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IMPORTANT NOTE: This post is now outdated. My brother now does the vast majority of his military activities outside of home. LIKE IT SHOULD BE!
Note: I have full respect for our military, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). They have protected us from terrorists before and continue to do so now, including the ISIS-aligned Maute Group and currently, the communist terrorist organization called the New People's Army (NPA). I wish you all to continue fighting the good fight.
Hopefully what I'm about to say in this post is still covered by freedom of speech because this is a mostly negative post...
More importantly, I hope I'm not sharing any classified information...
I can't remember when exactly, but during the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) was once again made mandatory for college students. I didn't need to take it since my university doesn't offer it, but as the title suggests, my brother is taking ROTC.
If you're a civilian like me who has no military experience at all, you might have different views when it comes to military training. You might think of something very similar to the movie Full Metal Jacket: a rude drill sergeant who puts recruits through brutal physical training regimens. You might think of the Navy SEALs' Hell Week: 4 straight days of training with almost no sleep. You might think of Shang or Xin Zhao making a man out of you.
All these three things I wrote down have one thing in common: They're mainly done in military camps or outdoor environments.
COVID-19 Pandemic Recap
Just in case you're reading this after the Wuhan coronavirus (a.k.a. COVID-19, a name I still hate) pandemic (I wrote this while a weaker sub-variant of Omicron was spreading), the vast majority of the world locked down. In the early months of the pandemic, millions of businesses and schools around the world closed, forcing employees to work from home and classes to either be suspended or forced to go online.
I was affected by both, being my mom's assistant in our family store and a game development student who was going to a physical school early in 2020.
Our store was closed for many months and, although we have been open for about a year already, many of our customers are either too scared to go out or have completely forgotten about us.
As for game development, we went completely online. (I'm just thankful that, when we were still meeting physically, I played Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the first time.)
The vast majority of my younger brother's academic activities are also online. And these include...ROTC.
And, given the three examples I enumerated earlier, as well as my Singaporean friend NachoPizza having military training in actual military camps even during the pandemic, my expectations have been shattered and so has my sanity.
Basic Details of My Brother's ROTC
Note that I don't actively pay attention to this because I don't want to disturb my brother and I know he only likes talking to me when it's important. The last thing I want to happen is both of us getting in trouble for my ruckuses. Being a slightly soldier-like gamer, I also understand the importance of morale.
The "main" academic part is made of two parts: physical training and a traditional online class.
During physical training, my brother takes a PC upstairs and does, y'know, workouts. I'm usually either fast asleep, in our family store, or teaching English with my headphones tightly worn so I almost never get disturbed by this.
During the "traditional online class" part, his superiors do a lot of the talking; sometimes with, sometimes without a PowerPoint presentation where they discuss things like etiquette, human rights, tactics, and such. This is ironically the noisier part of ROTC since he mostly does this in our bedroom where I also teach English--he mostly says "Sir/Ma'am, aye, sir/ma'am!" and similar responses.
The schedule of these classes is wildly unpredictable. Sometimes, he starts at 5 AM; sometimes, he doesn't. Sometimes, he stretches all the way to 1 AM.
He mostly does this within Monday to Saturday inclusive...but what I REALLY can't stand is the occasional ROTC meeting during holidays and special days like Halloween even on Sundays where they still observe military etiquette while wearing Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating.
Forgive me for referring to high-ranking officers with informal language, but dudes, most Filipinos are Christians and Sunday is traditionally a day of relaxation! If you wanna have meetings on special days that fall on Sundays, how about you make some regular Sundays class days if your point is similar to Kujou Sara's: that the battlefield never waits until you are ready?
Unless maybe the idea is to make cadets forget about mentally associating holidays with relaxation...
But the classes aren't the worst part.
Before and/or after classes, the cadets engage in casual conversations. I'm not sure if these are required or part of the classes, though--a "Ma'am, aye, ma'am!" may be placed in the middle of what sounds like a typical conversation in an adult's birthday party. (Is there a better analogy? I keep thinking of barkadahan which I don't think I've ever heard another Filipino say.)
My Problems with This Online Training
The biggest problem is that, sometimes, my brother's ROTC interferes with my daily schedule.
