He used the red “walker” for a while until he got used to the idea–he’s at the Depot, an indoor rink that was once a train station and has a zamboni shaped like a steam engine. What’s not to love, then, T-chan must wonder.
Now he begging me to buy him skates and he wants to take skating lessons….
I switched the furnace on yesterday morning, though by midday we were in T-shirts. That was me running and my son kicking his scooter down the greenway that stretches for miles alongside a cemetery called Sunset. We were flying, suspended, hovering, above the pine tree tops, between summer and fall.
You could say it like this: Old friends, nostalgia, ennui, and wabi-sabi, settled down at the low table for some green tea and the geese gathered themselves outside.
The sky-blue swimming pool in the park down the street was emptied of its chlorinated water last week, right before school started. It’s a stern message to children that the carefree splashing is over. Chaotic shouting is no longer acceptable behavior. The pool has begun to hoard its detritus of broken sticks and slate colored leaves for the coming freeze.
My son and I rush through the dead center of the stillborn pause, life and death holding hands, we can’t slow down just yet.
We took a trip to the downtown library to watch the glass elevators move up and down, their gears and pulleys exposed like whale intestines. My son leapt back and forth, sometimes his feet left the earth completely, as he celebrated noisily over and over the end, the middle, and the beginning of the behemoth machines’ migrations.
I stood at a table of display books nearby, reading Eleanor Roosevelt, who insisted that if I faced my fears head on they would lose their power, and I would have the courage to go on to the next fear.
If I did what I was born to do, she added, all the confusion and sleeplessness would fall off my limbs: I could be reborn, too, and leap toward what moves me, take flight, sing, even at that beginning of the end of things.
Updated view of our garden, now run amok, taken by husband, with me stuck in the middle. Yellow zucchini, Japanese cucumbers, green beans, sweet peas, basil, daikon radish, purple radish, cilantro, and roma tomatoes–not yet bright red though, all bursting out and over the fence. We also discovered a pumpkin under some big leaves creeping across the lawn, and it is now the size of a baby’s head; thus, we did the proper thing and made a “pillow” for it so its skin will not bruise.
I spent the day cleaning out son’s room and closet, in preparation to paint the walls with fresh (zero VOC) sky-blue paint. This is the fourth room and final room to paint in our now three years’ residence in the apartment. Wow, it feels strange to write this: three years in Minneapolis. I still miss Japan, sometimes it hits me furiously, but I am also accepting that this is the best place for our son to be, for now….but then again, Iceland, Ireland, Toronto, Åland Islands, hmmmmm….these are just daydream-lands, safe dreamlands to carry inside my mind whenever I look to escape the humdrum of now. Well, actually life is not so hum-drum today, as I am in the midst of a mini-vacation, which involves reading Sherman Alexie and gathering up bags of clothes, toys, blankets, dishes that we don’t need and piling it all into a corner. I will soon give it away to The Arc, a non-profit thrift store whose income goes toward empowering people with developmental disabilities.
Feels good then to simplify our home and help the tiny space we dwell inside appear more open. Now we have more room to dance and breathe and jump, which is good for the six-year-old, and good for his parents, too.
Finally after untold minutes and untold attempts, listening to machines tell me that “due to the high volume of calls”, etc. I have my password back and could today enter this new world (over 3 months later). This blog was shifted to a new platform–I don’t know how to use it yet–but nonetheless–it feels good to be here again.
Spring has arrived since I was last here. A gorgeous blue-sky fluffy-cloud day and students are in finals.
I am almost done with a submission for a local writing contest–I always try about once a year–to keep my mind sharp-edged, ready. Always good to revise and devote my time to something fun and positive vs. dull and stressful.
We have planted our seeds, son and I, and we have: daikon radishes, sugar pumpkins, rosemary, basil (2 types), cilantro, jolly jester marigolds, sunflowers, and Japanese cucumbers. We also have a successful crop of scorchingly hot orange tulips in bloom and strawberries in blossom.
This picture has nothing to do with the below message, and yet everything to do with it. I leave you to discover the connection.
The sun finally broke through the thick cloud cover we who are trapped in Minnesota had been suffering under for what seems like months. Yes~~!
