monoceros blogs
I decided to take a break from grading on Saturday, so my mom and I headed to Gallup Park with digital camera (mine) and digital video camera (hers). It was fun. There's a video of me on a little jetty trying to stay upright in the wind while wrestling with the articles in my huge bag to unearth my camera. My mom thought I was a little mad to be braving the wind that close to the water. There were moments when I felt the wind shoving hard, but I didn't get blown over.
I made a little speech for my brother who's a Halloween baby, but I believe he'll only be able to see my mouth moving on the video. The wind was so loud it drowned out my voice, so you can hear snippets like, "...and...tennis...BMW...I...you...great...football game...pages of...crap..."
After a while, I gave up grading papers on the bench. What would I do if one of them flew into the water? I'd never forgive myself, and neither would the poor student. My mom went for a stroll on her own and I retreated to the White Rabbit to read more pages.
Blow, wind, blow.
Last year, I put up Google's Halloween graphic because I loved it so much. Had to do it again this year, especially when they've topped themselves this time.
Emily the Strange - this is who I really wanted to be tonight.
I dressed up as an Egyptian princess one year; ah yes, the year I had my blue hair extensions, which went really well with the costume. This time, I really wanted to be Emily the Strange, but was too lazy to put a costume together. So I just wore my Punjabi suit and told people I was a Bollywood actress. I had the dripping gold earrings, dark red lipstick, shimmery eyeshadow (though you won't see these in the picture), but I stopped short of singing and dancing for people.
Plenty of cool costumes at the party. I'll put up pictures soon.
Highlights of today or yesterday (October 30th): Very warm and windy day (a record high for Ann Arbor). U of M won the game against MSU; it was a tough fight. Even my mom enjoyed watching the game with me (further discussions with LK and my bro, who still keep up with football news - Wolverines through and through). Daylight savings ends, so I'm now 13 hours behind folks in Singapore.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
Tuesday: I managed to squeeze some time between teaching and musicology to meet up with Chris and Amy who drove down from Clarkston, Michigan. My mom and I took them to Lotus Thai, a nice restaurant along Saline. We talked movies, the latest games they had the children at church indulge in, LK and work and tennis, Chris's new hobby, astronomy (he's got two huge telescopes; one has a lens eight inches wide - he saw Saturn with that one) and the possibility of my spending Christmas with them.
Wednesday: The program scheduled a few of us to meet with Elwood Reid (ex-MFA student and former Big 10 football player) to discuss manuscripts, but the conference got cancelled unfortunately. Today, I found out we'll be meeting with Ha Jin instead! Ha Jin, wow. Maybe I could speak to him in Mandarin...or not.
A L always finds fun quizzes and I couldn't resist trying out the latest one. Not sure if I really am Progressive Girl, but I suppose some of it is accurate.
I am Progressive Girl
Click on the picture below to read more:
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Instead of taking a break after the reading, my mom and I cooked dinner for my friends on Saturday. My mom got the menu together, did most of the work, and I played assistant chef. Someday, I'm going to have to do this on my own. I hope my mom will at least let me call her for emergencies - "How much of this goes in that?" "How long should I bake the what's-that-thing-called?"
At dinner, I got to meet a friend of Noella's, who's visiting from Singapore. A nice girl who was in the Navy, the Central Narcotics Bureau, and is now a P.I. She was very generous and said I could write her if I needed to do research for a new story, or even an essay on the life of a private investigator. I love meeting people with unusual jobs. One of my friends in the MFA program aspires to be a postal worker. The simple happiness of having a route, getting to knowing folks and their pets, being done with work by late afternoon, going home to write. Imagine the wealth of material you could generate from daily interactions with the community. For now, he's slaving away at teaching writing. And once upon a time he was once in the Peace Corps, based in Russia.
More female fun - I finally colored my hair on Sunday night. My mom's turn to help me. I was rather impatient to see the results; I even skipped the allergy test. Well, there's no point showing pictures because my hair hasn't changed much. It's shinier, and blacker, but not much blue. The box says blue-black, but I suppose it's hard to really get that blue-black color onto my own hair since it was already very dark to begin with. It's pitch black now. I'm enjoying it, though I wish I could have a little more blue. I miss those hair extensions from 1998.
