Cat in the Pine Forest

My love for one missing cat made me aware of so many others. I befriended a cat in Eden. He had a particularly hard life. It showed in the way he demolished a couple of fried siomai I stole for him from the kitchen. It was indescribable the way he gobbled the pieces, which I unwrapped from a tissue paper, to the utter shock of the waiter. The word "gobble" was not enough to accurately describe the way that the cat wiped out everything violently in just a matter of seconds. The word "munch" is simply too mild, too civilized, too out of place here. I think of this cat and his life in the pine forest that covered most of the 80-hectare resort, and I simply felt he might be having a very tough one. The driver of a shuttle told me cats and all types of pets are forbidden in the resort but the cats, he said, are just getting too many. I was worried about the cat. I left him eating the suman we hadn't eaten during the afternoon session. I thought it was a lowly food for a strong cat like him but he ate it when I gave it to him at the door.  I hope the waiter would not be cursing at the discarded wrapper, they were banana leaves anyway, because we were already hurrying out the door to the waiting shuttle, there was no time to clean the garbage.  But would I ever see this cat again? Would he remember our brief encounter?

On the other side of Eden

I've been documenting a strategic planning workshop of an Iligan-based non-government organization in the past two days before yesterday; and on the second day of that workshop, a Thursday, I awoke very early to take a walk within the 80-hectare compound before the sun goes up.  It was very cold; and so, all I had was a jacket and a camera. I was all alone and had the entire place all to myself when the sun started to appear. It was the sort of morning I can only describe as glorious!

Richard Brody explains himself

Unlike most people, I only treat movies as secondary affairs to my first love, which are books. I may survive a day without food but I can't survive a stress-laden, hectic work week without sneak-reading one good book or one good story. (Ja keeps saying books are my primary vice). He was aghast to  see how I detested books and stories that have been turned into movies, unless of course, they go through the hands of directors with discerning eye. Until I started reading Richard Brody on The Front Row, I decided to seriously begin to consider my old views against movies.

The cat who wins our hearts

It was in September when the Yellow Cat came to stay with us. At first we called her Buffet because of her penchant to sit and sleep on Ja's working table. Later, we called her Gavroche, because she was a stray cat, we thought of her as a street-smart cat, just like Gavroche, the boy in Les Miserables.  But the Cat's elegant manners (she even refused to stoop down to the rudeness of the neighbor's dogs), her finesse and intelligence, indicated to us her superior upbringing as a cat. I used to tell Sean, the Cat’s openness to human conversations and her perceptiveness could not have been possible without a child’s love that once had nurtured it when the Cat was still a kitten. The Cat also wore a necklace, which told us she must have had an owner, although I kept asking myself why she finally came to live with us, if she had a home. Was she not loved enough in that other home? But this puzzle I merely took for granted, thinking, we were merely welcoming the cat, she was free to come, she was free to go, although, we loved it so much if she stayed with us.

What of its owner, Ma? Sean used to ask, to which I used to reply,  “The Cat owns her life, Sean, she is the real owner of herself.” So, we left our relationship with the Cat at that. She would arrive at close to midnight, meowmewing outside our door and either Ja or me would wake up to open the door. She would enter the living room, walking to and fro, telling us stories about what happened to her outside, and we would listen with keen interest, even if we don’t understand her cat language. Then, at 3 am or 5 am, the Cat would wake us up again, meowmeowing, asking us to open the door, hungry for the first stirring of life in the idle lot outside. For aside for her nightly prowl, the Cat had a voracious appetite for small things that move (including Ja's toes when Ja is sleeping).

But the cat suddenly stopped coming one day in November, shortly after my trip to the T'boli mining site and the Ampatuan massacre site. I sensed an air of finality only hours after the cat's failure to return, as if, something was amiss, something suddenly turned quiet. I never sensed such a deafening silence. Then, somewhere in my gut, I suddenly knew the cat is no longer coming back. Why? Whatever happened to this dear, dear cat?

