Dreaming of Diving. Mess and photo by CallMeCreation.com
I was painting purple petunias when I messed up—I spilled water. Lots of it. Then made the most of it and turned this into a dream sequence, with me dreaming about diving. I propped this against my computer monitor to remind me that I can still rescue something that completely went wrong and try to work with it and be flexible. This ain’t pretty but it’s a reminder. Then I will replace this with another mistake, then another. Until I get better with my mistakes.
I made a lot of mistakes in my life and I simply had to work with what I’ve got. I’m no stranger to grinning and bearing it until I see a breakthrough.
I used to think that when things go wrong, they’re punishment for my sins, for the things I did wrong. Blame my very Catholic upbringing for this way of thinking. Now I should know better. Things happen because I’m just human; I am bound to make mistakes. It’s not punishment but rather just a consequence of my very human judgment. Now the test of character comes after how I will pick up myself from this mistake. Will I let it sink me or I will swim? Blame the universe for being cruel? Blame other people for this mess up? <<<< Well this is what narcissists do when things don’t go their way. They blame others but themselves.
Today is a bit slow since China, Taiwan, and HK are on public holiday and Southeast Asia is not that in a mood to chase stories today either. I was able to cook baby back ribs in the slow cooker for more than 6 hours. It was so tender that you can shred the meat with just your fork. You can make a Philly cheesesteak with it only that it’s pork, not beef.
This day was a more relaxed one compared to yesterday when I was still working until 10 pm. I was able to cull dead leaves from my plants. So far so good; the ones I recently bought are still alive.
Photos by CallMeCreation.com
I think I have more room for flowers since the deadly heat of midday is no more. I just have to continue with companion planting so the plants wouldn’t suffer root rot due to soggy soil.
Kimchi, cat with an attitude. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My obnoxious cat thought she could prevent me from working and could earn a treat by being bossy like this. I could still work from my main computer, silly little cat. 🐱
They couldn’t leave my side. Such babies. Photo by CallMeCreation.com.
Yesterday, my new Maya debit card arrived. This is my new card I applied for (via the Maya app) after their rebranding into a digital bank with e-money features. I use Maya (formerly Paymaya) more than G-Cash since the latter is full of bugs or is usually down.
New Maya Bank debit card. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
We broke the story of PLDT via Voyager applying for a digital bank license and their Series fundraising rounds are for this purpose. ❤️
Speaking of work, while I was busy chasing 3 stories today, I was also doing some admin work—re-hiring a reporter who left and wants to come back because I am the new manager. I never thought this would be so complicated and the amount of justification needed is more compared to just doing a new hire. 😭
It’s mind-numbing.
And they have yet to approve my promotion and raise. 😑
Too much red tape here.
I had a video call with a journo friend (the bureau chief of a competing news wire) and we were both wearing tank tops—basically comfortable house clothes— and she said, hurray for working from home! Indeed! I said, that’s why it’s ok to work late as long as we can do it in our tank tops 🤣 and bare-faced. No need to put on make-up and uncomfortable shoes. And no more driving for hours.
The aircon guys reinstalling my room AC. Photo via webcam
And here I was yesterday, working with the aircon guys at the back. I had my AC units cleaned as part of their quarterly maintenance. I just woke up so that’s why my hair was in a messy bun and my face is really bare and shiny.
Even though I barely come out of my room during work days, I always end up exhausted with the amount of brain cells I needed to overwork everyday. This is what my friend and I were talking about: our brains are elsewhere i.e. pursuing national and international news but we’re stuck inside our rooms. Can’t complain though. It’s a privilege to work at home when we feel like it.
Maybe next week I can attempt to work in Makati and have dinner with friends. I need stimulating conversations with humans face-to-face. Thankfully, most of my friends have great minds so every conversation with them enriches my life.
I don’t think I can live with someone who is small-minded—we will run out of things to say to each other. If you and I cannot carry a conversation about anything interesting, we’re doomed. You don’t need to agree with my ideas and vice-versa, but at least we know each other’s minds. If you are as shallow as the water on a saucer, no matter how good-looking you are, you are only just that, a face. I remember having drinks with the most good looking guy in my sister’s class but he was as boring as a doorknob. We never went beyond discussing people. 🙄 I don’t want to end up having dinner or drinks with him again if it’s just the two of us. Besides, he only goes after literal beauty queens. Maybe he was just testing the waters if I could fit his criteria…errr no.
