i have been given hints that the stress and pressure at work may have been causing this.  i have always argued in the past few weeks, this was nothing compared to the year before. i was 8-months pregnant then, dumped by the father of my child, and working 18 hours a day juggling the demands of my work and have miraculously still end up delivering what turned out to be quite the happiest baby there is. and I have survived that and moved on.  but never have I vomited at the thought of my work nor felt so heavy at the sound of my responsibility that it may got you into thinking this must have been worse than it was a year ago.  that, or i have finally cracked.

the funny thing about this, though, is that people who finally lost it couldn’t possibly write about it in such impartiality. the fact I am still scribbling away in such lucidity would make one wonder if all of this is just a ruse. but in what universe would it may have been necessary to deceive myself that i have cracked? it just does not make sense at all.

eleven years. it seems appalling that it takes only eleven years for me to just lost it. people have worked for more and got out of the rat race with their sanity intact.  i am not even approaching 40 yet.  worse, i can actually look back right now to these eleven years with so much pride of what i have accomplished- not a hint of regret, not a hint of remorse.

what is happening? something have cracked.  and i do not even know what it is.

If I have to die a thousand deaths, let it be tonight.

I could still smell the aroma of your breathe, of how it enveloped me as you breath me in and out. You smell of April mornings, of late breakfast in bed and lazy afternoons. You are my addiction, Miguel, a perfume to my unscented life.

I tasted you and no words can describe how you satiate me. The feel of your skin brushing with mine, the rhythm we generated as we rock our body back and forth. I love making love to you, Miguel, as much as I love everything else about you, good and bad things alike. I love every sound you make, every sweat that fell from your brow, every pressure you gave.

What was it I said that brought us in that state? I remember you approaching me with two cans of beer.

“Let us talk.” You said, handing me one.

“I refused, Miguel.” I told you. “I might fuck us up again.”

“You don’t fuck things up. You didn’t screw me yet.” You replied, grinning.

“Oh, so all along, I was just screwing myself, eh?” I told you as we sat at the gutter. I had wondered that moment what made you left your friends and brought you there with me. I had thought that we really should stop talking during special events. You took the unopened can of beer from me and opened it.

I watched you, Miguel, watched those lips moved as your fingers wrapped around the can of beer. And you caught me watching you. I told you “nothing” when you asked me why was I staring like that.

And then you spoke up, joking “You look like you are about to kiss me.”

“Fuck you, Miguel.”

It was the most unromantic prelude to a love making ever. You grabbed me and kissed me, and “Fuck the world if they have to mind.” Was what you said, yes? We left the two worlds, Miguel, your two worlds that do not complement each other, cannot merge together, and into your car and zoomed out of the party. We made love there, under the moonlight overlooking the lake. The moonlight shine as beads of sweat sparkled from your forehead. And the lake opened up to the darkness as you opened up to me and I take you in.

I love taking you in, and I would do it all over again. “Sensual perfume.” I whispered on your ear as I smelled it from you.

“Ahhhh, the allergic rhinitis girl. Do you mind?”, was your reply. I remember you laughing when I told you about that allergy. You always find dust and cigarette smoke allergies unnecessary; “What are you? A 90-year old lady now?” you used to mock me. But last night, Miguel, there was no place for mockery. You kissed my neck as you murmured, “I do not want to have my favorite girl getting the allergies from me,” you had that wicked look in your face, “as much as I hated her getting it from someone else.”
Your favorite girl. I can get the allergies from you a thousand times, Miguel, and it won’t matter. It will never matter. You are my universal anodyne as you are my ultimate illness.

And you can kill and resurrect me in infinity.

author’s note: To refer to having sex as love making, the body betrayed the mind once more. It had acted on its own, defining circumstances based on how it reacted rather than what the mind thinks it should be defined. One is untouchable until either of the body and the mind surrenders; and it does not matter which, the moment it opens itself up, both became vulnerable. I watched them and wondered if they knew what lies ahead for them. I took a mental picture of her on his arms for it may be the first and the last time it will ever happen. And perhaps, I can share it one day with Miguel who even at that particular moment did not seem to know what had gotten into him. Perhaps, when I do, he would want to remember her.

