I QUIT

Posted on August 17, 2022 by admin

I will quit caring about this job. I think I’m burning out.

Today was a shitty day. I don’t have the strength to write about it. It’s just…😡

I’ll just tune out after six. That’s it. I’ve been pushing myself too far and hard the past few months. I shouldn’t. Even if I’m out there to prove something, what will it bring me? Nothing. I don’t get gold coins for being extra.

So that’s it. I log on in the morning, do my job, then log off at 6 pm.

*Screen cap from Nikkei Asia, article written by a f*riend.

This is laughable. It has become a “blockbuster hit” because Imee Marcos bought all the tickets and gave them away to schools and government agencies.

Damn.

“It’s clear that they were trying to evoke sympathy, that we were supposed to feel sorry for them,” said Miguel Reyes, a University of the Philippines researcher who has studied the Marcos regime and the family…

…The film’s release comes just a month before the country marks the 50th anniversary of the declaration of Marcos’ martial law next month, which will likely put the old regime’s brutal legacy in focus.

All the more we need to educate the public about the crimes the Marcoses committed and brought the country down on its knees.

My children are better than most of the adults in this country. They had been researching on their own about the Manila Film Center tragedy, Archimedes Trajano, and Boyet and Primitivo Mijares. They did it without prodding from me. They did it on their own volition; they were curious why I am so against the Marcoses. They were watching video clips. These are just some of the thousands of stories that are out there to tell the truth about this family.

This crappy movie was just bizarre.

To continue with today’s theme—shit—here we have a story about sewerage woes in UK beaches.

This is the reason I never went back to Boracay. My last trip there was in 2009 and that trip wasn’t enjoyable because of this above ⬆. People who go there to see and be seen don’t realize they are swimming in their own crap. My mom (who is an expert on this) said the mere presence of algal bloom on the shores of Boracay every summer is indicative of the high nutrient content (i.e. sewerage). This is the same reason she never went back.

For an underwater enthusiast like me, there are much better alternatives to Boracay. However, people flock there to see and be seen. To party. To have sex (in the case of my gay friend K). To be able to say, yeah, we are in Boracay, like it was a badge of honor.

No thank you. I don’t want to swim in sewerage water.

I was tempted by my friend B to stay with her last summer because of the kite surfing part. But naahhhh. I was better off diving in Anilao.

To cap off this day, here’s some reality check:

And all I can say is when you’re 40, you no longer give a crap and you dig an underground lair for yourself and be content like a mole.

Lovely.

Food forest

Posted on August 16, 2022 by admin

I will soon achieve this.

Well not yet. I mean it takes years before you can establish a small holding like this. My plan is to have something more organized than this. Like veggie beds under the existing fruit trees that my father and my nephew planted. This guy also gave me an idea what to do the the laundry runoff—I will create a “wetland” to process the grey water from the washing machine since I plan to make my ground level a contained utility area and next to it is the outdoor patio for barbecues with an optional hot tub.

This video calmed me down after the shit I went through again today as a result of that idiotor that had been encroaching on other people’s turfs. Because he misunderstood the corporate structure (because stupid company named several layers the same thing), he messed up and made it look like I got it wrong. He published his own version of the story while I stood my ground and stuck with how we explain things. My manager kept on harping about it and until I drew a chart of the corporate structure and sent it to her and had the reporter explain it. So she recognized that I was right, the idiotor did a shortcut and edited it according how he understood it.

It was a painful way to end the day and my brain was so exhausted. All this hee-hawing while I was editing another story that competition was also chasing. I told another editor-friend that I was already tuning out (it was before 6 pm) as I was already so pissed and my brain was already hurting.

Then I played the piano and sang for an hour. God bless my piano that was within my reach.

*Fedora for the win! Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

For several days now, I had been installing several Linux operating systems on Twin A’s desktop computer because Minecraft doesn’t seem to agree with Ubuntu 20.04 and crashes. This last OS I installed is the latest Fedora version and so far so good, it is running smoothly. The Bluetooth manager is better compared to the crappy one that Lubuntu 22.04 has.

*Choosing wallpaper background. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

Twin A: Mommy, how did you know how to install operating systems?

Me: I learned by myself. Trial and error.

A: How did you learn Linux systems?

Me: I learned again by myself. I studied by trial and error.

