the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

the greenie patch by Jeneen R. Garcia to be published on May 28, 2006   Just a few days more and it’s back to school again! Are you excited?   Well, maybe not. But you can make sure to start the school year green! Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can help the environment (and save your parents hundreds of pesos, too) as you prepare for school:   1) Check all your old stuff. Do you have pencils, pens, pencil cases, bags, lunch boxes, rulers, etc. that can still be used? Try using stickers to give them a new look.   Do your notebooks have unused pages? You can re-wire or sew the pages together to form a brand new notebook. You can even design your own unique notebook cover! Old cartolina, gift wrappers, magazines, and art paper are just some of the things you can use. Used bond paper like handouts can also be sewn together as scratch paper for your Math or English assignments.   Instead of buying a new uniform, see if your tailor can still adjust your old o...

In reverse order (sorry, not everything is documented in photos): May 15 - distribute earthly goods, leave for Davao May 14 - dinner with housemates at Waterfront, final packing May 13 - ship boxes to Davao at pier, bring drawers to Ana's place (by manual labor) May 12 - ferry from Negros to Cebu, tour Dalaguete's vegetable cold chain system, climb up to Osmena Peak (highest peak in Cebu at 1,040 m above sea level) 2 p.m. in Typhoon Caloy, talk to Mayor 6 p.m., arrive in city 8:30 p.m., Bible study May 11 - arrive 4 a.m. at Dumaguete from Cebu, crash at Larry's hotel room, drop by Literatura Festival 11 a.m., sit-in at Dumaguete Writer's Workshop 3 p.m., poetry reading at Cafe Antonio 7 p.m., hang out, shoot and pose with the writing fellows at Silliman Ave. May 10 - finish writing Mother's Day essay 3 a.m., go to Sun.Star to email column (and get free wi-fi while the rest of the Visayas is in a blackout), attend Island Life digital art exhibit launching at K...

the greenie patch by Jeneen R. Garcia published May 14, 2006     There’s a reason people say “mother knows best”. Mothers wisely know which things are good for their children, and which are bad.   Mother Nature, the oldest mother of all, has had so many children that she’s definitely an expert on what’s best for us.   She designed plants to produce oxygen, which we need to live, and made us to exhale carbon dioxide, which plants need to grow. This way we never run out of oxygen.   She put an ozone layer around the Earth to protect us from the burning rays of the sun, but at the same time let in enough heat to keep us from freezing.   She gives us food with all the nutrients we need. Plus, her food comes in packaging that’s automatically recyclable! Fruits like bananas, coconuts, and oranges come in a protective covering that turns into a natural fertilizer for plants to grow strong. All you need to do is bury it under the earth after you’re done eating. Isn...

lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia published May 13, 2006 When I was little, I had such fine, straight hair that my hairclips would keep sliding down from the side of my head to my ears. Then just before I turned 11, my mother dragged me to the parlor and had my hair cropped like a boy’s. To have boyish hair at that age and, as she also pointed out, no breasts to speak of! It was only the first of a series of tearful episodes, my shoulders shuddering with sobs as the hairdresser snipped away every time my hair grew past my ears. My mother said I couldn’t grow my hair long because I didn’t know how to fix it. But aren’t mothers there to fix their daughters’ hair?                                                                                       Thinking abou...

the greenie patch by Jeneen R. Garcia published April 30, 2006     The past month, the greenie patch was abuzz with the Greenhouse Gas (GG) Gang, and how its members, Methane, Nitrous Oxide, CFCs, and Carbon Dioxide, have been messing up our climate. When there are too many of these gases in our air, they cause terrible typhoons and hurricanes when the sun should be shining, and make the sun dry up our water wells when it should be raining.   Let’s get to know the GG Gang better so we can stop them from doing more damage to our Earth!   Last time, we learned that carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) comes from machines that use fossil fuels like coal, gasoline and diesel. So when we walk or bike instead of use our cars, we release less CO 2 in the air. Plus, when we DON’T use fossil fuels, we don’t let loose two other GGs: Ozone (O 3 ), and Nitrous Oxide. Isn’t that great?   But what about those big power plants that use coal to produce electricity? They make lots of CO 2 ! ...

http://pcij.org/stories/2006/charter3.html THE PCIJ has just finished a three-part series that looks at the uncanny similarities in the manner in which Ferdinand Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo have attempted to change the constitutions prevailing during their incumbency. The series was written by Raissa Espinosa-Robles who, in 1984, wrote a 14-part series on the Marcos constitution for Business Day. Raissa dug up her files again and found transcripts, interviews and speeches that attest to how similar the current situation is to 1971-73, when Marcos managed to ram through a new constitution. This series compares historical material and transcripts of recent discussions in the Consultative Commission (ConCom) and found the following similarities: * Both the 1973 charter and the one currently being proposed were seen primarily as attempts to save an embattled president and keep that president in power by changing the form of government. * In both, there were sweeteners. In 19...

packing up is giving me an existential crisis that i'd rather avoid by writing here. i have a balikbayan box waiting to be filled. i took the first real leap the other night by moving my books into my neighbor ana 's library-writing room, where she generously offered me a whole bookshelf. and now, what to do with everything else? college handouts i've been moving with me through the years with the intention of using them as reference material for work (but which i never have) handouts and kits from workshops that hold precious information for maybe research in my MS studies (but that i'll probably never get around to reading again. EVER.) bags and bags and bags of unlabeled negatives (from September 2002-present), photo albums and loose prints (from when i was still willing to spend for printing the whole roll), contact prints (from when i didn't want to spend for printing the whole roll, but photo CDs were still expensive), index prints (from when they still came ...

Supreme Court: Arrests, raid under 1017 were illegal   First posted 04:04pm (Mla time) May 03, 2006 By Tetch Torres INQ7.net     THE Supreme Court has upheld President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's power to declare a state of emergency but ruled that arrests and a police raid made under Proclamation 1017, her instrument for such a declaration in February, were illegal. Voting 11-3, the Supreme Court said the Constitution empowered the President to declare a state of national emergency but also said the arrest of university professor and Inquirer columnist Randy David and Akbayan national chairman Rolando Llamas and the raid at the office of The Daily Tribune virtue of Proclamation 1017 violated the law.   Those who dissented were Associate Justices Renato Corona, Presbitero Velasco, and Dante Tinga who wanted the high tribunal to include of a definition on the extent of the President’s emergency powers.   The decision was penned by Associate Justice Angelina Sandova...

lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia to be published on May 6, 2006   Already, half the summer has been consumed in maddening heat, bottles of sunblock, and mileage across rough road and sea.   As early as March, I was out and about, diving at sunrise in Malapascua, rappelling from the mouth of a huge cave in Argao, and hiking up Cebu’s last remaining natural forest in Alcoy , a few days later rock-climbing to the peak of a limestone cliff in El Nido at the start of a backpacking tour of Palawan .   Today I sit in a corner café a few steps from where I live, facing an empty computer screen, wondering why, for every sweet bruise and ache gained, I seem to have lost a lifetime of stories, my soul now a blank page. It is as if in moving so fast, I’ve been dropping words in my wake.   I remember that time the family went on our first long road trip: the cold morning on the bus, Mama easing my youngest brother’s stomachache with a hot water bottle as I kept still, trying no...