take for example the dismay i felt when i sold the LCB shares i bought at a 3% profit after a day of holding it, only for the stocks to shoot faster up (what the hell is wrong with these people buying stocks when it is already in its all time high?!) by another 5% within 30 minutes. i am not going to deny; i felt bad a little bit. i could have more than doubled my profit.

but then, it was not as if i sold early. the stock price went up where i want to sell it for at the day i want to get rid of it. in fact, the 3.54% profit i got by selling my PLDT shares subsidized my LCB purchase. so, if i have to get hardcore accounting into play, i really did earn 18% from my money on the LCB shares.

but then, if i have waited for thirty minutes more….

people, i guess, are inherently susceptible to greed. and as i wrapped up my first week playing at the stock market, i realize that this exercise will not be just all about taking risks and growing my money. it will equally be about downplaying my greed and stretching my patience.

God bless my soul.

it seems so long ago now and yet for that particular moment before my yoga practice started, everything seems to go back in time. when we have to drag his horribly looking suitcase out of NAIA 1 to the outskirts of the airport because i totally did not want us to pay a flat rate to get us to the hotel.  when the same horribly looking suitcase got ripped off at the conveyor belt when we got back from Boracay and i have to make- embarrassingly, at hindsight now- a scene at the Seair office so they can freaking pay for the replacement.  all those 2pm calls that he made to let me know he has woken up from his slumber and all those 2-hour and 3-hour phone conversations to fix a fight or plan a holiday or just argue over why he thinks i was a brat and why i think he is insensitive. that moment when he complained the bartender at the hotel couldn’t get his favorite cocktail right. that night when we were so drunk we couldn’t find our way back to our our Boracay abode. the times he missed his flight and wasted his tickets to see me. the days leading to the breakup. the days leading to my breakdown.

it seems so long ago now and yet i remember them all so vividly. has there been no closure?, i wonder as i watched my yoga instructor called out the newbies in class for an introductory lesson outside the heated room. it has been six years and i have been happy since. a lot of stuff has happened; a lot of other stuff has hurt me more. a lot of stuff has replaced him and yet there it was, that rawness of the memory. 

i have apologized. but perhaps, i have never apologized enough. and perhaps- as he is reading this now- he will see that i am truly sorry for how it ended. between the two of us, he was the rock unto which the relationship has leaned on and i was the hammer that broke it all into pieces. my anger. my childishness. my insensitivity.

i do believe, more than ever now, that every relationship makes us to be who we are- or who we don’t want to be- on the next one. for what it was worth- and it was worth a whole lot- ours had made both of us a better person.

as the man who had made me deal with my anger and my demons in no way possible and had taught me how to rise above it all, that yoga practice was for you. i am deeply sorry.

and thank you.

things improved a little bit on day 3. My paper loss went back down to 0.51% due to huge dip on BPI and PCOR stocks. BPI dove 3% since i last bought it while PCOR fell by 2%, wiping out the nice climb of my other stocks since Wednesday.  i got lucky and bought First Philippine Holdings Corp (FHP) at a price lower than i set.  i tried buying another stocks of JFC but prices climbed up towards the end of the trading day that no one wanted to sell their shares at a price i wanted to buy them for.

what am i getting from all of these exercises? that i am one stubborn-headed piece of a thing. i have been advised over and over again that if i am investing in the stock market, the day to day fluctuations should be irrelevant to me. the day to day fluctuations are all noise to my cause; i am not selling after a few days or weeks, so why would the price of my stocks on a particular day that i am not selling important to me? i have heard those advises- solicited or unsolicited- a lot. and here i am, watching the stock movement multiple times in a day in the first three days as if the length of my hair is dependent on it.  but then again, this is not the first time that the realization that i am indeed one hardheaded person dawned on me. early this year, my banker advised me- pushed me, in fact- to invest in yen. it was in its all time low and it was the perfect time to put some extra cash in it. i thought it was a great idea but i didn’t quite see it through. fast forward a few months later and i got some good scolding from him on how i had let a good opportunity passed. if i heard him out on that time he posed that investment idea to me- i would have had earned a lot on that investment by now.

