Brent oil went past USD 100 per barrel today as the Ukraine crisis intensifies. EU is basically cut off from Russian gas, which could send the price of all fossil fuels skyrocketing. Two weeks ago, I was just talking with a CEO of an LNG company who assured me that the sky-high spot market prices of LNG would later come down as more bunker ships will come online and upstream players are already ramping up their production. But then here comes Putin disrupting everything. Mind you, we are still reeling from the economic fallout caused by the pandemic.

From a selfish investor’s point of view, this is a buying opportunity.

But as a regular human being, this is a disaster. Especially since the vegetables I bought today from UP already cost PHP 1,000 in total. This is the reason why the poor cannot afford to eat vegetables. Either they choose vegetables or meat, not both in one meal because there’s no way that you can spend this much for vegetables if you’re only earning PHP 500 a day. The cost of transporting these goods are now astronomical given that we have a very inefficient agricultural supply chain and the rising cost of fuel is compounding the situation.

Electricity costs will kill us this summer ☀🌡since the Philippines is highly dependent on diesel, coal, and gas to fuel base load power plants. We have a lot of renewable energy power plants but they are volatile because they are not consistent 24/7 and the grid cannot support such volatility. It needs constant supply that only base loads can offer. And so far our base load plants are fired by dirty fuels and geothermal.

This morning I brought the feral male white cat to PAWS for his neutering. All was well and right now he’s recuperating in my neighbor’s backdoor after fetching him from PAWS at past 4 pm.

And finally the expensive keyboard arrived. It’s sooooo girly and clicky. Hahahaha! Some serotonin boost for me while working. I am now transcribing a lengthy interview (over an hour) and I love typing on this thing; it’s like typing on an old-school typewriter.

The mouse is really silent but hefty. The top part is held by magnets so when you accidentally drop the mouse, it will just come open but it will not break. I read that they did this to avoid breakage when you drop it; once the clicker or wheel is damaged, the mouse is already useless. The silent mouse is kinda weird to use when playing games though because you need tactile gamepads or mouse when playing.

The keyboard is heavy, which is a characteristic of real mechanical keyboards. I can swap the keys on the right side (the weird emoji shortcuts) and program them on the Logitech app. However, I don’t think I can switch other keys, unless other manufacturers make rounded keys for the likes of Logitech. This keyboard comes with extra keycaps for the emoji buttons. I thought I won’t be using them but—well, well, the emoji keys were useful when I was talking to my colleague/friend, L, this afternoon. I think I need to buy the separate numpad of similar design on Lazada. I already have it on my cart. I need it for work since I deal with a lot of numbers, ironically.

Speaking of my colleague, L, we were talking this afternoon about some stuff that she missed while she was away in Switzerland during the first two weeks of Feb. So I filled her in on the latest brouhaha involving J and the stuff I discovered. She said, “I don’t know why we always come across this kind of guys.” She also had a bad experience with a guy we code-named Jaded. Another narcissist who gaslighted her for a long, long time. He also led her on for a couple of years.

She said she recently met someone interesting in Switzerland and she wants to see him again. However, she said she has to be realistic because they’re far apart. I said at least she was able to meet a decent guy. If you consider meetings like this a hit or miss, mostly it’s a miss. As L’s friend said, for every 100 Tinder/Bumble date, there’s only one decent guy worth seeing again.

“I think you can meet up with people while healing. Don’t set so many limits for yourself,” she told me.

“But it’s scary. There are a lot of evil men out there. After my experience with J, I no longer know who is evil like him and who isn’t,” I told her.

She conceded. “Yeah, it’s hard to tell.”

She knows that because when we were talking about J that week that he and I started going out in Singapore four years ago, we were discussing that he seemed like a decent and harmless guy. How completely wrong we were. I’m still paying the price of that wrong judgment.

“He was a bad accident that caused me my sanity. I’m still undergoing psychotherapy until August. That’s why I’m scared of meeting people because I’m not yet well. I’m not yet sleeping properly,” I told her.

I’d rather stay home and stick to my friends. There are only very few decent men out there. Especially at my age group.

I’m happy that L has found a decent guy after that episode with that horrible Jaded. She was crying to me one time after Jaded invalidated her feelings and I told her he is gaslighting her…and that she is going nowhere. That was the last straw. She quit Jaded and enrolled for a CFA review. She threw herself into reviewing and she passed level 1. She is now reviewing for level 2. She sounds quite happy now.

So assignment to myself: 1) work double-time on my healing then 2) achieve some kind of certification as I mentioned here earlier–just for the heck of it–so I have something productive to occupy me and not mope around because of a person who did not add any value to me. 3) Then be a famous writer tucked away in some little hovel at the foot of a mountain (which I will be in a year). The famous part, I will be working on it 😂😂😂. Either I work on an academic book on journalism or I publish a book under fiction. I have an anthology of short stories with me but I don’t know where to publish it since most literary magazines I know of here have already stopped printing. We don’t have a version of The New Yorker here. A decade ago or so, I was working on a YA novel but I quit. One really needs a lot of concentration, discipline, and free time to be able to produce something like that.

In the meantime, I will continue urban sketching to keep me grounded and a bit happy.