Late afternoon, Twin I and I went to UP to buy vegetables and then went to buy flowering plants and more gardening supplies. Because we like growing stuff. I love flowers but my allergies don’t love them. What the heck, I will have my flowers and there are always antihistamines.
I don’t know what this is called. Photo by CallMeCreation.comWhite rose. Photo by CallMeCreation.comDark red daisies. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
From Wednesday I’ll be having my break and will come back to work on the following Monday (25 October). I have plenty of time to repot my flowers and plant more vegetables.
Soon, I will have a 100 sqm garden, if all goes well.
You see, my mom offered to me a part of her property so I can build my tiny home. It will be 2-bedroom affair (around 60-65 sqm or 646 sq ft, which is around the same size of some condo units in Metro Manila) and it will be a duplex. I will take the upper floor. The construction can begin once the pandemic is over and I told my mom I have a friend (who went to another high school) who is now a contractor who can do this. We also talked about installing solar roof panels that will be hybrid, which means it can be tied to the grid but can run off batteries during power failures. I will also extend the water catchment system to water the garden, which will be at least 100 sqm (1076 ft). I can also have chickens for manure and eggs.
And finally, I can have a small dog again.
My dream of a small homestead is slowly within reach, if all goes well.
With the savings (because I don’t have to buy land anymore), I can finally let go of my old car and buy a new one (not a sedan!) so my daily drive to Makati, once the pandemic is over, will be easier. The hours I spend on the road from Makati to Quezon City pre-pandemic are more than the time I spend driving from Makati to my hometown on a good day. The parking in my future home will also not be a problem–there’s a huge parking lot in front of the property.
I can also rent a small studio in Makati as a crash pad or just rent an airBnB if I need to stay a night or two in Makati when there are late events or during bad weather.
My girls will now also have a chance to grow in a safer and healthier environment. They can take the public transportation without me having to worry about them. They can also ride their bikes to move around. The girls can also play a lot of sports of their choice given that it is within the university campus.
I will be able to join my high school friends in their bike rides around Laguna and Batangas during weekends. I can have a proper mountain bike or road bike since space to store that would no longer be a problem. Driving to Anilao will also be easier because I no longer have to go through South Luzon Expressway.
Because I’m saving all that rent money, I can also save up for a bigger plot of land or farm. Or a piece of land in Anilao.
While I was working late yesterday, the PC kept prompting me to restart because of some updates. Then there was a warning sign there that says my system cannot support Windows 11.
Then I checked…The minimum for Windows 11 as far as Core i5 goes is 8th Gen and as you can see mine is 5th Gen. So that means I only have three more years to run this perfectly working gaming laptop on Windows 10 before Microsoft pulls the plug on the support for its old OS. Then I will have to turn this into a Linux machine. I have three years to decide whether I would want to still run Windows (for seamless integration with my company’s system) so that means I have to buy a new laptop or desktop setup or work again with Linux using this machine. The bad thing here is there are some backend stuff by my company that can only be run on Microsoft Edge. Super annoying.
In three years, hopefully the tight supply of computer chips will no longer be a problem and the supply chain for tech will only a memory.
Angus beef burgers on my stove top gas grill. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Today I just want to do easy food because I’m lazy. After working my butt off on that problematic story I’ve been chasing the entire week, I guess I deserve a lazy day, no?
Mayonnaise makes everything better–June Xie, Delish. Photo by CallMeCreation.comThe burgers were so juicy because they were grilled. They’re smokey and oh so lovely. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My cat seems to agree that we have the license to be lazy today.
Kimchi in her favorite sleeping position. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I went out and bought some medicines from Mercury and I am now inexplicably tired. Maybe because I didn’t take a nap today at midday. Will have an early night tonight.
We are inviting another surge. They’re opening everything up without the proper safety measures. Two years on, we still couldn’t get a proper contact tracing system and accessible testing. We are groping blindly in the dark and we just have to pray that our bodies would be healthy enough to withstand Covid. Even if you’re vaccinated, you can get infected again and again. One journo said the president of one of the Philippines’ largest conglomerates got infected thrice. He is still alive though.
And unvaccinated children are the perfect vectors.
By December-January, we will have another surge by the looks of it.
Meanwhile, an internal memo from CNN Philippines got leaked to Vera Files and got published. Well, good for the editorial team at the network for resisting the orders from the owners (or the real owner). But then the family that owns the network (in name only) is known to be a Marcos crony, but the rumored real owner is a beneficiary of the cronyism of the Marcoses. Very, very close associate of the late dictator.
