Camina
Legacy Name: Camina

Attribution:

Human artwork by grouse.

Photography by pax.

Wood background from osliving.com.

iPhone vector from psdgraphics.com.

Little Snorlax typeface by Grace Yun.

Crown of Freshly Picked Golden Daisies and Half Knitted Onyx Cardigan custom wearable by paranoia and Cathii.

Choco Macaron Curls custom wearable by fuubun.

Torn Snowfield Photograph by Shalashaska.

Various other treasure chest items by respective Subeta artists.

Story, character, profile design, coding, and overlay image by pax.

Daisy would have been her name, if her mother had not intervened.

Alan Orgel, a horticulturist in his early 30's wanted to name all his daughters after beautiful flowers, and his sons after strong trees. Calla Lily and Cattleya were then both seven years of age, and Monserrat "Munse" Ferrer, seemed to have taken a liking to a different pattern she saw.

Their next daughter's name also had to start with the letter C. In another wish of hers to give homage to Catalonia, where she only spent half of her life, yet where her family originated, she had to make sure it had something to do with Catalan.

She had been left paralyzed from the waist down after a bad fall off the ladder she had been stepping on while painting the roof of their home, and so, one word immediately came to her conciousness.

caminar (to walk.)

The girl had to be named Camina, and she would be the strength by which she could "walk" again, so to speak.

The aforementioned girl is I, whose "memoir" you seem to be reading right now.

I am Camina Orgel, presently 31 years of age. If you care to give me something for my birthday, I was born on the 27th of September. I was recently employed by a design agency in some obscure country. People think I'm so ~exotic~ and special, but that might owe to my being a "foreigner" to this place. It was my choice to move here, and I don't regret any part of this decision. It can get tiring to live in the same place for the rest of your life, just to be stuck with the same, old, boring people, day after day.

People here keep referring to me as Carmina, after some actress I have no resemblance to. I'm totally fine with that.

My education wasn't particularly stellar. Let's not talk about it, please?

Wait a minute.

What are you even doing with my phone, anyway?

Yeah, right. As if anyone would even want to do anything with this junk you call a "phone". If anyone can explain what "EclaTel" even is, without saying that it's a "hipster rip-off of the iPhone", you're wrong, because it is a hipster rip-off of the iPhone, if only from its design.

Look at this thing. You can try to drop it, and it wouldn't budge, break, or even get damaged in any way. I believe I've thrown it down a flight of stairs, slammed it repeatedly against my desk, and hit it against my bedside table, whenever its ridiculously effective alarm starts to ring. I might have had this phone for... say, 3 years?

As with everything else, this "memoir" may serve as a disappointment, in itself.

I've disappointed so many people and wasted so much time. Among those people are my mother, and myself.

For a while, I was quite convinced that there was nothing I could do right.

I convinced myself for a very long time that advertising was my passion. My parents always told me that I had a great sales pitch, and that my ideas were innovative. I can't believe I actually allowed that to get into my head, and think it was all true.

Of course, your family would be charitable to you, unless you were awfully unlucky.

I've tried engrossing myself into any artistic endeavor you can name off the top of your head, or the tip of your tongue. Sculpting and oil painting kept me busy for a year, until I moved into bone carving, accessory making, and other simpler crafts. For a time, I also tried to doodle, draw, illustrate, and sketch from life and my imagination, with none of my outputs being of desirable quality to my eyes. I've done a couple of designs for clothing in the past, and gave a hand to interior design. Web design was my most recent foray, until I found something I may want to stick to.

I love photography.

I'm not saying that I'm any good at it, but something about capturing life in such rich detail appeals to me. It might be the fact that I don't have to sit for a whole day, trying to mimic life through each stroke of my tools against various media. I'm a lazy person, what can I do about it?

The lazy person I am, I stick to a handy point-and-shoot camera. A DSLR camera is too rich for my blood, and requires tremendous amounts of maintenance that I'd rather do without.

But hey, some lovely girl named Tsukino decided to give me one anyway! It'll take me a while to get used to this beaten down model, but it's better than nothing!

This will sound very dorky, but I love to print some of these images out in cheap photo paper, and cut them out. I can pretend that they're Polaroid prints, and just scatter them around my desk.

Kid, if you're still reading this, kudos to you, and thank you for bearing with me. Clearly, this is not how anyone writes a memoir.

