Hello first paid leave of the year!
A Thursday that feels like a Saturday. Off we went to Podium and had lunch at Madeca, a Filipino-Mexican fusion restaurant. I had the spinach & mushroom quesadilla and J had the salpicao burrito. Flavors are bold, just the way Pinoys like it. (We don’t do subtlety in our horror and drama films, and we don’t do subtlety in our food.)
After lunch, we headed to ADB to meet up with Books on Demand Philippines. Bumped into Mina Esguerra! Also saw G, who bought us donuts. (And who didn’t know ADB has an Espresso Book Machine haha.) ADB looks gorgeous (I was too shy to take photos), but the offices are very quiet.
Then UP with J and Phil for the launch of several UP Press books.
The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction editor Dean Alfar saying a few words.
Hope you’ll pick up the book! It’s a good sampler of what the Alfars and the other editors (and the writers!) have been up to for the past eight years.
opens with the narrator introducing herself (My name is Kathy H. and I am 31 years old), and who then talks, bewilderingly, about her job as a carer. She has been a carer for years, she says, and she is proud of her job, and she is proud the donors she cares for are calm. She then moves on to talk about a boarding school she attended when she was young. From the description of events you can tell that it is not an ordinary boarding school, and Kathy H. is only telling us a tiny sliver of the truth at a time, doling it out like candy. She doesn’t do this deliberately. She tells a story like a child. She sounds naive at times; she jumps from one topic to another before returning to the original discussion. She is matter-of-fact. She doesn’t wax poetic, even when what she is telling us is horrible. She doesn’t regard it as horror. She regards it as her life, and that’s that.
Eliza Victoria 