White wine and Jamon Iberico Bellota. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My Christmas vacation leave starts right now. 🎄 Wohooo!
However, I still have a lunch meeting on Monday with a CEO of a listed company and coffee meeting in the afternoon with the BD and CEO of a subsidiary of a conglomerate. Plus I will have the last team call for the year before lunch.
My fairy lights arrived. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I was reading some social media posts of friends who braved the traffic from north to Makati and they ended up cursing the wretched situation. Well, cardinal rule no. 1 during Christmas rush: do not book dinners and get togethers on Fridays, especially if it involves getting out of your 2-km radius. I’m serious. I’ve lived here for 21 years and as a field reporter/road warrior, I know this by heart.
I can’t go to my hometown to visit the construction and attend my high school homecoming tomorrow because my mom’s household got Covid. My nephew caught it (most likely from school) so my Mom’s household is on a self-imposed lockdown. I won’t have a place to stay, especially after I go for drinks with high school friends.
So tomorrow, we might go to the A&S Lamps Cubao to check out lighting options for the bathroom and dining area. My contractor suggested this:
He is finally riding the ridiculousness that I am aiming for. Let’s see what the girls and I can find in A&S.
Meanwhile, my contractor sent me this. My new drywalls are up and the Rockwool insulation/soundproofing will soon be installed as well.
Drywall in my room. The Rockwool insulation/soundproofing will also be installed soon. Drywall between the girls’ room and the dining/TV area.
We would also try to go to the Marikina River Banks carnival since the girls wanted to try again the rides now that they’re all older and it’s just the three of us.
Inking. Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
The paper of this sketchbook absorbs color instead of half-repelling it so that’s why the watercolors bleed. I couldn’t make it behave the way I want it so layering is difficult. The gray on jaune didn’t blend so it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Ah well, this is a practice notebook anyway. It’s ok if my sketches are bad. I need to fill up 20 sketchbooks before I improve. 😏
Maybe I could try sketching Manila Cathedral now or Fort Santiago.
Today is a public holiday and I’m not supposed to work but I did. I had an interview with this firm that the Singapore PR I blogged about the other day was promoting. It was a hard interview because I tried poking from different angles and I’m not able to penetrate his wall so I couldn’t get what I wanted. I don’t know if I just wasted everybody’s time since there is no actionable angle I could write about 😒
This left me exhausted. Hard to interview lawyers if they’re not drunk. 🫠
I want to visit an art gallery or watch somebody create art so I can be inspired and restore my mojo. Creativity can be drained and I tell you I’m so dry. I’m running on empty now.
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.
Me: requesting for an interview with this firm because of a new development.
External PR: responds and feeds me questions to ask in the interview.
Me: sending my own questions and say if the firm is not ready to answer my Qs, then there will be no interview.
Toink!
This is not a Philippines-based PR. Thank goodness, PR people here in PH are much better.
When I received that email with the questions feed, it took me a few minutes to process what the PR firm wants me to do. Then I was flabbergasted (“how dare these guys!” *deep inhale*). Then anger had set in. Then later I had this urge to laugh hysterically due to the absurdity of it all.
This is exactly the reason why there is zero journalism skills in Singapore. I mean, the PRs are even feeding journalists questions to ask during an interview. 🙄
And also this is a reflection of how clueless Singapore-based PR firms are when it comes to how real journalists work (and not the state-controlled hacks). YOU. DON’T. FUCKING. DICTATE. TO. A. JOURNALIST. WHAT. QUESTIONS. TO. ASK!!!
If you are pushing a certain narrative, you give the journalist who is going to do the interview a press release with your narrative/the client’s narrative. You leave the journalist the choice if she would use it or not. If the journalist is lazy, she would just take it, hook, line, and sinker.
This is why we jokingly say that Singapore journos are copywriters—they just copy the press releases. I receive 50 press releases in 24 hours (from different time zones) and I see how the regional (Southeast Asia) media outfits publish them. Some have journo bylines but the copies that have been published are just rehashed/paraphrased PRs. No new inputs to make them exclusive or fresh.
The PR firm has not come back after I replied to that bizarre email (in the most diplomatic way I could). It still hangs if the firm wants the interview or not.
And that, folks, is how the rest of my week will go.
I just want to have my Christmas vacation!!!
Kimchi, very comfortable after doing her zoomies at 3 am. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I must to go Marriott tomorrow for a conference and grant me, O Lord, patience. LOTS AND LOTS OF PATIENCE because that annual conference is always known to be chaotic.
I guess the Marcos trolls got their 13th month pay so they’re licking the asses of their principals, big time. The socmedia post above is so absurd that it makes me wanna barf. It’s so cheap.
Kadiri.
Imee Marcos expressing her “distrust” and saying that the senators will study “thoroughly” the Maharlika Investment Fund is a joke. They’re doing the “good cop, bad cop” drama. Only the stupid and the equally corrupt would say that the MIF is for the good of the country. OMG! It is the legalized slush fund of the Marcoses, how can you be soooo… And any investment banker that will touch this will be tainted forever…but those fuckers don’t care. UBS and Credit Suisse were the principal players in the siphoning off of billions of USD that the Marcoses’ looted for half a century.
Well, the Swiss don’t care.
Traffic jam along Katipunan Ave on a Sunday early evening. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I had run errands today and finished all of them because I don’t want to go out within the 2-km radius of my home in the next few days since everywhere will be a bedlam starting tomorrow. Christmas rush, despite the economic difficulties, is very much alive.
