Back Where I Started

...but not quite.

Unravel. Pen and Ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board

Wiser.

Brisk. Pen and Ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board

So many things have happened since I drew the top image. It was my first entry to Illustration Friday. I posted it on January 12, 2008 for the Illustration Friday prompt "Stitch." Later that year, in the month of August, to be exact, something wonderful happened on my blog. I posted the drawing on the left and I was visited by a beautiful human being who turned out to be more than just a blog acquaintance. We have been friends ever since, the best! What have I done to deserve such gift? I am so happy, truly blessed. Thank you.

I love tracing my blog history. So many happy moments. I have met so many wonderful and talented people who have enriched my life. Most of all, I have been inspired to pick up the pen again and draw. I rediscovered my love for pen and ink. I keep on experimenting. One thing I noticed though, I have always loved mushrooms! The drawing on the left has parasol mushrooms!!! Oh, and lizards. Haha! Have a lovely week everyone. I am going to have a very busy work week, interspersed with very important tasks and physical pain. Noooooooo!!!

Not Really Scary

Dream Series: Bound. Pen and Ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board.

I relegated this drawing to my box of "Draw and Forget." I did not really intend to post this for a reason. However, my drawing pad right now has nothing scary, so I thought I'd give this baby a chance and share it with you. When I showed this drawing to my children, I expected them to be a little bit shocked by it but instead they said "Cool!". Do you think this is cool? Hahaha! I am experimenting with line strokes. I am reaching my boredom level with squiggles, so you may notice more lines on my drawings. I have also decided to make my inked area measure exactly 8"x10" So I made an 8"x10" Bristol Board template and before I start drawing, I trace the area template on the new Bristol Board.

Life Fuels Love Fuels Life... Popetchca

Popetchca, Circa 2011

Archival pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board

2010

From: Leah To: Ces Sent: 1:33 AM Subject: Re: My Sister

Nene Cecil, I read your final write up. You know, I never felt or knew that you were ignoring me. Remember, when you left for the US, I had just taken the bar. And you were with me everyday. You massaged me when I came home from the court and when I was tired. You were someone who we felt was very strong and who could always survive. Nanay brought you up the "American" way. She and Tatay were very strict with us. Remember when I went to Girl Scouts' camp in Mambucal and Tatay was there everyday? Whereas you could join any camp alone and for a number of days. We really admired you. And we love you. We miss your popetchca, etc. Ay Nene Cecil, I won the case in Tanza Cavite. This means ......... Inday Lyn is already watching the results of my land cases. She is more interested. Ha ha ha. Day Lec

On Tue, 12:59 AM, Ces wrote:

OOOOOOOHHH! Inday Leah! I don't remember popetchka. What was that? It makes me smile. I think it may have been funny. You have a good memory, that is why you are a lawyer. I have a rotten memory, I remember the details of awful events. Maybe I feel guilty. I remember that spat we had at Luneta. I felt horrible but too proud to apologize. I always loved you then and love you now. I am so proud of you and everyone else but you, you were always tender and gentle. You were the gentlest of all of us. You did not quarrel with anybody.

Everybody else was very gentle. I was very mean but in reality, I loved everyone and considered myself as protector. Hahaha! remember the time I ran after Junior with Nanay's huge knife. It was the binangun. HAHAHAHAH!

Oh I hate being here in Texas by myself!

I love you. I will call this weekend. Tsup!

From: Leah To: Ces Sent: Tue, 7:18:47 AM Subject: Re: My Sister

Dear Nene Cecil,Popetchca is potatoes, petchay and carne which you always cooked remember?We just came from Sta. Rosa Laguna, ...

