A friend says that for one to be good at something (like really really good or be god-like good), you have to devote 10,000 hours for it. Or more. 10,000 hours for that dedication to that chosen craft. Be it walking, running, taking pictures, line sketching, sewing, reading, painting, sculpting, throwing trash, recycling, writing, protesting, or whatever. Even breathing. It takes time. It takes practice. It takes heart.
So I'm counting hours now. 1 hour a day for each of anything, really.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
TRENTA?? ANAK NG TOKWA!!
Eksena
nakaharap sa kompyuter sa opisina sa isang gusali sa lungsod ng Makati
Oras
ganap na hapon, matapos na mag-abala sa kaumagahan ng pagtatarbaho
Ent. (habang nag-iisip at nagsasalita sa kaniyang sarili..)
Ako: Ano kayang kahalagahan ng tatlompung taon ibinuhay ko? Bakit kaya ako katulad ng itay ko, malambot ang puso sa mga babae? Bakit paminsan, hindi ko matanggap ang mga ito? Ang mga karanasan ko sa buhay, ang aking katayuan? Bakit sila, kung sino man sila, masyadong pinaghihirap ang buhay? Ako, hindi. Bakit ako masuwerte? Bakit ako nakakapag-isip ng ganito? Bakit ako may hinanakit? Bakit sa oras na ito, eto ang aking inda mulat na isipan.
Sal.
- wakas, unang akto –
...
Ikalawang akto
nakaharap sa kompyuter sa opisina sa isang gusali sa lungsod ng Makati
Oras
ganap na hapon, matapos na mag-abala sa kaumagahan ng pagtatarbaho
Ent. (habang nag-iisip at nagsasalita sa kaniyang sarili..)
Ako: Ano kayang kahalagahan ng tatlompung taon ibinuhay ko? Bakit kaya ako katulad ng itay ko, malambot ang puso sa mga babae? Bakit paminsan, hindi ko matanggap ang mga ito? Ang mga karanasan ko sa buhay, ang aking katayuan? Bakit sila, kung sino man sila, masyadong pinaghihirap ang buhay? Ako, hindi. Bakit ako masuwerte? Bakit ako nakakapag-isip ng ganito? Bakit ako may hinanakit? Bakit sa oras na ito, eto ang aking inda mulat na isipan.
Sal.
- wakas, unang akto –
...
Ikalawang akto
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Letters of the Law
Why are the letters of law too much to comprehend?
I am a simple man and I can not and won't read 100 words in one paragraph-long sentence.
Why use passive? Why be passive at all? George Orwell said "Never use the passive when you can use the active".
I guess for all the political brouhahas and people power and all, we are a nation of passive, apathetic people.
And all the loquaciousness of our politicians, the passive voice hides them of corruptness, unspeakable truths,
and cloud their responsibilities for their actions. They say: "It must be admitted that after the investigation was reported, mistakes were made,"
rather than, "I was caught, investigated, and I admit I made a mistake."
If we could just beat around the 'bush', literally.
I am a simple man and I can not and won't read 100 words in one paragraph-long sentence.
Why use passive? Why be passive at all? George Orwell said "Never use the passive when you can use the active".
I guess for all the political brouhahas and people power and all, we are a nation of passive, apathetic people.
And all the loquaciousness of our politicians, the passive voice hides them of corruptness, unspeakable truths,
and cloud their responsibilities for their actions. They say: "It must be admitted that after the investigation was reported, mistakes were made,"
rather than, "I was caught, investigated, and I admit I made a mistake."
If we could just beat around the 'bush', literally.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Soliloquy
Day 001 / 1st Night
I bought two bottles of Gilbey's Premium to celebrate my independencia, my prelude to act two of this life. I've forced myself to live alone, holed up in a condominium high above the transitory avenues, floating in the smokey polluted rafters of Mandaluyong. I will live somewhere far off next year, nearer to the sun. And this prelude will be my wealth.
