i am sick. i have been out of our house for 6 days and have been eating hotel food for that same length of time. 

i am at the airport waiting for my flight in 6 hours. 

I thought i would manage since Iloilo is also polluted but it turned out Manila is way way polluted. Worse, my 5-star hotel accommodation is located in the 5-stars of the polluted districts in Manila. They also have 5-star wi-fi provision--it's at P300 for 1 hour worth of wi-fi use. 

and so I succumbed to a bad case of allergy on the 4th day. 

i can't imagine how anybody manages to "live" in this city. it's just the really dirty, polluted, unwalkable, unfriendly to public transport users; just very unlivable. 

good thing the Green Urbanism conference was a success, otherwise i would be hating this city for the rest of my life. 

desktop, literally.

Desktops are an interesting bunch. I've seen a handful of blogs and forums posting pictures of member's desks and i'd say that --wow---desktops are a totally different world. Like they have a psychology of their own different from the owner.

We have only a couple of desks at home. One is a drafting table converted into regular desk to hold a mishmash of things. It was my husband's drafting table from architecture school, a very heavy table made from scrap coconut lumber. Sometimes my 4 year-old use it as an inclined plane to jump start his toy cars and send them flying across our bedroom. And i am always guilty to use it as a place to put my hair clips and my end-of-the-day trash that i take out from my pockets. It drives my husband crazy. He said that THE desk is not supposed to hold hairclips, especially when they easily tear HIS onion skin-like tracing papers.  And also because it has too many things on it already--his aging computer, his film camera, his junk art fixed lamp, his T-square (complete with the strings that help it slide back and forth smoothly), 3 of his countless sketch pads, numerous ball pens ON the table placed in a way that they do not ROLLLLLLL (because it's inclined and it can't hold a pen stand unless it's a fixed, screwed pen stand)--yes, some are felt tip (or at least the calligraphy pen is).

The other desk is like a public desk. It houses the desktop computer that is free for everyone to use but only after my husband has given his permission. Sometimes, my siblings' (yes, my siblings live with us) stuffs would find their way on this desk. They would often end up in trash bins--the real trash bins. You see, even the use of this public desk is highly political. The desktop computer on this desk contains the CAD and sketchup files--yes, they are the ones that pay and see to it that there is food in the fridge and that both my husband and I are able to drink beer at the beer places at least once a month.  With the basics of survival secured, i could easily feed by addiction to cheap white wine using my own money sans the guilt.

And have i mentioned I do not have a desk at home?

but here is a picture of my desk at work:

yyeah, and at work all i do is surf the net and read online forums. there's practically nothing in my organizer as my calendars are blank. but there's a libeskind book there (that is the property of my husband--i dunno how it found its way to my office desk) and some list on post-its, none i've done yet--NOT!!!

As you can see, it's relatively clean and free of piles of paperwork. I made sure to include only the side of my desk where it is still--YES!--clean. If i tilt my camera a little to the left you'll get the picture of HELL. In there, there's at least 10 watershed reports that have been trying to get my attention for the last few weeks. I tried so hard to give them some but it doesn't help. They do not decrease in number. In fact, the last time i checked they were about 5 and now they're 10. I should really get the stuffs on my desk to practice some family planning--or a population control method that actually works.

But no matter, i love this desk.

In fact, in my last four years of significant development work, this is the only "true" desk i ever had. In my previous project i had to content myself with heavy, weather-worn, wooden desk. It was about the same age as my grandmother and I think it really wanted to retire. I felt sorry for the desk. The desks in my other short shots i never really considered MY desk, as most of my engagements were short-lived. So short i didn't get a chance to put ugly valentine's day stuffed toys and pollen-exploding flowers on them.

And i think that any respectable, rational, clear-thinking, intelligent person should never stuff her office desk with ugly stuffed toys and pollen exploding flowers from boyfriends. Reports that give you visions of hell, maybe, because that's what the office desks are for. And i because, man, your boyfriends deserve some privacy, too. (Yes, desks are ours to use and use freely to express our individuality, and the expression of individuality are sometimes overdone that the lines between what's private and public are blurred. think: facebook.)