See, I was supposed to be a resource speaker for some high school's digital art program, but they eventually changed their mind and informed me that they had found another speaker. Perhaps they realized how pathetic and unqualified I was for the job, heh. This was supposed to be my "speech". Boring, isn't it?

I'll try to quit that, and get onto the juicier parts of this thing. You'd neither need to, nor want to know how I got into photography, if you were anyone like me, but I'll be talking about it anyway.

Despite convincing myself that I can make do without having a partner, or that I wouldn't need love at all, I loved someone more than anything in the world.

His name was Finch.

Yes, it's like the bird. He is a bit like one, if you'd take the term "songbird" literally.

He was absolutely perfect in my eyes. He was pretty good-looking, and had a great voice. Finn is a very intelligent -- no -- wise man. Apart from that, he was the most selfless person I've ever met. We studied in the same university, but his highly analytic mind led him to a path that was the complete antithesis of mine. It's a good thing he didn't follow me wherever I went, because that would have been such a waste.

I'd rather not discuss much about the time I spent with him, as I am a private person who would rather keep that to myself. I will tell you, however, that it was nothing but pure bliss, innocence, and euphoria...

Just like any other sad love story, this was the kind of relationship which ended with a break-up, not a marriage.

It was not Prof. Able's fault, it was mine. I was too immature and too needy. When I realized this, I was the one who cut this off, because I did not want to be too much of a burden to him. He was quickly going places, while I was a fresh graduate, with close to no job prospects.

I had not taken any pictures with him for the entire course of our relationship.

As such, I did not have any physical mementos of such time. He gave me precious stones and expensive dresses, but he did not leave me even a single photograph of him, especially not one where he donned his enigmatic smile.

It's a sight I miss greatly.

I know that I would no longer be able to see the rest of his face anymore. His eyes are probably much deeper now, but his gently sculpted nose would only be a memory. I would not only be deprived of his soft kisses, but I would also have not even a single glimpse of his supple lips.

I know things about Finn that the rest of the world would never know. For one, I am the reason why he would no longer show his face to the world, and I regret everything that had lead to that.

With a seemingly petty, yet sentimental motivation, I was driven to capture every memory of mine that I could, be it mundane, or otherwise. I would capture the world around me in rectangles, so that I would never forget these details. I want to remember how iridescent goldfish scales are. I want to retain the vibrant red of strawberries on the best cake I've ever tasted. I want to look at beautiful people.

Memories are all I have left, and I do not want to lose any of them.

messaging

Bad News Target sighted. Coordin...

THE BIG BAD BOSS Hoy, tapos na...

Michael Santos D specifications for...

Mama honey i will be visiting you ...

Finn It is for your best interest if you...

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.01.29 22:10 GMT+8

Target sighted.

Coordinates: lat. 34° 45' 34.7976" lon. 134° 15' 10.5474".

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.01.29 22:54 GMT+8

Geez, you make it look like a stalking service. Why is this so impersonal? Might want to fix your "programming" too, everything is parsed as gibberish on my phone.

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.01.29 22:59 GMT+8

Fujitsu, I know for sure that your brain isn't mechanized just yet. You're not an android, you're a cyborg. That means, no matter how many "upgrades" you keep getting, you're not becoming more human, you're becoming more automatonic with each succeeding text message, if anything!

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.01.29 23:01 GMT+8

Sorry, that is an invalid command. Please refer to the "Commands" section of your D7 WebPanel for available options.

exillium-gamma EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.01.29 23:09 GMT+8

Not funny, Tsukino. It's a pain in the bum to copy-paste all these A's!

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.01.29 23:11 GMT+8

Sorry, that is an invalid command. Please refer to the "Commands" section of your D7 WebPanel for available options.

exillium-gamma EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.01.29 23:17 GMT+8

Wow, this is so convincing and amazing. Hey guys, look, someone knows how to copy and paste entire text messages on a Nokia 5110! Or maybe she types extremely quickly! She might be a ROBOT, right?

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.01.29 23:19 GMT+8

Sorry, that is an invalid command. Please refer to the "Commands" section of your D7 WebPanel for available options.

exillium-gamma EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.01.29 23:22 GMT+8

Very funny. I'm not falling for this, not this time. You're an intelligent girl, but don't think you can fool me. I'm a full decade your senior, and have experienced far worse pranks than this. Your play-acting isn't even remotely hilarious anymore!

