i’ve been out of this blog, mostly because i was writing like crazy for most of March and April, and i mean working on four columns a week (!!!) for The Manila Times. and yes it was as crazy it sounds.

i’m glad it’s over.

i said yes to it on the premise of proper compensation and when that didn’t push through, i was more than glad to go back to two RadikalChick columns a week, two deadlines a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, thank heavens. it is also liberating that i can say no to something that won’t pay me well enough.

though maybe that’s also because other doors were opening as that window closed. i started work with Tanghalang Pilipino in May. as dramaturg for Kleptomaniacs which opens its 28th Season in July (naks, i know Jo, you’re grinning eh). then there are a couple of Theater for Development projects in the post-Haiyan context with TP too, which i’m doing monitoring and evaluation for (you’re grinning even wider eh). and there’s one more post that i don’t want to articulate just yet, haha, baka ma-usog.

yet all of that has become embroiled in getting sick (again), a recurrence of a post-partum-depression ailment that i thought had gone away. but going all healthy the past three months reminds me that there are some things that i might need science and medicine (gasp!) for, no matter my groovy hippie zen self (ang daming sinabi). so i’m back on medicines for it, prepping for what the doctor will say in a week.

strange too how this ailment reminds of being mother, no matter how fleeting that was, and how it felt like forever. how it is forever.

but i like that my body has forced me to take it easy. to breathe more deliberately, to listen to what things feels like, to smell what i’m tasting, to touch what i’m seeing. i like that i’m cooking my own food, and making fruit shakes with chia seeds: it’s the kind of meditation that i used to get out of the ritual of making coffee (which i’m having very little of). i like the discovery of milk tea (serenitea’s okinawa no sugar with black pearl mygawd, tara milktea tayo Jo!).

i like that i can just drop what i was writing and do this for you.

i wonder now if i would do this too if you were here, nearby, or if i’d just txt you and tell you to meet up tomorrow. i’d make the trip to the South so you wouldn’t need to go through the trouble, and we can just sit quietly and not talk. or you could come to Ortigas and we could both pretend we were going to work (on the bazillion projects we have, you know), a pretense that’s supposed to save us from having to talk about the difficult things.

so maybe if you were in Manila, i would still do be writing you this. because maybe there aren’t a lot of things to say, not a lot of questions that are important. other than this one right now, because you ask it: how was your day?