No wonder the atmosphere was heavy, hazy, and very humid yesterday…Taal Volcano is acting up again and the ashes are blowing up this way. The local government has suspended classes today because of the heavy vog we’re having.

Yesterday morning, the world was still fine and I walked to the weekend community market to buy food for the entire Sunday because I didn’t want to slave in the kitchen.

I encountered freshmen college students walking in blocks for what seemed to be a campus tour. It was probably the first time they met their blockmates. Ah yes, today is their first day of classes and it’s better to get acquainted with the buildings or else they will get lost going to their Math 11 class or Crop Science 1. Jumping to one class to another more often than not requires a jeepney ride.

I walked to the market without any umbrella and I really felt the oppressing heat. I sweated so much and I wondered if it was just me or it was unusually humid.

This freed me from slaving in the kitchen all Sunday. It gave me the freedom to lounge in my bed before we went to church. I should do this every Sunday, no?

So for today, we’re just stuck here inside because the vog was bad. Our Philippines reporter sent me this photo she took this afternoon in her condo.

She said she can hardly see anything. It rained so hard and it was unusually heavy. Rain mixed with vog has certainly reduced visibility. She told me that España was already flooded. Gee, that means Taft Ave is already underwater as well.

Good that we’re leaving at 4 am later and hopefully my mom’s other driver (the first one bailed out on me) can drive my car. Its clutch + accelerator mix is finicky for those who are not used to driving it. My sisters gave up on my car as they can’t get the proper combination—and to think their cars are also manual transmission.

Anyway, we’re already packed for PGH. 😴

My two outside kittens are healthy but I have yet bring them to the vet clinic for their shots. I have too many things on my table right now but I’ll get to that soon. They don’t stray too far, they just stay within our compound when they’re not on my doorstep. My indoor kitties have grown more tolerant of them but I still keep them separate. Until the outside kittens have been vaccinated and dewormed, they won’t be able to enter my house, just to keep both indoor and outdoor groups healthy.

Save for our trip to PGH next week and the unknown that lies ahead, life is generally good. I’m so easy to please and maybe what turns off other people is that I don’t have any ambition to climb the social ladder and/or try to wield power and prestige. 

What I want is the polar opposite. I want this for myself, the life this artist has created for herself (see below).

She’s free to experiment with her art because she has no financial pressures. Her overhead is minimal and she has the luxury of having leisurely coffee or tea breaks among the trees. She doesn’t have to worry about healthcare because Australia’s healthcare is free for urgent and necessary care.

Someday I’ll get there.

Meanwhile, I got stressed with just reading about this story about Brandon Miller and his Instagram-whore wife, Candice Miller.

I know some people who had aspired for their kind of life but maybe I’m just built differently. I’m stressed by it. I think the desire to become like them comes from a place of insecurity and general lack of joy and satisfaction.

It’s no longer keeping up with the Joneses. It’s keeping up with Ivanka and the Olsens in the Hamptons. It’s hard to keep up appearances. 🥴 Unless you’re a trust fund baby, you have to toil away until you die just to keep the mansion in the Hamptons and the multi-million home in Manhattan.

It’s not the way to live. You’re barely living with that kind of lifestyle. Candice wasn’t even monetizing her Instagram content; she was just showing off her life, which some people on Reddit have estimated to be costing them USD 10m a year. It’s money they don’t have because they owe creditors at least USD 17m, not counting the money they owe friends and the lawsuits Brandon was facing. Brandon killed himself just to be able to live the Instagram life Candice was keeping.

So nope, I’m fine just where I am now. I don’t have debts and I don’t plan to have them. I will devote time to writing columns, books, researches. Arts and crafts. I do not desire to hang around parties and be photographed as a socialite.

Once my obligations to my children end, I may go back to teaching and lead a simpler life. Teaching is just to keep my brain sharp and to join the government pension fund.

After I have my solar power system up and running, my overhead costs will be minimal. I will lead a life like that lady in the bus in that YTube video.

I had been invited to be an adjunct in my old college in this uni but I declined since I can’t handle my job’s current stressors and if I transition into another job, it will just be so complicated. Handling the thesis of graduate students is not a walk in the park. I can give occasional lectures but time commitments are tricky.

