{"id":161,"date":"2026-05-20T22:19:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T22:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/?page_id=161"},"modified":"2026-05-21T22:55:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T22:55:00","slug":"a-study-of-michelangelos-david-personal-essay","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/a-study-of-michelangelos-david-personal-essay\/","title":{"rendered":"A Study of Michelangelo’s David & Personal Essay"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Digital paint on ballpoint pen drawing, May 2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My origin story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s the relevance of David?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You’ll see \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Money Flows Like Water, And I Am Never Thirsty<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The sun hangs overhead, as bright and blistering as I have always known it to be. My guess is that it\u2019s around 90 degrees. A violent wind threatens to whip my body around, my large fluffy curls sway this way and that. This breeze would be cooling in other circumstances, but a grey haze fills up half the sky, choking the air with humidity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, I do not sweat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My coolness does not come from my vintage cotton Breton striped J. Crew dress that shows off my lightly goldened knees. It does not come from my beat up black sandals, nor my overfilled Dooney and Burke tote that keeps me grounded in the wild wind. And it certainly does not come from my red Wellbefore K94 style mask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, the reason I am able to feel fresh despite it all is because of my greatest accessory\u2013 a beautifully arranged iced coffee from the local coffee shop down the street. Perhaps it\u2019s a bit gauche to flaunt my class aspirations so openly, but the fact is, holding a cold object helps one stay cold. Otherwise, there\u2019s no barrier between you and the heat, and just walking to your car becomes a wet odyssey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, I am not thinking of any of this. I am not thinking at all. Slightly tired, my mouth an exquisitely stupid hidden \u201cO\u201d, I step inside the nearby Family Dollar, locked on finding what I need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in a place as hot as a Valley, this is not what a March should be. But in 2026, nothing seems to be what it should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was it ever that way at all?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tiqqun\u2019s Young-girl, untouchable in his\/her\/their perfectly performative consumption, was never meant to be an instruction guide to life, and the idea that this is only option available as the world crumbles apart seems bleak. Indeed, when I was younger, I thought all symbols of wealth and status were pointless and violent, and rejected all pretensions of glamour and conventional beauty. But in the present day, I have to come to understand that the facade of Western civilization is inherently violent. We dance, drink, smoke, and fuck on the foundation of violently extracted bones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They\u2019re already dead. They\u2019re already there. To not acknowledge them, to let their sacrifices go unappreciated, is the ultimate violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I myself was almost born a pile of bones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet I live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, to keep a baby born a month early alive is very expensive, and my world debut cost about thirty thousand dollars in \u201890s money. This is the first debt I ever incurred, and it has been hanging over my head since. It imparted a deep heaviness on my young parents\u2019 psyches \u2013 just six months later, my diehard Nuyorican father and Filipino mother made their way to the Rio Grande Valley, enticed by the possibility of a six figure nursing job and fat sign-up bonus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To the average person in the Valley, that kind of money is crazy. The only way you can get that is if you go into medicine, policing and border patrol, or law and politics: all professions aimed at controlling the populace and maintaining social order. Since it\u2019s deviant for a place in America to be 90% native Mexicans, it\u2019s punished with being the most economically depressed region in Texas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, since I was raised to be a good American, an aspiring elite American at that, none of this bothered me growing up. In fact, I hardly noticed it, my immigrant Filipino medical bubble a fuzzy hologram projected above it all. The privilege of being able to visit my family in New York City every year growing up never registered \u2013 instead, I felt deprived in not being able to visit Europe or East Asia like my peers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a successful American is supposed to do is: when they have extracted all they can from their origin, they are supposed to rise above it. They are supposed to go somewhere with more opportunity, more people, more visibility. An actor goes to LA. A writer goes to NYC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s just sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s how you become somebody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did not do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My life as a proper American peaked when I fulfilled my mother\u2019s dream, a prospective full scholarship at the local university. I tried medicine; it wasn\u2019t for me. I parlayed this opportunity into studying art for free, but I still could not square away the true educational demand of university \u2013 learning to uphold the daily rituals necessary for living a respectable American life. I simply could not perform these things, and trying to resolve the ideals projected onto me with my reality literally drove me crazy. I slipped out of the hologram I lived in for so long and finally became aware of the world around me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Valley is a difficult place to live. It\u2019s obscure and mired in poverty. If it\u2019s in national news, it\u2019s for something bad, the latest example \u2013 birthing the two Hispanic ICE agents that executed Alex Pretti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if not for those things \u2013 big \u201cif\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s still a tropical desert with temperatures in the 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s most of the year. The native plants, 90-something-percent of which have been destroyed over the past three centuries, are prickly for a reason. If they didn\u2019t have thorns and spikes, their hard-earned water would be easily stolen. The average household, the average business is run on a razor\u2019s edge. And if it isn\u2019t, that in itself is suspicious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have always felt lack, and continue to feel lack, but I\u2019ve never had to deal with no credit, no family, no nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wealth is relative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a mild spring\u2019s day in 2023, I manage to wake up early and attend my first estate sale on the edge of town, lured by the promise of a bronze statue of Saint Michael. It\u2019s out of budget by a magnitude of several hundreds, and already sold anyway, but the scene is extraordinary. The meticulously decorated mansion is buzzing with all types and ages, from transient opportunists like me to those I would come to learn were regulars. We had all come to pay our perverted respects to some doctor we never knew, hoping his success would bless everybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Half-asleep, wandering the mansion feels like a dream. Catholic memorabilia everywhere. Many, many cowboy hats for sale, but no ladies\u2019 clothes. Giant portraits of Marilyn and Audrey. Heady mix of symbols…am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? He-Man and She-Ra DVDs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wander into the backyard. The pool is surrounded by crime scene tape. I take a selfie with Michelangelo\u2019s David, my black mask near his white dick. I see a slightly crude commissioned painting of The Virgin of Guadalupe above where the pool chairs are and want to cry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could have loved this stranger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He would have definitely loved me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If only life itself could flow more freely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written March 2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My origin story. What’s the relevance of David? You’ll see \ud83d\ude09 Money Flows Like Water, And I Am Never Thirsty The sun hangs overhead, as bright and blistering as I have always known it to be. My guess is that it\u2019s around 90 degrees. A violent wind threatens to whip my body around, my large […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-161","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/161\/revisions\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deevaldes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}