Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 7

Journal of a Lockdown, 20 May 2020

Listen to the beginning of The Adventuress, a new short story by Jessica Zafra. Signed copies of zine#1: The Adventuress are available here, P250 each. Limited edition, 500 copies only. To order, email your full name, delivery address, and mobile number to saffron.safin@gmail.com. We’ll get back to you with the total cost including delivery charge. […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 19 May 2020

New quarantine hobby: Listening to the death zaps of those blasted mosquitoes. I know my stats are accurate. Each color represents a different day. There I was in front of my building, waiting for the Lalamove rider to pick up a package, soaking up some vitamin D while I checked my messages. Five minutes later […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 18 May 2020

Housework is therapeutic (unless you are a housewife and/or you have to do it for a living). I mopped the floor with a solution of bleach and felt my anxiety dissipating. Then I had a comforting meal of Ligo sardines, rice (ran out of bread and bought plain rice from the canteen next door), and […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 17 May 2020

via GIPHY I feel like I spent the last two months in an endless cycle of sweeping the floor and washing the dishes. In quarantine my primary relationship (after the cats) has been with my phone. It kept gloating about our stiflingly close relationship, pointing out my escalating screen time until I turned off that […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 16 May 2020

SM North Edsa on First day of MECQ. Photo by Mark Samson. Disoriented. Nothing’s changed—I have no intention of going out, and my street is still quiet—but now that the city is waking up from a 60-day coma, I dread returning to reality. Everything was simple in lockdown (ECQ). My only concern was to stay […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 15 May 2020

After weeks of microwave sunshine and temperatures high enough to perm your hair, the weather has swung to another extreme: lashing rain and rough winds that set off car alarms. Flooding is expected. Mike T mentioned that he is looking forward to walking his dog around the block tomorrow, assuming the storm exits the city. […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 14 May 2020

The police general of Metro Manila, who arrests all who violate quarantine and social distancing rules—including street vendors who need to earn money so they can eat, and volunteers who feed the hungry—was caught having a birthday party. To most of us “birthday party” qualifies as a mass gathering and is therefore banned, but it’s […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 13 May 2020

The online book club discussion for kids went well, though the moderator was often flustered. I didn’t prepare a system for controlling the flow of the conversation: I was expecting long pauses as people collected their thoughts. In most Q&As with adults, getting people to speak is like squeezing whisky out of a rock. The […]

Journal of a Lockdown, 12 May 2020

When this pandemic is over and we have settled into our new and hopefully improved (kinder, more equal or at least less ridiculously unequal, and less destructive to the planet) world, will I miss this strange, quiet period? Will this confinement seem like an idyll? Working from home, away from the glamor and the perks […]

Listen to “___ was Here” read by Jessica Zafra

“____ was Here” was translated into Italian for Balikbayan: Racconti filippini contemporanei, edited by Ubaldo Stecconi (Ossigeno, 1999) Signed copies of The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra, published by Ateneo University Press, are available here, P350 each. Email your order, full name, delivery address, and mobile number to saffron.safin@gmail.com.