Katrice > Recent Status Updates

Animals are the same. They need friends. Have you ever watched two animals in a field? They may be of different species—a pony and a sheep—but they hang together.

Men are like animals. I don’t mean men are “beastly.” The fact is I don’t think animals are “beastly.” What I mean is that no two are exactly alike. Many people think my farm patients are all the same, but cows, pigs, sheep and horses can be moody, placid, vicious, docile, spiteful, loving.

superstition, taught since birth, is not rational.

There is a word in Tagalog, kiliti, which literally means "tickle." And yhere is an expression-- huli niya ang kiliti namin-- which very roughly translated means, "he knows what will delight us.

Evil in power is often charismatic and appealing. It no longer needs to disguise itself in a world that's now mostly surface and flash. It can simply be what it is, and many will revel in its authenticity.

God is dense, is deaf, is dead, is a one-trick poney, putting people on earth only to forget about them.

They were that branch of the family that could be counted on to say the most tactless things, to give the tackiest gifts, to be the most indiscreet about relatives trials and misfortune.

I’d never participated in direct acts of cruelty, but I never stopped them, either. I always stood on the sidelines like a fretful shadow and pretended to laugh.

Being conflicted means you can live a shallow life without copping to being a shallow person.

Her wheedling tone reminded me of just the kind of girls I was never comfortable with, the types who peddled a sort of plastic chumminess, who told me things about themselves only friends should know, who described themselves as “people persons.”

A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day.

That’s Wind Gap. We all know each other’s secrets. And we all use them.

But children digest terror differently. The boy saw a horror, and that horror became the wicked witch of fairy tales, the cruel snow queen.

Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach. She worries over people she’s never met who have a spell of bad chance. She cries over news from across the globe. It’s all too much for her, the cruelty of human beings.

It’s impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand.

The one thing I know for sure is that at the time, it was crucial to see these letters on me, and not just see them, but feel them.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose.

It's so much hotter in Metro Manila now...Maybe it's global warming; maybe it's the thirteen million or so people crammed into an area of 620 square kilometers. So many lured to this sprawling, chaotic metropolis by the promise of economic opportunity, only to be let down by the reality that this promise is reserved only for the select few. The rest have to fight and steal and grift and hustle for scraps.

I fell for a snake and soon found it impossible to extract myself from its jaws.

She reminded herself that she was married to a good man; a man who had not swept her off her feet, who did not set her heart racing madly, but who had won her with quiet devotion and then kept her with a calm, clear-eyed, loving steadiness.

We couldn't give each other what wr needed. So we gave each other what we could.

Jackie was catty and shallow, but she was always completely herself. She also was more at ease with me than my own mother.

I know the wisdom, that no parents should see their child die, that such an event is like nature spun backward. But it’s the only way to truly keep your child. Kids grow up, they forge more potent allegiances. They find a spouse or a lover. They will not be buried with you. The Keenes, however, will remain the purest form of family. Underground.