Why I blog

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business coffee composition computer
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Why do I blog when this is not even public and not indexed by search engines? Why do I even bother blogging anonymously?

Number one, I need an outlet to express my thoughts that I cannot share on social media. I have limited my FB engagement because it really does something to your brain, especially now that politics is so toxic and divisive. I maintain my Twitter because it is my source of fast news. I use Instagram for shallowness, like following hashtags like #workspaces, #hobonichi #travelersnotebook, #moleskine, etc. LinkedIn is just for work and personal branding.

I have no outlet to express my thoughts and emotions, where I can talk about the mundane and inane things. I sometimes need to practice writing other than business writing. My old school journal is for the things I need to express explicitly, naming names, places, specific things, specific events. Things that aren’t for consumption of people other than me.

I am a very opinionated person and I am expressive but mostly that is about current events and politics. Or about funny things. However, I am never comfortable about airing my personal struggles and dirty linen. I always try to maintain an air of dignity and I also think about the dignity of the other party involved in my dirty laundry.

Second, my blogs are my archive of whatever. My photos, my voice, my record of my daily life. For my kids. When I depart this universe, they will have something to come back to, to hear my voice in my writing and actual audio recording. So that when they miss me, they can still feel that I am with them, just somewhere, taking my grand vacation.

I started keeping journals since I was 10–their age right now. Because I was a diligent journal writer, I became I professional writer. I started publishing in high school–in a nationally circulated magazine in Filipino. I don’t know if Liwayway is still around but I was a published Filipino writer at first but I had always been a bilingual literary writer. I remember writing in one of my journals in high school that I keep journals for my future children. So they will understand how I went through adolescence, that I went through what they are going through. The insecurities, the heartbreaks, the self-doubts…all those raging emotions that a typical teenager go through. At the back of my mind I knew I will have daughters. I don’t know…it was just a gut feel. Even at 15 years old.

fashion woman notebook pen
Photo by Negative Space on Pexels.com

Then I started blogging in 2002-2003. I used Geocities to create my website and learned HTML codes to build it from scratch. I wrote about my travels. It was hard to keep up with it because building pages with just HTML codes is tedious. Because of the skills I learned from blogging then, I was able to build websites for our online store using Joomla. Then the WYSIWYG blogging tools came into being. I started with Blog-city, then Blogger, Blogspot, Multiply, then settled with WordPress. I remember in 2003-2005, my co-workers and I were reading each other’s blogs because all of us were just ranting about our editor whom we codenamed “Virgin Doll”. We called ourselves by our blog names like Luthien (me), Styar and Crimsonarrows. Then we got into different paths but we still kept in touch via our blogs. Then the rise of social media took over our blogging so that is that.

I couldn’t recover now my old blogs because the hosts became defunct. I tried saving some of the contents of my old blogs via TheWayBackMachine but most were irrecoverable. It’s really unfortunate because I need to use some of the contents for my annulment case.

Tracking my personal growth is easier too as I get to read entries from 10 years ago or older. It was a struggle to blog when I was still with my newspaper then because my life then was super competitive so all my free time was devoted to learning my business–reading books about investing, the stock market, reading all my magazine subscriptions to help me understand global events. When I woke up it’s about news–watching cable news and business channels–and before going to bed it was still news (magazines). When I got into broadcast/online, I found it easier to blog because Internet connection was easier due to the availability of my own mobile internet connection whereas when I was in the newspaper business, the only time I get to go online for personal reasons is when I got home and most of the time my brain was already fried and would rather vege out infront of the screen to watch my anime.

After my breakup with J, I had been blogging religiously for my sanity. I needed to let this all out. I needed to talk to myself by writing about myself for myself. It’s like the exercise that we had during a writing workshop I attended at the Philippine High School for the Arts–the stream of consciousness exercise, which is a literary device employed by writers, like it’s having a monologue to yourself. Aside from developing your own voice, stream of consciousness clears away the cobwebs that clutter a writer’s brain and help it organize the mind for more important writing tasks at hand. As I told my students, a good writer can already organize an outline of her piece in her brain; how to line up the facts, how the story/article will flow and how it will it arrive at the thesis of the piece. A really good writer knows how to edit and re-edit herself, keeping it to the simplest understandable form and being direct to the point. A good writer never stops editing her piece until it goes to the printing press.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, said one becomes an expert after devoting 10,000 hours to that specific task. The successful people have the advantages/resources to have these 10,000 hours. So I am privileged enough to be able to devote time to writing other things so I can practice my craft and not waste my free moments scrolling through social media. I must constantly write, edit, and re-edit my entries so I will not lose my “voice”, how I process my thoughts, how I can write quickly without any outline in my head.

Practice, practice, practice. Read, read, read.

