2010 – Page 14 – Eliza Victoria

aftermath, and new poem

I’m hearing news that Meralco has so far energized more than 90 percent of the Metro, but as of last night the stat was as low as 20 percent and Makati looked like the site of apocalypse. Cables hanging dangerously low, dark streets, dead traffic lights, candles sitting on windowsills. Our condo building has a generator, but at 9 p.m. last night our unit’s still gloomy and humid. Apparently the utility men couldn’t connect the unit to the generator. What infuriated me was that there was a goddamn party near the pool area. With ear-blasting music. And huge speakers. I should have pushed the lot of them into the pool so we could use the leftover power to heat our water.

Anyway. I was thankful to Jake and his family for inviting me to stay over. They were at the Marriott while waiting for power to come back to their home. There were only two beds in the room, so Jake pushed two sofas together. Initially he wanted to sleep there, or sleep on the floor, but I fit on the sofas anyway. Nice and cozy. Had a good night’s sleep. :) I texted my mother, and she said we have electricity back home, so I’m traveling to Bulacan with two short story collections (borrowed from Andrea) that I’m planning to finish over the weekend.

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I just received the good news that my poem, “Variations on the Expulsion from Eden”, will appear in the August issue of elimae. A year ago elimae published “Storytellers“. Click the link to read, and watch this space. ;)

dental adventures, plus basyang

Why can’t loose teeth be this cute? Source.

Here’s how you can get a dentist to talk: allow her to stick her fingers into someone else’s mouth. While running rubber-covered fingers over your teeth, searching for cavities and plaque, she’ll ask about your job, where you live, what you write about or what books you read, and actually expect you to answer.

Sometimes they give their opinion about things, like if they think your job is hard, and that is better because then you only have to blink or nod as best as you can, and not actually attempt to form words and gag on your own saliva.

Also? They always find something else wrong with you. You come in complaining about a painful molar and they’ll find four teeth that need to be drilled and filled. Oh, and they’ll have to extract that molar. Sorry.

Like any office employee, I’m covered by an HMO. Unfortunately the HMO-accredited clinic I went to early on Monday (a Monday, take note!) was full to the brim with patients. And? The dentist is sick and is going to take the afternoon off. I was, of course, scheduled after lunch.

No shit.

So I asked Kate about her dentist, and set an afternoon appointment on Tuesday. My molar was hurting too much for me to stop and think about saving money. I will not mention that the dentist is hot, because that detail, no matter how true, has no bearing on this tale.

But yeah, the dentist is hot.

Still: four pastas, a rigid cleaning, and an extraction. Afterwards I took some meds for the pain, lay in bed, and ate butter pecan (the dentist told me to eat a lot of ice cream) while watching Will and Grace like a heartbroken girl.

Jake was also a bit stressed, having just taken his first exam under grad school, so we decided to meet up. Unfortunately Basyang came and blew out Metro Manila like a candle, so our scheduled marathon of Top Chef Masters Season 2 had to wait. And wait. The wind howled like a dying woman and the next morning the MRT was down and EDSA looked like a battlefield.

Oh well. It’s one of those days.

At least now my teeth don’t hurt anymore.

new necklaces!

I really should stop buying but they’re so cute!

Met up with Detsy, a college friend and my new supplier, in UP. She said something about meeting up in the CAL New Building, by Magdangal, which made no sense to me at all. Have they renamed the CNB Magdangal Hall? (And who keeps track of hall names, when even freshmen call Palma Hall AS and calling the Main Lib Gonzales Hall is considered idiotic?) Apparently Magdangal is this statue in front of the building. Am I that old that I don’t even know about this statue?

Anyway. Bubble wrap!

Read Detsy’s Terms and Conditions here. She still has several vintage necklaces on sale, so go browse and shop!

