After a rough day yesterday, recovering from a hangover while editing back-to-back, my body was able to bounce back quickly with good sleep. I love my bed. ❤️

Because of that, I was able to cook breakfast for my brood: Katsu curry rice and Japanese curry omelette rice bowl for me.

After cleaning up, I retreated to my dimly lit, airconditioned room to escape the oppressive heat. Summer is really upon us. And it’s just March. 🫠And I melted. I woke up at almost 3 pm to spend money 😂

My best friend’s mom gave me a housewarming gift, which I will use to buy a loveseat from Ikea. My kids and I piled up in my car and to eat xiao long bao and go furniture shopping.

My kids finally agreed on the model we will get after testing some couches/arm chairs. We couldn’t buy it yet because it won’t fit in the car and we don’t have anywhere to put it yet. I think I’ll have it delivered next month after I come back from Singapore.

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If there’s one defining song that represents R.E.M. for me, it’s this song, Everybody Hurts. Whenever I get so beat up by life, I go and listen to this song.

It’s just like Michael Stipe is comforting me, telling me that it’s going to be ok even if it’s not right now. It’s like, it’s all right to cry.

Like yesterday. I was feeling so blue for some reason or another and I really, really needed to sing to shake off the sadness that was overcoming me. Then I remembered R.E.M. and this song.

Everybody cries.

Sometimes everything is wrong.

I’m at Poblacion, Makati. I’m so wrecked.

What did they even put into those pitchers?!

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I woke up to this, my head spinning. My sis in law recorded my snoring. I don’t remember taking a shower before crashing into bed but SIL said I did.

I was so hammered that I showered while blacking out???

Well, my HK colleague and I started eating appetizers at 6 pm but I wasn’t drinking that much. Some friends of my colleague arrived and my SIL followed. That’s probably when the sports bar decided to spike our drinks with higher alcohol content so my colleague would shut up and go home. He was already loud and offensive to the other people at the nearby table.

But they decided to jump to a nearby KTV bar. SIL and I excused ourselves, saying I still have edits the following day (today), which is true. It was only when SIL and I arrived at our hotel when the alcohol hit me.

At least I managed to be clean before I lost consciousness.

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Anyway, one of the errands I did yesterday was to get the requirements for enrollment in my kids’ junior high. Unfortunately, they didn’t qualify for the second screening at my high school. My school’s criteria during the pandemic years may be weird because even some of those who got past the Philippine Science High School first screening also didn’t get in. I think they based it on household income and whether the applicants are UP employee dependents (everyone knows there is preference for them as part of the fringe benefits of working for the university).

During my time, our equalizer was just the entrance exam. But since mass testing/exams were prohibited until 2023, my high school’s screening method was based on grades and family background (I think). If you’re from a lower income family and have come from a public school with high grades, your chances are higher. The online schooling also hurt our chances because some schools have relaxed their grading standards to accommodate the kids who have difficulties with online school. Some schools even implemented a “no failure” rule. My kids’ school didn’t implement that so my girls didn’t get 100 in their subjects but their general averages are above 90. The grades were based on merit and what is just fair.

This also pissed my bro because his youngest son also didn’t get past first screening, which was weird because he is an honor student and a dependent of a UP faculty.

So anyway, I will enroll my kids in this school that has a track record of producing UP passers. They also have good extra curricular and sports programs. I may be forking out more for tuition (versus zero tuition in my high school and my kids’ current school) but it’s ok. My kids vowed that they would study hard in junior and senior high to make up for not passing my high school’s screening.

Ever since they started to mature physically, their attitudes have also changed. They have become more responsible and they are now my regular dishwashers and they do their own laundry. They also fold and put away our clean laundry do other chores like cat litter cleaning daily. They’re always proud to report to me that they topped their exams in major subjects, their projects, etc. They do their own reviewers and study on their own without me having to coax them. Their averages are 95. They do their Kumon exercises regularly, without me having to nag them.

