I posted this because I needed a URL that works for my profile. Haha. I still haven't gotten used to doing this. And low and behold, it didn't work either! It just kept saying that the link was broken. So now of course I am asking, was it the link or me?

The initial post

“Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience…” – ee cummings

This is the first post. And it feels like the first kiss of the ink and the white page. I have been so wary about writing or even creating a blog for I knew it would always be like some kind of literary challenge for me to write an entry. I cannot discount the fact that being a teacher, a literature teacher for that matter, would of course rouse certain expectations from students just in case they happen to see this blog.

I’m at ease with friends though. With them, I can simply be the old seemingly-a-butch-hunched-girl who liked Math and Science, who carried her inhaler as if there was a secret pocket in her skin just for it, spent a good deal of time in the prefect of discipline and principal’s office during her high school days, tied her classmates’ shoelaces, was a proud member of the NTBO, ate four cups of rice and 3 BBQ sticks during the 20-minute recess, wore brown sandals during the prom (To Shelly who couldn’t fathom and is certainly choking at the sight of it - I’d rather wear something comfortable instead of using the white shoes I wore with the pink gown (ugh!) for the cotillion which gave me a shit load of blisters. I have really sensitive feet!), and was rather the closet literature lover/aspiring fictionist or poet whose eccentricity is well known but whose depth is only for a few.

Yet the idea of a blog excites me. I’d like to state my acknowledgments to Shelly Toribio and Tonton Guerrero before I have a memory gap. Anyway, it excites me because the net to me is like a galaxy well, and with each bucket, you pull gallons of different waters of constellations, meteors, satellites, all from the same well, forgive the analogy. I was even thinking of an anonymous blog so that I can simply be a nameless dot in the void and only I, knew that there is some significance in it because only I know that it exists…and that’s stirring. (Niño/Igme sprouted this idea last night.) I know, I know, time to consult a Freud enthusiast.

So now, I’m bemusedly grinning, seeing that I have written three paragraphs when I was adamant to write even just a line a few minutes ago. I guess like Cefie’s eyes, this would be another place which I have never traveled, yet am gratefully and gladly experiencing.

My foreword from the LIT folio SY 2006-2007

Moi holding the folio LIT for SY 2006-2007
My ever reliable officers taking instructions from the Volderator/Moderator. =)

Pictures thanks to Nikki Calayan

Reminiscence


The noun of the verb,
that state of cognition,
the stating of the fact

that it indeed transpire –
the feeble stalwart words
ending in the future tense,
never reaching a period.

Yet, though deceiving,
I have always thought of it
as the verb of actuality.

To know that even just in the mind,
one can take a picture of a
leisurely landing leaf,
or a waning gibbous.

To own that even just in the mind,
I saw through deep set pensive orbs,
I heard the most sonorous whisper,
and I held a firm calloused hand.

Only then can I confirm that
the you,
the I,
and the We
existed.

How language can work to affirm or to deceive is as real as each dead star giving us light that has long expired. Reminiscence, the theme of this folio for SY 2006-2007 is as much a noun as it is the verb, for it is the act or the “action” of remembrance.

Writers and everyone else are as much free persons and captives of memory. Like photographs, we are able to confine a moment – a smirk, a leap, a boisterous laugh, a tear, a sigh, into a mental photo album which we can leaf through again and again.

Yet sometimes it is the photograph that imprisons the photographer. We either leaf through the album and become part of the pages, not wanting to make another album, or we get stung as we reach for even an inch of the cover.

There are so many things in our memories that we’d like to edit, delete or even recreate. And that is where the power and the danger of reminiscence lie. Only in the mind can we embrace the truth or alter it into our truth. Only in that past tense can we say that I did it, I had it, and I will always have it. Only in our reminisces can we say that it is ours, and that nobody can ever take it or him or her away. And only there can we say that I exist because I have a memory of what it was like before I started existing.

As you read through the contents of this folio, may our reminiscence trigger you to remember that in the beautifully scarred landscape of the mind, we can always run under the sprinklers and dance as if we were under the rain.