Although there is the occasional bakery delivery or trip to the gym with my mom, my schedule from Monday to Sunday is more or less the same. My shift in our family store starts at 11:00 AM and ends at 8:00 PM which is also our closing time. From 8:30 PM to 12 midnight, I teach English to Japanese students. I then play Genshin Impact until 2:00 AM which is typically when I finally fall asleep.
This training mainly interferes with my English teaching and my sleep.
My students were already caught off-guard by my brother bellowing "Ma'am, aye, ma'am!" or a question to his superiors--my students thought I was giving them instructions or questions. On the other hand, I don't want my brother's superiors to think he's speaking without permission--after all, I often hear something around the lines of "requesting permission to speak freely/make a statement" and my brother and I have similar voices and English skill levels.
As for sleeping, I'm a light sleeper since, as lazy as I am, I can't stand being late and I have a "ready for emergencies" mentality. As such, many sensory stimuli can wake me up, including but not limited to drooling on my pillow by accident, hearing my parents talking about me while they're eating breakfast, and obviously, hearing ongoing military training.
Thanks to my brother's...exemplary achievements, he currently holds the position of 2nd Lieutenant and has more administrative roles than physical grunt work.
Unfortunately, alongside those...he occasionally has to record their classes using my gaming PC. This prevents me from teaching at all. He started out, I think, in September 2021 so, if this goes on for 2 years assuming a best-case scenario for Hypixel Studios, I may not be able to experience Hytale on Day 1.
But the casual conversations with his squadmates (I know they use "batchmates" but I want to use a term that civilian average Joes can relate to) are the worst.
While I admit I'm guilty of using the full power of my voice while my parents are asleep during my lessons and YouTube videos since I'm a wannabe voice actor and I want to engage my students and viewers in a unique way, my younger brother has a naturally louder and more commanding voice than me because as a child, he shouted at full volume a lot when he didn't get what he wanted. (Or maybe his personality is just how he acts when he's with other people in general whether they're family members or not. There are moments when he genuinely feels lazy and just watches gaming videos or plays with our horse dog alone. When I'm not teaching or doing YouTube videos and I don't feel a surge of strong positive emotions, I often speak quietly and minimally or just grunt and nod in acknowledgment.)
My brother's tone of voice at night with his squadmates is the same as during the day. Once, this chatting stretched to 2:30 AM so, although I felt super sleepy at the time, I continued to play with a Singaporean in Co-Op Genshin Impact since I might as well do something while that booming voice that can burst into unrestrained laughter at any second (not even any minute) is preventing me from sleeping. I mean, even Mom complains about that booming voice.
Assuming no shyness or hardware problems, I also notice a lot of people, both gamers and wannabe voice actors, don't want to voice-chat or practice voice acting at night to avoid disturbing their neighbors or other family members. These cadets, however, don't seem to give a firetruck at all.
Heck, if you've played or watched a military-themed game or movie, you might notice that soldiers swear quite a lot--it's no different in these casual situations. I get extra nervous when my brother says any sort of swear word in any language I know during my lessons--Japanese people are very proper, many of them know that "fuck" is an English swear word (ファック (fakku) is a common word according to jisho.org), and a few even try to speak Filipino to me. Once, I had to profusely apologize to my student after I said "Good morning." and my brother let out an Atomic F-Bomb in response.
And as of writing this specific paragraph on March 29, 2022, at 1:25 AM, I heard my brother's phone ringing at about 1:05 AM while he was fast asleep after 3 days of a tree-planting and beach-cleaning activity with the Navy. I simply heard it vibrating while my brother wasn't paying attention so I just let it slide--I thought maybe it was an alarm but he only wanted it to vibrate to avoid waking me up.
But the phone rang again so I lazily paused watching gameplay footage of Yakuza: Like a Dragon and investigated the phone. It simply showed a phone number--there was no name so I assumed it was a scammer or a wrong dial. I ignored the call a second time.
And it rang AGAIN. I thought, "There is NO way a scammer or wrong dialler would call this many times." So I lazily picked up the phone. The caller responded, "Good morning, batch."
I introduced myself as his brother, Juliann Baloran, and stated that my brother was asleep. I stuttered a lot since I did not know the right military lingo and I was scared that it might have actually been one of his superiors or maybe one of them is listening behind-the-scenes--I know what one of them sounds like and this one sounded terrifyingly close...or maybe most Filipinos just sound the same to me.
