the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

a look back into the past to start the new year right...

lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia     Where I live now, it is December, and the nights are warm and heavy, and the sea is always calm, and the grass is fading yellow on the field. A man stands along the boulevard, his feet treading, it seems, on the horizon itself. On a bustling Monday afternoon, only sky and sea matter.   January had offered only the anticipation of the unknown and the uncertain--possibility! It was the beginning of the end, I sensed. Only, I had a vague idea of what it meant. Four months later, I had moved out of my office of four years, moved out of my rented place, and moved out of Cebu .   I was adrift for the first time in my life. I had no source of income or guidance about where to go next. All I had was a restlessness I couldn’t define telling me that my life as I had known it till then had to end.   But surely the end of the present must mean the beginning of the future. The problem was, I could see only a frightening dark wall before...

a summary of things i've managed to keep records of, whether on paper or in my steadily dimming memory.     TRAVEL   Scratched off my always-wanted-to list   MAR - Diving in Tinggo off Olango, Monad Shoal off Malapascua APR - 11-day backpacking tour of Palawan (PPC, El Nido, Sabang, Honda Bay, Narra) MAY - Going up Osmena Peak     - Seeing the Liloan lighthouse JUL - Canopy walk in Cagayan de Oro AUG - Road trip with Mama (Bukidnon, Misamis Oriental, Davao Sur, North Cotabato ) SEP - Diving in Arbor and Granada off Boljoon     - Working in Mindanao (ComVal, Davao Norte, Davao Sur for an agrarian reform project) NOV - Road trip with Papa (DVO-CDO by bus, CDO-DMGTE by boat, DMGTE-CBU by EZ-ride, pumpboat, and v-hire, BOLJOON-CBU CITY by multicab and v-hire)   Unexpected bonuses   FEB - seeing the Supreme Court in session in Manila MAR - 6-day backpacking tour of Southern Cebu (Argao-Alcoy-Moalboal-Badian), with separate to...

this morning i just took my first prelims exam, so i'm giving myself a short break/ reward before i start working again on my students' papers and studying for the next exam. i'm writing a blog entry to commemorate it because 1) i had only a vague idea of how exams for grad school and for Silliman and for this notoriously difficult professor went, and 2) this was the first time i actually studied for an exam since college (!). i was even afraid i'd forgotten how. i mean as far as i can remember, the only exams i've taken after college are the professional civil service exam and the TOEFL, and THOSE aren't things you study for =P actually, i think i HAVE forgotten how to study, as in college-style where you focus on all the little details that might come out in trick questions. fortunately, i have the sense now to read for the sake of understanding rather than for getting as many words into my head as possible that i can use in the exam. which means i didn't ...

December 8, 2006. For the first time, my Powershot A540 went to school to with me so I could take pictures of tissue slides under the microscope, to help my students review for their lab exam. To my delight, and even with many instances of poor focusing, my A540 still came through =D Never before did I think it possible that I could shoot cells through an ordinary compound microscope (sunlight and mirrors still the best!) with an ordinary digital camera. And so allow me to share my excitement over my first microscope shots (aren't they cute??). And my joy at actually recognizing the types and parts of the tissues based on the textbook description hehe. Next time, will shoot corals under the stereoscope--something I saw for the first time the day before this. It's an even more fascinating landscape! I'm finding more and more reasons to love biology =D

November 30, 2006 - Martisan, Bacong, Negros Oriental. In commemoration of Bonifacio's heroic death, or perhaps of the fact that all classes had been suspended for the intrams, Stephen and the usual gang of DMs got together, this time for a night dive at Mandarin Point--my first one on this island. I was content turning off my light (which was weak, anyway--gotta get myself an LED!) and watching the bioluminescent plankton. Thankfully, Vera kept spotting all the good stuff that made it worth the trip for my camera. No mandarin fish, but I DID see some movement in the little volcanoes that i saw last time . Since one of the dive objectives was spearfishing, we had fresh lapu-lapu for dinner (cooked in some mysterious European style by Stephen =P), but thankfully had beef and spaghetti as back-up. Had to bring my oceanography book to make sure I didn't fall behind schedule in my readings for class, but reading about the sea while sitting in front of the sea is no effort at all. ...