Lord, help me get through next week then I’ll figure out what to do with my life.

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From a macroeconomic perspective, this is a disaster. However, I cannot fault the Thais for choosing the child-free path or delaying pregnancy. You see, unlike in more developed countries in Scandinavia, the Thai government (or governments in Southeast Asia in general) do not provide structural support for families to encourage having children. In Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries, they have free healthcare (giving birth is almost free or affordable), public schools are excellent, and maternity leaves are years-long. Those things are unheard of in Southeast Asia.

The problem with raising children in this part of the world is unaffordability, especially in capital cities where the jobs are. The village that raises the children (“it takes a village to raise a child”) doesn’t exist in cities—unless you’re lucky to have your extended family with you to help with child-rearing. Middle class families are trapped between the need to have two working parents and having one parent to stay at home to take care of the kids. With rising cost of everything, especially private school education, many couples are opting to go child-free. Public schools in this part of the world are crap, except for specialized public schools that are hard to get into. The comments section of this news feature by CNA reveal that. Many Southeast Asians chimed in, agreeing that this is not only a Thailand problem.

Alongside that are the pressures that the “sandwich generation” face; it’s really hard to think about having a child of your own to raise. The sandwich generation are the children who are trapped between supporting ageing parents and raising their own families. This social phenomenon is caused by, among other things, the lack of adequate pension system so the children are forced to become the pension source of their parents/in-laws until they die. In the Philippines and Indonesia, it is very common for eldest children to bear the burden of being the breadwinner of the family and sending siblings to school while the parents have completely stopped working. These children could not even support themselves, how can they even think of getting married and having children?

Another problem is the very low wages in Southeast Asia—these haven’t caught up with inflation for decades. Our governments are adamant in keeping our countries affordable for foreign investors so we can replace China as the world’s factory. How can anyone raise a family with PHP 10,000 – PHP 15,000 a month?

Even I was terrified of having children. I keep telling people I wasn’t ready because being a journalist is a vow of poverty, whether I like it or not. My mom told me, “one can never be ready when it comes to having children but we managed.” With that, I jumped off a cliff and prayed that I will survive…

And speaking of Thailand, the latest political upheaval brought in a new face but the same people. Thaksin’s daughter takes over and there goes the circus. Very Southeast Asia. This will further divide the country. But then, as one of my Bangkok sources told me, it’s business as usual in Thailand. “We have been through many coup d’etats that it has become commonplace and so we continue to plod on.”

These are some of the universal themes played over and over in Southeast Asia and only we fellow Southeast Asians can truly understand each other. My Korean manager couldn’t understand the story she was editing, why banks/lending companies must go to the provinces to offer motorcycle loans. She doesn’t understand that it’s a very big business in Southeast Asia; motorcycles are the main means of transportation in far-flung rural areas, be it in Medan in Indonesia to Da Nang in Vietnam. Our infrastructure is very broken and motorcycles are the only means to private (and public) mobility in rural and urban areas in this region.

What I’m trying to say is such events like the return to power by Thaksin (in the form of his daughter) is very much understood by Thailand’s neighbors.

We’ve been having beautiful weather the past two weeks and it would have been lovely to just drive to the beach and chill.

But no, I must face the stressful unknown next week.

I hired my mom’s driver so I don’t have to stress over parking slots that are in great scarcity in Manila, particularly in Malate. If we have another round of habagat rains and flooding, I don’t have to worry about my car being flooded within the PGH compound.

Ahh work is calling…

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Errr… I was wrong. 🤣

It rained hard in the afternoon. It was hard but not long.

Et voila!

It flooded. Mountainside road getting flooded is…🤦🏻‍♀️ I mean there are trees—an entire rainforest above us—and yet here we are driving through flood. How did we even get to this stage?

I had no choice but to plod through because my mom needed to have her hearing aid cleaned at the nearest Manila Hearing Aid branch, which is in the next town.

I needed to do all the chores within today and tomorrow because the Singapore president will be dropping by our uni campus this weekend. The area will be closed off and heavily guarded so vehicular traffic will be horrendous.