Freaking Out

I did not regret going to the Cinematheque this afternoon to view the Berlinale, particularly, Frieder Schlaich’s “Three Stones for Jean Genet,” with Patti Smith narrating. Who is Patti Smith? Ja asked before we left home. Of course, I did not tell him I knew all about Patti Smith from Sheilfa, I miss that old witch.  Later, I'd realized Ja and Patti Smith are born the same year, and yet, they never heard of each other.  Ja lived in a totally different world, where Patti Smiths could not exist. Patti Smith believed rock and roll belongs to the people, not to the rich and famous rock stars. Ja hated rock and roll, whether or not it belonged to the people. I loved to think of people like Patti Smith at the time when I was already freaking out of my daily routine, where some people simply suffocate me. So, I did not regret viewing Un Paraiso, either; painful, absurd and shocking; I did not regret even that other story about a teenager wanting to buy Marc Jacobs sunglasses, I did not regret any of the stories at all; despite Ja, mumbling out loud in the middle of Marc Jacobs, “I’ve wasted my time here, what kind of movie is this, it’s just like a play you produce in class, where nothing is happening, the story is not going anywhere.” I covered Ja’s mouth, so he asked. “Let’s talk when we’re outside?” Outside, he said, I don’t have your intelligence to understand those stories, I could not perceive meaning from them. I sighed.  I would have said, I don't have the intelligence to understand my life. I could not perceive any meaning from my daily grind. But I said instead, “Only because you've grown up to expect the story has a beginning, a middle and an end.” 
Was it Marguerite Duras who said you can begin your story anywhere? 
“Your stories begin at the beginning and end at the end," I told Ja. "You adhere to Aristotelian unity. You even design your life in that concept of unity, mistaking it for truth. You believe in the Order of the Universe. You believe in the Absolute Truth and Absolute God, You cannot accept a movie that defies this sense of order. That's why, you freaked out.” 

Journal on Asia's Climate

While I was desperately battling against writer's block, a malady that really sounds so presumptuous, our friend Rorie F. posted on FB that the maiden issue of Asia Climate Journal has been presented at the Society of Asian Journalists (SAJ) gathering in Manila, which finally prompted me to check if the magazine has already come out. When I opened the page, I was delighted to see the picture that the editors chose to go along with my story. The rest of the articles in the journal give me a glimpse of what is happening around Asia, particularly in the advent of climate change.

I can't write

That's the problem with me nowadays. Even if the things I need to write are just lying before me, waiting to be touched, I simply can't write. I've tried writing at home, at the office; I've tried walking around, going to the malls, running at the park,  but still, when I get home and sit before my desk,  I simply can't write. I keep staring at the computer screen, wondering what's wrong. It seems that a part of me is on strike, or is trying to make me feel I would be totally helpless if I keep ignoring its demands. Its demands are my secret pleasure: Annie Proulx, Marguerite Duras, even Paul Theroux; and other delightful authors I've not been reading nowadays. I've been so busy trying to learn to shoot and do the Adobe Premiere that I haven't been reading a really good book lately; all I read are photography books and software instructions so that part of me that is fueling my writing is now getting back at me. I need to locate my pleasure first before I can go back to write.

Blurring Eyesight

That night, I told my Pa the only thing I strongly desire is simply to get my hands into the soil to plant some timber trees along the slopes of his farm. It has to be hard timber, but I don't care if it be soft. I particularly choose timber from the stories he used to tell me about how he arrived in our place when it was still a forest until the logging companies started felling down the gigantic trees. I was amazed that those gigantic trees have been in the place for nobody knows how long, nobody planted them there and yet, when the logging came, everybody acted as if they owned the land as far as they ca see, and went felling the trees, one by one, just like that! I told my Pa I wanted to see that forest and would start by planting a single tree, and then another and then another. But I can't seem to do it because in the city, something is pulling me out of myself, killing me. I did not tell this part to my Pa. I merely told him I wanted to plant trees desperately and would do it as soon as I get the chance. He did not appear surprised, which surprised me because my Pa has been very prone to violent mood swings. I never really got to the point of telling him I wanted to abandon everything right now just to be in some glorious nowhere. I am already very tired.

