JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Eighty people showed up. Massive relief as we expected ten. (Admittedly the ideal number would’ve been zero. We don’t like parties. Crowds in general make us go into lockdown unless it is a concert.) To ensure attendance we considered inviting celebrities but decided to keep it amongst ourselves. This party was for our readers; we don’t know if those people read.

Our fifth anniversary event was hosted by Jump Experience Center, a showcase of convergent technologies from PLDT and Smart and a high-visibility platform for strategic brand marketing and communications. Thank you, Jump, for hosting the party. We really liked the bar chow.

Since our site has turned five we presented five awards to friends and readers, beginning with Best Transition from Old School to New Media to National Bookstore. National Bookstore continues to make books easily accessible and affordable to the general public while building up its online presence and preparing for the next stage in the evolution of publishing. The award was accepted by National Bookstore’s Xandra Ramos Padilla and Miguel Ramos.

We handed the Awaaard for Best Use of Digital Technology to Raymond Lee, executive producer, writer, and tireless promoter of the surprise indie hit Zombadings 1: Patayin Sa Shokot Si Remington. In the photo: Raymond with our friend Jerome Gomez, managing editor of Esquire, whom we hijacked on his way to his birthday dinner. Happy Birthday, Jerome! As Raymond noted, his birthday is on the 10th day of the 11th month and he has 12 digits on his hands.

L-R: Stella, balqis, listbonne and Brewhuh23. Brewhuh23 is the recipient of our Best Online Stalker Researcher award for her unparalleled skill at rooting out people’s deep, dark secrets. If you have a crush on anyone, Brewhuh23 will find the information that will de-crush you instantly. Seriously, we’re going to open a detective agency. Note hoop earrings so large she can never wear them on the MRT.

The Readers’ Choices for Best Subject/Columnist and Best Commenter were determined through online voting. For Best Subject/Columnist you picked our indefatigable agony aunt Auntie Janey, who will not show her face lest those who have followed her prescriptions chase her with an ax. For Best Commenter there could be only one: Momelia our resident tattooed badass.

With his super-sight Momelia spotted an interesting-looking guest. “Si Sam Milby ba yon?” he demanded. (Brewhuh23 thought it was Joem Bascon.) It was in fact one of our LitWit winners, Evan, who is also in our Reading Group for The Sense of an Ending. Talent scouts, please leave your contact information in Comments.

Class picture: The last to leave the party. Thank you for showing up. Socializing in large groups wherein we are the featured entertainment is not one of our favorite activities, but you make it comparatively painless. Special thanks to Jackie O for the wine. And Miguel for the signed Walking Dead, Kim for the book (We confess we never liked Sylvia Plath and prefer Ted Hughes actually), Stella for the Eye of Sauron and Jules for the Kahlua.

Thanks to Smart for the raffle prizes: the Netphone 701 went to the chronicler of boredom and the Samsung Galaxy Y went to our friend, journalist Stella Arnaldo. We swear that the raffle was not rigged. When we saw their names in the fishbowl we tried to avoid them but they kept coming up.

The FEU campus in Manila

The Lamp, the official publication of the FEU Institute of Nursing, invited us to give a talk on writing to its editorial staff. We’ve given many talks, some of them quite eventful (People bursting into tears), some underscoring the fact of our irrelevance (“What do you have against tweeting that we went to a Mini Stop and had a Coke?”), some laugh riots (Teachers are an easy audience, esp if the speaker is the child of a teacher). The worst talks are the ones where you feel like you’re blabbering in a vacuum and everyone is having an out-of-body-experience from sheer boredom. We never want to be part of those again.

So before accepting the invitation we requested that we be made to talk for 5-10 minutes, and then answer questions from the audience. That way we’d be certain that at least one person at a time was interested in the topic under discussion. This turned out to be an excellent format.

Thank you to the alumni and staff of The Lamp for the invitation. We enjoyed the talk so much we’ve decided to give more talks to students—provided we follow the 10-minute speech followed by 1 or 2 hours of questions format. Here are some of the things we talked about.

Where to get inspiration

Keep a notebook

What next

If you’d like to invite us to give a talk at your school, please contact Michael Jimenez, mychael@hotmail.com.

The floor of the College of Nursing

Kong Hei Fat Choy! Welcome the Year of the Wabbit with the Daily Gazette: a picture of Gaz posted every day for no good reason. Witness a vast range of goofy expressions, silly tricks, vanishing clothes, general hunkiness, and declarations of man-love. We provide the photos, you tell us what you think. Yes, let’s make it all about you.

Members Only for now. (Gaz doesn’t think anyone would be interested. We like a little doubt in the good-looking.) To register, drop us a line in Comments and we’ll email you an invitation. (Please check the address you used to register on this site.) We only have 90 invitations, so sign up immediately.

Photo: Rejected Facial Expression #43-B

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We will be unconscious between 3am and 11am so if you want an invitation, please email Brewhuh at angelagenevieve@gmail.com. We have shifts!

Warning: NSFW.

As long as we’re doing projects, here’s an accessory you can make yourself. On my birthday last year Leo gave me an old police whistle and a book by Queneau. I said, Thanks, I’ll read the Queneau, but I’m not joining the police. Leo said, No, I think the police whistle would make an interesting pendant. All it needs is a chain.

So I’ve been looking for a chain to hang the police whistle on, but I couldn’t find any I liked. Plus silver-plated stuff gives me a rash (silver-plated earrings are fine since they’re not on the skin). Then I saw Ricky wearing a leather cord around his neck and I thought it was another one of his clever (nakakainis) accessories. It was an eyeglass holder necklace with a silver hoop to hang your glasses from. I said, Is that another Margiela thingy, and he said, No, it’s from True Value.

So I visited True Value and voila, I have my necklace.

The eyeglass holder necklace is P399 at True Value. You can hang anything on it—action figures, your cat’s photo in a frame, or your actual eyeglasses.

Are you tired of your sneakers? Do you feel like you’re wearing a uniform? You could go out and buy a new pair of sneakers, but other people will be wearing the exact same shoes, and after a while you will tire of them, too.

You could take your existing sneakers and deface them.

You will need: one pair of patent leather sneakers, a soldering iron, and acrylic paint. Best to have a design in mind.

Now do this.

These sneakers were defaced by Rickyv.

Chances of you running into someone with the exact same pair of shoes: Zero. And when you get tired of them, you can deface them again.

Photo from INK Illustration.

There’s a wonderful blog called Invisible Library which catalogs books that technically don’t exist: fictional titles mentioned in works of fiction. Like D.B. Caulfield’s book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, which his brother talks about in The Catcher in the Rye. (In a meta-move, a real-life author published a book entitled The Secret Goldfish.) Or all those books by Benno von Archimbaldi that the characters were obsessed about in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. And a ton of titles in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov.

Here’s one for the Invisible Library: Under A Loggia by Eleanor Lavish, from A Room With A View by E.M. Forster.

Invisible Library has teamed up with the London-based INK Illustration for an exhibition. Brilliant.

Photo from INK Illustration.

Which brings me to my project: I’m going to produce completely handwritten books for friends. Hard labor, but I like writing anyway.