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.01.29 23:25 GMT+8

Your D7-EGLS service plan has been disabled for a period of one month, due to three consecutive invalid commands. Your account will be automatically reactivated on 2013-02-29. Thank you for using D7-EGLS.

exillium-gamma EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.01.29 23:32 GMT+8

When will you EVER give this ruse up? How many "one month suspensions of service" do I even have to put up with? How much programming do you need to increase your user-friendliness? I'm starting to get convinced that I might be the crazy one here, not you!

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.02.28 23:25 GMT+8

Target sighted.

Coordinates: lat. 34° 58' 47.0238" lon. 134° 13' 56.3874".

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.02.28 23:32 GMT+8

If there is one thing that impresses me, it's the fact that you deliver everything to the dot. I'm not yet fully convinced, so would you mind specifying the location for me?

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.02.28 23:38 GMT+8

Shiroishi-yama, Mimasaka-shi, Okayama-ken.

exillium-gamma build 2 EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.02.28 23:45 GMT+8

So, he's in a Mount Shiroishi, in some city named Mimasaka, in Okayama Prefecture?

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.02.28 23:49 GMT+8

Sorry, that is an invalid command. Please refer to the "Commands" section of your D7 WebPanel for available options.

exillium-gamma build 2 EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.02.28 23:52 GMT+8

Wow! Do you really want to go through this again?

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.02.28 23:55 GMT+8

Sorry, that is an invalid command. Please refer to the "Commands" section of your D7 WebPanel for available options.

exillium-gamma build 2 EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.02.28 23:58 GMT+8

FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.02.28 23:59 GMT+8

Sorry, that is an invalid command. Please refer to the "Commands" section of your D7 WebPanel for available options.

exillium-gamma build 2 EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.01 00:08 GMT+8

EGLS IDENTTARGETNOW

From: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.01 00:13 GMT+8

Fujitsu Tsukino

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.01 00:15 GMT+8

Ha ha ha. Very funny. You were broadcasting your own coordinates to me the entire time?

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.03.01 00:18 GMT+8

Your D7-EGLS service plan has been disabled for a period of approximately one month, due to more than three consecutive invalid commands. Your account will be automatically reactivated on 2013-03-29. Thank you for using D7-EGLS.

exillium-gamma build 2 EGLS (English GeoLocation Service)

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.01 00:21 GMT+8

Fine by me. See if I care!

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.03.29 23:07 GMT+8

Target sighted.

Coordinates: lat. 34.590836 lon. 133.933225

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.29 23:09 GMT+8

Now that's what I call a geolocation service. Thank you! I hate coordinates with minutes and seconds in them.

Let's see if your "upgrade" is any good: EGLS DOKO NOUTF8

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.03.29 23:11 GMT+8

Okayama Kuko, Okayama-shi, Okayama-ken.

SYSTEM MESSAGE: I'm starving.

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.29 23:19 GMT+8

Ha! See, robots don't STARVE!

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.03.30 21:40 GMT+8

What is the rice in the night of today? The English is difficult. I am no use... I'm sorry for a fool.

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.30 22:30 GMT+8

OMG... I was bathing. Hontoni gambatta. Wait a minute, am I still texting the same person?

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.03.30 22:40 GMT+8

Hello camina. Can go in makatei tomorrow?

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.30 22:55 GMT+8

You're here, and you're no longer crazy! Kei and I have work tomorrow. Can we go next Monday?

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.03.30 23:10 GMT+8

wao~! I want to see Kei, too.

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.30 23:25 GMT+8

I'll see what I can do, you can meet him in the restaurant where he works if you like? It's in the same city, and I can give you directions. It's a Japanese place, so you probably won't have a hard time.

From: Bad News

Received: 2013.03.30 23:31 GMT+8

Is it so? Thank you!

To: Bad News

Sent: 2013.03.30 23:35 GMT+8

The place is called Izakaya Shiroishi. Hey, isn't that the name of the mountain you were in? Let's talk when we meet up there!

From: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Received: 2013.02.25 21:50 GMT+8

Hoy, tapos na ba yung order ni Mr. Santos??? Kahapon pa 'yun balik nang balik dito at mukhang inip na inip na. 'Yan ang hirap sa inyong mga foringer, e. Buti na lang kamo nakakaintindi ka na raw ng tagalog. 'Wag na 'wag kang magkukunyaring hindi mo ako naiintindihan, at sinabi sa akin ni Aya na matagal ka na rito sa Pinas.

