FPN-P Meet at Conti's

We thought it would be a mini-pen meet with less than ten members, but the event was so well-attended it became a full-size one. Not in pictures: Caloy (late), Mona (took pix).

Those who were able to join us (we were 15 in all) included John, JP (TOJ), Butch (DOB), Beng, Clem, Chito, Joseph, and Caloy. There were also a number of new faces: Cesar, Tato, Raffy, Paul, Winston and Sonia. The Conti's function room could barely contain us as well as the waiters, hahaha!

One of the original reasons we decided to organize a mini pen-meet was that John needed help resaccing his Sheaffer 875 Balance. Fortunately I had a spare size 18 sac, shellac and some pure talc from Woodbin, and we very quickly put his pen together. (Since I started buying relatively inexpensive vintage pens on Ebay, I figured I would invest in a basic resac/polish kit. My order arrived in the mail early this year.) Clem's Eversharp Skyline also needed resaccing, as the sac it came with had fallen off for some reason. The cap of the copper Esterbrook SJ Clem bought from Cindy also had some dried up shellac marring its finish, so that was the very first pen I used my micromesh (also from Woodbin) on.

Pidoy arrived, bringing Adring Silverio with him. Mang Adring is an experienced pen repairman and vintage pen dealer from Sampaloc. He brought with him some items to show the group (mostly an assortment of Parkers). Despite the fact that we didn't have much time to look over the pens for sale, some of us were able to have a very interesting discussion with him over lunch.

We raffled off only 4 items this time because we didn't expect such a huge turnout. Winston won the disposable Japanese fountain pen, but Chito won a Japanese notebook from Saizen, Joseph won the Wality 69T eyedropper fountain pen and Clem won the Rhodia notebook. Caloy arrived after lunch, so Chito, John and I stayed to have dessert with him.

All in all, it was another very successful pen meet! We may meet again some time in July.

Memory Palaces

Sebastian Faulks writes in his novel Charlotte Gray: "When you reach the age 40 there is no cell in your body that you had when you were 18." You are the same person, and yet a new person, and yet an older person. And thus there are limited slots to be filled by new data in your short-term memory; there's always the need for things like a smart phone scheduler and directory and Post-its. Only the most significant or the most-repeated bits of data find a place in long-term memory as you grow. Memory and learning require will, and we are the architects of that process.

In the last couple of months I read a couple of books that mention the term "memory palace" - Daniel J. Boorstin's history book The Discoverers (a personal favorite), and Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence. What an evocative, romantic term, I thought. Also called "method of loci", a memory palace is a mnemonic technique that involves assigning data to virtual place-holders in an imaginary structure in one's head. It's a mental map, a prompt. Associating a memory with an item located in a specific area in that map makes it easier to return to it and retrieve it, among the plethora of other related memories.

I believe high school students in the US who join geographic contests create memory palaces based on National Geographic maps they've studied. Even people who quote the Bible, chapter and verse, have a version. Teachers, students taking exams, craftsmen, professionals and performing artists need them too. I remember singer Christian Bautista being so nervous at Manny Pacquiao's boxing match that he forgot the entire second stanza of our national anthem and just repeated the first! Would you need a teleprompter just to sing the national anthem? We're human, surely we only need help when our senses are so bombarded and we are overwhelmed by information.

In Rushdie's fable the protagonist "Il Machia" (the erstwhile Niccolo Machiavelli) regularly visits a courtesan's salon in Florence to see an exotic noble-born beauty, recently freed from the Turks. He is curious about her identity, and why she knows a story from his childhood, and stories from the genealogies of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He coaxes the stories out of her, because he wants to solve a mystery to his potential benefit. She plucks them out of her prodigious memory like Scheherezade in The Thousand and One Nights. I suppose if you were a prisoner of war you'd rely on some type of mental discipline to keep going until you've achieved your purpose.

Lately I've been dreaming again of the house I grew up in, in UP Campus. I can remember the floor plan, even every significant tree that grew on the property, and I would remember details from when I was a kid. When I dream of "home", it's always of that house, not where I currently live. The stories and the personal details from 1970-1989 remain in my long-term memory. Beyond that period, I'm pretty selective. So yes, I've used the floor plan and furniture location of the UP house for my personal memory palace. It becomes helpful when I write.

Memory palace? Priceless. For everything else, there's Google... and possibly Facebook.

First Quarter Blahs

The first quarter of this year had some interesting events in it. And a lot of self-imposed drudgery. And somehow my online presence dwindled.

I left Plurk. I mean, I have Facebook and Twitter and Multiply and sometimes I post the same posts there as I do here. In an era when we are flooded by information, we in turn flood information REDUNDANTLY, and with glee. Some people probably have different audiences/contacts on each social network, depending on the mode of communication, so that works for them. For me, well, it's mostly the same people. The same real people I actually know and like and occasionally buy things from. I liked the way I could have extended conversations on Plurk, but hanging onto conversations takes up time I prefer to spend doing something else. Does leaving Plurk make me feel less connected? Not really, because the same friends are on Facebook, and commenting is conversation too.

While other friends move to other blog sites like Tumblr, it's for efficiency of communication. I'm staying put on Multiply because it fills my needs. Migrating information is hell; my mirror sites in Wordpress and Blogger haven't been updated in ages. I really should update them, but I really should be blogging actively here first.

I haven't been taking new photographs. I mean, I have, but not as much as before. It's another sign of information fatigue. I have raw videos of my niece's FIRST moving-up ceremony, a friend's Boracay wedding and an alumni race in my video camera that haven't been finalized or off-loaded to digital storage because things just tend to PILE UP. So don't let it pile up, you say, do it at once. It never ends :) (That was a wan smiley. It's wan because it's summer and it's hot and I'm whining.)

There are reviews lined up that ought to be here in Multiply. I just haven't gotten around to writing them (I'm editing an engineers' handbook at the moment). It's amazing I manage to journal by hand. I actually remembered (belatedly) to schedule salon pampering time for myself. I renewed my passport recently, and could've written about that, but didn't, and so the moment passed. And I realize, that while I entitled this rant "First Quarter Blahs" it's already the MIDDLE of the Second Quarter. How's that? Do I need more caffeine in an IV drip? Or would a halo-halo or mais con hielo do?

There are days I feel like a zombie headless chicken being marinated. Oh well, at least I can look forward to being tasty.