I tried the local onsen this afternoon after cleaning the inside of our water reservoir with my new power washer. That left me itchy, cranky, and exhausted 🫠

To save my back, my sister and I booked a 30-min onsen + 2-hr massage. The massage was ok; I fell asleep. But the hot tub was so disappointing. The onsen relied completely on the heat of the natural spring water (which was likely near-surface level, hence, the warm temp and not HOT) and did not complement with artificial heater.

In some parts of our town the water is piping hot, especially near the lake. My mom said these areas have ground water nearer the magma level than in some other parts of town. My other bff told me about one hot spring dipping pool by the lakeshore which her triathlete coach of a husband frequents everyday to relieve his aching muscles after 100-km bike rides in the mornings. We’ll try that one of these days.

For now, my quick fix is invading my mom’s bathtub and cranking her heater to the highest setting, dumping a half bag of Epson salt, and wallowing here for an hour.

My one-week wellness break has been meeeehhh…🥴

---

Why can’t we have nice things and efficient services?!

Oh yeah, Filipinos keep on voting for crooks, so everyone—from the Office of the President down to the rank and file—is useless.

I had my license renewal yesterday and guess what? We still don’t have license cards.

I use my license as my de facto national ID because our actual national ID is not honored by most institutions because of the fucked up way how they rolled it out. Those who have applied for the national ID three years ago have yet to receive their ID cards. Majority of Filipinos are just issued paper IDs that can easily be forged, mutilated, and lost. 🙄

I certainly don’t want to use my passport as my ID to bring with me everyday in my bag. 😑

---

When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.
For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I’m feeling most ghost-like, it is your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I’m feeling sad, it’s my consolation. When I’m feeling happy, it’s part of why I feel that way.
If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget, part of who I am will be gone.

Frederick Buechner , Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary

---

A trip around the sun. What have I learned from that journey?

Well, if I put my mind into it, I can accomplish almost anything. I built a house with no debt. Even though it’s small, it’s still mine.

I didn’t know it, but I realized I was a strong person to have withstood all the shit I’ve been through. My heart has endured so much that I wonder why it’s still beating.

I have voids somewhere inside me. They feel hollow and will never be filled up…but there are areas within me that have swollen so much with love to compensate for those voids that cannot be closed up.

My back hurts so much.

I am trying to come into terms with my not being able to get thinner. I need to accept that a woman like me who has polycystic ovarian syndrome will always have a battle with her weight.

Two years ago, I wrote here about self-preservation. Indeed, I’ve only been here for 5 months and yet I feel like I’m being hugged and protected whenever I come home. My world has become smaller as I retreated to my mother’s womb to be reborn. I have yet to emerge from my cocoon. I have yet to see who I will become.

And I’m about to take a driver’s license test today—a test I haven’t taken since I was 18 or about to turn 18. My 5-year driver’s license is about to expire in a few hours and I’m about to get a new one with 10-year validity.

However, I’m still figuring out how to navigate this LTO online portal.

Happy birthday to me. I’m old but I’m wiser. I don’t take shit anymore.

---

1) She had been seeing a professional from UP Manila (maybe as part of the university’s support for all faculty members during the lockdowns) but when F2F started, she fell off the wagon. It’s hard to commute from our town to PGH to see your counselor regularly—schedules and traffic situation are always fucked up. Our common friend told me she was very comfortable with the online setup, just like me.

2) The husband did not pick her up at work. She drove herself as per usual, parked the car not in her usual spot but somewhere it wouldn’t be easily found. When she didn’t come home when it was already dark, that’s when the husband asked friends where she was and then they formed a search party.

3) She might have done it right after a student knocked on her door for a consultation but she told the student to come back on Friday. When they found her in her office, she was already discolored so it might have been more than 5 hours.

4) They didn’t find her immediately because the lights in her office were off so no one would think she was there.

5) There was a note.

6) Some people (police maybe, the people who have read the police report) have spread the story that the spouses had a fight because the husband (a high school classmate of mine) has a third party.

I’m sorry, friend. It’s too much for a mother of a child, who may be under the spectrum, with an iffy husband whom you love to bits. All the pressures of being in the academe. And the support that you had was lost when the world tried to go back to “normal”.

I’m sorry the world is unfair to mothers like us who try to do it all. We can’t. We can’t have it all. Something has got to give.

The world has now less light.

---

After Twin I’s fever started to dissipate, her diarrhea stepped up so there was no way I could bring her to the clinic. She was in the bathroom every 30 mins. Then she had unbearable stomach aches. Confirmatory Covid antigen test is still negative.

This morning when she woke up she had stomach muscle spasms and then it’s gone. I still had the CBC and fecalysis just to make sure it’s not amoebiasis or I’m missing something. While I believe this is just stomach flu, I really cannot leave things to chance…

Meanwhile, Twin A’s MRI reading shows her insides are responding to the anti-TB meds and it seems like there is no thickening of the colon walls. No more scalloping of the liver. Lymph nodes shrunk, since the old CT showed the biggest was 2.1 cm.

I just learned this afternoon that a friend died by suicide late yesterday. She was the one who visited me in my house in July and we talked for 3.5 hrs about so many things. I gave a lecture in her class the previous semester. It became a college-wide lecture because they opened it up to other classes and even to graduate students. She and I talked about doing another one at the start of this semester but Twin A got sick so I wasn’t able to get back to her about the syllabus and about the schedule.

My brother and sister-in-law already knew last night but they didn’t want to tell me, maybe because I was already too exhausted taking care of my sick daughter.

A common friend told me about it this morning through FB messenger as I was about to get up from bed. I confirmed with my bff and she said the husband was picking up our friend after work but it was taking her so long. They found her office door locked so they had to force their way in. They found her in a creepy situation, already dead, that I don’t want to write it down here anymore.

She has been very sad for a couple of weeks now, my bff said. Anxiety was eating her up. As far as I know she wasn’t seeing any professional…maybe she didn’t recognize that she was going through a major depressive episode. Many people do not recognize this in themselves unless they are self-aware. When you don’t know you are depressed or could not put into words what you are going through, it’s difficult to seek help. People around you wouldn’t be able to help you because they wouldn’t know how deep is this depression or you’re just sad. There’s a big difference.

I can’t fathom her doing that when she’s so anxious about her only child. She’s so hands-on with her son and she homeschooled him for a long time before transitioning him this year to formal school. I don’t know how the child would fare now. 😞

That’s why we have to be kind to everyone. We don’t know what people are going through.

And to make things worse, I now see that two of the friends who chose suicide were writers. I know a lot of writers who are depressive or had been depressed. That’s why the stereotype of the drunk writers live on…because we self-medicate and use alcohol to numb the pain that comes with depression.

I don’t know, maybe because we live inside our heads most of the time? We are prone to digging into ouselves when we write? Just like painters or actors, we eviscerate ourselves whenever we do our craft?

I really don’t know.

Tomorrow I’ll just visit my friend in her wake.

Twin I is sick again, but this time it doesn’t look like respiratory tract infection. She doesn’t have colds and cough but she has consistent high grade fevers that don’t go away. I had to bring down her temp with sponge baths every two to four hours. I didn’t bring her yet to the clinic or hospital for blood tests because she was feeling so poor (she is complaining of headache) so I let her sleep first. As long as her fever doesn’t go over 39 degrees C, we can afford to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, I tested her for Covid but so far she is negative. But I have to test her again after two days to make sure it wasn’t false negative.

We will have to do the IGRA test (as ordered by our PGH doctors) to make sure she didn’t get TB from her sister, a CBC test, and probably a dengue test.

I have a hunch this could be another case of UTI. 🤦🏻‍♀️