Things I Love Thursday

Posted on 26 August 2010 | Comments Off on Things I Love Thursday

Genevieve introduced me to this particular kind of Thursday loving back when we were both in the UBC First-Year Blog Squad. Though I never did it on my previous UBC blog, I did post my happy things in life (on Wednesdays) in my personal notes.

But I feel like following the crowd now, so Thursdays it will be from now on!

Fantastic things going on in my life right now:

♥ Our dryer is fixed. It broke a couple of nights ago just when I was doing some emergency laundry. I’m very proud of myself for my relatively small panic, and for the way I artfully hung most of my clothes on the single tiny drying rack we own. It got me thinking that maybe here’s a way for me to cut down on my massive carbon footprint. I’m very glad I have the dryer back if I do want to use it, though.

♥ Yuna Ito did a cover of ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’, which of course had me listening to the original by Aerosmith and reflecting, once again, what an amazing song this is.

♥ Making mac and cheese from scratch. I had a slab of Gruyere cheese I grated up and melted, then baked with my macaroni. Sure it’s a lot more time-consuming than Kraft, but it is so good!

♥ Half of my books for one class arrived from Amazon. I haven’t ripped it apart yet, but I am so excited to nerd it up and hopefully be done with my readings before school starts. I’m really looking forward to my classes this year!

♥ Speaking of reading, I’m really pleased with myself for picking up books for pleasure again. At the moment I’m re-reading A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (one of my favourites), just finished re-reading Mary Oliver’s Dream Work (another favourite) and am starting on Linda Hogan’s Seeing Through the Sun. Also decided to pick up Canada’s First Nations by Olive Patricia Dickinson from the beginning, as I never finished it the first time I tried it.

♥ Finding the perfect present for a friend. I forgot what a wonderful feeling it is to give someone exactly what they wanted and never expected—in this case, a copy of the Mr Nobody DVD that’s only available in France or Belgium. The headache I got from trying to remember my three years’ of long-ago French was worth my friend’s joy and amazement when she got it. I can’t wait to come up with the next perfect thing to give someone else.

♥ Sunshine and blue skies! I’ve been out on every one of my lunch breaks on the days I’m working, in my attempt to soak up the summer light before the rain and grey skies set in.

♥ Lightning just flashed and thunder just rolled. Are we about to have a storm? I LOVE STORMS. Rain so rarely pours itself out here; it just drizzles. Tonight is going to be a-ma-zing. (Also, I sleep remarkably well when it rains at night.)

♥ Saw the Big Dipper for the first time last night, from the stairs to my front door. It was fantastic—I just stepped out, and there it was before my eyes. (My brother’s friend had to point it out to me, because I didn’t know how to look for it, but now I know and will remember!)

♥ Also: looking at the mountains and ocean everyday on my way to work; the new ability to call people’s mobile phones within Canada and the US for free through Gmail; getting work assignments from my second part-time; making beautiful plans for this coming weekend; having lunch to bring to work tomorrow for the first time this summer(!); discovering takoyaki at Donburi Ya on Robson and Jervis; turning my music up when I’m home alone and singing at the top of my lungs; getting a text from a beloved friend in Australia in the middle of the night; actually going to bed early instead of just saying I will; the fresh, cool sensation of the morning when it’s 8 AM and there still aren’t too many cars on the road; getting a go-kart deal through GroupOn and having a means of fulfilling one of my Day Zero goals; doing chores that have been piling up and getting rid of them; and getting phone calls from people who love me.

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Posted in Things I Love Thursday

Walking on grass

Posted on 21 August 2010 | Comments Off on Walking on grass

Growing up, walking on grass was just not something we did — there was so little of it, after all, in our sky-scraping city with its parks of concrete. Grass is something precious there; something to be looked at, but never walked upon. Coupled with our mothers’ fears of us picking up dirt and parasites (but mostly dirt), it doesn’t surprise me to reflect on how I have never really walked upon the earth until recently.

And yet it is one of the most basic acts we know in our bones. An act our ancestors did without a second thought, to walk on the ground that gives rise to each of us. We follow them in their footsteps with each pressing of a sole onto the soil, each lifting up and setting down again, our skin to the earth’s.

An act I have been relearning in this past summer, taught out of me by the misgivings of people who have been out of touch with the thing they speak of for so long, they come to fear it.

The dirt is really nothing, in itself.

A brushing of the foot before you slip it into your shoe, a cleaning or a washing away with clear running water when you get home — it is something, to have clear running water at our beck and call.

