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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, October 26, 2025

entry arrow9:00 AM | I Like Serendipity

Alas, carefully laid plans had changed. I was no longer Baguio-bound after I touched down in Manila from Frankfurt, after attending the Frankfurter Buchmesse. The itinerary had been clear: no rest in the capital after arrival in NAIA, straight on to a bus station in Pasay to take me to the mountains for a book event—my first ever in the City of Pines in more than 15 years.

But, as life often reminds me, certainty is a fragile illusion. The event was canceled at the last minute, leaving me stranded in Manila for three days before my scheduled flight back home to Dumaguete. I could not change the booking, since it was the National Book Development Board who did that for me as part of my grant as a delegate to the Frankfurter Buchmesse. I was also left scrambling to find a hotel, which proved to be a futile exercise: nothing decent within my budget could be had in the days I was set to be in Manila. I was, of course, also disappointed over the fact that my dream of a return to Baguio was suddenly for naught—for I always felt like that city lived inside a poem, and I had been craving its air after the gray, efficient cold of Europe. I also missed writer friends who lived there, and I was eager to see them once more.

But I had also learned, with time and years, that derailment is not always a disaster. Sometimes, it can be the beginning of something else.

When I arrived in Manila on Tuesday, near midnight, “home” was a word that felt more like a placeholder than a destination. I got out of NAIA past midnight, bleary-eyed and body aching after the long anxietry-ridden wait at the luggage carousel. I had thanked the heavens that I had not yet booked a hotel in Baguio. Friends from high school came to the rescue, offering me their place in Bonifacio Global City. I remember standing under the shower, washing away the travel fatigue, feeling grateful to be grounded even in an unplanned stopover. There was some comfort in the unplanned, a quiet relief that the universe, despite its odd sense of humor, still managed to catch me when things fell apart. Plus: did I even think about what I would do lugging my heavy luggage around to Baguio?

So what do I do in this unexpected layover of four days?

The next day unfolded like a gentle surprise. I had been an Anvil Publishing author since 2012, with two books to my name that they have published—Heartbreak and Magic in 2012 and Don’t Tell Anyone in 2017—yet this was the first time I had ever stepped into their offices in Mandaluyong. Finally, I could put faces to the names that had lived for years in my inbox: managing editor R. Jordan P. Santos, marketing maven Page Jose, and senior editor Arianne Velasquez. Page, Arianne, and I had already spent a week together in Frankfurt—“bonded by trauma,” as we liked to joke—and now, back in Manila, we found comfort in the familiarity of shared exhaustion and laughter.



That evening, upon the invitation of Anvil publisher Xandra Ramos, I joined the Anvil team for a special screening of Jerold Tarog’s Quezon at the Metropolitan Theater. Jericho Rosales, with whom I exchanged some pleasantries and shook hands with, played the titular president, and I was struck by the film’s almost farcical tone—fitting, I thought, for a story about the roots of Philippine patronage politics. “We really had no choice to have the kind of government we have,” I told the interviewer who asked us about our reactions after the screening. “From the very beginning, we were already wading in the mud.” Afterward, our publisher treated all us to a late-night dinner at The Aristocrat, joined by fellow Anvil authors Yvette Tan and Danton Remoto. The conversations ran deep into the night—about Frankfurt, about writing, about life. It was one of those rare, luminous evenings when fatigue dissolved into fellowship, and I remembered why I chose this life of words in the first place.

The following day, October 23, should have found me already in Baguio, talking to readers in a book event, but instead I was in Quezon City, meeting with Vibal Publishing’s managing editor, Gelo Lopez, to discuss a book project that had been nearly a year in the making. The meeting brimmed with creative energy, filled with the kind of spirited exchange that made the long delays and rewrites worth it. Had the Baguio event not been canceled, I would have missed this moment of quiet progress—a reminder that detours could be productive, too.

I spent my last day in Manila mostly indoors, catching up on work and correspondence, the city humming faintly beyond the windows of my borrowed apartment. Looking back, I realized that the entire episode—the canceled trip, the scramble for lodging, the chance reunions—had unfolded like an orchestrated accident, each piece falling into place as if by divine mischief.

This year itself had been relentless—a wild pendulum of highs and lows, a roller coaster I could neither predict nor pause. But as I turned fifty last August, I have found myself embracing these unpredictable turns with something like grace. I wanted to be more fearless, more grateful, less anxious about the things beyond control. Serendipity, I realized, often arrived disguised as inconvenience.

What seemed at first like a disruption became an alignment: a canceled bus ride turned into reconnections with friends; a missed mountain event became a reunion with my publishers; an unexpected pause opened space for new beginnings. Perhaps that was the quiet lesson of the week—that the world had its own way of rearranging our plans toward small, necessary miracles. In the end, what I thought was lost time became found time, and the story I had meant to tell in Baguio began to write itself, instead, in Manila.

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