Blue and black are kind colors

Nameless-Beach-Somewhere-In-San-Antonio-Zambales

The sand in Zambales has always been black. The only time that the beaches had been washed white was in 1991, when Mt. Pinatubo awoke. Further inland however, there is sand instead of soil, and this sand is white as ash. The land is white with the memory of Pinatubo wherever the sea could not reach.

Before the surfing boom, everyone went into the water with their clothes on. Children learned how to walk and how to swim almost at the same time, and in the same vicinity, and that there were two kinds of blue: the blue of the sky, and the blue of the water.

My fondest memory of Zambales is of the sea: as a child, falling asleep dreaming of the movement and murmur of waves, and that if you were to lay still enough, you could feel the sea beween your fingers. People choose their memories of the sea, over the beautiful, giant flower of a cloud, and the mad descent of ash and rain and terror. It's because the sea always changes back, they explain, when everything else does not, and would not, the sea always will.

Undas Report: Panag-Apoy Festival 2013

Dusk begins early on November 1, the famous Sagada sunset neglected as locals light pyres for their dead.

 
     "It's hell on Earth," locals like to joke, my host's 12 year old nephew Osong among them. As early as finishing lunch, the Isagada head on to church, submitting the names of their deceased to a list, later to be read aloud before the Panag-apoy (to light a fire). The reading of names take hours, readers replacing one another, a calm, monotonous drone. People stack pinewood atop graves and may choose to light them early. 5pm: stray lines of smoke; 5:15pm: isolated bursts of flame; 5:30pm: the air turns grey, then black; 5:45pm: Inferno.
    "It's a specific kind of Pine," says Blue, a man I met on the bus, and I can't remember if he said Saeng or Saleng, only that the sap catches flame easily. Back at home, we are told, "agtukkeltayo," set up [candles]. Nobody uses candles in Sagada for that, I am told.

    At some point, the padi (priest) comes to bless the graves, after which the people put out the flames and return home for dinner, saying that the dead can join them if they wanted to.

Finding Luck in Sagada

It was the last days of summer, and a cloud of gloom followed my mother wherever she went. We had just come home to her, my sister and I, from Abu Dhabi, heavy hearts lifted by the sight of each other. I had said that we should go to Sagada, a little resort town in the Mountain Province, where I had been to a handful of times (most without my mother knowing, but that is another story). Cities take their toll, and we had wanted to go somewhere far away, together, to find some happiness.

Chunky the death moth (named such because of this author's ignorance regarding the
 true names of moths) overseeing the goings-on of the Kanip-Aw Lodge common room.

We lived in a lodge overlooking the cliffs, and at night the common room fluttered with moths. When I had been little, on the nights we spent by the sea, I would attempt to kill moths for flying too near. "Don't!" said my mother then, "moths carry good luck." And I had taken care to never harm moths since then. Now I wonder if this is related to the myth of butterflies being souls of the dead. I wonder if butterflies and moths are, instead, messengers.

chos.

This one saw us off as we set for a Kiltepan sunrise

Anyway. We had nothing but good fortune, in Sagada. 

on volunteering, and weekends with the children

There are no pictures today, not for this post. At the orientation, we had been cautioned against taking pictures--not forbidden, but to exercise restraint, for the children's parents feared their exploitation. Perhaps this is a wise decision. Dolphin, who we looked to as leader, and her co-officers took pictures of hands, knees, and the art: shapes cut out with trembling fingers, restrained fingers, weak fingers, but with keen eyes and strong hearts, paint lines wobbly but determined. They seldom took pictures of faces, even then they never put names, or afflictions.

The first boy I worked with put little clay feet on his little clay monkey, and fashioned a harness for it so that it could sit on his windowsill. He did all of this, with one hand, the other in a sling. At the orientation we were taught not to spoil them, we were taught to let them do some things on their own. All I taught the first boy I worked with, was how to roll the clay into various shapes one-handedly, against flat surfaces. The rest he did on his own, a menagerie of little clay creatures keeping him company by his bed by the window.