On Tue, 8:32 PM, Ces wrote:

Dearest Inday Lec,

HAHAHAHAHA! OMG! Now I remember. You know Inday, I forget about a lot of things like how we used to go to the market and how I cooked and all those things but then something like this popetchca will remind me and I will have a flood of memories. Do you remember that drug-crazed son of Mrs D? OMG I was ready to kill him! I still have the photograph of the four of us, Inday Ched, Lyn, you and me, in front of that unfinished house down the housing project at the university. Tatay came to visit us and took a picture of us. Lynette was holding an umbrella and I was holding my mandolin. I also remember spending Christmas with Inday Ched in 1973. I was on my way to the First Asia Pacific encampment as a Girl Scout and she picked me up from the national headquarters in Padre Faura. It was very quiet at the university, it was almost empty and we walked to church. I always remember that and I love Inday Ched so much just remembering how much she sacrificed for all of us.

What are you guys going to do with all these land?!!

I am working from home today.

Oh BTW, Inday Frey and I video-chat with each other several times a week. Sometimes we just look at each other and laugh! The kids left for summer school. They will be home at 2:30 PM. M is now 17 and Em is 14. They are both very loving kids but M sometimes stresses me with his teenage angst. Oy, he is such an American teenager! Grrrrr! But he is a good and loving son.

Love,

Ces

Toilet Paper

Dream Sequence No. 4

Oh wow! No mushrooms!!!

Just nine mice.

I had this dream about toilet paper, do you want to know? One day I'll write about what I think of toilet paper. Oh yes, it is a very important subject matter. It's quite fascinating actually. Toilet paper has very peculiar cultural and political aspects to it...seriously.

Quincunx

Dream Sequence No.7, Quincunx.

Archival micro pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board

You know, sometimes, the only reason why I blog is to take a break from being such a terrific and amazing clinical analyst or take the opportunity to use high scoring words. Hahahahahaha!!!

Sincerely,

The Grande Witch of Xystoi, Xylem, Zoysia, Zeks, Oyez, Soja and Jeux

The Light Of Your Love

Sometimes, life takes you down on a bleak and dark journey. You seek the light at the end of the tunnel but the journey is long. You look around, and you hold on to something to steady your gait. Sometimes you fall and can no longer walk. Then there is someone or a special few beside you who willingly accompanied you on your journey, and they carry you. And then something astonishing happens. In the midst of darkness, you look at their faces and you see light! Yes, their hopeful, loving gaze, brighten the way. These are the people who truly love you. I hope my sister sees the light, for she is surrounded by it.

My sisters and brothers would never wear these clothes; first of all they are black. We do not wear black clothes when we go home and when we are together. In fact I don't think my sisters even have anything black except for an occasional pair of pants; but I wanted to best illustrate what I am talking about and it is fall; and I heard we are having a cold front this coming Wednesday. For the record, I have over twenty black suits for work, but I don't think of them as "black" suits, just suits.

I often bristle at the cliche "Love is all you need." Love is not the answer to everything and it does not even lighten the load. This is what I thought, until my sister got sick and I see what my sisters will do without hesitation. There is no other word for what they do but it is none other than love. And I see my stoic and quiet brothers who carry my sister in their own way. Then there is my husband, who, since the day he told me he loves me, has never said no to anything I ask for my family, and who loved my parents as much as I loved them, and who loves my sisters and brothers.

My illustration is lacking. I cannot possibly draw everyone who comforts my sister and our family throughout this trying journey. There are my children who never complained when I had to leave for more than a month to help care for my sister. There are my nephew and niece who faithfully visit their aunt, help care for her, they do not complain that their mother who is stretched by work and travel, come home and spend the time with our sister at the hospital. There is our niece Lani, for making sure my sister had comfortable transportation during her doctors' visits, thank you Inday. There are my co workers who carried my load when I had to leave on such short notice; my manager and director who facilitated my leave; friends who pray for my sister; my sister's generous classmates, friends and former students. There are my blog friends who send me words of comfort. There is my beloved sisterfriend, Deborah who needs our love and our prayers for her Brawny Man but has never stopped loving and praying for others. And then there is my best friend who has been with me through so many challenges and difficulties; who loves my family like family and I can only think of her as such.

In darkness I see the light when I look into your eyes.

Thank you.

