Half the thrill

of krill
in wait at a whale's
natural grille,

no near so shrill
as a tinned flute's
uppermost trill:

With the very last drill
where tender
minds were grilled

I'm over the proverbial hill.
Maybe they will keep something,
anything more than nil.


What a silly little rhyme! I was just thinking today that it had been a long time since I'd attempted any kind of controlled writing. When I was washing my hands at the department, I had a non-chemically induced flashback to when I told Rita Dove that I'd gone back to poetry after a long walk in the desert and that I'd just finished a villanelle. Or was it a sestina? Funny how memory tends to mix up the pots. It's often been my idle wish that Rowling' Pensieves actually existed. It would just be too wonderful (and/or nightmarish in some respects) for words.

Today was the last day of official TA duties. Of course, there will still be some stragglers who will put their make-up homeworks or late assignments in my box at the last possible moment, but those will be few compared to the bulk of classes I've finished grading. I thought last week at this time that I would have champagne corks popping all over in honour of the event (though I can't imagine actually drinking much of it--can one just buy popping corks?), but now that it is come, I am rather sedate. Relief at the time that has been returned to me (just in time for the research paper resuscitation) is combed into a darker bed: I'll miss the kids very much. It makes me sad that I'll no longer be able to tell them stories, reward major improvements in classes with Chinese candy, or make them do boring grammar drills. Well, maybe I won't be nostalgic for that last part, but it's been really great getting to know them. I just hope future students will be over all as gifted and enthusiastic.

How lucky I am (in a quiet realisation, without fanfare or brass)...

tribulations, if only tribblelations

Planning and anticipating one's own parties is fun and not fun, nerve-inducing, strangely disconnected, exhausting, troublesome, headache-ridden, and... necessary.

I will try to make the best of the situation, no matter what happens.

Thanks to my parents, I don't have that innate, innocent optimism beating in my chest like a second, larger concentric heart.

Now we are 11

Not counting the select Poultry Collection, we now have 11 small animals. The newest arrival is Albus, an impossibly supple and silky polar bear that is less anthropomorphisable than the others due to his more anatomically correct proportions and features. We found/rescued him in an odd little Sunset toy/junk store run by a pink-faced Asian man. The shop was an exemplar of clutter and random merchandise. When I jokingly set on my head a giantish pair of glasses that looked made for a very petite head with bug-like eyes, his voiced shot over the heads of his queued up customers, around the awkward corners of jumbled shelving: "30% percent off!"

We marvelled at the sheer number and mass of items crammed into the distantly flourescent-lit space. It was a sort of post-apocalyptic cabinet of Dr. Caligari--toy cars, action figures, plastic gold rings, glittery hair ornaments, hairbands, stuffed animals, eclectic (or indifferent) selection of racy stockings--all adrip from storage units stacked high and wide, forcing one down deep and narrow impasses between the jungle of stuff reaching out to grab one's attention, clipped as it may be in such a maze, or unmindful limb.

Albus was on the highest shelf of animals, nested snugly next to a sincere-looking snow leopard. I am not usually a fan of stuffed animals that are too true to life because they rarely capture the adorable liveliness or spirit of the creatures and often just look a little stoned, like imitation diorama displays not made to scale. Maybe it's the artifice of the glassy eyes that can look less disarming on an overtly false representation of the genuine animal. Say, a penguin: I have noticed that our notorious (Potato Patch Chairman) Penguin is a lot cuter and "animated" by his penguinish-features than toys made to resemble the exact dimensions, colours, and contours of real penguins. It could be that his Christmassy red and green scarf, red beanie hat, and Danish birth certificate (though he has since relocated to a potato-farming commune in China in mind) lend him unfair advantages, but I found the baby pups in "March of the Penguins" irresistible, too.

In conclusion, I suppose I could try to tie in some pale allusion to aesthetics theory and symposia about Art's power of artifice that is somehow more truthful than truth, but that would be too much.

We welcome Albus to the roost.

Un bel di

...you wake up and the phone's biting your ear off with new information--A is getting married after a ten year hurry and B is multiple months along to minting her own family, rather than simply a marriage--and you experience genuine happiness for the loved ones at the end of the receiving line. And something else. A slight confusion, or better yet, "confoundment". The French way of recounting it feels more apropos. How did I/we get here? Where was there to begin with? Is this really my face approaching me each morning in the looking glass above the washstand?

At the heart of it is this matter: even my younger friends seem firmly committed and on their own flowering path to somewhere with someone; I couldn't really complain about my own flowering patch, but it was less vector and more (at times) a straight sword hung at an implacable angle on the wall, perpetually shooting blankly into the ground.

This evening, I unmoored the aging boat and threw the rope into the water. It seemed a facile and petulant act, but in fact each step had been weighted with familiar thought. There was a last minute desire to jump into the cold and jerk the line ashore again, but there had been sufficient time to watch the cable sink all the way to the source. The boat itself was upset at first by the waves brought on by the breathiness of the evening, dashing its dented bow onto the water weeds and then the thudded oak of the pier. But then it appeased itself along with the rises in the water and turned its blind prow away.

I was relieved. I was horrified. This meant that I'll never be able to reach the centre of the lake again or climb onto the small island there thick with short green growth. The garden had been doing quite well, some seasons. I imagine that the green will grow wilder without people treading on its young. But my topiaries didn't really work out any way. They kept sprouting new heads or had stunted tails. I didn't like the callous developments on my part either. One day, those shrubs will meet the right trimming hand and be jubilant, like in that Cat Stevens' song.

And I will have tired of trying to sculpt the things in my mind out of stubborn, living matter and moved onto some other life-giving art.

Right?

