I’m sick.
I have a million things on my plate but here I am, sniffling and coughing. My lungs hurt. I have a presentation to the commercial team, a press briefing, an interview with a freelancer tomorrow, and other things that I keep losing track of in my emails.
And I was fighting with my APAC boss this afternoon.
I just want to sleep. Rest.
I can’t drive this weekend to check my house.
I feel an asthma attack coming in a few hours.
There’s this tug-of-war inside of me that puts me in this difficult position.
I love what I’m doing as a journalist and editor. I like to mentor others. I love picking the brains of executives and learn a lot of things, about sectors or niche areas that I don’t normally encounter—things like sustainable aviation fuels and the feedstock for those. Just today, the exec I was interviewing said our conversation is thought-provoking because I asked things that he has not even thought about. Now that I sparked an idea, he has to delve into these things more closely, like vertical integration of some businesses or some strategies for the horizontals.
The thing is I don’t like my company’s parent company. This is the difficulty when you get acquired; you have no say about the changes and this is not what you have signed up for when you first joined the company. The system has gone bad, which is why I lose people and it’s hard to hire.
I saw a job ad on LinkedIn that matches my qualifications and it’s mid-senior level and completely remote, in the sense I can work anywhere in Asia. It also has regional travels. While I can do the communication campaigns and strategy, it’s not exactly the thing I love to do. It’s not an issue of comfort level since I know I can do it. It’s just that my heart is not into it.
And life is too short to be doing things that you don’t like or love.
My ex-boss here in local media left the industry to head a department of one institution and thought he could wing it with his MBA. But he didn’t like what he was doing and some feedback I got from other people who have worked with him indicated that he messed up. So now he wants to go back to our industry but senior level positions are rare. VERY rare. I’m afraid of turning into what he has become–that I will mess up because I don’t like what I’m doing. That I got out of the frying pan and went straight into the fire.
Now that I’m interviewing candidates for the job openings under my team, I am sensitive to whether the candidates just want to escape the current employment or they genuinely like or are interested in covering what we cover. One candidate I interviewed just wants to come back to Singapore after finishing her master’s degree in broadcasting and film production. I asked her, how can she reconcile that fact that what we do is very different from what she pursued for her higher degree? She said she learned now that broadcasting and film will not feed her because that industry is unstable. I immediately put her in the bottom of the pile because what we do is very difficult and if she doesn’t like it, she will have difficulty staying afloat. Chances are she will quit in 6 months. She will just use us as her ticket to come back to Singapore.
Another candidate just wants to get out of her current company because I heard rumors about that media entity that they’re not that great, to put it mildly.
That will be the same for me when I apply for this job posting on LinkedIn. My heart will not be into it as I’m just looking for a way to escape the annoying parent company. It will show during my prospective interviews. So basically I would be wasting my time and the hiring company’s time.
So I don’t know.
But this stream of consciousness I’m doing—THIS—verbalizing it is making things a bit clearer. The more I am writing about this now, the more that my heart says I pass up this job opportunity because it is not yet THE ONE.
I know being choosy has risks, especially that I’m in mid-senior to senior roles now. But choosing peace of mind is not at all petty, no?
I am in awe and also envious of his skill. After watching a couple of Hahn videos, I suddenly want to make leather bags. Seriously.
Before Covid, I had been seeing on Instagram some leather craft workshops that I wanted to attend. But I was thinking I couldn’t fit it into my life because I was with J at that time and attending to his wants and needs already took up 80% of my time. I had no time for hobbies or down time for myself.
Now that I don’t have that kind of issues anymore, I will try the workshops once I’m done moving houses.
Once I have the skills and confidence, I will try to upcycle some leather bags here that have lost their luster or sustained damage. It’s exciting to learn skills like this because it would allow me to create with my hands something beautiful and practical. It will also help me de-stress.
Meanwhile, I brought Twin I to the ENT because of excessive nose bleeding. While past tests showed that nothing was wrong with her (her aplastic frontal sinus does not contribute to the nose bleeding, the doctor said), we are still going to double check what exactly is going on. She will have an nasal endoscopy at Delos Santos Medical hopefully in the next two weeks and either she will only have local anesthesia or we need to sedate her if it’s going to be difficult to keep her still. We just have to get rid of her cough and colds this week, which may have caused her to have more frequent nosebleeding.
But the initial diagnosis for now is her allergies are keeping her sinuses inflamed all the time. The doctor said (as several pediatricians have told me) that nose bleeding is pretty common for her age.
“Do you have pets?” he asked.
“Yes, two cats.”
“Oh, is there a way we can remove the allergens?”
“NOOO! They’re like my children as well,” I protested.
“Then Twin I just have to wear mask at all times around the cats.”
He said that there is no need to bring her to the ER as long as we pinch her nose and the bleeding stops in 30 mins.
I told my twins that they should stay away from the cats from now on. Stop irritating the cats.
I think I will have a bigger problem when we transfer to our new house. My hometown is hell for those suffering from asthma and allergic rhinitis because of all the trees that flower every summer and the year-round pollen showers.
I wonder how I survived with all those allergens around me while growing up.
I always love watching actors talk about their process, the art of acting, the craft… And this roundtable is about vulnerability. It’s great that Ke Huy Quan set the tone of this interview and it was very apt that it ended with him as well.
But what’s surprising to me is Jeremy Pope. I never knew anything about him before this roundtable but he gave me the most important nugget of wisdom in this episode. He was talking about his conversation with his therapist, telling her about his really high highs and really low lows. He told her, I just want to be steady, in the middle. I just want to be chill, he said. You know what his therapist’s reply was? She likened it to a heart hooked to a monitor.
“Jeremy, when you say you want steady, that means you’ve flatlined.”