November 25, 2006. Fiesta time in Dumaguete! my third weekend here, and i'm into my third watersport--kayaking =D for this weekend, i had two visitors from cebu who were in town for the grand eating. kayaks courtesy of malax , whom i met on Multiply, and whom i met in person for the first time. additional beauty courtesy of jakathra , whom i met in Bohol almost exactly three years ago during my first time to kayak, and her paddler-outdoor-everything loverboy morris, whom she met on that same trip. the experience of sitting inside a single kayak floating towards the sunset, and then under the full moon at midnight was so enthralling, i became a convert for life after that. this was only my second time to kayak (and, turns out, kat's, too). malax, my paddling partner who paddles from MACTAN to BOHOL in her free time, was kind enough to give me a professional orientation on how to maneuver our tandem sit-on-top kayak with feathered paddles (whew all these outdoor sport terminolog...

Rating: ★★★★★ Category: Other If you're a friend of mine or just a random web wanderer/world wonderer, and you want to communicate but don't have a Multiply account, click here to send me a message. All words and images on these pages copyright of Jeneen R. Garcia, unless otherwise credited. For permission to use anything, leave a message and I'll try to get back to you ASAP. Current site theme courtesy of Lisa .

November 19, 2006 – Agan-an, Sibulan, Negros Oriental. What better way to spend a birthday than to try skimboarding for the first time? The wind was so strong, the board banged against my lower lip and front teeth while I was holding it. But it was SO worth it. *that's cebu island there in the background =D note the raised pinky finger all throughout. hehehe. bakla talaga ako!

  when i was younger, i used to make an inventory of all the gifts i got and from whom. now that i’m older (and we do get fewer gifts, don’t we, if at all =), i count how many people greet me, sort of as an indicator of whether my friends have also increased in number along with my age. my standard is that the number of greetings i get by phone and text should be at least equal to my age. last year, it was off the scale—too many friends ;-)   this year’s birthday index:   ADVANCED (day before) = about 2 or 3 texts ON TIME =   25 texts, 1 call (only! tsk tsk) **first greeting from my father (who says he doesn’t believe in birthdays anymore since shifting religions) at 00:05:47 **weirdest hour award goes to my former boss who sent a greeting at 03:51:55 BELATED (day after) = 2 texts, 4 calls   i guess that’s good enough, even though i didn’t quite hit the number on the day itself.   actually, i didn’t have the usual “rite of passage” feeling this year; didn...

November 19, 2006. What I found in my solitary search for a marine sanctuary. From Bantayan, Dumaguete City to Agan-an, Sibulan, Negros Oriental.

thank God for the rain.   the other day, and then last night, we finally got SOME downpour, although it was intermittent and didn’t last very long each time.   it’s the end of my second week, and i’ve had a little more experience about what they day-to-day is like as a graduate student of Silliman. last Monday, for example, i paid my first visit to the university library.   researching at the library   i have to say that going into the silliman library makes me miss the ateneo and UP diliman libraries =( i typed in “ cora ls journal” into the online public access catalog (a.k.a. OPAC) and got FIVE results. i typed “fish journal” and got about twenty. and this is in a university by the sea that has pioneered coastal resource management in the philippines? people told me i had to go to the Marine Lab if i wanted to see publications on marine topics, but there the materials aren’t properly cataloged. still, wasn’t this supposed to be the MAIN library?   i went to l...