Knowing some of the editors at CNN, I could very well picture in my head how they would have reacted. One of them took over the subject I used to teach in UP after I quit and I gave her some of my teaching materials and syllabus. Her reaction to this memo would have been priceless and I could hear the invectives she would have thrown around the newsroom.
Some founders of Vera Files are also teaching at my college.
However, CNN Philippines’ viewership is very limited because they’re an English-language channel. The people who should be reached by the truth are the C, D, E markets who comprise the bulk of the Philippine electorate.
Because it is in every dictator’s playbook, ABS-CBN–the one with the widest reach in the country and owned by the Lopezes, one of whom was imprisoned by Ferdinand Marcos–was killed on free TV last year. All the Filipinos can see/watch/hear now are the propaganda of the very Marcos-friendly GMA, the executives of which are Marcos allies. I remember writing the news about one case filed by Imee Marcos more than a decade ago before the SEC, claiming that the shares owned by the Duavits (Gilberto Duavit is the COO of GMA) were just “lent” by the Marcoses to them.
As I said, the real fight is not on social media but at the grassroots level. Those who want change must talk to the people on the streets, in the farms, in the far-flung barangays who do not have access to internet or even cellular phone signal.
My cats investigating the Christmas wreath I bought from Shopee two weeks ago. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The crap that I’ve been buying have been arriving daily. I should stop buying stuff. I really need to get out.
Some of the good purchases I had were the watercolor sets and brushes so the girls would be able to put into practice the stuff they’re learning from Skillshare and Domestika. Twin A today was so busy painting. Good. She is off computer games, unlike her male cousin who has never taken his eyes off his Roblox game.
Twin A’s first watercolor painting exercise today.Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I told her if she practices and gets better at this, I will buy her the more expensive gouache paints so she can level up. She initially wanted to start with gouache painting but I told her she should start first with watercolors, learning how to control her brush, the water, and blending colors. I told her to always bring her sketch notebook and smaller watercolor pad with her so she can practice copying scenes around her so she can practice all the time. I told her I always had a notebook and pen with me in my bag while I was growing up so I can write during my idle moments–one way of practicing my craft. That habit has stuck with me until today. I have several notebooks with me all the time in my bag: one for work and another for my random musings when I don’t want to fiddle with my phone while waiting for my car to be washed, for my turn at the grocery store, or whatever.
I always knew from the beginning that her right brain is more dominant. However, she is overcome with insecurity as she is obscured by her twin, who is more of a left-brain child and articulate.
As a parent, I should nurture their talents and interests. If one is more introverted, I let her be. If one is more extroverted, as Twin I is, then I let her be. It’s about training them to be well-rounded people, with emphasis on their interests and talents.
The tricky balance here is how to keep nurturing them while I grow as a person and as a creative as well. Being a single parent is hard because I do not have anybody else to lean on and help me with the nurturing part. Everything is on me. If they fuck up, it’s 100% on me. I usually have to forego my own interests because their welfare is my priority. I salute mothers who have pulled back on their careers and interests for the sake of their children. It’s only when the children have flown out of the nest did these women pick up their lives. The sad thing here is many years have gone by and little time has been left for their own personal/professional/creative growth.
I wish their children have realized that before their moms became Mom, they were individuals who had their own desires, hopes, dreams.
Why do I blog when this is not even public and not indexed by search engines? Why do I even bother blogging anonymously?
Number one, I need an outlet to express my thoughts that I cannot share on social media. I have limited my FB engagement because it really does something to your brain, especially now that politics is so toxic and divisive. I maintain my Twitter because it is my source of fast news. I use Instagram for shallowness, like following hashtags like #workspaces, #hobonichi #travelersnotebook, #moleskine, etc. LinkedIn is just for work and personal branding.
I have no outlet to express my thoughts and emotions, where I can talk about the mundane and inane things. I sometimes need to practice writing other than business writing. My old school journal is for the things I need to express explicitly, naming names, places, specific things, specific events. Things that aren’t for consumption of people other than me.
I am a very opinionated person and I am expressive but mostly that is about current events and politics. Or about funny things. However, I am never comfortable about airing my personal struggles and dirty linen. I always try to maintain an air of dignity and I also think about the dignity of the other party involved in my dirty laundry.
