Saturdays

I'm not the only person taking pictures every Saturday morning while the cadets are jogging, training, listening to lectures and participating in activities. Sometimes, one of the Abad twins (cadets from last year) will drop by with a camera or two. But most of the time, its one of the cadet officer candidates (they're CP2Lts now, or Cadet Probationary Second Lieutenants, so congrats to them!) with the G-7's SLR. And its been a good thing, too, cause my cameras can occasionally be bratty, complaining of low batt only because I was taking pictures under the sunny heat, or getting all fuzzy and out of focus from low light (and a broken zoom lens on my smaller camera).

Since I'm not currently a cadet or anything, I don't wear a snappy uniform like that most of the time. They did, however, give me a uniform this year so I do bring it out when I can. :) Finally making use of my boots. And its been a fun year too, cause the ROTC facilities have been getting renovated. They haven't looked so pretty since probably before my dad's generation. Old and ratty sofa monsters being replaced with a new and functional set of white plastic chairs and mirror-surfaced meeting tables. A ceiling full of holes and leaks replaced (new roof, too!). New light fixtures, new wiring, electric fans for once, new windows, you name it! And the bathroom finally works again. I never could've dreamed it'd look like this back when I was a cadet.

Nostalgia and amazement aside, I basically still spend my Saturdays there. I may not be a cadet, (or cadet officer), but that doesn't mean I can't volunteer. My batchmate from back then is now the second female Corps Commander they've ever had, and she's doing pretty darn good job at it. :)

Meanwhile, its up to us photographers to keep on taking pictures, documenting training, events, renovations and everything else along the way.

Once in a while, I'll snap one of my fellow photographer.

And I do get snapped back too. :)

Some people sleep in on their Saturdays. They're missing out on all the fun stuff.

That third footstep in the dark...

About three months ago, during an overnight activity at the end of last sem, I was walking late at night to my area. The grass had been left to grow for a while and I'd sometimes snag a foot in the tangles. It was hard to see because the street lamps nearby only gave a yellow glow, leaving every shadow pitch black. The ground was uneven and I was clomping along in boots a few sizes too big (my boots had disappeared the night before). It was a slow, careful walk in near-blind conditions for a gal with next to no night vision.

I'd just passed through an area shielded by bushes, and while adjusting to the dark and the light, I realized the dark around me wasn't a flat black. I'm the sort of gal who'd see faces and figures in the darkness when none is to be found there. A few years back, when I was a cadet, I was playing sentry at an odd hour, half asleep but I was the last shift. When morning came, all the others who'd held my post would complain of an eerie feeling that came from a tree to the left. I topped their stories - during my shift, I thought there was a man there, so tall that his knees were six feet in the air, but he was seated so his head was between his knees. That or he was headless. :) Ghost stories and sentry duty seem to go hand in hand. It was funny how some of them freaked out. (The phantom is similar to folk descriptions of Tikbalang sightings, but I'll explain that some other time).

The hour was somewhere past midnight. The silence was eerie, traffic in the distance only casting faded echoes in our direction. Once in a while, a taxi would pass by down the nearby street, but beyond that I could only hear the rustling of the trees, the wind, and my own footsteps. I'd try to pull my scarf up to guard my face against the cold, but my captured breath would fog my glasses, and that just wouldn't do. Who knew it could be so cold at night, this close to the equator.

I needed sight, but in the dark, I knew my eyes weren't reliable. So as I stepped carefully through the grasses towards my area, I depended on my ears to tell me what was real and what wasn't. And my ears told me I was alone. The only noise beyond silence was the crunching of grasses and branches with my own two feet.

As I neared a log, the hairs on the back of my neck suddenly rose. A meter in front of me, I heard a footstep. I paused. There was only the cricketing of bugs, and that soft buzzing silence. In the dim light, all I saw ahead of me was a log that I wanted to sit on. I took another step. For every two of my steps, I'd hear a third one, just in front of me! It was just as loud and heavy as my own steps. And when I'd stop - I could hear no breathing, I could see no crouched figure. But the noise came from an arm's reach away! What was it? A one-footed dwarf? Finally I just pulled out my flashlight and turned it on.

What I found in front of me, depressing the grass around it, as large and as heavy as a foot in a sneaker (like that wandering hand from the Addams family...) - a frog.

Palaka, it is called. It didn't ribbit, but it is larger than a closed fist. It really is as big as a sneaker. This was my third footstep in the dark. This was the loud noise, the phantom in front of me that had scared the heck out of me for maybe two minutes. I tried to catch it but let it hop on. Tucked my flashlight away and spent the next two hours either sitting on the log, or beside it. There was one passing taxi that moved unusually slow, until it was just by me. Maybe the driver was looking for somewhere to take a leak, thought one of the trees might be nice for that. Suddenly it sped up and zoomed out of sight. Elo (another former cadet) and I joked that there would be ghost stories in the morning, probably about a ghostly girl sitting on a log or whatnot.

Didn't have my camera with me that night, but I caught this picture of the same type of frog, a few weeks later in the daytime. :)
It's always fun to find out where those midnight phantoms and ghost stories really come from.

If there ever was an Ent

It was a chilly Saturday morning some few months ago when I went to campus with my camera to catch the cadets jogging. I still can't fall out of bed early enough to join them, but I could at least snap pictures. So I was walking along the Academic Oval, knowing they'd pass by soon enough, when I saw this in the Sunken Garden, on the dry side of the lagoon and that mysteriously abandoned-looking (and graffiti-decorated) ampitheatre.

A tree, grown and broken and overgrown in just the right ways... to make an unmistakable figure. Not quite the gnarled old things of Tolkien's story, this might count as a younger Ent, looking east to the dawn and frozen mid-stride when I caught it. Its right arm, branches still growing and full of leaves.

Even with all the trees here, you don't see something like this pretty often. And I was just as sure that it would disappear or change, maybe in weeks, maybe in days. Trees around here, as massive and ancient as they are, are always changing. Leaves and branches growing and falling. The occasional typhoon bending all the smaller ones in one direction or another. Back in 2007, just after a powerful typhoon, so many old trees fell over, roots pulled out of the earth with soggy clods of dirt trapped here and there. Now, the effect is a couple of old logs almost parallel with the earth, from which multitudes of younger branches and trunks now grow.

That's one of the things I love about this place. Around here, you don't see a good clump of woods, no matter how scrawny and bare the trees are - you don't see it get torn up and replaced with a cookie cutter subdivision with grass thats just a penny better than astro-turf and the 'trees' in their lawns are just little ten year old saplings and everything else is cut and trimmed and tamed into an artificial 'perfection'. Around here, nature is allowed to grow. It grows everywhere, in the empty lots, in the nooks and cracks of houses and everywhere. Around here, a clump of trees is not a nuisance but rather retains the mystery it had back in the days of fairy tales. It grows, to offer shade and fruit to strangers, a haven for birds to twitter about in, and maybe a snarky and sticky-sweet response to whatever flashy vehicle tries to park beneath it. And if a storm blows it down, so long as it ain't wreckin' the street or a house, they leave it be. They let it grow. They let it recover. Until it gives shade and fruit and shelter all over again.

If there's any place you'll find an Ent today, or the fairy-tale wonders of Middle Earth, its probably here in the Philippines. At least thats the view from where I stand.

The Princesita de Mediya Noches

There is a plant that although ugly, blooms just a single amazing flower very rarely. And that flower blooms in the span of a single night, with a fragrance so strong every corner of the house (no matter how big or far) will be filled with the smell of it. At its greatest, the flower is as large as a dinner plate! And when morning comes, all that is left is a withered blossom, which will not long after, die and fall off.

The Princesita de Mediya Noches in my family has a strange and funny story. Whichever country the cactus orchid actually originates from, the aunt of my dad got it in Indonesia or from a business acquaintance in Indonesia. In the forty years the aunt owned it, it had never blossomed. When she moved back to the Philippines, we got the plant, and brought it to Memphis with us. There, it enjoyed a brief summer outdoors when we noticed the plant had begun to bud. We were excited. The flat, green leaves with occasional stalks had something new- these strange, pink-purple buds that looked like a bundle of thick pink hair or thick pasta held in a handful. After one or two of the buds fell, we brought the plant inside. The rest of the buds fell, to our disappointment, but a few weeks later it began to bud again. This time the bud got bigger and bigger until it was as large as a kid’s fist (at its fattest point), the rest of it snaking around – down to gravity and back up again.

The night it bloomed, we were all fascinated and excited. We didn’t miss it, because suddenly the house was so fragrant! And the blossom was so large! We could almost have taken a video of it blooming, for every few minutes it was inches larger. I was taking pictures with my camera as often as I could back then. How the noodle-like covers had slowly parted to reveal the soft, delicate white petals within. How they lifted and the petals slowly began to spread, as though part of a tantalizing dance that only an Ent could have enjoyed for all its subtle movings. And oh! The strange and fascinating things it began to uncover that were previously concealed within the bud - strange, soft yellow filaments thick with fuzzy pollens, and a curious white catching-thing, with strands of its own in every direction, as though only a slight brush of wind was what it needed to grow seed.

 

And like the careful ballerina, it ran through its night-long dance of blooming, until the flower was as big as my face, and soon after even bigger! And there in the foyer, when I turned, I could see what it was dancing for – a full moon had risen in the deep blue outside, and its full moonlit rays graced the princess in her performance. 

The clock had struck midnight. The flower was as big as a dinner plate, but still so delicate in every direction. The ugly, noodlish coverings were hidden behind it now, like a spider puppeteer behind the curtain-skirts of a princess truly worth the name. Soft, long white petals in every direction. A fragrance that couldn’t be escaped. But as time grew on towards sunrise, the flower began to close. For this, I went to bed that night, because I knew the flower wouldn’t bloom any further.

And when the sky was bright, the princess of a flower was hidden again. It had wilted, soft white petals showing here and there through the pink coverings, like a sleepy little girl who falls into bed still in her dress, not caring to kick off her dress shoes while she dozes on cushions as soft as cotton candy.

--

When I came to the Philippines, I brought a few leaves of the Princesita with me, and from that I planted them here. This is the climate they were meant for, and they flourished and grew faster than Jack’s magical beans. Four years later, I come home late one evening, just before the rain started, and it was the perfect moment to arrive. The Princesita was blooming again, and so I snapped these pictures. Because of rain and sleep, I was unable to watch it for its entire blooming. But I’m sure the stars and the moon gave it a perfect audience. :)

A story for my younger self

This used to hang on the wall of my old room. I’ve still got it hanging in my new room. :)

Once upon a time, long long ago, there was a girl who was raised in a magical country, where the streets were paved with gold and you could eat anything you wanted to. It was a place that many people tried to go to, some becoming fugitives in order to stay there. But the girl’s parents did it the right way – they filled out all the forms, all the paperwork, her dad had a steady job and her mom took care of the house. The girl, being born there, was already a citizen (in every legal way). Her parents, because of how long the paperwork took and how many other people were trying to become citizens as well, had to wait fifteen years before their citizenship finally arrived. By then, the girl’s dad had gotten successful at his job, and the mother, in the style of many women in this magical country, divorced him for half his money, and tried to take the kids too.

During this sad time, the girl’s dad told her about the country they’d come from, though she’d hardly ever been there except for vacations, and even then only saw the tourist spots. She didn’t know what life was like in a country where the streets were paved with stones and many people were very poor. She didn’t know what life looked like in the countryside, where farmers lived and farmed without the big machines she’d seen in her magical country. 

So she decided to read about it. And when she read, she was horrified to learn that her magical country had actually done harm to the country her parents’ came from. Imagine if, after the revolutionary war, an allied country decided instead to invade the country it had just helped to gain independence.

That and other things made the girl decide. When high school or college was over, she was heading back. Her parents had never taught her the language of their parents, and she had never been taught the history of it that she was reading ravenously as well, but she wanted to go back. She didn’t need to live in the magical country. It wasn’t so magical there, she’d learned. But she wanted to know what life was like in a country where divorce isn’t the norm, where Catholics aren’t a minority, where lives are a little tougher - and, she’d soon learn, the folks are a lot friendlier too.

And she’d also find out – things are much more magical in the land her parents came from, than in the land she had left.

And now I’m here. :)

The Steps

There’s an area on campus that I’ve always found a little mysterious, enchanting, maybe even haunting. Some folks know its there, some pass it by every day and never glance to see it – the old stone steps, moss thick between the cracks, obscured by overgrown vines and greenery.

They lead into nothing. They stop abruptly, chest high above the grass below. There’s nothing there but an empty patch, a shallow, muddy lake that comes and goes with the rain. Bamboo and other trees there – nothing that you can’t find elsewhere in the Sunken Gardens, or elsewhere in campus for that matter. Can you see the steps? They trim the grasses a few times a year, but the steps are never fully uncovered. I found these steps as a freshman, and included them in a scene, a story where a fantastical creature lures an unsuspecting girl to her doom. This place evokes a sense of enchantment and dark mystery. As though by walking down these steps, you’d find yourself in a fairyland.

But we all know that doesn’t happen these days. People rarely wander down there, and almost never use those steps. You won’t know to find it if you don’t look for it, sometimes. Its probably pretty muddy down there, too. Oh well, so much for that.

But if you ever do walk down the street that leads to the Palma Hall and Faculty Center, then glance to the left a bit as you walk, and you might just find it. :)

Starting a blog

Golly, its been more than two years since I last did any blogging... And a lot has changed since then too.

Well, except for this: I'm a girl, I have a camera, and I like taking pictures once in a while.
So this blog will mostly be about that. :)

Here's something I snapped back in July-August 2010, in the Sunken Garden at the University of the Philippines one early morning while the ROTC cadets were jogging:

If there ever was an Ent...