Category Archives: on the job

16th day without a car

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My officemate sleeping on the job. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

So today my foul mood is gone and the other effects of the booster shot. Was busy fulfilling my duty as an underpaid manager; so with that thought, I took a break and slept for 3 hours this afternoon before trying to draft another story. An underpaid manager is entitled to all the breaks she deserved, right?

Had a good session with my shrink earlier this evening. She could see that I’m in a better place now and told her my realizations. “I don’t know if this is the antidepressant talking but I’m good,” I told her.

Just like any good doctor would do, she is dialing down my dosage to half tablet every night for a month, then half a tablet every other night for another month before my consultation with her in September. She said she just couldn’t pull it out altogether; we need to have my body/brain adjust to the changes before we pull out the antidepressant completely.

But still no coffee. 😑

Healing on my own, without going into a rebound relationship, is sweet. It was hard but it was for the best and I’m reaping the benefits. I congratulate myself for being brave and strong. It was a slow and arduous process but I made it. I never thought I could but here I am. ❤️

I asked Twin I how she would feel if I started seeing other people. She said she’s ok as long as he likes them. I said that is the top criteria for me, that he should love them as he loves me. It’s a tall order but there is zero compromise there. My daughter hugged me and said, thank you, Mommy.

I felt guilty. They had faced so much rejection from the men in my life that I feel like I didn’t prioritize them and I’m just too wrapped up with myself and my personal happiness that I neglected their welfare.

Not this time.

You don’t like them? Then I don’t like you. Go away. You don’t deserve to have a life with me.

They’re my life.

I will start applying for SKorea visa right after my Singapore trip. I would be there for at least two weeks before things get really cold there. I’m meeting a PE executive in their office as they are gearing up for a SPAC listing in the US for one of its portfolio companies. I would be meeting some lawyers as well as there are lot of things going on there with Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Maybe I can work for a week or less and then take off a week to go around. There’s always Google translate. 😂 I’m also meeting up with a friend there who would help me navigate. Besides, half of the fun of traveling is getting lost. 🤣

My Singapore trip, on the other hand, is packed and I don’t think I would be able to meet all the people I need to talk to. Even my dinner with my lifelong friend who works as BD in a law firm there would have to be carefully planned. 😶 I wonder if I would still have the energy to go around to see people outside work. I hope the company just wouldn’t instantly pull me to host one of the panel discussions there just like what they did to me in one of our conferences a few years ago. That was nerve-wracking.

I could stay longer but I’m not that enticed to do that. I don’t know why but staying there for more than 8 days would make me go nuts. It’s just too confining for me. That’s one of the reasons why I was also not that hot about transferring there, aside from the regular 30% jump in rental rates because of the increasing transplants from Hong Kong. My colleague-friend told me she has to move from her studio again because of the skyrocketing rent. That’s just bad; she would have to room again with others in an HDB. So on a net basis, I’m doing better here compared if we lived there and I get to own my home. Rent there would just gnaw into my subconsciousness. Regular trips to Singapore would just suffice. Living in the Philippines is like living with somebody with a bipolar disorder but you just have to get used to it. It’s home.

But Scotland sounds nice and my friend is near to convincing me of that. 😂

Day 13 without a car

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New bumper.

So my all-around mechanic sent me photos of how my car looks right now. They said the body needs some scuffing before applying primer and buffing.

They evened out the dents and scratches with body fillers. Hopefully in the next few days there would be no thunderstorm so I can have my car ASAP. I’m already dying inside.

Meanwhile, I found myself finishing work earlier than usual that I decided to go to the salon and have a hair treatment. I think I won’t have any time next week before the event at the central bank so better do it now.

Went to the salon I had been going to for the last 10 years. ON foot. Under the rain. Yes, I cannot emphasize this enough that I don’t have a car, just like an alcoholic would go on and on about not having anything else to drink

Mirror selfie.
Yeah, I’m alright.

So this would be my look for next week. I look decent enough for the executives I would be chasing all around either at the Metropolitan Art Museum or at Fort San Antonio Abad.

I figured I’ll just take LRT2 and then LRT1 and disembark at Vito Cruz then take a taxi from there to Hotel Jen and work from there from noon until I need to go to the central bank.

Please don’t rain!!!

I had been going to this event since 2007 so I know what to expect. I once went there wearing high heeled shoes so I ended the night with a lot of blisters. 👠 I will never torture my feet again like that. 👗👛💄

10th day of being carless

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So I miss my car, that heap of rusted teenager car. The car shop sent me photos of my very rusty back bumper that they will replace with a new one.

So wow, it’s only the paint that has been making it look decent all this time.

After the ironworks comes the paint. Hopefully the rains will stop so the humidity will not affect the painting and drying process.

