I don't remember why we were here. Mindtwist and I slept under one of those trees.

College of Arts and Letters, my building. (Not really my building;
I don't own it, mind. I just used to mop here.XD)

Where I used to run. Photos taken two years ago using Mindtwist's Polaroid camera.

I still haven't processed my clearance and taken my diploma since graduation. I haven't got the time (but I do!) and I prolly don't care (and I don't!). Do we really really really have to do these things? Is the UP Police Squad (I don't know if there is such a thing) going to pick me up some day for not having cleared my records? And what do I do with the diploma? Make a hopping frog origami with it? Plaster it on a blank wall? Cut it into a mask, stick it on my face, and then let it absorb the oil and unclog my pores? What?

I'm leaving for Davao tomorrow and will be climbing the highest peak in the country. I don't know how I should feel about this, but I am not particularly bouncing with excitement; I am bouncing with apathy. I just missed the Mt. Napulak (Iloilo) climb with Dinagyang Festival sidetrip last weekend. I should've booked for Iloilo instead of Davao. :| I don't want to climb no effing Mt. Apo.

I am depressed I am leaving Manila again.

We don't know whose puppy this is. Kaira and I squatted
on the sidewalk and played with it this afternoon.

Keolo's wooden puzzle which, after a little catfight, is now mine.XD

Apparently the puzzle has been puzzling me for the past five days. I haven't solved it yet because I haven't dismantled it yet. The pieces are all wedged tight into each other like a supertight wedgie.XD I've handed it to eight different people with puzzle-solving capabilities ranging from Master Puzzle Solver to Master Puzzle Dweeb, but none of them were able to pry the pieces apart. Losers!

And with my Google Ninja skills I did find solutions on disassembling it, of course, which should be a piece of cake. You hold two specific pieces tangent to each other and then twist them this way and that and whole thing should collapse BUT IT'S NOT BLOODY WORKING. However I twist and pull and push, what with all the possible combinations of two pieces tangent to each other--despite their specificity--the pieces are jammed into each other's armpits.

All them eight who's gotten a look at it (plus me, which makes it nine) scoffed at it, the silly mathematical plaything, and were deluded into taking it apart without twitching a muscle. We were wrong. This version of Escher's Star is an indestructible, unpryable piece of fossilized pigeonshit. After five days of hurling it and pulling it apart my fingers throbbed red and bled with revenge at its maker. Whoever its maker is must be HEE-HAWing at himself and his cunning craftsmanship to intensify the suffering of all star puzzle-loving intellectual people.

Earlier this evening I shoved it back into Keolo's face and said, "Take it! I can't bloody figure it out!" "No Tita," Keolo said, "if you can't solve it then I can't solve it. You're the smartest person I know so if you can't solve it nobody else can!" Apparently Keolo lives in a fishbowl. "Never!" I said. "Of course you can, Tita," Keolo said. "If you solve it I'll give you P50." Ha! Bribing me eh? He can't bribe me. The puzzle's already mine! I just want him to have it again because I changed my mind. Nevertheless I am a sucker for challenges. I said, "Okay."

So unwomanly.XP Featuring Eva Gubat!
Reminiscing the habal-habal ride down Mt. Talinis in Dumaguete.

I missed the smell of books! Photos taken by Jordan, at Tin's house in Marikina.

So this is what it's like to be a useless vermin in the society. Jobless and demotivated to find a normal boring desk job I cower in a gloomy corner of my sister's house and feed on food remains and beg for alms from my mother. Then again, I still get to travel and climb a mountain every weekend (That's from my measly savings as a writer person with wit and writer skills from last year. But alas, I am no more. I have misplaced my wit, have discarded my skills, and have degenerated into a filthy disease-infested cuddly rat, yes, cuddly.) BUT STILL I have numbers on my credit running on the negative.

I have lost all interest to make money. (But I have no interest to make money to begin with, silly.XD) Hence I have no interest to work, and neither do I have interest to find one. I might just have to wait for starvation to pounce on my belly before I force myself to get a job.

Today I have reduced everything I own to a 30L backpack. I sold my furniture to my eldest sister, gave my stuff away to friends, and parked hundreds of my books at the laundry area of my sister's condominium. Now I only have ten days worth of clothes, three gadgets (Prozac, Liberty, and Cyclone, my laptop, camera, and phone respectively), sleeping bag, climbing shoes, cookset, a Lonely Planet guidebook to the Philippines, and an anthology of science fiction from different cultures all over the world. That, and a few other stray items that need not mentioning.

(Nonetheless Kaira, my seven-year-old toothless niece, skittered into the room and started poking at my stuff which were all splayed on the bed. She picked up my combination lock and asked, "What's this, Tita?" I said, "That's what I'm gonna lock you in the cabinet with." She lifted my cellphone charger, saying, "What's this?" "That's what I'm gonna strangle you with." She took my mechanical pencil, saying, "How about this?" "That's what I'm gonna poke your eyes with." She studied my swiss knife. "This?" "To slice your ears off with." She unwound a band of tying strings. "And this?" "That's to tie you upside down up a tree with." She took my Timex watch. "How about this one?" "The timer for the bomb I'm gonna blast you with." And on she went asking about this and that, while I answered her questions in all manners of torture. And then she picked up the pieces of letter-shaped corals. "Are these corals?" she said. "What are these for?" "Oh nothing," I said. "They just spell out a silly name." She arranged the letters and figured, "Jom? Who's Jom? I think you need an A and an R..." "Jomar? WTF. Who the fuck is that?" "I don't know," she said, and started laughing and showing her toothless gums.)

All this in an attempt to survive on just a backpack and continue with my solitary tramphood. I simply cannot walk among the staggering zombies of this apocalyptic hellhole (what with the year 2012 oh me effing god o_o). For to live means to breathe; to breathe means open space; and open space means anywhere else besides this goddamn city. Next week I will be in Mindanao (Hello Mt. Apo!:DD I shall kiss your ground and caress my cheeks on your mossy rocks.) and a week after that I'll be back in Boracay for dragonboat training. WOOHOO!

Random training day at Bulabog Beach. How can you not wake up for this everyday?

For the past nine years I've moved to about twenty different places in five different cities as such is the life of a runaway rat.XD In all those places I've packed, moved, and unpacked my stuff, and lost, gave away, threw away most of them in the process. Now that I've gotten the hang of it, I fancy myself as Wile E. Cayote--swift and light and wild in his ulterior motive to weightlessness. My next goal is to survive on nothing, not even clothes.XD I shall regress to the Garden of Eden and take the role of a scaly she-monster crawling on its fat beerbelly. That's if I can still crawl on a fat beerbelly. Back in Environmental Science class in UP, my bald and pudgy professor once said that if you really really really want to reduce your carbon footprint to zero, all you have to do is garrote yourself. Not that carbon footprint reduction has anything to do with being a primitive crawly smartass. But if you force a connection there is one in the vague ideological scheme of things but I wouldn't bother to point it out because it's too vague.

Alien & Pothead. Sara's birthday climb at Mt. Gulugod Baboy.:)

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