I just want to quit. Quit this company. All I can say is you cannot make yourself small for somebody who refuses to grow up.
As I told a friend, I just do my job, keep my head low, get my salary, then jump when the opportunity comes.
I’ve been looking at openings but so far none stirred excitement inside me. I mean, none tugged at my insides yet.
Pita bread and curry. Photo by CallMeCreation.com Beef strips with enoki mushrooms that I made myself. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Since we’re stuck indoors again, I have been trying to cheer ourselves by cooking yummy food (and yes I am forcing my girls to eat Indian food). I no longer know how to make things better for the four of us (the other househelp already went home to her hometown and got married the other day) because…we are all tired of all of these.
I have already asked for a leave of absence for a few days this month before they announced the lockdown. I was initially planning to go to my hometown for a mini-break (bike to nearby towns and just chill) but I guess that won’t be happening anytime soon. So I will be stuck with nothing else to do.
Filipinos are glued to their free tvs and internet streaming to watch the Olympics. Because we have nothing else to cheer us up during these dark days. We’re facing a hard lockdown in three days and beds are running out in NCR hospitals. We are looking for distractions that could allow us to leave the grim realities, even for a little bit.
We now have three medals in sports that really do not attract a lot of sponsorships (weightlifting and boxing). Our bet in men’s pole vaulting didn’t make the podium but that’s ok; EJ Obiena still ranks 6th in the world and that’s something because we had nothing before. Carlos Yulo, was near podium, finishing fourth overall in men’s gymnastics but that’s still ok; we didn’t have anything before. He came a long way.
Carlo Paalam and Eumir Marcial are assured of a bronze after shocking the world with their wins to reach the semis/final round. You know, boxing is a sport in the Philippines to get people out of poverty. They’re fighting with all they have because they had nothing to start with so they have nothing to lose. That’s how Manny Pacquiao fought his way out of literal hunger.
I was once interviewed by my journalist cousin who was writing for NBC at that time (or I cannot remember which outfit she was writing for) about Manny Pacquiao’s near-legend status in the Philippines and why his story and his wins resonated with all Filipinos and Southeast Asians. I can no longer find that article online.
Meanwhile, the RAM stick I ordered arrived the other day and added it to the laptop-turned-desktop to make everything faster. My daughter saw me once again operating on that 15.6″ laptop and asked what was I doing? I said, “Saving me at least PHP 500 of labor,” because I can do this simple task on my own.
It’s a Samsung DDR3 stick shipped from China that I bought for about PHP 1,500 on Lazada. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I think this machine will stay with me for a while, even after Windows 11. I think this is the only physical remnant of my relationship with J that is left with me. I still couldn’t bring myself to call it mine and I think I will always refer this to as the laptop that I hijacked from J. I didn’t know why I did what I did even though I knew I could buy my own. Maybe at the back of my mind I wanted a piece of him because I always knew he would leave sooner or later. He already left me twice to go back to his adopted country. He was also trying to get back to Singapore because he was applying for jobs there. It was just a matter of time, it was always weighing on my brain. I don’t know how long I will keep this but based on experience, I can keep machines running until they’re past 7 years old. This Acer Aspire E-573G is already 6 years old (released in August 2015) but is still working well.
So the rains just took a little breather this weekend but it seems like more will come in the next few days as we see we have three tropical depressions forming north and northeast. They look like they will be typhoons heading to Japan later this week, which may pull more southwest monsoon rains for us in Luzon and in Taiwan. Monsoon + lockdown = cabin fever.
Or extended lockdowns = joblessness/hunger. I need to keep my coffers available again for the community pantry.
Which spells trouble for us economically. As my economist brother posted on social media:
The purpose of the quarantine is to delay the surge so that the system, specifically the health care system can prepare itself. The question is, does the system have the resources it needs to prepare/recalibrate/upgrade? Can we expect additional health workers? Do we have enough vaccines for the planned intensified vaccination program? Have these vaccines been distributed or are they ready for distribution? Have we taken stock of the capability of our LGUs to vaccinate or intensify the vaccination drive? I HOPE THESE WERE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION BEFORE LAGUNA WAS PUT UNDER MECQ. REMEMBER QUARANTINE DOES NOT KILL THE VIRUS. BUT IT KILLS THE LOCAL ECONOMY AND THE LIVELIHOOD OF OUR PEOPLE.
Because this freaking government does not have any concrete plans at all. we’re 1.5 years into this crisis and yet we still don’t have plans. The healthcare sector is completely exhausted. There are no more nurses; hospitals are understaffed. Doctors are tired.
People are sinking into anxiety, anger, and/or depression because of this never-ending lockdowns while other countries with high vaccination rates are returning to normal. They’re opening Lion King on Broadway, while we scramble to get our shit together before we hunker down again and wait for another disaster.
