Will document my life in the last 48 hrs after I catch my breath.
Chaotic
Category Archives: blogging
Chronicling life
This guy is 100% right. Ever since I started drawing and keeping a sketchbook, I began to see the beauty in ordinary things. I always think about how light and shadows fall on an object and how I would render it on paper. Instead of doom scrolling on my phone, I make my brain busy by thinking about how I could draw it and what colors I would use. My daughter once caught me staring at something and she asked me why. I said I was thinking of how I would draw that. She may have thought I was nuts.
I was like that when I was into photography—I was looking for the beauty in the mundane. I was always looking for a better angle, better way to frame a scene.
This is also the reason why I always carry a notebook in my bag. My passport size Travelers Notebook is where I keep my musings while waiting for my turn at the doctors’ clinic or at the bank. When a thing happens while I was standing in line, I always thought to myself how I would write it in my notebook.
It’s just like this blog. There’s no reason for me to continue blogging but I still do it because this is for myself. It’s lovely to chronicle my life this way because I can upload photos, videos and whatnot—like a scrapbook of my daily life. I don’t have to print photos to make a point. When I was writing about things that happened in a day when I was in high school, I had to write the news for that day (“Today Miriam Santiago lost to FVR”) and had to describe/lift passages from newspapers. I had to cut out photos to document the day properly. Now I can look back and see how I was in January 2021 and read how I was a different person back then. I’m still the same person and yet a different person, too.
So this reminds me I have to finish that sketch of that view from UCC. As this guy on the video said, it doesn’t have to be perfect and beautiful; what you’re doing on your sketchbook is for you. I always have to remember that.
So today is a little bit less brutal compared to yesterday. I only had to deal with three edits and rewrite my own story, which my boss had to return to me because she’s demanding so many things.
I rested a bit at lunch—that’s when the world suddenly went dark. It rained heavily.
It was so dark that it looked like it was already 6 in the evening.
It was conducive for a nap. I slept on my tummy because I was scrolling through my emails. I think I’m a half-panda; I could fall asleep anywhere.
In between edits, I took the car to the aircon shop to have its AC cleaned. It’s an annual thing so that the evaporator and condenser would not grow molds and smell bad. Tomorrow, I’m gonna have the auxiliary fans and belts checked and buy a new pair of Yokohama tires. I have to make sure that my car is in tip-top shape before our Pico de Loro holiday and for the rest of my vacation leave that I would be spending in my home province. I talked to my bestfriend while I was on the way home from grocery shopping tonight and checked if she would be free for an overnight stay in lake Caliraya. Ah, we have to schedule it the following weekend since she’s still busy computing grades—I almost forgot, it’s Hell Week = the week before the semester officially ends.
Mommy duty called. I had to fill our pantry with supplies again and this is the only big shop I will do for June because I have no time. The rest will just be top-ups of meat and vegetables in smaller marts because supermarkets are full on weekends.
I then found one little big girl playing with my phone while I was having dinner…
I have like 8,000 photos on my phone so I had to order a new SD card (500GB) because I would run out of space at the rate I’m snapping photos/my kids are snapping photos of themselves.
Anilao sunset and my life-long penchant for winging it
This sums up my feelings last week.
Meanwhile, my cats are having none of those stresses and are just chilling on my bed while I have my zoom meeting.
No more basura days because the month is halfway gone and I need to push the team to chase stories. Myself included. I have an interview tomorrow and I must process my travel plans, book tickets and hotel.
And damn it, the rains are already here! We are having heavy rains in the afternoon everyday. I guess camping in the mountains this coming weekend is already out of the question. I checked the NOAA satellite view, there’s no typhoon or low pressure area; it’s pure southwest monsoon, or what looks like it.
It came really early. Drats.
Went around the village this afternoon for errands and had Twin A’s gear shifter and brakes changed. Hopefully, it won’t rain as meeehhhh, according to weather.com it would be thunderstorms for the rest of the month. So I guess the best bet is to go to my hometown this weekend to bike, even if it’s raining, it’s perfectly fine. I actually like cycling (and playing football) under the rain when I lived there.
