Limits of time, and other things

“How do you spell neighbor?”

The whisper was at first so quiet, and the face of the whisperer so discreetly turned away from mine that I didn’t realize it was addressed to me until it was repeated. The woman at the library computer next to me seemed the prototypical lower-middle-class white American: tired-faced, with her slightly overweight wrapped in a lilac T-shirt, her light brown hair pulled back into a low-set ponytail. I looked over at what she was typing and almost told her to add a ‘u’ after the ‘o’, but remembered the difference from the British spelling.

“It looks okay,” I said. “There’s this website called dictionary.com, let me check...Yeah, it’s fine.”

“I guess I could have gotten a real dictionary.” Again the mumble nearly so low as to be inaudible. She was filling out an online application form for working at Copps [an American grocery chain]. As she typed, a young boy came to ask her for something and was rebuffed with “I’m busy, go look at the...” A few minutes later I peeked and saw the few brief sentences she had typed in the input text box..

“I am a mom...”

“...have helped my neighbor take care of kids...”

Having several years of helping various friends edit application essays, including my med-school-bound roommate, I was itching to ask her if she wanted help with her application. Those choppy sentences, dripping self-conscious inadequacy, cried out for someone to rewrite them, reassemble them into a curriculum vitae which would let the reader know that here was a real live person who, despite her lack of fancy education, would work hard, learn quickly, and be reliable because she had a kid to feed and a house to pay for.

Some time later the whisper on the threshold of sensibility addressed me again. “How do I save my stuff?” The dreaded, “This is your final warning! You have two minutes left!” window had popped up (the Madison public library system is untactful when enforcing computer usage time limits).

“Is there a button somewhere on the web page that’ll let you save your application?” I offered lamely. Vet school applications had accounts that let you save. I doubted grocery store applications did.

“What time is it? Four-thirty? That hour went by quickly...”

She was on page 16 of 28, according to the Copps page (twenty-eight pages to hire a grocery store worker? sampat!). She typed and re-typed the datum in first box on that page, “Name of School”, trying to decide whether an acronym should be entered as MATC, M.A.T.C., or M A T C. Then another window popped up with its ghastly cheerful “Goodbye!” and her application disappeared.

“Now I have to do it all over,” she muttered. She went to the reference desk and I watched anxiously out of the corner of my eye as she spoke to a librarian.

“Can you log on again?” I asked when she came back to collect her purse.

“You can only have one hour a day,” she said.

“Are you looking for a job?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. Good luck.”

She disappeared. The UW-Hospital had a few openings for various assistant jobs that I could do. Covance had an animal technician-something which sounded like it might be interesting, albeit a bit depressing. I’d only been searching for a few minutes. We joke about how liberal arts education doesn’t give you any financial benefits, we whine about how hard it is to find a job, but really? We soar on wings like eagles compared to the woman in the purple shirt who’s not sure how to spell ‘neighbor’. We have no right.

Good little doctors

This is not a good day for higher education. I revisited UPM's vet school website and am seething with rage that over a third (9/26 credits) of the 1st year curriculum is devoted to what are essentially propaganda courses.

First Year (Freshman)

Semester I - May

Code	Course	Credit
ANT 2001	Society and Changes	2 (2+0)
SKP 2201	Islamic Civilisation	2 (2+0)
SKP 2202	Asian Civilization	2 (2+0)

Semester II - November

Code	Course	Credit
SKP 2101	Malaysian Nationhood	3 (3+0)

Nearly half (6/13) of the first semester credits and nearly a fourth (3/13) of the second semester credits are consumed by this Mickey Mouse trash at a crucial time. This is the time when kids who say they like animals but hate 'biology' should be learning to see biology as not just a conglomeration (as it's taught in school) but as a new way of seeing the world. This is the time when kids who have never had an original thought in their lives should be learning to be scientists, investigators. Look at it. This is not veterinary medicine. It's total cock-and-bull.

I'm currently trying to figure out where to go to vet school (just finished a BA in biology America -- go figure, a Bachelor of Arts in Biology? Liddat how to find job?). I firmly plan on going home after finishing professional education to counteract the brain drain, but because of the insane UPM curriculum, I'm look anywhere but Malaysia.

Why do they feel they have to keep stuffing patriotism into young adults' heads after 13 years of schooling? What on earth makes them think it works anyway? Oh, right...because nowhere in our primary or secondary education are we taught to think independently.

Lavanderia

So...I've finally unrolled my last pair of washed-in-the-Philippines undies, and I still haven't succeeded in fully reverse-engineering the Filipina Laundromat Panty Sausage. It's very frustrating because I would love to be able to have all my panties bound into a neat little roll by the elastic waistband. (Not while I'm wearing them, however.) If anyone knows how to get it like that, please please let me know.

Obviously you can tell I'm not the type who buys underwear at Victoria's Secret.

This is Panik. Her name was originally Lilia, but she didn't answer to it. 'Paniki' is 'bat' in Tagalog, so with the big ears it was a natural choice. Dondon (or 'Don x2' as he spells it) took her back to Del Rosario after the fieldwork was over.

Eight people plus luggage plus hen plus puppy hanging off a motor-tricycle is a sight that has to be seen to be believed.

