Love, Your Artsy Girl

I have for so long neglected my writing and artistic pursuits, and lately, I have this vision of starting a new book.  Don't know what the premise will be, but I definitely feel it brewing. This is a good sign.  I just have to follow all the good tips on how to kick-start creativity and get back to a creative lifestyle.  I have been concentrating on how to get my foot in the door at the college institution full-time so that I can have stability, but I now realize that the moment is NOW.  Like now is a better time than any to continue traveling.   Why wait until retirement? I want to go to Europe, an area I have not visited yet.  I will also start saving for my high school reunion trip to Costa Rica in 2015.  I always believed in order to experience a place, you actually have to live there, but there's also times where just being there can just be as rewarding. As I am nearing 50, I see how important it is to check off those things on ...

I have continually grieve over these losses.   One Art by Elizabeth Bishop The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like ( Write  it!) like disaster.

First day of middle school!

Two years have passed since my last post.  My youngest daughter, who is now 11, have embarked on an adventure abroad to a tranquil and remote speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific where I taught English Composition, Speech Communication, Advanced Reading, and Introduction to Art for the whole year of 2013.  It was a sobering experience to come back, leaving my significant other behind to pursue his own dreams. http://www.kpress.info/index.php/site-map/613-com-students-create-art-on-a-large-scale-at-pohnpei-library As I adjust to Florida life once again, I embark another semester teaching at Hillsborough Community College and Pasco Hernando State College this fall of 2014, hopefully landing a full-time teaching gig somewhere sometime soon.  But in the meantime, I will be cleansing my mind, body and soul, and enriching other minds...

I have been in transition.  Since I received my MFA, I embarked on my career change into the academic world.  I became an adjunct instructor at a local community college, not making enough to make ends meet even with the spotty freelance work I get from time to time, mind you. I have been in the crux of subsistence living and putting up with folks who think less of me because of it.  Because of it, my creative life is nonexistent.  Because of it, I have withdrawn further within myself.  Because of it, I have no romantic life to speak of. We are approaching the new year and I am anxiously waiting for the tides to turn but trying yet to hold off my desperation.  I have to let go of old and tired things in my life and break old habits.  I even plan to change my daily driving route. I read a little today about the history of post-modern poetics.  How it interests me so.  If I had money, I probably would take another major in literary...

My mom grew up in a small sea-side village in the Philippines, and growing up there as a child has given me a different set of lens and a great appreciation of  what it means to live very close to earth. Coming stateside, however, throughout the years, have been quite a total disconnect.  Recently, I have discovered a plethora of information pertaining to this subculture.  I am still experiencing the wonderment no matter where I am-- even in a nondescript suburb of Florida.

I assume it was a normal season when I was born in 1967. The typhoons raged through the dirt streets of Angeles City every year, yet it never washed away the gregarious GIs, the loud-mouthed go-go girls of the strip clubs and whore houses so eloquently called cabarets. Here in this one Philippine city, I grew up with everyone’s second-hand stories—stories that lingered like the smoke of barbecue meat cooking outside the bars and discos at two in the morning, wafting in and out of my life, sometimes blinding the full view of my adolescence. The clamor of their drama still rings in my ear to this day. The frenzy and ire outside the military gates of Clark Air Force Base include the whir and hum of jeepneys (army jeeps left by the United States after the Second World War made into colorful commuter vehicles) and tricycle checkpoints that whisk their patrons through the big, red veins of prostitute alley—a girl running topless after a garish Aussey while her friends sit outside on...