Mangagoy overnight

On March 1, 2013, as this picture indicates, I awoke to a morning in Mangagoy, which was a village, not a town, as I earlier thought it was. I arrived the previous night in a convoy that travelled the whole stretch of road from Trento, Agusan del Sur to Lingig and Bislig in Surigao del Sur before reaching the typhoon-hit town of Boston and Baganga, Davao Oriental. These were a string of towns that I wrote about, and heard about so much without seeing, and so, catching the glimpse of the bridge in Lingig and a huddle of houses, made me glimpse for the first time some parcels of the things I merely wrote about. When in the towns of Boston, someone happened to mention we were going to sleep somewhere in Mangagoy, my ears perked up and I summoned my last ounce of energy to keep myself awake. We arrived in a place full of what looked like ramshackle buildings at about midnight in the middle of nowhere before we were deposited in a hotel, whose name served as the stubborn monument to the exploits of the logging era. Was it a Paper Tree Hotel? A shame, they have no shame, celebrating the memory of their crime in that name. Before this, Mangagoy was merely a name, a signboard in a bus terminal, a mysterious name of a place I've never been to. Did they say it is the country's largest village? I would remember Tsa Elim and the snotty guy from Mangagoy, who meticulously kept his room squeaky clean, the sheets smelling of perfume, the walls well-painted and well-lighted, to indicate his breeding, class and arrogance back in my university days. But it took three decades before I had the temerity to discover the beautiful place where he came from.

Sunrise according to Ja

Reading Love

Its pages now yellowed with time [and perhaps, travel], the paperback bore the marks of the years. Only a year after it came out of the press in 2003—on October 6, 2004, to be exact—someone left a note, in an uneven handwriting on its first unnumbered page, which reads: “To: Ms. Ruth Walters, From Cathy Danis with Love.” Which sets me off thinking who Ms. Ruth Walters and Cathy Danis were. How did they come upon Toni Morrison, how were they introduced to the author, how did they discover her?  Was Toni Morrison something they talked about over a cup of coffee or tea or did Cathy Danis merely pick her on the shelf to give as gift? Did Ms. Walters read the book before it landed in my hands a year or so ago? I was looking for other marks on the yellowing pages as I finished reading it but did not find any, even as I left the green marks of my marker on its dog-eared pages for future readers to think about. If you'd be confronted with this kind of writing, would you be able to put the book down?

Life with Ja

He has been asking why I've been calling him Ja. No, he was not asking, he was complaining. "Ja, what do you mean Ja?" he began, "Who among your friends knew who is Ja? Do they pronounce it as Ja, like I do or J.A., as you do? But you don't capitalize each letter and put period into each so that they will pronounce it as J-A, instead of Ja. I'm sure, they pronounce it as Ja, I'm sure of it. So, who is Ja? By the way, who is he? Ja? His name almost sounds like Jack, if you put c and k in it.  I think they really think it is Jack.
Say Ja--as in Jack. They would think it's Jack. "It's not Jack!" I screamed at the top of my lungs. He knew how I hated that name. In our house, Jack is an accurst name, it's the name of the devil. "You're not allowed to speak that name in this house!" I screamed again. "That name is an abomination!" My voice, I think, reached as far as the mosque. It was still early. No one can be seen on the streets yet. "Then, who is Ja?" he asked, calmer now. "Tell me about Ja, then." So, I told him that Ja is actually J.A. Romualdez, the fictional name of someone who wrote a story about a catfish but has stopped writing long ago because he said writing is a hopeless enterprise. He nodded. It's easier for me to write it as Ja, instead of J.A. because I don't like words that are in all-caps. J.A. Romualdez has already assumed a lot of names lately, including Jamil Ahmed, the guy who frequents the stock market pages. I no longer wanted to continue. I felt I was veering towards another topic I did not want to talk about. But there's one think I am sure when I talk about Ja: he would never read this post and never will. He is the no-nonsense kind, you see, and had dismissed my writing as trash. While I--well, Sheilfa used to say I'm at my best when I'm murderously mad.