Don't Settle; The Flea Party; Here, Take Some Drugs and Other Saturday Ramblings

Dream Sequence No. 8

The Spider and The Earthworms

005 Micron pen on 9"x12" Bristol Board

You know, every time I open my blog and see that header up there, it's a detail of Anomie right now, I want to revise it. It is lacking something, perhaps more squiggles. I would like to do that, unfortunately, I do not know where that drawing is right now. So sad. Everything I have is scattered, like my mind.

How often have we been told that in order to achieve peace, we need to be settled. Yes, settle. I think I am settled but in my case, it is the very state of having settled that makes me restless. I want to fight it. I do not like it at all. Yet I also like predictability and monotony, being ordinary. I love that I wake up to familiar things and scent, that there is routine and expectation, that my friends and I are boring and uncomplicated. I do not deny that life is fraught with difficulties. Some people I dearly love wake up to uncertainty, worry and grave concern. That is not to say they are not at peace. In fact they seem more peaceful than I am. I think they are more grown up or wiser.

How many times have I read this or heard this "I am generally a happy person, but..." Well, you know something? I want to say "I do not like to pretend I am not because I am..."

Sad.

Angry.

Stressed.

Harried.

Bored.

Amused.

Tickled.

Irritated.

Ecstatic.

Satisfied.

Frustrated.

Tired.

Wishing I am really the Grande Witch so I can send a hex to some people.

Pretend that I did not like what I read from someone's blog the following statement "It is not beneath me to dance on top of my enemy's grave." And just so you know, the person who wrote this is a fun loving, handsome young man with a lot of promise.

What do you think? How do you feel?

Some people speak and write very wisely. They know a lot of things and seem to be authorities in many matters, like this very educated person who wants everyone to think like she does.

Oh on another note, I like reading about the new Flea Party; did smart Michelle Obama think the British were going to blow her away?; Occupy Wall Street Protesters Blaming the Jews or defending a terrorist; Stupid Republicans.

Don't you love political correctness? I think people who are so concerned about political correctness, about appearing egalitarian, pretending to be altruistic need to have better fitting shoes or underwear. Oh wait, they may not wear shoes or underwear.

Get real! Stop whining. Live!

Multitasking, My Scattered Mind - The Mangrove

It's midnight and I got paged for a problem. I was so sleepy, now I am wide awake. I can't sleep! sadly, the drawing above pretty much illustrates my mind sometimes. So much...........stuff!

I have, pinned to my office wall, a Wall Street Personal Journal article titled "Multitasking Makes You Dumb", "The perils of taking on too much." I think I saved that article because despite the fact that multitasking is lauded in our field, the level at which I was taking it, was too much. Yes, even for me who is a natural multi-tasker.

The mermaids are soaking in their coral sauna. One baby mermaid has been neglected by her mother who took off to watch some human males at a construction site. In the meantime, an octopus in her garden is savoring a tarpin. So it came to pass after a massive genetic mutation accident, humans became tiny shrimp-like creatures while mushrooms became gigantic skyscrapers. Much of earth was underwater...

It's 2:17 AM and I am wide awake. I am on call tonight and I have been paged every two hours, an interval right enough to disrupt my sleep. I will try to sleep now because I have a full day of work tomorrow. Good night! Tsup!

When I draw something like this, I use a penny as a scale.

The people in this drawing, except for the suited divers, are the size of the mint mark on the penny.

I literally doodled this piece.I think it is the act of squiggling. A lot of things come to mind. I think about my sister, my sisters and brothers. I think about those dear to me. Sometimes I have this eloquent train of thoughts about what I am going to write about. It is very easy when I am in bed thinking but it is difficult to write my thoughts down especially when I cannot see for the tears obliterate my eyes. Besides, I do not want to blog in bed. I find that rather invasive. I drew everyone I love in this piece. My brother is up there taking photographs of the sky. This is 9"x11" Bristol Board.

Yesterday, I was on call. I had on my computer screen the following applications opened: email, rule builder, preference and privilege maintenance tool, electronic medical record, system pager, remedy, not one but two interoffice instant messaging conversations with the interface analyst and emergency system analyst; while I was on the phone with a biomedical engineering technician and someone had just left me a voicemail. I can't remember when I went to the bathroom for the first time that morning but I had lunch past one o'clock at my desk. I had leftover roasted cornish hen with potatoes, carrots and celery.

