The Morning Routine

In an ideal world, my perfect morning would be:
1. Waking up at 4:30am perfectly refreshed
2. A light, 5 minute stretch and a drink of lukewam, distilled water
3. Brewing myself a cup of black coffee I relax in the lounge..
4. ..while I read the NY Times…
5. At 5:30, doing four sets of push-ups and dumb-bell presses before..
6. Having a shower, followed by..
7. ..a 15-minute facial prepping…
8. Then off to work, 15 minutes ahead of everyone else

But in reality, this morning was like
1. Snoozing the alarm when it went off at 5:30. I had this awful dream where I went on the ferry without paying.
2. Coffee in the lounge, with a quick scan of the NY Times before being distracted by Instagram (I still have our company account which I’ve created and maintain).
3. Taking too long doing facial prepping and forgetting we needed to get out of the house at 6:30
4. Taking the train and thinking of breaking this awful morning routine by having a small breakfast at Burger King, writing a blog post and being creative and shit.
5. Arrived at Burger King and it was closed- it apparently opens at 7am.
6. 7am comes and the goddamned fucking store is still closed, so I just left.

Start of the working week

We have to eat, pay our mortgage, prepare for retirement, buy another $5,000 Apple product 😅.

I had to clear about 160+ emails from one work email address alone so I thought it best to avoid the back-to-work-gossip-catch-up fest by working from home on Monday. And while working, I managed to click on a site showing what the the Year of the Rat was going to be like. I was avoiding this, pretending that a decade hadn’t actually passed but then I saw that the start of the decade was heralded by the rat sign- MY SIGN!

I’m not into specifics (you will find great fortune this year) or abstractions (this year will find you more lucid and open) but I’ll gladly take positivity and put it into my head. There is nothing to lose by moving your work station just because anything north facing this year at least for me, augurs bad fortune.

Besides, how am I going to do great, creative work (again, foretold by my sign) this year working on a small table?

Moved my home work station away from its north-facing area

My work station at work (!) and yes, you can never have enough iMacs.

Interruptions: Dracula, Netflix

Like any person dead-set on staying as youthful as long as possible, I find the idea of being a vampire quite attractive. But what kind of vampire though is the more important question; the eternally melancholic vamps of Anne Rice? The millennially inclined Twilight group penned by Stephenie Meyer? Or maybe the historically immersed creatures from A Discovery of Witches?

None of the above- I think I’ll pick Count Dracula from Netlix’s new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Neither brooding nor silly (like going to high-school!), this Dracula is literally like me bingeing on so-so Netflix series, skipping and fast-forwarding through the boring and predictable parts (of life). Instead of spending the next 100 years learning and practicing painting or the violin, or German and fourteen other languages, he simply drinks the blood of someone who knows these things and voila, all of these skills and talents are absorbed.

For why wait, even if you did have all the time in the world, when you can have something now???

I look at my desk and my lists- write, paint, read, design, cook, learn- and think, goddamn it- will I seriously get everything done??

Never too late to start a diary

I’ve never done a diary partly because I’ve never really developed a good penmanship. And there was always a type-writer or my dad’s secretary Rebecca who typed up my short-stories. To this day, I wonder how she transcribed it; it’s either I wrote the manuscript out painstakingly well, or she completely deciphered what I had written, because a whole lot of them got published.

But I’ve come to realise after a few entries that writing by hand is a much more enforceable discipline. I don’t waver or question my thoughts as much as I often do lately with blogging. My penmanship is the same awful upper-case printed mess, but it doesn't bother me. I’ve had enough of reasons that turn out in the end to be just excuses.

I’ve done an entry since the new year; here’s to the rest of the year and beyond.

What did you eat during the holidays?