I wanted to add to her that I am a geek at heart and tinkering with operating systems was a hobby of mine before I had kids. I even wanted to have a Raspberry Pi system (the barebones PC setup) to experiment with. I wanted it to be my multimedia machine back when downloading *stuff* was still a thing (now everything is streamed).

I think I can make a smart home with this Raspberry Pi if I learn how to configure this. Something to occupy me—as if there’s not enough to occupy me these days.

Twin I said she saw my door was open this morning (while the AC is running) as the cats let themselves in while I was sleeping. As I posted here before, Sushi knows how to open my bedroom door if it’s not bolted.

My sister-in-law told me over Viber last night that they adopted a black kitten. She is part of the litter that resides near their apartment and SIL said she fears that mommy cat is pregnant again. I told her when we come home this Friday I will bring my cat carrier so we can bring the mommy cat to the College of VetMed hospital to have her checked. If she’s not pregnant, we can have her spayed the following day.

*Black Kitty.* *I want to name her Kuromi クロミ*. Hehehe.

We will be spending 3 days at my mom’s. I hired my nephew to tutor my girls on Fri and Sat for their upcoming simulation high school entrance exam on Sunday. I’m quite useless when it comes to Math because I already forgot how to solve algebra problems, among other things. My nephew, Kuya H, graduated with honors from my high school–the high school that my girls will be trying to get into. At least his memory is fresher than mine. I took the entrance exam in 1991 and of course I couldn’t remember if I had a hard time when I was taking the exam. All I remember was I had no problem with English and my high score there pulled up my Math score 🤣.

OK, another day has ended and OMG I need to cut off all communication tomorrow so I can finally finish my drafts. Like seven of them.

Dude, no. You’re not that important

Posted on August 16, 2022 by admin

So there’s this guy I met in Singapore during our conferences. He messaged me this afternoon to say that he is in Manila and when can I meet him?

Dude, it’s so short notice. Who do you think you are?!

I asked him when is he leaving because I live far from the CBD area i.e. Makati and when I go there, I pack my meetings on days I have other things to do there, like on Thursday.

He said he will be leaving on Wednesday. Pfffftttt.

Does he think that I will just go and drive through the monsoon rains and horrible traffic that has gotten worse compared to pre-pandemic era just because he says so? Hey, when you introduced yourself to me, you didn’t even have a business card and you just got mine. I couldn’t even search for you on LinkedIn because your name is very common. Then you just messaged me on WhatsApp and had the gall to ask me for free entry into some of the our conferences that you weren’t able to purchase tickets for. The nerve.

Then you message me now like that?

No.

I don’t even know what kind of company you represent and I don’t think I would get any story from you.

Whoa dude. I only waste diesel and my energy on very important people.

Meanwhile, one of my old sources who has transferred to an investment bank in Washington is back in town and he asked for a coffee date. So yeah well, at least he told me he will be here until Sept so I can time that meeting with other things. Unfortunately, I can’t give him new updates because he’s so focused on mining and I’m not covering that sector often these days because the conferences by the Chamber of Mines have yet to come back. Plus none of my regular contacts have been looking into mining.

She invited herself in, plopped on my bed and slept. She can be adorable and annoying, like this:

*Girl, how do you think I can work with you two occupying my worktable?* *Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

Ah Monday. I was in a good mood and started working early. I still have a backlog of emails though that I need to attack tomorrow. I still have a long piece from Japan that I need to finish editing. It is a lot of work.

I took a break and went to Araneta Center to check if Ticketnet is still selling the cheapest seats for the G(Idle) concert in September for my girls as a little reward for finishing review school (which will end on Sunday). Ah well, they ran out of the Level 4 tickets so it’s a no-go for the girls. I won’t spend PHP 5,300 for each child. I even did not spend that much on my ticket to see GooGoo Dolls in 2017 and I waited for them for 20 years!

I didn’t go home empty-handed though. I wasted diesel so might as well pick up something from Gateway.

My bestfriend and I are still thinking if we should queue on Sunday (when they start selling) at the SM Mall nearest my hometown for the tickets to the NCT concert. Nope, I’m not watching; it’s for her and the girls. My music preferences have evolved through the years but this evolution does not include Kpop.

