Category: Stuff I do

Yesterday was the Philippine book launch for Yasmin Ortiga‘s book Stuck at Home: Pandemic Immobilities in a Nation of Emigration, published internationally by Stanford University Press and locally by the De La Salle University Publishing House. I’m very honored to have been a part of this project as the copyeditor and book indexer. I also love that the creation of this book was helped along by Facebook; Yasmin and her researchers collaborated over Facebook, she conducted interviews with her respondents over Facebook Messenger, and she found me through a friend over—you guessed it—Facebook.

The book is a snapshot in time, talking about the challenges faced by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) during the pandemic. The lockdowns forced aspiring OFWs to abandon their plans to work abroad, stopped current OFWs on vacation here from leaving the Philippines because they were not allowed to return to their jobs and lives abroad, and led OFWs back home after being let go from their jobs during the pandemic and subsequently forced to figure out how they fit in the Philippine job market. One could say it’s a pretty dry topic, but Yasmin tells the stories of the OFWs she interviewed with heart and sympathy while providing in-depth research and commentary on the situation. It’s just a really good read and I hope more people get their hands on the book.

Congratulations and thank you, Yasmin!

I always loved taking screenshots of the websites I made ever since I discovered the power of the Print Screen button. I used to change layouts every couple of months at most and would beam with pride while staring at each one.

I lost screenshots of my old sites when my computer was destroyed in a fire at our house in 2008, though. The only ones I have left are screenshots from archive.org of whatever sites they were able to crawl but with broken images.

Anyway, last month, I decided to finally start working on this site when I figured maybe it would help to be less anonymous for work and networking purposes.

This is what this site looked like before I decided to change things up.

The WordPress theme is Björk by Anders Noren. I made it pink because cute and also, too many sites are white now. I know nothing about UX and UI so maybe this is not the “correct” way to do things. It’s a cool and straightforward theme, and I’m sure I could have turned it into something like what I have here now, but I figured I’d just start over with a new theme.

Aside from the look, I also decided to do away with the stuffy-sounding writing. I think I was influenced and intimidated by what colleagues and acquaintances wrote about themselves on their LinkedIns and websites that it made me go, “Hmm, I too must highlight my expertise in such a manner.”

Anyway, good luck to the current layout and may it last at least six months.

I started blogging in 1999, back when blogs were still known as weblogs and online journals and Blogger was cutting edge. It was so cutting edge I was afraid of nicking myself and thus opted to just manually update and reupload HTML pages on my personal website, wherever it was hosted. My online heroes included Christine of Maganda.org, Claire of Loobylu, and Heather of Harrumph and Jezebel (which incidentally became one of my favorite websites in the 2010s, though it was completely different from the site Heather ran). I wanted to be as creative and as good with words as they were, and thought that whatever I wrote deserved to curl up and cry in a corner when compared to what they posted.

Eventually, I found a community of fellow online journalers, and many of us made our way to Livejournal, which used to require an invite from a friend before you could join. Once I received that elusive invite, I proceeded to vomit all over my journal and most likely caused eyes to weld to the back of heads with all my drama.

Once I started working, the urge to blog tapered off, and when I wasn’t looking, blogging exploded. People were cultivating loyal readerships and making money from blogging. Soon, food blogs, travel blogs, shopping blogs, beauty blogs, parenting blogs, green blogs, gadget blogs were everywhere. I wanted to have any one of those and often regretted giving up blogging.

Trying to figure out my unique niche (ew) and worrying about being cringe have forced me to stop blogging for years. As I got older, I realized that, truly, most of the time, you’re the only one who gets in your way, and you just end up doing absolutely nothing, and life’s really just too short to keep yourself stuck. So here I go again.