Yesterday, however, I spent the afternoon curled up in a chair at the downtown library, reading and taking notes obsessively about one of my interests–graphic novels. It was a love~ly day…until I ran to catch the wrong bus and ended up having to walk in sub-zero weather (slipping about 4 times, completely wiping out once) along busy roads on sidewalks covered with black ice.
I walked for about an hour, until my husband finally answered his cell phone when I was five blocks from home. So, two blocks from home, I got the “ride home” I had been longing for. Since I also happen to have a nasty cold that has erased my voice for 3 days–my stint in-the-elements was not a comedy of errors as much as a comedy of terrors for me. Needless to say, perhaps, I was in bed by 9:30pm and woke up at 12:01a.m. exactly and thought to myself–Happy New Year!
So–I am here inside my house, next to the heat-bearing radiator, where any sane person would be on January 1st, 2009, in Minnesota–land of the snow, the frozen nostrils, and androgynous winter fashion.
The moral of the story is, I guess, that I might have had to experience one hour in which to freeze in the cruel winter wind, but thanks to having a home to walk toward and a husband who eventually answers the phone, I am fully alive and happy to be so.
Okay, take a deep breath for the following run-on sentence: May all those in our world with less fortunate news find the basics–Love, food, shelter, clothing, good health, peace, freedom to read and dream, and clean water–and may they get what they so greatly deserve and need because of their own ingenuity and struggle and because those, like me, who have most of the above also become willing to give our time and (if we have it) our coins to help them achieve these true essentials, so that–ultimately–we can all help out others, until we have passed the gift of basics and on and on.
Oh, dear, am I a socialist? [That’s potentially the new dirty word in the USA, it seems! It used to be liberal].
Yes, I am, if it means being aware of the privileges I have, and that many have more than I, and that many, many more people have less privilege than I do–and that this bothers me; well, then, yes, I am exactly that. In the end, I am probably just a pathetic, sentimental soul (re. closet optimist) who believes we all can do many things to (when we see our faces in the mirrors across the planet) say to ourselves that we are making a positive difference in this chaotic world. Not so much to wish for in 2009, is it?
Well, as many of you know, we uprooted ourselves three weeks earlier than anticipated due to my good luck in finding a job at my alma mater as an academic advisor.
More later when I get a chance to breathe, but for now I’ll say I am enjoying the overall experience of returning to Minnesota because it has that nice blend of rekindling longlost memories, sights and scents with encountering new faces, knowledge, places, and goals. Maybe I can more aptly describe these first few days here as the ‘strange familiar’ or the ‘familiar strange’.
–An injured horse flees the US bombing of Baghdad–
(Image taken from here)
I was asked about six months ago how I can be an anti-war idealist in light of what horrible things happen in our world. I was asked how I can say, for example, that war is wrong, when it was the way in which someone like Hitler had to be stopped. It’s a difficult question.
I have been thinking about this for a long time, trying to formulate why I feel any act of violence against another human or living thing is only a worsening of the situation. And it comes down to my inner voice. I can’t see the good in violence, and I can’t support or condone it, even though I can understand why some people prefer it, having moral justifications for it and perhaps financially thriving from it.
I admit the line gets fuzzy when I think of issues of self-defense, and if I became a victim of violence, or if I saw someone harmed, I would quickly move into response, of course. But that response is not violence in and of itself, it is a reaction to direct oppression. I believe people who practice the resistance of non-violence will in the end create a better world rather than a worse, even if they must lose their lives in the process. This is a gift that people like MLK, Jr., Gandhi, Biko, Nkrumah, and Jesus leave for us to learn from. They are humans, with faults and weaknesses like us all, but they chose the tougher path of peace and love.
I do not, however, feel war and killing people ever creates a better world, and many, many innocent people are killed in the process, many people are left injured mentally, physically, and spiritually, often losing their loved ones, and thus denying the world of so many unrealized lives. I will never be hawkish, as I find no wisdom or joy in bullying. I imagine the pain of all the people who have lost their children to war. How can anyone call these lost humans ‘collateral damage’? I cannot.
