JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I am strangely wistful about the end of the holidays. “Strangely” because my schedule during the holidays was no different from my schedule the rest of the year. (If you like your independence, I suggest freelancing: the pay is unsteady, but the schedule is fantastic.) Metro Manila is so much nicer when nearly everyone is out of town and the road traffic is fairly light (three taxis stop the second you step onto the sidewalk). There is a lower stress level when people aren’t killing themselves and each other to scratch out a living; you can feel it in the air. However, I will be happy to get my usual haunts back minus the hordes of shoppers and strollers.

Last year, on New Year’s Day, Ernie, Bert, and I made a solemn oath to radically decrease our book backlogs. We each had dozens of books we had not yet read (or finished reading), and we knew that we would never get to them if we kept buying new books. (It’s not just avarice or bibliophilia. If you see a book you want and you don’t snap it up immediately, it will probably be gone by the time you come back. Unless it’s a bestseller.)

Therefore we resolved that we would allow ourselves to buy only one new book for every five that we finished. Then we went to dinner. Then we went to the bookstore, and Ernie and Bert immediately broke our New Year’s resolution. At least I managed to hold out for a week, although I had the advantage of being broke.

Because I have what Kierkegaard calls “the despair of possibility” (what I understand of it anyway), the fact that I didn’t keep last year’s resolution does not prevent me from making an even tougher new resolution! I will not buy a new book for the next three months. Instead, I will read the books I already have, and there’s at least a year’s worth on my shelves. Let’s see how long this lasts.

Purslane and Swiss chard, two superfoods that contain lovely antioxidants, are available locally as alusiman (or kulasiman) and kaylan, respectively. Look for them in your neighborhood markets and in Chinatown.

There are fashion victims, and then there is our friend Guy Smiley, science victim and antioxidant junkie (Is that an oxymoron?). “Blame it on the biggest evolutionary oversight!” he declared. “The by-product of sustaining life is aging. Dang mitochondria. Wait, maybe that’s what intelligent design means.”

If only evolution had gone for immortality over sexual reproduction. See what we humans have given up for sex. Those of us who don’t reproduce should live forever! It’s only fair.

Idea for science-fiction story: Humans discover that they are immortal. . .as long as they don’t have sex. What to choose, what to choose.

Essay question: Would you rather have Sex or Immortality?

Cio e un romanzo meraviglioso, ma dove e i gatti?

Tutti i caratteri sono gatti, essi soltanto sembrano umani.

Translated by widget.

Read The Great Gatsby here.

A few months ago we started feeding two stray cats who live in my building. I can’t let them in the house because there’s no room, my three cats would freak out, and there will be war. So I give the outdoor cats Janko Jarndyce and Jarko Jarndyce (names out of men’s tennis and Dickens) regular meals outside my door. Mike, who is too traumatized by the loss of his cat Mingming to adopt another cat, provides the kibble. Jarndyce & Jarndyce are no longer scraggly and Jarko no longer hisses when approached. In fact Jarko has indicated that he (or she) wishes to go inside the house, and is attempting to manipulate me with soulful looks.

David Fincher’s movie of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button should get a few people interested in the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Does anyone feel like reading/rereading The Great Gatsby? Sign up, we could have a discussion group.

Painting: “View of Toledo” by El Greco

West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.

Original book cover by Francis Cugat

Today’s dispatches from our Agents of World Domination.

Trina Penaflorida is in Milan.

“Bicycles for rent in Piazza Missori, near the Duomo. Buon Anno!”

Tere Picazo is in Lake Tahoe, California.

Raymund Santos is in Vancouver, Canada.

“I’ve been based in Vancouver for over two years. These are shots from my favorite back alley downtown. It’s near my school and I shot my first project here. It’s really underappreciated…well, it’s a dumpsite, but with really awesome graffitti.”

Contribute to our World Domination Tracker. If you’re a Filipino living outside the Philippines, take a picture of your location and send it to koosi.obrien@gmail.com.