Now/here no/where woman

Mid-morning, May 1, residents of Baguio launched a petition asking the tv network ABS-CBN to change the venue of a thanksgiving concert that was going to be held on the set of the popular teleserye, Forevermore. The thanksgiving concert was scheduled for May 10 in Sitio Pungayan, which is inside the Mt. Sto. Tomas Forest Reserve, a vital source of water for Baguio City and surrounding areas. People here were worried that the concert would cause further damage to an already suffering watershed. The details are in the petition . Within 24 hours of the petition's launch on change.org, over a thousand people had signed it. While the petition was circulating on social media, people were also making calls and connections, asking for help from anyone and everyone who might have a line to ABS-CBN decision-makers. People who signed the petition called or wrote messages to colleagues, former teachers, childhood friends, public figures, journalists, former tv stars, staunch environmentali...

Wanderlust strikes again. We made our way to Lias on April 27, 2015, a place in the Mountain Province we'd never been before, because I broke a glass in our bedroom in the first week of April. Muttering irately to myself, I grabbed a spread from an old newspaper and began picking up the larger shards of glass. As I placed the broken glass on the newspaper page, the word "Lena-u" caught my eye. It was the title of an article about a local delicacy in Lias, which would be prepared during the coming Changyasan Festival on April 28. Intrigued but also in a hurry to clean up, I used my phone to snap a picture of the paragraph containing the phone numbers of the author and festival coordinator, Sixto Talastas. Then I swept the floor, bundled up the broken glass in the said page from the Mountain Province Exponent and dropped it in the bin, article and all. But lena-u had worked its spell on me. I had to get to Lias, no matter what. There is no rhyme or reason to wande...