A night of many

Tonight is the sort of night where I want to do everything at once--

Swim, call Waipo, practice my "flowers" on the straight sword, do cartwheels, eat less, eat more, have the coolness of melon without ballooning the gut, drink water in a train of glasses, floss, listen to new music, play old music, strum, hum, sing along, type on my typewriter, be a writer, be a bum, be a zombie, be a burst of fiery work, blow my heart out on a smokey flute, be good, be less good, be all the non-dichotomous things in between, kiss all my animals, open the window and stick my head into the pines (though that would be clearly impossible).

I ate too much noodle, packed too much noodle for tomorrow's lunch, eyed bananas wearily--all in the name of not crashing during 4 hours of teaching and then a breath before wushu wushu, you break my heart and my bones.

But it is quite fun to do those flowers on the straight sword. My right forearm is already more perky than before. But it feels awful to eat so much (not that I'm not grateful for the food) so the great black cloud doesn't pull itself down before my eyes just because our bloodline is "special" and would probably perish first in an expedition with little food across the Alps.

On a less indulgent note, Natalie Merchant's music is so addictively beautiful. Even if she doesn't change much, I love her. I might even love her more for it because there aren't many stable symbols in this world. And apparently, C. knew Leonard Cohen back in the day! Cool, man.

And black pepper is the perfect complement to the heady richness of oxtail. I can understand the spice drive to the East Indies much better after that last pot of daikon-oxtail soup.

Tyra relinquishes her tyranny

On my Wednesday nights...

YAY!

The lovely, decent Danielle, my favorite pick (after Nnenna was removed for being too highbrow--but no worries, the French industry will love her), is America's Next Top Model! For once, Ms. Banks and I agree.

Reality TV actually leaves me feeling pretty good and fuzzy. Wow, why aren't there mandarava flowers raining down right now as witness to the miracle?

Bog & Good

News...

I've found the missing sock! It was hanging on an innocuous ribbon on the laundry basket all this time and discovering its whereabouts was such a happy occasion. Sunday had been a thoroughly "unproductive" in widgets, but yielded a brilliantly clean house in honour of a long and satisfying tea (+ dinner noodles of sesame, spinazie, and garlic) with some lovely young souls. Frankly, it felt good though I am rather underslept and worn today.

But then to put this little princess cherry on top of that Kilimanjaro of cream--I was so relieved that the poor separated thing had not been in fact lying on the side of a Mexican highway somewhere, half rotting with dark water and serving as a second rate erstwhile home to some undiscerning animal nosing itself across the terrain...

This morning, when it was time to choose a pair of socks, I took out the newly reunited grey and yellow polka dotted darlings first, but decided to just enjoy their restored complementary state for a while without subjecting them to the brutal contortions of wushu practice. I put them back into the drawer, happy, knowing that though one day they will be retired and missed, at least for now, they will be there tomorrow.

The things of this world may be "empty", as C. says, but mad elephants trundling through the wilderness can still kill you. Similarly, the joy of things may be transient and ultimately doomed to memory and loss of that memory, but it is sweet nonetheless, especially in the Florentine formation: gioia. Now that's a joyous word.

*The quagmire in the title refers to the handing out of checks and check-minuses-pluses due on my person by tomorrow. But instead of spending the minutes on that, I have written this.

machine love

Yay! New computer has finally arrived. To my slight surprise and relief, I like it, but do not love it. It sounds silly to type this out with punctuation, but I was a little concerned that a) my old computer would be sadly neglected from now on, despite not having committed any sin other than succumbing to age, part and whole; and b) the status of my favourite mechanical thing would be taken away from the disused, but much affectionately beheld guitar--but a guitar is an instrument, not a machine.

When does an instrument stop being merely an instrument and become a machine?

I suppose there is a spectrum and at some point, when the touch of hand becomes too removed through too many processes and parts to produce an immediate, emotive sound, it can be said to be more machine than simple instrument. However, a vend diagram would still be in order.

So rest secure, my Cavallera guitar, you are still (aside from my beloved bear who really qualifies for some genuine animism by this decade) my number one--cue ABBA!

Missed dim sum today, but will try to make it to the Powwow. Saw "Big Lebowski" again last night and it is a great testament to that bromide about friends (and films): sometimes the best ones are old ones. Next time somebody gets a little righteous or smarmy or whatever stripe of unattractive, not-minding-his-own-business shows through civil clothing, I can channel the Dude and say:

"Oh yeah? Well, that's just like, your opinion, man."

Geniusity!

Blurring

Sometimes when I am weary and walking in sunlight, my shadow dense and short as it moves past the grated textures of materials the local architects favor--stone, sand, corrugations in rusty hues--the tall withdrawn forms of the eucalypt trees surprise me at their certainly planted roots. The bark doesn't peel as easily in this climate, so the trunks remain quite smooth and glossy. It is funny to find this preponderance of eucalypts here: sometimes when I am weary, the scent of their leaves, though not intensely blue-green, breezes through, stirs an old pleasant pot, and I think for a moment I am back in Tasmania.

First Swim

Despite plunging temperatures after I trod through 50 pages of the Lotus Sutra this afternoon, the waning light and the thought of not having to put on sunscreen beckoned a twilight swim. It was the first of the season, calming, surprisingly easy, and made me thankful for California and the serene surroundings of my home.

It is sad that I shall have to leave it at the end of summer for a colder and raspier place: all the more important to appreciate it now--the illusion of solitude as one moves through the temperate water watching the silent planes on high fly with the pale fire of the late day on their sleek bodies. All around, the green has grown deeper, more quiet, closer in.

The Bravest Man in America

I salute you, Stephen Colbert!

I love that silverware still on the table, but no more cloth trick you pulled under W's very wired nose! There will be no unnatural reserves on exclamation points tonight!!!

Wanton! Wanton celebration!!!!!!!!!!