Keeping my fingers crossed that I can hail a taxi tomorrow for my second Covid vax booster and hopefully they can enter my data soon in VaxCertPh so I can generate the ID before I leave for Singapore. Traveling these days is so much of a hassle that I wonder if it’s still worth coming to Seoul in September or October.

I just had a stressful couple of weeks because I had some kind of battle of wills with the parent firm’s HR dept in London. And there’s this guy from legal (also in London) whom I want to punch in the face. He wants to change our contracts in SEAsia to freelancer mode to be paid on a per article basis due to “legal risks” in the old contracts our old company had prior to being acquired by this parent that does not have any idea how to run a media company.

That made me fume.

I told my boss in Shanghai via MS Teams that I will quit and the rest of the team will follow if they touch any of our contracts. It was a risky move but I stood my ground. I asked them to talk to our global editor and even the chief of correspondents (who unfortunately is on holiday) to talk some sense into this asshole.

woman sitting in front of macbook
Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com

So I spent the next 24 hours on tenterhooks. My stomach acids went on overdrive and I was in and out of the bathroom this morning while waiting for the verdict.

Finally, the asshole grudgingly relented after calls and calls and some more calls from bosses.

And I searched for him on LinkedIn, the asshole turned out to be this KID who just graduated from law school and is just a legal analyst and yet to be a solicitor. The kind of language he used and the tone of his email sounded like he’s the fucking boss.

I wanted to punch him on the nose. I wanted to kill him.

So now I understand why they’re not announcing my promotion. Doing so would force them to overhaul my contract and that could lead to another battle of wills with London and this d*ckhead.

I knew from the get-go that my transfer to Singapore would have been very complicated had I requested it.

I showed a friend in Edinburgh the LinkedIn profile of that KID and said just give me one chance to make his nose bleed when I get to London. Just one punch would make me so happy.

You know, I was just cheerful last night that I was dancing in my room to my playlist. Then that “ping” from my Outlook and that email thread from that KID who was throwing his weight around eroded the rare happy mode I was in.

No. No one is allowed to ruin my happy mode. Ok?

Boycott

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https://twitter.com/guampartosa/status/1539085547846504448?t=2orc_WutBsrcDxdNhuztSQ&s=19
https://twitter.com/guampartosa/status/1539085553961799680?t=acdDUqfUmPn2ADE3cWw06w&s=19

If I only knew 😤

I would never support enablers. I’ll stop going to Pinto; there are other galleries out there.

I just learned Dr. Cuanang is also the doctor who issued the questionable medical opinions for Gremlin a.k.a. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to escape prosecution. No wonder this doctor has a lot of money; he serves the biggest crooks in the world.

Twin I inside one of the galleries of Pinto Art Museum, the first time they went there when they were 4 years old Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I had been chatting on Telegram yesterday with a friend, who taught me the mantra, “All is well. All is well,” whenever bad thoughts about the past come to invade my head. He told me that not all men are like my exes so I shouldn’t lump together all men under one category.

Well, I told him, I will only change my opinion of men if I meet creatures of their sex that are the opposite of my exes. But as far as I’m concerned, all of them are the same (sorry friend, that includes you). He got pissed, of course, since he was cheated on by his gf who slept with his officemate. 😑

Why is that my friends and I are in this predicament? Because we’re nice? Maybe we shouldn’t play nice anymore. It’s a dog-eat-dog world anyway. The nice ones die quickly.

This friend got depressed for two months and just got out of this funk this year (the cheating happened last year) and he told me I had dwelt too long in my grief. I said this is precisely the reason why I went to a shrink so I can get out of this clinical depression alive. I was too late in consulting a professional (already 8 months after the fact) that’s why it got protracted.

And I pointed out to him that his ex-gf didn’t send him a painting to destabilize him like mine did. The friend did acknowledge that the ex-gf was not as cruel as my ex.

Hah, it’s already 10:34 pm I’m still working on an energy story. Being workaholic makes me dull. I haven’t drawn anything in weeks. This is what it is like having your ass always on the line. I have back-to-back calls tomorrow with the sales team and then in the afternoon, I need to talk to one of my people to tell him that our bid for his promotion wasn’t granted. So I needed to push him further to improve his stats so I can make another attempt by end of the year to push for his promotion.

Meanwhile, I needed to handhold the newest member of the team because of her language issues and she isn’t used to the Western-style journalism, so I need to co-write her stories until she gets the hang of it. If I don’t do it, she will be kicked out by end of the year. I keep on losing people due to language issues and/or not being able to cope with Western standard journalism.

As my former APAC editor told me, the hardest bureau to run in Southeast Asia.

