Author Archives: admin

It’s the 14th of August

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And we have 14,000 new infections today. Very apt.

To make myself feel better, I tried again the oven and grill feature of my new stove top. Less oily food for us today.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I received some packs of Quorn products from its parent company as part of their relaunch in the Philippines. So for today I baked the vegetarian nuggets while i cooked tamagoyaki on top of the oven.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

After this I removed the pan and replaced it with a wire mesh to grill okra.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I haven’t tried grilling steaks on this gas griller and I don’t want to ruin a perfectly seasoned steak. Not yet anyway. But I tried grilling burgers on it last week.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

It has been quite a while since my meals have become irregular. Too much work. But it was last week when I realized that I had consistently been eating less in terms of serving and frequency. Only twice a day. I tried fasting yesterday with only milk as my source of nutrition (breakfast). By 4 pm I gave up. I couldn’t go without food. I needed to eat, especially after writing a 1,500-word article.

So if I should attempt again to fast, I should do it on a weekend and not when I am pressured to write epics. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I am distracting myself with cooking because right now I want to kill the DOH secretary. I don’t want to be stressed today with news about him and the COA report. And the mass resignation of healthcare workers.

Meanwhile, the lockdown may be extended given the steady rise in the number of new cases and hospitals operating at maximum capacity. A lot of people are going hungry again. I am in touch with one of the community pantry organizers here and they are now distributing food packs to jeep and tricycle drivers. I’ll see if I can give them a hand during my work leave.

We’re so f*cked

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This lockdown will never end and this Delta variant is just getting started. I’m scared for my children as no vaccine has been allowed for those aged 18 and below. Even if I’m already fully vaccinated, I can still carry the virus back home when I’m buying supplies outside. I haven’t gone out since Thursday last week or 8 days. My freezer is holding up so I really don’t have to buy meat but I have gone low on vegetables. I have to brave it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Dept of Health Secretary Duque is going straight to hell. He has to answer a lot of questions…missing funds, unpaid hazard pay and allowances to healthcare workers, missing PhilHealth money…He is Satan’s little worker. He’s going straight to hell.

According to Commission on Audit (COA), DOH spent PHP 700,000 (USD 13,868) for four laptops. I wonder what kind of rocket DOH was launching to require them to buy a laptop costing PHP 175,000 (USD 3,467) each.

When I was still reporting on national issues, I used COA reports during my slow news days to investigate how each line agency or Congress is spending its budget. I once wrote about congressmen spending most of their pork barrel on waiting sheds and basketball courts that do not exist. When I was doing the investigative reports on the Napoles pork barrel scam, I used COA reports to follow the money and I haunted the Securities and Exchange Commission to get the General Information Statements of the NGOs that were supposedly the recipients of the pork barrel funds.

PhilHealth not paying hospitals is already crippling the country’s healthcare system. A lot of hospitals are going belly-up and many more will become crippled and may have to close down if this goes on. I wrote a long-form article last year regarding this. As some of my sources said, private hospitals outside Metro Manila have bigger exposure to Philhealth compared to those in Metro Manila as the percentage of privately insured patients and out-of-pocket payers is higher in the country’s capital compared to the provinces. This is dangerous since there is a dearth of public and private hospitals in the provinces and if you have a raging pandemic, it’s like you have already doomed the population that lives outside Imperial Manila.

I was supposed to write something related to this for a local news outfit but the lockdowns and my lack of free time for other things outside my day job have hampered me from doing this. This kind of reportage requires old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism—it involves poring over voluminous public records and documents that could only be provided by sources. Clandestine meetings with sources. Working as an independent journalist on output-basis arrangement with a news agency is not feasible unless the journalist is under a grant. Investigative stories should be done by news outfits that can dedicate a team for this, which we did before. It’s expensive and a lot of work. The news desk will also be understaffed because it will lose people who can write and edit daily spot stories because these people will have to dedicate their waking hours to the project.

So I can’t blame newspapers, TV networks, and online news outfits for not being able to build and retain a special team to tackle stuff like this. They are caught up with the day-to-day production of news stories as they fight for eyeballs and ad revenues. And this country is not like Singapore where nothing happens–where trivial things get front page treatment. Our news cycle is faster than other markets–about two weeks max–because this country is just too fucked up, too many things happening. I remember going through and reporting on a civil war, major earthquake, and earth’s strongest typhoon on record, all of which happened in just three months.

So it is up to the special dedicated investigative journalists to put these corruption stories to the spotlight.

All The President’s Men and Spotlight will not happen if not for them.

How to be brave

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I’ve talked to two HR managers today–two cousins of mine who works and worked in global companies–for career advice.

It has been weighing on my mind for months and months. Both of them gave me some kind of solution to my predicament, but each gave me a different approach. So I’ll sleep on it and if I still feel the same tomorrow, then I roll into action.

But right now I’m starting to get a bit… apprehensive. What if there’s really no room for me to maneuver? What if the solution is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire?

How to be brave?

I’ve taken so many risks in my life and I’ve been strong because I have no other choice because I’m a single parent. But I don’t know if I am brave or just foolish.

Lord, just catch me when I fall.

Most powerful song

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This one song had a profound effect on me, especially the lines:

“Years go by, will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand?
Years go by, if I’m stripped of my beauty and the orange clouds raining in my head
Years go by, will I choke on my tears ’til, finally there is nothing left
One more casualty, you know we’re too easy, easy, easy“

Because of this song, I promised myself I will not waste away my years and end up at 65 years old, asking myself where has my life gone? It was 2016. I told the the father of my kids about me filing an annulment case. Because of these most powerful lines:

…I said sometimes I hear my voice
I hear my voice, I hear my voice, and it’s been here
Silent all these years. I’ve been here silent all these years
Silent all these, silent all these years

After I got off that horrible situation, I thought I found “somebody else to understand” me. Nope. This need for some kind of understanding was exploited. And landed me in a situation where “I choked on my tears ’til finally there is nothing left.”

