Heat index in my town yesterday hit 50 degrees C. 🫠 It was in the news. No wonder I felt really rotten. Today was no different either. I was blowing off my nose during early morning training (financials). I sounded like I was near death during the call with my manager in the afternoon.

I still have no refrigerator, hence, no icy drinks. Panasonic has yet to deliver the unit that is supposed to replace my old one that has a factory defect.

I had so much trouble finishing work that I submitted my story for editing really late… so no editor picked it up. 😑 That means I have to work tomorrow to publish that article or else it will go stale.

Just as I was looking forward to a real mental health break this Holy Week… 😭

I was planning to go on a drive southeast to cool off but I don’t know if I can because I’ve been popping cold tablets and sometimes they have narcotic side effects. I was thinking of going on a food crawl here in our home province and/or go on a hike to some of the waterfalls nearby.

It’s hard to be sick during a heat wave. 😷

Twin I passed down her colds to me. The virus must have been incubating in her before we checked into the hotel. She got sick the next day after she, her twin and their friends went swimming in the hotel pool at night. Of course her sister and I caught it. We’re all sick and stewing in our house right now. 😷

It was a battle between sleeping this off and editing. And there were lots to do yesterday. I was still working until evening and it was so draining (Japanese stories are a lot of work 😣).

I have a headache coming now.

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I have no agenda for today. I just woke up my birthday girls so we can eat at Mary Grace at the mall and then later meet their elementary bffs who will sleep over. I transferred to the smaller room next door. I just checked out some stores because this is an area of SM North that I seldom or have never been to because this mall is massive—one of the biggest in the world.

Despite its size, it’s still packed with people, like it’s Christmas rush or sales day. But no, it’s just an ordinary weekend and Manileños want to cool off. This is the kind of consumerism that foreign businesses want to capture. Fueled by OFW remittances, domestic consumption is alive and kicking.

SM North is huge that it can devote a large store just for Gashapons. These vendo machines for toys just line up streets of Akihabara in Tokyo or outside of supermarkets. I’ve never seen Gashapons this many in one spot anywhere else. Who buys these things? Well, apparently people make the trek here from all over just to get their hands on these trinkets. They’re not cheap ha. Almost PHP 200 per capsule = one combo meal at Jollibee or McDonald’s. In Singapore they’re much more expensive. The ones I saw in Don Donki are about SGD 10. The last time I was in Japan, it was about JPY 300 (about PHP 150 or less), mostly in Nipponbashi Denden Town.

When I was already on my own and my kids have met their friends, I went to book stores. I went to Booksale but I didn’t see books that I liked. Then went to Biblio and was tempted to buy more…

But I held back. I HAVE STACKS OF BOOKS on the shelf in my room that I still need to finish. 🤦🏻‍♀️ But how can I resist this??? 👇

I’m so dead inside. I worked on an analysis piece the whole day yesterday while I edited one or two stories. Then today I had to chase a story 20,000 km away from me.

I had to rework the piece as two editors came down hard. In between, I had to drive to QC and check into our hotel.

And still write and tweak and edit.

Just came out to the mall to send off my daughters to meet their dadbecause they’re going to have their birthday dinner with him. I had dinner alone.

Went back to the room and worked. And worked. And worked. 🫠 I almost forgot to book my massage! It was almost 9 pm so I was the last customer. Even when I was being squished, I still had to check my phone every now and then because the third editor might message me before clearing my article for publication. 🥲

I’m so dead inside.

I couldn’t write and I have a ton of things to write. It was so hot inside and claustrophobic so I worked in my balcony yesterday afternoon.

It’s holiday today but I must will myself to write. I need to write 😭

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Nope. I just really couldn’t work today even though people kept messaging me on Teams, sending me off the edge. Our APAC boss even harped about the tariffs fallout, which I had already told my team to do eons ago. Even without her telling me, I knew beforehand that what we’re seeing right now is reminiscent of the Lehman Brothers spiraling of the markets.

Because that’s what Trump wants, by design, he and his team wants the world to go into recession, just like in the 1930s. They want to bring down the value of the USD, since they want to bring back manufacturing in the US and make US goods more competitive by crippling the world. They want to control shipping, that’s why BlackRock bought CK Hutchinson ports. They want the northern trading route—the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and the Northwest Passage (NWP). That’s why Trump wants to annex Canada and Greenland and befriending Russia—because the northern trading route is a shortcut to Europe and Asia.

