Onsen please!

Kamikochi with Asuka and Tomomi in July 2005

burlesque in the old capital

On Saturday I went to a burlesque show in New Westminster. The show was a tribute to B-movies. It was well done. I laughed so hard that I cried. Jen enjoyed herself so much that she suggested to host a burlesque party at our place. She even got her character sketched up already, "biciclette mama." Ariel suggested that I should be the "the dictator." Funny though she didn't volunteer her stage name...hmm, that Ariel is a trickster, I tell ya. Good times!

30 blocks of thoughts

Hate it when I’m lucid on a Friday evening and have nothing to do but sit 15 inches from the computer screen, typing words and erasing them again. I’m actually missing my sleep deprived body and the fuzziness in which I interact with things. I shouldn’t have walked home from Broadway. The 30 blocks and fresh air in my lungs cleared the cirrus clouds in my brain. I really didn’t want them cleared. I wanted them to become higher level clouds; perhaps altocumulus would have been nice, not dark, but buoyant, unlike my current state. Mostly, I wanted to return to the last time I walked home from Broadway. It wasn’t very long ago. It was New Year’s Eve and I was on another planet. That night my mind raised so fast and I was experiencing a new sensation induced from the event that I stormed out of. But I couldn’t really recapture it. My memory had betrayed me once again. All I could concentrate on were people carrying plastic bags, fake flowers and Venetian curtains, the silver van that drove by again and again, the two Asian guys in their yellow Mazda on the corner of Victoria and Kingsway, lovers waiting for the bus and his shiny gold chain resting on his soccer jersey, homeless people curled in their sleeping bags with only two foot eaves and hard sidewalk for shelter, prepaid phone sign, fluorescent glow of a late night Chinese diner sign telling me I’m near home, gorgeous pictures of South Asian women with bindi on their foreheads and mehndi hands, the taste of his lips, mayflower restaurant and expecting pilgrims and members of Wampanaog tribe to walk out its door, more Vietnamese Pho restaurants, sky train and the wonders of engineering, and awesome nights in the land of the rising sun and the infrequency of that sensation.

Sunday and I'm in love

Wind. It caresses me in my sleep, graces my jaw line with its fingertips, whisper names that aren’t on the map. I feel its breath on my neck. It calls me.

Today I’m in love with my red goose down comforter, steam rising from my tea cup, the sound of rain hitting my bedroom windows, the simplistic beat of Meg White’s drums, with images on my memory cards that I thought I’ve lost forever, the eyes that look at me in the mirror, most of all with Salman Rushdie’s words.

"In the old stories, love made possible a kind of spiritual contact between lovers long separated by necessity or chance. In the days before telecomunications, true love itself was enough. A woman left at home would close her eyes and the power of her need would enable her to see her man on his ocean ship battling pirates with cutlass and pistol, her man in the battle's fray with his sword and shield, standing victorious among the corpses on some foreign field, her man crossing a distant desert whose sands were on fire, her man amid mountain peaks, drinking the driven snow. So long as he lived she would follow his journey, she would know the day-by-day of it, the hour-by-hour, would feel his elation and his grief, would fight temptation with him and with him rejoice in the beauty of the world; and if he died a spear of love would fly back across the world to pierce her waiting, omniscient heart. It would be the same for him. In the midst of the desert's fire he would feel her cool hand on his cheek and in the heat of battle she would murmur words of love into his ear: live, live. And more: he would know her dailiness too, her moods, her illnesses, her labors, her loneliness, her thoughts. The bond of their communion would never break. That was what the stories said about love. That was what human beings knew love to be. "

Aahhh! Rainy Sunday spent in my house coat curled in my bed beside a well written book. Afternoon tea with unexpected guests. Life is good. And the wind of change smells pretty.

my death in rhetoric's hands

My Rhetoric class pushed me over the edge today. The in-class assignment was easy. The prof asked us to provide a summary of Janet Giltrow’s Vagrant Voices first paragraph. She defined that a summary was hierarchy of terms; language functions from the specific to the abstract. This was how I interpreted her lecture anyway. I didn’t find her exercise terribly difficult as I thought I understood what she demanded of me. After 5 minutes we had to present our summary. And typical of this class, half of the people didn’t understand what she wanted. When it was time to present, it became obvious that some of the students couldn’t provide a summary for they didn’t understand how to conduct the specific summary she asked for, or were questioning the purpose of the exercise. In case, you wonder I belonged in the latter half. Students’ stabbed in the dark in hopes of giving her part of carcass she wanted. Of course, the meat they presented to the lioness where not up to snuff. I really think that all students could have provided her the goods if the instructor provided a clear explanation. Somehow, throwing names such as Derrida, Bakhtin, James Coe was supposed to orient the students to the relationship of language and the students’ role in the discourse. Ha!

I’ve sat in this class since September. I’ve listened to people worried about their GPA, about dropping the course; not being able to drop the course for it’s a requirement for their future academic pursuit. I’ve listened to the two pretentious women who believe they’ve something to say because they love the sound of their voice.

Since September I sat patiently. When she used big words I went home and looked it up. I read the articles she instructed. In my papers I used linguistic jargons even though I’m not convinced of their signified meanings, consulted my peers and appeared at her office door for clarification. I did this all for a mark. But somehow, today I couldn’t roll with the punch. I questioned her. I asked her what the point of the exercise was. She said it was to show that you understand the rhetoric of the literary criticism by using synonyms.

It must have been the cleanse Jen and I did but my head became light. All of a sudden I was arguing with her. I told her that there was no need to use a different word if the word provided by the author defined the article better than any other words. That authors do not have ownership of language, because by asking a summary from students that she was asking us to explain our relationship, our linguistic position; that the author should be taken out of this summary, that a summary was reiteration, by reading a text I am making sense of it within my experience; that a summary was a repetition, a medium that reveals my being and my relation’s to this world.

I think in my rant I bit someone’s head off, maybe two, not really sure. I just hate this pretentious bullshit that I must follow the Academia’s discourse because otherwise I am disrespecting the value of English academia. I don’t really care. I don’t want part of this community, nor will I regurgitate a belief system I don’t hold.

On a second thought I do want that A. Wait! Which words you want me to use again? Synonym. Paronymy. Homonymy.Whatever! Just give me my A.

Goofing around with Anya

Thanks for the pictures Al.