Time Check

i am not a watch person. while growing up, i had many watches gifted to me but never grew fond of any of them. so naturally, either i forgot about them when the straps came undone or the batteries gave out or after i decided to not wear them for a time because i always had a watch strap tan line and i had to have my skin tone evened out. also, i hated that my skin got moist from perspiration just below the strap all the time.

anyway, lately, i got myself a cheap disposable watch and found it very handy while conducting FGDs, interviews and presentations. it kinda keeps me on track knowing every now and then how much time i have left to do my work without checking my cell phone which would be distracting. also, lately, i am less prone to being late to appointments. it's a refreshing change in my scurry-happy routine. kinda makes me think of investing in a good watch.

i want a watch that tells the time, that's it. even on other people, i was never really a fan of watches that double as fancy jewelry. i want a simple clean watch with a simple uncluttered face. something like these perhaps

uniform wares 100 from dezeen watchstore

 muji watches 

achille castiliogni

extra normal by ross mcbride

om1 by ole mathiesen

now i just have to decide which font i liked, whether i'd get an all black model or a white-faced one (so difficult), oh and the when, where and how to get it, considering the last, and to me the most beautiful entry in this list costs USD 1200 or PhP 53,000! 

Haphazard Morning Notes

...or the i-just-woke-up-and-am-too-lazy-to-get-my-notebook-downstairs-and-i-just-scribble-in-here-because-the-laptop-is-beside-me post. 


Possibility is more intriguing than reality...


Quoting Kierekegaard: "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!" 


The foolish longing for the asymptotic. The romantic's pining of that which he can almost have. 


The cowardly inclination to be an appreciator not a practitioner. 


But how long does possibility entice? Dreams deferred "dry up like a raisin in the sun." 

Building a Mystery

Still no definite plans but my daily activities tell me I'm in the middle of something important, like I only have to do what I do and Time, the Universe or God will make things fall into place. It's a peaceful feeling and even if sometimes little worries creep in, overall, I am not afraid.

“I need you to go because I am in some wrestling match with myself here. I can’t trust myself not to manipulate you! I don’t know if I’m doing it now…I think I am.” 

-  Jack Nicholson as Charles in "How Do You Know" 

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

USkPH

My colleague from IPC, Janiel, who is an architect and a watercolorist, has just created Urban Sketchers Philippines. Pretty exciting stuff, if you ask me. Basically, an informal group of artists meet every so often to have sketch sessions in a chosen area within the city. This is part of a global effort to document the living world one drawing at a time. The USK manifesto:

1. We draw on location, indoors or out, capturing what we see from direct observation. 2. Our drawings tell the story of our surroundings, the places we live and where we travel. 3. Our drawings are a record of time and place. 4. We are truthful to the scenes we witness. 5. We use any kind of media and cherish our individual styles. 6. We support each other and draw together. 7. We share our drawings online. 8. We show the world, one drawing at a time.

I am no artist but I do appreciate these kinds of efforts. And look, Janeil painted my favorite building of all time!

Peeping with God Eyes

My mom and me, circa 1984. I was maybe a year old, her first baby at age 26. I wonder what she was thinking at this time. Did she have it all figured out? Has she kept it all together by then? Did she actually know the best temperature in which to bathe an infant? Did she not cringe while washing up my soiled lampin? Did she set aside enough money to buy me what I needed or was she up all night to figure out where she can get the extra bucks? When I was convulsing out of high fever, did she have the doctor's number ready? When I looked bored and restless, did she master a technique to make me laugh or shut me up? Despite having to cram a day job and taking care of me into her 24 hours, did she still have the energy and the enthusiasm to enjoy her one-on-one time with Dad? Mommy may not have the same spirited personality as Tina Fey, but something tells me that her prayers ran the same themes everyday. Especially because I grew up alright, I haven't lain with drummers (haha), I haven't fallen off any balcony and because she almost always suddenly called when I was just about to realize that at that moment, it was her i needed the most. 

A Mother's Prayer
by Tina Fey  

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.  

May she be beautiful but not damaged, for it’s the damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the beauty. When the crystal meth is offered may she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with beer. 

Guide her, protect her: when crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age. 

Lead her away from acting but not all the way to finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes and not have to wear high heels.  

What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit. 

May she play the drums to the fiery rhythm of her own heart with the sinewy strength of her own arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers. 

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a tiger flower blooming magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.  

O Lord, break the Internet forever, that she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers and the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed. 

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, for I will not have that shit. I will not have it. 

And should she choose to be a mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. 

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a mental note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Summoning the Female Spunk for 27 Consecutive Days of Fieldwork. Yeow!

A royal wedding, a beatification, a resignation and an important death. As if the world isn't interesting enough, they made me research associate for a project today. I am no longer documenting the Post-Ondoy SIM FGDs and interviews. I will direct and conduct them and, along with other associates, i will write the final output for publication. What's up with May?