A great haiku poet, Taneda Santoka (1882-1940) wrote the below haiku during the war between Japan and China that broke out in July 7, 1937. No one in Japan was allowed to oppose this conflict, and all poets were supposed to support the war in their poems. Yet, because he was jobless and homeless, Santoka was free to express his true feelings.
Marching together/On the ground/They will never step on again.
Futatabi wa fumumai tsuchi o fumishimete iku.
Winter rain clouds–/Thinking: Going to China/To be torn to pieces.
Shigurete kumo no chigireyuku Shina o omou.
Leaving hands and feet/ Behind in China/ The soldiers return to Japan.
Ashi wa te wa Shina ni nokoshite futatabi Nihon ni.
Soaking wet,/ Quietly returning/ The remains of six hundred fifty.
Shiguretsutsu shizuka ni mo roppyaku goju hashira.
Sweat trickles down/ The white boxes.
Poroporo shitataru ase ga mashiro no hako ni.
(Translations by John Stevens)
Let us hope for love and reason to win out over chaos and hate. I conclude that, yes, I believe in the power of non-violence and in the actions such belief necessitates.
“If you zoom in too close, a spiral appears to be a line…” I’ve said this before, and now I realize it’s my life.
The ties you think should have been broken or at least disintegrated after so long an absence hold firm. The prodigal daughter takes a road that ends up where she began.
Come to think of it, I am always dreaming of the land I came from, where people dig for ore in their sleep, where the violent punch of waves turn rocks serenely round, where sweetgrass grows and no one mows it down, where the loon calls and you return home to earth again.
Out back of our dilapidated public housing is an unkempt field of beauty. A sturdy pine tree, in its classic Christmas shape, stands near to where a house used to be long ago. Dragon willow trees spring and curl up tenaciously even though the city workers mow them down, and now patches of daffodils and a few single ruby red tulips grow among the tall grasses along with wild asparagus, small purple flowered ground cover, and dandelions.
This year I decided I would create a miniature garden, although no one else in our building has done so, and I would do it without asking for anyone’s permission. Boldness comes to those who have little time left on their contracts, I suppose. I pulled a heavy sack of soil around back, purchased a mini shovel and scoop, and planted three marigolds and one tomato plant in the middle of all that wild life. My husband helped me get up the toughest weeds until we created a small guerilla garden. The plants are loving their new home, and already a small yellow flower has bloomed on the tomato plant. I put up some wooden fencing so that the city mowers might take heart and not murder them with their electric weed-whackers, as they invade the field and slice up the other vegetation twice a year.
I am not sure they will show deference in their work, as they have previously hacked up my son’s Thomas the Tank Engine he had dropped over the veranda last year. But for now, I will believe in the basic goodness of humans, and I think they will understand the very human desire to bite into a juicy sun-ripened tomato, so much more pleasurable than those mass produced types grown by unknown people in unknown places.
He started going here from this week. Now each morning he is waiting by the door with his shoes in hand, eager to go to school! What a joy to take him to such a place each morning. We have been blessed by the misty autumn morning beauty of Hokkaido all week.
View from son’s new school
Now that I finally have breathing space (2 weeks) before outside work and academic duties return in gale force, I find myself wandering about from place to place via the Internet, from idea to idea, without any one focus. Is this what happens when a dog is suddenly unleashed and de-collared after being tied up for too long? Am I unaware of what freedom is and how to enjoy it? I like to think I just don’t know where to begin!
Well, I am enjoying the fumbling about, actually. I have been reading about nationalistic tendencies and cultural identity in Japan, looking at updating some research papers for publication, considering submitting papers for conferences, exploring more on using blogs in teaching writing and cultural understanding, about interactive digital fiction, toying with possible graduate programs in diverse places like california, the netherlands, baltimore, vancouver, london, switzerland, and some virtual campuses. I have also looked up things like outsider art and fulbrights. In other words, I have done a lot of skimming but little commiting–but if I had just one focus, then I wouldn’t be relaxing would I? Rationalizing my wayward soul…
In other words, I am truly a virtual ‘tabibito’ (or travelling person, but it sounds so much better in Japanese)…plus, we are off to Sapporo in real world time this weekend to see the Isamu Noguchi Art Park that he created for children, looks like the perfect place for my son, husband and me to clammer up and leap off rock sculptures. Oh, by the way, we celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary yesterday! Whooo-ee!