Anyway, I need to schedule this coffee date with another friend who is recovering from a stroke. She was overworked that’s why her neurologist recommended that she let go. I was advising her to just take a consultancy gig so she can work remotely most days of the week. Anyway, she just came back from abroad and she just finished graduate school. I will help her draw the terms of the contract and the deliverables. We will also draft the communication plan for this particular office.
And if we’re successful, we can tag-team later on and do consultancy work together. ❤️
After that pep talk from that sketchbook guy on Youtube, I finally decided to finish this thing that has been festering in my pile of to-do.
Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
I decided not to line the baby blue eyes with dark liner and left the pencil outline and then I painted the filament silver.
Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
Then I decided not to draw individual leaves and use the urban sketching technique of doing color washes (three types of greens) and do a collective outline of leaves and some individual leaves since the baby blue eyes in Hitachi were actually in a bed of grass.
Art and photo by CallMeCreation.com
Et voila! I now have a version of my favorite flowers on my wall. My favorite flowers in one of my favorite places on earth.
I think I will make another version of this baby blue eyes for my cousin.
“Mommy,” Twin A said, “KKR si promoting liquid botox.”
“Huh? Who?” I asked, bewildered.
“You know, KKR, that girl. She is promoting liquid botox on Facebook.”
“Ahh, Tito J’s gf,” I said.
“Yes. Twin I and I were watching her videos on Facebook. She’s always doing all these beauty videos and she keeps showing off her boobs in revealing clothes. She still looks like a transvestite though,” Twin A said.
“Ah I don’t care. Let her be. As long as I don’t need that botox I’m fine,” I said.
I really don’t need it and will never need it. In the first place, botox is injected and not applied topically, as my girls said this woman is demonstrating on her video—whatever. Besides, I’m already beautiful as is and I don’t need to inject myself with botulinum toxin. Hello! Anybody with a half-brain knows it is a neurotoxin that can cause your face to be frozen and be without facial expression 🙄 Exhibit A: Nicole Kidman. Exhibit B: Renee Zellweger.
My self-worth need NOT be measured by how many wrinkles I have, by being a daughter of a restaurant owner (a very poor way to be identified, by the way), or by any other external identifier. As my gay friend K said, do not measure yourself against these people—it’s not you who is the problem, remember that.
Yes, K, I am believing you now. I measure myself against how I was a year ago, how I was five years ago. I am older but much wiser now (I hope). I have only myself to compare with.
Someday, someone will appreciate my 42-year-old clear skin that doesn’t need botox, for my intellect, my talents, my generosity, my capacity to love, sense of adventure, my wide range of interests, my resilience, my practicality, my strength—the overall me. I will be appreciated by someone who will not take me for granted and not use me for his selfish gains.
Someday. Not today.
I’ve got some more healing to do.
In the meantime, my cats sleep with me on the bed and provide me with love and comfort. We woke up like this today ❤️. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Today’s news isn’t reassuring and on top of that I was busy dealing with errant reporters again. So Twin I asked, “Mommy, do you want hot choco?” “Ok,” I said.
Ahh! Hot choco with whipped cream and marshmallows. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
This made me feel a lot better. My daughter made me a calorie-laden drink to ease the tension on my forehead and back. ❤️
Twin A asked me yesterday, “Mommy, did you regret having children?”
I said, “No. I will always choose you over everything else.”
And this question and answer between me and my daughter echoed in my head while I was reading this article and the FB comments on the WSJ post.
To Get Into the Ivy League, ‘Extraordinary’ Isn’t Always Enough These Days. The Wall Street Journal.
While I was not really aiming to get into an Ivy League school for my master’s degree, the opportunities presented to me before I got married and before I got pregnant with the girls were there. I was encouraged by one of my teachers at UP Masscom to apply for a scholarship at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where she is an alumna. I was preparing to apply when my father died. Then it all went downhill from there. My priorities have shifted; I got married, just as what my father had wanted. Then other opportunities came along (although not Ivy): scholarship at NYU and Germany but I couldn’t push through because then-husband didn’t want to come and I got pregnant, respectively.