As I drank my two bottles, I kept on being insistent that I shouldn't buy cheap anymore; that the table I got was too wobbly to eat on. I could even use it as a blender, given the right stir. I was nagging about my towel hooks, for it needed more suction to hold my towel. As such, I was thinking too much of house utilities, which at point, gladdens because of this new realization. I always thought of myself as an independent individual. But this, this was an up-in-my-face slap of an almost all too surreal imagination of what being alone would be.
I leapt for bed moments after and read a book. I could hear the horns and buzz of the streets below. Amidst all the noise of the metro, here high above, tucked in my red sheets, I smiled. And then, slept soundlessly through the night, like I've always had.
I bought two bottles of Gilbey's Premium to celebrate my independencia, my prelude to act two of this life. I've forced myself to live alone, holed up in a condominium high above the transitory avenues, floating in the smokey polluted rafters of Mandaluyong. I will live somewhere far off next year, nearer to the sun. And this prelude will be my wealth.
As I drank my two bottles, I kept on being insistent that I shouldn't buy cheap anymore; that the table I got was too wobbly to eat on. I could even use it as a blender, given the right stir. I was nagging about my towel hooks, for it needed more suction to hold my towel. As such, I was thinking too much of house utilities, which at point, gladdens because of this new realization. I always thought of myself as an independent individual. But this, this was an up-in-my-face slap of an almost all too surreal imagination of what being alone would be.
I leapt for bed moments after and read a book. I could hear the horns and buzz of the streets below. Amidst all the noise of the metro, here high above, tucked in my red sheets, I smiled. And then, slept soundlessly through the night, like I've always had.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
typing with one hand and getting tendonitis
typing with one hand and getting tendonitis
hand in glove in another.
hand in glove in another.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Oh.. My Jaw just dropped.
Another round of god-blessed boys and girls.
Noli Aurillo doing a Michael Jackson Medley with his awesome fingers.
Kseniya Simonova dashes and sprinkles sand on a big light box.
Daniel Tammet has an incredible brain.
Cheers!
Noli Aurillo doing a Michael Jackson Medley with his awesome fingers.
Kseniya Simonova dashes and sprinkles sand on a big light box.
Daniel Tammet has an incredible brain.
Cheers!
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Mental Exercises of the Sleepless Kind: Photography and Change
Cross-posting a friend's written work on picturing, and what it means to her, as well as I.
Mental Exercises of the Sleepless Kind: Photography and Change
27 August 2009
FSC Forest Complex
Subic, Pampanga
2:15 a.m.
Since the dawn of civilization, storytelling has been used by man as a means to entertain, educate, instill moral values and record history in aid of cultural preservation. Stories were shared through song and dance, rudimentary drawings scratched into cave walls and even temporary media like sand, leaves and the trunks of living trees. Through technology, man learned to develop more permanent and portable forms of communicating stories by drawing or writing in cloth, textiles, glass, metal and paper. Innovations like the printing press and film photograph paved the way for communicating en masse. Information reached more people in shorter time.
In the advent of the digital age, the speed and ease by which knowledge is transmitted has grown tremendously. Now, stories have the ability to trespass all familial, geographic and cultural boundaries. A plague in an obscure and remote town in Central America, for example once reported by international news agencies, can send a group of Japanese scientists in a flurry to seek a cure for the disease. An amateur video coverage of an endangered species in Antartica being slaughtered by poachers uploaded through the internet may cause a worldwide outrage among concerned groups who would call for stricter policies and sanctions regarding the issue. On a more personal level, a feature story of a young man without any limbs but who manages to be mobile and teach high school in an effective manner can inspire thousands of people with even less debilitating disabilities to lead more proactive lives and be of use to their communities. Stories, when presented truthfully and effectively, especially on a large scale, do facilitate inner and outer change.
