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Why do I have the compulsion to watch Beavis and Butt-head?

I’m trying to figure out where my day went because it’s almost midnight and I haven’t gotten any writing done. All the time that lockdown was supposed to free up was consumed by the latest round of uncertainty.

My plan had been to go to James’s anniversary lunch (sitting far apart), then stop at the supermarket (because there’s always something I forgot), then walk around in the open air. But I woke up late for the lunch and over my microwaved meal I started wondering if I should go out at all, even if there are usually very few people on my walking route (but several cats whom I help to feed). Mariko, who was going to join me on the walk, agreed that we should stay indoors. News of crowds at the police checkpoints on the borders of Metro Manila—the optimal situation for spreading coronavirus—did not inspire confidence that the pandemic was being contained.
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I don’t watch horror movies because my brain won’t shut up afterwards, and I can’t sleep from imagining worst-case scenarios. What if the heroes are overwhelmed? What if an ally turns? What if the big bad can’t be destroyed that way? It’s my work. Fiction-writing entails answering a series of What if’s, usually with very little information. Pick an option and live with it, or produce nothing.
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The Milkmaid by Vermeer. Reason to live: to see all the Vermeers in museums around the world. (There aren’t many.)

On Friday morning I expected silence, but my neighborhood sounded the way it always does—cars and buses, tricycles, voices, music. I looked out the window and people were standing close to each other. Good luck to whoever has to explain social distancing: Filipinos like togetherness, i.e. getting in your face. You could be standing by yourself in a vast empty field, and someone will appear and stand right next to you.
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This is the novel coronavirus, the microorganism that is fucking everything up right now.

And this is an illustration of the earth’s internal fires from Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century polymath who is a character in Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll.

We knew it was coming. We sensed it in the air that might be carrying droplets of infection, we heard it in the pauses in our conversations, we saw it in the supermarket shelves emptied of toilet paper because everyone knew shit was going down. The empty official assurances, the blithe indifference and vehement denials only stoked our certainty. Humans did not survive this long by not expecting the worst.

Are viruses sentient? They are intelligent. I remember reading about an ancient virus that combined its genetic code with the genome of animals. It may be the root of human consciousness.
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*which has been postponed while the Ateneo campus is in lockdown as a COVID-19 prevention measure. NO, WE ARE NOT ACCEPTING MORE APPLICATIONS.

1. People love romantic stories. No problem with that, except that they want to write the same stories over and over and over. I suppose it’s therapy: everyone wants to get over romantic disappointment by rewriting their history, but please, I beg you, give your characters a personality and a life. “A life” means there is more going on in their day-to-day existence than moping over their beloved, talking about their beloved, wondering if they should send a message to their beloved, and boring everyone into a coma about their beloved. All romances are similar, it’s the characters who make them interesting. No character, no point. I don’t want to read about relationships where the only problem is that they’re wimps (torpe).
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Book review by Paula Abjelina

It may be strange to find James McBride’s Deacon King Kong comforting.

Set in the Cause Houses of 1969 Brooklyn, the novel begins when the local drunk named Sportcoat shoots a teenage drug dealer at close range. Sportcoat, sardonically referred to as Deacon King Kong after the homegrown booze he consumes in vast quantities, opens fire in a haze of alcohol and rage. Tongues wag, drama ensues, and mobsters get involved in this tale of a close-knit community dealing with a singular event that challenges everything they know about their hometown.
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