The Mark Webster reading on Friday went reasonably well. I'd been up till two on Friday morning trying to work on revisions for the story. Then I woke at eight to do more revisions. I didn't complete the final draft till a little after lunch time, so I spent most of the afternoon reading the 23 pages out loud, and rewriting my thank-you speech. The speech I had to memorize since I didn't want to be referring to notes while saying thank-you to a bunch of people - it seems a little insincere. Then again, the folks at the Oscars always go up with bits of paper to remind themselves who to thank. But I'm no movie star and am just an earnest young writer.
I mis-pronounced several things in the essay. But I got more confident as the reading went on. Thanks to Boon for helping my mom video the whole thing. Thanks to my friends who showed up. It's really nice to be loved.
Next time I'm up there, I'll be introducing my friend, Michelle. That will be fun.
Fun also comes in the form of post-reading parties, and Joel, who introduced me at my reading, threw a one. Mexican food, witty conversation (a few jibes about my height), good times. It's hard to talk to my friends sometimes because they're so tall and I have to shout up to them. A friend noted that at the reading, when I said, "Can everyone hear me back there?", he thought it might have been more appropriate if I'd said, "Can everyone see me back there?" Honestly, the mike covered about half my face. But that wasn't the reason people were there anyway.
I'm getting an audio recording soon, I think. But I don't think I'll be listening to it, or watching the video Boon helped with, for some time. Need to distance myself from the event, get over the intensity of it all.
Last year's trouble was blackouts. This year, it's the water pipes. When the water in the bathroom sink wouldn't go down fast enough, or even at all, my mother said my hair was too thick and too long. I felt guilty, since I love trimming my hair by the sink. I do use a magazine to catch the falling strands, but sometimes I get lazy when I'm doing a quick snip. So, with that weighing over me, I got some special liquid to pour into the pipes, a little sink plunger, and this nifty malleable stick with the intention to undo the result of my negligence. I was determined to fix the problem myself - if I could get things working on my own, why bother calling in the plumber?
I got the water to go down eventually, and then the toilet bowl started acting up. The water level in there didn't look right, the flushing didn't sound right, and I was getting nervous. So my hair clogged the pipes in the sink and that was somehow affecting the flushing mechanism? When my mother told me that the bath water wasn't going down either, I felt like getting a crew cut. I used a bigger plunger to work the bathtub, and got rid of the bath water eventually.
This took place for the most of Saturday and Saturday night. Sunday afternoon, after we returned from church and household-items shopping, we returned to a half-flooded bathroom. The water was seeping in from the neighbor's side. I went out of the apartment and saw that the laundry room was thorougly flooded and parts of the ground floor carpet was soaked. My neighbor's mini corridor (shared by the laundry room) was damp and pungent. Okay, I said to myself, this is certainly not my fault. It's the building's problem; I just let a few strands go into the pipes and no harm ever came of it.
So much for all my mom's and my handiwork on Saturday. We only brushed the tip of the iceberg. The office had to call in the heavy-duty guys - plumbing, sanitizing, the works. They cleaned up my bathroom and got everything working again. Thank goodness, because they had to turn off the water for some time, and my mom and I were wondering what to do about dinner, showers, face-cleansing, flossing, brushing teeth. I was prepared to pack my bag and head to NCRB (school gym) to get clean or maybe even spend the night at a cheap motel. After our bathroom got the industrial cleaning, my mom and I set to work - adding more disinfectant, scrubbing the bathtub, replacing all our toiletries and the bathroom supplies. I even shined the faucets.
All's well now. And what did I learn from this episode? That I shouldn't think every problem is my fault and try to fix it on my own. That I have to consider the larger picture. That even though it wasn't the culprit, my hair-trimming practice should always be carried out with magazine in hand to collect those nasty strands of hair that travel (or don't travel) goodness-knows-where once they disappear down the sink.
