Now/here no/where woman

Whoa... Food for thought. Add a dash of salt but keep an open mind. Where is your mind, anyway? Do you know? I don't, but sometimes I think I do. By the way, this was dug up by my new friend Zego, who loves trawling through the internet for random stuff we call re-thinks. More on him soon. He's still a little shy.

It's not a poem you'd think to read before seven in the morning when the sunshine is just beginning to stream through the windows and is throwing dappled shadows on the floor, but I randomly pulled a book off the shelf and opened it without thinking, and there it was, so here it is. Do Not Put Dead Monkeys in the Freezer Monkeys at the laboratory, monkeys doing countless somersaults in every cage on the row, monkeys gobbling Purina Monkey Chow or Fruit Loops with nervous greedy paws, monkeys pressing faces through a grille of steel, monkeys beating bars and showing fang, monkeys and pink skin where fur once was, monkeys with numbers and letters on bare stomachs, monkeys clamped and injected, monkeys. I was a lab coat and rubber gloves hulking between the cages. I sprayed down the batter of monkeyshit coating the bars, fed infant formula in a bottle to creatures with real fingers, tested digital thermometers greased up their asses, and carried boxes of monkeys to the next experi...

I admit: this series of updates isn't really about the whole zoo that I keep. It's mainly about Whisky and how he gets along with the dogs. He likes to play favorites. For the longest time, his best buddy was Carbo. You saw the ear grooming heirarchy in Week 8. This week, Sambal is his number one pet. (I dunno, did he maybe lose respect for Carbo when the latter was fixed? Little does Whisky know, he's next in line!) I try to be fair with all three animals but there's no use denying it, Whisky is the King as far as I'm concerned. Sambal and Carbo are several rungs lower. They're just cute mignons. Er, minions, that is to say.

All of these things are available in one of the Baguio market's best kept secrets... Darn, I almost don't want to give the secret away.

This is a follow-up to my Palengkera post on plastic bags . A lot -- but perhaps not yet enough -- has been said about Baguio's present political garbage problem. You can read several intelligent diatribes, view disgusting photos, and watch a heart-wrenching video and weep in the Eco-Warrior's Garden . Chi from the Cool Clouds provides a link to an enlightening slideshow on where plastic goes, what we can do about it, and which countries have already done something about it (in answer to Ikin's question). The comments are also well worth reading. And land-fill sized amounts of information can be found online for anyone willing to dredge through the millions of hits for "garbage" or "plastic". Meanwhile, the basura continues to pile up on Baguio's street corners, almost to catastrophic proportions. Now the nice thing about catastrophes is that they bring out the best in people. (Point in case, the Baguio earthquake. All of a sudden everybody in Ba...

The book we've all been waiting for is here at last!!! I'm so happy for my Big Little Sister, BFF Lia, and my Nanay!

What I am about to say will probably look like excuse for procrastination #247, but it's not. I have decided that since writing is my first love, my vocation, my calling, my pain, my joy, my craft, and my work, I shall no longer mentally beat myself over the head or kneel on a pile of mongo beans and punish myself when I am writing other things besides the diss. So there. I write, therefore I survive this mad world.

This is my second year in high school PTA. After last year's PTA experience I swore to myself I wouldn't get roped in again but I seem to have this terrible compulsion to accept -- or worse, volunteer! -- for time-gobbling things that I don't need and that don't need me. So last week, to my dismay, I found myself in the position of secretary for the Education Committee of the PTA. Great. I was right back where I was last year. The Education Committee is in charge of organizing field trips, workshops, and other extra-curricular activities for the kids that will enhance their values, leadership skills, and spirituality. (Sounds awfully righteous, doesn't it?) But there was something notably different about this ED-COMM. Last year's ED-COMM had three pastors and one assistant pastor. We spent 50-minutes of every meeting I attended debating values, leadership, and spirituality. There were debates about whether you could teach values separately from spirituality, and...

A whole new way of looking at my theoretical chapter . If only putting it all together could be this much fun! I'm considering sending my "revised" chapters to my supervisors in this format heeheehee! Credit where credit is due: A whole new way of procrastinating http://wordle.net/

Congratulations to Kawayan de Guia for bringing the Ateneo Art Award home to Baguio, and to Butch Macansantos for winning First for Poetry in English in the Palanca Awards! Wooohooo!

My Siga Boys Whisky gets his ear groomed by Sambal! Carbo gets his ear groomed by Whisky. Whisky: Who's the man? Carbo: You're the man! Sambal: Hmph. Boys will be boys. Boooorrring.

Mushrooms allegedly have no nutritional value. I find this hard to believe but then there are a lot of delicious things out there that have no nutritional value. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of delicious things out there that are BAD for you! As far as I know, edible mushrooms aren’t bad for you. On any given day in the market you can buy at least one variety of mushrooms. On a good mushroom day in the market you can find three or four varieties! The most common mushrooms are oyster mushrooms or button mushrooms. For a few months in 2007 the people of Baguio (who buy their food in the market and not in SuperMarkets or groceries where the choices in fresh produce are so limited and where the chain from producer to consumer is way too long to really support small community farmers and fishers phew!) enjoyed The Portake (pronounced por-ta-kE) -- a cross between the portobello and the shitake (pronounced shi-ta-kE) mushroom. Thank goodness they didn’t call it the shitobello. But th...