We also went to the girls’ school to get their report cards. I’m happy to say that their GWAs are above 90. They have a fighting chance to pass the UP high exam. They need to have this kind of GWA from 5th Grade to first two quarters of 6th Grade and high entrance test scores to pass. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
I remember when I was their age, I needed to keep my GWA above 90 as well but my internal target was 92-95. Sometimes I messed up, sometimes I hit the target…But I don’t remember studying as much as my classmates who were also in the honor roll. Like they even had pie charts of their daily study schedule whereas I was just winging it 🤣. I guess if I really studied hard back then I would have been one of the “bright kids” that the teachers loved. But that wasn’t me. I had too many things going on (extra-curricular activities and socializing) that’s why I was always distracted.
Of course, I won’t tell my kids this. 😂
And when I got to UP high, I told my parents I promise I will pass the UP College Admission Test, but let me have fun in high school. So I did. I was just an average kid among the the “bright” ones because I wanted to be just that. I didn’t want to bother with being on top of the class because… I don’t know. I wanted to pursue other things like theater, glee club, sports, and social life. I was a popular kid back then but I wasn’t cool enough to be the “It” girl.
I was qualified to take the Advanced English class but I skipped the screening exam one summer because I was vacationing with my cousins in our parents’ hometown. Well, it turned out ok in the end because none in our batch’s Advanced English became writers or journalists. I think it boils down to grit and guts + skills in pursuing such goals. So in the end I didn’t lose much for not being in any advanced classes before but I had rich life experiences. Like I missed screening exams but that summer (and the following summers) we hiked regularly on the mountain to have a beautiful view of Taal Lake and West Philippine Sea whenever we were bored, bathed in a pool of spring water, we made lifelong friends with the children of our parents’ neighbors and classmates, reconnected with distant relatives, and grew closer to our grandparents, aunts and uncles. We had so many escapades that I wouldn’t exchange for any academic recognition when I was in high school.
I only got back to being serious with my academics when I was in college. I think that was the only time I did study, but I still didn’t have good study habits because I loved winging it since I still had a lot going on. I remember going around campus with just a ballpen and a steno notebook. I only had a few pesos in my pocket. I was a good note-taker but my notes were chronologically ordered. A normal human being would arrange it according to subject/course, but not me. So my classmates got confused when they photocopied my notes 😂 Little did they know I typed my notes into word documents at home and saved them into little diskettes in rainbow colors. I think that’s how I studied back then, that’s how I can afford to wing it.
I also remember going around campus in loose jeans, tank top, baseball cap and hard ground football boots like the one below so I don’t have to bring too much when I played in the field every afternoon.
I deliberately dressed like a boy because I was trying to be low key, to stave off male attention. I had been the subject of jealousy among some female classmates (spreading rumors and lies) because one heartthrob kept sticking with me because he found my company more enjoyable because there was no pretension on my part. I knew he wasn’t interested in me because he was courting a really girly girl on campus. It was just he was a theater major in the Philippine High School for the Arts (which could have been my track if I pursued it), we both watched Beavis and Butthead and Daria on MTV, and liked the same music, books, and movies. It was just… What can I say? The attention from other people was overwhelming. I also learned that there were guys who watched our scrimmage in the football field every afternoon because… I was really uncomfortable with that. So for a year I pretended I was a boy so I can continue with my carefree life.
When your child’s life is hanging by a thread
A colleague’s daughter suffered a three-hour seizure episode and had a hard time getting admitted to any ER because every hospital in the metro is full of Covid cases. She is intubated and on life support now, in the FEU parking lot because there really is no space for her. She is around 7 years old or younger.
The cost now of hospitalization is very high as he posted on FB:
Right now, she’s confined in one of the tents in FEU. Because of COVID safety protocols, the bill can reach PHP 50k (USD 1k) per day because PHP 4k per PPE plus PHP 5k per swab of each doctor and nurse watching over her on rotation. I don’t know yet how much the intubation, bloodwork, x-ray and other tests would cost. I no longer have the strength to ask. As long as G’s condition stabilizes, that’s all I want to hear. But we may still be far from that.
I contacted his boss (this colleague isthe Philippine correspondent of a sister publication so he’s not under me) to inform him of what’s going on and to ask if something can be done to help ease his financial burden, like a salary advance or loan from our mother company or maybe the company employees pass the hat. This afternoon my colleague showed me his running bill for 24 hrs and it’s already more than PHP 100k. He told me that apparently his daughter has been having seizures for 24 hrs but they just didn’t know because those were just ticks and they were sleeping so they weren’t aware. Because of that, her brain may have been deprived of oxygen.
The child’s mother (also a friend) posted on FB that the doctor said she may already be brain dead; she hasn’t woken up yet.
