Dia de los muertos

Posted on 01/11/2021 by admin

Last night the traffic was so heavy in our usual route that I had to drive an extra 20 km to take another route. It took me 2 hrs and 45 minutes before we reached our apartment.

So today I did all the DIY stuff that I left hanging. Stupid me, that made me exhausted today.

I refreshed the white paint on the wall where my living room windows are. I also finally changed the curtain rod brackets downstairs and was able to hang the Christmas curtains that I bought from Shopee one night I wasn’t able to sleep. I’m afraid I overdid the Christmas thing.

*Looks kitschy. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

But I think it looks better at night, less overpowering.

*I have to make it grow on me because these damned things cost me PHP 500. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

And I did not stop there. I added curtain rod brackets in my room because my annoying cats keep on climbing the curtains and they’re not exactly light.

Since I felt so energetic today, I proceeded to sand my closets because the paint is peeling and Kimichi kept scratching the corner so it was worn.

*I turned my impact drill into a sander. I uncovered several layers of paint. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I chose Boysen Skyblue for my closets. There was something off with the Tiffany blue that came with the apartment when we moved in so I decided to go for a lighter shade of blue.

*Unfinished. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I didn’t paint the upper cabinets yet because I was so tired and I looked like a Smurf because I was already blue all over. And my paint was the quick-dry type so it was sticky, smelly, and hard to even out. At least I was able to fill out with wood filler the scratches that Kimichi made and I was able to cover it with paint. Now I’m getting high with the smell.

As I was letting the paint dry, I grilled marinated chicken outside while my kids and our househelp, Ate C, lighted candles for our departed loved ones. Today is Dia de Todos los Santos (All Saints’ Day) and tomorrow is Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) but in recent years Filipinos started visiting the grave of loved ones on 1 November instead of 2 November. Traditionally the holidays are 31 Oct-2 Nov but was truncated this year to only the 1 Nov. Dia de los Muertos is more known to be a Mexican holiday but most Spanish and Portugese colonies have their own way of commemorating the dead. In the Philippines, it’s more subdued compared to the Mexican one. When I was a kid, some people spend the night of the 31st in cemeteries to hang out in their family mausoleum or tombs until Nov 1 and have some kind of family reunion there. Filipino Chinese families light joss sticks and offer food and flowers. In our family we just clean the tombs, offer flowers, light candles and say our prayers. We stay until the candles have died out.

*Lighting candles in front of the apartment. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

This is the third straight year we just have lighted candles in front of our house. In 2018, the traffic was so bad that I just opted to stay at home. Last year and this year, obviously, we had to stay home because of Covid-19 restrictions. My mom is already contented that I brought her last week a huge pot of mums and the purple hydrangea for my father’s niche at the columbarium near my mom’s house.

Since I’m making the most of my stay here in this apartment, I will be filling up the walls with crafts and art. Next time that will go home to my mom’s house, I’ll be taking my old drawings with me and put them in frames and hang them in my room. I bought some frames from Photoline in SM that were on sale last week.

J left his drawing on my refrigerator door and when we broke up, I shoved it in my closet and let it stay there almost 11 months. I decided to take it out again and put it in one of the frames I bought. He drew this scene from Istanbul when he was demonstrating to the girls how to use their color markers.

I had hung his drawing in the place where his workstation was. He may not be a nice person, but for old times’ sake this is how I am choosing to remember him: a traveler. I am just one stop.

Soon this room will be filled by my old drawings/paintings and cross-stitch projects. And probably new ones too. His drawing will just be one of the many that I will have on my walls.

Digging through memories

Posted on 31/10/2021 by admin

Traffic was terrible yesterday; it’s as if the whole world descended on South Luzon Expressway. I left at 4 pm and arrived at 7:30 pm. I was just in time for the live broadcast of our talk show, where I wore a gorilla mask before my high school friends revealed that I’m the newest co-host.

*Halloween selfie. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

The episode is a Halloween special and of course I’ve had a lot of those scary stories of my own. Two of our viewers last night were primary witnesses to my scariest story, which even freaked out my co-hosts. “You know,” one of my co-hosts and friend said, “we’ve known you for decades and we don’t have any freaking idea about this side of you. If we only knew that you were one entire horror movie, we wouldn’t have gotten you as our vocalist.” It was in jest but I could feel he got freaked out.

This is why I don’t like horror movies. I’ve lived through them.

Anyway, I was asked by some of our high school classmates to contribute to the photo gallery that we will be using for the homecoming. So I rummaged through my boxes in my old room and scanned some of them.

Then I found some treasures.