Well, unless you live to work--which, is a completely different matter--then you should have a fridge and a pull-out bed installed in your desk, and if space would allow, a dresser, and ironing board and a closet. and something to hold the washing machine, too.

eh.

and i present: the desk at home. 

screaming sun.

i have nothing to post today. i have like 3 drafts saved here though. i have nothing to post today.
so i am posting this.

it endlessly features the cover of Teenage Fanclub's Grand Prix album. the only teenage fanclub album i ever had. on cassette tape. It's a acoustic radio session of the song "Don't look back." "I'd steal a car to drive you home," a line said. It's pretty romantic if it's said to you and you're still in high school. It's tedious and a tad loser when said now, like the me now, 30 something me now. but i love this song and i can;t really help my fondness for this geeky scots. like keith said, their songs sound wonderfully wet, like a stereotyped scottish landscape, even if they're played on really hot summer days.


and there's this screaming sun outside my window.

in 30 seconds, it''s gone.

like this.

it screamed like that. and left. hurriedly.

suns sure are jokers.

me and my ninjas.

Apparently, this blog has turned into an update-on-me blog as i have lost my creative juices, and that really good film scanner remains to be inaccessible--meaning, just to darn expensive and unavailable in my part of the world.

what i am doing as of now is eating peanut butter on a soda cracker for dinner, with three architects inside a room on a climax of a bombastic renovation. these three architects are friends. they have not yet reached the bankability of starchitects, and i doubt they will ever do. one of them has a hole in his pants right where the edge of his front pocket ends and we told him it looks like his balls are dangling out, especially with the a mobile phone in it. One them is my husband who has rhinitis and can't stay too long inside a dusty construction site. he doesn't want to be a starchitect. although i think he dreams of getting a pritzker. he's hanging around because i asked him to and because the architect i contracted for this renovation is his friend.

(do not ask me why i didn't ask him to do it. i'm very particular about "ethics".)

there's a beautiful early night city scene outside and it's just too bad i didn't bring my camera today. in fact, none of us brought a camera today. and i am supposed to love picture-taking at night.

the room is gonna smell of turpentine, or paint thinner, or something really awfully synthetically chemical. tomorrow. so i won't be coming here tomorrow. and torn-pants-dangling-stuff architect said there's gonna be a lot of dust everywhere. tomorrow. "So it's better if you don't come here."

we just had beer with somebody i mistook for a butch that my husband said was actually male who dresses like a butch. "Is he married?" I asked. "No," husband replied. "He must be really gay," I said again. And husband laughed. I can be that accurate in describing scenes.

...

have to pack up. we're going home.

yawning ninja.

Architecture and Buwan ng Wika...and whatnots.

John Lautner, i know. Keith has mentioned his name before but Enric Miralles, no. Enric Miralles is supposed to be a spanish architect who's said to have designed one of the superb-looking cemeteries ever, and since this i DIDN'T know (him or any of his works), Keith was compelled to give me a 10-minute lecture the Igualada Cemetery (where he was also buried after he died of brain cancer at age 45) as example.


Lautner and Miralles came about because of this ilonggo house, which Keith said appears to have Lautner and Miralles elements on it, not to mention Le Corbusier's. (The house is really amazing, i hope you are able to access the link.)

Incidentally the mini-lecture led us to this picture of the Igualada cemetery detail. I hope you view the bigger version of the picture so you will get what i mean.

view it bigger here.

"Sobrang ganda! idol! 2004."

Had he wrote it in english, we wouldn't have known that a filipino has seen and has been to -- and actually loves -- this amazing architecture. and august happens to be Buwan ng Wika. So, happy buwan ng wika to all Filipinos out there!

-------

keith proceeded to tell me about gabion walls (can be seen in Igualada cemetery), which prompted us to discuss our concept for my granmother's tomb. he finally got what i mean when i said that i want grandma's tomb to look like it's encased/enveloped in stars at night. or like it's radiating light or floating among the stars.
something like that.

i wish i knew how to draft. or sketch things.


-------

My kid is almost 5 and he refuses to write his name still, more-so go to a "real" school. he's been enrolled to a play school for the last 3 years. I recently bought him a Grade 1 (for 1st grade) pad paper hoping to inspire him to put aside his dream of becoming a fine arts student majoring in Trucks and Heavy Equipment sketching, and start writing alphabets. It didn't go as well but so far, he has shown interest in writing the first letter of his name. 

Tonight, in the middle of Keith's mini-lecture, he prodded us to help him draw a MIXER (yes, the heavy truck, heavy equipment massive concrete mixer truck) until it was too much to handle. Keith convinces him to believe that anything he draws, no matter how they remotely resemble what he [the kid] has in mind, is ART and ART is always beautiful, even when ugly. Our household's definition of art is not based on Imelda Marcos' definition, anyway. For a while he believed us and worked on his own. And since we said that anything he CREATES  is art, he asked if he could borrow his tatay's dry seal. permission was granted. then he asked if it's art if he dry sealed his pad. permission was granted and we convinced him it is art. and he believed us. (and maybe smiled sheepily while dry sealing.)

