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.

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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. 🤦🏻‍♀️

So I have this friend (the one who coined the term “human appliance”) who ranted to me yesterday that her surviving child, her four-year-old son, is being hurt by the “other woman”–the same one who got pregnant by her husband (now ex-husband but still legally married).

Wait whut, you say.

Again, again, again. So I wrote here last year—I think—about this friend, let’s call her N, who lost her daughter due to seizures since hospitals brimming with Covid cases couldn’t admit her child to the point that she was having seizures in the hospital parking lot and that cut off oxygen to her brain and rendered her brain dead. Her (ex) husband is a reporter not directly under me since he writes for a different title but sometimes I get to manage him, depending on circumstances. I knew them from way back, during our newspaper days.

Anyway, the (ex) husband has been playing around and gotten a young reporter pregnant and there you go…Fast-forward to the current situation, the father has joint custody of the boy and he has the child on weekends. Now the boy—a child that has yet to have acquire/learn malice—told his mom that Tita Y (the “other woman” that his father is now living with; the boy still doesn’t know the truth) has been hurting him. The child has been telling his playmates that Tita Y always hurts him.

And the father is siding with the abuser, gaslighting his legal wife by saying she is teaching their son how to lie.

OMG!!! The child is four years old! He is so innocent! The fact that this friend is allowing the father to have access to their son is evidence that she is being fair and has no motivation to teach her son to lie. What for?

I told her to talk to her lawyer and ask for a court order to keep full custody of the child.

Today she ranted again that she is asking for child support and she didn’t get any positive response. The father always has some excuse.

I told N that do not expect, or keep your expectations low to keep your sanity. Your mental health is more important and squeezing blood out of stone will only anger you and will keep you from moving on. Since he is not giving financial support, you have 100% right to keep the child from seeing the father. Besides, the boy is also being abused by the mistress. “Remember, there is no law in the Philippines that would punish a parent who does not give child support. Better keep your son with you before he forms core memories that involved physical abuse from the mistress. That will surely wound him for the rest of his life,” I told her.

I also told her to be 100% financially independent because life is unfair to solo mothers. Dead-beat fathers will remain so until the day they die. Besides, the father is not doing well at work; I just received this morning the performance metrics of the editorial department for APAC and I saw his name in yellow highlight, which was a warning.

I told N that I had always been financially independent so breaking away didn’t hurt my pocket that much. I had just transferred houses—but there was minimal disruption since the running of household was still the same as the ex didn’t have any contribution to child-rearing, aside from zero financial support, even when we were still figuratively under one roof (but he was seldom there anyway).

“You are capable of earning as much as you did before, or even more than your ex. Go build yourself up again. Dream again,” I said. “The best revenge is us living the best life we can.”

“Thank you, CallMeCreation. Seriously, I need someone to verbalize things that I already know that I should do but because I’m in the denial stage, I find it difficult to do,” N said.

Dream again, I urged her. My tiny house was just a doodle on my sketchpad while I was building a dream. The what if…Because I was hurting so much from my last relationship that I now regret. Who knew that a year and a half later it would become a real house? This house helped me build my life again, I told her. Build yours.

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And my daughter, Twin I, forgot her art kit this morning so I was forced to drive to their school this morning and take it to her. 🤦‍♀️

Which was in a way good because it forced me to work earlier than usual. I started sending emails to people, chatting with people on multiple messaging apps (setting up appointments), and do some admin work. I received a rejection email *sigh* so I must scrounge for more people to interview. I only had four stories in September—which was excusable given the shit I went through the last two months. But this time I need to pick up the slack and work doubly hard. I already have two floating appointments in Singapore and I still don’t know yet whether it’s safe for me to fly out again. I need to meet our oncologist first next week so I would know if we are already cleared from her cancer watchlist or not.

Right now I’m working overtime as I am live editing a story from Dubai about a Malaysian regulatory issue. The reporter is having a hard time understanding what the story is about since he is from Dubai. I have a long night ahead of me.

I’ve been holding back on writing about Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu’s populist handling of the fragile situation with the Palestinians and Gaza because it hurts my brain. It’s a complicated thing, this decades-old Israel-Palestine conflict. It sprung from colonialism, with the British meddling with Middle Eastern affairs—a case of colonizers making pawns of everyone. Then it spiraled down from there.