Blogging also helps me write even though my heart is breaking into a million pieces. Writing through tears and pain. It’s very cerebral work and it’s hard to deliver if your mind has already shut down. No one really cares if a writer/journalist is hurting so she still has to write and deliver work. Writing despite all these debilitating circumstances helps a writer conquer emotions and plod along. It also helps in the numbing process.

This is why I still keep on paying for my web hosting year in and year out. It’s all worth the money.

New toy

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My streaming/podcasting mic, Fifine K670B. Photo CallMeCreation.com

I’ve been playing with this thing the entire night by recording my audio. For less than PHP 2,000 (PHP 1,750 to be exact since I bought this during the 10.10 sale), I was able to score a good USB condenser microphone for my interviews. As I have mentioned before, I will be joining my high school friends in their Youtube series, interviewing people about anything under the sun that interest the kwarentals, or those aged 40 and up. They already ran the teaser last week and then they will interview me next month before my debut in December in time for our high school reunion.

The audio is crisp and picks up my voice really well. There is also a 3.5mm jack at the back of the mic for earphones/headphones monitoring. You know, kinda like what recording artists put on their ears to monitor their own voices so they can easily track if they’re going off-key because the backing music can easily drown out their audio. This is really neat. There is also a converter so I can hook this up to a microphone arm if I don’t want the stand blocking my LED monitors when I’m interviewing or doing podcasts/streams.

The base is heavy and solid so the mic will not topple down. Overall this is value for money.

‘Til They Take My Heart Away
Burnout

I’m so happy with this purchase.

Girl power

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Duterte and his administration are really afraid of women. For all his misogynistic attitude towards women, deep down he is really scared of us. Look at those who rose up against him: VP Leni Robredo, Sen. Leila de Lima (jailed), Hidilyn Diaz (harassed by government), and Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

He loves to harass and belittle female journalists. It is a scary time to be a journalist in this country. We had been a hotspot for journalist killings for years now (we were the most dangerous place for a journalist next to Iraq for quite some time now) but it has heightened during the reign of Duterte. I am glad I no longer have to report national news and suffer through his Q&A, press conferences with Harry Roque, or even monitor Duterte’s late night ramblings.

“Many Philippine presidents have attacked the press, but only Rodrigo Duterte, of all the presidents, have publicly subscribed to the idea that journalists are fair game for murder,” Varona says.

Attacks and harassment: Women journalists in the Philippines on the cost of truth-telling

Because of the dangers we are facing with Duterte’s rise to power, some veterans in the industry like Howie Severino, Glenda Gloria, and Sheila Coronel, called us to a meeting in a secluded restaurant in Quezon City just to talk about forming a guild so that we can protect ourselves and fight back. Sadly, nothing happened after that initial meeting because we were just too damn busy trying to survive our day-to-day work of churning out stories. This was the week I got brutally attacked by government-backed online trolls that even harassed my office in Hong Kong.

I had issues with Maria Ressa and I won’t list them down here and those who had been in the industry long enough know what those are. But I admire her grit and determination to fight this tyrant single-handedly. I had marched alongside them wearing black when they had the march for press freedom in UP.

Since day one of becoming a journalist–since I co-wrote that series on juvenile justice–I knew that every time I publish a story, I have one foot on my grave. I had been threatened with lawsuits before and I had been scared but I pushed on. Being a journalist during the time of Duterte, even if you are not covering him, is a doubly dangerous job. I was told that a powerful government official does not like me because I am vocal about my anti-Duterte stance. And he scolded me and lost his cool on national TV when I was hosting a forum where he was a guest. I was asking a fair question that everyone needed to ask. It was scary but I had to keep my composure. I was told he and other officials boycotted the forum the following year because of me.

I had friends in Reuters publicly lynched by the mob, having their IDs, photos and personal information posted on the Internet, with trolls encouraging the public to inflict physical harm on them and their families. (Upon investigation by some of my other journo friends, my Reuters friends’ personal information was leaked from their records with the National Bureau of Investigation–information that they got whenever we needed clearance to apply for visas or passports). In a country where life is very cheap (you can have somebody killed for only PHP 5,000), those are not empty threats. Their employer had to take them and their families to safehouses until the storm died down. I was so distraught that time that I had to take a break from the Philippines and went to a place where no one spoke English–Taiwan–and took a breather to collect myself for a week. I just didn’t want news from the Philippines and I just had to be away immediately.

But Maria Ressa had to endure conviction, harassment, bankruptcy, and daily mental torture and yet she plodded on. She had to wear bullet-proof vests whenever she goes out. Because it’s no secret Duterte wants her dead.

This administration has demonized us. It’s in every dictator’s playbook–demonize every journalist and create your own propaganda machine and feed your shit to the public that has lost trust on the media. Now you all have this revisionism going on and conspiracy theories that make the maleducated poor believe the lies.