I said, "Sino po sila?" (Who is this?)
The caller gave her name and as far as I know, she wasn't one of the superiors. (Phew.)
I pressed the squadmate for more information. "For what purpose?" (In English because I felt "Bakit?" (Why?) felt too direct and informal.) I don't want to wake my brother up just to participate in a casual conversation that serves no purpose besides boosting morale--I wanted him to get some good rest after all the hard work he did. He can do this morale stuff during the day, I thought.
The squadmate simply said it was "super important" or whatever. (Or maybe I wasn't listening clearly.) Yeah, this is clearly not one of his superiors--otherwise, if she deliberately wanted to hide the purpose, she would have said something around the lines of "That is classified information." using more formal language--"super" as an adjective or adverb is too casual.
I lazily said "Thank you. I will wake up my brother." and ended the call.
And waking up my brother is exactly what I did just in case this is some huge emergency meeting that he absolutely, positively cannot miss.
Edit, April 3, 2022: On Saturday, while my brother was upstairs doing his ROTC, another one of his squadmates (or is it the same one?) messaged my brother while I was playing his Genshin Impact account, saying "Batch".
Uhhh...what? Why would you say that in a private message to a single person in a video game? The simplest way I understand the term "batch" is a group of at least two people.
I did the same thing: I introduced myself as Juliann Baloran, his brother. In addition, I said "Please state your purpose. He's a very busy man." He/she did not reply after that. (My brother has gotten angry thanks to unexpected visitors to our house asking for him before.)
Anyway, my point is that while military training is a great thing (sometimes, I feel like I also need it to get rid of my chaotic neutral alignment), doing it online for the most part is, for me, a stupid idea.
I'm pretty sure the main reason for this training being online is because of COVID-19. Dude, Omicron is very weak, only a few hundred people get the Wuhan coronavirus every day in the Philippines now, and some countries like Denmark are finally scrapping all pandemic restrictions! (But I suppose they can use the rising cases in countries like Japan, South Korea, and European countries to justify staying online...)
According to Mom, some college students have worse living conditions than our family does--some live in even smaller houses with just two or three rooms (one room being the obligatory bathroom). To add to that, I think many college students still live with their parents considering how family-oriented Filipinos are in general--they want to help their parents. As such, our family is probably not the only one experiencing the problems I stated above, but also the families of the other cadets. Not all of us are binge-watchers, gamers, graveyard shift employees, or students, pal--some of us actually need proper sleep!
Dad once told me that he handled a real M16 back when he was in ROTC. Last I checked, however, my brother and his squadmates only saw written and illustrated instructions--I bet they've never even touched a real gun in training. This is the biggest disadvantage of any sort of online learning--there are some things one can only really practice physically, not in the "metaverse" or whatever the heck Big Tech calls it.
I'm just glad though that there were a few things they actually did physically like attending an award ceremony (I think?) personally hosted by an admiral, as well as the tree planting I mentioned earlier.
Although the tree-planting got my brother off my back for 3 nights, I still was unable to sleep well thanks to the now blazing-hot temperature of this bedroom forcing me to use airconditioning especially to maintain my patience with some...peculiarly dumb and unruly students. The temperature changes caused me to get sniffles (Filipino: sipon).
But anyway, I would really like to read your thoughts in the comments.
Have you had similar experiences with someone living with or close to you like a family member or neighbor?
Do you think my complaints are justified?
Or do you think I should just put up with my brother's training no matter how physically draining it is for me just for the sake of my country as a whole? (This is what I'm trying to do.)
Anyway, if you're a current or former member of the Armed Forces of the Philippines or a Philippine government official and want this blog post removed, I will do so immediately with my sincerest apologies and comply with any and every other legal order.
But regardless, I want every last criminal, especially every last terrorist, put to justice. Don't think I haven't thought of y'all, you scum of the earth being the reason we have military and police officers.
TL;DR summary because this was a surprisingly long rant for me: I have no idea when the heck my brother's online military training or his casual conversations with his squadmates start or end, even on holidays. Sometimes, this messes with not only my sleep and work but also Mom's.
