Thoughts on a Baguio Talk

August 5 was a date at memory-making.

Imagine a roundtrip ride to Baguio, minus two nights of sleeplessness, one for going, and the other for returning to your base somewhere in some other boondocks in the metro.

Imagine you are awake in all the hours that you get to the terminal and take that bus ride to the other cooler mountain up in the Amianan, and at five in the morning, you wake up the dawn as you get to alight from that bus and take your first cup of coffee under the pine trees, the mountain air crisp and smelling of the new earth spilling into the rain-soaked streets.

This is Baguio once more, a city you pine for, its secrets yours to keep forever, remaining unrevealed.

It is a talk that brought you there--and the autograph signing of the dictionary you have been able to put together after years of struggle with the Ilokano word.

Let us do the memory-making here: August 5, 2011, 1-3 PM, at the Social Science AVR, UP Baguio.

Earlier, you and your group paid a courtesy call to the Chancellor Dr Priscilla Supnet Macansantos.

Earlier, you and your Nakem group planned for the next big clandestine thing to wage a cultural and an epistemological and literacy war at the 7th Nakem in Leyte, with partners in that part of the country.

You thought that the meeting went well, and the talk too.

You thought that you had fun answering even the most difficult questions about Ilokano hegemony.

And you thought that you did not go there to pander to the convenient thoughts of the young people but to challenge them to think otherwise, including the need to get out of the herd, to get out of the mass.

We all sow the seed.

It now all depends on what ground the seed is sown.

We will see.

We shall soon see.

Baguio City/
August 5, 2011