The Origami Project

Because it was my everdearest mother's birthday last Thursday, I had to come up with a gift idea that would surpass last year's (a scrapbook of her trip to Davao, personally hand-delivered to New York). Especially since she's been asking me to go visit her again, but I just couldn't leave in the middle of the semester :P


My mother, you see, is the type who keeps what her children gives her in her bag so she can take it out and show it to everyone she meets until it's all ratty and torn. Thats why I have to give her something I've made every year--poem, story, photo, drawing--for birthdays, Christmas, etc. Maybe this is also why, for me, the most precious gifts are handmade, not bought. Time and effort are the best expressions of love, after all, more than any amount of money ;) (although money's not so bad, either :P).


And so, in the midst of "hell month" (because the semester's deadlines are, as I write, crashing down all around me) and the corresponding paralysis in creativity, I managed to come up with this at 3 a.m. last week, after writing my papers. My mama had sent me an origami kit last month from out of the blue (she likes to do that, send me unexpected stuff like candy and stickers and whatnot for no reason at all). I'd been occupying myself with it in the wee hours of the morning, a new form of procrastination from schoolwork.


So I felt it was just right that I give her origami for her birthday. But I still didn't know what to do with the origami after I'd made them. When I put the pen down on the yellow folder I'd bought as a birthday card, the story just started writing itself... (I love the creative recklessness of not having a draft ;) Improvisation is the heart of creativity, I say, hehe. It's also a good excuse for laziness ;).