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Uh oh…

That’s why I prefer to have massages at home. I’m sure spas do not change sheets after every customer.

Oh dear…

I’ve been trying my best to be a good mom so I had packed my girls lunch on Monday. However, I didn’t have enough time to cook a vegetable side dish so I opted for the shortcut cucumber for fiber and dried mangoes for dessert. I cooked their favorite salmon (with salt and pepper) in butter and parsely because it’s the easiest to prepare at 5 am.

My Monday was full and I had to do a lot of admin stuff, writing and editing stories at the same time. Had long phone calls. Then my manager killed me again 😵‍💫 I finished the stories and had them published late into the night.

Tuesday is back-to-back press briefings, one online and the other is in Makati so I had a very narrow window to travel and make it to the presscon on time. 🫠 Then I had a discussion with another editor about the hullabaloo the previous night. He advised me to finally talk to our APAC head, to tell her why I had been wanting to quit. Of course, I won’t say I’m already advanced in my application process with a competitor because she would put me on garden leave or fire me directly and I would end up jobless with a sick daughter.

I will be having that talk later today.

In the meantime, my manager was killing me again when I was having my story from the presscon edited.

I’m so tired.

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My girls’ second-hand PC monitors are on their last legs (or the connectors are blah) so after uploading and having my stories published after the presscon, I went straight to Glorietta 2 to buy them new monitors.

I was able to snag Samsung monitors with discount at PC Express. I was debating whether I should get them the 27″ or the 24″. I couldn’t find good deals on a 27″ and the price difference between 27″ (non-discounted) and 24″ (discounted) was almost 3k for any brand. They don’t need a 27″ but it would be fun to watch Netflix on it.

I should have gotten the two 27″ and passed down my current 24″ monitors to the girls… But I don’t know if my MDF Ikea workdesk can take the weight of two 27″ mounted on my heavy iron VESA brackets. My current setup already made a deep indentation on my workdesk. I bought from Lazada metal plates specially made for VESA brackets so the gromet will not further sink into the MDF board.

Now that I think about it, I really should have gotten the 27″ for myself. My workdesk in Singapore is dual 27″ so I know bigger screen real estate helps in productivity.

Meanwhile, I had my mom’s laptop fixed the same day we brought it to the Acer service center in our town.

The technician did a bit of sleuthing and he figured that Microsoft did an automatic download and update and my mom didn’t let the update finish. This corrupted not only Windows 11, but also the hard drive.

My mom had to admit that yes, the update “probably didn’t finish” because she had to send an email. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I love my mom but I swear, she should stay away from Windows and maybe use a Mac because that OS is so simple, like it’s made for non-techie users.

Ubuntu and its many distros, would have been ideal for senior citizens, since the UI is meant for those who cannot cope with Windows and its maintenance. But Ubuntu maintenance is a nightmare for a non-techie person due to the Linux updates and plugs.

I was somewhat comforted after a long tearful prayer while I was driving home last night. I told God I was laying all my fears at His feet. I may be alone in this fight for my daughter but I am not really alone. God has always been with me. If it weren’t for Him I would have crumbled a long time ago because I’m weak.

Trial after trial, I am being broken into many pieces but I am going to be built over and over by my Maker. He is making me stronger so I can give my strength to other people. I must be strong as well for my daughters.

I started the day appreciating the sunshine and flowers. I haven’t stopped praying.

Prayer of thanks that I have a roof over my head and resources to support my daughter’s medical needs. I’m so thankful that I have my family to support me. My mom will be staying in my house for a while to cook Twin I breakfast and see her off to school while Twin A and I will be in PGH. My sisters will look after my household and take care of Twin I’s meals.

I can’t emphasize enough how good it is that we have already transferred here when this medical crisis had sprung up. I can’t imagine managing my life if we still had been living in QC with Twin I left only with the househelp.

I can get past this. I have to.

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Tomorrow is the first day of classes for my 8th Graders. I’m back to waking up at 5 am 😴🥱

But I’d rather have this than being awakened every hour by nurses and fellows/residents as they poke and pry my patient. Plus Twin A had to go to the bathroom with assistance if she’s hooked up to the IV.