In this world, a typhoon has passed. Now the residents of this mangrove community have to deal with the destruction of their mushroom-like sports arena. They have to fix it or take it out for it has become a safety hazard. The sea is filled with dangers. There are poisonous and ravenous sea serpents, Portuguese man-of-war, crocodiles, octopuses, gigantic fish among others. I have included in this scene a hospital building.

The other day, a friend of mine gave me a self awareness exercise. The exercise involved identifying the three most important things in your life. It could be anything. I had mine. Then she asked me to write them down in three separate pieces of paper. She asked me to crumple each of them and put them inside a cup. Then without knowing what to pick she asked me to pick one and throw it out the door. I budged. She urged me and reluctantly I did. Then she asked me to pick another and throw it in the garbage. I refused to continue with the exercise. She coaxed. I threw the second in the trash can. The third I got to keep. The lesson, she said was this: In life we sometimes cannot choose what to keep; we cannot have everything we want. Things will happen to take away what is most important to us, therefore we need to be present, it is easy to be consumed by our tasks, what we do, what we want, by our hopes and dreams. When we look back we have forgotten what mattered most sometimes, too late.

I decided to apply a thin layer of charcoal on my doodle to make the waterline more obvious. This is The Mangrove. Inspired by K.H.Whitaker's comment about genetically modified organisms; tasked by my heavy heart; directed by my crowded mind; encouraged by my best friend; guided by the abiding love of my favorite blog reader who can no longer read what I write, see what I paint and draw; my mind screams and my heart breaks. Sometimes I do not know what to do... I love you so much. I am so sorry that love is not everything.

mAliceCesious Contraptions In Blogland

WOWOWOWOWOWOW!!! Three posts in one day! Sleeplessness has its rewards, right? This is mAlice in Wonderland. Micron pen and ink on 11"x14" Bristol Board. This was the drawing that inspired me to start my Dream Sequence Series. It was the contraptions and ropes on and around the mushrooms that I enjoyed illustrating.

A Nobel Prize For Settled Science

"Today Dan Shechtman, Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University, received a telephone call that he didn’t expect. It was from the Nobel Committee which had taken valuable time out from awarding its Peace Prize to assorted crackpots, incompetents, frauds, despots and genocidal killers to bestow upon Dr. Shechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry." http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2011/10/06/a-nobel-prize-for-settled-science/

I just posted this last night before I went to bed, but now I will post something that explains why my art oftentimes contains the symbols that repeatedly appear in many of my illustrations and paintings. This morning, after I was awakened by a telephone call, I could not get back to sleep and so I started reading. I have to share this with you. This field of science is so dear to me mainly because it is has been for years an integral part of the many advances in medical care, among its many applications. The science of crystallography was also my brother's thesis topic for his PhD in Mathematics and I helped him obtain some of the reference materials he needed for his research. Yet, it has been in recent years, under attack by those who want to skew science for their own personal agenda, because the climate scare mongers do not want you to know.

For the longest time after I arrived in America, I have often wondered how liberals recruit new followers. I soon realized that liberals rely on the people's lack of knowledge in order to strengthen and spread their beliefs. Whether it is in law, education, healthcare or politics, they succeed by relying on the audience's ignorance and tugging on their heartstrings. Rather than welcoming discourse, they personally attack those who would question their premises. Facts, research and scientific principles are brushed aside. Their success is vetted by tugging on raw emotions and the human propensity for mobs that deafen and drown out reason, rather than engage in logic and scientific discourse.