I’m blessed with good kids. I still cannot forgive myself for choosing an asshole partner over them.

I believe what I’m doing is the best for my kids. And they’re going to have a chance to grow up in a cleaner and more relaxed environment like this:

My contractor sent me photos of the loft beds that I’m having custom made in a workshop somewhere in my hometown.

The woman who inspired me to be a frontwoman of a band. 😂 The woman who wrote the soundtrack of my life, especially the very angry and apt You Ought To Know (which I loved singing these past 2.5 years).

I will be watching. I had asked my bestfriend to come with me but she said, pass, since she spent too much already on Kpop concerts. Still about to ask some friends who equally loved Alanis in the 1990s.

If I can’t rope somebody to come with me, who cares? I will watch alone as I did in 1997 when GooGoo Dolls came. ❤️

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For posterity’s sake, I’m posting this photo of my bed, to remind me how cozy it is. I would soon have to dismantle this. Everything.

Got a long drive tomorrow to my hometown to issue another check to my contractor and then do some errands (internet connection, blah blah), be interviewed by a group of students for their project (for a course that I didn’t take in college), lunch with bestfriend, then drive back to Makati to have drinks with colleagues from our HK office. Because I knew I will be exhausted by the end of it all, I booked an overnight stay in one of the hotels within the vicinity where we’re supposed to have dinner and drinks. I think my sis in law will hitch a ride with me and stay at the hotel since she’s attending this event at Rustan’s Makati.

Good thing I got one story published today. Less pressure for me in terms of story production but I still have to edit stuff in between all these things. I wonder how, with my full schedule of non-work related things. 😬

Damn if you do, damn if you don’t. If the US Fed raises key rates by 50 basis points, heaven knows how many more banks will fold up. If it doesn’t, then it looses credibility and inflation could not be reined in. In any case, the US Fed is already f*cked as it has been for quite a while behind the curve–the favorite term spewed by central bankers in all my years as a banking reporter. The era of cheap money has overstayed its welcome and has skewed the financial markets, causing overblown valuations in the venture capital and private equity spaces, for example. Because of this, the US Fed has little room to maneuver.

Some pundits have weighed in by saying that the US Fed is highly likely to keep its eye on the road and will not allow the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank–and the write off of USD 17bn worth of Credit Suisse AT1 bonds after the UBS takeover–to deter it from taming the raging inflation.

“(The write-off) may impact investor’s views of the bonds and how much they are willing to pay for them.”

Elisabeth Rudman, global head of financial institutions at DBRS Morningstar to CNBC

This loss of market confidence will drive the cost of funding for banks even higher.

Markets are all about perception and sense of stability. Authorities come out with pronouncements that they hope will calm the markets = perception. Bond prices, stock market, alternative assets…

Speaking of which, I just finished writing an article about alternative asset investing, which looks very attractive to me right now. Alternative assets have been tokenized and digitized to make them more tradeable (liquid) and affordable (in smaller chunks of securities) instead of buying a whole Banksy art worth USD 100,000, which is out of reach for ordinary retail investors like me. Instead of buying very rare wines and whiskey by the bottle, I can have a piece of it by holding a certificate that says I partly own that rare wine/spirit stashed somewhere in the vaults of a Swiss bank (securitize). Instead of holding a piece of paper, I hold a token that I can trade on a digital platform.

And it is a legit asset class. The Harvard Business Review said that in 2020, about half of the portfolio of the ultra-high-net-worth investors (worth USD 30m and up) are comprised of alternative assets.

Anyway, gotta sleep. I have a big interview tomorrow with a global aviation company.

Series of bad decisions and bad luck brought Credit Suisse to this situation. Ah well, there is no honor among them anyway. While some regions within APAC would not be that affected as CS hasn’t been active in recent years (e.g. India), this could spell some changes in Southeast Asia.

Anyway, this mega-deal is out of my purview so I’m not beating myself up for missing this. Such move happened during the weekend when markets were sleeping.

But anything could go wrong you know, until a deal is signed.