Inside the cement factory

He said, don't stay out too long, Ma'm, this is a danger zone, anything can happen here, better stay inside where the press con is about to begin. Here, it's not safe, we don't even allow our workers here unless they have important things to do. We're  no longer using these parts frequently now, if we do, you would not be able to stand the heat; we wouldn't have been here had the  engines been running; everything you'd see, those gigantic pipes, they'd be very hot and noisy, you won't be able to stand the heat and the noise. Nobody can. Better get inside, Ma'm, we don't know something might fall or give way somewhere. Better be safe. It's safer inside, I promise. Everyone has gone inside, what are you doing here, Ma'm? This is not safe for people, especially for news people and stowaways.

Lovers

I promise to give myself a break

Am I a Coffee Cat?

On the Road to Boston, Davao Oriental

That day, we took the road that diverged from the highway in Trento, Agusan del Sur, cutting through huge swathe of plantation area that would later give way to the long stretch of land where nothing much seemed to be happening after the trail of the typhoon. The road brought us by midday to a torn bridge that connected the land of Agusan to Surigao del Sur.  I was alarmed to discover that the British-Indian (or was it Indian-British?) humanitarian aid worker knew the area better than I did; she said she spent her Christmas there, she flew in after the devastation of Pablo, which hit us on December 4, 2012; I felt awkward and embarrassed when I realized she had been elected as our guide for this trip. No one knew the area better than she did and she had several local contacts. So, I pretended there was nothing unusual or extraordinary about that as I sat next to a British communications officer, spending her last weeks in the Philippines before flying back to London to wait for her reassignment to South Africa. Who are these people, I asked myself. Wasn’t it a bit insulting for a journalist—who grew up in Mindanao all her life—only to be guided by a foreigner from the other side of the world in her own territory? I was thinking then, this might be a new kind of conquest, something that is designed to make you feel totally emasculated, helpless in your own land? She was a sweet, handsome woman, bubbly with a lot of sense of humor.  I was reading Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure” at this time, its paperback copy, I secretly sneaked into one of my backpack pockets, but I refrained from asking her about the place where Hardy used to live and the places he wrote about; most people in my circle thought Thomas Hardy was the author of The Hardy Boys, but I realized I did not want to spoil my T.H. pleasure with what I might discover.

The Boatman

The TawaTawa in Camouflage

Just trying to detoxify

The absence of stories is failure of the mind

That shot is totally useless, throw it away, Ja said as soon as he saw this. But it's yellow and it's made of wood, I replied, you know how I love wood, and the way that it bears the marks of the elements, see those dents on the edges? See its uneven surface, the marks of time showing despite the yellow paint? The marks of the sea and wind, how can I just throw it away?
But there's no story there. What exactly are you trying to say? Ja asked.
No story! I exclaimed. Canary yellow against the blue, no story? Who painted it, no story? How long has it been standing there, no story? Who are the boatmen? What kind of people are they? No story? Isn't the absence of stories a failure of perception? Isn't it even a failure of the imagination?

I miss my reading time today

Photographing photojournalists

Lake Lanao. Mick and Toto. Panglantaw Mindanao Mobile Multimedia Newsroom. June 2014.  

Shining Moment

Loving the Shadows

Since I am still chasing an impossible deadline, just let me post this first to mark this time of my life, hoping that I can retrieve it later, and then, I can remember what I have gone through, and finally, I can write and talk about it with you, and that would be a chance for both of us to laugh again and be free.

Sunrise at Nova Tierra

Morning starts with Ja telling me if you really want to be a photographer you have to get up and watch what the sun’s first rays are doing to the mosque, get up, what are you doing there, lying down, you, spoiled lazy brat, just a few seconds and this moment is gone; I said, what do you mean, just a few seconds, are you sure you're talking to me? I live here for a long time, don't you realize? I have taken millions of pictures of that mosque and they all look the same,  I’m tired, I’m still sleepy, I have memory loss, and I still have to finish my dream to retrieve my memory, otherwise, I’ll feel lost and tired the whole day. As soon as I said this, I get up anyway to take a picture of the Al-Ziddiq Mosque.