*Mommy and kitty. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

Here’s our mommy cat, Puppy (yes, that’s the name we gave her) and her kitten, Kulet. They’re so lovely.

Our cats by the old computer. My dogs. I suddenly missed them. I wasn’t joking when I told my kids that at one point we had four dogs, three cats, and a tankful of fish.

I also unearthed short stories I wrote and some drawings from high school that survived.

*Charcoal drawing by CallMeCreation.com*

*Splotches, watercolor, by CallMeCreation.com*

*House of Cards, Mongol pencil, as interpreted by CallMeCreation.com*

*Dancing under the moon, Mongol pencil by CallMeCreation.com*

*In Paris, watercolor by CallMeCreation.com*

*By the Cafe, watercolor, by CallMeCreation.com*

I’ve almost forgotten that I used to draw and do watercolors. I should revisit this one of these days.

Congratulations to me

Posted on 29/10/2021 by admin

Yey! I was able to write a long-ish feature article today and right now it is being uploaded. I didn’t go to any coffee shop because I woke up late and it was hot. It was such a struggle to be able to get into the writing zone today. I needed a big push to start writing, like a looming deadline (last workday of the month).

So that’s it. I’m no longer motivated by whatever is happening at work. Writing is like pulling my guts out and it seems like I have no reason to do that anymore.

I really need to address this problem. My livelihood rests on my ability to write and if I keep on getting this writer’s block, I’m screwed.

This lethargy may be brought about by my need to implement the drastic changes I want to do, like moving houses, to signal a change in the direction of my life. I needed a serotonin boost to get me through the day so I bought several shares of ETF while prices yo-yoed this morning. I did two tranches to catch the drop in prices.

After that, the guilty feeling of not being able to adult for the entire week has been erased so I clicked “buy” on that retro-looking red Midea microwave oven on Lazada. Do we really need a microwave? Yes, our househelp said. We use the defrost function in the microwave when we’re running out of time and lunch just came out of the freezer. We heat leftover food with it. And if I do batch-cooking again especially when we move to my hometown in 2023, I would need a microwave oven for dinners and lunchboxes. So yes, my purchase was justified.

I also bought new chairs for the girls again because the black ones that I bought from SM were of bad quality. The place where metal screws go underneath the shell of the seat are made of soft plastic and they broke. I bought the new adjustable rolling chairs from Ofix instead of Ikea because they have quicker delivery time.

Hopefully these will last longer.

Meanwhile, I was able to fix the backrest of this one, which was pushed all the way to the the back since this is a recliner gaming chair. The hydraulic seat no longer lifts but it’s usable. One of the legs is wonky because J kept on leaning on one side when he used this so it was a little bent. But this is still serviceable so I will throw this at the back of my car tomorrow to give to my sister or nephew.

I’m just rambling on. It’s like having verbal diarrhea in front of a shrink to let this all out but in truth I’m masking the real problem. My birthday leave didn’t help at all.

I have trouble writing.

It’s like the end of the world.

Smitten

Posted on 27/10/2021 by admin

The Yamaha P-125 is on sale at Yupangco.

I should be saving money for my future tiny house but I really, really want to buy that piano. I have to sell my Roland E-09 first but I don’t know how without too much work on my side. I don’t know how I will be able to sell it before the sale ends.

I can pay cash for it now but that would be reckless with Christmas coming up and stuff. The question is, do I really need it? No. But I really want it. For two years. I just didn’t want to indulge my wants before because there were more important things to spend on the last three years and I needed to be more practical.

Music is one of my passions. I wonder how long can I hold off buying this thing. I need to buy a new microwave oven because my old Whirlpool (which I think is already 10 years old) already conked out.

I’m so tempted to drive over there tomorrow and test the piano.

I received today a Tumindig shirt birthday gift from a friend.

For the uninitiated, the Tumindig shirt/movement/logo started as a protest symbol against Duterte. You know how he and his minions love to do fist bumps as his signature stance (which is really cheesy, by the way, but the masses love it). So the fist bump stood up (tumindig/tindig), an act of defiance or a symbol of people waking up. This character was created by a comic illustrator that goes by the monicker/nom de plume Tarantadong Kalbo (“bald dumbass”) and people had been customizing this tumindig symbol by dressing it up according to the occupation/personality of who wants to adopt it to indicate his/her defiance vs Duterte.

When we still had a printing shop, I had a shirt made with national hero Jose Rizal (who was executed by the Spaniards for his subversive novels) muffled to protest the passage of the Cyber libel law (they wanted us to become the next Singapore with no freedom of speech). I wore it to a business conference at Manila Peninsula, which almost cost me my entrance to the event because I didn’t look like a business reporter. Good thing the person manning the registration knew me that I was a regular at their business conferences.