My mom is getting concerned that I talk too much to myself. She thinks it'll be better if someone else lives in the apartment so that I won't seem so looney when I mutter incoherently to nobody in particular.
This is where Milou comes in. She hails from Meijer, and my mom persuaded her to come live with a neurotic, high-strung writer. Milou is named after a Belgian dog. He's better known as Snowy, trusty aside of Tintin, world-famous reporter. The name suits her since she's rather easy on the eyes and a little arrogant - she bites instead of shaking hands. But she's loosening up, willing to leave her room and hang out every once in a while. You just have to put your hand out to her gently and give her time to respond favorably.
I think we'll be friends. We're already splitting groceries - I let her have some of the honey dew I bought last week.
I turned in my paper on orientalism in the opera, Aida, twenty minutes before the deadline today. I certainly perform under pressure - I printed the paper at 4:05, washed my face, pulled some warm clothing together, hustled my mom out the door, drove like a near-maniac to Lane Hall, and dropped my paper off as if I were disposing of a bomb.
After that the relief was so immense I didn't quite know what to do. Finally I parked the car and brought my mom to Steve and Barry's where we tried to get U of M T-shirts for folks back home but could hardly find the right sizes. I fancied a couple, but only left with one that came in my size - Michigan Alumni. Next we went to the camping store, Bivouac (where I once outfitted myself for camp in New England), and got some - of all things - lip balms for my mom's friends. Dinner at Totoro, and then we headed to Target where my mom wanted to pick up a few things. I made a few impulse buys too which I won't name here because they're too frivolous.
We rushed out of Target at 8:00 and headed to Showcase Cinemas where we had tickets to the 7:55 showing of Wimbledon. It was a fun, feel-good show. Paul Bettany was hitting some good shots and Kirsten Dunst was even tolerable. London and Brighton look fabulous. Some really nice direction during the tennis matches. I miss playing. It's a movie for tennis afiocionados or Bettany fans. Oh, and if you like King Theoden from LOTR, you can catch him here unshaven, long-sighted, and dwelling in a treehouse.
At workshop yesterday night, our instructor told us how we really should write a little every day. You can hold a job, bring in the money, satisfy yourself and other people who expect you to earn some kind of living. But in the end, you'll never get out of the abyss if you don't write. It's the writing that will get you out, and if you don't do it, if you let the work take over, you're going to be there for a while. It's okay if you enjoy the work, but if what you really want to do is write, you have to keep at it and send out the stories or poems. Once (and it will take a while) they get picked up by a literary journal, agents will notice, and you might get somwhere after that. Then maybe you won't need that job. But until then, you'll have to balance both work and writing. And writing will have to come first. You'll probably have to wake up a couple of hours earlier, write, then go to work. Because it'll be a lot harder to get back from a day's work and think you'll have enough energy to do something creative. I once spoke to a teacher in Singapore and he said that never happens. So that's how you avoid winding up a teacher who once wanted to write, and be a writer who teaches. You keep writing no matter how crazy life gets.
I'm already letting teaching overwhelm my semester (three-hours-of-sleep nights anyone?) and it's looking bad. What will life be once I'm done with the program? I'll get a job for sure (how else do I keep up with my other interests? How will I keep reviewing fun movies and terrific music? And the occasional action figure?), either in the US or back in Singapore. Teaching, I hope. As long as the job has something to do with sewing wonderful and surprising words together. I think I'll really like teaching writing classes. I've just completed my course description for next year's creative writing course and I'm already excited.
I want to keep writing, even if it's just in a weblog and a worn-out notebook. And reading, always reading. Few things are more beautiful than a poem gifted from someone who knows how much you love words and loves words as much as you do (yeah, Tiggie, I'm thinking about that poem you sent me last month with the Moleskine).
Lin Kiat once told his best friend, "I want her to write." You just don't get more loved than that. Having someone who wants you to do what you want to do is something I forget some days. My being here in MI is proof of that promise. I'll need to remind myself more often and do what I'm supposed to do.
