Category Archives: current events

G.O.A.T.

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I’m still love struck with how the game last night was played. It’s a fitting retirement for Messi, who is now elevated to Diego Maradona level.

I miss playing football. At least Twin I now understands why I love this sport because we watched it together last night and she was equally excited as I was. She said she is now interested in joining the girls’ team once we have transferred here in my hometown. I told my nephew, who teaches football under xxx team, that his cousin wants to join.

This sounds wonderful because they will be more exposed to team sports and more physical activities.

Meanwhile, my sister expressed her defiance against this government through the Christmas decor she installed in my mom’s house.

They’re so pink!

I plan to go back to QC on Dec 22 because Ate C will be leaving for her home province so I need to come back for the cats. In the meantime, I’m bringing something to read with me while I laze around my mom’s house.

Kimchi wants to come. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I packed books this time as should be reading physical books instead of doom scrolling on social media. I missed reading but I get easily distracted now by my phone. I should have a digital detox and do analog things like drawing and reading. I’m a bad example for my girls. 🤦‍♀️

This has been with me for quite some time and I never quite found the time to open my hoarded books. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

We left QC at around past 10 pm tonight because we fetched my nephew, his gf, and my sis-in-law from Araneta Coliseum after the UP-Ateneo basketball game. Araneta Center was clogged with cars and traffic was terrible. It took us about an hour to extricate ourselves from there.

So tired.

Maintenance

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Two-hour massage before I drive off tomorrow to the South.

I had done last-minute maintenance stuff before I subject myself to an hours-long drive to my hometown tomorrow. I just finished a two-hour massage c/o Zennya because I know my back will be frozen after the drive.

But before that, I needed to do car maintenance like what any responsible car owner should do.

Engine oil flushing and change and other preventive maintenance checks. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Car wash and interior vacuuming. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I gave Twin A my Tokyo-finds watercolor palette and now she’s trying them out. Twin I, on the other hand, was influenced to do the same but she is using the set that I bought for them from Lazada two years ago.

Making art. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Will be bringing our bikes tomorrow and we will try to go to that pond at the back of a research facility on campus. Draw, grill hotdogs or chicken wings, and have a picnic.

But it’s rainy in the next few days 😑

Meanwhile, I’m just gonna watch the Messi and the rest of Argentina.

I think I won’t sleep tonight. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

UPDATE: GOAL! I LOVE YOU MESSI!!!

As an ex-goalie, I feel bad for the French goalkeeper 😂. Well, a penalty kick from Lionel Messi is a death sentence.

WHOA! ANOTHER GOAL FROM ARGENTINA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s raining yellow cards!!!

OMG!!! Last 10 mins France scored 2 goals 2 mins apart!

The French owe it to Mbappe. Fantastic game!

Ugh! I can’t take the suspense. Overtime is killing me.

UPDATE

OMG! Messi!!!

This is the reason why football is the most beautiful game. OMG!!! Messi scored again! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Update:

NHOOOOOOOO! HANDBALL. PENALTY KICK!

MBappe is a beast! Whooooo!

3-3 in an overtime. This brings us to a shootout to break the tie. My heart can no longer take it.

Emmanuel Macron is so ecstatic!

This is the best World Cup game I’ve ever watched. It’s so beautiful. This is what football is all about.

This has come down to the penalty shootout! Best of 5.

Brillant save by Argentina. ❤️

Ahhhhhh congratulations to Argentina. Brillant game. Just beautiful. Messi will be sainted in Argentina after this.

Public shaming

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I will troll her until kingdom come.

You see, I used to cover her at the Philippine Competition Commission when she was still a commissioner there. She was one of my favorite commissioners to put on a hot seat during press conferences (the other one is Comm Joey Bernabe). I used to love covering both of them and she once told me that I keep them on their toes whenever I attend their presscons. She was really good and made sense. Her specialization at the UP School of Economics was health economics—everything that concerns private healthcare funding, universal healthcare, public health finance, etc.

