alamat, "kasmala" + language feelings

[halfcactus]

Watch on YouTube

This video has been sneaking its way around Twitter lately! And completely worth watching because:

a filipino boy group serving “fuck colonizers” concept in their mv and im sitting here wondering how the world isnt hearing them pic.twitter.com/0271wPbL3B

— closed (@yeosangliker) November 6, 2022

I'm so sad that the subs are only in English ajsfioaasfj;a I could tell they were singing in various regional languages (I speak two, with a passing familiarity with a third because it's my mom's native language), but the vocals get drowned out by the production. :(

-

In light of that, I've been having many Thoughts about language! For most of my life I've felt extremely inadequate, never able to pass as a native speaker and always trying to "catch up", but for the past week I've been finding doors in languages, opening and closing and escaping through them when everything becomes too much. I know I'll feel bad again once my feelings settle down, but just for this week I feel lucky to be able to consume art and media in three languages? All of a sudden I'm remembering how much art and literature mean to me as an individual, not just as a means to socialize and be opinionated, but just as a way to feel present and human and connected to someone's vision—and sometimes, to be alone.

And so I've sort of been retreating to Filipino media lately, the ones I don't have to discuss with anyone at all, and it's nice to just... be there with the text. No outsiders, no translation happening in my head or outside it, no explaining to other people or even discourse-ing about the themes because the only dialogue is between the text and our lived experiences. Recently installed Penlab (kind of our local Tapas) and binge-read the webcomic Ang Jowa Kong Crosswise (My Crosswise Boyfriend) up to its latest update! Also booked a ticket to Mula sa Buwan (From the Moon), a Filipino musical retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac that I’ve already missed twice and regretted. It's still a month from now and I'm so anxious that there will be unexpected real life incidents that prevent me from catching it. 😂

I also have a couple of media in my to-finish queue that I hope to finish within the year: The Kangks Show, a sex comedy show that explores sex positivity, body positivity, and generation/social media platform gaps (English subs available, the whole thing is actually completely free to watch on WeTV [here]); Oro, Plata, Mata, a 3-hour war film that's finally now on Netflix and that you thankfully can break into three one-hour chunks because the structure of the movie seems to echo the title (Gold, Silver, Misfortune). CONVENIENT. It's an important and critically acclaimed local film but I'm no longer used to watching serious films and am scared. 😂