I’m still trying to recover. I’m still trying to find my voice because staying silent through the years, when I gave more energy than I received, is like being disembowelled. I died but I kept on living.

Tori Amos, you do not have any idea how much your song changed me.

The political economy of media

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When I was still teaching in UP, I always introduce my students to the concept of political economy of media in real world settings. Not the kind that you read in textbooks or essays of academics. I tell them how the day-to-day decisions in the newsroom are affected by this. It’s about what story gets killed because the newspaper/TV network’s sacred cows would be offended. Or a real estate company would threaten the advertising department with an ad pullout if the article written by a supposedly independent-minded journalist is slanted differently. You have your ideals as a reporter and an editor but then the powers that be have a different view. As my ex-boss said before, it’s an everyday battle. You keep pushing the envelope; testing how far your sense of justice and fairness can get you.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer was the first newspaper I wrote for. I had been writing for them when I was still in college, which spilled over to my first few months as a fresh grad research assistant. It was born when the country was about to mount an uprising against dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It was founded by Eugenia “Eggie” Apostol, who led Mr and Ms, an innocent-looking magazine that contained anti-dictatorship articles, subversive stories that people like my parents were consuming like mad during the time all media outfits not under Marcos’ thumb are shut down (we had mountains of those magazines at the back of our house, together with Malaya).

It was a newspaper that defied the government when it was wrong. It fought for what was right. It was THE newspaper after Manila Times never recovered its footing after Chino Roces got imprisoned by Marcos and had to sell his newspaper. After some years, Eggie Apostol stepped down and Letty Jimenez-Magsanoc took the reins. She was an equally tough lady who faced a threat of closure by Joseph Estrada when his own presidency was threatened after scandal after scandal was uncovered (which led to another revolt against a sitting president). Manila Times under Lisa Gokongwei did not survive the economic pressures from Estrada after my friend wrote that famous “unwitting ninong” article about the insider trading involving BW Resources and the president. Gokongwei had to sell the Times to an Estrada crony.

Inquirer was the first newspaper that stumbled upon one of the biggest corruption stories of the decade, if not decades, which started with a simple kidnapping case filed with the National Bureau of Investigation around 2012-2013. (I also picked up this “pork barrel” scandal and was part of the investigative team for my own news organization that focused on this and our stories competed and complemented the stories produced by the Inquirer). That newspaper was instrumental for sending three senators ALMOST to prison (the courts have overturned whatever progress we had, after Duterte came into power because crooks gotta band together).

Now I feel that the Inquirer is already a puppet newspaper. It has folded under the pressure from some bit players in that pork barrel scam. The pressure though may not just be coming from one Melo del Prado but from some more sinister quarters of Duterte’s world. I don’t know; it normally wouldn’t succumb to such small fry. But then Duterte has already crippled the owners, the Prietos, when he came into power and there was a point that Ramon Ang, the president and CEO of San Miguel Corp, was about to take over the newspaper because financially they couldn’t cope anymore.

And here is Prof. La Vina’s take on the whole thing:

Shattered

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Yesterday I died, tomorrow’s bleeding
Fall into your sunlight
The future’s open wide, beyond believing
To know why hope dies
And losing what was found, a world so hollow
Suspended in a compromise
But the silence of this sound is soon to follow
But somehow sundown

And finding answers is forgetting all of the
Questions we call home
Passing the graves of the unknown

As reason clouds my eyes with splendor fading
Illusions of the sunlight
A reflection of a lie will keep me waiting
with love gone for so long

And this day’s ending is the proof of time
killing all the faith I know
Knowing that faith is all I hold

And I’ve lost who I am, and I can’t understand
Why my heart is so broken, rejecting your love
Without, love gone wrong; lifeless words carry on
But I know, all i know is that the end’s beginning
Who I am from the start, take me home to my heart
Let me go and I will run, I will not be silent
All this time spent in vain; wasted years wasted gain
All is lost but hope remains and this war’s not over
There’s a light, there’s a sun taking all these shattered ones
To the place we belong, and his love will conquer all

Yesterday I died, tomorrow’s bleeding
Fall into your sunlight

Been swimming in David Hodges (including Trading Yesterday, Arrows to Athens) songs the past 48 hours. I don’t know why. I haven’t listened to him in years. Maybe because he has been very apt for the past few days.

It’s Monday again; it’s such a struggle to be productive but against all odds I was. There was a “little” mishap during today’s press conference not of my doing (never trust other people to do their jobs well) but I still managed to salvage what could be salvaged and still end up triumphant. But I ended up rushing a time-sensitive story, rushing to publish ahead of competition. I hedged an article related to this one last week, which was a good call since today could have gone another way. My 20-year experience always gets tested in situations like these.

To calm my frayed nerves. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I had to grab one bottle of Smirnoff to calm me down after the hectic day I’ve had. I had to finish another very long article today that was already overdue while trying to rush that time-sensitive story. And my editing jobs had piled up on me from last Friday.

All I wanted was to float today.

I wanted to process so many things today but life gets in the way.

Like you know, you can’t stop the world from turning just because yours already stopped but your children’s worlds continue to move on. You cannot die even if you’re already dead because your children need to go on living. You cannot afford to be suspended in air because your children need you. You have no choice but to be strong when you just want to buckle and give in. Because you’re tired of fighting. But fight you must, for your children.

Thus is the life of a solo parent. You carry the weight of the world and that is yours alone to bear.