I am always skeptical of ideas that sound so "wonderful" because they are well packaged and presented with an accompanying business plan and a solution that sounds like a panacea, until it is opened and turns out to be a pandora's box. Some bloggers regard me as calloused, uncaring or extreme. I cannot argue with those who have set their minds for their own personal benefit, but what I am is someone who questions rather than blindly accept ideas because they appear trendy and overwhelmingly wonderful and good. I also love to study and read, not opinion journals and television talk shows and subjective journalism but basic scientific premises and documents. I am passionate about original documents, not interpretations of documents, which explains why our home library has a copy of Principia Matematica and the writings of Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; not Aristotle's, Jefferson's and Adams's according to someone.

I once was engaged in a heated argument about the effects of abortions on crime rate. I found the study's conclusion too offensive. My best friend was exasperated and frustrated with me. She was citing research while I relied on my emotions. Absent of facts I can study, we ended our discussion at an impasse. Yet I continued to think of the topic and even discussed it with my husband who calmly informed me that what my best friend mentioned was true; and we also happened to have the original book that discussed the research findings. I obliged. After reading, I wrote my best friend and admitted my shortcomings. I changed my positions and opinions based on facts even if I found it rather morally offensive.

If there was anything I learned from my parents, it is the process of critical thinking. It has served me well in my trauma and emergency nursing career and now as a clinical analyst writing clinical rule programs. It is the logical part of my mind that always gets in the way of my art. It is the active process that dominate my mind which most often clashes with my passionate and intense emotions.

I think the Nobel Prize is trying to redeem itself after bungling the Peace Prize several times over. This time, the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry is awarded to Dr. Schectman.

Following is the article I want to share from http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2011/10/06/a-nobel-prize-for-settled-science/

A Nobel Prize For Settled Science

What the climate change scaremongers don't want you to know

Posted by streiff (Profile)

Thursday, October 6th at 2:40PM EDT

Today Dan Shechtman, Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, an Associate of the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, and Professor of Materials Science at Iowa State University, received a telephone call that he didn’t expect. It was from the Nobel Committee which had taken valuable time out from awarding its Peace Prize to assorted crackpots, incompetents, frauds, despots and genocidal killers to bestow upon Dr. Shechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Professor Schechtman’s Nobel Prize is a cautionary tale for the anthropogenic global warming scaremongers.

When Dr. Schectman made his discovery he was hounded out of his research position as a crackpot and derided by no lesser figure than Dr. Linus Pauling with the quip, “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”

To make a long story short, for the longest time the science of crystallography was settled.

Since the birth of modern crystallography in 1912, when x-rays were diffracted from a crystal for the first time, until that moment 70 years later, this branch of science had relied on an unchallengeable basic tenet: the atoms in crystalline solids – such as metals, rocks or ceramic materials – are arranged in periodic order. The periodic pattern repeats itself throughout the crystal, as in a chessboard or a honeycomb hexagon. The regularity of the pattern dictates another important quality: crystals are composed of “tiles” possessing rotational symmetry. In other words, if the basic form that makes up the crystal is rotated, it will look exactly the same. A chessboard can be rotated four times, a quarter of a rotation each time, and it will look the same; the hexagon of a honeycomb can be rotated six times.

Crystallographers determined that there were only five possible rotational symmetries: single symmetry (there is only one way to rotate the tile so it will look the same ), double (two stages of rotation ), triangular, quadruple and hexagonal. The scientists concluded that there can be no pentagonal symmetry in crystals, since they cannot create periodic order – as anyone who has tried to cover a bathroom floor with five-sided tiles knows. In countless observations over many decades, crystallographers indeed saw only geometric crystals, all of them possessing rotational symmetry.

Then in April 1982

Shechtman looked at the pattern of points created by the crystal of the alloy he had prepared in the lab from aluminum and manganese, he saw a structure that contradicted both rules: the 10 points that appeared through the microscope attested to the existence of pentagonal symmetry; and the immediate conclusion was that the crystal did not possess a periodic structure. Shechtman had discovered a new world, in which there are solid crystals, but the known order was gone.

As is more common in science than we would like to admit, Schechtman wasn’t hailed as an original thinker or feted for a new discovery. He was belittled and ostracized by his colleagues because he had found something new when the science was clearly settled.