"Nanay, is it art if i drew on our floor?"

To which his Tatay replied, "Of course it is art! but we will have trouble cleaning that." and hence, no permission was granted. 

kids. Really.

-----

List of films that i've tried so far:

1. ykl fujicolor 100 -- cheapest so far
2. kodak gold 100 (colored)
3. kodak colorplus 200 (colored) -- will see what difference it has with 100.
4. kodak cn400 (black and white) -- didn't get to see the results since the processing said all the frames were "EXPOSED". one of these days i will post a picture of the actual almost unprocessed-looking film roll that they returned to me.

2 of my films rolls came back with most of the first half of the roll underexposed. i'm still trying to see if it's a camera problem, a film or a technique problem. And also because, processing people and printing centers ALWAYS assume that an underexposed frame = bad photograph. one processing center decided to throw the negatives of the underexposed frames to the can. luckily i was able to ask them in time for the developing lady to retrieve them before they got covered in more trash. Again, i amazed the developing lady by my interest in things that are not valuable and she gave me a fresh roll of kodak pro image 100 film. it's now in my fridge along with the 3 other kodak gold 100s that i keep as reserve. i am gradually adding to my number of film stocks because Keith has recently acquired his own film camera in the object of minolta x700.

i'm almost done with the kodak colorplus 200 roll. will post pictures soon.



---


end.

and again.

Yeah.

as you all know i've left the island. i'm all done with the rasta life and had gone back to being an urbanite.

i'm also now engage in a different project, which i apparently enjoy notice my lack of posts lately), though i  kinda miss the action that i get in things transport planning.

this week keith and i will start on our yoga sessions. i've decided to quit TRYING to return to running and do something else. i've had the 8 years to enjoy running, anyway and it is probably time to venture into something new, something that my body and my age would easily relate to. yeah, like yoga.

No, actually, i would love to return to running but i've been having health issues that i'm not sure would really agree with the demands of running. for one, i've had fainting spells after my "recent" runs (2 runs--months ago-- to be exact). the latest of the 2 was a lot worse than the first and i knew it was time to listen to what my body has been trying to tell me. getting a running partner is one option but the "runners" at home have different work schedule, and keith, who was once my running partner (yeah, like 6 years ago), cannot run anymore. he has a leg condition, a broken-and-re-attached-by-a-rod femur condition (if you care), that prohibits him from doing strenuous exercises like running. actually, it's not an issue of a broken bone but after coming out from that accident, his left leg became about half inch shorter than the right. you can just imagine what running would do to the joints of his uneven legs when he gets older.

so yoga, it is.

again, on sunday, keith and i will start our yoga session in the house cum office of this vegetarian organization that is located almost 2 blocks from our place. keith personally asked for this yoga session; i didn't talk him into it. and i am glad he "volunteered" to do it this time.

and the developing shop TOTALLY destroyed my 1 roll of 36 frames exposed black and white film (kodak bw cn400). one of these days i am going to make a list of all legit film developing shops in the city and rank them from best to worst. the worst so far is the KODAK SHOP right in the corner of iznart-yulo street. film processing takes more or less 8 hours and yeah, they totally destroyed my kodak black and white film. said it was EXPOSED. of course it was exposed! that's how you take pictures--you get your film exposed. when i asked why the film was returned WITHOUT the frame numbers the developer guy said: "it was our first time to develop a black and white film."

Dang.

and you HAVE to work in a film developing shop.

(that answers the lack of photo posts lately--if ever you wondered.)

while you were out...

i left the island and went partying in the city.

yeah. island life is exciting but it tends to get monotonous and bland after a while. 

and i've used up my stay. 

on my 7th day in my new work and new office, the sun was amazing. i thought i finally found a good scene to get a picture of. and i was without a camera. so i brought it the next day. and the next and the next, but all that the sky gave me was a muted sun. 

bleh.

and because i am still swamped with revisions after revisions of a report which supposed to have been finalized 2 a week ago, i still have not touched any posting projects (read: short writing stuffs). I've been constantly postponing them and out of desperation, i wrote down a list of things to write about in my notebook. but that was only when i was home and alone. can't do no other thing when the kid is at home.

(now, that manually writing things down in a journal is a long gone habit that i've been meaning to do again but can't. people give me strange looks when i write things in public.)

anyways, all i wanted to say was, i discovered this blog, a very interesting one. i discovered it via beat architect's  blog roll. the first post i read in the blog life of an architect is about finding a house. this weekend, husband and i will be seeing a lot for sale in another district. we don't have money but the recent encounter with the pests at home left us no choice but to look for another place with lesser rat infestation problem. i know, can't really avoid rats in the city. but the rats have almost taken over our apartment, and we are very punctual rent payers, and we have also made it known with the landlord. and everyone is saying my rent is just too expensive, i could rent a big house with it. sooo.

