Why I hate writing my diss

Because it reduces me to this behavior, this thinking (this whining)...

Everyday, the first thing I do (after coffee, after eating bread or rice and eggs or oatmeal, after washing my face, after shooing everybody out of the house so we can all go about the business of the day) is turn my computer on and open up my dissertation files.

A note I wrote to myself in green text stands out from the white Microsoft Word document that is peppered with black letters. The note says, START HERE DARLING.

I stare at the note for five minutes and try to make sense of the text that comes before it, and after it. I absently scroll up and down, up and down, stopping at random to read sentences that don’t make sense to me.

After this ritual, I check my mail, I write emails, I check multiply, I post stuff, I check flickr, I post photos, I read blogs, I post entries, I go to three quarks daily, and I proceed to find all kinds of things to read that are infinitely more interesting and far less intimidating than my bloody dissertation.

And then I go back to my dissertation files. I don’t want to, but I have to. Why? Because I’ve already put five years of my life into this. It would be a total waste of five years not to see this through to the end. Because I’ve dragged my family into the mire of this dissertation and forced them to live with it so by now I owe it to them to finish. Because if I don’t, I won’t be able to face all those people who contributed to the research and who tolerated my endless silly questioning.

Oh ya, because I’ll get two extra initials before my name, and three extra initials after it. I’d like five extra zeroes at the end of my future income, too but who knows whether those initials will help me rake them in. At the beginning, that’s the magic I believed extra initials would do for me. I have shed all such delusions (but I'm still hoping).

Ah hell.

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Cordillera Folktales and Story-telling

It was cold and wet outside on the day of the launching of The Golden Arrow of Mt. Makilkilang and other Cordillera Folktales . But inside Mt. Cloud Bookshop we were warmed by stories read and performed by the Aanak di Kabiligan community theater group. Storytelling on a stormy afternoon. Paco Paco. A Benguet story from the book, published by the Cordillera Green Network. Aanak di Kabiligan means children of the mountains. The theater group was born out of the Cordillera Green Network's eleven years of conducting workshops in which children transform their grandparents' stories into theater productions. Here they perform the title story of the Golden Arrow of Mt. Makilkilang and Other Cordillera Folktales.

Lola of Maipon

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The Golden Arrow of Mt. Makilkilang

On June 30, 2013 at 2 PM, Mt. Cloud Bookshop will host the launching of the new children’s book, The Golden Arrow of Mt. Makilkilang and Other Cordillera Folktales . The event is open to the public and will include story-telling and a performance for children by the Aanak di Kabiligan Community Theater Group. After eleven years of telling stories through the Community Theatre, the Cordillera Green Network (CGN) and its theater company, The Aanak di Kabiligan has published a compilation of Cordillera folklore. These stories were the inspiration behind the CGN's successful environmental education campaign, dubbed as the "Eco-Theatre Caravan", a roving theater community of young Cordillerans, theatre artists and volunteers performing in different communities in the Philippines and prefectures in Japan advocating environmental causes through performance. The book is a collection of folktales from Kalinga, Benguet, Apayao and Mt. Province. These storie

Now/here no/where woman

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