To: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Sent: 2013.02.25 21:54 GMT+8

I coordinated with Mr. Santos a few hours ago. I will personally deliver the tarpaulins once they have been printed. I have been ill for the past few days, this has nothing to do with my being foreign to this country. I have lived and worked here for close to 10 years. Modesty aside, I am not as irresponsible as Mark, who I had warned you against the moment he arrived for his job interview. Conti lang ang aking Tagalog sir.

From: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Received: 2013.02.25 21:57 GMT+8

Report to my office ASAP tomorrow. Kayo ni Mark. Pwede mo ba 'yan kausapin nang masinsinan? Ilang araw na 'yan pumapasok na amoy alak at namumula ang mata.

To: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Sent: 2013.02.25 22:01 GMT+8

I do not have close contact with Mark. I will see what I can do.

From: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Received: 2013.02.25 22:05 GMT+8

Thank you.

From: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Received: 2013.02.25 22:07 GMT+8

Carmina, 'wag mong kalilimutan yung medical certificate mo bukas.

From: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Received: 2013.02.25 22:09 GMT+8

Suspension ang abot mo sa akin kung wala 'yan!!

To: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Sent: 2013.02.25 22:12 GMT+8

Whatever.

From: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Received: 2013.02.25 22:15 GMT+8

Bastos ka talagang bata ka!!

To: THE BIG BAD BOSS

Sent: 2013.02.25 22:12 GMT+8

I'm older than you. :-P

From: Finn

Received: 2012.12.21 03:33 GMT+8

It is for your best interest if you will not visit me. Grid #8 is too dangerous, and to my knowledge, any incoming flights from the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations are barred here.

To: Finn

Sent: 2012.12.21 07:54 GMT+8

I don't care. I'm going to find a way to visit you... please? I care if I'd be risking my life, I just really need to see you. Have they been treating you well?

From: Finn

Received: 2012.12.21 08:40 GMT+8

I appreciate your gestures, but I value your life as I do my own. I do not want to cut this short, but a stable signal is difficult to come by. Live well, Camina, and be free.

To: Finn

Sent: 2012.12.21 09:00 GMT+8

What the hell does this mean? Finn, please tell me you aren't in grave danger... for the sake of my sanity.

From: Finn

Received: 2012.12.21 09:14 GMT+8

You haven't changed, not even a single bit. I'll call you as soon as my current research is done, alright?

To: Finn

Sent: 2012.12.21 09:27 GMT+8

You better. You gotta promise me you'd visit me again, like you promised 2 years ago.

From: Mama

Received: 2013.01.13 01:01 GMT+8

honey i will be visiting you after your papas birthday. can you book me a flight?

To: Mama

Sent: 2013.01.13 07:12 GMT+8

Are you sure you want to come here? I don't have a good place for you to stay. I'm just renting out a small, "bedspace" unit. There won't be space for both of us.

From: Mama

Received: 2013.01.13 08:40 GMT+8

baby are you silly? i am used to cramped spaces. i want to see where you live and work now. cattleya also wants to see you.

To: Mama

Sent: 2013.01.13 12:03 GMT+8

But we can talk through Skype when we both have time!

From: Mama

Received: 2013.01.13 23:14 GMT+8

you are not online at all.

From: Michael Santos

Received: 2013.02.25 13:05 GMT+8

D specifications for d tarp r as follows... 2 ft x 4 ft. Can u make dis by tom? Pls reply asap.

To: Michael Santos

Sent: 2013.02.25 13:54 GMT+8

Yes, sir. I just received the corrected files from Mark, and will now be in charge of your order. Between you and me, I don't really trust him much.

From: Michael Santos

Received: 2013.02.25 14:15 GMT+8

Wil d tarp be ready by tom morning?

To: Michael Santos

Sent: 2013.02.25 14:24 GMT+8

Yes. Today is my day off and I have been off work due to sickness for the past week. I will report to the office at 7 AM tomorrow, so you can pick the tarpaulin up between that time to 3 in the afternoon.

From: Michael Santos

Received: 2013.02.25 14:25 GMT+8

Ok thanks.