I still equate happiness and fulfilment with eating and it’s such a hard habit to break. Ideally I would’ve have liked to have eaten the following:

1. Sisig; probably have a huge batch in the fridge that you can have any time you want

2. Lechon; Doyet and Jong’s lechon-belly

3. Chinese ham

4. A black-forest cake

5. Pork barbecue

6. Peking duck

7. A ton of seafood (I did have my fill of oysters, crayfish and Alaskan King crab at a SkyCity dinner so..)

But everyone was busy, I spent too much on new devices on myself and I didn’t want to face the new year with a bunch of health problems so…

And then you realise, it’s just food.

Roast Beef

Albeit, a bit too done to our liking, I can finally say that we’ve perfected roasting a 2 kilo scotch-fillet roast

Little things

Grazing is in

Roast Chicken

New Zealand has great poultry and a roast chicken is satisfying on a lot of levels

Ham

I wasn’t meaning to get one, but I couldn’t resist something half-price even if it’s just your ordinary supermarket chain cooked ham on the bone. Perfect for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Has it been 10 years?

Apparently, a decade has passed; sorry but I didn’t notice because I wasn’t counting.

New Year’s Eve/at Emma’s

The only song I could recognise was Avril Lavigne; He wanted her/ She'd never tell/ Secretly she wanted him as well/ But all of her friends/ Stuck up their nose/They had a problem with his baggy clothes. High school never changes, only the people do. When we started the countdown, mirroring something we found on the internet on someone’s phone, 12 midnight had actually already passed; our Apple watches had already announced the new year with tiny fireworks blooming on our wrists. But we counted down anyway. And again for good measure.

For what is time, or 25 and 47, or 1985 and 2050? It’s all relative. From the past to the future, everything is going in one direction.

Interruptions

“The great enemy of writing is interruption”

— Joyce Carol Oates

The Witcher, Netflix

I bought the book but unfortunately, when you’ve watched the 1st season, it seems pointless to read it. Henry Cavill has a perfect face, but he is so dull and his portrayal of Geralt seems like he trained with someone to bring out your standard gruff-talking, grim-faced masculinity. But there are enough interesting elements in this adaptation (including the insanely hot Anya Chalotra as the sorcerres Yennefer) to make you excited for season 2.

Lost In Space, Netflix

There is an abundance of sci-fi/dystopian stuff on Netflix but Lost in Space is a little bit more polished, a bit more interesting. Parker Posey is annoying as hell, but that’s called being really effective in your role. But the real gem of this adaptation is the mom, Mrs. Robinson who shows us that maybe, what the human race needs in its quest for a new home in space is a nurturing, compassionate, kick-ass female leader with an IQ of 180.

Watchmen, HBO

Eight words- thank-God-Jack-Snyder-did-not-make-this

Holiday Reading: A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

“Government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.”

“I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn’t have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.”

Happy Holidays

I’m not complaining, not really.

I bought amazing gifts for myself; gifts that allow me to continue earning money that I could in return, give amazing gifts to the people I love as well as more gifts for myself (a win-win).

My health is okay and will be better because finally, I have self-control; the lechon can wait until April 2020.

The world is shittier than ever, but I’m not adding to the sludge of shit by creating/sharing my own shit. The rare tweet aside, I’ve closed the door on the situation in the US and the Philippines. Let people who do their beds, lie on it.

Where has the year gone??

It’s a fear that feels similar to going away on a long trip and agonising, sitting on the plane, that you’ve forgotten something really important.

Not that you can do anything about it at that point, 30,000 feet up in the air. But you go through the range of emotions as if it’s already happened.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve gone back to the house from the bus stop three times because I couldn’t remember if I had turned off the clothes iron. Several hundred thousand dollars up in smoke; do I still pay the mortgage?; how much am I insured? How do I rebuild my wardrobe?

Sometimes I comfort myself with the fact that in my bag (and I bring a big bag to work everyday), I have my Macbook, my pills 💊 enough for a week, and a toiletry bag with perfume, anti-perspirant and moisturisers. I could find a temporary place somewhere and literally start all over again wth just a laptop, an Internet connection and a week’s worth of stuff that guarantees you don’t look or feel any worse than you already are.

