Updates

weekend in bullet points

  • My father’s birthday was on Wednesday, the 14th, and apparently he had this big party, involving lechon and two boxes of red wine and a huge-ass cake. Yep, right in the midst of a blackout after the storm. Pity the guy who reportedly brought an electric guitar for entertainment. Oh, well. You live, you learn.
  • I was supposed to be with friends for dinner on Friday, but I’d like to see my family, so I went home to Bulacan instead with cake. I ate my father’s leftover cake and leftover lechon for dinner. Chika with the sister and the mother, then Will and Grace and this new show called Pretty Little Liars, because I want to shut down my brain and look at pretty things.
  • On Saturday I ate leftover pancit palabok for breakfast and went to our store. My father arrived late on Friday after his lawyer friend threw him a party. I want to be friends with his friend. Anyway, my father and I went to visit my paternal grandmother, who no longer remembers people. Met up with relatives who were there, who all said the same thing: Bakit ang taba mo na?
  • Ewan ko! Kebs! Masaya ako! :-p
  • My aunt has this wittol African parrot, a wittol baby that can fit in my hand, eee so cute. (Forgot to take a picture.)
  • That same aunt said, May hubog ka naman e, kahit bumigat ka. Voluptuous, orayt, I’ll take et.
  • Off to QC later that day to meet up with Jake. Happy ninth monthsary, dear! He spent most of the day programming Math equations while I screamed at the TV, urging the Maroons to stop fucking up the game. (They eventually lost to Adamson. Did you see that? They tied with AdU after the 3rd quarter and then – argh. Hope! It is an awful thing.)
  • We ordered pizza and buffalo wings for dinner. The pizza joint (which I shall not name) had a policy where if they delivered the order late (i.e. beyond 45 minutes), you’ll get everything for free.
  • They were late! And we didn’t even lay out the obstacle course! I literally jumped up and down because I thought the rider would put up a fight. But we got the dinner for free! Hooray! And on our monthsary to boot! Tipid!

This has never happened to me before, so I was ecstatic. Look how happy Jaykie was:

Tardiness has never tasted this good.

So yes, that’s a party-sized pizza, 12 pieces of wings, and Coke. The pizza people provided four cups, as though to say, “Certainly this order was meant for four people”. I was ashamed. Not. ;)

We stayed in bed eating pizza and wings while watching Modern Family. The leftovers (There were leftovers!) we saved for breakfast. The life.

  • I am lucky to have the nicest parents.
  • Love is a good thing.

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.

* * *

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.

Read more.