It doesn’t always match up to what I think it will be.

The closest I came to knowing grass as a child, was by reading of it, the same way most of my ‘knowledge’ is acquired. But none of it is true knowing, not when you’ve never really felt the supple, forgiving blades for what they are, not when you know the difference between sparse, thinly growing grass and thick lush patches — and I used to think that it would always be thick and lush. That it would be a soft, springy carpet that would feel divine to walk upon, because that’s how my childhood stories romanticized them. And once in a blue moon, if I am lucky (or if someone has watered their garden to no end), that’s what I get. More often than not, however, it is more like the grass I walked upon today: in some parts soft, in most parts tougher, with more individual strands you can feel, but which bend under your weight regardless.

It gives me a kind of peace to walk like this. To fill in some of the gaps of what I never knew, and will never know in the same way as one who grows up with the knowledge of the land as their birthright instinctively does.

And I will have to learn, all my life, what others take for granted, and will have to remember, with great effort, how to care for this place that we live on. This place, this earth, I did not even know how much I cared for until I came to see and touch and listen to with the senses of my own body, that had once known nothing more than what other humans had created out of stone and steel and concrete — amazing, wondrous things, but creations with no sense of context when seen away, apart from, the rest of the world that we live in.

Each time I reach out and touch the earth for myself, I forge another link in this new, and somehow ancient, relationship. I am (re)discovering the meaning of grass by learning of its being; this grass that is one of my namesakes in the language of my human heritage. These slender blades and open fields tell me something of who I am, and teach me something of what I always hoped to believe: that we belong here, here in this world. Not on Mars or on any other distant planet, awesome as it would be to reach those places. Here, on our own blue and green earth.

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Posted in Spirituality, Sustainability

Summer Goodies

Posted on 18 August 2010 | Comments Off on Summer Goodies

I made up my mind when I was a young girl / I’ve been given this one world / I won’t worry it away…
— Sara Bareilles, “Many the Miles”

The last few days have been hot, but there’s a refreshingly cool breeze blowing today. The textbook list for September should have been posted up on the UBC Bookstore site on Monday, but it’s still mysteriously MIA, so I’m taking this opportunity to enjoy my freedom from academia.

And summer is good. I got to go to the beach for the first time in three years (!!!) after my exam on Saturday, and soaked up the sun to my heart’s content. I’ve also been going out with my girlfriends, practising promenading Jane Austen-style around a park, having lunch with a Groupon coupon at La Brasserie (a Franco-German restaurant), and watching movies.

This year has been lovely to me for the movies I actually wanted to watch:

Toy Story 3 was probably my favourite one of the lot—it was surprisingly funny and touching; my eyes actually stung a little bit near the end.

For those who have never seen the first two movies, you probably don’t have to: suffice to say, Andy is off to college and his childhood toys are accidentally donated to the local daycare centre. The movie is about their attempt to return home. It’s beautifully animated, as all of Pixar’s works are, and is definitely a summer highlight.

I watched this in 3D at Tinseltown for $15.75, because I returned to Vancouver quite late and there were very few places showing it at the time. The cinema has large, comfortable seats, but the area is a little dodgy at night and I’m not a fan of being there after dark. The movie was totally worth it, though!

And how could anyone miss out on Inception after all the hype? I’d never seen the trailers or paid attention to the posters, but one of my friends told me it’s about stealing information from your dreams. Now that’s a concept that caught my attention.

I procured two friends to join me at Dunbar, which shows movies at $7 on Tuesdays. (Happily, this is one of those movies it’s easy to procure friends who want to rewatch it.) The movie was fine; I enjoyed it, but didn’t have my mind blown. Actually, I caught myself reflecting on another movie I’d watched with a friend before I left Hong Kong while watching Inception — Mr Nobody, directed by Jaco van Dormael, did blow my mind.

The last movie I saw yesterday at Oakridge (in 2D for $5.99 on Tuesdays, which can include popcorn and a soft drink) was Despicable Me — and I am so disappointed! All my favourite parts of the movie were what I’d already seen from the trailer, and apart from one ‘aww’ moment at the end, the whole thing was remarkably mediocre and requiring more suspension of disbelief than usual. I’m so sad, because I love Agnes; she’s easily my favourite character and exactly what I think my little sister would be like if I had one. Thank goodness I didn’t pay more for a 3D version — I probably should have waited for it come out on DVD.

Ah well.