I have a long history of wearing protest clothes and my friends know this.

I’m slowly adding Christmas decor because I want to end my dreary year with some cheer. I took one Christmas lantern from my mom’s house (and she has a lot) and this one is so bright that I no longer need to buy more solar-powered lanterns so we can hang outside.

I could order patio furniture from Ikea but what will I do with them after we move? We already have patio furniture in our future tiny home. Let me weigh the options…But I’d like to grill and eat outside with the girls and I promised some friends we can grill some steak and fish and have drinks before Christmas break. Since my friend K will likely stay in the city again for Christmas (K’s entire family is in the US), I think we should have another get-together with our friends, if they can brave the traffic going to QC.

Hmm…stuff in Ofix are cheaper…

Here we go again

Posted on 25/10/2021 by admin

I know that tourism is the lifeblood of some cities, provinces, and countries but until we have everybody inoculated and not take precautions (please, no to crowds!), the virus will continue to mutate. Chinese tour groups are notorious for the lack of crowd control or the volume of people. If the virus mutates again from China, God knows what kind of monster will come out of there again. We should refrain from encouraging this kind of complacency.

Meanwhile, the dolomite beach along Manila Bay is I think politically instigated, to show that stupid project is not a waste of people’s money when funds should have been channeled to pandemic response.

This is really stupid.

What Dr. Mojica says is true. Presidential aspirants who promise to build hospitals do not know what the problem is, therefore, they do not know how to solve a health crisis like Covid. Mojica says that hundreds of hospitals will not solve the pandemic if you do not fix the contact tracing, air circulation in public utility vehicles, offices, schools and public places and not enough vaccines/low vaccination rate. These hundreds of hospitals will still be filled with Covid patients to the brim. He asks, where will you get healthcare workers? “We do not multiply when we get wet,” he said.

As I said in my post on LinkedIn, you are like groping in the dark and Covid will just hit you from out of nowhere because there is no contact tracing, no access to low-cost testing, and no support for quarantined breadwinner from poor families. You can’t just go on cycles of lockdowns that kill livelihoods and spur reckless behaviors, like that of the uncontrolled tourists in the two examples above.

I don’t want to get sick with Covid again. Nope.

*Adjusted floor plan. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

So after discussing with my siblings and mom the plan, I was told, no, I cannot eat floor area in the main house so the room that I will be taking from the main house will remain narrow. So I decided to keep the existing walls and just make another wall to extend my room and make a separate office/walk-in closet. The girls’ room will be transferred to the corner of the unit and will be occupying the rest of the eastern wall. There will be just a wee bit of space for hanging out/lounging for my girls and their friends. We don’t really watch TV that much but this will be for the girls’ movie nights with friends, which I regularly had with my friends when we were in high school because our house was so near our school.

It looks tight because I have my dimensions off (this is not to scale) but the general idea is there. The bar stools can be pushed under the counter for more walking space but I think this will not be that small. I have inspected the space yesterday and it’s doable and is more spacious than I thought. I can also have transoms all around the entire east, north and western walls because there are gaps between the support beams and the naked ceiling. There will be sunlight all around.

Then I told my mom that I will just follow the vaulted ceiling and not have a dropped ceiling so that the entire unit will feel more spacious. My house will feel like a church with super high vaulted ceilings. I think I wouldn’t need a/c in the living/kitchen area and just have my window-type inverter a/c units in our rooms because of the number of windows and the vaulted ceiling will keep it well ventilated. Plus my hometown is generally cooler than Metro Manila since it is at the foot of a mountain.

Meanwhile, the girls are having fun with their older cousin and the younger one. They played all day long until it was time for Kuya P to go home at around 8 pm.

*The four of them in a group hug. Another kuya in the background.* *Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

We brought their bikes so at least they can bike around the area. They need a lot of exercise and fresh air and more playmates.

I have one week of freedom. And the cats have peace.

*Kimchi taking advantage the absence of the girls and my bedsheet-changing day.*

Self-preservation

Posted on 23/10/2021 by admin

Friends and family had been sending messages, greeting me and asking me what my plans for today were. I said I just want to lay down in bed, savor my airconditioned room while the girls are downstairs doing their crafts. Which I did.

However, I had to attend first to my new babies, my plants, and had to water/spritz on water, and make sure there were no caterpillars. Then attend to the cat litter. Other than those chores, I did zero. Ever since our other househelp left, the dishwashing duties, dusting and vacuuming are now assigned to the girls. I really have no reason to get up from my bed because they can take care of themselves now. My ideal day.

