Views from everywherever

The past seventeen months held my first three terms (or four, including summer) in postgraduate school.  Since it's school, it's full of people talking, and writing, and of talking about writing, and writing about talking, or any other permutation involving those two pedagogical things.  Since it's postgraduate school, the talking and the writing happen in the land marked "Here be Dragons," ruled by B minuses with the strength of ten men and the dreaded entities called deadlines. I assume that learning happens by osmosis amid these processes and entities.

I didn't have time to write about starting school again, and I still don't have time to properly digest my feelings about moving to Manila.  (I know that my university is in Quezon City, okay, but for Baguio folks the entirety of QC, Marikina, Pasig, Mandaluyong, San Juan, Caloocan, Navotas, Makati, every other city within a ten-mile radius of all these places and even Metro Manila is for all intents and purposes called Manila).  So, true to non-sequitur form, I will give you pictures of views from where I momentarily find myself, in those times I remember to remember to take pictures.

The lectures by Fr Roque Ferriols, SJ, are rare opportunities, and I tried to listen to them as often they occur.  This particular lecture was about Descartes and his Meditations on First Philosophy.

Apart from lectures are the classes I have attended, and at the end of two of those we had mini-symposiums.  So here is yet another picture, of one of those mini-symposiums, in which my classmates and I each presented papers written for the course.  This particular forum was about Wittgenstein.

Had I enough singlemindedness for this entry I would've taken pictures of every class I had taken, though the instructor would've dinged me right in the ear.  The point is, however, that I appreciate my classes and all the talking and the writing in and for them - well, the talking more than the writing, at least.  I will not be able to give you literal pictures of writing, since I was writing while writing.  This shows the state my surroundings are reduced to whenever I write, and I fear I will have a worse set of environs since I still have several papers to go for the previous semesters' required papers.  

And so, true to non-sequitur form again, in light of the workload gathering dust, we took a trip to the North once more.  The way there was filled with interesting things, certainly, though these are the only things I managed to get halfway decent photographs of.

    

I don't know what these are properly called in the world of highway engineering - I just thought they look colorful, bisecting some parts of the NLEX.

There's the rows of rice grains lining some parts of the highways, the roads serving as concrete driers.  I wish I could say that the rice glowed golden in the sun, eager to nourish the hungry, though I'm sure I'm not that kind of writer. I'm barely any kind of a good one, I think, if my term papers (or at least those that I managed to pass on time) are anything to go by.








There's also the distinctive architecture and city planning you sometimes see along places struggling to maintain the urban and rural to whatever end.

Because the bus driver spent a whopping eight bloody hours to get to San Fernando, the beach was a welcome stop.  Actually, two piles of garbage with a dead cat on top would've been a welcome stop, after that bus ride.  But then we arrived safe, albeit battered and hungry, and are therefore happily slapped in the faces with the blueness of the big blue.

We then went to Baguio after two days in La Union.  The blue gradually became replaced with greens and browns and the road gradually became replaced with a benevolent roller coaster.  All the pictures I took of the mountain ranges were a blurred mash of hazy greenery and mountainery, so here is a picture of a truck.

You know you're approaching the city limits when splashes of houses dot the sylvan green of the mountains, and hence try to capture a decent picture whenever the bus slows down enough to allow you and your point-and-shoot camera any measure of focus.

We spent one week in Baguio, where we cleaned the house, went to my mother's sari-sari store, visited friends, had coffee, and generally dirtied up the house again.  As with all visits, we learned of good news and tragedies, and tried to hug one other and breathe through all of them.

The way back was the shift from the greens and browns found on the mountains and provinces throughout La Union, Pangasinan, and the neverending stretch we call Tarlac - 

- back to the unforgiving but no less distinctive cityscapes only to be found in Manila, whichever city I actually am referring to.  At the risk of being that kind of writer, I will say that somehow you always know whether or not you're in a big city by the look of the sky.  Perhaps it's the lack of trees, or the different kind of violent sunsets the color of which are almost tasteless.  (We have tasteless sunsets up North, too, but it's our tasteless sunset, damnit.)  I am slowly learning to love bits and pieces of this place lumpily called Manila, though I have yet to love its sky.

So ends one part of the semestral break, and I'm off to another semester.  If only I would hurry up and love (or at least develop a pleasantly functioning relationship with) writing papers, then I'd be set.  Nevertheless, a constant, welcome view that I have had along these seventeen months is this.

Perhaps it's time to stop taking pictures, then, and start writing yet again, said love or functioning relationship be damned. I would after all not want my view to remain a blank piece of paper slowly gathering dots of blood from the sheer effort of thinking.