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| Our Worst-Case Scenario |
| 05.23.04 (4:58 pm) [edit] |
The tornado warning that came over the P.A. system said that we had to go into the basement of the library and stay away from windows. Instead, everyone sat at their computers and looked at each other.
As I looked out the window, I saw a guy in a heathered T-shirt, white shorts and sandals carrying a a bag of McCombo in one hand and medium-sized fountain drink in the other. The trees waved frantically.
I figure that natural disasters are like the movies: we look out the window and we see special effects. Say, did that guy just get hit by a lamp-post? Or maybe it's the opposite--we look out the window and we see reality TV, which, come to think of it, amounts to the same thing.
Either way, everyone turned back to their email.
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| Fiddy cent |
| 05.18.04 (7:25 pm) [edit] |
I'm listening to Patsy Cline and reading a story in which a museum security guard wakes up one morning and decides to stage a heist at work.
I'm a sucker for duffel bags full of money and guitars that sound like they're from California. And boots. Real. Pointy. Boots.
That's the thing about movies with protagonists. Imagine you had your very own story, one in which some omniscient narrator keeps having to describe how bad ass you are every time you cross the street.
You probably don't play in a band, but boy do you like to hold meetings in really loud places. Somewhere there's a cop who looks who's going to have to come out of retirement just for you. And he kinda looks like Bruce Willis.
In the meantime, I think the chicken stew burning to the pot.
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| For the record |
| 05.11.04 (6:23 am) [edit] |
It's taken me two years, but two nights ago I finally interviewed my dad about his life and recorded it to mp3 and even burned it to CD. I've been writing about his life since the interview.
Here's an excerpt. He's describing what it's like living under Apartheid in South Africa:
My parents lived in the big city: Johannesburg. My father was working for the Chinese Councillor as the newspaper division with the government Gazette, earning very little money because it was not profit-making. It was subsidized by the Taiwanese government. Your grandma was the only dressmaker able to make Chinese dresses. She got lot of business. She was quite well known in the small community in Johannesburg. Because of the racial policies and immigration there was less than seven thousand Chinese in Johannesburg.
My family wasn’t allowed to buy a house in South Africa. The Chinese government provided a house for the employees of the newspaper. Their house was shared by three families. Each had one room, sharing a shower and kitchen. Imagine three of us living in one room, four of them living in another room.
I was working for thirty rands a month. Rands were equivalent to two U.S. dollars. I was working for thirty rands a month so I was earning sixty dollars a month working for somebody. Compared with whites it wasn’t much money but compared to blacks it was a lot of money. You can rent a house for thirty rands. No one would rent a big house for himself.
I worked long days and saved as much as possible. I sent it home so my brother and sister could afford to go to private school. They went to a Catholic-run private school where they studied with whites. Chinese could go as long as they could pay the fees. Blacks couldn’t enter the school even if they had money to pay. I couldn’t get a good education because I couldn’t go to white schools unless I paid large sums of money which my parents couldn’t afford to, and I couldn’t go to black schools because I’m a Chinese.
Because my father was earning very little money and couldn’t afford send me to private school. So I had to start working at the age fourteen for somebody outside in Eatondale, about forty-five minutes drive from Johannesburg. I ran a corner convenience store. I worked with no salary because I couldn’t speak English. But there’s only one condition they offered me is a tutor to learn English paid by the employer. But other than that I might have a few dollars pocket money to buy clothes and so on.
After that I start learning English and learning Afrikaans which is official language and some of the native language. Mostly the customers are the Bantus. I’m able to speak Zulu, Sesotho, three or four types of languages. After a year or so when I know how to speak, how to serve the customers, they started paying me a little money but not too much still.
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| The Year We Left Home |
| 05.09.04 (12:21 pm) [edit] |
My father is a good man, his son writes, who was born on Valentine's Day, 1938, in the province of Canton. Times were poor then and he played with a tin can that rattled. His father was a baker who made too little to send his children to school.
My father went to school until something like grade seven, his son writes, before dropping out of school to make enough to send his brother and sister to private school in Johannesburg.
His son writes in a language that he now speaks. His son had little say in the matter, except when choosing "English" as the way he would begin a new stage of life, at college, away from home.
During this time of growing up away from home, his son writes about coming home to visit for Christmas. "Home is strange," his son writes.
The language his son writes in is one of the many languages he speaks from travelling. Canada, and before that, South Africa, and before that, China.
While writing, his son knows that this is only one of the languages my father speaks. But will he understand these stories? Will he understand the fruits of his labors?
He wrote a story all about his family. He left a copy of it at home. More than likely, his family never read the story. He thought he could pay them back for their sacrifices with the writing that their hard work enabled, but as he found out, writing was precisely what they would never understand.
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| Birds |
| 05.08.04 (3:29 pm) [edit] |
I heard about a boy who had a dish-shaped ear. After school, he would sit in a field out behind his house. Whichever direction he would listen in, he could hear everything that happened for miles just by listening in a certain direction.
