Year: 2011

palawan – day 1

This year’s trip with my high school friends was to Puerto Princesa City in Palawan. June booked our tickets, Ghia booked our rooms, and Grace Anne, who had been to Palawan before, took care of budget and the itinerary. Departure from NAIA 3 was at 3:45 pm on Feb. 5. Jaykie had class at UP till 1, and I was worried we might miss our flight. Amazingly, though, we arrived at the airport after only more or less 30 minutes. Hooray!

(Click pics to enlarge, of course.)

Cebu Pacific’s flight left a bit late (around 4 or so?), but we arrived safely in Puerto Princesa at 5:30 pm.

My travel-mates. :)

Puerto Pension offers free transpo from the airport to the hotel. Air-conditioned jeep!

Checking in.

It’s a nice place. Very homey.

Our room! (Deluxe B – with queen-size bed, TV, bathroom, AC unit, hot and cold shower.) There’s really only enough room for two, so if you want more space, take the Superior room, which can fit three people. Deluxe C does not have a bathroom inside (you’ll have to use the communal bathroom), but it’s of course cheaper.

We took the trike to get to Kinabuchs for dinner. It rained on our first night, boo.

We had crocodile! It was okay. The meat was tender and tasted like chicken. Not memorable though.

Then back to the hotel and then sleep. Loooong day tomorrow.

kritika kultura soft launch

Hopefully I’ll be able to attend. :)

From Facebook, and Chingbee Cruz’s blog:

Kritika Kultura and the National Committee on Literary Arts – National Commission for Culture and the Arts cordially invite you to the soft launch of the Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing. This event will take place on February 11, 2011, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm, at the Natividad Galang Fajardo (NGF) Conference Room, dela Costa Hall, Ateneo de Manila University.

The program for the soft launch will include a roundtable discussion on new writing, featuring the issue editors Mark Anthony Cayanan, Conchitina Cruz, and Adam David. Topics pertinent to the anthology—such as the selection process, the trends that have emerged from the contributions, and the tradition from which the “new” seems to be drawn—will be tackled. The discussion will be followed by a reading of works from five of the authors in the anthology: J. Pilapil Jacobo, Anna Oposa, Petra Magno, Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Alyza May Taguilaso.

This anthology is the first exclusively literary issue of Kritika Kultura, the international online journal of language, literary and cultural studies published by the Ateneo de Manila University and indexed by Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI), MLA, Scopus, EBSCO, and DOAJ. The soft launch is the satellite activity of Ateneo de Manila University for Taboan: The 3rd Philippine International Writers Festival.

intersections

Says the Expanded Horizons team:

Dear Readers,

Our Issue 27 is up for your reading pleasure. Four stories, by four women authors! Space travel! Mermaids! Gateways between universes! Hindu mythology!

An all-female issue, awesome! You can click here to read my short story, “Intersections”. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to share, if you are so inclined.

victory

is sweet, bitches.



Weight Chart

Remember how I was stressing out last week that I haven’t lost a pound since Jan. 11? (I lost 2.2 pounds from Jan. 3 to Jan. 11.) It was that time of the month so in hindsight I think it’s possible that I was bloated, it was water weight, etc – but whatever the cause, all is right in the world again. Considering that I had two buffet meals before the weigh-in, this is very good news indeed.

Still a long way to go, though, but I’ll get there. Eventually.

floating dragon

Floating Dragon could have knocked my socks off, but unfortunately the novel’s middle part got bogged down by too many abstractions, too much 80’s horror imagery – the pulsing red light, blood everywhere, visions in various stages of decomposition. Granted that it was written in the mid-80’s, but I’m reading this now in 2011, and it was just too much. Many times the horror becomes ridiculous, even cheesy, even laughable, far from the subtlety of his short story collection, Houses without Doors, for example.

But it starts and ends beautifully enough. The beginning reminded me of Straub’s The Hellfire Club (which, by the way, did knock my socks off), with its huge cast of characters, its Gothic feel, invented history, and invented pop culture legacy referenced throughout the story (the show Daddy’s Here in Floating Dragon, the novel Night Journey in Hellfire Club). The novel starts like a crime story: a woman named Stony Friedgood is found brutally murdered in the idyllic, middle-class town of Hampstead. But then the story gets a hint of scientific disaster: an experimental chemical called DRG is released accidentally into the air, and settles on the town. This chemical, when inhaled, either kills instantly, or turns the person insane. Did DRG just create a serial killer? All over Hampstead, birds fall dead from the sky.

Still, that’s not all: when the town of Hampstead was built in the 1800’s, a man named Gideon Winter arrives in town and brings with him a destructive force that will visit Hampstead time and time again.

It’s worth a read, if only for Peter Straub’s superb writing.

 

The Mighty Reading List!

Saturday

Feast for Crows

The Kobayashi Maru of Love

Showbiz Lengua

PGS Horror issue

Floating Dragon

El Bimbo Variations

The Tesseract

The Dispossessed

100 Bullets

Our Story Begins

‘slow and steady, slow and steady’

I found this from this blog I’ve been reading, but I’ll pretend the letter’s addressed to me as well:

Though I don’t consider my lifestyle a diet, I live the way I do because I know that “health” is a never-ending journey. There will be NO point at which I stop striving for health. So I figure, since I’m relatively young, why not learn how to eat in moderation NOW? Why not learn to love exercise and CRAVE it NOW? Why not learn to indulge in healthy ways NOW? That way, when I’m 30, 40, 50, 60, etc., all of that won’t feel anything but completely normal.

The trick is to PLAN for indulgence. PLAN for screw ups. PLAN for lazy days when you don’t feel like working out. If they’re part of the plan from the beginning, you won’t ever feel like you’ve messed up and want to throw in the towel. Because indulgence? Screw ups? Lazy days? Those will never go away. They’re part of life. The key is to figure out how to deal with them in a healthy way. Example: Too lazy to do your scheduled run? Go for a leisurely walk! Craving a piece of a coworker’s surprise birthday cake? Have a piece, but just one.

I used to be a very all or nothing type of girl. If I ate poorly, I was going to do it all day/week/month. Now, I know it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I can have the cookie. I can skip the workout. I can have one drink. I don’t consider myself a failure, I just figure that I’m handling life and preparing myself for forever. I live by the saying, “Don’t do anything on a ‘diet’ you aren’t prepared to do for the rest of your life.” Slow and steady is the way to go… you’ll be able to live this way forever! You’d never be able to work out every day and only eat 1,200 calories forever.

I hope all of that made sense. Your mantra right now should be slow and steady, slow and steady, slow and steady.