I should be making a list in this post, but won’t, primarily because I have an aversion to listicles. A numbered list is supposed to make an article easier to read—light to the eyes and friendly to the memory. But it doesn’t work that way for me. I feel that a list insinuates to the reader that each item is important and should be given attention. My brain finds that stressful. I don’t want to remember ten persons, things, or reasons. I prefer going over dollops of words and even paragraphs and take note of just one or two truly important ideas that are stated in the article or can be inferred from it.
So no, this post won’t have a numbered list in it, but it will have a list all the same. I will enumerate the reasons why I keep on writing in this blog. But the five or so reasons will be embedded, at no particular distance from one another, in the sentences and paragraphs. So here they are:
When I decided to create this blog, it was for a purely altruistic reason, believe it or not. I wanted graduate students who were doing research on the Dulangan Manobo to have less trouble looking for reference materials. I wanted this blog to contain links to all possible online resources on the Dulangan Manobo. I know it sounds like I merely wanted to do what Google was already doing, but the idea of creating this blog in fact came to me out of my frustration with Google. It was time-consuming to sift through the results for, say, “Cotabato Manobo” or “Kulaman burial jars.” Because of search engine optimization techniques bloggers employed, the “most relevant” results often turned out to be blog posts that barely contained useful information and plagiarized from one another. So contained in this blog—especially in the Bibliography page, the News page, and the tags—are the truly relevant results, I dare claim.
I have pretty much scoured the Internet by now, more than two years since, for information about the Dulangan Manobo, so my original intent for maintaining this blog no longer holds true. It has been replaced by, among others, another altruistic reason: to help promote Kulaman Plateau as the next ecotourism hotspot. The place surely has the potential. It has a hundred caves, for one. The best that has been discovered so far, the White Cave of Kuden village, is one of the most beautiful in the world. Try googling the best caves in the world and compare their photos with that of White Cave. It would not be an exaggeration to say that White Cave is at par with the others. There are other beautiful things in Kulaman Plateau aside from caves, but I’m not going to expound them here. Please check my other posts.
I won’t claim, though, that I’m doing good in promoting the touristy qualities of Kulaman Plateau. I call a piece of shit a piece of shit, so I don’t sugarcoat anything about the place. I have posts about how bad the road here is, how incompetent the government officials can be, and the like. I don’t want to promise paradise to anyone who might be enticed to explore the place from reading this blog. So I help promote Kulaman Plateau, but I’ll never call it a haven or anything. The most generous description I’ll say of it is that it is a rough, raw beauty. Exploring this place is like riding a horse, not making love to a woman. It will take at least a decade for this place to be friendly to vacationing retirees. But, backpackers who like roughing it, I invite thee.
I’m also maintaining this blog for future writers and researchers. I want to record even the inane facts of living here in Kulaman Plateau because it might someday benefit writers of local history or historical fiction. I don’t want them to have the same difficulty that I’m having. I’ve written a few stories set in the past, and it was difficult for me to create characters and scenes with verisimilitude because I don’t know how ordinary everyday life was like back then. I couldn’t find good sources to draw my stories from. Someday, say, 2050, writers writing about the 2010s would be thankful to this blog for recording how different Kulaman Plateau it will be from today—or, hopefully not, how unchanged it will be. I may not be able to brilliantly document or make sense of my generation today, but one writer in the future might be able to by usings as a source, but not plagiarizing, my humble writings.
Now let’s go to my selfish reasons for maintaining this blog. The main item on this subject is my goal to keep my hands moving—to write regularly. I believe in what experts say that writing is like dancing and playing basketball—the more you do it, the better you become. Writing posts for this blog is a good exercise. I won’t run out of things to write about—from humdrum daily lives of farmers to noisy fiestas and noisier horse fights, from dreary village centers to magnificent caves in hidden locations, from the meager meals of many locals and tribal people to exotic food. I write here mostly in a conversational style, so I’m able to write fast, to write as I think. All that I write here will be published, so while writing, I don’t have to worry about the taste of the editor or the superiority of the work of other contributors, which can intimidate and suppress creativity. I sometimes skip copyediting, for it can be tiring and time-consuming. (Once in a while, though, I review old posts and make necessary corrections.)
I’m also using this blog as an online CV and to keep track of my literary progress, if I may call it that. The page about the blogger includes a list of my published pieces. But that’s most likely the most personal, vain, shameless, or uncensored I’ll share here. I’ll spare you from two cents’ worth on the latest national issues, rants on how unfair life is, and names-less accounts of sexual trysts. (Not that I have a lot to share in those departments.) This blog is not about me. I am only one of the thousands of residents of Kulaman Plateau, and I hope to keep that in mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment