the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

STRANGER THAN FICTION by Jeneen R. Garcia Published in May 2002 One of  the more embarrassing things about my parents is their love—no, compulsion—for taking photos. No opportunity passed up, the flash goes off everywhere: malls, hotel lobbies, sidewalks, parlors. Even bathrooms. And I don’t mean cutesy shots of naked babies in a bathtub. I mean me and my siblings, all grown up, with the bathroom mirror of some resort as backdrop. Father’s orders, don’t ask me . They love to travel. Thus, we have pictures of cockpits with amused pilots and stewards, the beaming captain and crew of different sorts of ships (including a submarine), but fortunately none with a bus driver yet, though the Davao-Manila bus route is a favorite. I didn’t think it was that bad till I graduated from college. We were in a classy restaurant for a joint graduation dinner with my friends’ families. As we stood looking for a table, my parents whipped out a camera for the waiter. My epiphany ...

The von Garcia family singers strike again--this time with a different name! ;) Song written and recored on the same day.... This is the last installment of Mama's birthday present: the video we somehow recorded in secret even though she was just at the next block :) As usual, we didn't plan it, it just happened that it was the only opportunity we had to do a recording before the party, and somehow the color schemes worked out, too. You just need to believe that it can be done ;) Besides it's promotional for our career HA HA! (You have to watch the video to the end to get the joke). Make sure to click on the HD button to see the high-res version! ============ QUEEN OF QUEENS I. She's the queen of Queens You know what I mean She's here to stay forever She's making a scene She showed me how to hustle And make them greens She has that kind of love So I can live my dreams She's my mama (2x) (Queen of Queens) II. She brought me out to ...

For Papa who still refuses to come see Kaizen! In Tagalog, with English and Spanish subtitles :) This was my first attempt at using iMovie. Did it around 2 AM on a Saturday night since it was already Father's Day in the Philippines.

25 December 2008 and 01 January 2009. ...family pictures in New York and Connecticut, pre- and post-hair cut (plus streaks for the first time in my life ;P)

Working with the warm, fuzzy feeling I got from having everyone on a conference call with Papa on his birthday--him in Davao, me in Queens, Jace in Manhattan, and Josrique in Maryland--I was excited about using simple technology to come up with another remote birthday gift idea, this time for Mama. She had been begging and nagging the three of us to book an hour at the studio during Jo's band practice for us to do our own recording (her longtime dream, she said), but there simply wasn't time, because of our difficult schedules (and actually, because none of us were very keen about being so "showbiz" :P). But her birthday was coming up, and who knew when the three of us would see each other again? So on my last day in New York, a few hours before my flight to London, we managed to all come together to do a secret recording at Jace's apartment (I let my mother assume we were having a last-minute psychotherapy session among ourselves, as this is what she ...

Rating: ★★★★★ Category: Other This was published in September 2003 in Sun.Star Weekend as a Crossline. Happy Father's Day not just to the fathers out there but to all who know the joys (and frustrations) of having a father ;P NB At that time, I had really short hair. Look here to see what I mean. ======================= My father came over last month for a visit on his birthday. He said he wanted to see my new boarding house and office. Of course, the fact that The Boyfriend (whom he refuses to refer to as anything but ang iyong amígo ) had just moved to Cebu must have provided some amount of motivation. We’re not really the type to talk. I always thought he was too engrossed in his private world to be interested in anything I said, while he thought I was too opinionated. But when I live at home, he sometimes sits on my bed when I wake up and talks to me about The Rules. “Don’t you know it’s a New York Times bestseller?” he would say on so many mornings. He has this bad habit of f...

21 April 2008, Davao City. The night before Lola Coring's birthday, we took her to People's Park (the former PTA) and then had dinner at a barbecue place right across. Papa went into historian mode and started asking her about their life in Sorsogon when she and my lolo were growing up. There's still so little they know about their grandparents. I guess he wanted to do this a long time ago, but just didn't know how to initiate the project. Of course, I, too, instantly went into video documentarist mode.

16 April 2006, Davao City. In this clip Lola Coring realizes that her younger brother (my lolo) is actually in a worse physical state than she is, while Lolo Joe learns for the first time that his favorite younger sister, Josefina, has died--just last year, in September, and I never got to meet her :(

16 April 2008, Davao City. In a quick turn of events, the plan to bring Lola Coring to Davao for her 89th birthday came to fruition on April 16, less than a month after we first met, and only three days after the doctor gave her a clean bill of health for travel. Finally, the only two living siblings from Barcelona, Sorsogon met again after 20 years. Thanks to all who made this possible, especially for your prayers. Because time is of the essence.

Rating: ★★★★★ Category: Other STRANGER THAN FICTION by Jeneen R. Garcia published in April 2002 I wrote this for Earth Day, April 22, which also happens to be my Lola Coring's birthday. She's turning 89 in a few days, and she's celebrating it in Davao for the first time (more on that in a forthcoming--i hope, if/when i have enough time--blog entry or photo album). I just found it cool that now I have two groovy lolas associated with Earth Day :D ================ The things you inherit from grandmothers. My lola 's name was Generosa. She was thrifty, frugal, cheap to the point of stinginess. She kept everything—letters, designer shoes and bags, and cash from every decade—in an aparador she had rescued all the way from Cavite where she lived before WWII hit. She insisted on saving things for a rainy day till she forgot all about them. If not for me and my brothers poking around in her drawers, precious antiques would have stayed buried under piles of unremarkable memor...

22 March 2008. Black Saturday, I went on an expedition with my second cousin Bisig and Tito Joseph to visit Lola Coring, my lolo's 88-year old eldest sister, whom I had never met. We brought our full gear for documenting the visit, her stories about surviving World War II as well as present-day Cubao, where she continues to sell candies on the sidewalk. In this clip, she tells us about a dog that was given to them from Australia while they were hiding out in Romblon in the 1940s with the family of a guerilla captain. It was risky to keep a dog, because it could bark and lead the Japanese to their hideout. But this one, she says, was smart and would hide every time there were Japanese passing by. This is the rest of the story....

Here's hoping it was warm and fuzzy as this bunny for all of you out there ;)

Rating: ★★★★★ Category: Other lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia published in June 2004 In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found , I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :) Another post-break-up piece haha ;) My father, he loves taking the elevator to the highest floor of the building. Any building. Almost as if it were a pledge, to view the world from the highest places he can find. He even has the distinction of getting his jacket blown off from the top of the World Trade Center, at a time when it was the tallest building on Earth. As the eldest, and with the personality most similar to his, I think I’ve sort of picked up this peculiarity. I’ve scaled dozens of floors on my own, on various types of elevators, in hotels and corporate towers, out of habit, just to get a glimpse of the view from above. But my obsession with heights has developed its own twist. Ever since hi...

Rating: ★★★★ Category: Other lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia published in January 2004 In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found , I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :) When I wrote this one, I was already starting to get stuck on what to write about for my new column. I wrote this with a dry taste in my mouth, but surprisingly this third piece was the one that got very positive responses. Which just shows that even if you don't have the heart for what you're doing, you can still bluff your way through it hehe. I had prided myself on being a light traveler, always with the smallest bag. Then one night I found myself sitting on the floor of JFK Airport in New York in the midst of five “small” bags and an extra-large shopping bag, desperately repacking and re-repacking my handcarried luggage up until forty minutes before my flight. In that crazy moment I finall...

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 co...

lost and found by Jeneen R. Garcia     It is the most beautiful things that come to us unexpectedly, at those moments when we have our cameras locked in the car, or forget to bring the spare set of batteries, or simply, too transfixed by this exquisite vision, do nothing and lose it to fleeting chance.   On the other hand, how does one capture the blueness of a twilight spanning the breadth of heaven and the depths of the sea? In the blink of an eye, the late afternoon sun leaves the earth cold, and darkness blankets the shore. All that is left are fragments in forgetful corners of our minds--the tide rushing in, light falling on the sand, the breath held in awe at the magnificent silence. These times, the only thing to do is stand still. Listen.   Driving with my family in upstate New York in October last year, we realized too late that we had not a single working camera with us. My mother and brother had not thought to bring their digital cameras. Mine was in...

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

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

September 10, 2006. so i insisted on bringing josrique, who had just gotten his open water diving license in davao , on this trip so he could see more of cebu and get to cross to dumaguete as well. we'd just come from diving in mactan, and were promised two dives the day after courtesy of club fort med and pacific cebu resort so i could write about boljoon's underwater attractions. we knew we would be diving with some japanese, but we didn't know the pair were sisters until we were suiting up. took them on a tour of boljoon's historic church after the dives--their first time inside a catholic church, and their first time on a tricycle =) afterwards exchanged japanese and tagalog phrases over dinner: "onaka ipai" = "busog" and "watashiwa anataga s'ki" = "gusto kita". food and love--perfect dinner converstaion, don't you think? Open Water Diver status: Josrique - 10 days Ane Yumiko - 4 years Ate Jeneen - 5 years Namiko - 6 ...

September 9 & 10, 2006. For some strange reason, I found myself exactly one year later on the road southeast again to the picturesque town of Boljoon . But while I had only solitude, dread, and anticipation as companions then, this time I had my brother Josrique along, as well as Oliver, marketing manager of Club Fort Med, which had invited me to write about their resort. Same moon, same sea, but on a much lighter note this time.