Second, my blogs are my archive of whatever. My photos, my voice, my record of my daily life. For my kids. When I depart this universe, they will have something to come back to, to hear my voice in my writing and actual audio recording. So that when they miss me, they can still feel that I am with them, just somewhere, taking my grand vacation.
I started keeping journals since I was 10–their age right now. Because I was a diligent journal writer, I became I professional writer. I started publishing in high school–in a nationally circulated magazine in Filipino. I don’t know if Liwayway is still around but I was a published Filipino writer at first but I had always been a bilingual literary writer. I remember writing in one of my journals in high school that I keep journals for my future children. So they will understand how I went through adolescence, that I went through what they are going through. The insecurities, the heartbreaks, the self-doubts…all those raging emotions that a typical teenager go through. At the back of my mind I knew I will have daughters. I don’t know…it was just a gut feel. Even at 15 years old.
Then I started blogging in 2002-2003. I used Geocitiesto create my website and learned HTML codes to build it from scratch. I wrote about my travels. It was hard to keep up with it because building pages with just HTML codes is tedious. Because of the skills I learned from blogging then, I was able to build websites for our online store using Joomla. Then the WYSIWYG blogging tools came into being. I started with Blog-city, then Blogger, Blogspot, Multiply, then settled with WordPress. I remember in 2003-2005, my co-workers and I were reading each other’s blogs because all of us were just ranting about our editor whom we codenamed “Virgin Doll”. We called ourselves by our blog names like Luthien (me), Styar and Crimsonarrows. Then we got into different paths but we still kept in touch via our blogs. Then the rise of social media took over our blogging so that is that.
I couldn’t recover now my old blogs because the hosts became defunct. I tried saving some of the contents of my old blogs via TheWayBackMachine but most were irrecoverable. It’s really unfortunate because I need to use some of the contents for my annulment case.
Tracking my personal growth is easier too as I get to read entries from 10 years ago or older. It was a struggle to blog when I was still with my newspaper then because my life then was super competitive so all my free time was devoted to learning my business–reading books about investing, the stock market, reading all my magazine subscriptions to help me understand global events. When I woke up it’s about news–watching cable news and business channels–and before going to bed it was still news (magazines). When I got into broadcast/online, I found it easier to blog because Internet connection was easier due to the availability of my own mobile internet connection whereas when I was in the newspaper business, the only time I get to go online for personal reasons is when I got home and most of the time my brain was already fried and would rather vege out infront of the screen to watch my anime.
After my breakup with J, I had been blogging religiously for my sanity. I needed to let this all out. I needed to talk to myself by writing about myself for myself. It’s like the exercise that we had during a writing workshop I attended at the Philippine High School for the Arts–the stream of consciousness exercise, which is a literary device employed by writers, like it’s having a monologue to yourself. Aside from developing your own voice, stream of consciousness clears away the cobwebs that clutter a writer’s brain and help it organize the mind for more important writing tasks at hand. As I told my students, a good writer can already organize an outline of her piece in her brain; how to line up the facts, how the story/article will flow and how it will it arrive at the thesis of the piece. A really good writer knows how to edit and re-edit herself, keeping it to the simplest understandable form and being direct to the point. A good writer never stops editing her piece until it goes to the printing press.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, said one becomes an expert after devoting 10,000 hours to that specific task. The successful people have the advantages/resources to have these 10,000 hours. So I am privileged enough to be able to devote time to writing other things so I can practice my craft and not waste my free moments scrolling through social media. I must constantly write, edit, and re-edit my entries so I will not lose my “voice”, how I process my thoughts, how I can write quickly without any outline in my head.
Practice, practice, practice. Read, read, read.
Blogging also helps me write even though my heart is breaking into a million pieces. Writing through tears and pain. It’s very cerebral work and it’s hard to deliver if your mind has already shut down. No one really cares if a writer/journalist is hurting so she still has to write and deliver work. Writing despite all these debilitating circumstances helps a writer conquer emotions and plod along. It also helps in the numbing process.
This is why I still keep on paying for my web hosting year in and year out. It’s all worth the money.
