2013

It is amazing how, at just the second day of the year,the month of January is already filled with dance competition training, yoga classes, a plane ride, and plans to relaunch this blog as Parade Paper Studio and into retail. Waking up at 6:00AM today, on the last free day before my last 3 months sitting in lecture hall for medical school, to find the world already running its wheels inspired me even more to dream less and just do. It is a blessed thing to have so many lasts lead to so many beginnings.

Here is my new mantra for 2013, in gold type hand-drawn and embossed onto a moleskine I’ve had tucked in the back of my drawer for most of 2012. A year is tucked into every day. There is so much time in the world.

Christmas: Part 3

Everyday this year has felt like it led up to Christmas and I really think it has to do with the half a dozen wish lists my friends and I left all over the internet and the corner of my room that was originally filled with more wrapping paper and ribbon and twine than presents. And in the spirit of the season and in the hopes of sharing my overflowing cup of Christmas cheer, I signed up for Hey Kessy’s Merry Mail Swap, in which we were asked to make like Santa and deliver presents to people we did not yet know.

My Santa baby, Eula, loves eating at new places, cosmetics, traveling, and is a brand-new minted doctor, which is also to say that I found myself again online. Here is the canvas bag I handpainted with inspiration from the Hippocratic Oath.

Now all wrapped up in kraft and twine, with one of my Happiness Theory pieces finally going out to its owner;

a freehand letter drawn while waiting for my sisters to get ready for an afternoon of shopping;

and an image of the letter up close.

Happy Christmas, future friend 🙂

Christmas: Part I

When I discovered kraft paper this year and decided that I would have a handmade Christmas or none at all, I set my mind on spending as much time wrapping presents as buying and making them. Below is the product of some old glitter glue I kept from way back when (for the weekly highschool art project), some of the Hey Kessy baker’s twine I won at a recent craft soiree, extra wrapping paper from yet another Muji trip, and a scrap section of index card.

I’d like you all to meet my snowy reindeer, who I’d like to think is Prancer, handcut for a friend’s boyfriend, whom I am playing secret Santa for in the first real Christmas dinner of the season.

Retrograde/Anterograde

1. For lunch yesterday, I had roast chicken in balsamic vinegar and an oreo cheesecake that had sugar crystals in its crust and chocolate curls over its head. My patient later that afternoon, a 64-year-old mother who planted her own vegetables and had malignant hypertension so severe that each time she stood up from her seat her vision would go dim, lamented over the time she fainted from a blood pressure that reached twice the normal limit and dropped the first rotisserie chicken that her family would have had in over a year. She burned her thigh down to the muscle, hit her head so hard against the table that blood had to be drained from in between her skull and the linings wrapping her brain, and what was still so important was how she lost her family’s dinner. She is still sick today. She is still happy today.

2. Two days ago, I realized that I have a penchant for making friends who like to leave. I’ve lost friends to money, to other friends, to family, and to principles. As of today, I am 2 friends for 2 years in medical school and it really feels like the third is right across the room, right around the corner, right in between two friends who forget better than I do. Two days ago, I realized I have a penchant for leaving. I do not know how to be around people who make me lonely.

3. Two weeks ago, I decided to make time for art despite 40 hours of lectures, 12 hours of clinic, 8 hours of dance training, 6 hours of case discussions, and 2 major exams. Today and just in time for Alessandra‘s Craft Soiree, I finished.

It took me a couple of tries (I now have brand new additions to my collection of unfinished projects!) until I found something that captured the kind of craft I like to do that I could make in the time I had. I finally settled on these hand-drawn stickers hand-cut from origami paper. The tiny ribbons are my favorite and are in honor of my baby sister, who, at 22, still loves bows, unicorns, and Twilight.

It was also a pleasant surprise to find that there is way more washi tape in a roll than I had previously thought, which is also a lesson right there that I leave to you guys because I’ve already written my share of reflections for Leadership class this month.

And here’s the final product, in fortune-cookie-inspired packaging folded from architect drafting paper,

and some of the rules I live by day by day.

