JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Courtyard, originally uploaded by 160507.

I love sleep. I never had trouble sleeping. It’s a gift. When I was in college I would board the bus, lean against the window, fall asleep, and wake up three minutes before my stop. On long-haul flights I am asleep even before the plane takes off. I suspect most of my work gets done in my sleep. (If your boss catches you snoozing at your desk, try this explanation: “I’m working”.) If I have a deadline looming, I take a short nap; when I wake up, the article has been worked out in my head and I just have to write it down (though there is no guarantee that it’s any good). The only time I cannot fall asleep is if I have to get up early for an important appointment: then I spend the whole night checking the clock to see how much time I have left. Without my nine hours of sleep I am useless; I spend the whole day plotting a nap.

Recently I had a bout of insomnia that just about drove me bonkers. I would go to bed at my usual time, 2 or 3 am, then spend the next four hours waiting to lose consciousness. It was exhausting. I tried counting backwards from 1000, listening to nature sounds, various non-pharmaceutical remedies, nothing worked. Maybe I should’ve just gotten up and read a book or watched DVDs, done something constructive until my systems shut down for the day, but I kept expecting to fall asleep any second. Then when I finally dropped off from sheer exhaustion, it wasn’t the deep, sticky, artificial death that I consider a good sleep. (My friend Carlo, a borderline narcoleptic, says death wouldn’t be so scary if there were some assurance that it was like sleeping.) I would wake up round noon, unsatisfied, and be in a zombie state the rest of the day. Oddly, I did not feel sleepy during the day, and I seemed to function “normally”, though I felt cheated (I want my sleep). This went on for about a month, and then last week my sleep came back. I’m still trying to figure out what happened.

Here’s a true medical horror story: Fatal Insomnia.

1. No Reservations—no relation to Anthony Bourdain’s food and travel show—may be the blandest most flavorless movie ever made about chefs. When the real estate (Bleecker St, the apartment of Catherine Zeta Jones’s character) is more interesting than the characters, the movie’s in trouble.

2. When a movie contains five or six montages set to music, that’s just laziness.

3. What is the point of casting Zeta Jones as a sexless careerist? If she’s looking to broaden her range, this is not the way to go.

4. Aren’t we all over that “I chose a career over propagating the species” female guilt? Why can’t a strong female just be a strong female without being made to feel inadequate?

5. Aaron Eckhart has the most cringe-inducing role as a caricature of the sensitive male. His “exuberance” is supposed to be charming, but it’s just embarrassing. I only hope his career survives his overacting while singing Nessun Dorma in orange Crocs.

6. Nessun Dorma is to opera what My Way is to karaoke joints.

7.  At least Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) plays a recognizable child.

8. This is the second day in a row that I heard myself say, “We should’ve watched Resident Evil 3.”

I was a huge fan of The Police in high school and college, and when I started writing short stories I was in the thrall of their final album, Synchronicity. I had plenty of time to write stories because I wasn’t a member of anything, I just scribbled. This is a story that occurred to me while watching the video of Every Breath You Take. The title is a line from The Once And Future King by T.H. White. It was published in my first book, Manananggal Terrorizes Manila and Other Stories. Later it was translated into Italian by Ubaldo Stecconi and included in an anthology called Balikbayan: Racconti filippini contemporanei. (The story sounds better in Italian, but nearly everything does.) I can’t read my old stuff without an antacid and a stiff drink, but this one I’m actually fond of.

Chus and I endured 20 minutes of the Kim Chiu-Gerald Anderson movie I’ve Fallen Down The Toilet. Then we both said, “We don’t have to do this! We have free will! We’re freeeeee!”

I have this theory that I’m testing, and I need more evidence to back it up. Two questions:

Do you often cry in real life? (Iyakin ka ba? What’s your definition of a crybaby?)

Do you cry at the movies? Not just when the hero dies or proposes, but even at stuff that’s not supposed to be tear-inducing.

Please post your answers in Comments. At the end of the survey we’ll raffle off a copy of Twisted Flicks among the commenters.

If you have trouble registering on this site, please email your details to emotionalweatherreport@gmail.com.