(Later on, with a bit of practice, he figured out how to hear so far that it would go all the way around and he'd hear himself again).
Once, after he'd get tired of hearing what a particular family was eating in one time zone versus another, he heard someone say something about everyone having an ear. At first, this struck him as a kind of joke, but he listened further. It seemed to have something to do with someone who was waiting for something in the mail, but it was the time of the year when a tremendous number of birds were resting up along the Texas Gulf coast for their big trip south, so he couldn't make out what it was that she was waiting for or even whether it had arrived.
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| Timely Manner |
| 05.08.04 (11:13 am) [edit] |
Having finished his third cup of coffee, the boy figured it was as good a time as any to go to the counter.
The barista was pouring out espresso remains into the industrial sink. He picked up one of the leaflets on the counter, read it carefully, then put it back.
"I've been meaning to ask you," he said.
Her hands arranged the flavor shots into a combination that would be pleasing to the eye.
"Yes," she said.
She had just begun her shift, so she couldn't have known how long he had been sitting in the café. She wiped her hands behind the counter on a rag he couldn't see.
"I've been meaning to ask you."
He thought about the books he had on the table beside his empty coffee, which had left an incomplete circle on his lecture notes.
"Yes?"
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| Your war work |
| 05.03.04 (6:17 pm) [edit] |
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You apologize, in passing, for not writing about the war. We will be sending you a copy of our most recent issue, with a relevant editorial. As you will see, we do not believe that artists have an obligation to strike up attitudes to the war. Indeed, they are wise and right to ignore it and devote themselves to other subjects. Since artists are politically impotent, they must use this time to develop at deeper emotional levels. Your work, your war work, is to cultivate your talent, and go in the direction it demands. Warfare, as we remarked, is the enemy of creative activity. (Atonement 297)
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| The Girl & Her Ear |
| 05.02.04 (9:00 pm) [edit] |
Waiting by the mailbox for her shiny new ear was difficult to do. It should arrive any day now, or should have. Never a patient girl, she was less than ever under such trying circumstances.
This was, she claimed, the last appendage she would ever need, this tiny organ that would allow her to do so much. She could hide it in her pocket or she could hold it against the side of her head.
(She imagined shaking it like this slightly, brows furrowed, and it making no noise whatsoever; it had no moving parts, after all.)
She could discreetly leave it on the table between himself and whomever she was having coffee with. Under no circumstances would she leave it at home; it would be with her always, in her jacket, in her purse.
Her boyfriend scoffed. "Everyone has at least one these days. Imagine what you could do with an eye." But her fancy would not be deterred: she woke every morning this week dreaming of opening the catalog and choosing her favorite color.
Before long, she had already sent in her order form along with a money order. The difficult part, as I have already mentioned, was the waiting by the post. For now, she could only imagine the myriad uses, the fantastic new world it promised to bring.
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| Human (and not so human) resources |
| 05.01.04 (1:35 pm) [edit] |
On Tuesday and Wednesdays the Teaching Assistants were on strike to keep our healthcare. Spending two days solid on picket lines sapped my body and destroyed my voice. I'm still hoarse from chanting around the English building.
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/" title="http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/" target="_blank"http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~kewalsh/walkout/walk-Pag es/Image28.html
(Note that, in the image above, I am wearing my tan Sauconys, with excellent arch-support and suede/nylon uppers, only $49.95 USD. Active wear for your activist lifestyle.)
Performing "spoken word" (whatever that is) at the rally made me realize how much more affective the performance would be if I had memorized my piece rather than reading it off a piece of paper as I had. An emcee friend tends to give kick-ass performances memorized.
With that in mind, my next big project (besides writing my final papers and grading those of my students) is to memorize my poems. According to a book on poetry slam strategy, recording devices can help you memorize in the same way that listening to music--even bad music--will hardwire it into your brain if you listen to it often enough.
And now we've hit a new level in recording devices: a few of the newest mp3 players can voice record directly to mp3. You could then easily transfer them to computer, burn them to CD, and any number of other diabolical things.
Any number of diabolical things: http://reviews.cnet.com/iRive...
[LINE]
In ways that he would never know, the shoes he had come to understand as his own had a life preceding that late summer garage sale during which he had first laid eyes upon them. During this incarnation, the shoes had trampled the final life out of what was no longer a priceless vase, the last recognizable from the half-destroyed museum. After their tour of duty ended and in the final days of that war, they found their way back to Saskatchewan, to live out their battered days in the care of their owner's parents, in the basement attached to the garage. Without his knowing, the owner's parents aired them out one late summer evening and set them out the next morning on a table near the sidewalk, and unbeknownst to him, the shoes found their way to downtown Manitoba, where neighbours of the upscale sort found their battered tan uppers "cute," or "vintage," as the more upscale amongst them put it.
[LINE]
From Ian McEwan's Atonement:
It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. (38)
Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go? (72)
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