I have asked our journo organization here to extend financial help to ease his worries. The current president is a good friend of mine and he said he will raise it to the board.
I know how it is when your child/children are on life support, fighting to see another day. I didn’t have the strength to cry at that time whenever I saw my twins full of tubes, watching their monitors, hoping that I won’t see a flat line. I held up and didn’t allow myself to be weak because once I start crying, I will crumble and never function anymore. I never rested; the day I got released from my hospital confinement after my Caesarian section, I traveled to my twins’ hospital everyday. CS mothers are usually given enough time to rest; I didn’t allow myself to rest. I needed to be with my babies everyday and express breast milk because they needed to be fed via gavage tubes since they were too premature to suck on their own.
I couldn’t think about hospital expenses at that point; my thoughts were on my children’s survival. I saved money to prepare for my children’s birth but I didn’t expect that they would be spending 31 days in the NICU. It’s hard to think about bills when you don’t know whether the doctor will just suddenly come to you and say your child/children have flatlined and are never coming back.
You cling to hope. To hell with hospital bills.
So I’m doing everything in my power to help this colleague.
As part of this reflection about life and death, I started writing ahain on my old-school journal so I can finally close this 2021 chapter. I needed to fill up the gaps from the moment I stopped writing in July to my Covid episode, to my reflections of 2021. So I can leave it all behind.
Why do I bother doing it? So that my children can have something tangible to hold on to when I die. My memories will live with them. Twin I declared, no Mommy, you are immortal. You will live forever.
Yes darling, I said in my head, I will live on these pages, and on my blog.
Why I blog
Why do I blog when this is not even public and not indexed by search engines? Why do I even bother blogging anonymously?
Number one, I need an outlet to express my thoughts that I cannot share on social media. I have limited my FB engagement because it really does something to your brain, especially now that politics is so toxic and divisive. I maintain my Twitter because it is my source of fast news. I use Instagram for shallowness, like following hashtags like #workspaces, #hobonichi #travelersnotebook, #moleskine, etc. LinkedIn is just for work and personal branding.
I have no outlet to express my thoughts and emotions, where I can talk about the mundane and inane things. I sometimes need to practice writing other than business writing. My old school journal is for the things I need to express explicitly, naming names, places, specific things, specific events. Things that aren’t for consumption of people other than me.
I am a very opinionated person and I am expressive but mostly that is about current events and politics. Or about funny things. However, I am never comfortable about airing my personal struggles and dirty linen. I always try to maintain an air of dignity and I also think about the dignity of the other party involved in my dirty laundry.
Second, my blogs are my archive of whatever. My photos, my voice, my record of my daily life. For my kids. When I depart this universe, they will have something to come back to, to hear my voice in my writing and actual audio recording. So that when they miss me, they can still feel that I am with them, just somewhere, taking my grand vacation.
I started keeping journals since I was 10–their age right now. Because I was a diligent journal writer, I became I professional writer. I started publishing in high school–in a nationally circulated magazine in Filipino. I don’t know if Liwayway is still around but I was a published Filipino writer at first but I had always been a bilingual literary writer. I remember writing in one of my journals in high school that I keep journals for my future children. So they will understand how I went through adolescence, that I went through what they are going through. The insecurities, the heartbreaks, the self-doubts…all those raging emotions that a typical teenager go through. At the back of my mind I knew I will have daughters. I don’t know…it was just a gut feel. Even at 15 years old.
Then I started blogging in 2002-2003. I used Geocities to create my website and learned HTML codes to build it from scratch. I wrote about my travels. It was hard to keep up with it because building pages with just HTML codes is tedious. Because of the skills I learned from blogging then, I was able to build websites for our online store using Joomla. Then the WYSIWYG blogging tools came into being. I started with Blog-city, then Blogger, Blogspot, Multiply, then settled with WordPress. I remember in 2003-2005, my co-workers and I were reading each other’s blogs because all of us were just ranting about our editor whom we codenamed “Virgin Doll”. We called ourselves by our blog names like Luthien (me), Styar and Crimsonarrows. Then we got into different paths but we still kept in touch via our blogs. Then the rise of social media took over our blogging so that is that.
I couldn’t recover now my old blogs because the hosts became defunct. I tried saving some of the contents of my old blogs via TheWayBackMachine but most were irrecoverable. It’s really unfortunate because I need to use some of the contents for my annulment case.