Another thing I’m loving about my free time now is being able to catch up on all my emails. I do my best to keep up with emails, but I currently owe a lot of friends a lot of typing. They’ve been steadily sending me some fantastic goodies, such as Sin Titulo (which means “Without a Title”), an amazing and suspenseful webcomic I wait for updates like a hawk, and this fantastic commencement speech Ellen DeGeneres gave at Tulane in 2009:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e8ToRVOtRo]
(Her speech starts about one and a half minutes into the video.)

On that cheerful note, I am off to continue cleaning my house and prepare to make kimchi fried rice and pancakes with a friend tonight!

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Posted in Recreation

A View from the Bench

Posted on 13 August 2010 | Comments Off on A View from the Bench

a view from the bench

Armed with a bottle of water and a tube of sunscreen, I brought my books out to a bench today to study in preparation for my exam tomorrow. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m terrible when it comes to studying indoors on a sunny day, so I thought I might as well be productive while sitting in the sun.

And I was.

Honestly, I can’t wait until this exam is over and I can be free to do all the summery things I want to do in the next two weeks:

  • go to Lonsdale Quay
  • visit the UBC Farm Market
  • cycle in Stanley Park
  • walk home from UBC
  • sit and read on Granville Island
  • walk up and down Granville Street
  • attend a slam poetry session at Cafe Deux Soleils
  • go to the beach — and the list goes on.

That list doesn’t cover the things I need to do as well, such as sort out a banking problem, prepare to move back into rez, and deal with The Return of the Wasps — we had a wasp nest by our chimney and pest control dealt with them, but they have come back and I am infuriated at this invasion of my territory. I’m actually petrified of them, but there are unfortunately three waiting to be killed, so I’m off to do that now.

(Oh yes, and the title of this post is in reference to Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, which I don’t actually care all that much about, but he is the author of the wonderful All My Sons and The Crucible, which is one of my favourite plays. Ever.)

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Posted in Recreation

Vancouver Rain

Posted on 7 August 2010 | Comments Off on Vancouver Rain

For the first time in weeks, the rain has come down again. A little part of me is going, ‘Nooo! I don’t want to return to the Vancouver that rains all the time! Not yet! Not now!’ — But wait. Wasn’t I the one who was telling my friends in other places that Vancouver rain is really not so bad?

Summer must be getting to me, because all I can remember of the other eight months of the year are dreary skies and a constant drizzle. Looking over my notes to friends, I can see myself asserting, ‘Vancouver rain isn’t as bad as everyone makes it seem. The weather here is actually fairly predictable: grey skies one day, rainy the second, and sunshine on the third. Rinse and repeat. It’s kind of nice to know that sooner or later, another clear, sunny day will pop up. For some reason though, everyone seems to forget the last sunny day we had two days ago, and focuses instead on the rain — which isn’t even real rain by Hong Kong standards. I’m dying for a total downpour. Here, it’s just a halfhearted drizzle that can’t seem to decide whether to come down or not.’

Well, at least I remembered the drizzling part right.

I think I just haven’t had enough sun. I ran back to Asia for three weeks over the summer to see my family and it was raining almost all the time there.

What I would like to do — as soon as my distance-education exam is over — is go out into the world and bathe myself in sunlight. I want to soak up every little last bit of Vitamin D that I can get before the weather turns and I’m wearing my minimum of four layers that make up my autumn, winter and spring attire. (Fashionable? Oh yes, if only being a very round ball would come into style this year. No matter, at least I’m warm.)

Of course, when I take a step back, I know the rain really isn’t so bad. It waters our garden, for instance. It keeps things looking green (and I love the green!).

It also keeps me indoors, forcing me to study after I’ve procrastinated sufficiently long enough to feel the stress. I admit it—summer weather is not conducive to studying. If I make myself stay at home to work, I end up standing beside the window feeling remarkably like a trapped pet.

So rain is clearly A Good Thing during the academic year. (Note to self: never ever again take a class that examines you for credit during the summer. Ever.)

The shortened daylight hours in winter? That I’m not so keen on. I’ve discovered my mood tends to dip when night falls, so it’s quite low during the winter when the sun sets at four. (I used to think that was an exaggeration, the sun setting at four. Oh, enlightenment.) Haven’t the faintest idea how I’ll fix that just yet — this year I’m considering investing in fantastically bright lights. Perhaps that will help? Hmm.

At any rate, I can’t wait for the sun tomorrow. Even though I do love

the cool smell of falling rain you can almost
taste on your naked skin…

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Posted in Wellness