it seems to me that a lot of people are like me. everyday, a great idea dawns on us and we get excited about the thought of pursuing it. but a lot of these initial enthusiasm are stuck in the glass walls of our head. we rarely pursue it and when we looked back and realized how good the opportunity we let passed was, we justify the loss by all sort of reasons from the lack of time, the lack of resources, the lack of discipline, the lack of confidence and all sorts of shit. my head has been ground zero of a lot of ideas that never saw the light of day and i have spent a lot of coffee time talking to people about these ideas but it never materialized. reflecting as to why this is, i realized that although we may all think it was a great idea to begin, we are all waiting for the other to start the ball rolling before we even bother to make the first move.

i believe the entrance to the stock market for a whole lot of us (the normal working class) are like this- a lot of it depends on what we hears, not so much on what we understands that we are much pretty dependent on the bandwagon effect kicking in that we are at solid idea of why we want to enter the stock market and what it can provide us.

as for my day to day monitoring of the stock market, i don’t quite think i will ever grow out of it. not yet at this point, anyway. my banker- who is a trader in all bones of his body than he ever is an investor- probably has a lot to do with this behavior. i am quite interested and excited about how it works and i always enjoy the coffee conversations with him about these things. he always tell me that even though the market movement is never quite rational, there is a science to its irrationality- the method to its madness.  and from where i am standing right now, it may be quite a long shot for me to earn shitloads of money from trading stocks- that burning fire of learning that method, that science interest me immensely. it is quite a great idea to pursue- and unlike most great ideas i have came across with, this is going to be one of those i will definitely do something about.

this is exactly how people get burned. all the accounting bones inside me twitched. anything it cannot measure, worries it. i waited two years since i put in some money in mutual funds (which gave me a fat, unhealthy return of 84% at the present, by the way) before i dove my nose right into the stock market naked- i am not going to gamble my money on things i do not know a lot about.

the accountant in me likes that line of reasoning.  anything it cannot explain, it repulses. stock market is a foreign territory it does not like exploring; too many noises and they are all very distracting, it reasons. i like that consistent, reliable voice inside my head- it makes everything about my life simple.   it doesn’t quite like me at this point, though and looks at this entire exercise of building my wealth through stocks as a sign of abandonment and breach of trust. i will handle her later; first, the market just opened and i have to start shopping for stocks now.

I have seven companies in my list, three of which were recommended by Bo Sanchez (i have subscribed in his truly rich club program- and yes, i really am serious about this wealth building program), two of which were my banker’s picks and two of which were my own. I got the order for four of these stocks completed: Jollibee (JFC), BPI, Petron (PCOR), and Energy Development Corp (EDC). Aboitiz Power (AP), First Philippines Holding Corp (FPH), and Zeus Holding, Inc (ZHI) orders remained uncompleted up to the time the market closed at 1PM. no one was willing to sell their shares at the price I want to buy it and a lot of other traders are buying them at a higher price than i want.  oh well, I found myself thinking, that would be the stocks I can buy for another day. 

a few hours later when the market closed, i checked my portfolio and found out that on my first day at the start market, i lost 0.54% of the value of the stocks I bought on the same day.  I bought shares of pretty solid companies- i am not that worried.  my banker has taught me that I should set a threshold for my tolerance on losses (and conservative i may be, 0.54% is not that number; it is not even close to that at all).  He also told me that i should be disciplined enough to decide what I want to do with the stock before I do any buying or selling activities with it.  that does make sense, if you really think hard about it.  the worse thing you can do at the stock market is buy or sell a stock because everyone else is doing it, without you understanding why they are doing it.

how do i rate my first day at the stock market? well, seeing as i am now one of the owners (albeit, insignificant) of a successful food giant, a huge corporate bank, an oil company owned by one of the largest conglomerate in the country and an energy corporation that are all going to be around for a while….it wasn’t so bad. i do not know about you, but it turned out to be quite a productive morning.

i guess i could say this again- having a kid does change you. and i guess, the realization of being so blessed- amidst all the suffering and hardships in this world- does fuel that fire.

at the present, i am sending a few kids to school via the World Vision organization. It was a convenient way to give a little of something back; the money gets charged to my credit card automatically every month. I get report cards on how they are doing and i sometimes get a letter from the kid and the mothers of the kids i am supporting. it feels nice and i believe i would be doing that for a a very long time.

