Sydney on sale

When my family first arrived in Sydney, even 20c lollies seemed like a rip off. ‘What? That’s almost four pesos. Ang mahal naman!’ the adults would exclaim as they marched around the grocery with a calculator, feverishly converting dollar prices into pesos. It took years for us to stop thinking in pesos and refrain from the mental gymnastics required to do exchange rate calculations in a blink of an eye. No wonder so many migrant children do well in Maths.

It’s been a long time since I went shopping with Mum and her calculator, but I still feel a twinge of alarm when I buy any item of clothing over $50. With my mortgage and child, sometimes even the credit card company is alarmed. Continue reading →

The passport in my PC

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I pledge allegiance to the IP and the protocols for which it stands.

I don’t do cigarettes, drugs, gambling or orgies. I do the Internet. I have to: I’m a cybercitizen.

At uni, my friends dreamt of going on safari, riding a gondola or trekking the Himalayas. I just wanted to go to Canada to see dexx, my cyber pal. I spent at least $50 a week to log on at the library and chat in the Filipino room at wbs.com. I’m convinced that taking up Computer Science—and free access to lab computers—saved me from bankruptcy.
Continue reading →

Enrol to vote now 2010

Enrol to vote

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Enrol to vote now 2010We’re having an election in August. Don’t waive your right to vote!

For most voters, the key dates for this year’s elections are:

Deadline to enrol to vote: 8pm on Monday, July 19
Deadline to update your electoral roll details (Close of rolls): 8pm on Thursday, July 22
Election day: Saturday, August 21

The deadline is tight, but enrolling is easy. All you have to do is complete the form online and return it to an AEC office in person, by fax or by email. The Australian Electoral Commission’s website also has a list of frequently asked questions about enrolling to vote.

If you have travel plans and won’t be in Australia for the elections or if you’ll be away from your electorate, you should fill in a postal vote form (PDF).

I firmly believe that voting is a right and a civic duty, and I urge you to make your vote count.

Her Son, Jose Rizal - June 2010

Her Son, Jose Rizal (Gala performance)

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This was a review of Her Son, Jose Rizal performed by a local Filipino community theatre group. This piece went through a lot of revision, but it didn’t quite suit the publication I was aiming for.

Her Son, Jose Rizal - June 2010The sold-out gala performance of Her Son, Jose Rizal, written by renowned Filipino artist Leonor Orosa-Goquingco, was an extravaganza of music, colour and emotion. Goquingco’s one-act play is a brief but powerful look at key moments in the life of Jose Rizal, the Philippines’’ most celebrated patriot. Four scenes are linked by soliloquies of an older Rizal (Manny Diel) in prison and show various stages of Rizal’’s life as a boy (Elijah Merjudio) and a young man (RJ Rosales).

A sense of expectation hung in the air as the lights dimmed at the Tom Mann Theatre in Surry Hills. Diel opened the play from one corner of the stage, an anguished Rizal on the brink of martyrdom. Although director Armando Reyes seemed heavy-handed with these speeches, the spectre of Rizal’’s prison cell, ever present downstage, remained a deliciously foreboding presence. Continue reading →

An official welcome to Words by Kat

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Hi, everyone!

If you were subscribed to the feed for my personal blog, you should—I hope!— have noticed that your feeds now point to this blog as promised. Yay for technology!

I’m no longer using Feedblitz to deliver updates via email. If you’d like to get my latest articles via email, please click on the email icon at the top right hand corner of this page. (It’s the bright pink icon of an envelope.) Or you can visit the About page and enter your email address in the subscription form.

Please bear with me as I post my previously published articles over the next few weeks. Before I do that, however, my next post will be a bit of bonus because it’s an unpublished review of Her Son, Jose Rizal—a community theatre performance I saw last month. After that I’ll post previously published work in order of first publication. I hope you enjoy them, and thanks again for following me over to my new online space!

Bowl of rice - Photo by kittenpuff via morgueFile

Developing an Aussie tastebud

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Food is one of the cornerstones of Filipino culture.  Imagine the shock of Vegemite on toast.

Think of quintessential Pinoy cuisine and an entire feast comes to mind.  We have pancít palabok, adobo, sinigáng and, for dessert, ube, kutsintâ, and bibingka.  And that’s just for starters. When I think of quintessential Aussie food, I think of … well, Vegemite and Tim Tams.

Vegemite is a national icon.  Trust the unofficial Aussie national food to be made from by-products of beer manufacturing.  Continue reading →

The Laws of Procrastination

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I blame my laziness on entropy. You can’t argue with Physics. This article has been tweaked a few times. With apologies to M. J. Farabee.

Second semester can be a weird time at uni. The pain of assessment is still fresh in your mind from semester 1, but not quite close enough to worry about. You think you should be studying but … ah, stuff it, it’s early days yet. You didn’t start studying for your HSC until two weeks before your exams, did you? If you did then stop reading this right now—you obviously have better things to do, like summarising your lecture notes and drawing your mind maps. You’d better get on with it because the rest of us are waiting to borrow you colour-coded summaries. Continue reading →

Yesterday, my lover left

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This was my first published work of fiction, written just before I graduated from uni. I wrote it in about an hour and entered it in the Women’s Words Competition run by the university union. Needless to say, it didn’t win.

Yesterday, my lover left
me

in a fit of calm before a tableau of too many words left said—best in the shadowy space of unexplored truths—a trousseau of deceit and subterfuge and niggling little things that  all of a sudden translate into failure. And little else left silent and secret and precious. Continue reading →