My streaming/podcasting mic, Fifine K670B. Photo CallMeCreation.com
I’ve been playing with this thing the entire night by recording my audio. For less than PHP 2,000 (PHP 1,750 to be exact since I bought this during the 10.10 sale), I was able to score a good USB condenser microphone for my interviews. As I have mentioned before, I will be joining my high school friends in their Youtube series, interviewing people about anything under the sun that interest the kwarentals, or those aged 40 and up. They already ran the teaser last week and then they will interview me next month before my debut in December in time for our high school reunion.
The audio is crisp and picks up my voice really well. There is also a 3.5mm jack at the back of the mic for earphones/headphones monitoring. You know, kinda like what recording artists put on their ears to monitor their own voices so they can easily track if they’re going off-key because the backing music can easily drown out their audio. This is really neat. There is also a converter so I can hook this up to a microphone arm if I don’t want the stand blocking my LED monitors when I’m interviewing or doing podcasts/streams.
The base is heavy and solid so the mic will not topple down. Overall this is value for money.
Duterte and his administration are really afraid of women. For all his misogynistic attitude towards women, deep down he is really scared of us. Look at those who rose up against him: VP Leni Robredo, Sen. Leila de Lima (jailed), Hidilyn Diaz (harassed by government), and Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
He loves to harass and belittle female journalists. It is a scary time to be a journalist in this country. We had been a hotspot for journalist killings for years now (we were the most dangerous place for a journalist next to Iraq for quite some time now) but it has heightened during the reign of Duterte. I am glad I no longer have to report national news and suffer through his Q&A, press conferences with Harry Roque, or even monitor Duterte’s late night ramblings.
“Many Philippine presidents have attacked the press, but only Rodrigo Duterte, of all the presidents, have publicly subscribed to the idea that journalists are fair game for murder,” Varona says.
Because of the dangers we are facing with Duterte’s rise to power, some veterans in the industry like Howie Severino, Glenda Gloria, and Sheila Coronel, called us to a meeting in a secluded restaurant in Quezon City just to talk about forming a guild so that we can protect ourselves and fight back. Sadly, nothing happened after that initial meeting because we were just too damn busy trying to survive our day-to-day work of churning out stories. This was the week I got brutally attacked by government-backed online trolls that even harassed my office in Hong Kong.
I had issues with Maria Ressa and I won’t list them down here and those who had been in the industry long enough know what those are. But I admire her grit and determination to fight this tyrant single-handedly. I had marched alongside them wearing black when they had the march for press freedom in UP.
Since day one of becoming a journalist–since I co-wrote that series on juvenile justice–I knew that every time I publish a story, I have one foot on my grave. I had been threatened with lawsuits before and I had been scared but I pushed on. Being a journalist during the time of Duterte, even if you are not covering him, is a doubly dangerous job. I was told that a powerful government official does not like me because I am vocal about my anti-Duterte stance. And he scolded me and lost his cool on national TV when I was hosting a forum where he was a guest. I was asking a fair question that everyone needed to ask. It was scary but I had to keep my composure. I was told he and other officials boycotted the forum the following year because of me.
I had friends in Reuters publicly lynched by the mob, having their IDs, photos and personal information posted on the Internet, with trolls encouraging the public to inflict physical harm on them and their families. (Upon investigation by some of my other journo friends, my Reuters friends’ personal information was leaked from their records with the National Bureau of Investigation–information that they got whenever we needed clearance to apply for visas or passports). In a country where life is very cheap (you can have somebody killed for only PHP 5,000), those are not empty threats. Their employer had to take them and their families to safehouses until the storm died down. I was so distraught that time that I had to take a break from the Philippines and went to a place where no one spoke English–Taiwan–and took a breather to collect myself for a week. I just didn’t want news from the Philippines and I just had to be away immediately.
But Maria Ressa had to endure conviction, harassment, bankruptcy, and daily mental torture and yet she plodded on. She had to wear bullet-proof vests whenever she goes out. Because it’s no secret Duterte wants her dead.
This administration has demonized us. It’s in every dictator’s playbook–demonize every journalist and create your own propaganda machine and feed your shit to the public that has lost trust on the media. Now you all have this revisionism going on and conspiracy theories that make the maleducated poor believe the lies.
Journalists in South America face drug cartels and the corrupt government officials in cahoots with them, we in Southeast Asia battle despots like Duterte and the Marcoses. Journalists in Russia, China (in HK, that is), and the Philippines face the same thing.
My daughter expressed her interest in becoming a journalist. I told her, anak, you can become whatever you want but I hope you don’t follow my footsteps. You will be penniless and you will get killed.