The Happiness Theory: Part III

The Happiness Theory: Part II

The Happiness Theory: Part I

Trying out this new thing where I papercut the world into becoming a brighter place everyday for at least a month. This week’s message is on happiness. Please help spread the love.

Vision Mission

The first time I learned that people could grow up wanting to become doctors was when my ballerina friend Kei whispered to me, in the middle of a geometry class, that she wanted to become an orthopedic surgeon. A year later and when my hormones had caught up with all of my extracurricular activities (up until then I did not know what I wanted to do so I was on both the cheerdancing and debate teams) and I was in the dermatologist’s office once a week, I knew that I wanted the kind of life she led. The year after that, when my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer (and then my aunt, and then one of my mother’s best friends), I said I wanted to become an oncologist.

4 months into medical school, I fell in love with cardiology because it was the first thing I did on my own. It was the first system I learned the complete physical examination for; the first time I heard the lub-dub beat of a human heart underneath my own stethoschope; and the first time I heard the woosh through a hole in a baby’s chest without a doctor having to tell me it was there. It was the first time a patient told me that I could make a life out of this. It was so easy to fall in love.

Today is 2 years later and all of a sudden I am considering ophthalmology because it was the first thing I did that I thought I could not. I did not expect that seeing into the human eye could be as amazing as listening to a heart beat life.

I did not know that 1.5M Filipinos are blind from bilateral cataracts, of which 100% are treatable, or that some heroes would rather travel the country performing surgeries for free instead of  staying tucked inside hospitals earning a living. I did not expect that it could do the most when it came to public health. It was by far easier to fall in love with that.

Make Yourself

It has been the longest week of the year but my friends and I, we found each other again and made some more, and already it feels like calmer seas.

Handmade Saturday

Q and I got ourselves purposely lost (I am very bad with maps) around my neighborhood a weekend ago and ended up at this refurbished house called 10A Alabama that was tucked down the road in between a construction site and a tiny hotel.

They were holding an arts and crafts fair there that day, as they do around 4 times a year, and it was a refreshing change from the bright lights and corporate packaging of the city. Across the threshold that had a teacup engraved onto the driveway and unlit light bulbs hung in a line like Christmas lights, it was intimate and warm. Tables stacked with chalkboard notebooks and rubbercut prints were flush beside shelves full of hand-stitched dolls and cabana pillows and vintage suitcases held solid perfumes in every childhood scent imaginable. The crafters, who looked amazingly the part (it’s in the way they move their hands), were standing along the hallways instead of sitting hidden behind their wares and talking to visitors like old friends. I have never seen so much inspired art in my life. To be honest, I have never felt so insecure about my own art as I was in that house.

We ended up walking around the entire place twice: once, quickly, like a child and the second time like a woman lengthening the hours in bed between dusk and dawn. I wanted to touch everything and I mostly did.

I discovered washi tapes back during my trip to Japan with my baby sister and I’ve been using them to hold up postcards and tape down pesky book corners since. I wanted every pattern and was holding onto so many of these at a time that Q laughed and said I looked like he would in an ice cream store, which is to say that I looked like I was going crazy. I finally chose white daisies on a yellow field (top row, leftmost) and pink ones on blue (3rd row, 3rd from the left). Get some for yourself via heykessy.com.

These handstamped postcards were displayed right by the entrance and were missed the first time around because it was all magnet to people’s Norths and completely hidden behind a sea of bodies. During the second go-around and when Q had calmed my heart enough not to take in all of the art in one breath, I snuck my hand in in between a girl and a boy and found that the cards were made by the people behind Craft MNL. I’ve been playing with the idea of joining one of their workshops for awhile now and that was all the convincing I needed.

Cue in, handmade rubber stamps by the Rubber Ducky Stamp Company;

these adorable owls by the quiet Job of Una Toys;

and a butter, sugar, and lemon crepe that was as delicate and well-thought-out as all of the art today and it was a weekend of beauty.