So Filipinos are distracting themselves with the Olympics, with the stellar performances of our athletes, despite all odds. They’re serving as beacons in the dark days ahead.
Our boxer, Eumir Marcial just knocked out his opponent today, assuring him of at least a bronze medal. He’s up for silver in the next bout.
A genuine display of sportsmanship! Philippines’ Eumir Marcial and Armenia’s Arman Darchinyan hug after the men’s boxing middleweight division at the #Tokyo2020#Olympics. Read more: bit.ly/3ygA204. (: Luis Robayo/AFP)
Meanwhile, another woman in a “masculine” sport is gunning for gold. Nesthy Petecio will be facing off with her Japanese opponent in the finals. As Manny Pacquiao has proven, the Philippines is one country to beat in boxing.
Meanwhile, EJ Obiena is also up for gold in pole vaulting. These guys are so inspired now that they saw how Filipinos celebrated Margielyn Didal and Hidilyn Diaz the past few days.
Hoping for three golds. So at least my countrymen would have something to smile about in the coming days.
This reddit post has made the rounds on social media because of its universality among Filipinos. This is one of the most annoying attitudes I have encountered among those Filipinos who just happened to have stepped on foreign soil. I related to J this situation when he told me of his encounters with at least two Filipinos here in the Philippines who have distanced themselves from Philippines-based Filipinos and elevated themselves as superior to those who stayed here. One insisted he is a Singaporean (even if he’s really a Filipino) and he is just “forced” to be here because his company assigned him here because, well, he is Filipino! While the other one is a Fil-Am who grew up in the US and kept on insisting he is American and he disdains being identified as Filipino during his conversation with J.
As I told J, some of us chose to stay here because we can. Our families have means to stay here, meaning our parents didn’t have to go abroad to give us decent lives. Some of us stayed to help the country because if all the skilled manpower and the intelligentsia left, who would be there to help the oppressed and the voiceless build the country? Brain drain devastates a country. This is the primary reason why none in my immediate family left the country, even if we’re going to be a cesspit come 2022 elections.
And yet we get flak from those who just happened to have a whiff of foreign air. I have heard from my classmates, my sister (who tried to live in the US for a while) and other relatives and ex-in-laws stories about the Filipino communities in the US, the primary preoccupation of their members is to one-up each other. The reddit thread in the above post also talked about that toxic environment among Filipinos that some of them have all together avoided Filipinos or left the US to live back here. One high school classmate of mine told me about the toxic community she was forced to live with for a time when she was pursuing her master’s degree in the US. It was so toxic that she avoided all Filipinos within the state.
Too many things happened the past week that I wasn’t able to write my thoughts about Hidilyn Diaz and Margielyn Didal making waves a the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
Margielyn Didal of the Philippines in action at Tokyo Olympics 2020’s women street skateboarding finals at the Ariake Urban Sports Park, Tokyo, Japan onJuly 26, 2021. (Reuters/Toby Melville)
Margielyn was just a beautiful ray of sunshine in this dark, dark world. The Brazilians love her (and I’ve been seeing their tweets). She was just happy to be there competing and being friends with her competitors.
Meanwhile, that day was one of those days you just want to shut down and ignore the State of the Nation Address of Duterte. He was rambling for three hours, being his usual incoherent, unintelligible self. He even would not exert effort to read his prepared speech well. Then he would segue into one of his stream of consciousness that don’t make sense. When I caught him on TV (a rare moment that I watched TV, by accident), he was invoking China several times that I had hurled a string of invectives at the screen.
The irony later that day was that a woman–which Duterte looks lowly upon–earned the first gold medal for this country in a sport that as seen as masculine. And crushed China. How poetic.
This administration even demonized her when she asked on social media for private sector sponsorship for her bid in the Olympics because government support was not there. Then the DDS crucified her: how dare she challenge the government, the oh so benevolent Duterte! Then she was included by then-Presidential Spokesperson Panelo in the fictional matrix of destabilizers. Which the DDS trolls magnified and made Hidilyn fear for her life.
It gave me goosebumps. Kudos to you, Sgt. Diaz.
I had stayed with my cousin for three days and made sure her mom is stable before I went back home to attend to my household and work. My other cousin (the older one) finally arrived and they were able to make more arrangements in case my aunt turns for the worse. They were able to arrange for a priest administer the Anointment of the Sick (last rites) via video call (IATF protocol says no personal visits yet allowed? Or is this a parish decree? I don’t know) and funeral arrangement when the time comes.
Unfortunately, we will be going on a hard lockdown again a.k.a. enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) on August 6-20 so I don’t know how I would be able to go to my aunt when she…I was already assigned by my family as the first responder.
Speaking of lockdown, I did a lot of errands yesterday and today before everything shuts down. I contacted a plumber who charged me PHP 4,000 for changing faucets. And I had to redo all his work today because he did a bad job.
But it was a learning experience for me. I finally was able to do simple plumbing work like changing faucets.
