Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 33

Turn on your bug zappers and stock up on taua taua tea. It’s dengue season.

Photo of Aedes aegypti mosquito from CNN. Just looking at it makes my skin itch. Now that my eldest niece is 11, we can have actual conversations. Our common interests are tennis, notebooks, and Greek mythology. Last week she had a persistent fever that turned out to be dengue. Aargh, will we never be rid […]

Let’s reread Kazuo Ishiguro.

The first Ishiguro novel I ever read was The Remains of the Day. It was subtle and shattering, two adjectives I’ve found myself using regularly to describe his work. (Full disclosure: I hated The Buried Giant.) Fiction readers tend to have huge backlogs, but to celebrate Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize, why don’t we toss Never Let […]

Coming Soon: Twisted Travels Volume 2

The Twisted books are out of print so it’s time to make new ones. I just finished writing a long account of my trip to the Czech Republic, which reminded me that I have over a decade’s worth of travel notebooks, most of them unpublished. There’s enough of them to fill a large bag. Chuvaness […]

A Halloween Story about my late cat Mat

Illustration by Anne Tamondong Yesterday I organized my journals, meaning I collected them from wherever they were scattered and put them in a trunk and in a big plastic box (there’s a lot of them). I found my journal from mid-2015, a leather notebook I got from Papers and Tschai, a handmade studio in Cebu. […]

I bought a pair of ipis earrings from the beercan art guy of Poblacion

I kept hearing about how Poblacion is the place to be, so when I met my first workshop group I suggested we eat at Bucky’s then cross the equator to El Chupacabra. You can feel your ears pop. The difference between the two sides is a subject for an anthropological paper. Afterwards I was waiting […]

Thor Ragnarok is the funniest superhero movie AND the most fun!!!

It’s a scream, a hoot and a blast! (Plus lark, riot, barrel of laughs) It’s anarchic and hilarious! A different kind of funny from Guardians of the Galaxy, which is pop culture-centric. Here the comedy springs from the disconnect between the characters’ ideas of themselves, what they say they’re going to do, and what they […]

Two or three things I learned in Czechia

Travel is always an edifying experience. Two things I learned from my recent trip. First, the poetry you pick up in school is never completely lost. It will pop into your head when you see its real life counterpart (even in a different country). This is The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats. The […]

Jacob Jonesy Totoro Tormund Z. Howlett is 2! Today he is The Oracle.

Hello, I am Jacob the cat. I am named after Jake Gyllenhaal; one of only two survivors of the xenomorph attack on the Nostromo; Miyazaki’s forest spirit; the wildling from Beyond the Wall; and the Wolverine, because when I was a kitten I was run over by a truck but was protected by my adamantium […]

A Possessed Chorus: A review of Tanghalang Pilipino’s Ang Pag-uusig (The Crucible) by Deo Giga

Sinapiang Koro (A Possessed Chorus) by Deo Giga Sa mga huling sandali ng pelikulang The Crucible, maaalalang may pagka-sentimentál ang tagpo sa pagitan nina John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) at ang may-bahay nitong si Elizabeth Proctor (Joan Allen). O lubhang sentimentál nga naman; tila layunin lamang ng pelikula na magpaiyak. Natatandaan kong puspos ng luha at […]

“Funny how it’s only paper that lasts.” Notes after a second viewing of Blade Runner 2049

Obviously I have to see it again. Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. I looked up these lines from the Post-Trauma Baseline Test, and they’re from Pale Fire by Nabokov (the book itself makes a cameo), a poem by a fictional author, […]