*Tonkatsu ramen. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

If it weren’t for the kids, I wouldn’t bother with the food. But of course I had to feed them so I ordered ramen from Botejyu via Grab. Yesterday I already ordered 3 tubs of ice cream for the girls and my househelp and a blueberry cheesecake from Conti’s and have them delivered at home while I was having my car checked. Twin I has been singing praises about the cake sent to me last week by a friend so she pestered me about ordering cheesecakes.

So it seems like her prayers had been answered again after I received two cheesecakes today from a good friend from the industry and another from a PR person.

*I honestly haven’t had any of the cakes yet. I’m controlling myself. Photo by CallMeCreation.com*

I have the girls off my hair today since they were busy eating and painting or doing some crafts. Which was lovely as I get to have peace and quiet.

For dinner, we just had leftovers from yesterday and ham & egg sandwiches. And oh, I was able to revitalize leftover rice from the fridge into fluffy white rice using claypot.

*Claypot rice, Ottogi yellow curry with mostly potato, bell pepper and carrots and few meat. My bowl is above the claypot. I limit my rice intake.*

Tomorrow I should keep myself wide awake because I will drive the girls to my mom to spend their semestral break there for a week. Then I drive back here tomorrow evening because I have back-to-back calls on Monday.

I’m a year older.

What have I learned from the past 12 months? Last year I was miserable and I took an antidepressant so I can balance all the things I had been juggling without having to dwell on the fact that I felt rotten and spent and that pill kept me from breaking down. I knew I was being treated shabbily but I pushed on, thinking that things might get better if I did more.

But no, you cannot win the love you already lost. Or never had.

Last year on this same day I was so lost and alone. I was the loneliest with J. I was confused why I felt that way. I couldn’t fathom why I was wretchedly unhappy. I felt like I was sinking into an abyss. Like it was my fault that it had come to that.

But I was always gaslighted.

I felt helpless.

I was always dragged around because it was always about him, him, him. What about me? I needed comfort and support too but I didn’t get it because it felt wrong if I asked for kindness and love. I felt neglected and tired. But isn’t it enough that he was there with me?

But no. He wasn’t there with me for quite some time. He was already so far away.

It was unfair. He was unfair. He should have left in June, the time when I felt I lost him. He shouldn’t have used me like that.

I’m in a better place on my birthday this year. I have showered myself with love today by being kind to myself. That for once I am not mommy or a woman who must attend to every whim and caprices of her partner. Friends have sent their support and love to me today. I didn’t have to ask for it.

It hurts just thinking about it now. How could have I been unkind to myself for letting me think that I do not have to feel special and loved? That I should just accept what I had then?

I think my return to my hometown to raise my children is my way of sheltering myself from being hurt again like that. You don’t know how much J killed me everyday for several months, especially after that thing with that kid in my circle. What’s worse is everyone knows that by now. And my friends explained to me, in my drunken stupor, that J was chasing her so he can tap into her network, which she doesn’t have. As if she can summon conglomerate owners and C-level people to talk to him like I was able to do for him. As my friends said, why would he go for someone like her when clearly she didn’t have anything on you except youth? “Sex maybe?” I answered in my alcohol-fueled raspy voice. Being infront of the camera doesn’t mean you are the best there. It just so happened a lot of them in that network left (the network is not doing that great) and they had to promote people from within. After one year or less as a researcher, she became an on-cam reporter because she was there. Of course J doesn’t know that; he just probably thought that being on cam she would have more clout, my friends said.

It’s only during my Covid isolation that I firmed up my decision that I should make some drastic changes so I can never let anybody kill me like that again. Now I am beginning to realize that I am retreating from the world by returning to my hometown and will be embracing spinsterhood. My hometown is a small world and there is less chance for me to get involved with someone else because I know everyone there.

Once I uproot ourselves here, that signals that I have finally closed the door. I will start building a fort around me on top of that duplex that I just have drawn plans for. Yes I would still have a queen-sized bed but that is all to myself. Yes, I will be traveling more frequently by next year because of my job and meet a lot of people but I will never ever let anyone near me again like I had let J. It will all be distancia, amigo.

That is how I will love myself–self preservation. At 42 years old, I don’t think I can waste more years and energy again for somebody who never thought I was precious and never put me on a pedestal like the way I did with him.

I cannot afford to be that unhappy anymore. Life is too short.

Stories from the sidelines

A journalist has a life other than news

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