At another hospital, we made puppets, at first only with a single boy, who was the only one bold and energetic enough at the time to come with these strangers to the playroom for a workshop. He knew exactly what he wanted his puppet to look like, adored the colors yellow and blue, and when more children came, he decided that his puppet should have a crown, so that it could be prince to another girl's princess. He would make another puppet, a rockstar puppet, with a guitar and a microphone, but soon his mind took him elsewhere, and he cut out capes that moved in the wind for his puppets and made them battle for the hand of the princess.

The only teenager in the group spoke very little, hauntingly drawn and silent. At the orientation, we were warned that the children will most likely be lethargic, some would not want to participate at all. At a more recent session, one boy indicated that he did not want to paint, but when we were about to leave, remained the only child painting. The colors these children came up with, mixing oil paint with poster paint, tiny rivers of color amid larger swirls of other colors, courageous with their blues and browns and reds.

 This silent girl, the only teenager from the puppet group, sat very still, never looking up even when asked. Soon, the other children started making flowers. I asked her if she wanted to learn how to make flowers from paper, and she defiantly said that she already knew how to, and slowly, she showed us, taught us.

"Most times," we were told at the orientation, "it ends up that the children teach us, instead of us teaching them."

Finding Sagada with a Fork (or spoon. or your fingers.)

It's how enthusiastically the people who go there talk about food that draws others to it: "Big servings, not so pricey!" Back when I still worked in an office, my co-workers showed me food pictures of a recent Sagada outing they had taken. "So cheap," they told me breathlessly as I leafed through shots of big plates heaping with toast and side vegetables. I remembered hours-long road trips with my Aunt in California, past tunnels of redwood and cliffs overlooking the ocean and pit stops with plates filled to the rim with local crops and homemade pancakes. "Just like the States," they giggle. "Just like the States."

Lemongrass Tea at the Yoghurt House. Demeter, who owns a reader's cafe, once told me
 its local name so I could look for it in the Saturday market but I have since then, unfortunately, forgotten.

It's been said that to know a place is to eat it (in the form of what is served locally of course). Pateros is the Balut; Batangas, the lomi. Binondo is Chinese food, with its fried siopao and dumplings that go beyond their stripped down, streetwise distant cousin, siomai (to be completely truthful, I don't know much about food as local identity, but I'll get to the point, I promise!). 

There is nothing of Sagada that you can see in their food, is what I've heard from unimpressed foodies. "It's all just bastardized Western food."

Most things glitter and is really gold in Abu Dhabi

The Atrium Dome, inside the Emirates Palace

"Oh, everything in Abu Dhabi is gold," laughs our cousin Jam. We had spent the better part of the afternoon gaping at the many luxury cars that seemed to be commonplace on highways, and the many luxury hotels that studded the coast like rhinestones, "they have gold in their teeth, on their fingers, in their hair, under their deserts...it's like gold is just another decorating material!" She brought us inside the Emirates Palace, a seven star hotel where a night could cost up to fifteen thousand pounds, and everything is trimmed in gold, where the topmost floor is out of bounds for anybody who isn't an Arabian Royal. We looked up at the ceiling, our heads dizzy from all the vacuous chaos of luxury. The child in me wondered if once upon a time in the desert, someone had found a jinni and had asked for boundless prosperity, and the jinni, ever wise, gave him oil saying "this gold will have you prosper," and that was how all of this came to be.

Abu Dhabi p.2

Times for regretting to not have a decent camera and the skills to wield one properly: countless

No, we did not get a chance to visit Ferrari World. We pined continually to regret that fact much later. We passed it, though, as we fled. Much of the Abu Dhabi we had seen were from behind windows. Here, we had ached to ask the driver to bring us instead to the beach with its caramel sand and emerald waters.

Abu Dhabi p. 1

At the Souk Central Market, everything smells like all your best and deepest daydreams

Buscalan Night-life

Mr. Happy, and the latest form of sound system technology to reach Buscalan--the little radio car
photo c/o Ponyo

Because when one goes places, one will almost usually be asked: "How's the nightlife over there?" regardless of said place's proximity to what 'nightlife' usually entails. I don't know where this fascination comes from, perhaps a very human desire to live well into the night, an acquired victory over a time previously spent in darkness and fear. Also a very human need to party and get punch-ass drunk.

