Schadenfreude

Karma is out there to bite your ass.

This person, whom I refuse to name on this blog, is the primary mother troll who had released his troll farm on me a few years ago when I criticized a government agency (which allegedly employed him as an attack dog a.k.a. social media handler) regarding an infrastructure project bidding.

For two weeks they tried to destroy me online. Even attacked my company’s social media assets, much to the shock and confusion of our APAC and global headquarters.

I do believe the universe will be out to get you if you haven’t been nice.

My friends and I are ROFLing now.

Speaking of trolls, I once again dodged the prinicpal of these creatures by leaving the conference venue early today. I AGAIN didn’t check the program—it was only during the welcoming remarks did I learn that Marcos is supposed to speak this afternoon. 🤦‍♀️ So the conference delegates were told to avoid going in and out of the area by 2 pm because the Presidential Security Group needed to check and secure the premises.

I used our PH reporter’s media pass that’s why I had a different name on my tag. Our PH reporter is in another event across the metro.

I left at 11:30 am. Good thing I was able to ambush interview my targets early.

I really can’t stomach the thought of being in the same room as this thief.

I just can’t.

I have covered past presidents and sat through some of their speeches but the last two presidents… 🤬 Nope.

I quickly escaped to SM MOA (since I was just at Marriott) to write my stories, buy Christmas gifts, and then I took Skyway so I can fly back home.

Or so I thought I could get back home quickly.

It still took me two hours to get home. I left at past 3 pm, I arrived at past 5 pm. 🫠 And to think that I already used Skyway to bypass Edsa or C5 to reach QC. 😵‍💫

I just want to stay put in the next few days… Traffic jams are so bad that they suck the soul out of you.

All coffee/dinner with friends would have to be pushed back after Christmas. It’s just insane to be on the road these days.

Keeping it real

I just discovered Haley Kalil this week and she’s funny.

I always get invited to press conferences with two tables: One for media and one for influencers and vloggers/bloggers. This is very true for presscons of consumer-facing companies like telcos and real estate. I often wondered about how do these people even keep up with making content everyday, setting up cameras and shoot themselves walking back and forth to give a false sense of, yeah, this is how I live my everyday life.

Apparently, it is a full-time job and they even have managers. I think if you are a “content creator” (a new job description I learned this year) and have your own wares to peddle like Nicolas Fairford, who has launched his own brand of tea wares, you have another revenue stream. However, for content creators who rely most of the time for sponsorships, you don’t have a choice but to lie to your viewers that you do indeed use their products—the more sponsorships, the more revenues you have. Even if their products suck. And if you are a content creator who relies mostly on ad revenues—you’re better off with your day job because Google sucks the life out of you as I read that unless you are the top 1% of xxx (can’t remember if it’s your country/market/or Youtube), you will not really make money that could pay your bills.

By the way, Haley is gorgeous. Like Cindy Crawford x Angelina Jolie gorgeous.


Grief is love holding on

This is the thing I told my friend who is grieving for her father, who died while in ICU in the US. She couldn’t fly there on short notice and it’s little use since they will be bringing his body back anyway since her parents are really based here.

I told her I have no comforting things to say because there’s nothing else in this world that can make her feel better, based on my experience. So just let grief overwhelm you, I said. Don’t pressure yourself to be ok because it’s not ok. Don’t think about how long it will take you to grieve. Don’t let other people dictate how long you will grieve, I told her.

It’s a pain that will never go away. We just learn to live with it. Nobody will understand your pain because your pain is yours alone.

B sent me a video of her last conversation with her dad while in the ICU (which was not permitted but was made possible by her sibling who slipped the phone inside the room–probably the sibling was a nurse). I told her to save it on the cloud because she will be watching it everyday for a long time. I said I saved my father’s text messages to me (hey, early 2000s!) on my phone and held on to them for years until my phone got snatched from my bag. I even lost his phone number. One time I was so overtaken with grief I sent that number a text message. It was a comfort to me, pretending that I could still message him.

“Until now, 17 years have passed, there’s still a dull pain somewhere in my chest when I remember that. I feel like crying now. It’s something that never goes away,” I told B.

“In a way, that’s comforting to know. I don’t want to forget him,” B replied.

Grief is love holding on. You will hold on to everything,” I said.

