i am here at work this chilly morning (chilly for hawaii, that is). my morning session student hasn't shown up for about a week now. i don't really blame the student at all. he was in quarantine at a hotel for a couple of weeks, and after moving home, discovered that he doesn't have any internet. so until that is taken care of, we can't meet. what that means for me is that i can come in and sort of relax. i mean, there are a lot of other things to do to prep for the face to face students that will be coming in (soon), but i've kind of taken care of a lot of that, so...
my feelings regarding politics oscillates. i was elated and relieved that biden won, but i feel a sense of dread when it comes to the way that trump and his gop sycophants are refusing to accept the results of the election. what will it take to make them leave? and what will it take to make them feel remorse or shame? i feel that they need to feel that. the hatred... it's a non-negotiable. they have to realize the mistake they made. or, as i've mentioned, generations later, when grandchildren look over the facebook records, they will see this black spot on their family tree, this instance of true shame. i mean, it is literally like germany; we should shun those who supported the nazis, because it was a shameful thing. the only difference here is that, at the moment, at least, we turned trump into a loser, before he took us into a world-wide war...
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i need to write a 4 page assignment for my writing workshop. i'm kind of excited, but kind of anxious about it. i have a lot of fun in the workshop. it encourages a lot of spontaneity in writing, which i tend to lack. i mean, i've been trying to encourage that free-floating spontaneous voice inside me by doing a lot of little exercises... now, after i do my blog, i have a 10 minute "true" free write, which becomes a kind of dump for my thoughts (often lascivious and unspeakable), and then i spend 10 minute sessions writing based on alternating visual and word prompts (i use these sites called random picture generator and random word generator). and finally, i try to write for 30 minutes on a more prolonged project... it's been fun, i suppose. i still struggle with turning these efforts into more "purposive" writing, that is, writing that leads to a completed project... but i don't know, maybe if i get more confidence in my "voice," it will be easy to do that...
anyway, for this 4 page project... i was thinking of associating a few things. my mom, when i was young, used to force us to get our ears cleaned by her. she used this thing called a mimikuri (it's funny, when i google it now, there is no reference to the cleaning instrument that i was used to... instead, it's turned into a loan word for "mimicry"). the mimikuri is this thin wooden instrument, with a tapered shaft that ends in a little hook or scoop. you're supposed to stick it in your ear to dig out all of the accumulated ear wax and crap inside of your ear. i know, definitely not medically approved. but it was something my mom would force us to do. we would have to lie down with our heads in her lap, and then she would gradually dig out whatever was in our ears, and put the leavings on her knee right in front of our faces. so we could see what came out. usually, it was just some powdery stuff. but sometimes we would see monstrous strings of skin, like shavings off of a pvc pipe. or there would be hard chunks of dark, transclucent material, like a carbuncle... a mixture of blood and pus and ear wax.
i was thinking of associating this with an image i've been struggling with... this notion of the deep sea. and the image of the five chinese brothers, and how one brother (the first) could swallow the sea... and how there was a beggar boy who drowned when the first chinese brother let loose the sea upon him. i have been struggling with that as an image to capture my relationship with my brother... and there was this idea of the treasures on the sea floor being laid open and bare for the world to see, and how it was similar to what my mother did to my ears... but i could go a lot of ways with the whole mimikuri thing. for one thing, i could talk about how my brother punctured my ear drum once. i had been digging my ear with the mimikuri (when we got to be a certain age, we would do it ourselves... by then, we were addicted...). my brother was doing some sort of martial arts pretend shit, and he knocked the hand holding the mimikuri so that it went straight into my head... there was the sudden loss of sound. i'd thought that the mimikuri had penetrated into my brain, and ran halfway up the stairs in utter terror... yes, i could tell that story, and its aftereffects, like how i started to believe in the chinese meridian system, because simultaneous with my subsequent ear infection and the gradual reconstruction and healing of my ear drum, there was a rotting of the nail of my 4th finger...
i could go that way. or i could talk about how my father unearthed my tongue...
anyway, i will see what i can do for that assignment...
oh well, time's running short. it's about 7:30, and some of my earliest students come in about this time.
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