I am foremost a social development worker and social researcher by profession. My work with various local non-government organizations (NGOs) brings me to the field where large contentious issues play themselves out in a concrete level. So far my work has been fulfilling. This is the drill: International funder promises aid to a developing country through various NGOs. These local groups create social programs and projects proposals for the funder’s approval. The money is released and the NGOs implement the programs. Throughout this stage, NGO workers, me included, are exposed to the socio-economic, cultural and political challenges that the people in the communities face in the micro level. We are able to pit their stories against the wider landscape of governance and socio-economic, cultural and political trends and see possible points of intervention--whether to troubleshoot existing projects or policies or to create needed ones. We write volumes of reports that the funders need to determine whether to fund another series of projects or not. The cycle continues.
Notice that the glut information has a very limited audience. At best, reports are furnished to government agencies in order to help them do their jobs well. However, these information usually replete with gut-wrenching stories and proposed solutions are only read by the usual people—the NGOs and the funders themselves. It’s like preaching to the converted.
There has been little move to disseminate newfound learning in the field to the common people. This is unfortunate. Time and again, social development has emphasized the need for change to begin from the grassroots. But how can this when people themselves do not have a grasp their issues as part of a wider context? How can this be when they do not know that their issues are similar issues that affect other groups of people even from different locales as well? It is common knowledge that people are debilitated when they feel alone but are empowered when they band together because of shared problems, operative word: shared.
That information is taken from the common people but do not go back to them prevents an active and dynamic participation which can only be borne out of awareness. When the stakes are conveyed to them in a comprehensive and coherent manner, people don’t just wait for solutions to community problems. They are forced to come up with these instead. Only from a well-informed community can participatory and therefore more sustainable development be spurred. To illustrate, a mother who realizes that the stagnant water in her backyard is the kind that caused hundreds of deaths in a town far from her residence due to dengue fever, will clean up her yard and not wait any government program to address the potential problem. Perhaps, especially if she holds some power in her neighborhood, she will also engage others to a collective action that will ensure that no household in their area will tolerate the existence of stagnant water there.
In all this discussion, where does photography, particularly documentary photography factor in?
Knowledge and inspiration are ingredients for change. I doubt that the mother in the above example would have read the World Health Organization’s annual report. She may have read the story from a newspaper or heard it on the radio. The challenge to sow knowledge and inspiration, I believe, is to convert an amalgam of useful information into a popular medium that has the capacity for clear, coherent and concise storytelling. Documentary photography, aside from newspaper articles and radio sound bytes, is one powerful tool.
In various experiments conducted by scientists, it had been discovered that people learn more quickly and retain knowledge by the use of images. A simply truthful yet aesthetically arresting photo can provide knowledge and inspiration to more number of people than inches-thick of academic reading or radio talk show. A photo can move you, figuratively and literally. It is for this reason that I have been dabbling in various sorts of photography for a couple of years now. For me like writing, photography is a means to communicate and knowledge and inspiration. But unlike writing, a photo is universal in that even an unschooled person can instantly recognize truths within just four angles. With photos, there is no language barrier. And in a world where problems can be shared by various groups of people from different lands at digital pace, it is imperative to communicate through universally recognizable means—the photograph—at least initially, in order to facilitate the rapid and collective seeking out of solutions.
Photography is not just showing everybody how beautiful the world is, although it is also that. Photography, when used to tell stories, can make more known to the wider public the problems, victories, best practices, workable solutions and possible points of cooperation as viewed by different stakeholders in society. It is a means to impart knowledge and inspire. It is also an effective tool for change.
-DM
Mental Exercises of the Sleepless Kind: Photography and Change
27 August 2009
FSC Forest Complex
Subic, Pampanga
2:15 a.m.
Since the dawn of civilization, storytelling has been used by man as a means to entertain, educate, instill moral values and record history in aid of cultural preservation. Stories were shared through song and dance, rudimentary drawings scratched into cave walls and even temporary media like sand, leaves and the trunks of living trees. Through technology, man learned to develop more permanent and portable forms of communicating stories by drawing or writing in cloth, textiles, glass, metal and paper. Innovations like the printing press and film photograph paved the way for communicating en masse. Information reached more people in shorter time.
