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

In the wake of the ChatGPT x tariffs brouhaha (plus taxing penguins and seals), all I can say is, I have little respect for people who use shortcuts and pretend they’re some genius for coming out with all these numbers.

We do use a lot of AI in our company but AI needs a lot of intervention from humans who train it. We reporters and editors, most of the time, have to correct the AI-generated data. AI relies on large datasets and predictive patterns to be able to do its thing but it doesn’t really do the thinking for the humans. It cannot generate the context so I had to scrap 90% of the summaries generated by our AI.

It cannot interpolate and extrapolate correctly if there are missing data—and we have a lot of missing data in the Philippines.

I tried it before.

More than a decade ago, I went straight to what was then the National Statistical Coordination Board when I was sifting through the national accounts data for a macroeconomic analytical piece I was working on. I also went to Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, just to try my luck and see if they have the data I was searching for. I went through ledgers upon ledgers of numbers to piece together a narrative that I needed. This was data analytics pre-AI. I had to give up because if I interpolated or extrapolated, there were weird/wild outliers and they were a lot of them—which made them less of outliers. This then made the whole thing incorrect or inconclusive. To think I already had the guidance of my siblings who know their econometrics (and my sister’s main job before was in econometrics)…

AI wouldn’t know whether the parameters you fed it was right or wrong, just like what White House did with the tariffs. 🤦🏻‍♀️

And as explained by those who redid the calculations, there was no accounting for elasticity (see blog entry the other day).

🤦🏻‍♀️

Anyway, I have yet to schedule my Data analytics course (which includes machine learning etc). I can’t seem to fit them in my calendar. It seems like I’m fully booked until June.

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Yesterday was exhausting.

I cleaned my widows, stairs, roof, and rain gutters with my power washer. It took me hours.

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I had the wrong settings in the video above but I corrected it so I was able to blast off the black bits on the cat balcony. I was able to reach the girls’ window but not from this angle.

I also repaired the doorknob in my daughters’ room that fell apart. My door knobs are not cheap, you know.

Never rely on a man for things that you can do yourself.

First, if you’re going to bring down the world, do it properly. Like have real numbers to fuck up world trade, not some percentages you have pulled out off someone’s ass. 🤦🏻‍♀️

I already know that Trump’s audience doesn’t know how tariffs work, but his own people don’t even know where tariff comes from. YOU DO NOT JUST DO A SIMPLE ARITHMETIC ON TRADE BALANCES!!!

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People who do this can be smelled by smart people. And even if we come from a third world country, you can’t fool us, we can smell your bullshit from afar. So those so-called consultants like McKinsey or Bain or those who pose as independent consultants deliver work like this—uh uh 😠 we can see right through you.

Your day of reckoning will come.

In the meantime, let Trump and America burn. We’re just here along for the ride.

I had to get out of the house and touch grass today. I had been playing games until 2 am and that’s not good from any standpoint.

I brought Twin A with me so she won’t be staring at the screen the whole day.

I forgot. 🤦🏻‍♀️ Summer means flowers and pollens flying around. Five minutes into our walk, mother and daughter were already sniffing and developing runny noses.

We first went to Kurimi to buy milk tea before we took our places in the field. The Kurimi shop was overlooking the university pool that I haven’t visited in over 10 or 20 years. That end there is 12 ft deep and it should be perfect for practice free dives.

We brought our drawing tools so we can enjoy the dying light, fresh air, while practicung our craft.

We packed up our stuff at 6 pm and walked to the nearest Korean grocery store to buy meat, enoki mushrooms and kimchi for barbecue. Hopped to the vegetable stall for fruits and veggies.

When we got home, I took the Lazada packages and tried my new glass teapot for my Chinese fruit tea—a TCM remedy for menstrual cramps and other women-related discomfort.

It lacks the sweetness of the berries and dates. I should add oranges tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I helped Twin I with her home-made lamp that she will be submitting on Thursday. It’s made of wooden hanger, a chopping board, a tin can and ordinary socket, wire, and switch.

Good thing Mommy is handy with power tools. 🙃