(beat architect's blog is new--he has long left the 2 other old blogs.)

updates.

FIRST OF:
Nasty comments.


I rarely get comments in my blog, in fact they are so rare, i'd be more lucky to win in the lotto than get a comment.


What luck i have that in late February i received not 1 but (WOW!!!) 7 comments in what i call now, my very controversial post. It came from an Antiqueno who now resides in the UK, or at least what the IP locator says, based on my Feedjit and my blogger's own stat counter. His/her (but i have a bigger hunch it was a her) roots was known, perhaps angered by my lack of attention, after s/he posted his/her comments in Kiniray-a. 


I decided to save her/his face and deleted her comments, otherwise, the SIXTEEN (16) (one-six) regular readers of my blog will know that one of those cake-houses I "architecturally critiqued" in my aforementioned controversial post belonged to him/her, built using his/her hard earned euros. 


But that is not the point of my argument. I even call my mother's architectural sense tasteless. I even call other architect's architectural taste tasteless-ier. And still, that is not the point of my argument.


My point is, I do not like those kinds of houses and even if i call them ugly, that is not for anybody to decide that i am a BAD person. Or that i am out to destroy anybody's family. Nor that gives anybody the right to threaten me. 


People, please remember that if you build a monument meant to catch people's attention be ready for critiques. critiques/critics will come whether you like it or not. It so happen that UK Commenter got it from a stranger brave enough to say that that house is not very sustainable and adaptable in the tropics, given that, in order to comfortable live in those cake houses, you have to install air conditioner and pay thousands in electric bills. But that is my perspective from the school of thought that i subscribe to. Anybody can argue with that as long as they do not tell me that i do not like those houses because my own PAY is not enough get me those kinds of houses. (I will like everyone to know that my friend, 27 years old, works in the PHILIPPINES and is paid at least PHP100,000.00 a month. We belong to the same profession -- environmental/urban planners, development workers. That is why we do not need to go abroad to earn enough.)


Zaha Hadid is a very famous architect and she has been called many funny names by her critics. These funny names are read by millions of people in the world. Imagine how much time she'd waste if she went after each and every one of those critics. She wouldn't be as rich as she is now. Just to let you know, i do not like Ms. Hadid's Dubai architecture. But i loved her for the vitra firehouse. 


And, Ms. Ay Abaw, made similar post. but the houses she critiqued in this post, i'm sure very many Iloilo City people, 1st district residents are very familiar of. The post was made in April 2009, years before i did mine. Taking pictures of houses, posting them in your blog and calling them ugly, is not a new thing after all. and definitely it's not only me doing that.  


Ms. Ay Abaw and I are very very good people though, we do not include personal details of the owners, not the address, of other people's stuff we put in our blog (without the concerned consent) because we know it is the proper thing to do.


>>>>Bob Borson, a residential architect, has this thing to say in his blog, in this particular post: "You may not agree with my opinion as to the...- please keep your 
uninformed opinions to yourself or get your own blog."  <<<<<




Secondly:
Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.


ALfredogs lead singer and main photographer Pai is living in Sendai. she has lived there since December (oh she left on my birthday!!!) 2010. 


She left Sendai 10:00, March 11 to go to her new area of deployment in Iwate. 


The 8.9 magnitude earthquake hit Sendai around 2:00 in the afternoon and not long after, the tsunami came crashing into the city of Sendai and sanriku, and some other parts of Japan and the Pacific. 


On March 12, before lunch, we still lacked information about her whereabouts.
But logging in to pushpullbar, i found Pitrak's post about the tsunami. A moderator said that he still couldn't contact his parents who are in Iwate. One moderator, Takes, who lives in Tokyo said it took him 6 hours to contact his parents who live near the area where the tsunami strike. 
Though i was just a lurker in pushpullbar, i took chance to send Takesh a message, gave him Pai's contact numbers (which i took from her brother), including the people finder her boyfriend posted on the net. I do not personally know any ppb moderators nor are they my forum friends. 
I sent the message around 9:30 am, i think, and after a while, this is what i got:


****This is a message from takesh h at pushpullbar (http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/forum.php). The pushpullbar owners cannot accept any responsibility for the contents of the email.****

(received 10:19 am on March 12)

Hi REJI,
I talked with faylyn just a minute ago and she said she is safe, but has no electricity since last night.  Phone connection  is very bad so she couldn't reach friends or her parents.
She said don't worry.
Hope that'll help.

