Whew, I’m still tired but really want to discuss today and yesterday so my memory doesn’t get overloaded and there won’t be a reallly long post come Thursday. Though there probably will be. I was trying, for a while, to write in a journal besides this blog, a journal that I would submit to Ma’am Cecile at the end of the seminar, but I realize I don’t have the time. Aside from class, driving, sleeping, reading, eating, and weeping, there’s not enough time to journal and blog, so I figure I’ll just blog, collect the week’s entries, edit the sensitive portions that may offend my classmates, and submit that instead.

Anyway, onward, management fans!

Tuesday (yesterday)

had a specific focus: the VMOKRAPI/SPATRES. What it is and how to make one for yourself and/or your organization. It’s too long to get into here, but I’ll just give you what the letters stand for and you can ask me next time we meet for a more detailed lecture :). Vision, Mission, Objective, Key Result Area, Performance Indicator/Strategy, Program, Activity, Task, RESources. These can (and probably should) be in plural.

It’s basically a plan for your future. Cecile used a really simple and easy-to-remember example: she gave a VMOKRAPI… for a group of animals that wanted to get back into Eden. One of the strengths of the seminar has been that they treat us like idiots, which we mostly are in terms of management, hence our presence here… after all, if we were doing so well, why would we need to take it? The important thing to remember is to begin with the end goal in mind. That way you know where you’re going. You should also be really sure, and clear, about your end goal. It should be an ideal you aspire to, yet realistic enough to be met.

We then tackled things like External/Internal Analysis, and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). The most interesting part of the day was when we were presented with example VMOKRAPIs: Brian Tenorio and Joey Ayala’s. Brian I knew from Heights, he was one of our better designers, and apparently had taken the Management in the Arts Program last April (Batch 2). Anyway, he was turning 25, about to go to the US to study, and his vision for himself was very worldly. Global. He wanted outlets in Paris, Milan, New York, Tokyo, and Marikina. He wanted his style, Tenorium, to become reputable, distinct, and well-known. Etc., etc. He seemed really determined and I thought his advantage was that he knew exactly what he wanted. Very clear about that. Which is fascinating for someone so young. It kind of took some of the oldies by surprise. He had a very detailed plan about what to do with himself. Some of the key result areas had already been met since he’d taken the MAP. Some of the amusingly specific ones, though, were being asked to judge the Miss Universe, and being spotted while attending a Wimbledon match.

Joey Ayala’s was also really interesting, and highly personal. He talked about why he needed the MAP, the emotional and physical turmoil he’d gone through in the past 3 years. He’d lost his creative passion. He wanted to break free of his “neo-ethnic” image, which, he says, while remains part of him, does not encapsulate him. Outlined was his plan in getting back to performing more often, being selective about the venues, releasing a new album and setting up a website. He was also very frank with us about how horny he was (he kept making jokes like “I want to be able to perform for 2-3 hours… on stage, ha.”), how SEX (all caps) was part of his list of things that made him happy. It took him months to complete his VMOKRAPI. Then he sang a song for us, a cappella since we couldn’t find a guitar in the entire school.

Then had to meet with my group for a presentation the next day. We discussed the report, then the way to present it, since it had to be “artistic.” Me and Tomo, the Japanese cellist I mentioned, had to stay a little while longer and make the PowerPoint presentation.

I realize I’ve never really used PowerPoint or Excel. Through all of high school and college, I never had to use it, or was never the person who had to make the presentation. Weird.

Anyway, me and Tomo are fast friends now. I think he is floored because I seem to be the first person with an actual interest in Japan. We’re both big fans of Takeshi Kitano, Haruki Murakami (who Quark may see while in New York, the bastard), Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, Shonen Knife, Akira Kurosawa, the Ring trilogy and Hideo Nakata and the US remake, and Pink Eiga (Japanese XXX), Grave of the Fireflies, Perfect Blue, Metropolis, and manga like Astroboy, Lone Wolf & Cub, Blade of the Immortal, Akira, Domu, etc. Since he’s a cellist, we also talked about Jacqueline du Pre, who I only know because of the terrific film Hilary & Jackie, which he’s a fan of as well. We also both like Wong Kar-Wai (though he’s Chinese). He was at Cinemanila almost every day, and loves that movies are so cheap here. We may bitch and complain, but a movie’s 800 pesos in Japan. In New York it’s around 500 bucks already.

Saw the trailers for Adaptation and Punch-Drunk Love, two eagerly-awaited films. Woo-hoo!

Wednesday (Today)

began with a talk about 10 Universal Principles of Great Art, presented with slides of photographs taken by our professor, Eduardo Morato. He’s a really good photographer, apparently, having won several competitions and the like. The photos were excellent. Later I would find out that he also paints, and is a spiritualist, very much into dream interpretation and meditation. I wonder why these facets of him aren’t mentioned in his resume. All the professors we’ll have during the seminar have their write-ups included in the case folder. And none of these “artistic” accomplishments bear mentioning. Kind of sad, if you think of it. I’ll bet he’s prouder of some of these things than a lot of his “business” accomplishments. Not that I’m belittling them. The man’s a legend, always voted terror teacher of the year by the students, but also always voted best teacher. He’s psychic, can spot immediately who hasn’t prepared for class, etc. though he’s been pretty nice to us.