November 11, 2006. First dive of the semester =) Even though had a headache from a beginning cold and cough, went diving anyway to try out my brand new regulator and gauges =D my buddy, ian ray, assembled my reg for me. (of course, all headaches and illnesses disappeared underwater, as they always do)

day 2 make myself feel better by fixing up my room-- something i can find comfort in and feel proud about. finally, starting from scratch with a place of my own. and of course, wonderful God that i have, just as i finish taking photos of my new sanctuary , i get a text from the department head telling me i have a slot for a teaching fellowship! nervous about teaching, and college zoology lab at that, but i don't say no to a challenge, especially if it's something i'm afraid of. and at last, i can enroll. grocery for breakfast food and buy a trash can for my room. have a dilemma--blue, basic one, or red and yellow one (to match my floor and laundry basket) that costs twice as much. at the last minute, beauty wins over budget. day 3 i finally get to attend the class i missed; talking to my classmates, with whom i have different things in common with. and the teacher who tells me to shift to environmental science is actaully funny, in a wry way, which is doubly funny for me. m...

so this is how it feels to live in a place where it feels like summer all the time--hot and humid. i never thought the heat could depress me this much, but here it is. it's definitely not hunger this time, even though my mind was swooning this morning when i went to the department to see if i could enroll already, because i hadn't eaten since i arrived from cebu early this morning. maybe it's depressing because i'm so near the sea and yet i have to walk around wearing normal clothes like a normal person sweating through the day.   after class this evening, i walked aimlessly by myself past the stores that were already closing, not really hungry for dinner, since i'd overcompensated for my morning hunger by eating two cheesebreads and a bottle of soymilk plus nova right before class. not even on my first night away from home, in college in manila, have i felt homesick. not like this. must be the heat. and the tiredness from all the traveling since thursday. my first ...

lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia       Just as I do not know when I first learned to use words to name the world and make it my own, I do not remember a time when I did not have the sea.   Perhaps it was an ancient stirring in my cells that had me walking the shores of Samal Island in the summers--nine years old, magnifying glass in hand to peer at the curious creatures stranded by the tide.   Even going to college in hilly Quezon City , I swear I would sometimes smell brine in the air while walking under the acacia trees. Summer kept me in school, too, but it was during that long separation that I found the sea spilling over to--no, totally saturating--my poetry. I fed on words like perigean spring tide from enormous libraries that said so much about the sea, but had not a single drop of it on their shelves.   A few years later, after getting my diving license, I would lose all the words as I drifted in awe for the first time beneath a huge cloud of j...

September 23 to October 21, 2006. Less than two months after our reunion in Davao, here we are again... on another continent.

October 25, 2006 - Off Samal Island. Only three days since I arrived from New York, with a slight headache from jetlag, and I was itching to use my new diving gear. I called the dive shop (082-305-DIVE) when I got home at 3 p.m. from some errands and learned that there was a night dive that night, meeting time at 4 p.m. To dive or not to dive? Not too hard to answer, headaches notwithstanding. This dive, my last one in Davao before I move to Dumaguete next week, was also one with many firsts: 1) first night dive in Davao 2) first time to dive with my very own wetsuit and dive computer =D 3) first time to do underwater night photography =D It was hard, I tell you, especially since my last night dive was more than a year ago. Plus, only had a puny Eveready flashlight to illuminate the darkness. Hard to shoot holding both a flashlight and a camera. Fortunately, one of my buddies, Dave, had a $750-super-bright rechargeable LED light strong enough for me to shoot without a flash, and at de...

Imagine entering a glass rectangle on a busy street, with a red, lighted apple hanging suspended in it. Then imagine entering a glass tube within that rectangle, which takes you down to a large room full of iPods, iMacs, and other Apple gizmos. Imagine it's open 24 hours to anybody on the street. That's the Apple Store on 59th St. and 5th Ave. You actually see people there doing their homework and surfing the net! And of course, the whole point is to make your mouth water and make you want to slave away for a whole year on a MacBook (which, i think, is their latest 13-inch notebook). After Apple, how can life ever be the same again? Photos taken using the Photo Booth software and the built-in itsy-bitsy camera. *Sorry, don't have pictures of the Apple Store because i'm at an internet cafe now and ony have the photos in my flashdisk to work with.

