Top Secret Files of a Mental Fugitive, Exposed

And so another year has passed. Out with the old, in with the new and there's nothing more fun than to have food, parties and fireworks as a way of saying this. Especially ham, I like ham. We had ham on Christmas Eve, we also had ham of New Years Eve. It's a Filipino tradition. Balls of Edam cheese and fruitcakes are also traditions but those cheese balls are salty on their own while we didn't see any more fruitcakes being sold. I miss fruitcakes, I really do. And the smell of gunpowder, yeah. That smell, it reminds of Marisa. It's a perfect way to start your year. Now everything seems to be perfect, except that I got fever on the first nights of this year. Nothing ruins it more, especially when you don't know why. I mean, for all the meds I am taking, which includes Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C or something like that.), I also have to take Paracetamol for when the fever show up again, usually at night. While that is not a problem on it's own, my bone to pick on it is regarding it's effects of my liver. It sucks, especially when I have a stack of health problems and some of them not solved yet.

But let's not talk about my health problems any further, I've already tackled that. What I want to talk about is about the general events that happened in my country, most notably the ones that I remember. Let's start with the Priority Development Assistance Fund corruption scandal, as headed by a business person name Janet Napoles. To sum this up, she used fake NGOs, forged signatures and non-existent recipients to scam the government to the tune of 10 Billion pesos and I don't know if this includes the kickback of the politicians who too part of it. To the people not initiated, Priority Development Assistance Fund, or PDAF, is a legalized system of pork barrel in this country. It's a blank check given by government to fund projects for the country but given on how this country runs, it's also a blank check for them to steal from the government easily. After this scandal, some people started a protest against this. But since the government, as usual, does not have legal obligation to listen to protests, this is ultimately futile. And honestly, for all the media coverage that this caused on television, I was not surprised anymore. This happens, this always happens. This has become our culture and we just threw our hands up. Besides, the people vote for them repeatedly for decades, so yeah, it's like nobody's learning anymore!

Next is the Bohol earthquake. Bohol is a rural island province in Central Philippines that acts as one of the tourist hotspots of this country. But when the earthquake came, all those historical churches were heavily damaged or destroyed, all amenities for tourists ruins, leaving many of them stuck in the province for a while and generally the whole province was almost crushed. I was on confined on the hospital during that time and watching the whole coverage of it again, same with the corruption scandal. I only saw the whole thing as a message to everyone in this country, that they should not heavily rely on those three things that people here just rely on: Nature tourism, historical tourism and blind faith. Nature tourism because, if you know, people here are avid environmentalists in general that they seemingly don't want the rich resources of this country to be exploited and can't have real industrialized economy to we always have to rely on tourist dollars. Historical tourism because many of these old cathedrals come way back from the Colonial Era. Now that they're destroyed and gone, what now? They're gone. Their value to tourists are either reduced or lost. And the government ain't gonna restore all that, no funding. Private organization will try to but again, lack of funding. And lastly, blind faith. They just hoped to to God that this tourism will just last them forever. Then the earthquake arrived and voilah, all sources are gone. But what did they do? They just thanked God that they're alive while not caring that this would take time to recover and many people still died. It's like not acknowledging the fact that things around you were ruined just because you survived. While the answer is not to give up and go cynical, this should remind them that they lost many things and people should start to rebuilding or help rebuilding these people's lives, that they can't rely on the old things that helped their economy anymore.

And on the final thing that I remembered from 2013 is none other that ...Typhoon Haiyan, also known as Typhoon Yolanda in this country. They say it was worst than Katrina and the results were like Fukushima, except that it would be harder to rebuild because the government can't get it's shit together in the face of this disaster. They were ineffective, spineless and, as usual, even corrupt. I mean, people and governments from all over the world were sending help in the form of packages ready to be distributed and what do they do? They repack them on plastics, stick a politician's face on it and then give less than what was on the care packs to the afflicted. Hell, some of them even sold the goods to evacuees. What the fuck is that, huh? This is the very reason why people just suggested that they should just send their donations via private organizations or the Philippine Red Cross, because all of the politician's incompetencies and greed were exposed by this event. As for me, I can't find myself caring about the event nor could I get myself to donate to the victims of this typhoon. Why, you ask? Because it happens pretty much almost every year. Many people die, many homes lost and many things to rebuild. And the government is acting like itself in those situations. I can't get myself to care anymore and that realization is bleak to me. If I send donations to the victims now, it would just feel to me like I'm just following the trend and I did not give because I want to. I don't like that. But I won't stop people for giving things either because that's what they need the most right now. And they still need it, because National Geographic Channel still airs commercials urging people to helped the victims of Typhoon Haiyan.

So yeah, as Maddox said it on his Facebook account, he would not miss 2013 and does that with a bird flip. Perhaps we should just not look back to the past and move on to the future, hoping that 2014 would be better.