The Manila Collectible Co.

Yesterday's Intramuros Pasyal Sunday along Gen. Luna Street in Intramuros was a welcome break from my daily grind, and provided me with a good motivation for this week, especially since I'll be leaving for Davao in a couple of days for the annual UGAT conference. Busy days ahead.

A short walk from the closed-down street is the Manila Collectible Co., a store selling indigenous and locally-made products. It is also an event venue; they invite IPs and cultural advocates to share facets of indigenous culture such as dance, song, and food.

T'nalak weave.

bags! 

tiny baskets and quirky backscratchers

wines and teas

coffee, chocolate, brown sugar

my mom would really like it here.

It was really fun looking around. I've taken note of the stuff I'll buy when I come back. :)

mini furniture. great gift idea ;)

The Manila Collectible Co. is yet another reason to visit Intramuros. It's a good place to learn about indigenous culture and local products as well. TMCC is located at Cabildo corner Beaterio streets, just behind the Manila Cathedral. You'll get a visual treat when you climb up the rooftop area too. ;)

Throwback Thursday blog post

I went to the university this morning to do some errands for the conference next week and it made me remember my grad student days, haha. So instead of the usual photos, I've decided to do something different for Throwback Thursday. I do some #tbt posts on Instagram and Facebook every now and then, but today it's going to be all about the written word: a post from an old blog.

The one I've pasted here is from my old 2005 blog a culture of nonsense, which lasted only for three months. After that blog, I moved to DeviantArt and then to this one, which was named barya lang po sa umaga before it was changed to a wee i.

In this post, I recounted what happened during an exam for my Physical Anthropology class. I was a freshman graduate student of Anthropology and was very eager to learn forensics. That class made me a big Bones fan! Anyway, here's the excerpt. :)

hope floats...and guess what else?

I have just suddenly realized that I am losing my ability to think creatively.

Picture this: a small flat, curved bone lies on a piece of Styrofoam in a pot full of water, concealed in a paper bag. “Identify this!” was written on the questionnaire. The answer is obvious. I write, RIB. Then came the follow-up question, for two points: “Why the ‘name’?” I stared at the paper stupidly. What could be so special about the rib’s name? Nothing came to mind. Goodbye two points.

I ended up losing three points on that part of the laboratory exam. The correct answer, folks, is that it’s a FLOATING RIB, so-called because it’s not attached to the vertebrae, unlike all the others. The rib is floating in a pot of water. Duh. I feel so stupid, and “uncreative”. Well, how should I know that the professor didn’t put that together so the others wouldn’t be able to peek? Anyway, some of the others got it; I think I would’ve gotten it correctly had I not been so damn…exact? Uptight? Dimwitted? Dense?

And perhaps I’ve also lost my knack for looking—in a deep sense—or searching for detail. I also wasn’t able to see that (in another question) the skeleton in front of me (“Charlie”) had two left legs—set-up by my professor, of course. Tsk. I’m slipping, slipping.

Oh, memories. I would like to think that I've regained some measure of creativity and attention to detail now. I would probably suck at lining up the vertebrae in the correct order, though. :P

planes and rains

I meant to put this up last night on my Weebly blog the daily mews, but the power went down due to the rainstorm and as you know, when this happens, gadgets become more vulnerable, and we humans tend to treat them with more value because energy has become a limited resource. No power also means the WiFi device we had wasn't going to provide us with Internet connection anytime soon, so there. Anyway, enough blah, here's what I was up to yesterday.

My workmates and I attended an event with a bunch of people who, like us, make their living running websites and digital marketing campaigns. The organizers invited a handful of people to discuss stuff about Google Analytics, one of the tools we use to tell us what's happening with a website and help us decide what to do next to improve it to make a campaign successful.

The afternoon talk was held at a small cafe+bar at the penthouse of a condominium building along C5 road. It's along the flight path of most planes coming from the east, and every now and then we would hear a plane pass by, prepping for landing. I have a fascination for planes and being somewhere very, very high, so saying I was thrilled is putting it rather mildly. When it was time to take a break I made a beeline for the balcony.

The city with its slums and skyscrapers. It makes one think.

A couple of hours after I took these photos, the rain came. We were finishing up with questions for the last speaker when the lights flickered, went back on for two seconds, then died for good. My first thought was how funny the situation was, being in a tech-centered environment with Internet geeks and we had no power.

The major collective concern was this: "How are we going to get out of here?" We were at the top floor of the building, and no electricity meant no elevator, which meant we would have to take the stairs down 23 flights, run through the rain to the car, and make our way home. That was fine with me; I needed to work out this week anyway. Heck, we all needed the exercise.

Then came news: the elevator was working! People started filing out.

We ended up making a U-turn to one of the nearby commercial hubs to have dinner and coffee. Forcing our way through traffic would be a stupid move, and besides, a bowl of hot ramen sounded way better than being stuck on the road. I got home half an hour after midnight.

So that was my Thursday. How was yours?

oops.

Here's a writer--or at least someone who attempts to make a living by writing--who can't even manage to write in any of her blogs.

Shame.

Things have been pretty busy lately, and with the annual conference of the Anthropological Association of the Philippines coming up, I'm sure I won't even have time to THINK about writing here. It's going to be my last year being the organization's secretary and conference organizer; for the past year I hadn't been able to focus on my duties anyway. Plus I'm a grad school dropout, and also the most anthropology I've done lately is watching strangers in a jeepney and trying to figure out their life story.

Anyway, in a couple of days I'll be off to an event that will surely test and improve my knowledge on something I didn't really care much about before. I guess making the Internet the source of your income makes you want to understand everything there is to know about it. True, cyber/virtual anthropology was one of the topics I considered for serious study, but this--digital marketing and analytics and social media and everything in between--I didn't think I would ever consider to be a major part of my life, but there you go. It's exciting in a way, and a good challenge that keeps me on my toes.

Oh, and I promise to write a little bit each day for my "daily" blog, the daily mews. Yes, that is what I called it, perhaps because I really wanted to push myself to write a few words about my personal life whatever I can come up with on a daily basis. Ha. Let's see if I can convince myself to do just that.