Shades Envy

Body Talk

My knee is busted. more than feeling weepy from the pain, i am very pissed! I can't bend it, I wince when I take a seat, even turning to one side during sleep is a burden and i'm limping all over the place. My movement is hampered and i am worried about fieldwork next week.

What pisses me off is the feeling that this may be a long-term condition. Mefenamic acid and ibuprofen don't do their magic even at increased dosages. Despite my refusal to concede older age, I'd even succumbed to taking anti-arthritis and anti-gout drugs only to discover zero relief. I'm afraid it may be a ligament tear manifesting itself two weeks after a hard fall when I slipped on a driveway incline in front of my brothers' apartment and my right knee suffered the worst impact. Turned out many have gone down at that exact spot.

I'm the kind that rarely gets sick. I have only been sent to the ER once and it was because of a funky iced tea I ingested from KFC-Mendiola (blacklisted!). It would have been fine except that I was vomiting, turning white and couldn't sit straight inside the taxi. Embarrassingly enough, I think I also resorted to crying as an involuntary coping response. Also, I rarely catch the flu and I contract the common cold and cough only once a year, if at all. But I am now discovering that the body has its limits.

Only last year, one of my molars was chipped and upon visiting the dentist, I discovered that it needs to undergo root canal. I also asked her to do a thorough checkup and we discovered at least four teeth that need work. I was quite disturbed because although they were not perfect, I took some pride in my set of teeth. I took good care of them, or so I thought. I guess it was normal wear and tear.

Also, the night before leaving for an out-of-the-country trip, I experienced partial deafness and an annoying ringing in my right ear. That would have been fine except it was also very painful and when it throbbed, my head and jaw also throbbed. Sometimes it was a constant pain and my head felt heavier at one side. Sometimes it was as though someone had suddenly punched the right side of my face from the inside. I had my uncle who is an EENT doctor diagnose me through text because there was no more time before the flight to consult one here. The antibiotics cost me two museum entrance tickets. If I was not determined to maintain some amount of cheerfulness then, the trip would have been disastrous.

Again, for three months this year, I had been dealing with a bad ingrown toenail. It came to a point when I had to visit the salon weekly to have a pedicure and couldn't wear shoes. Now my toenails had always been problematic. I have deep-set nails which itch and ache when not cleaned regularly but one wrong move had resulted to a tear and an infection and, after many days of futile bandaging and cleaning with peroxide and betadine and constant fear of being stepped on in the MRT, I had to accept defeat and undergo minor surgery one day before a location wedding shoot. Good thing my flatmate Marielle's dad is a surgeon and even if I had to troop to Paranaque where he practiced, I only paid a minimal amount for ER equipment use and medicine. That was a bummer. I still hate my nails today.

So what next? I hope they don't tell me this knee is beyond repair. I still want to run, move through the commuting crowd with ease, dance, climb mountains. I want to sleep dammit, and I can't right now because the only way I know how is on my stomach, turned to one side with my bad knee folded in a 30 degree angle.

Accidental Lenten Retreat Masters

Dave Grohl and the boys have recently released a new album which I would not have learned of had I not clicked on a video of their bad-ass beatlesque performance at the David Letterman Show. I was blown away. My favorite tracks include the bop-inducing "White Limo" "These Days" which is a poignant and bittersweet recollection of a lost love told in the second person, the singable "A Matter of Time" and "Back and Forth," which sums up in music and words how I currently feel about me, about you and, very strangely, about God. Fitting for the season.

Listen to the album audio stream here. For your Foo Fighters Band History 101, watch the newly-released film documentary also entitled "Back and Forth" here.

There's Gotta be More

My throat constricts as I think about the things that I have to do for the rest of April and the whole of May. After the case study writing stint with Foundation Z which was tiring but professionally enriching, I recently accepted a referred job documenting a Post-Ondoy and Post-Pepeng Monitoring Study funded by the Big Bad Bank. This will take me to field for three weeks straight which will actually be more hard-core than my previous ARMM assignment. The real catch is that I would have to turn in reports only one day after every five full days of FGDs and interviews. That means 3 reports in 3 weeks. How I am going to pull that off, I don't really know. I do know that it would entail Sting energy drinks and lots of internal heaving.

As of writing I still have to submit some work for one of my usual clients which Lai calls my sugar daddy--someone who gives me cash in advance for future intellectual favors. But that's just kinda sick to consider even for 5 seconds so I'm just gonna call him Data-entry Corp 2. Have to finish this by Monday.

Another thing which gives me the urge to whine like a baby is that I need to decide if I really want to submit my CV to the dark side -- well more like just the wet side. A former colleague recommended me to replace her as head of a community service/events coordination/publications head. Honestly, I am not keen on working there and handling people in a very politicized large corporation. But the adult part of me wants to just try it out for a while just to gain financial stability. They do, after all, pay well and my job would not be entirely soul-less.

