Updates

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So J and I are responsible for this:

http://bleepthisblank.wordpress.com

About the Site

bleepthisblank contains reviews of anything that catches the authors’ fancies. Consider this a space for recommendations: watch this show, try this restaurant, read this book, play this game. Bleep this blank.

About the Authors

Eliza graduated from UP Diliman in 2007 and now works in Makati. She has won two Palanca Awards, and her fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications here and abroad. She loves the Oxford comma, is ambivalent toward the semicolon, and hates the ellipsis.

…

Hates it.

Jaykie is taking up a masters degree in Applied Mathematics (Major in Actuarial Science) in UP Diliman. If you are in need of an actuary, you’ll know who to contact. He enjoys gaming, be it tabletop, online, board, or card (esp. Magic). If you are in need of an actuary and a dungeon master, you’ll know who to contact. Could make for a very interesting game.

They met sometime in 2009. Together they enjoy watching films and TV series, drinking on weekends, and playing a round or two of the Game of Thrones boardgame.

Contact

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For our first post:

With Peter Berg confirming that a Friday Night Lights film is in the works, we think it’s high time that we revisit this series.

We just finished watching all five seasons of Friday Night Lights, which certainly deserved all the praise it got in its five-year run. It is set in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, and concerns the struggles and victories of its football team, its football coach, Eric Taylor, his family, and the close-knit circle of the football players. It is heartwarming, engaging and sincere, and we’d recommend it to anyone, football fan or not.

Personally it got me interested in watching football, though don’t ask me to explain the rules to you. I’m actually planning to watch the Super Bowl for the game, and not just the halftime show.

Anyway. FNL makes for excellent television, but it’s not flawless. It has plot holes large enough for Smash Williams to charge through, and the show has the tendency of dropping character arcs and characters just like that.

If you haven’t seen the entire series, stop. SPOILERS!

Read more.

(Visit us from time to time. Okay?)

food, love, food love

Twenty-eight months with this boy. And this cheesy post is brought to you by my food photo backlog.

Diet not allowed.

Kanin Club

Be kind to yourself and have some turon a la mode from Kanin Club. It’s basically halo-halo, only wrapped and crispy. Bananas, macapuno, mongo beans, purple yam jam – yum.

Sentro 1771

Order their sago’t gulaman. It has got to be the best I’ve ever tasted. You’ll get refills, and you won’t regret it.

Burgoo

We like the fact that we can draw on the table.

Cream dory milanese, seafood jambalaya, supreme sampler.

That’s it for now.

monday the 13th

We decided to have our Valentine’s Day dinner on the 13th to avoid the crowd that would probably go love-berserk on the 14th.

So! I enjoyed the night despite the fact that it started with me walking against a strong wind with rainwater inside my shoes. I never knew how annoying it was to look for a bus through several dozen people blocking the bus placards with their umbrellas.

Almon Marina at Mall of Asia.

Hey there.

We love this soup! Bacon, corn, and potato. Perfect for the weather.

I had their Chicken Sausage Crunch. A sandwich with apple slices (and inexplicable little flags).

J had the California Roast Turkey.

We loved the food! Healthy and light and relatively inexpensive.

Swensen’s after, but I was so ice cream-deprived I forgot to take a picture and just pounced on it.

When we were at Vikings, I got fixated on their fruits and cheese plate, so we bought wine, prunes, dates and our favorite cheese. Drank while watching Friday Night Lights.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

I’m sure you have that one friend who says Valentine’s Day is a fake holiday and should not be celebrated. For the Valentine’s Day haters, here’s a lovely, thoughtful post by writer Catherynne Valente. Read the whole thing.

It doesn’t work to say “make every day special.” First of all, most of you know damn well that you don’t shower your partner with gifts and adoration and that most precious of things: dedicated, mindful time every day of the year. Even the best relationship is not a 24/7 orgiastic festival of plenty and perfect moments. No human can sustain it. If every day is special, none of them are.

But I get the hatin’  on Valentine’s Day (and Christmas, particularly) – the traffic is always horrible.

In other news: I’ve started work on a new story and two new poems. I haven’t written anything new in a long while, so this makes me happy.

Week 1 at the new job done! I’m enjoying it.

February! How did that happen?

Anyway end-January we went to Vikings at Mall of Asia  for J’s sister’s birthday. Highly recommended. They have a wonderful spread.

Thanks for the treat, J and family!

On Feb.2, breakfast at Pancake House! We haven’t done this in a while.

Breakfast makes me happpyyy.

Coffee, cheese pancakes, and a Pinoy-style breakfast meal. The best.

Went clothes shopping and was horrified to find out that most slacks either 1) didn’t fit me or 2) didn’t fit me well. Who likes slacks? Tell me. I’ll stick with leggings and dresses if you don’t mind, corporate world.

PDI Research! It’s Almi’s pizza party. She asked us to wear something pink and bring a DIY crown, and me of the artistic persuasion took a crystal headband and wrapped it with a pink ribbon.

You can’t see it clearly here but Lawrence was wearing a Chief Justice Corona crown. Corona = corona = crown. And someone’s wearing a Loren Legarda calendar.

We’re ah tickled pink. Haha! Thanks for the pizza Ate Almi! :D

PANTAS folio + The Cabinet + other publication news

Christian Tablazon, poet and educator, invited me late last year to submit poems to the literary folio, PANTAS. I’m happy to hear that two of my poems – “Architecture” from my collection Maps, and “Notes” from Reportage – will be appearing in its pages. The folio, Blinds: PANTAS Tomo IX, will be out next week!

You can now read “Architecture” on The Cabinet.

The Cabinet is a Laguna-based independent multimedia arts collective established in 2011 to foster emergent and liminal forms of storytelling and produce and distribute works that cater to the said principle.

Click here to view and “like” their Facebook page. Several pieces are already online for your perusal.

In other news: I’ll have two stories out by July. “The Mechanic” will be appearing in Kaleidotrope, while “Fairy Tales” will go live on Daily Science Fiction.