Still haven’t gotten in touch with any of them. They could still be in limbo.

Let’s see what happens in the next few days.

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Suzume 凉芽 no Tojimari

My friend L and I watched this earlier tonight with my girls at UP Town Center. L and I sort of made a pact that we would watch all the anime shown in local cinemas. Through the years we swapped copies of anime (movies or series) across media centers, coffee shops, or wherever we can set our laptops down to copy each other’s hard drives. We fangirled at the cast of the live action movie of Rurouni Kenshin when they were here to grace the Philippine premiere in 2014. I was already on terminal leave with my old TV network but I still volunteered to cover the event because I was a fan. I had an all-access pass as an erstwhile entertainment journalist just for this three-day event.

Anyway, L and I last watched a movie together was in… 2019??? It was a Mokoto Shinkai movie as well, Weathering With You. That movie made me tear up a bit at the scene when the the main adult in the movie supported the main protagonist in his quest to free the female protagonist from the bonds of being a sort of shrine maiden who has been sacrificed for the good of mankind. Suga (the crazy detective, the main adult that has not adulted at all) said he understood Hodaka’s desperation to hear a loved one’s voice again and will do everything to be able to hear it again. At that moment I was in a relationship that I thought was steady and good. But at the back of my mind I knew if I was put in the same position as Suga and Hodaka, I would be desolate when I know I could never hear or reach that loved one forever.

Well, this blog knows the rest of what happened to me.

But I digress.

In Suzume, I was moved by the scene where Suzume finally had closure 12 years after her mother died/disappeared following the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011. For years she never understood and accepted the death of her mother, along with 20,000 people who never got home on 11 March 2011. Suzume herself was half-living, half-dead while she looked for her mother, roaming around the apocalyptic landscape. She always told herself that she had to find mama because mama would be worried and would be looking for her. She was half-frozen when her aunt found her hugging the wooden chair her mama made for her.

I also caught something in my throat during the scene where Suzume’s aunt and Suzume had a shouting match, unleashing 12 years’ worth of pent-up fury, for being forced to have each other because of the difficult circumstances. “Give me back those 10 years I lost!” shouted Tamaki.

I felt that. It’s not easy to be a single parent, whether it’s your own child or not. Your child is your burden alone. Only love gives you the strength to carry on; the road is very difficult and sometimes you just want to give up but you have no choice but to go on and move forward.

Hence the kanji 凉芽 for suzume, with 凉 = sadness/sorrow/grief and 芽 = to sprout/the beginning of something.

It’s about your personal grief and again the sorrow that permeates over the places that had been destroyed and became desolate. All the memories of people who never got home or saw their loved ones again.

Suzume 凉芽 = moving forward from grief.

Finding closure to start a new beginning.

How very apt.

It’s like the hardships of more than two years will be culminating into this event in May, opening this new life that I will be building in my new house with my children.

Suzume 凉芽 = from sorrow to moving on

I’m a bit lost.

I don’t know, I’m a bit overwhelmed these days. I have mixed emotions about our big move.

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Yesterday, my girls and I had a late afternoon walk to savor the cooler temperature. Metro Manila is turning into an oven nowadays but here in my hometown it’s just right.

We walked some more to go outside the university campus to buy school supplies for their school project. I swear it’s always easier to buy school stuff here than back in QC because that means traveling to a mall to a National Bookstore branch. Small shops here are super accessible. They may not carry the whole range of stuff people may or may not need but they cover the basics. I don’t have to drive to get them and I survived my school years with just the likes of them catering to my needs. I just walked. If I needed Japanese paper for some school art project, I just run to those stores. No need to bother my parents. In my current setup (in past 7 years), I always have to drive at the last minute for school supplies/project materials because stores like these are concentrated in commercial centers like malls or within universities so I still need to drive. Or if we have time, I ask Ate C to buy in the next barangay where an Ansons store is located.

Anyway, after that school chore is done, we walked to a small restaurant where we had dinner with my bro’s family.