How Most Pictures I Have of Sagada Are of People's Backs

Drummer and Hunter walking ahead in Sagada

Sagada had been an accident, in that I had not expected to be there. It had always been that place that former co-workers would bring up enthusiastically and rent vans to whenever they tired of Baguio. "Sagada has great Lemon Pies," they would say, and so Sagada was to me up until that point, That Place with the Great Lemon Pies. And so, having inherited the partiality for lemons and all things sour--having a citrus for a name also somewhat at fault for this need, i think--I put it in my mind that one day I would go to Sagada for their lemon pies.

Until, one day in November, while in Bontoc waiting for a bus back to Manila, Hunter casually grinned and said, "Let's go to Sagada." I shrugged. I trusted him with my life, and I shrugged. One should take note that even the most lighthearted things that people who have lived here their whole lives say, have roots in conviction. It is only best that you--tourist, visitor, transient, passersby--just go along. These mountains are greater than doubt, or fear.

i cant design things for sh--

so I changed the vivacious orange background to the plainest layout in the world ever. I figure that I might compensate with pictures.

Along a shop-lined street in Naples, in 2010

Above used to be the background. Thank you for reminding me that not all pretty things suit everyone. The picture itself was taken in 2010, as my Aunt and her partner were looking around in the dress shops and I had found myself gravitating towards the cheerful visual chaos that was the tile shop where a lone yellow labrador sat ever so still. I was reminded of Rex, our own labrador, at home, splayed over the cold tiles. Italy reminded me of home in more ways than one, and it baffled me to no end. 

(My mother would then chastise me for not buying at least a fridge magnet. Is it or is it not a unique Filipino trait to know how far one has traveled by the magnets one has on the fridge? I'm not quite sure myself. 

Seriously considering featuring that one of these days. But then, one can argue that keychains are also another yardstick through which worldliness is also measured.)

so, today

Meh there is always a meandering stage. I always meander. Maybe I like the word itself, all mellow and whimsy and easygoing.

I should really be starting to make this blog about something. Maybe I'll write about past trips and then put on the pictures. Maybe I'll write about dreams? Flash fiction? Longer fiction? Fiction outlines? Just put up pictures? Rant like the world is mine?

Today, I went to my old school, an ancient university, the oldest in the country (Hey! You're not allowed to wear shorts in here!-security guard. YES BUT LET THE MIDDLE AGED LADY WITH THE SHEER LEGGINGS PASS RIGHT ON BY)

I met with my friend Tortoise, and Ponyo, and our teacher from grad school who is currently head of a CW center sat us down for a chat and some ice cream.

"This office is haunted," she calmy stated. She would return to find that the printer had produced paperwork, some survey sheets about children, "Completely no relation to what I do!" And poetry manuscripts had mysteriously found their way to her desk. She was completely, flabbergasted, although elegantly so. We stayed for a good couple of hours just chatting, before we took our leave to go have lunch, to energetically discuss A Song of Ice and Fire conclusion theories, before switching to a milk tea place where the conversation would veer off from stories about floods, to naming parts of the reproductive system in Filipino.

i am the most boring blogger on the face of the planet. Shet lang. I hope people from the MA program don't see this, identify me, and then subsequently kick me out.

"The nerve of you to write this way!" they would say, "The nerve of you to write this way!"

First

Hello, New Blog.

I don't know if these greetings are mandatory, but what does one say at the beginning of all things anyway?

"Say hello," is what I had always been told. Imagine if I had walked in on something like someone with their pants down.

At the beginning there was the Word, and that was how the universe came to be.

So, walking in on someone with their pants down: "Let there be light!"

Sounds like several levels of inappropriate. So...

again, hello New Blog. I apologize for the violent orange-ness of your background, but I promise you, that once I get a good background photograph that I am happy with, I will have it changed immediately. I worry that is it too bright for the eyes. I worry that it might not match with the material. I worry that I might have the material match the background, which should not be the case.

I'm not even entirely sure what to do with you. I don't write poetry. I don't travel as frequently as I please, or photograph as well as I please, as much as I please. I only have little patches of stories, and maybe that is where we'll begin.