This is just so low. I haven’t snagged an interview with anybody. Those who had initially been open have ghosted me. Then a headache-inducing feedback from an Indonesian company made me apoplectic because they wanted to change the angle of the story. 😡 As my colleagues said, that conglomerate is dodgy.
August is a dry month and it has been consistenly so for years.
There are days that I doubted whether it was a wise decision to buy a 7-seater car when a 5-seater Raize would do.
Then there are days like today that made me think that I made a wise decision. I always knew I would be a school bus driver, since 1) our house is centrally located so it becomes the natural stop/hangout place/dumping ground for children who will be picked up later by their parents because they’re still at work; and 2) my kids are very outgoing and social and I would be the default chaperone of these kids.
At the back of my mind I knew I would be hauling more kids. I could stuff more children in the Crosswind but the Avanza is a good alternative for ferrying barkadas around.
They were chanting “Tagaytay! Tagaytay!” on the way to our house from their school. They were taking a video of it, perhaps to post on their chatgroup to make their classmates think we are indeed going to Tagaytay.
Ah they will look back on these days and think they were quite happy then.
I’d rather have them all here to be safe than have a kid-free, noise-free, and neat home.
Earlier today, I had lunch with G, my friend from my my former TV network, who was doing a documentary in the town next to us. I gave him the coffee I bought in SG (the brand that he and my sis-in-law love) while he gave me this: a new fountain pen.
He said it writes so smoothly that I would get so addicted to it.
I loved Original Pilipino Music (OPM) in the 90s, when the likes of Eraserheads and Rivermaya rose to fame. I bought tapes of Color It Red, AfterImage, Wolfgang, and their contemporaries. I watched their concerts here in our little university town when I was in high school and college.
My love for OPM returned with the new breed of artists I discovered on Spotify. The song that haunts me now is Multo by Cup of Joe. It hits the gut, especially when you experienced so much over 40 years of your existence.
Multo means ghost in Tagalog and this song is about the ghost of the past, it can be ghost of a past love, ghost of what could have been, ghost of one’s dreams, or just happy memories of the past that you couldn’t get away from but could never have anymore. Translating it into English loses the beauty of the lyrics, the feelings that this song evokes. Pure Tagalog songs are beautiful. I find it hard to write in Tagalog even though it’s my first language. I think and write in English first these days, which is sad.
Hindi na makalaya
Dinadalaw mo ‘ko bawat gabi
Wala mang nakikita
Haplos mo’y ramdam pa rin sa dilim(I could not free myself
You visit me every night
Even though I can’t see anything
I still feel your caress in the dark)
Mundo by IV of Spades made me listen again to the new generation of OPM artists. Their vibe is similar to the Manila Sound popularized by the likes of VST & Co in the 1970s and revived by now by IV of Spades and Lola Amour.
Ben & Ben is also one local band that I like.
K-pop could be popular worldwide but they’re manufactured musicians; P-pop kicks their butts. SB19 trained themselves–no agency, no manufactured music. They compose their own songs. No autotune. Twin I is obsessed with them.
I saw them perform during the New Year’s countdown in Makati in 2023-2024. They’re really good.
They’re really popular in Japan and Taiwan
There was a time I had Dionela on a loop while working and driving. He sounds like Neyo but still different, which I love.
I MISS GOING TO LIVE MUSIC VENUES, like I did when I was in my 20s. My friends and I went to Xaymaca to watch Reggae groups and to Conspiracy for indie acts like Cynthia Alexander.
Cynthia brings you to places you’ve never been to before but you have some kind of longing for it. It’s melancholy hitting you on the chest.
I’m slow this week. So far I have only published one story and have yet to line up interviews. What’s wrong with me?!
I think the only reason why I was able to finish a story and help a colleague with a compilation is because I worked at the co-working space and it was only me there for four hours. The AC was cold, I had a large milk tea to sip and keep me awake, and it was quiet that I was able to transcribe the interview in peace.
Kinda the vibe in our Singapore office minus the free snacks.