I’m still thinking, would it have been better/made a big impact in my life if any of my plans to study abroad pushed through? For sure I wouldn’t have my girls if I did. Maybe I would have been somewhere else, living in Germany or making a bigger mess of myself in NY—but life would be lonelier without my girls.
I am meant to be their mother because I always knew—at the back of my mind at sixteen years old—I knew I will have daughters.
But I knew also that I am not meant to be with someone. I am meant to meet all these people, not because we were meant to last, but to teach me hard lessons in life.
Would I be earning a lot more if I had a degree from Columbia or NYU? I don’t know. Will I be more fulfilled if I obtained my MA and PhD there? I don’t know either. Probably I will just end up in the academe. It’s not like I will be pursuing a Master in Finance or MBA or law and end up as a hedge fund manager or work for Big Law.
All I know is I am glad I have my girls with me. They give me direction, strength, and reason for being. I believe that we always end up where we are meant to be. Where we need to be. The universe conspires and throws all these obstacles so I would not go in another direction. Kinda like that one blog entry I wrote about James Hetfield and Slash ending up where they were supposed to be and not turn into a football player or a mediocre bass player. Metallica and Guns N’ Roses may not have happened.
So for those kids who had been complaining about not getting into Yale and Harvard (in the WSJ article), they may not need to be there in the first place to be happier and successful later in life.
Life is short. I have a high school classmate, a gynecologist who has gone through chemotherapy because she is battling breast cancer. She just had a mastectomy last week. I know she would give anything to be healthy and spend more time with her son.
No amount of Columbia U PhD can compare to moments with my kids and their laughter when we swim in the sea, when we bike, when we hug on my bed.
As I said, I am where I am supposed to be. I am healing with my children beside me.
I can think of all the times You told me not to touch the light I never thought that you would be the one I couldn’t really justify How you even thought it could be right Cause everything we cherished is gone And in the end, can you tell me if It was worth the try, so I can decide
Leaves will soon grow from the bareness of trees And all will be alright in time From waves overgrown come the calmest of seas And all will be alright in time Oh you never really love someone until you learn to forgive
Try as hard as I might To flee the shadows of the night It haunts me and it makes me feel blue But how can I try to hide When every breath and every hour I still end up thinking of you? And in the end, everything we have makes it worth the fight So I will hold on for as long
As leaves will soon grow from the bareness of trees And all will be alright in time From waves overgrown come the calmest of seas And all will be alright in time Oh you never really love someone until you learn to forgive
I never thought that I would see the day That I’d decide if I should leave or stay But in the end what makes it worth the fights That no matter what happens we try to make it right
Leaves will soon grow from the bareness of trees And all will be alright in time From waves overgrown come the calmest of seas And all will be alright in time Wounds of the past will eventually heal And all will be alright in time ‘Cause all of this comes with a love that is real I said all will be alright in time I said all will be alright in time I said all will be alright in time All will be alright in time Oh, you never really love someone until You learn to forgive You learn to forgive Learn to forgive
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.
Bantayan Island. 2010. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
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.
Starting to rain. I opened the window to feel the wind. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It was so dark that it looked like it was already 6 in the evening.
This is how my room looked at 12 noon today. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
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.
In my grocery cart. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
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.
Harassed mommy waiting in line at the grocery cashier for an hour. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I then found one little big girl playing with my phone while I was having dinner…
Playing with three pairs of my sunglasses. Photo by Twin I.
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.
It’s so cumbersome to be living in QC if most of your business is in Makati central business district. The travel time is hellish due to the mind-numbing traffic jam that is back to pre-covid horribleness. However, this is compensated by the fact that QC has more wide open public spaces with trees compared to surrounding cities and people do not have to go to malls to be able to access public spaces where they can bring their children.
My kids and I had bento brunch today c/o of moi because I wanted to eat maguro sashimi. I pan-seared the tuna’s surface but the inside is still raw. I like it that way, I don’t know why.