Takeshi

Thirdly:
Kid is back to the City. 


We've found a stay-in baby sitter and she started working with us last week. We almost thought kid will not be able to go back to school before his recognition, and that he'd be missing his second chance to go up the stage to get his medal (last year he was given the "Most Gregarious" medal). But he's back and he's attending practice for the recognition. Tomorrow their class is going to have their picture taken for their Activity Book and their Year book. 
And after that he'll be joining his father at the farm again to get his knees scratch, his skin burned, and his social skills polished with his newfound friends. 


And oh, we finally took him to the friendly neighborhood hair trimmer, Telloy. Telloy is a balding gay who used to cut my father in-law's hair, my husband's hair and now, my kid's hair. My former lady boss also goes for her regular hair cut to Telloy. 


One of his hair dresser is a dark-skinned, skinny gay with frizzy hair (here we will call SGWFH) and weird eyes. First time i came to Telloy's shop i was transported to a TV show featuring India, or Morroco. With his tiny (yes, 6x1.5 meters--if that's not tiny, i don't know what is!)shop's orange walls, yellow chairs and ceiling, and the SGWFH in  satin midriff with some gold piping (or maybe i am just imagining the gold piping, just now, trying to recall the whole scene) and a loose pants similar to what the belly dancers wear. his hair was longer and even frizzier. and it was dyed orange, his lips painted dark red.


I knew i am going to like that place.  




Lastly:
Tomorrow is a holiday.


Happy Liberation Day to Panay, Guimaras and Romblon!!!!!




- END -

listen to the randomness.

• received email that afg assignment MIGHT come in april. that got me excited. i'm baaaaaaaaaaad.

• and i went home past 7 pm. chris and i waited inside the rocking pumpboat. it was windy and the winds howled and rocked the boat and caused it to make lots of sounds, creek, for one. after a while a lady with LOTS of jackfruit came. sacks after sacks of jackfruit. the porters loaded her stuff at the front, the empty space at the nose of the pumpboat. and after more moments we left. we learned the lady decided to rent the pumpboat and we only had to pay PhP 15.00 after all. Chris earlier wished she would. today is his lucky day, late as the luck may have come, but still...

• in the middle of the ocean over the waves and the roller coaster ferry ride i saw a scene i have so badly wanted in my whole life. i have only 2 dream shots in my mind that i wish i could take before i die. and this could be the third. i so badly wanted to take that shot. (and i wrote under a really bad drawing: "i'm never a good illustrator but that's how exactly it looked like, if your imagination is good"--done using colored pens. really bad drawing)

            the boatman had his back at us. it was drizzling. he was carrying a fog lamp that doubles       as a safety lamp. he was facing the sea. on his head is a red shirt he tied like he would a bandana. he wore a white shirt and it was flapping in the cold, january ocean wind. the lights from the fog lamp spills on the boatpost, on his sturdy, muscular shoulders, on his temples and the red shirt tied around it, on to the sacks of jackfruit dirty and sticky from the latex, through the slits and cracks of wooden boat posts. and everywhere around, it's pitch black. i get ocean sprays from time to time, on my face. i taste salt as i wipe it from my face. in the distance, tiny dots of orange city lights outlined the sky.

              i so badly wanted that shot. but i didn't have a camera. and if i did, it would take a lot more luck, more than chris' to get me what i wanted. oh. well.

maybe next time.

• thoughts on last night's discussion: part 1 -- it is not proper to discuss african or asian politics and economy lacking extensive reading. more so if you do not know where that nation you’re talking about is located. because eventually you will imbibe a wrong impression to your listener. gut feel is okay if your discussion is based on a premise that it is going to be a dumb discussion, because international affairs, international security and economic stability cannot be discussed using gut feel and especially lacking adequate reading. wrong impression picked up by a handful of people has the tendency to spread like dengue and exponentially multiple like overpopulation. in the end what you'll get is a whole community believing that the philippines is better than africa when we actually aren't. we're just much fairer in color but really, we're not. and some years back some philippine city's hdi is actually comparable to that of ghana. of course that can be challenged because hdi is not always the perfect measure to everything. oh. well.

• thoughts on last night's discussion: part 2 -- and i know that imelda marcos did a lot of "good job" to the philippines. but i am not buying your opinion. because if you compare the philippines' state during her years of "good job" with the kind/pace of development in other nations (or asian nations, to be more specific), given the same amount of money, it remains inferior. and of course, the killing and disappearances and the abuses that happened as a result of her and her family being in power is something that the beautiful buildings and lovely city cannot compensate for. you know that.