Please, Lord, land me interviews tomorrow. 🙏
I really couldn’t work at home because I keep on taking naps. I barely did any work yesterday except for a video meeting. 😬 I don’t know what’s wrong with me; I think I’m in one of those dips again.
And I barely did anything again today because I was so distracted by another emergency from my next door neighbors…
Last Saturday, I drove Twin A and her friends to a classmate’s birthday party held in a farm resort two towns away from us. It was hard to find and Waze was showing us weird or narrow roads that I was afraid my new car would get stuck. On the way back home alone, Waze brought me to another narrow and unknown road, which scared me. It was not the national highway and I was terrified that I may end up again on a rough mountain road, just like what happened to us two years ago on the way home from Hidden Valley Springs.
Thankfully, I got home without any scratch to my car or I didn’t get stuck on some dirt road.
After a few hours, Twin A asked me to pick them up. This time I used Google Map because I thought Waze’s algorithm went nuts that day.
Google Map was worse. Much worse. I ended up getting lost, here on the edge of a rice field. I was already in a bukid along a narrow road that was wide enough for only one car. It was a test of driving skill to make a u-turn/maneuver along a small sitio road.
Waze and Google Map are unreliable in the provinces. 🫠
I mean, we GenXers had the coolest music. I knew the bands that were played in this game but because of brain fog, I couldn’t name them quickly. The one that stumped me though was Cracker because I don’t know/listen to them and the last one, Roxy Music.
But come on, how can you not know Soul Asylum and Stone Temple Pilots? They were played to death on the radio in the 90s!
So ok, I’m gonna pull out my 90s altrock playlist tomorrow and play that shit all day while working.
I felt really bad for Liam Neeson when Natasha Richardson died. He is a decent man who was robbed of a loving wife he adored.
Meanwhile, Pamela Anderson had really bad taste in men: Tommy Lee, Kid Rock… Enough said. Tommy Lee even beat her up. Pamela was a very insecure person and that must have been the reason why she always ended up with assholes.
Both of them took time— a lot of time—to heal, at their own pace. Living quiet lives…
Then…boom! They found each other. One is nearly 60 years old, while the other is 73, I think. Pamela finally found a man who respects her.
I’m not really looking and I’m happy with life right now. I’m loving it, actually. Just thinking about how I stooped so low to serve the men who didn’t respect me at all—Just no, I’m fine with being myself and I am slowly building myself up. I love that I make decisions for myself, I run my life how I wanted it and not being dictated by a dickhead or catering to the whims of an asshat.
Maybe I will be Pamela when I turn 60. I may find a decent man later, who knows. I will demand though that he keeps his own home, I will keep to mine. I don’t think I can live with another man. It’s too exhausting.
The online war between Thailand and Cambodia
I just read an article about a mentally unstable Thai man setting two Malaysian tourists on fire. The comments section was on fire as well, mainly with Cambodians (probably hired trolls) throwing so much dirt on Thais and stirring up controversy between Malaysians and Thais by pretending to be Malaysians doing a smear campaign vs Thailand.
Thais get fired up and throw back some dirt on Cambodians, opening up a Pandora’s box of human trafficking/scam centers and Khmer Rouge’s genocide record.
Reading the comments, I feel like the Cambodians took a leaf out of Duterte’s playbook and now has an army of online trolls spreading propaganda. I wonder what’s their gameplan, even dragging Vietnam into the chaos. 🤔
An interesting Tiktok video said that (save for the current Thailand x Cambodia war) ASEAN members really don’t kill each other, only we diss each other online about food. Generally, we don’t go to war with each other even though we’re so diverse. Some of the comments said we’re all SEAblings, we insult each other, just as siblings or cousins do. But if an outsider disses one of our SEAblings or SEAsia in general, we all gang up on that interloper. And we all “hate” on Singapore because of their haughty attitude.
One commenter said, ASEAN members really can’t go to war with each other because we are all too poor to sustain a war. At most, we will go to war with each other for a few days and after that we go back to domestic infighting because we all hate our corrupt governments.
Now if I can find again that Tiktok video…