Appearances are important to me. I look in the mirror and I feel calmed. That person looking back at me is what I’ve made that person to be- I have some degree of control over that.

The year feels like a fire that has raged out of control and now I am looking at the embers and thinking, it’s gone. But what’s gone really? The thing is when you’re middle-aged, everything becomes an accounting- your age, your mortgage, your income in 5 years, your blood pressure and time itself.

(at this point, I’ve actually lost my train of thought but I must admit that I was never good at making essays so I’m leaving this here as is, and moving on! Time is ticking! We can’t waste our time expounding on arguments and believing that resolving them on paper does any one any good.)

I left Instagram today

The photo above was the last one I posted on Instagram a couple of days ago before disabling my account today. The accompanying text for the photo was a bit from a NY Times article about how much social media has been monetised to the extent that by just signing up, someone profits, BUT IT’S NOT YOU.

I create content for a living, so to do all this for free is bullshit; and ‘all this’ is; tens of thousands of dollars of tech equipment, at least 6 accounted hours every week on the app; unaccounted hours spent looking, taking and processing image for posting. Is it everyone’s dream to become an influencer? To be that uhm, viral sensation? Sure- but we’re also happy to just be ordinary, posters of our cats, our lunches and our non-designer branded shoes. But it just bugs me that there is an underbelly to all this; why can’t we simply share without it being a hidden transaction that is one-sided?

So goodbye Instagram. Here’s to putting those hours to better use- for my own benefit.

in my mind's eye

i am alive

yesterday, today tomorrow

where the blue sky never changes

it is the same blue,

and I am me, the way I have always been

in my mind’s eye

where i live forever.

Sometimes, it's easier to know what you're not (or a passel of adjectives)

1. Idle

2. Un-creative

3. Passive

4. Cruel

5. Weak

6. Selfish

7. Boring

8. Sad

9. Afraid

10. Fatalistic

Awful Things

1. Working too hard and actually liking it

2. Not being able to blog as often as I’d like

3. Crafting my best work- a comprehensive appeal to God on why I should win the lottery- and not winning anything

4. Not being able to determine if I’m inept at DIY things or if I’m just lazy

5. That I still can’t get my abs to show

6. Family members and friends who get divided by politics- like that is the STUPIDEST thing and I can hear Satan actually laughing in the background.

7. That winter last for only four months and not enough time to buy and wear all the beautiful coats you want

8. That 90% of content on Netflix and Neon is actually crap

9. When you realise you’ve wasted three hours on that crap

10. When time flies and doesn’t give a shit about you

A truth

“I don’t write anymore because I no longer feel lonely”

Working from home

work & home

I work at home when I usually need to do design and creative work and having peace and quiet helps.

creating your own space

This is the general area work space but I’m not feeling it

lunch

..is leftovers..I tried to do chicken cooked in pineapple but I ended up putting curry in it and mashed kumara and was not quite the Filipino dish that I was aiming for

My space

Bought a cheap $99 Ikea desk which is going into this space

Coffee break

I would usually end up having up to 3 espressos when working at home

The weekly list

1. Game of Thrones done and that was nearly a decade worth of episodes which makes you re-think of how you perceive the passage of time. Are you living life on your terms or is it hinged on superficial stuff that you consume like content-streaming?

2. Loving my Huawei P30 pro (shot above taken by it) but wondering how the current persecution of the company and anti-Chinese anything in general is going to affect it down the track.

3. Where are you Lei?

4. It’s June. Half the year gone.

5. Love should be steady and consistent.

6. When you finally warm up to the reality of home-ownership and open your wallet accordingly

7. Where do you see yourself 3 years from now?

Remember how complicated your child's birthday used to be?

It was Matt’s birthday last Friday but because everyone’s schedules was all over, dinner was re-set for Saturday. We went to Kalye Manila, a Filipino restaurant. Matt ordered everything he wanted to eat; he had sisig, tokwa’t baboy and lechon kawali. His grandmother would’ve been horrified, but he’s 23; he could eat anything he wants and does.