Forgot to mention that we have stretching exercises every 250 PM. Cecile surprised us by being so flexible and limber, she could stretch waaaayy back without falling and could reach the floor with her hands while standing upright easily. It’s not in her write-up either that she used to be a ballerina before becoming Executive Director of Ballet Philippines.

After the 10 Principles came the group presentations we all prepared the night before. I daresay we kicked all their asses, and my mom came to watch, which unnerved me but wasn’t wholly a surprise. We even had props and costumes and shit, but the masterstroke was having Tomo play his cello and Raul his classical guitar, which he does professionally for some 30-odd years now.

After lunch came the really interesting part of the day: intuition. They first explained the differences between instinct, intellect, and intuition. Then we had our first experience: astral travel, or remote viewing. I was paired with a woman named Becky, and we had to stare at one another for something like a minute, trying very hard not to laugh while trying to “intuit” what the other’s house looked like, and then write down the images we saw. She got a 75%, which was pretty good. I got a 95%, which was downright startling and spooky. Becky got some colors wrong, but she was able to correctly “guess” that my fence was a combination of wrought-iron and concrete, that despite my having a fence I didn’t have a gate for my garage, that the sole computer in the house was in a room without a bed, and the spookiest of all, she was able to guess that I have an indoor pond. I was able to correctly “intuit” the color and height of her gate, the color scheme of her walls, the wallpaper in the upstairs rooms, the design and layout of the dining room, etc. I also accurately described some of her furniture, paintings, and vases. The most telling detail was seeing a bookshelf of encyclopedias on the second floor, but in an open hallway, not a room. And I got that right too. I had an astral projection exercise with Fr. Bulatao once in college, but it was about flying, not visiting someone else’s home. One person in the class got 100%. Everything she said about her partner’s house was right. Downright eerie.

We were then taught how to meditate, and to open our different energy sources (I now get that line in Fight Club about opening your heart chakra. No caves, though. Or penguins.).

Next: telepathy. Cecile would show our partners an image while we faced the wall, and we would try to get it right. Most of us had the basics down: color, number of elements, etc. And then change places. One really terrific and scary exercise was Cecile would choose someone who scored high in the remote viewing, get an object from them, give it to someone in the class while he/she wasn’t looking, and then ask them to find their object simply by “following the energy” of his/her possession and reading subliminally the class’s body language. In EVERY CASE, the person found their item. Two got it right on THE FIRST PERSON they approached. Others were in the right vicinity but had difficulty pinpointing exactly where. But instead of going far away, they were pretty near.

The final, longest session was about dream interpretation. Both Cecile and Prof. Morato handled the class. There were no real exercises, they were just asking for lots of dreams and giving interpretations. Lecture by example. Lots of spooky dreams/images came up, and I was taking notes. :) Cool things learned: dreams can affect you physically. One classmate told of a friend’s dream where he was making love with his recently-deceased wife and when he woke up he had a hickie. Another woman told of a recurring dream where her father was speechless. After Morato’s interpretation, she confessed she asked her father to die (he’d been severely ill on and off, but she didn’t ask in a cruel manner, she kind of just let him know that they were going to be okay). Still, being visited after your father like that would spook me.

Recurring dreams almost always mean some kind of unresolved issue or issues. There are prophetic dreams (hence déjà vu), recurring dreams, and sequential dreams.

A lot of stories of Morato being able to tell when people are pregnant before even they know. Also our Indian classmate being told by a Sufi on a train that she was going to have a son, and when she got to her destination she checked and was indeed pregnant.

Monsters in our dreams almost always represent our parents.

After the whole thing, I was resolved to keep a dream journal, since I hardly remember my dreams. I would’ve said I don’t dream but we almost always dream, we just don’t remember. We dream an average of four times a night. Neva, on the other hand, remembers a lot of her dreams with incredible detail (incredible detail and vividness, by the way, are indicators of a prophetic dream). I’d also like to read up more on lucid dreaming, willfully entering a dream knowing that you’re dreaming, so that you can confront figures in your dream to effect change. First heard about it in Waking Life (in a different version, Vanilla Sky, too), but forgot about it after a while.

One dream of a man’s balls having fallen off and rolling away from him on a bridge was successfully interpreted as, well, obviously, emasculation. In this case, his parents (mom especially) told him what course to take in college. When he rebelled against his mom and withdrew from college in third year, the recurring dream stopped.

You can induce hallucinations by fasting around 3 days. Of course, there are other ways: drink, drugs, meditation, chant, etc.

I have some more things to say about dreams and how they’ve really intrigued me recently, but I think I’ll save it for later. This is long enough as it is!

So there may be something in all this spirituality hullabaloo. :)

By the way, got my first offer of employment already, today. This networking thing works!

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By the way, I am now REALLY interested in seeing Joey Javier Reyes’s Live Show. Anybody have a decent copy I can borrow? I’ll take care of it, I promise.

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No time or strength left for links. Sorry.