I sometimes just assume that this blog is alive, and that it writes its own content, ha ha ha. Been writing short stories for a workshop where the main characters, mainly “fictional” doctors, do embarrassing things, stories which don’t really fit well in this blog. Hence the bloggeth drought (excuses!). Also, the catatonia from the elections. Many have referenced Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s DABDA stages of grief, but I think I’ve skipped the stages and went straight to B, as in Ballistic, followed by a crippling catatonia. Well. The past six years of enduring the system were, apparently, just practice. The key to surviving, and keeping our history intact, is, to quote Nica Del Rosario, be “matatag at matapang at mabuti at… vindictive”. Yes, the essence of Never Forget is to be vindictive cunts with a lot of resentment and lot of video documentation.

Missed clinics the day after the election, and tried to work the following day. 9 out of 10 patients, who saw the Leni stickers on my iPad, were ready to burst into tears. I turned into an instant grief counselor, and strangely, we were not talking about the metastatic cancer.

I then had the sudden compulsion to read this old book by Anne Rice, called The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. It was an “erotic” trilogy released in the 80’s, which I had read when I was in college back in 2001. I put the word erotic in quotes, because it’s more of porn. I couldn’t find my copy of the book, and wondered whether someone had failed to return it to me, or I had thrown the damn thing away in disgust. Still, no better excuse to read it than post-election grief. By chance, I saw a newer edition in National Bookstore, with the publication date of 2012. It was accompanied by a new introduction by Anne Rice, who gave us a background on how the book came about and why she wrote it using a pen name (she didn’t want her father to know she wrote it).

Had dinner in Coco Ichibanya for the first time, and read the damn thing. I thought that the decades and age and experience would make me roll my eyes at how mild the material was after all, but a few chapters in and I hid it under the table, suddenly conscious that people were watching me. Let’s just say that reading about characters dildoing each other with gigantic vegetables is not the best thing to do in a public place.

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