2023

A few times last sem the bell would ring to signal the beginning of the period and I’d wait for class to begin only to realize to my horror that I was the teacher. Once, in the middle of an activity in which I was allowed to dissociate, I came to the conclusion, no less…

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Moving books

In the course of a recent move, I realized I owned one bed sheet, part of the care/panic package A sent over after I moved to Katips with one backpack three years ago. Also: one pillow. Two blankets (one an inabel, from C). Two towels. One bowl, a favorite, smuggled from the house. Two plates…

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37

In the taut days after a family member was rushed to the hospital after a mild stroke, I was shaken by the gulf between the lofty-sounding things (professionally, cultural capital) that I appear to have and how they mean absolutely nothing in the real world. Nothing. Incessant was the refrain, part self-censure, part frustration at…

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Five or six notes on Y*

I considered calling it my ‘Palparan novel.’ Handy shortcut, like ‘call center-call center’ for TQO. I remember struggling to describe the then work-in-progress to my cohort at a residency, going straight to capsule–political killings in Arroyo-era Philippines–rather than what the novel is about (although, not to be a social realist on main, isn’t historical context what novels…

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Views

In one of the many heart-wrenching images taken in the aftermath of Ulysses, about a dozen people can be seen half-crouched and trying to walk on top of the flimsy-looking GI roofs of shanties, held-up umbrellas impotent in the pouring rain, the wind visibly upending their steps, while behind them in the hazy distance residential…

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‘Knowing the Enemy’

For the better part of the past year and a half I had been reading up on counter-insurgency. Work-in-progress is set during the spate of political killings under Gloria Arroyo in the 2000s, and things sort of clicked for me when I noticed a similar phrasing of a key idea in a leaked AFP PowerPoint…

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Freedom

I think my sense of freedom arrived during commute. Not one moment ofc but in their accretion. Over time. In the early 2010s I think when I just finished college and Manila traffic transitioned vaguely from tough to mind-numbing to the routine existential quandary that it is today. When I and my fellow passengers are…

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FQS daldal

If I can begin with biographical ek, I was born on February ’86, a couple of weeks before the ouster of Marcos and I started writing in the late 2000s. W/c means I’m a generation or so removed from the FQS generation. Even so I’d like to think that I can trace my own politics…

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