from foreshores

Prelude to a Getaway

I woke up freaking early last Friday to catch an early bus going to Makati. It's a good 3-hour ride and I wanted to get to the capital before lunch to get a cheque and encash it. The money will be paid for the Palladium Writers Workshop/Getaway for that weekend. It means food and lodgings for 10 people for 3 days. I was thinking, if I leave home at 9, I'll arrive by 12, and that just about leaves me enough time to go to the bank before it closes at 3. I left home at 10, arrived at 1, and found no check waiting for me in the school's accounting office. The check was still being processed. I shelled out a lot of money and cursed the lazy accounting people.

I hung around the Palladium office preparing the writers' kits. The workshop schedule showed yoga sessions for the Saturday and Sunday sunrise, modules on writing for magazines, literary criticism, photography, and basic layout principles, and a planning seminar on Sunday morning. The schedule differed vastly from the actual thing. No yoga sessions materialized as we all slept late (as late as early morning, 4 a.m. or so) and thus, woke up late (as early as noon). All the modules and the planning happened in 4 hours on Saturday afternoon, and layout was scrapped out for the lack of computers.

Going there

The 7 of us from Palladium left for a private beach resort in Lian, Batangas that evening. We left school at past 8 on a rented van with two drivers whom we forgot to feed. Hehe! During the first part of the ride (there are three parts), we were as noisy as what Quanny calls Green-and-White ingay. The whole van sounded like it seated a whole class instead of just a few, which is probably why we missed our stop in Shell gas station where Kiko was supposed to be waiting for us. We ended up stopping in the next gas station and had Kiko follow us there instead.

We ate at McDonald's, met with Kiko, and followed his van all the way to their resort. By then it was already 11, and we haven't properly eaten our dinner (it's hard to eat chicken with your hands on board a moving vehicle while constantly giving in to the temptation of butting in all the cacophony). After eating, one "Are we there yet?" came after another and another. And another. And another. We were all near switching to grumpy mode when the concrete road gave way to a rocky road, vast farmlands, moonlight, starlight, no electricity, rare huts, and a katipunero in the midst of nowhere. We all decided not to look behind us or to anywhere at all for that matter, out of fear of seeing spirits dwelling in the farms. Every bump felt sorely unwelcome, and the numerous stars, instead of consoling us, added spook.

(to be continued...)

We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.