My course description -
I just realize that we start out in these very awkward ways, and we do look a little stupid as we draft, and that?s all right . . . You have to be willing to go into the chaos and bring back the beauties. ~ Tess Gallagher
This section of English 223 will regard every student as a writer; and as writers, students should aim to produce stories and poems to the best of their abilities. With the study of published works, the practice of writing through in-class and take-home exercises, and constructive critiques from peer workshops, students will flex their writing muscles to experiment, to take risks, and to ultimately create stories that reveal startling worlds, desires, and truths. We will struggle at first to master technique and find meaning in our writing, but it is my hope that by the end of the course, students will have completed a portfolio of revised writing that represents their best efforts, their interests, and the stories they need to tell. These early stories and poems will mark the beginning of the unpredictable but always interesting path of creative composition.
The evening started out with a nice gathering at Kay's place. Great food and company. As I was talking to Lim Jia and Sophie, the two mentioned they had to leave for a concert. When I heard it was Dave Brubeck's concert, I near jumped out of my seat. I knew about his visit, but I didn't think I'd go since I hadn't bothered to ask around if anyone else was keen to go. I was reluctant to tag along since I might not get a last-minute ticket, but Lim Jia assured me that I'd have no trouble. Plus she had an extra ticket which might not be used at all. I felt bad for jumping ship but I couldn't give Dave Brubeck a miss now.
The three of us left at five minutes to eight, with me holding a plate of my half-finished food. We got to Hill Auditorium as the first song was starting up. Lim Jia and I dashed in (after I'd finished and disposed of my plate of food), and from the first notes that reached my ear, I knew I'd made the right decision. You just don't get live jazz like this very often, if at all.
Four white-haired men playing like they were in their twenties. When Dave Brubeck began speaking, the age showed in his voice. But it didn't matter, his hands moved incredibly on the keyboard. His drummer, Randy Jones, probably has arms stronger than men far younger than himself. His percussions displays went on and on; just when you think he was done, he'd start another round of whipping those sticks like weapons. Bassist Michael Moore was stylish as he plucked and bowed his instrument. Bobby Militello played both saxaphone and flute, and did really amazing things with the flute. For a Japanese-inspired Bebop piece, he created a sound very similar to one made by a Japanese kind of flute (the name eludes me). Eventually he got to humming while he played the flute. He was singing into the instrument, and the force of his singing kept the flute going, so he was actually harmonizing with the notes he played on the flute. I'm not sure if I'm explaining it clearly enough. His fingers would be creating one tune and his voice another.
One piece titled, Elegy, was dedicated to a friend of Dave's who was in the audience that night. An army buddy whose picture is in the album notes (or maybe the cover itself?). Caught behind German lines in World War 2, they contemplated their fates. His friend, John, told him all the awful things that would happen if Dave didn't remember the password. Well, they're both still here today. I'm not sure how many people in the audience wondered at the miracle that Dave never got the shakes from the horror of war; that his ability to play the piano was never taken from him.
Another piece that I remember rather well - London Flat, London Sharp. Recently the band had to play in the UK for some time, and when they finally thought the tour would end, Dave was told that he'd have 15 more one-nighters. The first involved a 7 and 1/2 hour bus ride. After that he was put in a flat and driven two hours to the venue each night where he'd play for two hours and then be driven back to the flat. He was better off on the bus. So in the piece, his left hand goes down chromatically, and the right hand goes up in sharps. Pretty cool stuff.
Blue Rondo A La Turk was the last piece. The crowd favorite, of course. They must be awfully tired of playing it so many times in so many years. But nice improvisations certainly spice things up each time.
Dave Brubeck first played at the "Hill" 50 years ago. Looking around him, he commented how wonderful it now looks, and added that he hopes he'll make it back again. There was something really poignant about that statment. This guy has seen a lot in life. (He's 84.) And he spoke so slowly and looked so fragile as he walked that I wanted to say, you need to retire and enjoy some time off, Dave. But then, it occured to me that he's already enjoying himself, performing exuberantly for an enthusiastic audience and re-visiting old haunts. He really meant it when he said he wanted to return, and everyone in the audience wanted him to.
