I didn't know that on my first night of my stay here in Bangkok, the sky was drizzling and I have followed Xangsane (the weaker version of what used to be Milenyo back in the Philippines). The billboards of the freeway didn't budge an inch to her passing.

Bangkok has a new airport which just opened last month, the design reminded me of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, and what NAIA Terminal 3 should have been. Glass and metal and white travellers. We built T3 way ahead of Suvarnabhumi but we haven't used it yet.

And I am extending my stay until Monday afternoon. I just hope the money won't run dry when I go haggling in Chatuchak this weekend.

"When you travel, your first discovery is that you do not exist"

--Elizabeth Hardwick

Blogging about travel and thinking how cool (and therefore, pretentious) I am that I am on my 12th plane this year and it's already October and yet I feel so homesick because I miss my boys and I want to try the new Philips LCD screen I bought for a song in Sim Lim Square and I want to assemble the Ikea Knappa Lamp but now I am an hour behind all my friends because I am in Bangkok and there's a possibility that I will stay a day longer and I only have a few cash left in my person and I don't know how will I live by the day because I don't want to use my personal credit card and my hotel is so bad the towels are rough and I smell sperm on the carpet and everything I touch and I blend so easily in the crowd even if my Dutch-English accent is a giveaway.

Whew.

I should have said I am pregnant with stories, simple as that. But J demanded that I should show and don't tell. Pretty much a challenge to illustrate a pregnant man using ASCII characters so this was how I made my workaround:

I've been having morning sickness lately and it is then that I concluded, after having one night stands with Chuck Palahniuk, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, and T.C. Boyle that I, Oscar Lopez Alvarez, am pregnant. The words house, amulet and samadhi have been floating in my man-uterus for months, longer than honeymooning elephants or our nearest cousins, the gallivanting gorillas.

Accepted for publication:

V.A., or The One True Agency For The Search of Disappeared Gods and Mythical Heroes in Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 2

A Change of Guards in A Time For Dragons

Economy Class in Caracoa, A Philippine Literary Arts Council Publication

and

Comparative Study of the Effect of Bond Pad Diameter on Wafer Level Solder Bump Reliability in Proceedings of the IPC/JEDEC International Conference on Lead Free Electronic Components and Assemblies "RoHS Compliance and Beyond"

The latter in which, I will be off to Singapore next week to present.

Katayan na to!