March Updates

Instead of putting postscripts and addenda to posts, I decided to gather all of them in a single entry. Hence, this post. I also had something like this for February, and this might be a monthly feature of this blog. With this system, I will be able later on to keep track of my changes to this blog, my corrections to posts, and the like.

In my March 4 post, specifically in the fifth paragraph, I created a link to one of my essays that appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. After the piece was published, I found out that the villages I mentioned toward the end are not really named after geographical features. Valley in Dulangan Manobo is lepak, cave is takub, and stream is wayeg. Kulaman takes its name from a Manobo ruler, while I have yet to research why Tacupis and Basag are so called. I wrote that essay while I was away from Kulaman and had no reliable source. My bad.

In January 27, as I was typing my posts for this month, a swift darted inside the house and flew in circles for nearly ten minutes. When the bird came in, I stopped typing, lay still, and watched it. It was black but had a gray underside. It flapped its wing in a dizzying speed, and I promptly learned that how appropriate its name was. I thought of closing the door so that the swift would be trapped inside the house, but my better self prevailed. The bird was probably looking for a nesting place. It kept on touching the wooden ceiling with its beak, producing a dull thud each time. Once it rested on the ceiling upside down, but only for less than a second. I had been observing the bird for more maybe more than two minutes when I thought of checking the time in my laptop. It was 11: 36 a.m. The tiny guest continued flying until 11: 40, often whizzing past my face as close as less than ten inches. It then flew out of the house and came back in an instant. It stayed for two minutes more before deciding our house was not a good replacement for a cave. Maybe it also realized that I might be greedy and I would take its saliva-coated nest and sell it. I was left on the couch a little lightheaded and suffering from a mild stiff neck. My point for writing this is, you only get to have such a simple wonderful experience here in a plateau.