Photographs are like Babies...

It’s a long wait for justice for this elderly claimant in Davao City who was forced to sit down as the long queue for claims processing seemed not to be moving. GERMELINA LACORTE Read on

Glimpse of Lake Lanao

After I chased Pam to the third or was it the fourth or the fifth (?) floor of the unfinished building, where, as soon as she saw me,  she glared at me saying, what are you doing here--you and your fear of heights? Go down, go down, just leave me alone, I can easily get this thing done. I said it's not about my fear of heights that is the problem here, finish what you're doing as fast as you can and let's get out of here, ASAP! All the while I saw the man or whoever it was at the construction site looking at us, with loathing, looked Pam up and down with such a look of contempt, why does he look angry, full of hate, am I just imagining things? I smiled my best smile to the man, hoping to break the ice, hoping his hatred will somehow thaw, but sometimes my charm just wouldn't work and this was just one of those times.

To the Man at the Marco

Back in October 2013, after I dismissed the class at a university at 9 pm, I crossed the street to cover a late night presscon in a hotel. On the third (or was it the fourth?) floor, we were all awaiting, ambush style, for the main source to appear  when I looked up at a man looking down upon us from his hotel room window.  This was my thoughts to the man:  Whoever you are, I want your life. If it’s not for sale, just give it to me for free and I’ll make you happy, do you think I talk like a whore? Come on down here, where Mick and I am squatting, looking up from among these cameras and TV crews, all waiting in ambush to interview the mayor; Mick, contemplating of a probable life in Jakarta, while I am thinking of buying a camera, how can I buy one, I need one very badly, what are you thinking standing there, opening your door like that? Are you looking down upon us, wondering, what are those cameras, those tripods doing down there, swarming like bees, what are they, TV crews, reporters? Those people with notebooks, pens, recorders, readied; why are they squatting like that? How about the others, how long have they been standing there, waiting? What’s up? Who are those people inside the function room, where their eyes seemed to be fixed upon, who are they really, these people? So many of them, waiting, when it’s almost 11 pm, only hour before midnight, what are these people waiting? Aren’t they going to get some sleep?

Losing my yellow coin purse

Losing my yellow coin purse is really very difficult because it brings back the devastating feeling of all my previous losses: those bagful of clothes long, long ago, I left in a hotel after I heard the devastating news about you; or that stupid brown wallet I lost inside the busy Marawi public market in June while taking shots with Mick and our Maranao friends; or how it felt to lose my beloved eyeglasses one Tuesday in April while shuttling from a magazine office to a TV network and finally, to a big newspaper compound at the heart of Jakarta. Or, how it was to leave the newly-found Rachel Cusk's book on a seat of a jeepney. They were not really worth millions, especially my yellow coin purse, which only had six one peso and two 25-centavo coins in it; but there’s something about losing that makes you feel empty and dry. There’s something about the absence of the thing you lost that makes you look around to notice the color you once took for granted but now makes you think of the missing object with ache. Now I look at them and take notice: the yellow tupperware glass standing tall amid all the clutter on my table, the yellow container thrown in a grass-covered lot next to our house, the yellow cover of Ken Auletta’s book “Googled,” my yellow underwear. I remember the day that Ja left and we ran out of cooking oil. Is that the way relationships are measured? Through the sheer number of yellow cooking oil containers bought from a convenience store, used up and emptied? [This post has nothing to do with Pnoy's yellow, which I vehemently detest!]

A Harried Visit to My Mother's Garden

I’m still in the midst of a very difficult assignment but I can’t help posting this here. It’s always gratifying to find out it was not my eye that was at fault, afterall; nor was it my poor overworked point-and-shoot. Something else is the reason why I can't take the kind of shots I wanted to take for a long, long while.