Now that I know how to apply grout, I can chip away that dingy grout and apply a fresh one. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I had to change this as well because the whole pipe assembly leading to the shower was leaking. The reason why water is not bursting outside the walls is because the broken joint or whatever was being held together by cement. But it’s just as matter of time eventually the thing will give way and I would have a huge problem. We changed the original separate faucet and shower setup to a dual faucet shower installation so we don’t have to open up the concrete walls to install new pipes. This is cheaper and easier.
Unfortunately, the one we installed yesterday was a lemon despite the its hefty price tag. I had it exchanged for a better one and installed this one myself.
I changed faucets! Achievement unlocked.
The rains won’t stop. No chance to ride the bike before ECQ. *Sigh*. So I need to buy that can of paint so I can finally refresh my closets and doors’ paint because Kimchi loooooooooved scratching that corner of my closet. I need to find something to do indoors. The rains would not stop. Soon the strong typhoons would come after August or September.
Looks like a typhoon forming northeast that sucks the southwest monsoon. The dark rain clouds over Luzon have dissipated a bit though.
I went on leave yesterday to help my cousin, who is like my third sister, with–how do I term it? Her mom’s long goodbye? My cousin is not functioning well so I needed to be the one doing the rational thinking and the legwork because she couldn’t think straight. One thing is, she couldn’t let go. It hasn’t sunk in yet.
I told her the best option now is palliative care at home and make her mom comfortable. So I told her there’s no point in prolonging the stay in the hospital and we have to bring her mom home. We just need to set up a mini hospital there.
Which was not easy.
At a time of rising covid cases, looking for oxygen regulators is such an endeavor. I was told that Mercury is out of stock of O2 regulators because their supplier doesn’t have any left. I had searched for alternatives to Bambang, Sta. Cruz, Manila–the hub for mom-and-pop medical suppliers. Because I don’t wanna go there when it’s flooding all over the metro. Long-story short, I was able to buy an O2 regulator by going straight to the supplier’s house somewhere in Quezon City.
Now, the oxygen supply is another thing. I didn’t know that oxygen suppliers close early. Like 4 pm. And all I had with me was a 20-lb oxygen tank which I was told can last us the night. Wrong. It was only good for max of 6 freaking hours if the gauge was set up at 5! So I had to call people and begged to buy 50-lb tanks. One good-hearted guy took pity on me when I was almost crying and told him our oxygen will not last us the night and that my aunt was dying. So he relented and told his men to go to the factory and wait for us there so we can get 2 tanks, each one would only last probably 10 hrs or so. Each costs PHP7,000, just for the tank rental. The oxygen refill is another matter. We’ll just cross the bridge later today how to deal with supplies.
I had a long day and I still can’t sleep because of adrenalin. Driving around searching for medical supplies that are already dwindling. Hospitals that can increasingly cannot accommodate non-covid patients. Patients arriving at the ER, suddenly collapsing on the floor and dying.
I hoped to never use the PPE I had at home but unfortunately yesterday I had to.
Because my immediate concern was to get as much cash I could the quickest way possible to bring to the hospital, I totally forgot to buy surgical masks because we don’t stock up on it that much at home. So even if I have my PPE overalls, I was only wearing two cloth masks. I just hope I am not contracting anything.
So how do you tell a loved one that their whole world was dying?
You don’t.
My cousin dedicated much of her adult life taking care of her mom and could not bring herself do the paperwork for DNR. I didn’t point out to her that her mom’s heart already stopped twice, which may have already cut off the blood to her brain. And Lord knows what that could do. It still doesn’t sink in.
I just told her, we need to bring her home now. We will be running the hospital bill needlessly. That finally convinced her to ask the doctors if we can take my aunt home.
I’m still here in their house because anything can happen at any time. And she would be totally useless, which she already acknowledged she will be when the inevitable happens. I will be the one calling for the doctor’s medical certificate that will declare the probable cause, calling the funeral parlor or memorial service, arranging the filing of declaration to whatever government entities, calling relatives, arranging household concerns. Logistical issues. Like what I did when my father died. No one was functioning well enough to do those practical things.
Because I know how it is to die when grief kills you. You’re just blank.
I didn’t eat during the first few days after the break-up and after my dad died. It was only ice cream that sustained me because it was full of sugar, enough to fuel my cells, and it was the only thing that is a pleasure to eat because everything else tasted like paper. As I said in a blog entry after my dad died (and after my break-up with J) that every moment at that time was like floating in memories that were played back like a movie. And it doesn’t stop. It just goes on and on and on. The pain is excruciating that you want to just inflict physical pain onto yourself to take the edge off the emotional pain.
That’s how I know my cousin will not have human strength when death comes.
Philippines’ Eumir Marcial and Armenia’s Arman Darchinyan hug after the men’s boxing middleweight division at the 
Read more: 
: Luis Robayo/AFP)