   yep, folks, as i type i am on flight KE623 from seoul to manila. my personal touch screen says we are at exactly 38998 ft over taiwan, crusing at 552 mph, with 1 hour, 21 mniutes and 687 more miles to go. and i have free wi-fi. woohoo! korean air rocks! on the 15-hour flight from new york to seoul, i watched four movies and ate two meals. could've seen more, of course (To Kill A Mockingbird, especially), but i thought i was being crazy tiring myself out like that. i didn't discover till the end of the flight that they've made the internet free since october because i don't think they're earning from it. they're phasing it out, supposedly, and making it free is their way of doing it =D the trade-off is, i haven't been able to write anything =( ah, the wonders and temptations of technology. so i'm almost home. i can't wait. (oops. please turn your heads counterclockwise to view the photo)

(surprisingly, another blog entry, so soon. on a friday night) things that make new york still my favorite city so far in this country: 1. the subway get an unlimited pass and you can take the train or bus to ANYWHERE in this city. get on at times square and get off at a totally different world, like chinatown, or the bronx, or the east village. or flushing (may sariling mundo). i also love how everything's in blocks and avenues so it's always easy to find your way around. makes me not mind all the walking. all you need is to know how to read. 2. the libraries borrow books at one branch and return them at another. and not just books--graphic novels, audio books, cds, DVDs, magazines.... you can borrow FIFTY items at a time, for as long as THREE WEEKS. whew! and they have free internet, printing, job-search facilities, lectures every day on topics ranging from nutrition, photography, and resume-writing, and a nice collection of art, too. i could stay there all day, i could. (of ...

11 PM on a Monday night, Columbus Day, on the 7 train from Flushing to Bryant Park. Thirty minutes of the train all to ourselves. Isn't it great to have that video function on your digital camera? =D

These are the salmon trying to go up the river to spawn. But they can't because the river has been deliberately blocked by this green metal fence. Imagine these fish two to three feet long exerting all their energies doing what they were made to do, not knowing that the path of their lives has been changed.

Description: NOTE: The writer is a popular Dabawenyo singer concerned with social issues such as fair trade , and is also an economics professor at the University of the Philippnes in Diliman. My name is Gary Granada, I am a KaalagaD volunteer, and I need 5 seconds of your time to help reduce the use of styrofoam in fast food chains. What was meant to be a nice and simple Saint Francis Day motorcade-march to McDonald’s last 6 October 2006 turned out to be a nightmare. We were rudely treated by McDonald’s, to put it mildly. Weeks before, we already sought a dialogue with them to reiterate our concern for their reluctance to reduce their use of styrofoam, despite their pledge to seriously attend to it during our dialogue in 2002! (Jollibee said the same thing, and while we are not satisfied with their response, at least they made some effort to shift to other packaging and serving materials.) We wrote to them, went to their office, made follow ups, waited for a response. The most we got ...

And this is where the salmon are forced to go because they can't go further upriver-- into crowded holding ponds where they're caught, killed, and milked for their eggs and sperm, which will then be put in basins for fertilization. I mean, sure they're going to die, anyway, right after they spawn. But in the river, they die on their own terms, among the stones. And not until the males have fought valiantly for their mates, and the females have laid their eggs and made sure they've hatched. Not in the hands of a knife-wielding salmon hatchery worker.

i'm at south street seaport right now, and it's about 4:30 pm, dawn on the other side of the world. i'm sitting in a lounge chair with a view of the brooklyn bridge, and the river, tug boats and water taxis sailing along as the sun sinks lower behind the buildings. it's an indian summer now, they call it, a sudden warm week in the middle of fall. the sun is following me even though i keep moving away. just got back from the salmon river in upstate new york. every year, the salmon fight the current in the river, going upstream to lay their eggs in the place they themselves were hatched. it was incredible seeing these big fish, and also quite sad. will be posting a video later to explain. stayed in a cabin at the shore of lake ontario (yup, across canada!). on the way home, dropped by albany, the state capital (something like boston and DC), an orchard in clinton for wine-tasting, a lake in the woods serendipitously discovered, and the vanderbilt mansion overlooking the h...