Lastly, a son update: he can officially put together an alphabet puzzle (with individual wooden letters) with his own two hands. He gets frustrated occasionally with the complex shapes fitting neatly (like his mother does about details, too), but with sideline encouragement, he can do it! That’s my sweetie pie!
Just a quick message to say that the new job at M. University didn’t pan out, but I sensed it wasn’t the right place when I visited–I mean–my ideals perfectly matched the university’s ideals; yet the realities of the place contradicted our ideals. Make sense? In other words, the university was more closed and conservative than its presentation of itself, although some lovely, valiant people were there trying to keep its ideals alive…it looked like a tough task. The sad part is I would have loved to live near the ocean, but maybe some other shore awaits me. Thus, here we go, folks, onto the next option! I am always a fan of options…
The best thing about such outcomes (for me) is that they provide excellent incentive to re-evaluate where I am and where I wish to be…and this time around I realize I am exactly where I want to be–even if my current job/situation can’t last forever–but what can? I probably wouldn’t be as excited about my life if it seemed static and set in tracks for the years to come…
I enjoy riding the wild horse of life, with freedom in the skies. It may seem odd but whenever one door closes, it seems to me that twenty thousand windows open up at the same time! And I am good at climbing through windows. I am glad I have the skill to see things this way, as it helps me out again and again. Long live human agency and the power to (re)invent one’s life!
In my current class, Cultural and New Media Studies, we have begun to explore the theoretical frameworks people tend to use when they discuss the relationships or the collision-intertwining of humans and technologies. It is all quite overwhelming and academic and so, from my class notes, and my own interpretations, I wanted to sound out what the various schools of thought are:
The technological-determinists tend to see the technology itself as controlling the masses and determining how we behave, and the masses are without any means to stop this control and shaping of our society.
The cultural materialists tend to see the technological impact as intertwined with political, social and (namely) economic contexts, and they also tend to see humans as possible active agents of how the technologies may be used.
The essentialists believe there is a logical, rational, systematic explanation for how humans behave and how machines behave. If it can’t be explained scientifically yet, it simply means we haven’t developed the science, but that problem can be solved eventually, via progress.
The techno-utopians believe technology is the new promise for solutions to modern day ills. The technologizing of education, health, media and more is seen as beneficial and freeing to humans; although the emphasis tends to focus on the economic benefits for those involved in the technology industries.
The critical theorists saw the long-held notion of scientific rationalism as a means to control, manipulate and distract the masses from any political consciousness. This school of thought developed in a resistance to the rise of fascism. They felt the organization of labor and technologies were dehumanizing and opposed to self-actualization. They believed humans had the power to (re) shape their systems.
The constructivists ask that we examine who has the power of the technologies, what is their aim, and who tries to control whom. They also seek to expose and dismantle the fabricated nature of power structures. I think these people might also called radical humanists, seeking to actively overthrow power structures that create oppression.
Post-colonialists are those involved in expressing resistant ideologies to the dominant (colonial) power(s) ideologies. This counter-thought can be a focus on those marginalized globally or locally by many factors: ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, “race,” education and status.
Post-modernists see all studies as limited by context and locality, no center or universals can exist. I like to think of this as the ‘chaos’ theory of humanity. They attempt to explore a multitude (a cacophony) of perspectives and voices without hierarchy, but still rejecting the dominant western bias of one set ‘tradition’ or set of ideals as representative for all.
Contextualists do not see the political, social, economic factors as separable from technological factors: all is interdependent. Thus, technologies create contexts and contexts create technologies.
Interactionists, similar to contextualists, concentrate on how technologies form and change according to their constant intertwining with the other factors.
Finally, the most recent theories, such as hybridity and cyborg studies, erase the traditional delineation of social, political, economic and technological factors as well as dismiss notions of ethnicities, genders, alive and dead, completely. These theorists feel humans have become machines and machines have become human. Human-machine relations are neither harmonious nor antagonistic, rather the boundaries are so blurred and constantly repositioning, that the two cannot be distinguished from the other.
