Tag: pablo neruda

Cien Sonetos de Amor

I was also fourteen when I “met” Pablo Neruda — it was that same high school literature class that introduced me (and forty-three other teenage girls) to the wonderful world of this man’s poetry, and I don’t think any of us were quite the same again.

I will never forget the first time we watched Il Postino, because that’s the time I found out I needed to wear glasses. We were in the school AVR watching the subtitled movie, and I was the only one not laughing along with everyone else — because I couldn’t read the subtitles! I got my glasses within the week, but I wasn’t able to enjoy the movie until college, when my Great Books Class watched it after taking up Antonio Skarmeta’s Burning Patience (the novel on which Il Postino was based).

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A Sad Goodbye

books

Last week, I finally bid farewell to a bunch of books that were damaged in the flood, after my feeble attempts at resuscitation. One of my shelves got submerged in the knee-deep flood that entered our house, and most of the books that were on the lower layer got damaged. I am thanking my lucky stars that I never considered storing my Harry Potter collection downstairs.

Prior to this, while I was in Singapore, my mom had already thrown away a batch of paperbacks that were an indistinct  mess after the flood. When I got back, I still had a couple batches of soggy hardcovers drying out next to to the fridge (where it’s warm), weighing about thrice their original weight due to the water absorbed by the pages.

Last week, my cousin (who’s completing her internship at the Philippine General Hospital) warned me about the dangers of keeping active mold spores inside the house and I was getting paranoid, as my mom and sister  were both nursing a bad cold, so I decided to conquer the pile once and for all.

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