He and his cronies want Wall Street to melt down so they, the oligarchs, can buy American corporates cheaply. Trump is forcing again ByteDance to sell Tiktok to an American entity because they want to control the narrative. Facebook and Twitter/X are already controlled by friendly camps like Zuckerberg and Musk. But not Tiktok, which is more powerful than the two combined. It is in Hitler’s playbook—control media, you control the world.

How to wrest control of trade and economy just like post-WWII America? Start major wars.

The thing here is, this will backfire. The rest of the world will trade among themselves and the US will just be isolated. The world will learn how to survive without the US. It’s going to be difficult because the US is the biggest consumer market but that will change because its people will be crippled by the recession. It will cut people’s buying power. Moreover, US manufacturing is decades behind China and the rest of the manufacturing hubs of the world. China has already automated manufacturing and logistics people had been saying US won’t be able to catch up.

Anyway, I just decided that I’ll just tackle everything tomorrow.

Keeping my blood sugar level down is a Herculean task. My concern now is how to keep my blood sugar from spiking because once it spikes, insulin won’t be able to do it’s thing immediately because I have insulin resistance. It will stay elevated before it crashes (hypoglycemia). I had been watching videos of PCOS-women who are suffering from insulin resistance/pre-diabetic—what they eat, what they do before and after meals, and what to avoid.

Cooled rice in the fridge overnight has lower glycemic index, so I had been keeping rice in the fridge when I still had a fridge. Toasting bread also has a lower glycemic index. If I can get away with eating rice, then I skip rice and only eat it once a day.

How to adopt a keto diet when you want to control cholesterol as well? I have a sad existence, food-wise.

It’s so hot inside the house so I am now catching some cooler breeze outside with my cats.

I kept putting this off for two years but I finally had the bandwidth to do it now: I am finally having an accordion screen door installed on my front door. It was my brother who finally found me a vendor.

Here is how it’s going to look like:

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They measured my giant door and it’s going to cost me PHP 22k. Normal-sized doors only cost PHP 15k. 😬

I just need to keep my hardwood door open because it’s freaking hot but I don’t want the insects to come in. I live in a forest so it’s not only mosquitos and flies that I have to be worried about. I also deal with beetles, grasshoppers, moths, cicadas—you name it.

Hopefully they would be able to install it before Maundy Thursday.

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I love Drumeo even though I’m not a drummer. I love them for doing this for Phil Collins, one of the greatest drummers who ever lived.

Most people know him as a solo artist, as a singer-song writer. But I regard him as a drummer first, singer second. The fact that he can shift genres from progressive rock (Genesis) to pop to Big Band/jazz is a testament to his versatility. Not a lot of drummers can just jump to jazz (watch Whiplash, the movie). His songs, if they’re not piano-driven, are drums-driven. Drums part shine, as shown in In the Air Tonight. Once you hear the concert toms, you know it’s Phil Collins.

His soundtrack for Tarzan was really good—heavy on drums and catchy. Percussions = jungle, to put it simply. I don’t like the movie but I liked the soundtrack and that was the one that stuck with me. And Glenn Close as the mother ape. 🤣

Anyway, my favorite Phil Collins song is Everyday, which was released in 1994. There was a guy I met in Davao where I spent my whole summer vacation in 1995. He made me a mix tape of the hits that year. It contained No More I Love Yous by Annie Lennox and Hey by Fatima Rainey…so you get how that 90 min tape sounded like. One particular song hit me to the core: it’s Everyday by Phil Collins.

These lines hurt and soothed me at the same time, in different seasons of my life:

You’ll never know, no, no, no, no, no
You’ll never know just how close we were
You’ll never know, no, no, no, no, no
You’ll never know
No, you’ll never see

The book closes, and we try to forget
But I know that things won’t change

How we feel, how life goes on
And that seems so strange

And so the light fades away, (everyday)
Try, try, try as I may, (Everyday)
I can’t stop thinkin’ about you, (everyday)
It seems my life’s worth nothing without you