Well, those were ideas from my notes and often taken directly from my teachers Stephen Petrina and Francis Feng.
I conclude that each theory has its focus and emphasis, and most of us think with an amalgamation of theories (without much consciousness). I just hope to recognize the theories elements in what I read, knowing each one has its weaknesses and motives.
If you read this entire blog, you must enjoy the theorectical trampoline! Jump! Jump!
Well, okay, okay it did snow yesterday I admit it, but the optimist in me must focus on the fact that the tree outside my office window is sprouting teeny weeny leaves. And okay, okay, I am still wearing a hat and wool trousers every day, but the grass has turned into a courageous green and the crocuses (that’s Korokkasu in romaji) have sprung forth in their royal purples and canary yellows.
So, just let me sing of these tiny miracles today….
Below the plane
a silver plate begs
for coins
of constellations,
enough to buy feed
for the night mare
to ride into the forest
of glistening eyes
and sharpened claws.
With blind mutt’s eye,
a lake searches its owner
by scent and sound.
There she is! Wrapped in
riveted armor
and hidden in
ocean-rage boom.
Yes, I ‘m here,
my lovely one,
and I hear you
snuffling through
snow for bones.
Wait. It won’t be long.
In May I’ll submerge
pale limbs
in your waters.
Add a tinge
of blue beauty
to your immortal eye.
We just returned from a short stay in Kaua’i and now back among the snow tunnels and crisp blue skies of Hokkaido.
The relentless roar of the ocean, the lush variation of tropical greens, the smell of citronella candles and the taste of fresh coconut meat linger inside me and I find it hard to be fully “home.”
Both places hold natural beauty in a different way, both places hold me in their embrace.
Yesterday my son decided not to take his nap. He lay in bed with his toy car and stayed silent, except for some muttering, for over an hour, without ever falling asleep. I figured the downtime might suffice for a nap…but in the evening he had reached that punch-drunk state of exhaustion, running wildly from room to room, falling and sliding across the floors, crashing into futons.
When carried off to bed, his body felt heavy, although he remained wide-eyed and chattery. He snuggled into the futon. After a short period of silence, he started to shout in very loud, syncopated yelps, maybe four or five times. These yells held no rhyme or reason, but blasted out of him like a trumpet on fire. Then, in another minute or so, he slipped into a blissful slumber.
It has been a while since I last wrote in this journal: there was glitch at the ubc site, and access was blocked, and, alas, I was also running around in headless chicken mode, so that is another reason for the lapse….
My son and I spent a night in Sapporo this weekend. We took a trip to the modern art museum, to a few galleries and past many undergound shops. I think there were at least six shopping arcades (maybe four blocks long each)?, and even though we didn’t see everything, we spent our evening just strolling past store displays, past endless items of clothing and toys and gadgets for sale, on sale, not on sale….
After an hour or so my mind numbed and I lost interest in buying anything, and then a strange compulsion came over me that I should at least examine things for their aesthetic values, as if each thing deserved some sort of critique (good design, bad fabric, cheap zipper, etc) until finally even my judicial game lost its allure and I wished to vanish into the sky. Instead I pushed my son, via stroller, through patches of loose snow, across glare ice roads, carried him up and down a series of stairwells until we reached our hotel.
On the 1.5 hour train trip back the next day, my son was shouting “Cars!” “Train!” over and over whenever we pulled away from a station. He also developed a routine of burbling his lips at the people sitting behind us (who thankfully found him amusing…). As the train compartment was silent except for my son’s one-man-show, it was a bit of an event. Although I secretly chuckled at his high jinks, I did make repeated efforts to calm him down, honestly I did. Children, however, have an energy that cannot be corked easily, and my son is always thrilled about riding trains. I did hope no one was too annoyed, however.
The year is new and I am optimistic that I will reside in a more creative space. I have hopes to make more paintings, poems, stories, essays, make anything really, and to do less practical sheeeeet. I felt the understandable need to be practical the past two years (feed son, dress son, change son, repeat, etc.), but I think it is time to find my inner life again. I hope you, too, my friends, can find a place and time to whittle on blocks of dreams.
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