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I read one opinion piece that boldly declared that Netanyahu has to go. Another news article said that an ex-Israeli prime minister has openly criticized Netanyahu, who has ultimately delivered the Israelis onto Hamas’ hands with his kind of leadership.

“On one level, Israelis are paying the price for years of hubris, during which our governments and many ordinary Israelis felt we were so much stronger than the Palestinians, that we could just ignore them. There is much to criticize about the way Israel has abandoned the attempt to make peace with the Palestinians and has held for decades millions of Palestinians under occupation…”

Yuval Noah Harari for the Washington Post

What hurts my brain here is that I have a good friend who is a…let’s say a Zionist Christian zealot who exults Israel so much, not taking into consideration that whatever is happening in that part of the world is political in nature, not religious in the sense “it is what God wants” kind of situation. If I were younger, I would have engaged her in an intellectual tussle over this. But age and wisdom told me not to waste my breath.

“The real explanation for Israel’s dysfunction is populism rather than any alleged immorality. For many years, Israel has been governed by a populist strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a public-relations genius but an incompetent prime minister. He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself…”

Harari for the Washington Post

This, however, does not justify what Hamas has done and what Hamas is doing. They’re no different from al-Qaida, Abu Sayyaf and the Taliban. Terrorists are terrorists.

But destroying Palestinians out of existence is not self-defense. It’s genocide, not much different from what the Nazi did to the Jews in Europe.

Look at what US has done to Iraq in the guise of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction. Now that part of the world is overrun by extremists. Look at what US did to Afghanistan. Netanyahu’s invasion of Gaza is not that different.

Violence to counter violence will cause the world to implode. We are still trying to contain the fires in Ukraine and here we are, inflaming another war.

“The government was repeatedly warned by its own security forces and by numerous experts that its policies were endangering Israel and eroding Israeli deterrence at a time of mounting external threats…”

Harari, The Washington Post

Always, it’s the ordinary citizens who are the losers in this game of chess among megalomaniacs.

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Beauty fades, lust dampens and what will be left?

Nothing.

What if you settled (i.e. get married) with somebody just because you don’t want to be alone but don’t have anything in common, like a shared love for something like poetry or if you don’t talk about ideas or have genuine friendship and the only thing that binds you to this person is sex? You’ll be stuck forever with someone whom you cannot talk to for days on end. All your life. To the end of your days…

This has been one thing that my friends and I were not able to tackle during our dinner last week. Fairy gaymother K has a bf who is 15 years his junior. There’s this huge generation gap and it becomes apparent when his bf sends him memes (and the bf can spend hours just scrolling through memes) and K couldn’t understand the humor in it, the bf gets upset. Our generation didn’t grow up with memes, hence, our lack of appreciation for such. Heck, our TVs then didn’t have remote controls and we physically turn the external antenna outside our homes to get good reception!

Both of them are now in Singapore for business (for fairy gaymother K) and leisure (the bf). It’s the bf’s first trip abroad so he wants to go to 1) Universal Studios, 2) Singapore Zoo, 3) Night Safari, 4) Merlion etc etc. Just thinking about it makes K exhausted. We told him he has to accommodate his bf’s wishes however distasteful or exhausting it is for him. “You’ve got to give him that. You’re the more mature one,” one friend said.

Our generation or our circle of friends, if we were to take a trip together, we would be 1) going to museums and discuss the latest exhibit; 2) backpacking our way by train from Thailand to Laos/Cambodia (which K and B did a few years ago); 3) attending a jazz music-fest or watching a dance performance; 4) enroll in one-time pottery-making class just for the heck of it; 5) sneak in a class in some university just for kicks.

We were talking about M’s online course about public policy with Harvard U; Mama K’s last marathon in Germany (her next one is NY or Boston Marathon); fairy gaymother K’s dance classes; and my plan to take up data analytics courses. We couldn’t stop talking; we only had to stop because the restaurant was already closing down.

This just illustrates that wavelengths matter in relationships. Beauty and lust die, what are left are the conversations and the friendship. If I don’t have that, better I remain single than settle for somebody substandard who could not even speak the same language as I do, metaphorically. Or literally, like writing or posting on social media using jejemon language. 🤦🏻‍♀️

How is it possible that the only thing I did on Sunday was sleep? I only woke up to cook then slept, then woke up at 2 pm to go to church and then slept again. It’s now 1:55 am, was forced to wake up to let Sushi out of the room.

It’s just one cetirizine tablet but I was knocked out cold.