Bat Tales 1: Tales of the Wild Horse

The morning the horse showed up I was sitting at our bamboo-and-raffia work table trying to wake myself up with Nescafe. The others were laughing somewhere on the other side of the cook’s hut, but I was too sluggish to get up and see what the joke was for some time. “We have a visitor,” Jodi told me as I shuffled over to the dinner table. Munching away at the knee-high scrub down the hill from our camp was a thin, flea-bitten dark grey horse. Under the hide you could see the bones of shoulder and pelvis shifting like some creaky mechanism as it moved about. At least it explained the presence of the strand of barbed wire laid across the path on the other side of the dry riverbed at the bottom of the pasture. The wire, strung at human head-height, wasn’t very obvious in the dim forest so we tied pink flagging ribbon to it.

The Tagalog word for horse is kabayo, rather like the Spanish but with a more Asian-friendly spelling, which can be a little confusing for the visitor because water buffalo is carabao (this one a cognate to Malay, not Spanish, as far as I know). It’s like the joke about how Westerners can’t tell the difference between ‘rambutan’ and ‘orangutan’.

The next day, having exhausted bat-processing as a way to spend time and feeling too lazy to work on drawing, I decided to go for a walk along the trail where the harp trap line had been a few nights before. Picking my way between hillocks of grass and piles of horse-apples, I was stopped by the appearance of the kabayo, browsing along the very path I wanted to take. I stopped and watched. To a city kid like me, who’d grown up with stories about people called Farmer Brown (even though our farmers are more likely to have names like Mat or Lim), even a poor skinny thing like that was interesting for a while. From no perspective did it remind me of the horse-gods from Peter Shaffer’s Equus – rather more like a large herbivorous anjing kurap. Nevertheless, it looked territorial enough that I didn’t take that walk.

“Be careful,” Laura and I were warned the next morning. “The horse was hanging around the men’s tents last night and they had to get up and chase it away.” Apparently, the fellow who owned it, named Dodi, had been requested to take it down and tie it up, but ignored the second part of that request. So whenever he took it down it would make its way back to what it considered its pasture in a few hours, leaving lumpy booby-traps along the way. It had been shy the first couple of weeks the bat team had been camping at the Pasto, but by the time Laura and I got there, it had decided that the strange people were safe and it could go back to mowing the grass. When asked to tie it up, our local field assistants Dondon and Darwin declined vehemently because it had a reputation for biting.

At first I didn’t think the horse was much of a nuisance and looked on it as one more of the animal characters in our camp, like the small white puppy that Darwin brought up on Thursday. However, it proved itself to be a major force of destruction by tangling with and ruining two expensive mist nets which had been left bundled up in the forest for the day. “I hate that horse,” groaned Jodi. “I wish there were no horses in my life right now.” We complained to the owner again, and a second strand of barbed wire at waist-height made its appearance soon after that.

Around seven o’clock on the last night at the pasto, someone went “Yaaaaaaargh!” in the forest and we saw the bobbing light of a headlamp as the wearer fled toward us. Darwin had all but literally run into a wild pig guarding her two piglets – not an animal one wants to be on the wrong side of. In light of the number of squatters on the mountain, the presence of pigs was actually a nice surprise, as long as we stayed out of their way. He went back later to warn the people at the V-net about it.

While Laura and I were working at the table between our tents and the cook’s hut a while later, someone called out a warning and then something big and dark came crashing up the hill toward us. Having just discussed wild boar, our first thought was to get away. Laura ran away toward the cook’s hut and I swung my legs off the ground, ready to jump onto the table. A wild-eyed spectre plunged past, snorting. However, the creature was equine, not porcine, and the stupid kabayo was heading for our tents! Looming out of the moonless night, it really did look like something from Equus. Panik the puppy barked perfunctorily, but she wasn’t up to horse-herding, so Mang Danny scared it off.

We last saw the horse on the last morning at the Pasto. I think it was as glad to see the end of us as we were glad to see the end of it...well, we did see quite a lot of tahi kuda on the way down.

Ooh...soap!

Well, I've survived 3 weeks in the Philippine jungle without getting any leech bites -- which is good considering that Jodi got infected leech bites, Ariel and Darwin each got a leech in the eye, and Laura got foot fungus so rampant I expect mushrooms between her toes. Am planning to type up excerpts from my diary and post them as a series of blog entries. The first thing we did after getting to CSSAC (Camarines Sur State Agricultural College and showering was to hop on a bus to Naga and go to Pizza Hut (Jodi's big goal for the day, aside from getting a beer. They have beer in Pizza Hut in the Philippines!).

Neways...I've concluded after 3 weeks that the Philippines is like a more lapuk version of Malaysia. It's kinda like how Singapore is similar to KL but much nicer. Urban Filipinos look like Malays, and rural Filipinos look either like Malays or like Orang Asli. I've had at least half a dozen people here (plus one Hawaiian kid back at college in the US) tell me I look like a Filipina, which is then scary because I'm expected to speak Tagalog.

One cool thing that's coming out of this: I'm going to have my first comic strip published! It's actually a pictorial guide on "What To Do With a Bat" for the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Philippines. Will post later when I scan it. Another cool thing: We caught a Myotis rufopictus (that's "red-painted" for those of you who haven't seen enough scientific names to decipher Latin) on the VERY LAST NIGHT. No kidding. The most beautiful bat in the world.

Oh, and I got the lab job in Madison! Now I have something to go back to America for...putting off the dithering about what to do with my lousy BA for the next year. I can imagine the hell it'll be trying to find a job in Malaysia with a Bachelor of ARTS in Biology. Jerng at least majored in Philosophy; with a useless degree like that, he's free to do whatever the heck he likes. *sigh*