Then she ran for congress.

She’s now swallowed by the system (or maybe there was a corrupt politician hiding in her all along) and has co-authored the bill that would create the Marcos slush fund a.k.a. the 1MDB 2.0.

What are sovereign wealth funds? These are created by states so that their excess reserves can go somewhere more productive instead of sitting in the national treasury. What states have excess funds in an age of budget deficits? Oil countries. Malaysia, Norway, Kuwait and other Middle Eastern states.

What is a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF)?

A Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) is a state-owned investment fund or entity that is commonly established from:

  • Balance of payments surpluses
  • Official foreign currency operations
  • The proceeds of privatizations
  • Governmental transfer payments
  • Fiscal surpluses
  • And/or receipts resulting from resource exports

And as a public finance and macroeconomy reporter of 8+ years, let me tell you this:

  1. We used to log BOP surpluses but that changes month on month. I used to do magic and produce news articles just from a table of national current accounts (oh the pain of writing BOP stories)…. BUT it’s more frequent that the numbers are in ( ).
  2. We privatize government assets because we are always short on cash.
  3. We didn’t have fiscal surpluses. We never balanced our budget and the smallest budget deficit that finance reporters of my time recorded was PHP 60bn (if I remember it right) and that was before the global financial crisis. Arroyo had to backpedal on the zero-deficit plan because by 2008 our economy went shit.
  4. Receipts from resource exports? We don’t have OIL AND GAS to export, unlike the countries I mentioned above. Our mineral resources aren’t generating enough receipts for us to create an SWF. Indonesia has coal and nickel, while we have the low-grade variety of these minerals.

(Not well versed in govt forex operations and transfer payments as source of funds for SWF so I won’t touch on those).

Tapos obsessed na obsessed tong gobyernong to magtayo ng SWF, kala mo may excess funds tayo. HOYYYYYYYYYY we have always operated on a deficit. Kapal ng mukha netong mga to!

HOY STELLA! Slush fund ng Marcoses ang tinutulak mo. Di kami bobo.

To calm me down, I resorted to sketching this scene at the Singapore Botanical Gardens before I started editing today.

Started with globs of color. Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com

This government is driving me nuts.

I bought more frames when I was at the Mall of Asia/Ikea. Just because. If I produce a decent sketch or painting of something, maybe I can frame it and give it as a gift.

My hoard. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

And I bought a wok as a gift to my cousin who wanted a paella pan (but I couldn’t find it.

Wok not too heavy so it’s good for flipping fried rice or stir fry vegetables. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Of course, Kimchi just had to sit on it. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Schadenfreude

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Karma is out there to bite your ass.

This person, whom I refuse to name on this blog, is the primary mother troll who had released his troll farm on me a few years ago when I criticized a government agency (which allegedly employed him as an attack dog a.k.a. social media handler) regarding an infrastructure project bidding.

For two weeks they tried to destroy me online. Even attacked my company’s social media assets, much to the shock and confusion of our APAC and global headquarters.

I do believe the universe will be out to get you if you haven’t been nice.

My friends and I are ROFLing now.

Speaking of trolls, I once again dodged the prinicpal of these creatures by leaving the conference venue early today. I AGAIN didn’t check the program—it was only during the welcoming remarks did I learn that Marcos is supposed to speak this afternoon. 🤦‍♀️ So the conference delegates were told to avoid going in and out of the area by 2 pm because the Presidential Security Group needed to check and secure the premises.

I used our PH reporter’s media pass that’s why I had a different name on my tag. Our PH reporter is in another event across the metro.

I left at 11:30 am. Good thing I was able to ambush interview my targets early.

I really can’t stomach the thought of being in the same room as this thief.

I just can’t.

I have covered past presidents and sat through some of their speeches but the last two presidents… 🤬 Nope.

I quickly escaped to SM MOA (since I was just at Marriott) to write my stories, buy Christmas gifts, and then I took Skyway so I can fly back home.

Or so I thought I could get back home quickly.

It still took me two hours to get home. I left at past 3 pm, I arrived at past 5 pm. 🫠 And to think that I already used Skyway to bypass Edsa or C5 to reach QC. 😵‍💫

I just want to stay put in the next few days… Traffic jams are so bad that they suck the soul out of you.

All coffee/dinner with friends would have to be pushed back after Christmas. It’s just insane to be on the road these days.

Institutionalized corruption

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Proposed by Sandro Marcos and his uncle, Martin Romualdez.

Approved by Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Who is the blueprint of Najib, the central figure in Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal? Najib’s wife was compared to Imelda Marcos, to give you a clue.

1MDB. OmG!

They would siphon off the retirement funds of my mom, my brother, and millions of workers who were forced to contribute to GSIS and SSS.

How dare a foreigner on my LinkedIn post say, “give it a chance.” I wanted to smack him and say, were you here when Marcos Sr destroyed the economy? Were you here when his family made the old Philippine Central Bank their personal bank account? That old central bank that the new BSP had painstakingly tried to erase to bring back credibility to the Philippine financial system? No. Then don’t say such stupid things.

It has driven me up the wall this morning. And it riles me more that opposition to this institutionalized corruption is not enough. 🤬

This economist at Natixis gets it, while my LinkedIn commenter doesn’t. 😤

I don’t know why I even bother writing this down. No one gets me anyway. No one also cares what I write about, think about, what I do…

Ah yeah. This is part of my therapy… Having conversations with myself to parse whatever is in my head to lessen anxiety.

While I was having my 2-hr massage, my brain went into a deep dive again why I was moving back to my hometown. I suddenly had doubts about its wisdom. I would be moving farther and farther from civilization. I would miss my Zennya massages. I would miss the convenience of having Grab Food and Grab car. I would miss the PHP 40 Lazada delivery fee.

My hormones are out of whack now so this may account for having cold feet very late into this stage. I’m writing another check tomorrow for my contractor. I mean hey, I would have a fully functional home by Feb, so why am I havig these thoughts?

My abdominal cramp is killing me now.

Missing persons

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The president of the Philippines is nowhere to be found. Insiders say he is abroad for a secret holiday. He left last Friday while Mindanao was drowning. He really doesn’t fucking care. Then he appeared in a Zoom meeting at 2 pm when Mindanao is already underwater and Metro Manila is hammered by strong winds and rain. If he was in the country, he should be in the meeting in person!

Then his disinformation team published photos of him allegedly in Ilocos. These people 🤦🏻‍♀️…The devastation is south!!! Why the heck would the people care if he’s in Ilocos?!

Well it doesn’t even matter. We just want to show the people who voted for him that he doesn’t fucking care. NO EFFORT ON THE GROUND. No plans whatsoever.

Meanwhile, his VP is equally incompetent. Just sent thoughts and prayers and is also nowhere to be found.

Nobody is leading the recovery efforts, nobody is being an adult in the room.

In contrast, the president of South Korea convened an emergency meeting just HOURS after the Itaewon tragedy. Late President Noynoy Aquino cut his official overseas trip short when a similar catastrophe happened.

God, I’m so tired of this situation.

I really, really envy Brazil right now. Lula won over Bolsonaro—kicking out a far-right madman who had plunged Brazil into chaos at the height of the Covid pandemic and caused more damage to the Amazon rainforest. Of course, Bolsonaro came into power with the help of disinformation and social media.

I’m cooling down my anger with some bubbly, savoring the last two days of my holiday. I only have tomorrow to sleep as much as I can before I get inundated again with work.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Then I need to drive back to my hometown to deliver my range hood and check the progress of my house this coming Friday. Stay the night there then drive back to NAIA to fetch the girls in the evening.

But I don’t have to think about this yet. I should enjoy the last 24 hours of my holiday. Today I just slept again, cooked one meal, and spent most of my time horizontal on my bed.