But what after all is one year?  Splintered into lengthened minutes and hastened days, vanishing and unpredictable as surfacing vagueness with features oddly resembling someone incompletely loved.

[_____’s loved one died.  _____ got married.  _____ gave birth.  _____ had a birthday. _____ lost their jobs. _____ moved in.  _____’s graduation party.  _____ called. _____ had a dinner party.  What counts?]

We bracket our moments in a year that began substantially: with a global economic crisis and 44th US President Barack Obama’s oath-taking in January; the death of People Power symbol Corazon Aquino in August; Typhoon Ondoy’s devastation in September and the discovery of the Maguindanao Massacre two months later; professional boxer Manny Pacquiao’s seventh win and teacher-social worker Efren Penaflorida’s “CNN Hero of the Year” award in November. 

Here, at OOV, we hovered fingers over rows of keys, first in tribute, then in contemplation.  Our 30th issue features works by 2010 Resident Poet Eileen Tabios, as well as poems by E. San Juan, Jr. In Plays, Remé A. Grefalda's "30 December 1896" employs "music [as] a character... [interacting, observing and commenting]" as it weaves in and out of scenes a hundred years apart.  In Essays, Bong Vicente stops the buck in a “representative democracy [that] …voted warlords and thieves into positions of authority”; Rene J. Navarro takes home a gourd, “symbol of healing… perfectly shaped and proportioned… with streaks of yellow in a background of green”; and Anna Alves journeys through “the Filipino imagination as wrought in Our Own Voice”.  In Short Stories, young Manobo hunter Mangulayon sets out to rescue his wife Amya from Mandaya warriors in “Sigaboy” by Macario D. Tiu, and Gerese Axalan's "Wonder Adobo" narrates the plight of straddling two worlds.  In Books, we feature Filipino Pride by Dale Dennis David et al, Ating Kalagayan: The Social Economic Profile of U.S. Filipinos by Peter Chua, The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora by Theodore Gonzalves, Nota Bene Eiswein and Footnotes to Algebra: Uncollected Poems 1995-2009 by Eileen R. Tabios, and Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults, edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard.

2010 brings with it “Filipino” as a distinct race category in the US Census.  Thus, we are separated and together in a diaspora we learned to call home.  How do we make it matter?  We are ever in flux.  We harmonize incongruities [fingers hovering over unchecked boxes] to stand on cusps with all the virtues of escaped air.  And before us, lovely, impermanent possibilities.

Aileen Ibardaloza-Cassinetto
San Francisco, December 2009

EDITOR
Remé-Antonia Grefalda

ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Aileen Ibardaloza-Cassinetto

EDITORIAL BOARD
Victoria Paz Cruz
Seb Koh
Yolanda Palis

ART DIRECTOR AND WEB DESIGNER
Geejay Arriola

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR FOR THE ARTS
Eileen Tabios

copyright 2009