20 Days Less and a Mental Block

I can’t believe it! There I was surfing for some materials for a paper and I saw on a website, my dad’s ancestral house. All in its decaying glory like what happened on all of my dad’s other properties. But at least it was taken artistically. I hate it when other people are taking an initiative to document our province. It has to be me, someone in the family, or someone I know! It can’t be strangers… That privilege should belong to me!!! Well all that’s in that site is glorified crap anyway.

And again the word…Crap, deadlines are fast approaching and I still got to finish 3 papers. Done are most of the researches, but I just cant get them to all fall into place. They are like scattered Lego pieces scattered in the floor, ready to be swiped away.

It’s a shit when I can’t find any resource about architecture about my dad’s hometown of Baler. I can’t help but be annoyed when all that is there are those photos and articles of the “manufactured” culture being promoted by the Angaras to give a sense of so called “character” to our old poor town. What do they think of making festivals, dressing up streets in coconut products? That it would be an instant Pahiyas festival like that of my mom’s hometown of Lucban. What is with dressing up pageant queens in sabutan costume making them look like sumans (with the delight of the dirty old foreigners)? A great piece of nativist garbage!
People sometimes ask me why do such research about Baler to just expose what is rotten about it. My 2 previous paper tackles the dirty politics in logging and the other the sad state of Baler’s art and Culture. Even my college interior design thesis tackle in portions certain social issues (and it was suppose to be of just interior designing). I can’t explain, at first I don’t intend to throw all that dirt, but I just can’t help to just shut up when I see failures in a system. If you’ll make a thesis about Baler, a town ridden by dirty politics and a backward social culture, it is hard to be nice. To hell about tourist promotion, to hell with it being the shooting location of the movie Apocalypse Now! The façade that what the powers that be wants to project is not the real face of the reality. I am in a unique position, I am from the inside but I am also from the outside. I speak for the locals, with my heritage coming from Baler. As I also speak as an outsider, being born and growing up here at Manila (actually QC, a misconception of probinsyanos, they don’t define Metro Manila to the city. That’s why when asked “taga maynila ka ba otoy?” I answered “di, tiga QC po”). I see this as a “privileged” spot/situation to do some criticism.

I am really having a hard time finding a theory that would fit. I have problem boxing myself, with a theory. My style is what I want to call ”free flow writing”. I just write what comes, ill create an outline of topics, have my datas, do my analysis and that’s it. I am an outsider in critical writing, I don’t feel comfortable basing my theories to people I just read in books. I want to concentrate on the issues, exposing what I feel are valuable blah blahs. But again the word crap, that wont pass here at UP. Got to think of an idea… as what John Nash (as interpreted by Russel Crowe) said, “we got to figure out our original idea”. For in the end, "it is by that how we are going to matter."