Attemptfull Sophistication

First and most important I want to wish a very very very HAPPY 21st BIRTHDAY to my little sister, Tricia. I love you and I am so proud of you and the person you have become!

I just spent a week in Dumagettee for a seminar on project writing and grant proposals. I have no current intention of applying for grants. The seminar, put on by Peace Corps, included working 3.5 days with our counterpart from our site. I found this aspect to be very rewarding. I would assume even more so for my counterpart. My counterpart tends to be very busy (not the norm for PC counterparts) so spending a full 3 days talking about projects, the proper way to introduce them, implement them, and follow them up proved to be very beneficial. I learned some new stuff too.

On my way home from Dumagettee, Negros Island, (about a 6 hour bus and a 1.5 hour boat) I decided to stop for the weekend in Iloilo city and enjoy yet another festival. This one being Dinagyan. I do have some pics from it that I hope to post another time, but I defiantly took fewer pictures this time around. I was there with a bunch of Pinoy friends and I wasn't so much in the mood for pictures. I will say that Dinagyan included many more people, with Iloilo being a larger city. But Ati Atian was more fun in terms of dancing and crowd interaction. With a crazy Friday and Saturday night at the bars I came home on Sunday very worn down, but still oddly restless. I started going through some papers and what not and realized I had been writing more then I realized since I arrived in the Philippines. At my seminar this previous week I wrote some random stuff, mostly poems. Well I’ve decided to post a couple here. Well see what the responses to them are. This may be the only time you get to read them, perhaps I'll put some more up. Depends on if I write better or worse than a Vogon*, It is, as my title to this blog states, my attemptfull sophistication.

That and I can't draw, so when I get bored I doodle poems instead of pictures.

TRAINING

Fuse them. Confuse them.
Tactful trickery
talks the walk
but
walk the talk?
Oh hell thee
audience is
health-y. Won
hopes

to win them
but how and
win.
You have the merit
write?
down the credentials
of knew.

Just

Has the walk taken
you?


STANDUNDER

Understand?
No
We simply stood.
under
stood
nothing.
Thoughts tearing
away.
Away at what?
away at us?
Away at tears
at THEIR tears
falling
gasping
Grasping at the next
not holding the last
in tranquil transition lingering
lost. Plausible
tranquil and torn?
Perhaps perhaps
simply miss
under
stood.

Well I hope that wasn't too bad on you, or mabey you just skipped it and came right to this paragraph. Eitherway i'll keep the poems limited and put some more pictures up soon. My friend Tin Tin from England, who most of you know, will be coming to visit me for a couple weeks in Febuary. I'm takeing 2 weeks vaction to "escort" him around the Philippines and see how much trouble the two of us can stay out of. I'm sure well have some good pictures from that.

*Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison. --(Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy)