Last night I went ballistic on my daughters because they can’t hear me with those giant earphones and ear buds jammed up their ear canals. I kept shouting and slamming doors.

My fuse always short-circuits these days.

I easily get tired and sluggish. I hate the world.

Welcome to the world of perimenopause.

I’ve been awake since 5 am, cooking breakfast and lunch to pack for school. I also cooked for Twin A because she needs to bring the food to Technology and Livelihood Education class. I can’t go back to sleep. I will be groggy all day. And cranky.

I don’t want to deal with so many interview rejections today.

I hate my hormones.

I don’t want to people today. No people-ing for this week. My social battery was never recharged this weekend.

Ghad, I hate my hormones.

I’m so wrong. I need to people today. When I messaged my friend L if there are important coverages today and tomorrow, she told me she was on the way to a CEO conference. I quickly jumped and took a shower and rushed to BGC. Our Manila reporter is sick (and has been out of commission since last week) so I am pinch-hitting for her this week.

Good thing I left at 9 am, already past the rush hours so it only took me 1 hr and 38 mins to reach my destination. 🫠

I’ve been playing for 7.5 hrs now. 🤦🏻‍♀️ I need to sleep.

It started with WRC 8 on my laptop. I was getting frustrated because my wrists were getting tired but I couldn’t budge out of my ranking.

Because my wrists were already hurting, I decided to play a more casual cosy game, Stardew Valley. It turns out, it’s more addicting than I anticipated and Twin I has been laughing at me because I couldn’t get out of my gaming chair.

This is dangerous.☠️

Jon Batiste may be my favorite individual musician to date. His enthusiasm and joy for life is infectious. And he plays one of the most difficult genres for me: Jazz.

The foley part of this video is just the start of something magical. His entire collaboration with Josh Harmon here is a joy to watch. Jon Batiste explained exactly why I’m having a hard time playing jazz on the piano: it drops beats in unpredictable ways. There are so many technically proficient pianists around who can play Franz Liszt flawlessly, but jazz… it comes from  the artist’s feelings that can’t be taught in any conservatory of music. Either you have it or you don’t.

With Jon Batiste, I’m convinced he can see colors when he hears and plays music. It’s similar to how Tori Amos is affected by music. They both have chromesthesia, I think.

Whatever. Jon Batiste is a joy to watch or listen to.

JOSHUA JACKSON WILL ALWAYS HAVE A PLACE IN MY HEART.

I was a forever Pacey girl. I even wrote a short story based on Pacey/Joshua Jackson when I was in college. ❤️ 😁

It’s the start of the “ber” months and that means Filipinos are starting to decorate for the Christmas season.

And I’m not yet ready.

I mean, not only financially, but also for things that I need to fulfill, meet, or just do.

I haven’t been to the beach!!!

We cancelled the family trip to Singapore next month due to the worsening condition of my other nephew so I’m racking my brain searching for alternatives. The original plan was to go to Singapore for a long weekend with my kids, my mom, and my sisters and nephew and I will stay behind for work after they fly home. But circumstances have changed—good thing I haven’t registered for the conference that I was targeting and haven’t booked anything yet.

I haven’t done anything with my life so far…ah well I did quit my post as manager. That’s it. I haven’t gone on a solo leisure travel since 2018.

Ah but I did buy a car without in-house financing or bank loans so that took out a huge chunk of my savings… 🤔 No wonder I feel poor these days—I’m trying to build up my bank accounts that I emptied last July so I don’t have any frivolous purchases recently.

I couldn’t set up the mini projector properly so I just focused the lens on the ceiling—et voila! Movie screen on the ceiling.

I realized that it’s hard to watch a movie when you’re flat on your back. I feel nauseous. 🤦🏻‍♀️

To start my Monday on a better note:

This is way better than any Dept of Tourism video. I hope I have the energy to visit South Cotabato and Bukidnon in the near future.

So much is going on since this weekend. First off are the protests in Indonesia.

@etchaskej

Please help stand in solidarity with the people of Indonesia by making sure they are not being silenced. #indonesia #affankurniawan #PrabowoSubianto #onepiece

♬ original sound – Ed

I had been monitoring the situation since last week and this escalated with the death of a motorcycle taxi driver when he was ran over by the police. I told our Jakarta reporter to leave and fly to Bangkok immediately because there is a huge possibility that Prabowo Subianto will declare martial law. He is the former son-in-law of Suharto, the Indonesian dictator, so it’s not far-fetched that he will follow in his former father-in-law’s footsteps.

Right now, the Indonesian government has blocked social media to immobilize the people. But no, Indonesia will go down in flames before the people will be silenced.

Our JKT reporter will be flying out this weekend and I advised him not to go out of his apartment until he goes to the airport. They will let a foreigner leave before a possible lockdown but it would be tricky for foreigners to move around once martial law is imposed.

Meanwhile, Bangkok is not really a slice of heaven these days. The Thai high court has removed Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra from office for her bungling of the  Cambodia conflict.

But as my sources in Thailand say, the markets are used to events like this, so life goes on.

However, I’m tasked to write an analysis piece on Thailand’s slowing economy, declining birth rate, sky-high household debt, and flat consumer spending. I have to take a trip there myself. 🤔

Back at home, the controversy over ghost flood projects have given birth to the public shaming of the children of government contractors who flaunt their lavish lifestyles on social media. These daughters (most of them are women) and wives of these government contractors show videos in Instagram and Tiktok their private planes, million-peso handbags…

… while we ordinary Filipinos wade through floods.

Quezon City had a freak storm that dumped a month’s worth of rainfall in just a single day. People were unprepared. The infrastructure cannot handle the volume of water that came rushing to the streets.

Our former neighbor told me that they were in UP Town Mall when it happened. The mall got flooded! She also said that the flood water at the intersection where Save More was up to waist-level. That area is 200 meters from our old apartment.

To think the UP Diliman became flooded! Hello! That place has a lot of land and trees that could absorb all that water — but noooooo, the soil is inundated with water that the campus became a swamp. The students in dorms had to be evacuated in several academic buildings to spend the night there.

Ghost flood control projects + climate change = Metro Manila sinks. God help us.

It was really a good call on my part to leave Metro Manila.

We went to the public market today in our town to buy Filipiniana costumes for Monday.

The Linggo ng Wika celebration — supposedly slated on the week of Manuel L. Quezon’s birthday every August 19 — was delayed due to several class suspensions and whatnot. Good thing we still had this weekend to prepare my kids’ costumes.

Good thing we checked this out first before driving to Lumban because the outfits were a lot cheaper, around PHP 500 per set. The Filipiniana in Lumban are the real deal — the type that you wear for formal occasions and not as costumes so the prices are premium. I’m not willing to pay that price just for a school costume.

Meanwhile, one of my bffs saw that a high school classmate is selling their family home. The seller was my bandmate and we used to have our studio there, which was their former storage room.

This was just a storage room that we turned into our practice studio. I used to go here everyday for practices and every 7 pm, we drove to the city where we used to play regular gigs.

So many memories are packed into this small room. And that house. His parents welcomed us with open arms and they didn’t mind the noise that we used to make. His dad passed several years ago and now it’s time to for his mom and nephew/niece to leave the place. Climate change = stronger typhoons made it impossible to live here now. They often get flooded since they’re just at the foot of a hill and all the water from the hilltop cascades into their subdivision. It wasn’t like this when we were growing up. 😢

Sad.

Moving on.