Now this is not to say that every discovery is, in fact, a discovery. I was alive when cold fusion debuted — the physics phenomenon not the software — and every day publicationsretract articles they have published, some of these articles are esoteric and/or irrelevant but some have wormed their way into medical practice.

The point is that science is never, by its very nature, “settled.” That’s why we have people called “scientists.” Sometimes those people, like Schechtman and like the people who are questioning Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, take aim at the very bedrock of some scientific disciplines. The scientific method, with its focus on controlled experimentation and reproducibility of results, offers the best insurance against fraud.

This remains the primary objection of those of us who find the APG theory underwhelming. (To cut through the underbrush here, conflating APG and climate change is simply an Alinskyite tactic. Everyone believes in climate change, no one is arguing the Ice Age didn’t exist.) The scientists involved are part of an incestuous little group practicing something barely one-step much more akin to witchcraft than science. They are secretive. They are politically driven. And when they are challenged, something that is at the core of the scientific method, they howl “the science is settled.”

They seek nothing less than the silencing of men who owe their allegiance to the truth and not to some political agenda. They are the ones who will receive the Nobel Peace Prize not the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Fungal...Err...People Infection

Dream Sequence No. 6

People Infection; Infectious People; Nasty Bugs; Nasty People

I have seen some strange infectious diseases during my clinical practice days; gangrenous tissues we packed with maggots to devour the tissues; some strange, malodorous rotting infestations of the skin; tiny worms coming out of orifices; some awful fungal infections... I often made myself sick or give myself goosebumps by thinking of those nasty colonies of bugs and I start to itch and scratch! I wonder what it would be like if it was the reverse? For example, a people infection on fungus or fungi? Do you think of things like those too? No? Oh well. What can I say?

Sea Of Love

Dream Sequence No.3, Sea of Love.

Archival micro pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board

Sea of Love

Don't Stop Doing What You Are Doing

Dream Sequence No. 5

Archival micro pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board

During my short hiatus, I started a new drawing series called Dream Sequence when one night, I woke up, drenched in perspiration because I just scaled a mountain and then ran through a town brandishing an AK47 rifle while saving some loved ones from rabid dogs and hooded men. Oh yes, I was rather impeccably dressed too. The illustrations in this series are a mixture of different scenes from several dreams.

Don't Stop by Gin Whitmore

Last month, I traveled via Texas-Minneapolis-Tokyo-Manila then Manila-Nagoya-Detroit-Texas, only to fly again five days later via Texas-Los Angeles-Seoul-Manila and back to be with my sister Leah who was diagnosed with lung cancer in April and undergoing treatment. I have blogging jet lag. These days, my heart and mind are filled with thoughts of my sister Leah, who is the number one fan of my blog, an avid admirer of my art and a faithful supporter of my endeavors. She remains hospitalized from cancer and is now unable to read my blog. If she saw my illustrations she would have giggled, for she knows me very well. I did not feel like blogging at all and have been ambivalent towards this activity. I remember her advice and her words to me one day when I attempted to delete my blog:

"I am alarmed by your repeated deletion of your blog cesandherdishes. You should not be burdened by it. It should be a free expression of your feelings, so that if you do not feel like updating it, just leave it as it is. If you don't like the comments of others, just delete the comments. Who cares. But we will miss Cesandherdishes. It is our connection to you. We feel we are with you when we read it. And most often, we smile because you remember memorable moments of the family. You have a way of expressing feelings which are difficult for us to do. So please, UNDELETE IT. We love you. Day Lec"

So there!!! For the record, I have not deleted comments from my visitors in recent years and since after Blogger installed anti-spam filters.

In the meantime, I want you to know that I remember, I owe some special people some art deliveries. Yes, I have not forgotten...Thank you for your patience.

Words Fail Me

Dream Sequence Number 2

Archival micro pigment ink on 9"x12" Bristol Board

Words fail me.

You know how I feel,

What I think.

I feel so lost with you there,

And me, here.

I cannot see.

Did you feel my kiss?

It is October.

Do you hear the typhoon?

Do you see the flood?

It is drought here.

Road to Mandalay