• i like making fun of hypocrites, and in that sense, i am really, and purely evil. 

3 Posts i cannot make.

the past weekend and today were very interesting days and i so badly wanted to write a post but I am so sleepy. i only had about 4 hours of interrupted sleep before I rushed to board the earliest bus to the city (leaving my husband and kid behind) so I can be at the office by 830am. I spent the morning half of the day on field work, travelling again (trip to city took 3 hours then there's 2 jeepney rides then there's a ferry boat ride then another jeepney ride...oh well.). there's also a report that i need to write, which i apparently can't do, given my present condition. i am so sleepy, more sleepy than i am tired and my brain is begging for some rest.

i wanted to make these 3 separate posts:

1. about the wonderful visit we had at this sugarcane mill of one of the old-rich families in one of the towns in my province. the place looked like an abandoned insudtrial community with broken old heavy equipment and a dilapidated mansion. most of the heavy equipment were manufactured outside the country-- the farm equipment and the big truck were clearly american made, the crusher, gears and machineries used to grind the sugarcane were from glasgow--in late 1800s. apart from the machineries being humongous, the old acacia trees were especially big also, they dwarfed the day laborers chopping the sugarcane endings for replanting.

i was terribly disappointed when the camera conked out before i had time to be creative. most of the pictures were taken in snapping frenzy.

i will remember to write about this before the week ends.


2. about the crazy discussions regarding valentine's day. there's a group of people and then i joined them for field work and then over lunch i listened to their crazy stories. most of it involved discussion on sex, religion, marriage, weddings, relationships and, of course, valentines day. plus a 5-minute lecture on GATT. well-rounded lunch (which only 3 of 13 people discussed, because well, only three of us knew about it. damn. frustrating).


3. about my mother and her lack of respect for group dynamics. i will just probably rant about her on this one but i promised myself (and my mentor-friend) that i will talk to her about it. i can;t totally blame her for her lack of skills because maybe, she does not really know...although ignorance is never an excuse for anything, oh well. it's just embarassing listening to my father talk to his guests about the practice of sugar milling and having his conversation hi-jacked by my mother, interjecting about some trivial things she learned at a trade fair or how fresh and healthy the fish soup she's serving is. Guests end up speechless because they cannot not listen to my mother no matter how badly they needed my father to continue his talk.


that's all. i'm sleepy and i got things to do.

>>>

but i've got a dinner date with friends tonight. i think i'll beg off tanduay ice this time. 

The Arrangements.

We have a different arrangement at home now.  PF's working somewhere far and will only be home on weekends. Meanwhile, i now work at the island and leaves the house early morning, comes home later than i usually did in my previous job. And the kid is turning four and has gotten used to the schedule and the old arrangement of his father working at home and me getting home early evening--or sometimes both his father and I, together--and for the next few days i would be repeatedly remind him of this new arrangement, over and over again, so he will not NOT want to go to sleep to wait for his father.

also, i will have to tell him that his parents will not be around for his birthday and that it is very okay because both his father and his mother grew up celebrating their birthdays in the absence of their parents. sometimes not even celebrating them, and yet they grew up to be good and respectful people. and i would need to tell him that it is okay to not have birthday bashes because people do not live for birthday bashes alone. and that on his birthday he must play and enjoy the time with his friends because time spent with friends is more important than a birthday bash. i will tell myself not have to worry about pleasing everyone on my kid's birthday.

Also, his nanny (here, Nanny 1) will be leaving our household this week. his teacher sent me message last week that my kid's nanny confided to her about her positive pregnancy test and that he will be leaving our household at the end of the month. She--the nanny--never confronted me though. she only sent a text last weekend while i was on my way home from work, that she will stop working by the end of the month because she wants to take a rest.
PF said, "Well, so now we know. If they're preggers, they say they will stop working because they need to rest."

The previous nanny which Nanny 1 replaced about 9 months ago also left our household 3 months pregnant. Previous Nanny and I come from the same town and last i heard she was in the hospital to have her baby treated from pneumonia. She was a smart nanny, the Previous Nanny. She has manners and my kid liked her alot. Nanny 1 on the other hand has a mental age close to that of a 12 year old. She has told me of her age the first time she arrive but i've forgotten. i guess she's just 19. and she's pregnant. and she her mental age is 12. i call her a retard behind her back. i am cruel, i know but i can't stand her lack of manners and her presumptuous attitude. she presumes she's part of the family and that she can just take part in any of our private conversations. she answers even if she is not the one being asked. i talk to my husband or my sister while we sit face to face and this retard Nanny 1, who is at the kitchen will suddenly blurt out an answer. to the question she is not asked. any worker must never to that to their boss. and i am the boss. and because of that, she is given the title of a household retard.