I told B: I have a friend who messaged me out of the blue one night and asked if he was already going insane or something was really wrong with him because it was already a year since his dad died but he was still crying and grief-stricken. He quit work because he really took it hard.

I told him that no, he’s fine. He’s not yet insane. There’s no timetable for grief. I told him that I was also jobless for a year when my dad died. I decided to be a full-time graduate student so I can just coast along and grieve. I only felt the urge to go find work when I found myself scrounging for money to buy myself airtime/SMS load for my phone. “Don’t mind other people; your grief is yours alone. We hold on because that’s what we only have left now. And it’s ok.”

Then B said: This helped a lot. Salamat.


I have other thoughts about how I lived with grief after a loved one has died and grief over losing myself over someone who didn’t deserve me at all. There are many types of grief: there are those that it’s ok if we keep it for the rest of our lives (death) and there are those that we need to get out of (love and betrayal) because, I don’t know…It doesn’t feel right anymore. There may be others but on top of my head are these two that I know.

I will just write about it some other time because it would be emotionally draining but at the same time cathartic. But I’m not for it right now.

I just want to relax and watch houses that I will never have.

Uncle Roger would be proud

It’s food recycling day. So I made fried rice that Uncle Roger would approve. Cold rice from the refrigerator left overnight ✅ leftovers ✅ Magic Sarap ✅ and cooking the scrambled eggs in the same wok as the rice (and not separately) just like what the ethnic Chinese uncles do ✔.

Photo by CallMeCreation.com

Meanwhile, mooncake gifts had been trickling in. I received a special Eng Bee Tin mooncake today and I think I would be drowning in mooncakes by the end of this week.

Nice tin box, no? Photo by CallMeCreation.com

It was raining heavily today so I decided to change course when we were already in Xavierville. We were originally going to Tiendesitas to buy cat supplies and shop at SM Hypermarket Pasig but the heavy rain earlier convinced me that traffic would be bad. I instead turned left in Katipunan Ave and went to UP Town Center to do grocery shopping in Merkado, because I want to check out their SKUs. We also had an early dinner at Razon’s because of the halo-halo. What I paid tonight is half of our usual meals outside our home.

I told the girls we need to put a cap now on our weekly dining out because I need to save a bit of money for the house. Although I have everything planned out, I’m just hoping that maybe my scrimping for a few months would allow me not to touch some of my investments to pay for the last few months of the job contract. Stocks are really low right now and I would be selling at a loss. Big, fat, juicy loss.

So I would be issuing a check for the half down payment next week, then it would 20%, 20%, and 10% as we go along.

Good thing I also canceled my Korea trip because I received this notice in my email:

Haha! My May 2020 trip there to cover this event is now pushing through. So I will have my trip paid for by my company. I will just extend my stay there for a week out of my own pocket.

By that time the financial pressure is less because my house is already built.

Let’s see if I can replicate my productivity in Yokohama in 2017 when I produced 16 stories from that event alone. 😏


I think I need to lay off Twitter and Facebook (well I’m not much into it anyway) because they’re causing me so much stress. I’m getting angrier by the day. The troll farms are going on offensive because a lot of people are calling out the government for the economic mess we are in.

It’s draining. No wonder I’ve been too exhausted the past few days.

I’ll just go back to my first love: reading. I have a lot of fantasy books here that I need to finish.

Social media, I now declare, is an evil creature

As a communicator and as person who lived towards the end of the repressive regime of Ferdinand Marcos, I applaud that the ordinary people are given the power to express themselves and not be subjected to the caprices and sometimes questionable filters used by some media gatekeepers to be able to have their voices heard.

However, there are limits to this freedom: your freedom ends when you are already stepping on another person’s own freedom.

Facebook and Twitter (but more of Facebook) have become toxic places for public discourse as these now sow hate among users. It has become an effective vehicle for misinformation of a population that has become a parody of some sort. The bullies are now silencing whoever is opposing them; sowing fear or ambivalence among those who have become wary or tired of offering contrary views.

And it doesn’t help matters that the owner of Facebook is playing god.

Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after Facebook deletes ‘napalm girl’ post

Norway’s largest newspaper has published a front-page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lambasting the company’s decision to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnam war and calling on Zuckerberg to recognize and live up to his role as “the world’s most powerful editor”.

3000

Read the rest here.