the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

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.