it's been a couple of days since i last wrote. i don't know where the time goes. i guess i got really busy with prepping a final and doing my student conferences and attending meetings. as far as my routines went, i've been trying to keep up, but i guess yesterday i was feeling somewhat tired. today, i did manage to plant some of the little vegetables that i got at walmart the other day. they are now taking up the front right section of the planter box. for the longest time, i didn't have anything there (except the weeds, of course). now, hopefully, we will have more crops that we can eat: two kinds of eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, lima beans, isla vine tomatoes, and peas (i think). in total, it's supposed to be nine things, so i'm missing a couple of things. oh yeah, there were green onions or some kind of scallion. i'm hoping that they grow well, because that's pretty much the sunniest part of the yard. i hope to fertilize them regularly, so that they grow up big and healthy. i also hope those stupid cats don't do their regular defecation on that portion of the yard.
i also have other ideas for the sections of the planter box that don't get very much sunlight. i plan on planting recumbent junipers to go along with the overall theme of the oriental walking path. i wish that i could get access to my grandparents' yard, so i could take another legacy plant and give it a home in the soil of my yard. but alas, i can never get a hold of my uncle, who is the current caretaker of the place...
eventually, i want to try the hydroponics thing, but with the covid-19 thing going on, i'm reluctant to shop around for hydroponics fluid (liquid nutrients). the whole monitoring thing seems a bit complicated to me. in addition to monitoring pH, they also monitor nutrient concentration. the part that seems like such a waste to me is how in hydroponics, you dump the nutrient solution after a certain point. that's where aquaponics has an edge over hydroponics, because ideally in aquaponics everything is recycled. (of course, you have to keep a watch on it, because the plants do lose water through evapo-transpiration, especially on hot days).
but enough of that.
i think i've been kind of stalling out on writing my kappa noodle story. i mean, at times, it seems like i have a point, and then at other times it just seems stupid. not sure if it really is about me, or my brother, or what. not sure if it really reflects my true feelings, or if i'm just trying to make it fit some sort of format or something. i did want to capture some kind of ambiguity in the relationship, how he basically ignored/treated me like shit (which i must admit is kind of an exaggeration- or at least, it tends to involve more the former than anything else)- but at the same time, i, like pretty much everyone else, admired him. i am still trying to play a piano song that i recall he used to play in the early mornings- a song that haunts me to this day. little things like that. and i used to steal his drawings to show off at school, because i thought they were so cool... until people actually started to think that i drew them. it's actually a simple thing to write about that, but for some reason, i am trying to frame it in some larger story. i don't know why i really have to do that, but it's been kind of the form i've been aiming at for so long that i don't know if i can write it any other way...
...well, i don't have much else to say tonight.
komaru means to have a problem. the character for it, in both japanese and chinese, basically has a picture of a tree in a box. this is in essence what it means to have a problem. a tree, by its very nature, wants to be free. a box, by its very nature, seeks to contain. so you have two irreconcilable forces.
i think of myself as a dichotomy. sometimes i am more of a motive force, just this restlessness that keeps wanting to move. no sense of real direction or perfection, just the appreciation of feeling a kind of surge or flow through me. but then there comes a point where you lose that force, you feel listless and empty, and you feel guilty about it all. kind of like if you lost pressure on a firehose. and then in the emptiness, you start to seek something else, a kind of precision, and perfection. you seek meaning in the crystalline. and then that order seems to take on pre-eminence, and you become anal about maintaining it. until, again, you seem to lose motive force for doing it, and then that too becomes empty...
komarimasu yo ne!
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