I’m wondering if I should waste money on booking a hotel next week so I can have drinks in Makati with friends…
I kid you not, it’s easier to drive from my hometown to Makati than QC to Makati. It’s quite horrible these days.
At some point in my life, I’ve had a friend like this who thinks that everyone is into her. One friend was recently been like this and I had to smack her and said, “Girl, you have to stop thinking like that. He is just talking to you, and definitely not aiming to go to bed with you.” I think it stems from her insecurity and the need to be validated by the opposite sex.
While I was growing up, I was the total opposite of this girl. Living with a narcissist (in my case, my father) makes you feel like you are so unworthy of this narc’s love and attention. So there, all my life I thought I was ugly and unintelligent and that the only thing that was of worth was my acting talent. (At that time I haven’t decided yet if I was indeed a writer until I had one of my short stories published in a magazine). Off-stage, I felt I was nothing. I always felt bad when my friends were being courted by boys in our school while I was left on the shelf. I focused on that one aspect and kept obsessing on it.
But I totally neglected the fact that I had been turning boys’ heads from other schools and when I travelled to other places whenever I represented my school in some competition. I even received love letters from the boys whose names I didn’t bother to remember. I DON’T KNOW WHY I dismissed those. Maybe because I kept thinking it was just a one-off thing or it was a fluke. If only I had a healthy dose of self-love and confidence, I wouldn’t have focused on my lack of suitors from our high school and think I was ugly and unworthy of someone better, which would redound to me having a better self-image. This would lead to better choices of boyfriends, and eventually, partner/husband.
You know, hindsight is 2020 and what I would tell my 15-year-old self that, hey, your self-worth is more than what boys think of you.
And I deluded myself into thinking that indeed, I was unworthy and my friends were all pretty and I was the ugly duckling.
It was not true.
If only I had someone assure me of that when I was growing up…But I guess everyone was wrapped up in her own insecurities to deal with my own gigantic self-loathing and self-flagellation. My mom was not assuring because maybe she was afraid that doing so would make our heads bloated like her older sisters who got movie star good looks in their youth. We never got praises from our parents. Maybe they thought that would keep us down-to-earth but it backfired since we sisters had our own demons to carry when it comes to our individual low self-esteem.
So this is probably the reason why I was oblivious to situations when males were genuinely attracted to me. It was only now 20 years later that I learned that I was one of the campus crushes in high school and college. I thought they were just joking when they said some guys were watching some football tournaments because of the goalie (me). I remember this one time I received flowers after a stage play from a friend of my brother. I thought he was being nice and extra attentive to me because he was my bro’s friend. I stayed away because he was 6 years my senior…. That I had a suitor in college whom I rejected several times but even in med school he was still talking about me (a high school classmate who went with him to the same med school told me). My contractor now, who was a year ahead of me in high school, told me I was intimidating back then because I was barako/astig = a badass.
Soooooooooooooooo that accounted for my lack of suitors from the same school. 🤔
There are so many stories I didn’t know and were just being told to me NOW and instances that I know of but ignored, which are proof that I wasn’t what I thought I was. That I was not ugly. That I was not just a shadow across the hall. That I wasn’t just a wallflower. That I was somebody.
Last year, my mom asked me, why him (ex-husband) when there were so many others —i.e. I deserved someone so much better. I said, I didn’t know I deserved someone better. I thought he was the only one who would love me.
WRONG.
Now we go back to the video above. I was the opposite of that girl. And it was equally unhealthy.
I had doubts last night whether or not what I’m doing, the move back to my hometown, is wise.
Then I strolled along the tree-lined sidewalk that is actually walkable, unlike the nonsense sidewalks in my QC village with dog poop, posts, other obstructions, and sloping concrete. My doubts were slowly being erased.
It also accommodates bikes. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I then took off my mask to breathe in fresh air, which is unlike the “fresh air” in UP Diliman that is still polluted by provincial standards. And felt the trees. So many trees around me.
This creek is just beyond the forest at the back of my house. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Almost car-less roads. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Blue, unpolluted skies. Photo by CallMeCreation.com The view I had when I was in high school. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I sat on the steps of the old building of my high school (they moved to a newer complex off-campus) to watch the sunset. I was thinking here, analyzing whether this is just nostalgia or is it really a good move? Then I remembered all my friends who lived in the city for a while like me, who eventually moved back here because Metro Manila is so unliveable now.
Then I remembered my kids are outside, hanging out with my sis-in-law at some coffee shop, waiting for their cousin to finish football training. They can move around on their own without me fearing for their safety.
My doubts were erased.
I will have to embrace this completely. Start loving it. It’s a new start in an old stomping ground. A new chapter in my life.
Polished granite counter and the double sink with a small strainer at the corner for the food scraps. Photo by CallMeCreation.com The custom TV bench with soft-close doors. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Sturdier than any ready-made tv benches from big box stores. Video by CallMeCreation.com
I said I needed a lot of electrical outlets. My contractor delivered. He also gave me 70cm-wide countertops, instead of the standard 60cm. Photo by CallMeCreation.comMy closet now has doors. Well-made doors. It will take four grown men to carry this because this is made of solid wood, not the MDF nonsense being peddled now by big box stores, my contractor said.
I am jumping into the water, feet first. I don’t know now, I’ll just make it work.
