I have a business plan. It’s hard to write down what it is and how to do it. A friend taught me basically showed me how to start it, what network to tap, and how to manage it.

This. Without selling my soul to the devil.

He told me I don’t have to work everyday once I learn how to set goals and how to achieve these with minimal effort. I just need gumption, my wits, and my face.

I am now positioning the chess pieces.

I’ve got another patient. Just when the other twin is already well, here comes another twin down with something. Quite a number of their classmates/batchmates are sick with I don’t know what, aside from the gastro problems that remain unresolved by the school. I’m getting irate already.

The children’s immunity really has been eroded so much by their confinement at home for several years. Now that they’re back in the petri dish that is school—without masks on—we have kids getting sick more often than usual

It will take years before their immune systems get used to germs again.

I had a dark cloud hovering over me the whole weekend. Monday was a bit better than I expected since my manager was off. Or maybe she was sick of making me her punching bag.

My younger sister told me that in order for me to survive and not get angry everyday, I should just treat this current job as a money-making venture and nothing more. Have my passion lie elsewhere.

Good advice but the thing is journalism is my passion. How can I be dispassionate about it?

Maybe quit it. Or quit it in my head. Transfer my passion until I find a new job.

How about home-making? I love my home. Maybe I should start homesteadying, id est starting my home “farm”, making my little patch of land productive and beautiful.

Maybe, I need to step down from my stressful managerial position and just be a freelancer for my current company so I can write a variety of things for other media companies. It’s a risky move but it could work. I become the brand. I would own my time so I can pursue other things such as taking a short course on data analytics at my university’s graduate school. Many of the jobs at my level involved data analytics already.

Let’s see what my meeting tomorrow would yield me.

Meanwhile, here’s the glaring truth about McKinsey and the other McKinseys of the world. 😂 I’m looking at you, Boston Consulting Group and Bain 😂. These guys are just around me all the time.

And here’s the short cut to the parody recruitment video:

It’s still somewhat cool in the evenings and mornings that it’s totally worth it to wake up earlier than usual on a weekend and have breakfast al fresco.

I needed to see the sky and trees. I need to clear my head.

Good thing I already have my house so I don’t have to worry about rent and moved back home for lower cost of living. This gives me some flexibity in terms of career choices or else I will be twisting and turning in bed because of finacial worries. I basked in that knowledge and tried to enjoy my breakfast by the trees.

After cleaning up, I went to my desk and manually computed my cost of living. It’s actually a fourth of my current income, including some savings. But the cost-cutting I did on paper was really brutal. This is the scenario just in case I go back to academe and not be allowed to practice my profession i.e. journalism on the side.

But I’m not there yet. Not yet.

I have set up a lunchdate on Tuesday with another PR friend who owns his agency. I told him I need to pick his brains. Let’s see if this will help clear some cobwebs.

I know I will be in for another beating from my boss tomorrow. Oh Lord, she will be in HK as well 🤦🏻‍♀️

This past week was so rough on me that I just wanted to give up. My manager was pounding me to the ground so hard that I cracked. Our Manila reporter told me to just say yes, yes, yes, and let my my manager win because there is no other choice.

I cracked so much that I sent an SOS to my bff and she went straight to my house to talk to me. We evaluated my options. Seems like going back to academe is a no go for me. I don’t want to go through the rigors of PhD, not after my miserable experience in grad school while being a reporter. That was so rough. Plus the pay is—😭

I was chatting the other day with our former APAC head who recruited me 10 years ago. She told me if I go to PR, I will cross red lines. Now the question is, how much red line crossing will I allow? There will come a time I would need to lie. Bad service and tarnished branding are defensible, but lying is something else and it is part of PR. That’s the reason why she left her last job. The client wanted her agency to lie and she couldn’t take it.

My other bff said, lying and other dark stuff in PR is opposite of everything I stand for in my profession: truth, honesty, justice, and fairness. She said it will mess me up if I take up PR.