(O ayan bakla ha, may plugging.) :D

the river king

I am fond of stories set in small towns, especially small towns created from scratch. The small town of Haddan, despite its “blustery” weather, is as picturesque as any town can be, filled with fields of wild irises, swans, and the scent of roses. Every year, however, a horde of rich boys and girls travel to the Haddan School, an exclusive academic institution that the very locals, who lead simple lives, cannot even afford to attend. One of the on-campus boarding houses is called Chalk House, built so close to the river that its residents wake up to damp beds and walls. The Chalk House boys observe a strict hierarchy; any boy who wishes to live in peace has to go through an initiation.

One morning, one of the Chalk House boys is found dead.

But Alice Hoffman’s novel isn’t just a murder mystery. It is a story of teenagers rewriting their backgrounds, of a town with a history of a suicide, of people with secrets. Inside is a trick on how to turn a white rose red. (Remember that scene in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, when the young girl passes by clumps of white roses and asks, Do you know how to turn white roses red? It isn’t magic. It is mentioned in Hoffman’s book that during Victorian times, aristocrats liked to keep white roses in their gardens in order to amuse each other with this trick. It is not magic, just a clever use of chemistry. But it’s magic when you don’t know the secret.)

parks and recreation

“He’s a tourist. He takes vacations in people’s lives, takes pictures, puts ’em in a scrapbook and moves on. All he’s interested in are stories.”

Amy Poehler plays Leslie Knope, deputy director of the Parks and Recreation department of Pawnee, Indiana. Another faux documentary set in a small town, featuring sad sad people that are unknowingly funny in their sadness. It’s like The Office, with a female lead. It works. I’m watching Season 2 now.

lightspeed magazine #1 review

There is a new online magazine in town, and this one focuses exclusively on science fiction.

Lightspeed Magazine, launched in June, is helmed by Fantasy Magazine and Prime Books publisher and award-winning editor Sean Wallace, with editorial support from John Joseph Adams (Fiction), Andrea Kail (Nonfiction), Stefan Rudnicki (Audio), and Jordan Hamessley and Christie Yant (assistant editors). A glance at the magazine’s impressive staff box shows that aside from showcasing fiction, Lightspeed also publishes nonfiction pieces, which can be read as companion pieces to its fiction offerings, and serves up a podcast, featuring one or two stories each month in audio format.

A fiction and a nonfiction piece is posted online for free every week, but readers have the option to buy the complete issue in ebook form at any time, even if there’s only one story for that month available on the website. The magazine’s regular monthly publication schedule (following this debut issue) will include two pieces of original fiction and two fiction reprints, along with four nonfiction articles. Fiction (and podcasts, when applicable) will go live on Tuesdays, nonfiction on Thursdays.

According to Adams, “Here you can expect to see all types of science fiction, from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF, and anything and everything in between. No subject will be considered off-limits, and we encourage our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.”

It was a promise delivered in Lightspeed’s maiden issue, which features four all-new, never-before-published stories from Vylar Kaftan, Jack McDevitt, David Barr Kirtley, and Carrie Vaughn. The magazine as a whole has been well received–see a review at Tor.com and the Secret Lair, even at SF Signal though the reviewer felt let down by the non-fiction; Locus doesn’t so much as review the entire magazine as each individual story.

beautiful things

I buy costume jewelry whenever I have the chance, and now I’ve accumulated a pile of them. Rings, earrings, bracelets, necklaces. I love them all, but last night I finally decided to organize.

I started collecting simple earrings, studs and the like,

until I fell in love with dangling pairs

These aren’t jewelry, but Jaykie gave me a tin box for them:

The rest of my accessories are now here:

Et voila:

Yay me.

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Every now and then I turn to Etsy. I don’t shop. I just look and sigh and wonder where I can get these stuff at cheaper prices. Ha. (Also, I don’t like paying first before getting my merchandise. I’d rather go COD or agree to meet-ups, or visit the stall myself.) (Also? Some of Etsy’s jewelry are overpriced. I saw a necklace that looked exactly like the one I bought at ToyCon for P150. On Etsy it was going for what? Eighteen dollars? Please.)

All of the following photos are from the site. Go visit.