Journalists in South America face drug cartels and the corrupt government officials in cahoots with them, we in Southeast Asia battle despots like Duterte and the Marcoses. Journalists in Russia, China (in HK, that is), and the Philippines face the same thing.

My daughter expressed her interest in becoming a journalist. I told her, anak, you can become whatever you want but I hope you don’t follow my footsteps. You will be penniless and you will get killed.

Buying online courses

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I bought Skillshare and Domestika subscriptions so that my girls would have something else to do. My daughter, Twin A, is showing interest in drawing so I will give her access to Skillshare while her twin prefers Domestika. They’re cheap–each doesn’t cost more than PHP 1,500 a year. Plus I can also have access to both when I want to learn new skills as well.

Twin A’s interpretation of a power pole and lines against the sunset. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

If there are things that my parents didn’t deny us/scrimp on, these are art/music lessons and books. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up because my parents were strictly academic people employed by a state university, with only a few consultancy jobs because my father said their foremost priority should be their research and teaching. Devoting more time to consultancy jobs is a form of cheating/corruption because you’re using the government’s time to enrich yourself. Well, most of the time their consultancy jobs are pro bono because the NGO work they were doing were for the poor.

Anyway, I digress. So my parents made sure we were well-rounded individuals who had access to or some form of training in the arts. My brother and older sister enrolled in drawing classes and piano lessons but they didn’t stick to it. My mom bought electric keyboards because of those piano lessons. When they saw I was displaying much interest in piano, they enrolled me in piano lessons and I stuck with it for a few years. Later, they bought us an upright piano and I was the one who mostly used it. I could spend three hours playing it. We asked for books, they bought us books. When my mom went abroad for work, she would scour the bookstores for copies of books that we didn’t have here in the Philippines.

I am doing the same to my kids. When they asked for ukeleles, I didn’t think twice about buying them those. They’re still playing the instruments, but it’s Twin I who wants to take advanced lessons in it. I will enroll her if she’s still up to it after having that access to Domestika.

They’re still doing their Kumon and next year I will enroll them in review classes to prepare them for entrance exams to Quezon City Science High School and UP high schools in Diliman and Los Baรฑos. I am not going to force them to take the Philippine Science High School (a.k.a Pisay) exam because there is a lot of pressure there but if they want, they can take it. My brother and older sister took the exams and passed (can’t remember though if my older sister went through the second screening though because she wasn’t keen on going there anyway). My brother had a slot in Philippine Science High School but he later decided not to enroll there because he had most of his friends enroll in UP. When it was my turn, I didn’t bother taking the Pisay exam because I didn’t want to go there because I knew early on that I will not pursue a science course in college so it was a waste of time. Plus my math grades weren’t stellar so I had a math tutor to help me pull up my grades to keep me in the honors’ list.

What I wish for my kids is to have the chance to have more exposure to sports and the arts because later on in life they may decide to pursue careers that may not be science-based at all. Like me. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t learn the hard sciences. In fact in my undergrad years, half of the courses I took were sciences because I was a science communication/journalism major. My grades in my biology courses were mostly 1.0 or 1.25 (1.0 being the highest and 5.0 the failing mark). I quit one course (environmental science) because it was only my mom teaching that subject that semester and I certainly didn’t want her to be my professor! I had to change course (botany) at the last minute. I wanted to enroll in an environmental microbiology course but it may turn out that my mom may be the only one teaching that again. So instead I took some forestry subjects. I initially wanted to pursue environmental journalism but there was no such thing in this country and only developed countries have that (my target was to be a photo journalist for National Geographic). 25 years on, we still don’t have that.

So back to lessons, offline and online. I may be cheap on other things (like cars, housing, and furnishings) but I will not scrimp on education.

DIY

Despite spending the rest of Sunday mostly sleeping, I was able to shoehorn some DIY projects today. I was able to finally change the curtain rod brackets after three years of living here. I used to use the hooks left by the previous tenant. I removed those and patched up the holes those hooks left behind with some white wall putty.

Alloy curtain rod brackets I bought from Lazada. They feel sturdy enough and they have some heft to them. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

And drilling holes into the walls made of solid concrete left me exhausted.

All adults should have power drills. This is the most useful tool I bought for myself for my DIYs. And yep, that white stuff on my fingers was the wall putty. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Finally, I was able to finish installing the brackets and lengthen the area where my curtains can go.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I should finish the second batch of katcha/muslin curtains I’m sewing by hand so I can change these because these are already full of holes. Courtesy of my cats.

Because I was too exhausted to do any real cooking. I settled for mandu and Kikoman with chili oil, instant yakisoba, spicy fishcakes, and seaweed for dinner.