however, as my trips to the province gets more frequent due to Grape’s arrival, i kept getting reminded of how much poverty looms in Negros- particularly in the hometown i grew up and live in, San Carlos City. i guess, it wasn’t just the fact of imminent poverty that bothers me, it was the fact that the gap between the rich and poor has become so visually striking it was quite disheartening to even talk about it.

i look at Grape and i am so thankful and amazed at how many people love her. i look at her grinned and i know she knows. i am starting to think that all that talk about someone not knowing how the other loves them so is all bull- the mind knows, the body feels. and as i watch my daughter being surrounded by people that she knows loves and protects her, the twinkle in her eyes confirm such fact. this is one child whose future is almost sealed in comforting certainty- unless she grows up and screws it big time.

but a lot more kids are not as lucky as her. the travel miles from their shack to the school everyday, others barefoot and with an empty stomach. a good bulk of kids that starts school in the far flung barrios in my town will not make it through the entire year. and for those that do, will not make it to graduate. and for those that graduate from grade school, a few of them would be lucky enough to get to a public high school and in a section where they actually can learn something (the state of public high school in these provinces are entirely a big, separate matter to discuss).

i always believe a good education and a burning passion for a better life paves way to a lot of opportunities. i was lucky to have had my parents gave me that; i wanted to be that someone for a couple of kids in my hometown starting this year. With so much excitement, i decided and sealed to sponsor two driven sixth graders (who are set to graduate in a public elementary school in the far flung barrios of my hometown) a high school education. i estimated that would cost between $30-$50 a month for each kid- probably lesser than what we- working people- spent on coffee in the same time frame.

if you are interested in starting this drive with me, please shoot me off a note. before the year end, i should be able to get all the criteria for the scholarship drive sorted out. it would be my pleasure to grab this opportunity with those who wants to make a little bit of contribution to make the lives of the underprivileged a little better.

a can of sardines made to be eaten by five or so people by turning it into a soup through addition of spices and Misua (a thin salted chinese noodle made of wheat flour) was the picture of poverty i swore off. it really wasn’t that bad, i know of families who have to settle with rice and soy sauce. until the bankruptcy and the fire that took everything we had, we were doing okay. but the years following that was very difficult that at my young age and that of my sister, we know there are some things we just couldn’t get.

the amazing thing about those years though was how my parents have managed to pull us through. when i got older, i have learned of the many nights mother succumbed to crying because she just doesn’t know how to make both ends meet. i have heard stories from other people how father could sit outside a placement agency for a day without a meal. but they have put me through college, and at a very good school at that. and had secured enough money to send me off to Manila for the review and eventually the board exam.

my parents never treated me as an investment (sadly, a common occurrence in the Philippine setting where parents sends their kids to school and then demand or expect the same kid to return the favor when s/he eventually landed a job). there was never a pressure to give back or to return the gesture. not being able to finish school, they look at education as a means for their children to lead a financially better life than they had. they sacrificed a lot for me not to secure their future but to establish mine. but the good thing about selfless sacrifice is that blessings given always come back a hundred times fold. i do not know when it started but things eventually became financially better for us and for my parents, too.

i do not know about you, but i am so blessed for the kind of family that i have. my family is my ultimate wealth. i am worthless without them; they are the reason i am where i am now. they are the gas to my fire, they are the fuel to my car, they are both the sugar and caffeine to my Coke. they are the driving force behind why i want to be able to earn more, save more. they are my wealth-generator because without them, trekking the path out of poverty would be less fun (i fancy it would otherwise be all about greed).

as for the can of sardines, i never got to the point that i had too much of it. i still ask mother to make me Misua soup sometimes. and it wasn’t so much for the remembrance of how life was before it got better. for some reason, i actually like eating it.

where we differ, however, is on how we look at the impending uncertainty of death. for father, conversations about life insurance is tantamount to talking about people actually dying. though, he is like every other people i know; life insurance is that one ugly maiden no one seems interested in paying for a premium.

i have one life insurance policy and a number of term life policies you would think my days are numbered. and i have my purpose for it; when i took those policies, my discipline on savings is pathetic so i needed a product that will force me into setting aside money. the crazy thing about insurance policies is that they are almost worthless if you prematurely stop paying for the premium. the idea of losing what i have already paid continuously give me that urgent force to make sure i do not make any single insurance premium to lapse.

