Decompress

artwork by our venerable tatang

if my office was a person, this post would probably be the equivalent of me looking deep into his eyes and letting out a lovesick, contented, delirious sigh. have i already mentioned that i love my workplace?

starry-eyed muni-muni aside, this looks like fun. i haven't drawn in ages -- the last time i seriously put pen to paper was doing the collage for kooky's (still unreleased) book, and that doesn't really count as drawing.

i used to draw and paint a whole lot when i was younger; then i hit puberty, lost the ability to focus, and started getting impatient. if i couldn't finish it in ten minutes, then i wasn't going to finish it, period. i took a once-a-week, three-hour-long art elective in college, where i was forced to take time with my work. the fruits of my labor were not bad at all, if i may say so myself, and i took to keeping a visual journal.

ironically, now that i work with a very visual medium, i've fallen out of touch with that part of me. although ideas are demanded of me on a daily basis, five-, fifteen-, and thirty-second bursts of words have become my way of putting those ideas across. sometimes i worry that i'm getting spoiled by having a creative juggernaut of a partner who creates visuals to match my words.

i can imagine that this coming wednesday will be extremely hectic (what with me flying off to palawan the next day!!!!), but this looks like something i should make time for. katuwaan lang naman, diba?. at may tsitsirya pa!

Meet the Captain

captain burbur

captain burbur hails from planet ocean park, in the distant galaxy of hong kong. while in his home galaxy, he was known to those who knew him (umm, bale dalawa lang kami ni marlon) by the unremarkable, if obscure, name of fu chi.

upon reaching philippine shores, he found himself possessed of powers mysterious and magnificent -- making him thoroughly deserving, he reasoned, of an equally magnificent new image and epithet.

newly clothed in a sticky, paper-thin (but virtually indestructible, of course) breastplate, a cape generously loaned to him by a neighbor named spawn f. igurine, and the vivid memory of a local matinee idol's cotton-mouthed superhero shout, he took upon the magnificent persona of captain burbur!

he stands a proud and valiant guardian over precious founts of inspiration and magic, as well as powerful magnetic fields filled with marvelous sounds and images. and his adventures have only just begun.

sundan ang pakikipagsapalaran ni captain burbur... ang pinakabigating oso ng bayan!

(so now i guess you know what account i handle. and how nutty things can get at the office by week's end.)

Franklin returns

back at the factory, one of the straws that broke this camel’s back was the introduction of a “personal productivity tool” called, innocuously enough, the myFranklin. named after the much-touted franklin planner that many factory higher-ups swore by, it was reconstituted from a thick black zip-up daybook into an excel spreadsheet with a dizzying number of cells, which we had to fill up with word counts and hours (or fractions of hours) we spent achieving those word counts.

image from www.geek.com

a number of us lower-order drones used the actual franklin planner, but the staid black, zip-up bible-like casing scared me – i felt my stubborn loyalty to my lonely planner would save me from being thoroughly assimilated by the factory. if the franklin planner in its book form gave me the heebie jeebies, its electronic incarnation had the power to draw blood from the very pores of my scalp.

here was something that literally forced our work, our skills, our very art (if you’re the type to take your profession as your art) into miniscule boxes and numbers that were forced lower and lower (well, lower for man-hours and higher for word counts), all in the in the name of the two-faced factory god, “personal productivity.” i say two-faced because way even after i left, nobody had yet come up with the brilliant plan that would transform all those cells and decimals into an actual, actionable productivity strategy. (j, meron na nga ba?)

anyway, why am i bringing up such a horrid memory? ironically enough, it’s because, in a way, the myFranklin has followed me to my new digs. my creative sanctuary, my wonderful office, with mucha and michaelangelo splashed on its walls and ceilings, has been invaded by the deadly excel sheet! aaaugh!

this time, though, the time-tallying is for a behemoth-wide efficiency audit, and the make-your-own-format spreadsheet is called, for lack of a better term, the daily diary. after the token rebellion, we creatives decided to hunker down and fill up those damned spreadsheets because, well, they aren’t really limiting or violating – they’re simply out of character for a workplace like ours. personally, i felt that unlike the myFranklin, the underlying objective and productivity strategy gave birth to the tool, and not the other way around. and i’m all for that.

plus, the daily diaries started to look even better when we realized we could use them to inform the powers-that-be of the inefficiencies that make our lives hellish. especially the ones that look like this –

2:00pm-6:30pm forced break (waiting for video material)
actual excerpt from my daily diary

so while some of us have to get our creative skills cracking (“mentoring”, “research”, “field work” and “brainstorming” now take up a *cough* significantly larger chunk of our time), it’s all good for now. i’m on the side of anyone or anything that wants to get me home earlier.