Tracking my personal growth is easier too as I get to read entries from 10 years ago or older. It was a struggle to blog when I was still with my newspaper then because my life then was super competitive so all my free time was devoted to learning my business–reading books about investing, the stock market, reading all my magazine subscriptions to help me understand global events. When I woke up it’s about news–watching cable news and business channels–and before going to bed it was still news (magazines). When I got into broadcast/online, I found it easier to blog because Internet connection was easier due to the availability of my own mobile internet connection whereas when I was in the newspaper business, the only time I get to go online for personal reasons is when I got home and most of the time my brain was already fried and would rather vege out infront of the screen to watch my anime.
After my breakup with J, I had been blogging religiously for my sanity. I needed to let this all out. I needed to talk to myself by writing about myself for myself. It’s like the exercise that we had during a writing workshop I attended at the Philippine High School for the Arts–the stream of consciousness exercise, which is a literary device employed by writers, like it’s having a monologue to yourself. Aside from developing your own voice, stream of consciousness clears away the cobwebs that clutter a writer’s brain and help it organize the mind for more important writing tasks at hand. As I told my students, a good writer can already organize an outline of her piece in her brain; how to line up the facts, how the story/article will flow and how it will it arrive at the thesis of the piece. A really good writer knows how to edit and re-edit herself, keeping it to the simplest understandable form and being direct to the point. A good writer never stops editing her piece until it goes to the printing press.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, said one becomes an expert after devoting 10,000 hours to that specific task. The successful people have the advantages/resources to have these 10,000 hours. So I am privileged enough to be able to devote time to writing other things so I can practice my craft and not waste my free moments scrolling through social media. I must constantly write, edit, and re-edit my entries so I will not lose my “voice”, how I process my thoughts, how I can write quickly without any outline in my head.
Practice, practice, practice. Read, read, read.
Blogging also helps me write even though my heart is breaking into a million pieces. Writing through tears and pain. It’s very cerebral work and it’s hard to deliver if your mind has already shut down. No one really cares if a writer/journalist is hurting so she still has to write and deliver work. Writing despite all these debilitating circumstances helps a writer conquer emotions and plod along. It also helps in the numbing process.
This is why I still keep on paying for my web hosting year in and year out. It’s all worth the money.
Headed for disaster
Our new COVID-19 daily case has hit an all-time high of almost 22,500 today and yet the government will be loosening the lockdown. Even in my hometown all hospitals are already at capacity and can no longer accept patients.
We are really headed for disaster. The overpriced purchase of face shields could have been diverted to buying more remdesivir and tocilizumab for hospitals in dire need of it. The government goons decided that we are better off with granular lockdowns without proper contact tracing (Duque even admitted to Senate that the govt contact tracing app is useless) and mass testing. COVID swab tests are so expensive, even for the middle class.
Malaysia and the Philippines are in a contest now for who got it worse.
As for my girls, their fevers had gone down today and they were able to attend their online class. I had them take paracetamol when they had headaches tonight but their temperatures didn’t go beyond sinat so I wasn’t that worried. I need more data to gather before I schedule a tele-consult with a pediatrician tomorrow. I was kind of panicking at 2 am this morning when I woke up to check one of my girls and thought about having us all tested for COVID.
To cheer us up today, our books I bought from Big Bad Wolf in June finally arrived.
They’re enjoying Horrible Histories. I am reading that now, too. Fascinating horrible stuff.
I’m slowly recovering and was able to co-write a time-sensitive story today about Philippine Airlines’ bankruptcy. Last week was a struggle for me because I couldn’t write. Or even transcribe an interview. Meds made me lethargic and I kept on sleeping during odd hours. At least I started the week right today, despite the lack of proper sleep because I was watching over my sick girls.
Over the weekend, a high school friend invited me to join them on their Youtube talk show, which started off like a podcast about nothing in particular that ended up as an interview platform about anything under the sun. They added me because all of them are guys–most of whom were my friends from way back high school or post-college when we played in a band. They needed a female co-host to sort of balance the show. And I think they chose me because of my interviewing skills. They were drinking buddies at some point 10-20 years ago.
So my plan to do a podcast with friends has sort of come into fruition. However, instead of a just a podcast, this is a live Youtube video show that requires me to face the camera and be presentable. Anyway, a podcast or a video talk show is one of my personal goals, including keeping this blog alive (albeit private), so I have other things aside from work that I could pay attention to.
I think I will be on air by November.
Balang araw, makakalimutan din kita.