Earlier tonight, I was going through my receipts that I accumulated from my trip to Singapore since I needed to issue an invoice for the refund of all my expenses there. Even my bottled water from Guardian. LOL. I wondered about my spending habits there; either I’m a cheap girl or food is more affordable there since I only incurred less than PHP 7,000 for subsistence there for 10 days! (well, that does not include lunch for four days when I was at the conferences) That’s pretty cheap. I mean when I eat here in Metro Manila whenever I’m out, every meal would cost somewhere between PHP 400-PHP 500 or SGD 7.4-SGD 12.3. Well, maybe because in SG I can eat at the hawkers or Kopitiam and I would still feel satiated. I would only go over SGD 10 if I buy lunch or dinner at the financial district.

My hotel, however, is a different story. The hotel accommodations in SG have risen so much because conferences are back and the HK conferences and events (like the SuperReturn Asia PE/VC Conference 2022) have transferred to SG. There are a lot of transients as well—these are the people who are uprooting themselves from HK to SG. Since the demand for housing has shot up, those who are in transition had to stay in hotels, contributing to the tightness in room supply in the city.

Anyway, I just realized I’m a cheap person. It only takes a little to make me comfortable and content.

We are populated by idiots

Posted on August 12, 2022 by admin

Dateline Philippines: Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino issues an internal memorandum calling on schools and public libraries to pull out books that contain ‘anti-government’ text.

Who the hell does the Commission on the Filipino Language think it is? We must resist all this historical revisionism and dumbing down of Filipino students.

We must expose these assholes and bring them down. Public torching should be the SOP for such things.

OMG I’m so incensed today.

An asshole editor, who is trying to be relevant, is looking to pick a fight today. Just because he no longer has any reporter left since they all quit and could no longer stomach him, he intrudes into my turf when he clearly doesn’t have any basis and grabs stories from my own backyard. We had a long email thread about his arresting stories on the backend/CMS because I stood my ground and told him that next time he should inform ME first if he is going to poach and mess with a story that I painstakingly edited for four days. I did not back down and told him I will not tolerate such discourtesy and I made sure I cc’d relevant people. Even the reporter who wrote the story couldn’t understand why he was dipping into this story that doesn’t concern him. It’s not even his turf.

He could not even understand how joint ventures work.

What a way to end the week.

I should really pick my battles but damn, this dude really is public enemy number one. And as I promised myself, I will not let anyone disrespect me anymore. Ever.

*Ice cream to calm me down. It’s the weekend! Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I was too exhausted, too agitated to relax on the last working hours of Friday. I should have been happy because I had so many scoops this week, especially today. But nhooooo, this asshat idiotor had to rain on my parade.

Ghad, I’m working too hard.

Meanwhile, my mom is super happy that my older sister gave her this:

*And I was just thinking about having my own massage chair. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I think I will be a frequent customer of this thing next weekend. Hohoho!

Lemme see, tomorrow we need to pickup the girls’ school uniforms, new PE shoes for Twin I (she already outgrew *again* her PE shoes that we just bought from Decathlon), pick up their Kumon sheets, and let’s see where else we can go to…

Rethinking

Posted on August 11, 2022 by admin

*Pizza for dinner. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I am thinking twice about going to S.Korea this October. A lot of people I know now have Covid and the cases are rising exponentially again. The girls said their dad has Covid since his sister and her entire family caught it on their way back from Switzerland.

Some friends and colleagues abroad are sick with Covid. My cousin in Ireland and her husband got hit, too.

The positivity rate does not tell the whole picture because a lot of people I know just used antigen test kits at home so these positive cases via antigen don’t get reported to DOH as they just elect to self-isolate.

Today just broke me.

Too many things going on and this added to my busy-ness. I was uploading a digest, I had to chase after a deal that I had been after for ~~months~~ years will soon be announced (either tomorrow or early next week). At the same time, I am tracking some news across the region, which my team and I are trying to piece together. And on top of that I was editing three stories at the same time…To my annoyance these were badly written ones, with missing context or ownership structures are not explained well, details missing, etc. It really tested my patience.

On top of this, I was having an argument with our company database keeper in London. I told her we cannot have the UK entity of the global company that is based in Luxembourg to represent the whole group because that is just the UK entity. The one who made the deal is not the UK entity but the Asia one and since we don’t have the proper company record for the Asian entity of the private equity firm, we must use the global one, which is the Luxembourg one. BUT NHOOOOOOOO! These guys in our London office are UK-centric—thinking that the world revolves around them—so we must use the UK entity. WHAT THE FUCK?! The funds used in the deal are Asia-specific funds, therefore, using the UK entity, with its own UK-EU funds, is legally wrong. Why can’t they understand that???