I roasted my own sesame seeds for the rice.Photo by CallMeCreation.comChunks and chunks of tuna sashimi. I ran out of wasabi. Photo by CallMeCreation.comSoybean paste soup.Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I took a nap after lunch because I slept late again last night. I had been tinkering with my older sister’s laptop that I wanted to convert into a Linux machine. Because I can.
An old Asus Vivobook. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I cleaned its innards and checked if the RAM has an expansion slot. Nope, the RAM is onboard, thus, I would be limited to just 4GB. The keyboard is ghosting so I bought a replacement to make this serviceable. The keyboard would come from Shenzhen, China so I would have to wait for weeks before I could perform another surgery on this thing.
Why am I resurrecting an old laptop? I don’t know. Maybe because I can? It has always been a hobby of mine to tinker with old laptops and Frankenstein it. I used to dual-boot computers with Windows and Linux but it’s a bit cumbersome to partition SSDs or HDDs and run out of space over time so might as well have separate machines for the two OS. Why? Because I need to brush up on Linux every now and then and teach myself how to compile drivers or work my way around GitHub. Why? Because I’m bored? I want complications? I don’t know. It’s just my way of educating myself with stuff that 95% of the people here don’t bother with.
Anyway, enough about the laptop.
So this afternoon we’re back in QC Circle because I wanted to buy more plants and have a very lush container garden again.
Tadah! I have more plants on the floor of the passenger side. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I let the girls roam free in the amusement park again and ride whatever they want with the budget I gave them.
Pedal and Paddle amusement park, QC Circle. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It was a lovely afternoon and we took advantage of the sunshine that has been rare every afternoon this week. After I spent like PhP 500 on additional plants, I watched the afternoon go by on this concrete bench and waited for the the girls to run out of money.
Waiting. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I appreciate this city for having this Circle, UP Diliman, and LaMesa EcoPark (further up north near Fairview)—and other places I have yet to discover—so families can have affordable places where they can have picnics and have their kids run around safely. I could not imagine living in other cities and being stuck in a condo for months on end because of Covid lockdowns. I would have gone stir-crazy. Good thing I had the foresight and chose to live in QC still. I was thankful every time I could bike to UP campus in the evenings on unbearable days when I was still living inside my head and grieving.
Since we live near Maginhawa St, I am making sure we dine once a week in some of the restaurants here so we can try all of the things on offer before we leave this apartment next year. I’m going to miss this place even though last year it was painful to be still living here. Through sheer determination, I was able to exorcise J’s ghost and learned to love this home that I call mine. My apartment in my city where I’ve been living for almost 20 years.
Media scrum after former Vice President Jojo Binay‘s speech in a business conference. Photo by Philippine Star.
Gone were the days that we could interview officials this freely. Doorstop/ambush interviews like this are golden because the interviewees’ responses to questions are often not scripted and this is where we get the soundbites. I used my iPod Touch for voice recordings because it was easier to use when I’m transcribing. This photo was taken in 2014, when then-VP Binay was dealing with allegations of corruption and such. I couldn’t hide my resting bitch face because I wasn’t really happy with what I was hearing. I could not help but reminisce and feel nostalgic about how our lives as reporters were relatively easier back then. 😭
I saw this photo when I was uploading new photos on my Google Drive that I share with my cousins.
We had lunch in my bff cousin’s house since her sister from New Jersey arrived for a vacation and to visit their mom who almost died last year (or technically she already died because her heart stopped twice???). So I took photos with my trusty Fujifilm XQ1 (which I don’t think will die anytime soon) because for me it was easier to snap photos quickly with a standalone pocketable digicam. My mom and older sister came, too, so they can see my aunt for the first time after she was hospitalized in our hometown at the height of the Covid-19 Delta lockdown (she had a stroke and no Metro Manila hospital could take her in).
As I went through my Google Drive and Photos, I saw some pictures that I haven’t seen for a long time, like this one:
I was just 18 here.
I was with my cousin (whose house we invaded today) and my younger sister (yes, she looks older than me). My girls look like me.
Gone were the days I could fit into a size 6 😭
I’m still staring at the sketches I’ve done the past few days and I’m still trying to find the “spark” that would inspire me to paint. When I painted the pink peony yesterday when I’m not really into it, I wasn’t happy with the result. It’s hard when you force it.