The night ended with two encores. One was a tune recorded here 50 years ago. The second was a lullaby - the popular traditional "Go to sleep..." - and the drummer was beginning to nod off. He didn't even finish the last beat. They all shrugged off the music towards the end, stood up, grinned, and left the stage. It was bedtime for everyone. What a way to go.
Amazon.com has it ready for pre-ordering. It's the cheapest price online...so far. I've already got a giftset on hold and the DVD (on its own) for my parents and brother who aren't as LOTR-mad as I am. That Minas Tirith keepsake is going to look fine in LK's and my living room one day. Okay, maybe not in the living room. That could be a bit much.
Tonight was the first reading of this year's Webster series, the series that features all the second-year MFA students, a coming-out party, if you will. Mark Webster was an MFA student here in 1989, a poet. He died at age 29 in the middle of the program, leaving behind a wife who was five months pregnant with their daughter. It was something to do with his heart. The series lives on in his name.
My friend Joel was reading tonight. Everyone admired him for being noble enough to go first. He'll be introducing me when I read in three weeks' time. When I asked him how he felt, he said it was fun to read. Now he's done and can enjoy the party. The party that's after tonight's reading, but I didn't feel like doing any partying. I'd rather come to the Media Union, mess around with the Ipod, complete my lesson plan for next week, brood about my reading, and maybe try and work on some critiques.
I have a life, but it just doesn't get very interesting past ten o'clock on a Friday night. And it's because of my own doing. Well, that's okay. I just learned that Pink Martini is finally releasing their sophomore album which is called Hang On Little Tomato.
In the fall of 2000, I was in Paris roaming the aisles of Virgin Records. I came across Pink Martini and thought they were a French jazz band. They're actually based in the Oregon, though the members come from all parts of the world. I thought purchasing Sympathique would be a nice souvenir of Paris, only to learn that they actually have the cd in Singapore, and the Singapore version even has an extra track, as my father pointed out to me. Still, the cover has the Eiffel Tower, and I thought it was pretty cool to be buying the cd within so many kilometers of the structure. Even though most of the songs are in languages other than French, I'll never hear Amando Mio, for example, without remembering how I was lying on my creaky bed in the hostel and watching the wind blow the cheap, white curtains while I dreamed up my next walk on another bridge on the Seine (I also imagined all the Tintin figures I would find in the quirky comic stores near the hostel; I actually left Paris with Asterix figures).
Their first cd is fun, bright, and boasts tunes so catchy I always feel like getting up to dance. And this is coming from someone who's become more of the wallflower type in recent years. I certainly hope their second album tops the first; it has, after all, taken four years reach the market. Most of the members from the first Pink Martini have left, but China Forbes, the female vocalist, is still around. October 19th is the release date. And three days after that, I take the stand and read before an audience, who I hope, won't fall asleep in front of me.
So I picked up my very first audio book today. I used a 20% Borders coupon and purchased David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day (only to find out that educators get a 25% discount next week). I've already got the book, of course, but I've heard so many good things about his readings (he contibutes to NPR and Public Radio International's "This American Life") that I wanted to own the audio book too.
Incidentally, I taught the title essay "Me Talk Pretty One Day" today and I think my class kind of liked it, though they were shy about admitting it. In any case, I plan to play the essay for them in class next week. When I heard it tonight, I began tearing. Laughing, by the way, is a really good workout for the stomach. I hope I can control myself in the classroom next week, although if the students are susceptible to laughing themselves, they won't notice me in fits so much.
My stomach's still hurting.
My friend, Elizabeth, often plays audio books for her children, particularly on road trips. Listening to audio books on road trips is actually a clever way to stay awake - you pay attention to the story and never feel bored, unless you're the type who plays heavy metal that's guaranteed to stay the hand of sleep. The Borders store in town has a decent collection, but I don't believe I'll start collecting audio books just right now. However, I think about how we loved to be read to when we were children, and realize that listening for a change is pretty special, especially if the writer is a good reader.
Sedaris is really priceless on this recording. If you ask nicely, I'll play some tracks for you. Nah, you don't even have to ask; I'll grab you by the arm and make you listen.