Light dinner. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Therapy

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Photo by CallMeCreation.com

I cooked brunch today then I slept again after that. It’s unbelievable that I was still exhausted from yesterday’s trip. Then I woke up a little past noon when I was asked by my daughter to sign a proof of delivery as some industry friends sent me baked lasagna and blueberry cheesecake so I didn’t have to cook a midday meal or even dinner. My daughter, Twin I, and I gardened in the afternoon. I transplanted this flowering plant (I wasn’t able to get its name) and herbs I bought yesterday along CP Garcia Ave on the way home from UP where I bought our vegetables.

Basil and dill in our “dirty kitchen”. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Then we planted some vegetable seeds in new plastic pots that I will transfer to our “dirty kitchen”/laundry area because this area receives so much sunlight all day. The vegetables and herbs will be protected from aphids outside plus we can just pluck leaves from our kitchen “garden” when we cook.

After gardening, I slept again and when I woke up, it was already dark.

Gardening is some kind of therapy for me these days as I still couldn’t go out due to fatigue. Watching something you grow and nurture is also fulfilling, like having my girls with me.

Speaking of nurturing, the stray cats that reside outside our compound have moved inside the compound as our neighbor had also been feeding them and tamed them. We also have been feeding these cats since we moved in here in October 2018–exactly three years ago! Our neighbor had put pet collars around them so people would know someone had already adopted them and think twice about abusing them.

Brushing him with a toothbrush. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

So this white cat has been trying to make himself cute to us while we were gardening this afternoon. He would lie down and go belly up and curl, something that my inside cats would do when they’re begging for some petting. Of course I didn’t pet it with my bare hands so what we did was we got a toothbrush and brushed it so it can have some grooming and belly rubs. It loved all the attention and loving touch. The girls were begging me if they can give the cat a bath, I said no because it’s not yet tame enough and we don’t know what kind of diseases it has. We have to tame it completely before we can do that. The compromise was we brushed on flea powder on it and the cat loved the brushing so much that it begged for a repeat tonight when I was checking out my partially charged fairy lights.

Kittykat waiting for us to play with him. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

When this cat finally becomes tame, I would bring it to PAWS to be neutered, checked, vaccinated and de-wormed. Then we will give it a bath. However, it will still have to live outside because I don’t want to have chaos in my house. We will just make some kind of cat house outside so they will be protected from the elements. I would have to buy wooden crates and I have some fiberglass roofing here that I used for my “dirty kitchen”.

They say a woman who has sworn off marriage and choose to live single the rest of her life would become a crazy cat lady. I guess I’m turning into that now…which is fine by me. Cats are obnoxious animals but when they do give you love, it’s real. They don’t give you bullshit.

Mockery

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Duterte’s camp is really making a mockery of the electoral process. They fielded a clown to run for president alongside another clown, Bong Go, as vice president. Because you know what they will do? The last minute, they will do a substitution, with Sara Duterte running as president with her demon of a father as VP. They will make so much drama out of it, and the script would be like “people are clamoring for us to run so we will be making the ultimate sacrifice so we will, for the country.” And all of the DDS would be all applause.

OR

At the last moment, they will make a substitution, Sara Duterte will run alongside Bong-bong Marcos as his VP. If her ego can take it.

They have done it in 2016, they will do it again.

God save our country from idiots.

It has been two months since I last been in UP campus to buy vegetables and milktea for my kids.

In front of Bahay ng Alumni, UP Diliman. Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Prices have gone up. I could feel the rising inflation month-on-month and the problem is this is a supply-side issue that cannot be addressed by monetary policy alone. It is structural that requires some fixes in the real economy.

Anyway, after the veggies and the milktea, I went to Sarang Mart because I am running out of shampoo. Even before J came, I had been buying shampoos and side dishes in that Korean grocery store. I had been using either Korean on Japanese shampoos (Japanese Lux or Shisheido) for several years now even if they’re more expensive initially but they do last a long time. I remember in my last trip to Japan, I lugged several shampoo bottles of Lux back home because it was way cheaper compared to anything I saw in Singapore and even in HK. Then I found Lux in SM, which was much more expensive than the Korean Kerastase sold in Sarang Mart but a lot cheaper than Lux in Singapore (which I often bring back home whenever I have to report for work there).

So I had to replenish my stock. Bought Korean curry (which my girls liked), dried seaweed, dried kelp (which I use as kombu in some Japanese dishes), beef strips for hotpot, mandu, side dishes, furikake, ramyun, and I no longer remember what else i chucked in my basket.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Photo by CallMeCreation.com

When I was going back to my car, I lost my balance, sprained my ankle, grazed my foot on the pavement (was wearing slippers), and fell flat on my back. I didn’t realize that I was that exhausted with my short trip to buy foodstuff.

I am NOT yet ok. I’m still sick with Covid symptoms, mainly fatigue, even though I am no longer infectious and I can function somewhat normally. I still easily get tired and right now my head is aching. I woke up this morning coughing and wondered whether this was still Covid or allergy.

I think I will be sleeping my weekend away.