My friends and family know that I do not particularly care about monetary rewards, even to a fault. The last 6 years of my working life as a social development worker, photographer, travel writer, social researcher etc has been enjoyable for me in the sense that I have experienced so many things, gone places, was exposed to the daily lives and issues of the common people in the country. I was able to know very inspiring people who, to no avail, have been convincing me to finally take an MA or diploma course in any field, pretty please (another blog topic altogether). But I never became wealthy. I never wanted to. I stayed afloat, lived within my means and just found richness in every experience I had.

But as days pass, I have come to admit that I cannot live like this forever. I need to bloat my savings for future endeavors or emergencies. My parents are tired and not growing any younger. If it weren't for my overly carefree attitude, I should have taken over a lot of things by now. Just a week ago, my Mom and Dad came by from the province for a couple of days to attend my brother's college graduation. They were driving for nearly 15 hours and before going to bed, my dad asked me to massage his back to which I willingly obliged. I remember how my brothers and I would walk through my parents' back as if we were traversing a pilapil when we were kids. It was a nightly ritual. Of course doing that now would break my dad's back so I just resorted to the usual rub. I was so surprised to find out how soft Dad's skin has become. Save for his smoking, Dad is never unhealthy. He eats well and plays tennis daily. Although on the thin side, he was very lithe and had six pack abs in his younger days. Now instead of being supple and leathery, his skin has just gone soft, like there was no flesh underneath, just skin, something else which felt like water and then bones. It was disconcerting. It felt like some mental disease has robbed me of precious years and I had missed out on important events in a loved one's life.

Still, I have apprehensions about doing an 8 to 5. My former colleague says she understands as, and I quote, "free spirits could never and should never be tied down." But I was reminded that there's gotta be more to life than frantic pleasure pursuits. I get that struggle is central in any human's being. More than ever, I am ready for a fistfight. But in order to take the blows and score some punches I first have to identify those for which I will be fighting. Maybe I should write them down and tape them in my daily line of vision, just like when I was 12 and I wholeheartedly believed and proved that nothing ever was impossible.

You know that feeling when you enter a place for the first time after a considerable while of avoiding it, you become tentative and unsure why you're there again? Well that is how I am now. I'm sort of looking around, feeling the energy of the space, deciding whether I should turn back or face the inevitability and importance of the situation. Because somehow I know that writing again is not only inescapable but also necessary if I want to be grounded again. Not grounded in the sense of a kiwi finally admitting to herself that her species doesn't fly but grounded like a swallow conserving fuel for an impending full migration.

Oh, poo. This is how taking a break from writing does to someone--a resort to lame-ass metaphors. At this stage I don't really care. I am only grateful I am typing this at all.

One of the main reasons I decided to scrap blogging indefinitely at the start of 2010 was so that I could have real face-to-face conversations with other people, especially those whom I consider special or at least are not afraid or don't get easily bored with my company--which automatically make them special! Also, I felt that I was withdrawing too much into myself that thoughts were lumpy, not being sifted and mixed with other ingredients (yup, metaphors). Few things give me much pleasure as having my ideas scrutinized, affirmed or lambasted directly.

To a degree, I succeeded. I met a lot of friends for catch-up sessions, short trips and errand-bonding but I could not bring myself fully into the moment. In hindsight, maybe it was because I wouldn't dare put into the open things which I did not have a good understanding of. I listened of course, but only listening halts the promise of a pithy interaction leading to a full-blown discourse into certain conditions of mankind. Not to make it sound like socio-babble but if you look closely, topics of concern of most people in whatever walk of life mostly relate to human nature and how to best utilize or manage it for the sake of maintaining or altering the existing social fabric.

I write in order to think. And since I did not write, I thought haphazardly and felt uncertain about so many things. There's a kind of uncertainty that exists after you've exhausted all efforts to solve that uncertainty. Then, you are certain that you are uncertain. But there is also the other kind which is uncertainty because you know you haven't thought about it at all. Then you are uncertain whether certainty can be reached, which is the worst uncertainty of all. This had me living like a zombie, just doing the bare minimum to survive: work, spend, cultivate a skill set, amass huge amounts of information, maintain a civilized demeanor, repeat from the beginning.

Suffice it to say, my goal of truly interacting with others was not fully reached. My realization, which I have reached through this mini experiment, is that one cannot engage in real mutually enriching relationships with others without first continually intra-acting, and i'm inventing words here. This means habitually engaging oneself in truth-seeking exercises (writing, in my case) to build certain conclusions ready to be presented to and validated by other people, the operative word being certain. For others, this is all elementary. But my personal pedagogy has always been experiential. I just had to go through this myself.

And this, my invisible friends, is how I convince myself to start writing again.

This is not a drill. I'm trying out some exercises for fear of atrophying. And besides, I updated the template. Like a nice new notebook impulsively purchased, it would be a waste not to fill this face-lifted blog up. So yeah, stay tuned, kids.