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.

I have no motivation to get out of bed. I love mornings in my bedroom.

Umm, but it’s laundry day today. My cleaning lady will pick up the laundry and do her thing downstairs. I needed to open the door for her.

Then I realized that we don’t use the couches because it’s full of cat hair. I changed the covers and et voila! It’s already Christmas in this tiny house.

Sana masaya ka na, nakuha mo na ang gusto mo. Gustong-gusto ko na magdusa ka pero, wala eh, pinalad ka. Kahit kulang-kulang ka.

Gusto ko sana ipaghiganti ako ng tadhana, kaso hindi ako pinagpala. Gusto ko sana maramdaman mo kahit kalahati ng sakit na naranasan ko, pero meron talagang mga tao na pinagpapala at kakampi ng langit. Meron namang mga tao na laging kasama ng pighati. Ako yun.

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It has been sending me signals that its life is about to end. Two weeks ago, it wasn’t powering up after sleep or shut down. I opened it up to check if the power supply got fried or the battery is already bloated. Then like its temperamental original owner, it would choose to power up and function normally when it decides to play nice. So this laptop and I were playing some kind of game and it would choose to not cooperate during an important moment.

Because of this, I never turned off this laptop and have Spotify play sleep music in the background.

But after we came back from Manila yesterday, the laptop wouldn’t power up again even though the indicator light is showing signs of life. I brought it to the PC repair shop to check if it still can be resurrected.

Then it powered up again, like it’s telling the repair guy I am a liar and it’s working fine. I got charged PhP 1,300 for some thing that he replaced that I didn’t really remember. I have a strong feeling I was scammed. When I got home, it wouldn’t work. Brought it back, the guy said the charger is shot. I went to another PC shop to buy a universal charger, but when we tried, it wouldn’t work. The guy said, it’s beyond power supply.

UPDATE: See? The bastard is working smoothly again. What’s his deal?!

I then asked for a quote for a mini PC tower based on the components I chose from another shop. Ryzen 7 5700G, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD, Gigabyte mobo (should be Wifi 6), etc…and oh, a mini-ITX casing.

This would be around PHP 36,700, without Win 11 yet. It could be 3k cheaper if I changed Ryzen 7 to Ryzen 5. I don’t play pc games that much so Ryzen 5 will do. I just needed something that is fast enough and can support all the progams I am running all at the same time, all the time. I guess it would be 10k more expensive with the OS installed.

My dilemma is this is almost as expensive as a Lenovo E16, which is already powered by Ryzen 5 7530U and I get to have a third screen of about 16″.

UPDATE: The Cool Master mini ITX case has its own 850w power supply, so that will shave 7k from my total cost. And if I go with Ryzen 5, I have 10k worth of savings, which could go to Win 11!

But it hurts my brain right now that I need to fork a huge amount when I’m still not done with my daughter’s illness.

I could use my underpowered but more portable Lenovo in the meantime…but it irritates me because it’s slower and it doesn’t have an ethernet port so video calls aren’t as snappy because I rely on wifi for connectivity. And that is meant only for working on the go, not as a desktop replacement.

I can’t spend for my wants, not until I am sure we won’t be needing chemotherapy/we are cleared by our oncologist.

Meanwhile, I bought additional RAM sticks for my girls and installed them because sometimes their PCs become laggy (Chrome is such a power hog).

I ended up cooking dinner late because I upgraded my girls’ RAM and cleaned the inside for better airflow. What’s the quickest to cook? This 👇

I have to think deeply about this PC issue. If only the Acer would stick around for a bit longer, then I wouldn’t feel guilty about spending on my wants because at the back of my mind I need to reserve my money for Twin A’s medical expenses.