looking back at it now, i know i could invested my money into another financial vehicle and would earn twice or thrice what i would eventually get from my insurance policies. but the thing is, insurance are not supposed to be viewed solely as investment vehicles (they really are not designed that way). you do not take a health insurance to earn money from it; you carry a health insurance to protect you from sudden medical expenses that you otherwise would have to pay from your own pocket. life and term insurance are the same; you do not put your eggs there and depend solely on that for your extra $$$ when you grow old or die or get disabled you cannot earn your normal source of income anymore. you take a life insurance policy to protect the people dependent on you financially.

and so, that was what i did.

so, when a financial planner from one of the banks i used offered a VUL (Variable Universal Life insurance) product to me as an answer to where i want to put my extra money, i told her i really do not want to pay for another life insurance policy anymore. she insisted that it was better for me to put the money there because not only do i get the flexibility to invest it in equity or bonds or money market, i also get an insurance coverage along with it. i firmly told her i believe i have put aside enough funds for my insurance policies i would rather concentrate on capital growth this time around. she insisted- as if her life depended on my saying yes- that VUL is better than putting my money in a time deposit and that it is also better than putting money in mutual fund or UITF too because there is also an insurance that comes along with it. i pointed out to her that the insurance rider is not free; she insisted it is. unfortunately for her, i am a certified life insurance broker so i know all about the shit she was throwing at me.

do i believe insurance should be something every parent or breadwiner should set aside funds for? unless you are filthy rich then yes, absolutely (ironically, it is the people who have enough money to burn that sees the real value of having an insurance). how much life insurance coverage should one get? a lot of insurance agents would tell you to get a coverage equal to 5x to 10x your annual salary. kind of crazy, isn’t it? i’d say, get a coverage you can afford even if you lose your job next month. the worse thing you can do is get a Php10MM term insurance coverage and let it lapse in a year’s time because you couldn’t sustain the payments.

as for me, i have reached my limit for the amount i want to commit for my insurance premium. Now that i am in my 30′s, with my emergency fund intact and Grape’s college tuition all prepared for- i’d love to take a little bit of risk and work on growing my money. i could only work for money long enough, it is always a good thing to start making money work for me.

and hey, maybe someday when i get rich, i could splurge on a business class Round the World trip with Grape!

i am as guilty as the rest of them now. Isabela Marguerite, or Grape as we fondly call her, did not only climb up my priority list but also has by default put a lien on all that i have without as little effort from her part. she would cry and i would drop everything to figure out if i can give her what it is that she seeks (in a number of cases, i usually hand her over to mother because she is always better at this than i am). she would smile and make those cute tiny noises and i know what it is that really matters.

i have wrote earlier on when i was weighing the impact of the pregnancy on me that going through with it is not saving her life but letting her save mine. and oh, was i right. i have never valued my life this highly before she came. and now, all i wanted was to live long enough to see my grandchildren grow up and make a life on their own. (i always fancy i will reach the 80′s but my healthcheck says that is too ambitious). Grape, wanted but unplanned, did not change my life but accentuate the things that should matter to me: peace, contentment, faith, and happiness.

it is quite funny. my desire to give her as much as i can so she lives a life designed by God for her made me look at how i have lived my life so far. it would be kind of silly, i’d think, to want to give myself what she needs to be happy if i have not given myself that. it would be hypocrisy to want her to nurture her faith if i haven’t done anything with mine for the last decade. it is going to be complicated to rear her up in contentment if i am up and about chasing the limelight. and what about peace? how can a troubled mother raise a child in serenity?

in the midst of buying milk and changing nappies and rocking a crying baby to sleep and work and love and other shit we have to deal with in our lives, it is understandable that we couldn’t afford to think about these things when we should. instead, we buy them the milk that we hope would give them killer brain cells, even if it is way above our budget. instead, we struggle keeping them in a school we can barely afford in the hope that it will seal their future. instead, we stay in a lousy marriage in our belief that it will spare the kid embarrassment and pain.

i haven’t seen Grape for two weeks. i am going to be seeing her very soon. i do not know if i will be thinking about these things again. perhaps her crying would distract me. perhaps her satisfaction while i nurse her overwhelms me with warm feelings. there is so much stuff i do not know around Grape that it challenges what i really know about my life.

perhaps, when she is older and i am wiser, we can both sit on the grass and talk about this.