Watching Dewitt Jones

Who won't fall in love with Dewitt Jones?

Birthday Wishes

I never used to celebrate birthdays—but increasingly, these years, I get a certain wish, a strong, quiet but maddening desire, to be with myself on this day; to do nothing, to spend time with myself (of course, with dear ones); but primarily, to see the beloved hermit in the form of an Old Man with the Lamp on this very day, very far away from society. But normally, this wish doesn’t usually happen to me. In 2007, I remember spending this day right in a newsroom in Cebu, trying out a copy-editing job with friends and strangers who never had an inkling it was my birthday. I read a lone greeting from a friend (it was from Ca) in Davao when I sneaked peek on my FB—or was it my email? They never knew I was in Cebu, spending the graveyard hours copy-editing. In 2008, I was inside a dorm in Quezon city’s barangay Loyola Heights, battling with thick theoretical readings for our Media Ethics class at the Asian Center for Journalism (ACFJ) at the Ateneo the following day. I was already very drowsy because it was already deep in the night so I told Prateesh, my pretty Nepali roommate, I can’t take it anymore, I got to sleep and leave my readings in the morning; but Prateehba was so insistent that I should not sleep. “No, no!" she said. "Do your readings now. You won’t be able to wake up in the morning.”  “I can wake up,” I said, confidently. “My body has an inner clock that’s working perfectly.” Prateesh insisted that I should not sleep so, I read a few more pages for a while and only went as far as Herbert Marshall Mc Luhan and never got to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, which was my report the following day (how I figured out John Rawls’ theory of justice the following day without reading him is another story) but on this night of my birthday, I simply could not take all those readings anymore, I was already very drowsy as I declared to Prateesh, “I’m not going to brush my teeth tonight because it’s my birthday.” I can still see the shock and amusement on her face. She laughed so hard that she totally gave up making me read the rest of our readings. It was Bryant who discovered the following day it was really my birthday (I think I had forgotten it) and he rushed to join us with the Indonesian gang for some simple fun at the mall.  The following years, my wish to be alone on my birthday remains a wish that has never been completely fulfilled and satisfied; and this year, this month, I’m afraid I’m going to spend my day exploring a Unesco mountain.  I only wish I get to see the hermit.  It will make up for everything.   

View from the Seventh Floor

Just a Glimpse of Iligan

We climbed up the top floor of the other building (what do you expect if you're with an excited bunch of photojournalists?) Pam, whose friend showed us the way, was always willing to climb anything; she's the type who won't think twice of climbing the highest tree in a jungle just to get the vantage point of a photograph, any photograph; as she did when she climbed the unfinished building inside the MSU campus to take a perspective shot of Lake Lanao. Here, we took what Ja and Sean would refer to as the sniper's view of the Iligan City Hall; even as I was trying to suppress my inherent fear of heights as we inched closer and closer to the edge.

Anatomy of Pablo

I was trying to organize my files when I came upon the photographs I've taken in one of the series of stories I covered in the aftermath of the typhoon Pablo. The photographs showed me something that I did not see at the time I was covering the stories. Years after the killer typhoon that ravaged Mindanao towards the tail-end of 2012, I feel the need to look back and bravely take account of what I did and what I failed to do in those stories.

Another View from Our Office Window

Everybody is looking forward to the weekend while I'm still trying to cope with my writing backlogs.

Jeepney seen from a Jeepney

I know that if I show this picture to Ja, he would stare at it very briefly and then, swiftly, he would look away.  Oftentimes, he'd let out a sigh. A long,long sigh. If I'd ask him, what's wrong? Isn't this picture cute? Ja would not even utter a word. He would just give me one long, sorrowful look, and then, he'd go back to his business. Ja is my photo-critic and I exactly know what he wants in a picture.  He wants a picture that tells a story; the kind of pictures with people in them doing some actions; of course, I don't need to say that they should be well composed, the rule of thirds and all, you know, the kind that gets published in newspapers. But I don't know how to make myself want to take those pictures to please Ja. I only want to please myself.