I will campaign for another raise for me by end of the year because of the headaches I’m having.

Oh hello, Monday

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Back to work.

With no fixed broadband Internet.

WTF!

And I had a lot of VOIP calls today. I couldn’t respond to a week’s worth of emails because I am just using my mobile phone as a hotspot.

And the promotions I asked for my people weren’t granted and salary increases for them and mine were minuscule.

My second-worst performer still has a higher salary than me.

Now this. 😤

And yet they still limit our access, we legit journos who have code of ethics and strict guidelines to follow before we publish anything.

I’m super pissed.

Oh hello, Monday. You haven’t changed.

Going down the memory lane

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Driving around the campus at around 9 pm. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

My girls and I drove around the campus last night, the first time in years. Well, they said this former gym of ours is very haunted and my father said the Japanese soldiers during WW2 used this area as their HQ and the entire Baker Field as POW concentration camp. Some people claim that they heard marching of soldiers coming from inside the hall in the dead of the night or saw shadows from the balcony above. Shining piercing eyes looking out from the huge windows. Thankfully, I haven’t nor I want to see/hear/experience such things. Before the Copeland Gym was constructed, this was where we played badminton, volleyball, table tennis, basketball, etc and we had the shower rooms here. As a former football varsity player, I was almost a resident here, playing for the university since high school.

Today, Twin I asked how I did my notes when I was still studying—basically, how to take down notes for studying. So I unearthed my notebooks from my boxes of memories to show them that I was a diligent note-taker during my student days, a skill that is very useful in my job up to this day.

My steno notebook that I used for ALL my courses 😂. These were my notes in Great Political Theories. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Even I am surprised to see that my notes were really neat back then. It’s just people who borrowed my notes were confused that these were chronologically arranged and not divided according to course 😂😂😂😂😂. So if they photocopied this, they would inadvertently copied my Chemistry notes or Microbio notes for that particular day.

My General Chemistry notes. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Statistics. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

However, I doubt if I was able to encourage my kids to be good with their note-taking because they keep on saying their handwriting is terrible. So I had to show them all my journals that I wrote and kept since 1990 (when I was their age now) so they can see I also had ugly handwriting when I was much younger.

Some of the notebooks that started my writing career. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Twin I tried to read one entry from high school, which was just an account of what happened that day, which is similar to what I’m doing right now—only that this is more high-tech. 😂 Keeping and writing on my journals everyday since I was 10-11 years old led me into the writer I am now. Some of the notebooks here are not necessarily just journals; some here are notebooks for my essays that I eventually transfered on Word doc and submitted to the national newspaper I was writing for when I was still in college. Yep, I was already writing for PDI even when I was still an undergrad because I wanted a headstart.

This brings me to the conundrum of whether it was wise of me to be limiting myself to this narrow path of being a very specialized journalist. Or just be a journalist. Some ex-colleagues have jumped into other professions; they have become lawyers, communication strategists, owners of their PR firms, or completely jumped into entrepreneurship.

But then because I didn’t go back to school so I can pivot, it would mean I would be starting from the bottom of the ladder. That is always the case: it doesn’t matter if you were an experienced journalist or an MD or a pop artist—if it’s not your expertise, like fund management, investment banking, or techpreneurship, you would have to start at the bottom of the ladder as an associate and work your way up. My extensive career as a journalist holds little value in a different field and I understand that. So my recourse then was to take CFA exams just like what my colleague is now doing. However, I simply cannot afford to be an associate at this stage because my kids are growing up. CFA certifications or MBA would allow me to shift as a mid-career professional. Even my friend who is a CPA-lawyer with an MBA and niche expertise in tech is still not partner in her firm. She needs to be as seasoned as her seniors in her firm and build a name. She still needs to earn her stripes.

So my dilemma is I have already earned some stripes in this field, more stripes than some of my peers have. I still like what I’m doing but sometimes I cannot help thinking if I’m limiting myself.

On the flipside, would I still want to slave away when my life is already “settling”? I’m soon building my home, taking life more slower compared to a decade ago, and I just want to plan my trips and building the life I want during the weekends. I realized that even if my children can already fend for themselves, they still need guidance especially they’re now entering adolescence—that age that has so many pitfalls that can scar a person for life. I felt this tug today when they told me their friend, who had everything, is still complaining about “life”. Twin A said, “we don’t understand why she’s being like that. She has all the material things she can ask for: she has a cellphone while we don’t have one but that’s ok. She has pets and her parents pay attention to her. She has a father and a mother, while we don’t really have a dad. Yes we have Daddy but…”

I don’t know the answer. I wish I have the wisdom to navigate this treacherous waters. Being a solo parent doesn’t help at all in answering my career questions.