancel, and Condemn.
Silent shaming. While I agree that there are some people who could use their ~platform and ~influence better, not everyone has to post their thoughts on social media or feel pressured to. Some people are doing work quietly through acts of kindness they'd rather not post about, some people need to focus on other matters at the moment, and others are having difficult conversations with family/friends. Change happens in different avenues.
I was on a conference call at 9AM and the organizer suddenly said, "I would prefer it if people turned on their videos." I WAS MASKING IN A BATHROBE. BEH, PINAWISAN AKO. No, I didn't turn it on and no, I have not done it again.
Making my own salted chocolate brownies. It was dry and I had to eat everything because... no to food waste.
Making my own guacamole. I was really excited because I love guacamole but I think I put too much onion. I tried to improve it pero hindi parin masarap.
I read three books this month and wasn't over the moon about any of them. Deep by James Nestor was brilliant in content and structure, but it was hard to read about ego-driven free diving accidents. War Doctor by David Nott was full of false humility, which left me wondering if the reviewers on Goodreads and I read the same book. This is an Uprising was well-researched and it helped me make sense of the ongoing protests but overall just okay.