JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

BBFH on Kalayaan near Rockwell, telephone (02)8957305.

Our one-week post-hospital house arrest ended yesterday! First thing we did, we went to the salon because our hair had gotten brittle, probably out of sheer boredom. Yes, that is the name of our suking parlor (Jay Lozada cuts our hair, but they do the hot oils, henna, pedicures, etc.) on Kalayaan Avenue near Backwell and Amapola, which has been around since 1939 and whose clientele includes my Jedi master (the hair that survived the dark side must be cared for).

The retro-ness of the name! Who is the “him” exactly? Who cares, they have the best chicharon, pastillas and roasted peanuts in the city. And the hairdresser confirmed that our hair has gotten thin, but it should get fat again in no time.

Our hair having been attended to, we’ve started writing again (our penmanship came back after an hour or so) and tried to reconstruct our lost time. According to the building janitress, on Monday the 26th when our brain tried to kill us, she discovered us sitting on the stairs. She says that for two hours we just sat there not answering questions, with our eyeballs white like Bran Stark warging into his direwolf.

Hodor! Our column is coming up.

While under house arrest, we started watching the cable series Penny Dreadful by John Logan, directed by J.A. Bayona and starring Eva Green, Timothy Dalton (he was Bond in the mid-80s), and remember Josh Hartnett? Set in Victorian England, the show brings together the monsters of Victoriana, including vampires, Frankenstein’s creature, and Dorian Gray. If there’s anything we love, it’s a TV show with a reading list. There are the obvious sources: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, but the book that immediately springs to mind is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore. Throw in Moore’s From Hell because there’s a serial killer preying on prostitutes, and Moby Dick because Dr. Frankenstein’s “child” may have worked on a whaler. And Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd, about the human sacrifice involved in the building of seven churches in 18th century London.

Speaking of the half-world, we don’t know if it’s the medication we’re on, but we’ve been having conversations with people who aren’t there. Hmmm probably not the meds, which are all antibacterial and antiviral stuff. More likely it’s sleeping 12 hours a day and plotting to break out of the house. The other day we were sure our sister had dropped by at 3am, and we remember what we had talked about. Except that she didn’t drop by at 3am. Uh-oh, is the Dark Phoenix hanging around again?

AT THE END OF 1995, the beloved “Calvin and Hobbes” sledded off the comics page for the final time, and its long-reclusive legendary creator, Bill Watterson, retired from the business, never to draw another syndicated newspaper strip.

Since Wednesday, Watterson’s new artwork has been featured in Pastis’s syndicated strip, “Pearls Before Swine.” It’s a creative collaboration that stunned Pastis, who says that he sooner expected to team up with “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz. “And yes,” Pastis says slyly, “I am aware that Schulz is dead.”

Read Calvin and Hobbes creator returns to the comic pages in the Washington Post.
Thanks to Stella for the alert.

The books that nearly killed their author haha.

The Stories So Far (fiction) and Geeks Vs. Jocks (non-fiction) go on sale starting today at the Library of Babel online store. Available in hardcover at an introductory price of Php399 for one title, or Php699 for both.

Seriously, did we learn anything from the recent brush with mortality? We learned that we have nothing to fear from death. It’s not terrifying, it’s Boring.

The day after we were admitted to the hospital, friends told us that several media outlets carried reports of our incarceration mysterious affliction. They all pointed out that being a freelance writer we have no health insurance, and called for donations.

Our initial reaction was embarrassment because we have a horror of being an object of pity. We got over it quickly—it’s not as if we could deny anything.

And then something truly awesome happened.

We knew we could count on the kindness of our friends, who do not even have to be asked. What we did not expect was the generosity of total strangers, people we have never met, random readers and anonymous donors who gave just because they could.

If there is a clearer, more concise way of saying We Got Your Back, it hasn’t occurred to us. Thank you. Your humanity and support are more solid than the backing of the Iron Bank of Braavos itself.

Now let’s take over something.

Na-ospital kami, nag-trending na. Bongga na rin.

Mat has been holding down the fort. He hired someone to clean the house while we were away. Clever cat.

We can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we’ve been confined in the hospital: three. Fractured skull at age eight—a formative experience requiring primitive encephalography (See Pinhead). Typhoid fever at age ten or eleven (“natipus” with very interesting hallucinations involving talking animals). There should probably have been more hospital stays, but we thought we were invincible.

Monday afternoon we decided we were over the flu so we were going to a meeting at Rockwell at 4:30. We never made it to the meeting. When we came to we were on the floor of the shower, with the water going glub glub down the drain like a basic remake of Psycho. We staggered out of the bathroom to find one of our bookshelves flung against the refrigerator. What the hell was going on?

We threw on some clothes, picked up our bag, and left the house. But we couldn’t step off the stairs. The distance from the last step to the floor suddenly seemed insurmountable, and we sat there until we could figure out how to traverse this vast distance. The security guard must’ve notice that we were stuck on the stairs, and summoned the building administrator. She came around and asked us a series of questions. We don’t recall our answers exactly, but we were making no sense whatsoever. As far as we could tell we were speaking gibberish (Hmmm maybe after a weekend of flu meds were could understand Aramaic at last.)

The next thing we know, we’re at the ER of Makati Med and everyone we know has turned up in answer to the hospital summons. Our sister appeared in a black and gold ballgown, which is not her regular attire, but it was her wedding anniversary. Next we’re having an MRI and a cat scan, and we’re so out of it no one even has to tell us to lie vewy, vewy still.

Initial tests showed that our sodium and potassium levels were way down. Hell, we thought low sodium was good and we should eat a banana like Rafa and Andy between games.

This typing is making us very, very tired. Later.