Justin Erik Halldor Smith asks, Is depression a medical condition?

I was 10 or 11 when I first learned the word “depressed” from a Woody Allen movie, and I quickly grasped its usefulness. “I don’t want to go out, I’m depressed” just sounded more dramatic than “I don’t feel like it” or “Tinatamad ako”.  Am I a true depressive? To say so would be disrespectful to the people with the real problem. I have these black moods, but I know that they will pass eventually, I just have to ride them out. But I see how it can get very bad, and pass beyond your control, and then you’re in the abyss. My friends tell me depression is chemical, and often you have no choice but to medicate. But what if depression is an inextricable part of your character, one of the things that make you you? Medication makes it easier for other people to deal with you, but is it still you?

So food-writing is macho now. Must remember not to snicker when straight guy friends say reductions, mesclun, arugula, or gherkins. Paul Levy explains why he’s opting out of the macho food-writing movement, whose practitioners include Anthony Bourdain and Bill Buford. He particularly dislikes it when food is described as “fecal”. For instance, John McPhee in The New Yorker describes durian as “a fruit that smells strongly fecal and tastes like tiramisu.” I think it’s an accurate description, but I am a testosteronic girl.

David and Goliath exhibit, originally uploaded by 160507.

David & Goliath the T-shirt store has an ongoing exhibition at Archaeology on the second floor of Power Plant Mall, Rockwell. The organizers asked a bunch of people for personal statements which were then printed on black T-shirts. My T-shirt expresses a personal observation regularly verified by empirical evidence. (The T-shirts are not for sale. I got a customized T-shirt, which is what passes for couture in my wardrobe.)

Saw Carlos Celdran and Quark Henares at the exhibit opening. They, too, went for statements of fact. Carlos: All artists are liars. Quark: Truly, Madly, Crazily In Love With Cueshe.

Did anyone else see this during the televised Senate hearings this week, or was my friend Underwood hallucinating? You know how each person on the Senate panel has a bottle of water on the table in front of him? Underwood claims that when someone was asking or answering a question, a hand (presumably connected to a body off-camera) would stealthily turn the water bottle around so the label was facing the camera.  Did this really happen? And if it did, was it Addams Family, or Evil Dead?

Hobbits did exist.

Velociraptors were more like big turkeys.  

Cats with books, originally uploaded by 160507.

The word is that Ian McEwan will win the Booker Prize for his short novel On Chesil Beach—wonderfully-written, but literally a finger exercise compared to his other work—because he should’ve won it in 2002 for Atonement (as the new film adaptation reminds everyone). If that happens it would be the second Booker correction in McEwan’s career. In the late 90s when he won for Amsterdam, the general perception was that he’d gotten it because he was overlooked the previous year for Enduring Love.

1. Why do we care so much about awards?
a. the publicity/celebrity
b. the prize money
c. the additional income from sales generated by the publicity
d. possible role in reality show featuring ex-celebrities

2. Awards are
a. all about the flavor of the season; next year no one will give a shit.
b. an indicator of the zeitgeist.
c. given to the work that all the judges can get behind, and not to the work that causes discomfort, offence, or debate, which is what great work tends to do.
d. excellent for padding one’s CV or grant application. (I am a beneficiary of the awards culture; if I hadn’t won a Palanca my book publisher wouldn’t have known I exist.)
e. according to a snooty friend, “so midul-klass”.

3. Inevitably, anyone who is adored by critics and the public becomes the subject of a backlash. We’re already seeing the McEwan backlash.

4. I cannot stand biographical notes that begin with “multi-awarded” or “award-winning”. It’s like I’m being cowed into admiring the artist because some jury somewhere gave him a trophy for being the least annoying entry.

5. Then again, there is an element of schadenfreude to all this.

6. As a Marxist, a Groucho Marxist, I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member.

Take pictures of your pets reading books and send them to saffron.safin@gmail.com.

At the Senate hearing into the ZTE broadband deal, Senator Nene Pimentel asked this question: “Ano ba ang broadband? Can somebody explain this in layman’s terms?”

Help our politicians join the 21st century.