First, an explanation. Unanticipated hiatus was due to several things:

a) an ongoing LOST marathon
b) Sims 3
c) my schooling
d) Little Big Planet, and
e) the seemingly inevitable wave of dread that comes with attempting to start a blog on your own and getting people to read it out of genuine interest

LOOK WHAT I FOUND!

Behind all those lovely, lovely pages is a LOOK OF GLEE.

See, I’ve been looking for this book all over the place. It hasn’t been available on Amazon, EVER, so I’ve resigned myself to never, ever seeing it in the flesh, ever. And, to be honest, given the chances of me and this book meeting, I was pretty OK with the fact that it existed and that I knew about it. That was enough for me. I really never expected to see it. E-v-e-r.

And yet.

I was browsing through Fully Booked in the new-ish Eastwood mall with Isa, and went all the way to the back of the store to get away from the Twilight vomit and contemplate on why poetry books seem to be more expensive than usual books. And then this called to me.

A Secret Convergence of Birds is an anthology comprised of works inspired by Joseph Cornell’s aviary boxes, and is edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, who happens to be my favoritest author of all time. He started the project when he was still in school and the whole story surrounding its making is just so wonderful. It made me think about how great and kind and beautiful humanity can be, how things aren’t going to always be so bleak, how strangers do unspeakably beautiful things for other strangers with nothing in return. Just because.

I haven’t read all of the stories in this collection, I haven’t really had the time to sit down and do so, but even if the stories don’t “measure up” to my expectations (although, I am sure they will), I will always love this book, because of what it stands for.

To me, it will always be about the kindness of strangers, the existence of a greater hope, and about finding what you are looking for right at the moment when you stopped looking and just let it make its way to you.

What I really want to say is this: If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. Obviously, I was meant to find this book, and obviously, it was meant to find me.

Since my brother is off to Singapore for two weeks (he has a trial period for a potential future job), my parents wanted us to have dinner at some fancy-schmancy place as a sort of goodbye-good-luck-I-hope-you-get-employed kind of thing. Here is a picture of my brother being nice to me:

Observe the overwhelming affection. He loves me.

I mean, clearly.

Anyway, I’ve never been to Cyma before and my parents had been raving about it, ever since they’d first eaten there. So that’s where they thought we should eat.

In an attempt to be slightly more journalistic, I wanted to started off with saying that ‘Cyma’ is Greek for so-and-so, but Babelfish told me that ‘Cyma’ is Greek for ‘Cyma.’ So that was a bust. I will pummel you with pictures instead! This is what I had:

Lamb on some sticks. With pita bread.
But it’s called something else fancy and Greek.

Continue reading Opa!: My brief but satisfying tryst with Greek cuisine, or the Day Before My Brother Leaves for Singapore…

The reason why I haven’t been around is because I went to the beach for a week. It was there that I found out about my incapacity to be a tourist. Here is a list of things I didn’t do:

1. Parasail, ride a banana boat, hop on islands
2. Get a henna tattoo
3. Get my hair braided and beaded
4. Get so piss-ass drunk that I pass out on the beach
5. Basically, everything someone does on vacation in Boracay.

However, I did tan myself silly and read a couple of books, so I guess, all in all, it was a pretty O.K. vacation. I even find that I would (kinda) like to go back there in the near future. Especially when the weather here in Manila is horribly grey, and while I do enjoy the general raininess, it seems a little wrong when it happens in the summer. But anyway.

I do have a plan (!) for the future of this website. But to tide you over, here are a few more pictures from the trip, after the jump, of course.

Continue reading like one of those clipper ship captains….