In the advent of the digital age, the speed and ease by which knowledge is transmitted has grown tremendously. Now, stories have the ability to trespass all familial, geographic and cultural boundaries. A plague in an obscure and remote town in Central America, for example once reported by international news agencies, can send a group of Japanese scientists in a flurry to seek a cure for the disease. An amateur video coverage of an endangered species in Antartica being slaughtered by poachers uploaded through the internet may cause a worldwide outrage among concerned groups who would call for stricter policies and sanctions regarding the issue. On a more personal level, a feature story of a young man without any limbs but who manages to be mobile and teach high school in an effective manner can inspire thousands of people with even less debilitating disabilities to lead more proactive lives and be of use to their communities. Stories, when presented truthfully and effectively, especially on a large scale, do facilitate inner and outer change.
I am foremost a social development worker and social researcher by profession. My work with various local non-government organizations (NGOs) brings me to the field where large contentious issues play themselves out in a concrete level. So far my work has been fulfilling. This is the drill: International funder promises aid to a developing country through various NGOs. These local groups create social programs and projects proposals for the funder’s approval. The money is released and the NGOs implement the programs. Throughout this stage, NGO workers, me included, are exposed to the socio-economic, cultural and political challenges that the people in the communities face in the micro level. We are able to pit their stories against the wider landscape of governance and socio-economic, cultural and political trends and see possible points of intervention--whether to troubleshoot existing projects or policies or to create needed ones. We write volumes of reports that the funders need to determine whether to fund another series of projects or not. The cycle continues.
Notice that the glut information has a very limited audience. At best, reports are furnished to government agencies in order to help them do their jobs well. However, these information usually replete with gut-wrenching stories and proposed solutions are only read by the usual people—the NGOs and the funders themselves. It’s like preaching to the converted.
There has been little move to disseminate newfound learning in the field to the common people. This is unfortunate. Time and again, social development has emphasized the need for change to begin from the grassroots. But how can this when people themselves do not have a grasp their issues as part of a wider context? How can this be when they do not know that their issues are similar issues that affect other groups of people even from different locales as well? It is common knowledge that people are debilitated when they feel alone but are empowered when they band together because of shared problems, operative word: shared.
That information is taken from the common people but do not go back to them prevents an active and dynamic participation which can only be borne out of awareness. When the stakes are conveyed to them in a comprehensive and coherent manner, people don’t just wait for solutions to community problems. They are forced to come up with these instead. Only from a well-informed community can participatory and therefore more sustainable development be spurred. To illustrate, a mother who realizes that the stagnant water in her backyard is the kind that caused hundreds of deaths in a town far from her residence due to dengue fever, will clean up her yard and not wait any government program to address the potential problem. Perhaps, especially if she holds some power in her neighborhood, she will also engage others to a collective action that will ensure that no household in their area will tolerate the existence of stagnant water there.
In all this discussion, where does photography, particularly documentary photography factor in?
Knowledge and inspiration are ingredients for change. I doubt that the mother in the above example would have read the World Health Organization’s annual report. She may have read the story from a newspaper or heard it on the radio. The challenge to sow knowledge and inspiration, I believe, is to convert an amalgam of useful information into a popular medium that has the capacity for clear, coherent and concise storytelling. Documentary photography, aside from newspaper articles and radio sound bytes, is one powerful tool.
In various experiments conducted by scientists, it had been discovered that people learn more quickly and retain knowledge by the use of images. A simply truthful yet aesthetically arresting photo can provide knowledge and inspiration to more number of people than inches-thick of academic reading or radio talk show. A photo can move you, figuratively and literally. It is for this reason that I have been dabbling in various sorts of photography for a couple of years now. For me like writing, photography is a means to communicate and knowledge and inspiration. But unlike writing, a photo is universal in that even an unschooled person can instantly recognize truths within just four angles. With photos, there is no language barrier. And in a world where problems can be shared by various groups of people from different lands at digital pace, it is imperative to communicate through universally recognizable means—the photograph—at least initially, in order to facilitate the rapid and collective seeking out of solutions.