That struck me. What Jeremy is saying is, life is about the highs and the lows. The moment you remain steady, that means you’re dead. Life is not about avoiding the highs and lows but rather it’s abou confronting a combination of those highs and lows and surviving these.
That was beautiful.
It reminded me of the line in the Googoo Dolls song Iris: “Yeah, you bleed just to know you’re alive.”
This roundtable brings me back to the documentary about John Cazale, the actor who played Fredo in The Godfather.
I keep coming back to this documentary when I want to feed my soul with the art of acting. This taught me why Fredo, despite his incompetence and disloyalty, you still felt sorry for him instead of being angry or annoyed with him. You feel more sympathy for him than for tough Sonny, when the latter was ambushed and died of multiple gunshot wounds. John Cazale made Fredo vulnerable through his subtle but great acting.
The minutiae. The control. The words that were never spoken but are still palpable as they hang heavily around the scene.
That scene with Michael with Fredo in that armchair, talking about being bypassed by their father, Don Vito Corleone, was an example of how not to overact in a very charged scene. 👌Instead of standing and confront Al Pacino on the same physical level, John Cazale chose to be in that armchair, signifying his degraded status, using it to prop his quivering body that was so tense with repressed anger. Even Francis Ford Coppola said he didn’t know what to expect from John Cazale; he brings his own weapons to the set.
Vulnerability. It’s difficult to portray without overdoing it. It’s the hardest thing to show without dialogues, without the hysterics. It forces the actor to dig within his soul so that the vulnerability is reflected in his eyes, the small shaking of hands, the inflection in the voice.
The instinct of every person in this planet is to hide our vulnerabilities, because in the animal kingdom that would mean life and death or the next meal of a predator. That’s why cats do not show their bellies when they feel unsafe. They curl and hide every part of their bodies. They stuff themselves into the smallest box or hole.
In a way, a lot of artists do that. We hide away and tuck ourselves in some hovel or faraway cottage, to hide our vulnerabilities because we can easily be eviscerated. But then, it is our nature as well to bring out our vulnerabilities in our art—be it in writing, acting, singing, playing an instrument, or painting. We expose ourselves because there is this inexplicable desire to express those: to be seen, read, or heard. Because we can’t forever live inside our heads.
Because we have this need to connect.
Art is a means to connect, be it with other creatures or with the environment. We tell stories to each other. As I wrote yesterday, drawing was a way for me to convey to my friends I was not fine but I couldn’t find the words to tell them that.
Actors become actors because they want to tell a story. Their life experiences are tools that they carry in their sleeves to tell that story, so in a way the actors themselves are lending their personal stories to craft the story.
How I wish I could talk to somebody now about art, on this level, and not just write in on paper.
I just cooked spaghetti in white sauce for brunch and did the usual cat chores. That’s it. I napped. I just wanted to be brainless.
I didn’t want to be an adult today. My brain was fried yesterday and I didn’t want to think too much or exert effort.
I still refused to be an adult so I decided to just have bibimbap at Bulgogi Garden along Kalayaan Ave. They have closed down the barbecue restaurant above the grocery store and they just serve the fast dishes within the store premises. Twin A just stayed at home because she didn’t want to change out of her house clothes.
My bibimbap is much better than this, to be honest. My gochujang-based sauce is spicier than this. 😑 If tomorrow my mood improves, I will try to make gyudon.
It was just supposed to be an uneventful day but then I saw on my IG feeds the year-ago post I did. It was about the three ginger kittens we found here in the compund and have successfully found adoptive families.
Then it struck me: It was exactly a year ago today when I received a painting from J and learned about the truth that I had been suspecting all along. It was exactly a year ago today that I almost had another breakdown because of that. It was a good thing that I was already in therapy when that happened.
Because of the excruciating pain, I was bereft of words and the only way to express it was through drawing. I couldn’t sleep. I was figuratively bleeding internally but there was no way I could make myself rest and stem the bleeding. My hands needed to do something. Then I just found myself drawing the image from my PC’s wallpaper. My drawing was perfect in the sense that it captured what I was feeling. I struggled to find the words but my hands found a way to tell my friends that I was already dying inside.
Because I hurt so much, I rediscovered that lost skill I had when I was in high school. I had to die to make my art live again.
That episode a year ago also pushed me to make my plan of building a small home a reality.
I’ve come a long way from 4 Feb 2022, when I got triggered and had anxiety attacks. When I was in my car, screaming at my friend on my phone, telling her about all the truth I had confirmed. I was having palpitations, I was blacking out with rage while I was screaming at her.
She said, screaming back at me, “You are still a whole person. You are still you. Don’t you ever, ever forget about that!”
I wrote last year that it would be the last time I would cry over that person. I still haven’t and I will forever keep that promise.
I had taken down his colored-marker drawing of Istanbul that same day. I told myself, I will make my own art that I will hang on my walls.
I’m still keeping that promise as well.
I didn’t do what I set out to do, like start and finish a feature story that our Japan team is supposed to promote next week. I was drowning in hiring issues (interviews with candidates ate up a lot of my time, too). Then I had to help out in inviting courting executives of Southeast Asian conglomerates (Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore) to speak in our upcoming conference🫠As this is a flagship event that is under my region, I am conscripted to do this.
To make matters worse, I was editing until almost 8 pm since an editor in London didn’t want to deal with a story that one of their reporters wrote… And after I labored over this badly written one, the journo didn’t have the courtesy of sending back the story with proper revisions. These guys really look down on us here in Asia, thinking that we have zero English journalism skills. 🤷🏻♀️
I just… melted. 🫠🫠🫠🫠
To rest my brain, I translated to piano a Breaking Benjamin song and kept playing it until the weariness lifted from me.
My kids are sick. I’m tired.
I don’t want to adult tomorrow.