All day long I couldn’t stop thinking about the choices I have to make. The only logical thing is to stick around until something comes up. I cleaned my fridge, I cleaned anything that I could clean but I couldn’t make my mind rest.

I needed to get out of the house.

I told my girls we would buy sourdough bread to eat in the park.

Early dinner for us. I’m not in the mood to cook. I just want to wash away the bad taste left by the horrible week I had.

We’re here again at St Luke’s BGC and unfortunately Twin A has to be on a wheel chair. I pulled her out of school yesterday after complaining of stomach and head ache. Then her temp rose to 38.8 C starting 5 pm so had to administer paracetamol every 4 hrs until 6 am. Fever broke between 2-4 am. 

She vomited at the hospital and complained of headache but still no fever.

Doctor said it looks like it’s viral and it’s starting to affect her upper respiratory system given the clogging of her nostrils. All her bloodwork are good, including the ones she had ordered to be done. It means her anti-TB meds are not destroying her liver.

What Twin A experienced last week was indeed food poisoning because there was nothing in her stool exam i.e. parasites. I guess the bacteria was normal and what I read as pus was not pus or I misread the values.

Basically everything was ok. The doctor just said maybe I could ask the FMAB radiology if they could measure the mesentery lymph nodes because the last MRI had measurements. She wanted to know if they shrunk from the last time.

When I say when it rains, it pours, it’s because I am also suffering from gastro problems because I am stressed. Really stressed. Super stressed.

This is actually terrifying.

I’m going to be 45 this year and in 5 years I will be deemed unemployable. There are indications that my time in this company is nearing its end since I’ve begun to verbally profess my hate for the company and am already picturing in my head the scenarios where I am telling my bosses off. Actually, last Monday when we were dealing with the mess left by one of my reporters, our APAC head again repeated the same thing that she has been yammering about for the last I don’t know how many months. In my head I was like, “if the company really intends to do what it wants then get on with it! But I can’t assure you we would be sticking around because I won’t.”

Instead, I just said:

“And if and when management decides to terminate the current arrangement, please let us know way in advance so we can make arrangements at our personal level.”

Then she pulled back, “Oh we don’t want people to over-react.”

Hell, if she thinks it’s an overreaction, then in their eyes we are just little peons with no voices and just accept things like we’re worker ants. This is not what I’ve signed up for 10 years ago when I joined this company, so I have all the license to be haughty and walk away.

Hopefully, there are no more health issues to deal with that would drain my savings because I am building up my savings for the event I need to walk away without any safety net yet. I had been buying mutual fund units in quick succession the past few days. My cash buffer may tide me for a few months but it would be a very tight squeeze. I can draw down my investments and my car purchase and solar panel installation would have to wait.

Why not exit now? Well, first of all, I need to squirrel more cash in preparation for my quitting. Second, I am draining this for what it’s worth because once I walk away from this, I know I will not be able to come back to journalism. This is it, the buck stops here. And I will have withdrawal symptoms (like what all my ex-colleagues went through) and it will be painful. So might as well maximize it, go with a bang because I want them to feel that I am the TOTGA—The One That Got Away—and regret all their decisions that led to my eventual resignation. I know it sounds like I think highly of myself but my goodness, I’ve slaved for this company for far too long and this is my only consuelo de bobo to myself. This incident with the erring reporter was just a sideshow—the company really doesn’t care about us planted on this side of the world. We have always gotten the shorter end of the stick.

While my cats have been doing their zoomies at 3 am today and woke me up (yeah, that’s why I’m always tired), I was going over in my head my next course of action. I think I should set up another meeting with that PR guy who picked my brains in January. I am also meeting our former APAC head in HK and see what she thinks about setting up our own PR firm under the tutelage of this PR guy, before he retires. I know I’m going to sell my soul to the devil but as of now, I have no recourse yet because I haven’t done my data analytics training that could help me pivot.

Today I am already beyond angry. I am entering the FU-I-don’t-care stage. And that’s dangerous.

It’s quiet quitting.