Photography is not just showing everybody how beautiful the world is, although it is also that. Photography, when used to tell stories, can make more known to the wider public the problems, victories, best practices, workable solutions and possible points of cooperation as viewed by different stakeholders in society. It is a means to impart knowledge and inspire. It is also an effective tool for change.
-DM
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Like kids, playing pretend
Around midnight, Sunday, we were watching "In the Mood for Love", and we were in that last scene where Mr. Chow was in Cambodia, whispering to a hole in a monument of an edifice his lost secret love affair, and covered it with grass and mud.
I could tell a secret now, like Mr. Chow, of what a weekend that was. But I won't.
Let's just imagine that I was pretending I was on a beach, somewhere in a city, where the waves were silent, like air, and the shore was littered with dust. There could be a television out in the deep sea and we watched John Lloyd & Bea's "One More Chance" over and over again. We were floating in the deep, lying helplessly, and hugging monotonously. Like the tide, the calmness soon wraps up and the air changes the mood. Our glasses with cute little cocktail umbrellas have been emptied and we set our sights to shore. We tend to be vigorous, moving about. A storm floating above washes away the apprehensions, and we fight an urge.
We sailed all day. We could have sailed 28 times more around the earth and be contented, for we were in the eye of the storm. After which, I would have been dead, from all the rope tying, the mast-heaving, the floor mopping. Out on the bridge, I stick my tongue out to lick the wind. Another storm would pass and brace again for this one.
I was tired, and I slept in hibernation. The morning light awakened me and your nakedness comforted my struggle during the night. I woke with a smile, alive, as well as you. It was too bright and glimmer-y. Perhaps your skin shines when you are happy. Mine, radiates the colour of the earth.
I could tell a secret now, like Mr. Chow, of what a weekend that was. But I won't.
Let's just imagine that I was pretending I was on a beach, somewhere in a city, where the waves were silent, like air, and the shore was littered with dust. There could be a television out in the deep sea and we watched John Lloyd & Bea's "One More Chance" over and over again. We were floating in the deep, lying helplessly, and hugging monotonously. Like the tide, the calmness soon wraps up and the air changes the mood. Our glasses with cute little cocktail umbrellas have been emptied and we set our sights to shore. We tend to be vigorous, moving about. A storm floating above washes away the apprehensions, and we fight an urge.
We sailed all day. We could have sailed 28 times more around the earth and be contented, for we were in the eye of the storm. After which, I would have been dead, from all the rope tying, the mast-heaving, the floor mopping. Out on the bridge, I stick my tongue out to lick the wind. Another storm would pass and brace again for this one.
I was tired, and I slept in hibernation. The morning light awakened me and your nakedness comforted my struggle during the night. I woke with a smile, alive, as well as you. It was too bright and glimmer-y. Perhaps your skin shines when you are happy. Mine, radiates the colour of the earth.
This is a Scheduled Post
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
This is a scheduled post.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Kasi natatawa ako sa usapan namin noong isang araw
Kasi natatawa ako sa usapan namin noong isang araw...
ang setting: usapan sa ym webmessenger pagkatapos kong maglakad-lakad sa mga kalye ng makati habang lunch break.
ang setting: usapan sa ym webmessenger pagkatapos kong maglakad-lakad sa mga kalye ng makati habang lunch break.
her: wow. and you did what while you were out?
me: was a classical conductor under the sun
her: oh gorgeous gorgeous
me: my eyes are now tuned for bright sun
her: you're a cyborg now?
me: not quite
me: robocop can not love
me: i can
her: very much, you can
her: can robocop kiss?
me: no he can not. he can wet his lips though, and be kissed
her: hmmn. don't want that. i like to be kissed kissed kissed until my cheeks are red and sore.
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