Tick-tock

Ah, it’s going to be a hectic week.  I can see it now.  Banyaga paper coming up, with the final Thesis proposal as well.  Better get rested up, and pray that I can focus on what needs to be done and get serious for a change.

So, I better make the most of the weekend. Ergh.

Breathing Room

The class was able to get an unexpected break, as Dr. Baytan (uncharacteristically I might add) allowed us to use the time supposed to be allocated to his class tomorrow to work on our long papers.  Things are really tight, as not only is the deadline for the Banyaga paper coming closer and closer, there’s also the final Thesis Proposal we have to submit as well.  It’s much shorter than the Banyaga paper, and at about ten pages it should be much easier by comparison.  Or at least, I’d hope anyway.  Since I’m not taking up Literature (I’m in Creative Writing), the proposal I’m going to submit will probably be light on theory and focus instead on genre influences and situating myself in the local tradition.  While the local literary scene is still relatively young when compared to, oh, the Western tradition, there’s so much I still don’t know–all the more reason to ‘hit the (reference) books’ again.

On the non-academic side, I’m embarrassed to admit that I was so engrossed in reading that I stayed up well into the early hours of this morning.  And no, I wasn’t reading a book — instead I was reading Blackest Night, or more specifically the downloads of the core issues of that DC Comics franchise crossover plus the tie-ins with all the other DC titles.  It’s a little funny, when one considers the fact that I rarely read any of the Western comic franchises, but when I do my attention is focused on it to the exception of everything else.  Those were a lot of wasted hours, but at least I had some fun, ahahaha.

Anyway, I’ll have to catch a little nap, so I’ll be more clear-headed when I finish my assignment.

Dead River

Dead River

The old river no longer flows,
Its bright azure waters long gone.
In its place, a dry riverbed,
Its surface baked hard by the sun.
No longer do iridescent
Fish swim through its robust currents;
their sun-bleached bones lay here and there.
No longer does emerald wreathe
its banks; like skeletal fingers
empty boughs sway in the stillness.
The river, it no longer flows.

Inspiration seems so fickle.
At times it comes like a torrent,
At times, like a minute trickle.
Yet for it to cease completely
It is an artist’s greatest fear.
It is my own greatest fear,
that the reservoir of my mind
has long since dried up.

Wandering Attentions

Urgh.  No work and all play makes Myssa feel rather stupid.  That pretty much sums my feelings for today.

I… Really need to shape up.  I can’t last long this way, but oh, it’s so SO HARD to focus on what I need to do.

Productive Unproductivity

Yes, I realize how contradictory the title is, but bear with me here.  I feel like talking a bit, especially now that the issues my house’s phone lines have been suffering were resolved (for the moment).

I just spent the good bit of the afternoon looking through the Kultura shop at SM Mall of Asia, and comparing the prices of the woodcraft-based kitchenware they had on sale.  Why, you might ask?  Simply put, it’s something me and my two friends decided on as a wedding gift.  Y’see, the last member of our quartet–who is living in San Francisco–is getting married soon, and we wanted to give something that was not only of practical use to a newlywed couple (or at the very least looked very nice as a mantlepiece display), but also has that Filipino flavor.  All that we need to do now, aside from actually buying the dining set and having it wrapped, is what kind of tree the plates and bowls would be made out of.  It sounds silly, I know, but it’s important as the material used influences the price; a plate made out of the kamagong tree is much more expensive than a plate of the same size made out of, say, wood from the acacia or mango tree.

I’m still waiting for the reply of my two friends, but the decision has to be done before the end of the week, as the sister of our expatriate friend is leaving on the third of August; that means that our little gift has to be wrapped and ready before that time.

This is on top of the painting I’ve managed to do on my Cato Sicarius stand-in during the morning — all I need to do is touch-up and highlighting.  Oh, and the re-purposing of those old ideas from my high school and university years is coming along quite well too.  Indeed, the picture included in this post is one of the results of that.  I have to say, Miyuu has never quite looked as good as she is now.  Funny how more than a decade influences one’s drawing style…

Sounds like a productive use of my time, yes?  When compared to the literal lazy day that was my birthday, I mean.  Well, it was time well-spent alright, but it wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing; at this point, my very VERY important paper on Banyaga still remains unwritten, and the pressure is building, especially since it’s supposed to be a Master’s degree-length paper.  Meaning at least twenty pages of critical academic insight.

And I haven’t even typed down a single word of it.

This is on top of the fact that there’s also another unrelated assignment for the same subject for this week, never mind the revisions I need to do on much of the poems in my folio in preparation for the out-of-town Workshop for my Poetry class.

This… is no longer simply procrastination.  It’s running away from the harsh reality of academia.  I’m reminded suddenly of that one episode of Lucky Star, where Konata, while talking to Kagami on the phone, mentions the odd little things one does to avoid studying for one’s exams (like cleaning one’s room despite the fact that the exam is VERY important), only now it’s less funny when I’m the one doing it.

Life-Gift

Well, here I am. I’m a year older to day, but I feel no different. I wasn’t expecting to, but sometimes one wonders if, for this year at least, it wouldn’t be just the same old routine. Sadly nothing particularly noteworthy happened, but I could at least take comfort in that I wasn’t sick in bed like I was during my birthday three-odd years ago.