I corrected PF and told him: "No, Previous Nanny did not say she's gonna get some rest. She said she's leaving to come home, help and accompany her mother."
Previous Nanny's mother is a battered alcoholic wife of an alcoholic husband.

The person that will be replacing Nanny 1 will be somebody of menopausal age. PF said so. He saw her already.

So for few months i would have to live with this. I have nobody to talk about alot of things when i get home. In the office i still sometimes forget. I tend to summarize and outline the things i am going to talk about when i get home only to remember that PF will not be there. Oh it is sad because i cannot tell him about this new story i read. or my newfound great finds on the net. so i have to get used to that and learn to tell ANIMATED stories about my day to my kid instead.

yes, arrangements.

we got to have them sometimes.

FIN.

For want of a better presentation.

today i attended a presentation on road traffic injuries. 


it would have been a perfect project with perfect concepts had the consultants have better grasp as to why they are actually engaging in things that are out of the boundaries of their expertise. for one, i did not see any transport planner or traffic engineer or road safety expert in their team, and yet we, the participants were supposed to be taught on how road injuries are prevented. 


(DO NOT, first of all, and again, DO NOT present a stat table straight from SPSS pasted in MS Excel, complete and unedited of all those permutation shits that only a statistic can understand. i say, DO NOT present this to a general public meeting. This does not only come from me, but from my Mr. Senor Statistics Professor. You will only look like you only want to drown them in details but don't actually know shit.)


and no, road injuries are not CAUSED by non-wearing of helmet, or by non-compliance to seatbelt law. we abide by the helmet and seatbelt law on the premise that if ever we DO MEET AN ACCIDENT, we will suffer from injuries that will render us severely handicapped, much more, dead. but non-compliance to those things do NOT, i repeat DO NOT cause injuries. 


take the example of wearing shoes. we wear shoes because we want our feet protected. we do not want our feet to be accidentally pricked by thorns or cut by sharp objects but would the non-wearing of shoes cause result to a bloody cut on your feet? 


i wish that the presentors had consulted first with road safety experts or at least made themselves aware of things regarding road safety because dude, road safety is a safety issue. you do not want to mislead people on matters concerning their life or death.  


(i do not understand why a bio statiscian is explaining a road safety perception survey that took counts of people not wearing helmets or seatbelts and asking them why they're stupid not to wear so. a statiscian, i can understand--any statistician can do statistics, but a BIO stat? what difference does that make?)


it doesn't help that this study is trying to anchor its framework solely on the fact that people who here drink and drive--or at least that's what i am getting from one presentor. come on, lindsay lohan does that all the time. people in the city do that all the time. do not try to make this an isolated case, you presumpter! first of all, the percentage of people who do that is too small compared to people who overspeeds, to infrastructure that would fail the road safety audit or to the fact that people here resort to habal-habal for their main mode of public transport. i would like to think that given those three major issues, we could anchor a road safety/road traffic injury framework there. blackspots, as a term, was not even mentioned. 


i do not know how community participation can be encouraged or solicited through IEC, advocacy and meetings. in my experience, community participation can only gained by allowing the community to feel that they own the project. "sense of ownership", anyone?


Before i could lambast the presentation in my thoughts, just before the session closed, a better presentor took over. although he did not present the project framework and the rationale for frontlining this project (when it could be better given to other agencies who are expert on these issues), he was able to assure me (not directly, of course)  that at least somebody in the team knows what they are doing, stuffs on road safety, and that somebody in the team has actually worked on projects of these kinds. and he mentioned blackspots. (ahe ahe)


i am not an expert on these matters. i am not even a transport planner but dude, i've heard and read better; i do know when i'm being fooled. 




(actually, never mind. never mind what i said. it's just that the invocation was that mass produced prayer-for-training song sung by josh groban and some church-sounding family name woman singer. i wish all training opening programs will just concoct their own prayer and stop using the damn song. it's not funny.)

wow, if it's not amazing news week, i don't know what is.

my kid's play school teacher just sent me a message that my kid's "nanny" is leaving us end of this month. Nanny just got news from her pregnancy kit that she is positively pregnant. she is the second nanny, in the 4 nannies that worked with us, to have become pregnant. the one before her was the first.

husband said he has seen it coming because she seems to have the same habit as the previously impregnated one -- endless time on mobile phones. i tell you, if your nanny is always spending time on her mobile phone expect a pregnancy soon.

i meant to write a story about her because lately she has been getting on my nerves. but i'll think about it now that she is leaving us.

eehh. but the shine is shining today after 3 days of rain and cold so it's not totally but news day. but eh, i realized i'm in the island and weather here is crazy.

eehh.

start of a new temporary.

