Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 37

It’s time to write something! Join our Writing Boot Camp on July 22 and 29

You’ve always wanted to write, but you don’t know how to get started. You used to write, but you haven’t done it in a while and you feel rusty. You’re sort of interested in writing, but you’re afraid to even admit it. You’ve started many stories, but you ran out of steam. You think you […]

Some books are meant to be read slowly, some are to be devoured in one sitting.

What started as pragmatic laziness—leaving big books at home and traveling with slimmer ones—has led me to a different way of reading. The active ritual of reading one book extremely slowly, patiently, in the same place, over an unreasonably long time, has changed the way I see. It’s a measured meting out of a book, […]

Wanted: A human parent for this sweet little cat

This sweet girl needs a home. She is currently living in a construction site in Bel-Air 2, Makati. My friend thinks the cat used to live in the house in front of the site, but her people moved out and did not take her along. A kind foreman at the construction site is feeding and […]

Monday with Cats

Cat merchandise! Clockwise: Exploding Kittens, a hilarious card game from The Oatmeal; cat button earrings; an “invisible” (clear acrylic) cat pendant from Croatia; and magnets shaped like cat butts, from a store in Singapore. Actual cat: Here’s Jacob when he was a homeless cat living downstairs a year ago. I fed the strays daily, but […]

Spider-Man: Homecoming is a delightful teen movie with superpowers, not that anyone needed an opinion.

Can you remember the time before superhero movies ate the cineplex, when viewers could actually choose from a wide range of categories and genres, and humans-with-incredible-abilities was just one of the options? My favorite movie year is 1999, when these were just some of the movies at the cinema: Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson, Being […]

This book kept me from running amok while I was stranded for 3 hours in that massive traffic jam last Friday.

Theft by Finding*, David Sedaris’s diaries from 1977 – 2002, is the funniest book I’ve read in years. Every other page I had to stop and cackle to myself, and then take a picture of a page that made me laugh and send it to a friend. That’s how I survived being stuck in BGC […]

We watched Okja, then we had crispy pata for dinner.

Since Wonder Woman, every Hollywood product that’s opened in cinemas has been garbage (My eardrums are still recovering from the previous Transformers. No, thanks). So for our Sunday movie night we turned to Netflix’s Okja, Bong Joon-ho’s satire about capitalism in general, and the food industry in particular. You might say it aspires to convert […]

I wish the BBC’s The Sense of an Ending had never begun.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is a short novel in which very little seems to be happening, but there is so much tension you cannot believe that that’s all there is. The novel rewards overthinking—everything happens between the lines. Yesterday I saw the BBC adaptation of The Sense of an Ending starring […]

If you suddenly died, would your cat or dog eat you?

Note: None of the adorable cats and dogs depicted in this article have eaten their humans. (Shutterstock) Surely the thought has occurred to you. The simple answer is…. Yes. Don’t look at them like that. You’ll be dead. Read it in Big Think.

Writing basics: Always carry a notebook.

David Sedaris does. This advice has worked for us for many years, so at our Writing Boot Camp in July, we’re issuing these pocket notebooks to participants. Paper cover pocket Moleskine journals I futzed with. The objective is simple: to start and finish a piece of writing (a short story, a personal essay, or a […]