You’d think that I feel a little reflective, as I take one more step towards middle age, but rather than that I’m feeling a little bored. And annoyed of course, but that’s more due to the fact that, up to today, the phone line problem my house is experiencing hasn’t been fixed.

Though… Maybe I do need to take an introspective walk.

Lethargy

Today I did… nothing, basically.  It felt like it was another long weekend, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I had a paper to write I would have just stayed in bed.  It was strange, since I felt so tired and couldn’t keep my eyes open, but as far as I remember I had more than enough hours of sleep.  I guess it’s just one of those days, where one doesn’t feel like doing anything.

Still no internet at home, so as I’ve been doing for several days now I’m posting this in an Internet shop somewhere in Metro Manila.  It was a feat to have been able to get out of bed, really, but here I am.  This, despite the dark and ominous clouds that will surely bring a deluge this evening.

I needed to check on my mail, after all, especially since we had to download this form from the Poetry Workshop group for the trip to Taal next week.

Denoument

At least that’s what I’d hope.  I’m still not happy that, once more, the house is without a stable internet connection.  Ah, I knew it was too good to last.

With the archive research exercise done with — I just had to go with Francisco Arcellana’s Divide by Two — I just need to come up with ten questions for an imaginary interview with Dr. Charlson Ong on his novel Banyaga.  It’s far easier than the paper that immediately preceded it, but I still needed to gather my thoughts for it.  My mind being a cluttered mess, I had to do something to focus.

So, I took a walk.  It wasn’t too hot this afternoon, mostly due to the prevailing cloud cover over the city.  My meanderings took me from our house in Pasay to Makati, and eventually I stopped and sat down in the park that was just adjacent to the Philippine Stock Exchange.  It was nice, quiet, and very peaceful, but as I sat there, I couldn’t help but regret that I didn’t bring a camera with me… or at the very least,  my trusty iPOD.

Still the walk served its purpose: I had the questions I wanted to ask during that theoretical interview.  All I have to do now is write them down.

Time-Bound

Well, it’s past noon already, and I have to say that my search so far has been mostly fruitful.

I’m currently at the Filipinas Heritage Library in Makati looking through their collection, but while the quality (in terms of preservation) of the books they have is admirable (even the more venerable books look almost-new), they don’t exactly have what I need: although the books I was so helpfully given by the librarian (Our People’s Story: Philippine Literature in English by Gemino H. Abad and Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Philippine Short Stories 1925-1940 selected and edited by Leopoldo Y. Yabes, Philippine Literatures: texts, themes, approaches by Augusto Antonio A. Aguila, Joyce L. Arriola and John Jack G. Wigley) contained stories by Francisco Arguilla (The Mats, Benediction, A Marriage is Made) they’re not what I need (Divide by Two).  Indeed, only Storymasters 5: 15 Stories by Francisco Arcellana had it, but it was something I already learned from my visit to the DLSU Taft Library yesterday afternoon.

Luckily the place I visited before this was the University of the Philippines Diliman Main Library.  In contrast to the well-preserved volumes that I was provided at the Filipinas Heritage Library, the books I perused there were, in many ways, falling apart, however I was able to find what I needed — printings of the story dating from the early sixties, to a relatively more recent edition printed around 2004.  I did felt bad about having them photocopied though; the pages in one book in particular seemed like it would disintegrate if I looked at it in a bad way!

Since I’m strapped for time, I think I’ll pass on the visit to the National Library for now, and focus on the material I’ve collected.  I’m not sure what Dr. Baytan meant, but it looks like the story has two versions — one that seems to be like an early draft, shorter and much impersonal in tone, and a second one that seems to have been cleaned-up (and much more personal in tone) and formatted.  It is the second version that seems to show more in anthologies, particularly those from the seventies onwards, and as such is the version that has seen more cases of (slight) editorial revisions.

I think I’m going to have to give each of my photocopied research materials a look, but I don’t expect to see much variation outside of the formatting used with each publishing of the story.  Hopefully I won’t take more than an hour or two, so I could actually write the paper.  Then, after that, I should be able to focus on the other requirement that I have to post today: ten questions for Dr. Charlson Ong on Banyaga.  Ah, fun times.

Oooh, embarrassing.

There’s one more day left until I have to post the result of my research on Francisco Arcellana’s short story Divide by Two, and while it seems I’m tight for time it doesn’t seem all that bad.  The DLSU Filipiniana library has been a little helpful, and as a result I’ve bee able to track down two of the required versions of the story for content analysis and side-by-side comparison making.  Just two more to go, and I think that I can find the rest at either the University of the Philippines of Diliman’s main library, or the National Library.  So, I’m going to have to wake up early to get things done.  Again.  Don’t you loooove cramming?

Got to remember the Library permit I got this afternoon from DLSU’s library services, so I won’t have to undergo the embarrassment I experienced earlier at UP Diliman, where I was turned away by library security since I didn’t have a research permit.  What a waste of an hour and a half’s worth of MRT travel that was.

On the down side, it looks like I’m going to have to post my finished report from a shop again, as our home’s DSL gone down again.  Darn it, I just paid our phone plus internet bills, and this is what I get?  I just hope nothing else goes wrong tomorrow when I head over to UP, and after that either the Ayala Filipiniana Library at Makati, or the National Library at U.N. Avenue.