It's a wet, rainy, muddy, windy Monday and i have to travel at least an hour from home to work, 3 ride changes with at least 2 transport mode changes.

Test travel to work place led to a conclusion that on a wet, rainy monday morning, i have to leave the house not later than 7am if i want to be in the office by 8.

work is not yet very hectic since i'm just starting, meaning, i have this day to look stupid and keep asking the busy everyones for all the readings so i can familiarize myself with the program.

it was still wet and raining when i arrived at the island; it was even wetter when i arrived at the office. it was half past 8. boss and other staff were busy so i went out for coffee. more wetness and drizzle, and now soft, brown mud all the way to the makeshift shelter that's a canteen. i intended to just buy instant coffee in a styro cup so i can bring it back to the office but no, apparently, nobody here likes their coffee to go so no canteen serves coffee to go so i took my coffee there, in one of the many empty, gloomy tables. i tried to plan my day while sipping coffee and gazing outside the cyclone wire fence. i have a view of my office's brown wooden door.

i remember the day PF, our common male friend and I went to the island and took the wrong ferry. The ferry choice was never wrong until we were in the middle of the ocean and the ferry did not make that unexpected  turn as we prayed it would. So we sat at the wrong dock, contemplating on what to do now that we're practically on the wrong part of the island. I suggested we return and take the right ferry. I remember male friend (mf) saying nobody goes back to correct a mistake. and that we should just proceed and do the correction along the way. correcting, meaning, we get a tricycle from the WRONG port to the other RIGHT port where we're really supposed to dock. it will be more expensive and would take longer BUT it is the macho way of doing things. and dude, i am a MACHOwo man. we got to where we intended to go and i will probably write a better story about it, now that i remember it.

but i must go back to office, now that i have finished my coffee because the drizzle has progressed to a full rain and i don;t want to be soaked in my first day at work.

Mellow Doubt*

When i had my kid, i thought i'd mellow down.


I thought i'd stay away from things too risky--which i did for some good four years.


So when i was first invited to join a project in Afg, my automatic response was to say "No" because it was the right thing to do. The work was, after all, not just risky, but VERY risky. My kid was too young to lose a mother. The second time i got the same invitation, I again said "No" but informed the invitee that i will be asking around. I wanted to compare the pros and cons. Hearing this, he took the "inviting" a step further--he started showing me half of the real deal. My friend, after learning about it, urged me to accept the offer. She said her colleague who has just gotten back from that place has gotten so highly marketable he easily got a post for a project in colombia (or was it bolivia?). Wow, i so wanted to go to south america. they have very nice architecture there.


I think i will consider.


Now, two months into unemployment i couldn't wait for the deployment notice. i now badly wanted that engagement. And also because in a few more weeks, i'll be broke. The least i'd like to happen is me asking money from my husband. It embarrasses me. I've never really learned to live off from other people's earnings because it seems not fair. I honestly feel that in a family the husband is only responsible for himself and his share of responsibility for the kid(s). The wife should find her own financial security. Therefore she must find a way to contribute to the bills and the things for the kid(s) but certainly her whims is not the husband's responsibility. That way, everything is "equal".


Gad, I really am pathetic.


With so much time in my hands now, I wish i had outrightly said "Yes" at the first invitation and immediately gave my CV. What was i thinking? Why did i let the news on BBC faze me and give me nightmares? After all, if i do get killed on duty, what my kid would be getting would be more than enough to put him through an expensive university. Hell, it might even be enough to support him post-university should he choose to become a starving artist/writer.


I've been reading the Balkan memoirs of Greg Campbell and John Falk and they honestly got me envious. John Falk, especially, since he only got and survived the Bosnia assignment because he wanted to "play" with his existence. He was never really there as a hard-ass frontline journalist. He was there to see if the bombs and the bullets could scare the shit out of him. To test my excitement, I watched Restrepo on Nat Geo last Sunday. Nothing. Not scared. Did I say Diego Bunuel has been there? And Reza--i'm a fan of his work and his advocacy.


Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's just the holidays. I've never been really a fan of Christmas because I've never had good experiences with this season.


Who knows what I'll feel when the papers are really there, in my face. But now i know, when you got the restlessness in your blood, you have it forever. I don't think i'll ever be mellowing down.

FIN.

------


*Mellow Doubt is a title of a very beautiful Teenage Fanclub song from their equally beautiful and amazing album (okay, second to the more beautiful, Bandwagonesque) Grand Prix.