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fil-in-the-gap

I am a Filipina in the diaspora, born in the heady sixties, raised during the repressive Marcos regime, this blog is about living and loving in the belly of the beast.

  • If I die tomorrow (Day 6)

    Please make a fucking fuss I traveled halfway around the world to be something You will not not cry as if my dying means nothing Once I thought I was Nothing I thought I could disappear and no one would even know Or care I liked disappearing I made a career out of running away Read more

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  • Paradigm Shift (Days 4 & 5)

    Spent most of the day attending training for a federal grant that my school received from the Office of Violence Against Women. Paradigm shift: I have not heard this term used so much in one training conference! But it is true. We have been so used to doing things a certain way that we have Read more

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  • Bringing the Outdoors Inside – (Day 3 of My Coronavirus Journal)

    I know I casually talked about feeding the farm in my last post, but we didn’t always have these many pets. We had Ringo and Gidget when we moved to our new home in 2019. Ringo was our elderly schnoodle, black with specks of grey, and the appetite of a hungry school of piranhas. Gidget Read more

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  • Rinse and Repeat- (Day 2 of My Coronavirus Journal)

    This is the first day of my birth month. To be honest, I’m not as excited to have another birthday. Not anymore after I turned 50, and then later on, my birthday became a grim reminder of my mother’s death. In 2018, she died three days before my birthday after being in a coma for Read more

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  • Family Outing in Downtown Chicago

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  • Coronavirus Journal

    I’ve decided to participate in the National Women’s History Museum’s project to document women’s daily experiences throughout the pandemic. If you are interested to participate, please feel free to sign up. My hope is that it will get me writing on a regular basis. Here’s the link. It’s been a rough year for most everyone, Read more

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  • Hay na kus at the 2019 Babaylan Conference

    I had the honor of presenting at the conference with my beautiful bff, visual artist exrraordinaire and community activist Melanya Liwanag Aguila, and we enjoined participants to write to find home/to be home/to make home. Most of them took the challenge of writing hay na kus, a form invented by the fabulous and among the Read more

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  • A Name Like the Desert

    This beautiful young woman walked into my classroom, one day and 30 minutes late. She had pursed lips, dreamy eyes, glistening curly hair tied tightly in a long ponytail, and a pair of starkly white earbuds. She had a name that sounded like the desert in the wintertime, and she wore a short, black, tight Read more

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  • Visiting Carole

    I was not expecting to see lake Michigan so blue between tall scrapers casting hooded shadows at 5:04 on St. Patrick’s day You, crumpled in despair between wrinkly pallid sheets, fatigued, turning on your side, a chore; talking, all the more I wondered if I’m imposing my presence on you my being here but you Read more

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  • Book Review: The Long Way

    The Long Way by Maria Jesu Estrada is no ordinary zombie short story. In fact, as a horror story aficionada, I can safely claim that it’s one of the best horror stories I’ve read in a while. Not since Tannarive Due’s  has there been good speculative fiction that makes a statement about the human condition, Read more

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