My boss in our Seoul office said I shouldn’t reply anymore because it was not going anywhere. I replied that I no longer have the energy to do so, yeah I will let it end there. And if the global entity sues, I will show them the long email thread of our argument.

By 4 pm I was so exhausted that I fell asleep despite drinking teh tarik. Caffeine was not enough to keep me alive. I woke up 2 hrs after and ordered pizza for dinner.

I think a beach trip is in order.

Here we go again

Posted on August 9, 2022 by admin

My Greek-letter organization brother, who just got back to Chicago where he has been living for two decades or more, contracted Covid. He said he never had Covid or got sick the entire time he was here in the Philippines when he was taking care of his parents for three months. He said people in the US treat the pandemic as something that is already over and he’s pissed that people refused to wear masks. People are dying again because they simply refused to have boosters/vaccination and wear masks. It’s simple.

It’s inconvenient but my goodness I will have all the inconveniences that come with mask-wearing than suffer another bout of Covid. The variant that hit me last year was nasty and it took months before I could fully recover. I’m glad that Asia hasn’t dropped masks yet. Ever since we got hit by SARS, mask-wearing has become second nature to us. It’s courtesy to other people so they may not get sick from whatever virus or bacteria we’re harboring, especially if we’re taking the public transport.

*Manic Monday. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I started working at around 8 this morning and I had non-stop calls from 11 am until 4 pm. A lot of talking and graph display had taken place. I haven’t had any chance to write my own stories—all admin work today. Arrrghhh.

And here I am, still sifting through hundred of cards that I got in Singapore and I have to make sense of all of them. It will take me days to sift through and email all these people and seek re-connection.

And yes, I have two keyboards. I use both, depending on my mood. My new key caps for my Royal Kludge will arrive tomorrow. I’m looking at this GammaKay 65% and Rakk 65% keyboards. Just because.

I think I had been feeling ill the past few days because my body is withdrawing from escitalopram that I had stopped taking on 24 July…about 2 weeks ago. And I feel really bad: I feel like I’m floating and have this nagging dull headache somewhere. It was a bad idea to skip it. I took a half pill today and I don’t know if it was psychosomatic that I felt a bit better. Having less triggers doesn’t mean I’m fully cured; it just means I can manage myself with less synthetic chemicals in my brain.

It has been exactly a year this week when I learned about J and that silly young journo, plunged into darkness, and had alcohol for my companion. I had sunk so low, as low as when I dug myself a hole in December 2020 – January 2021. When I started barfing on my toilet after downing a whole bottle of wine by myself, that’s when I decided I needed professional help to sort me out. That’s when I learned that what I had been experiencing was post-traumatic stress. I wasn’t properly healing and I just kept on putting on a brave front but deep inside I was crumbling. Seeing my therapist was the best thing I did for myself. Putting a name on what I was going through helped me sort out the tangles inside me.

Trauma. That’s what my therapist told me. The word trauma helped me heal; it was a validation that I was not being melodramatic about the whole thing. Whatever devastation I felt was legit. I was dealing with a lot of trauma, for being betrayed despite giving my all. For losing myself into something or someone who gave so little. For the abuse that I received: I let a Dementor/Nazgul suck the life out of me and I received no love in return. I was just a human appliance.

Mental health is very important and taking care of it is as equally important as taking care of the rest of your body. Just like when your body received huge blows, it has to adjust to the trauma and heal before it can fully function again.

I can’t say I’m fully healed—I don’t think you can ever recover from such trauma—but I was already able to get back on the saddle to fight for survival for another day. I have gotten better compared to last year when I couldn’t even write. I was back again in that deep, dark pit, trying to claw my way up. I couldn’t sleep since my mind couldn’t stop thinking about what happened. What’s sad is that Covid was the only respite I had. Because of Covid, I was able to sleep and recover all the lost sleep since the breakup.

I’m much, much better now. I’m now in that place where I can say I’m content with life—at this point. Of course this can change tomorrow. But so far, I don’t feel the need to have a partner because even just the thought of having one exhausts my brain. I am in control of whatever I have in my life right now. No one is leading me by the nose anymore. No one is being unkind to me anymore. I don’t have to bend backwards just to earn crumbs of affection.

No more.

Stories from the sidelines

A journalist has a life other than news

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