Asakiyume mita

Well the reading yesterday was tremendous fun for me, the reader--I think in very large part because I was reading with Claire, who can come to a thing so alight with joy and energy it's impossible not to respond. I fall in love every time I'm around her.

The other very large part of the joy was all the friends I got to see, and who I got to introduce--sort of, as best you can with Zoom--to one another. I got to hear the voices of people I've only ever known through text before! And I got to see people I haven't seen for years. And people whom I became friends with in the most crazy ways! The spider that weaves the web of my friendships does so in a wonderful, unexpected way--it's a true blessing.

Claire's husband Carlos made a recording, which I'm now in possession of, so when I get a chance, I will see about uploading it to Youtube. Once it's up, I'll share the link.

Meanwhile I did promise people who attended that information that was shared in the chat I'd also share here, so I shall put it under the cut. Folks who are just dropping by, click on the "Info Under Here" link below!

( Info Under Here )

So I think... now I can return you to your regularly scheduled (which is to say, irregularly updating) Asakiyume Mita blogging!

Some days ago, rachelmanija posted about supporting small, family-owned businesses in the LA area. One was a Filipino café, and the description Rachel gave of the yummy ube coffee cake.... mmmm.

So I ordered some, and my box came today!



Look at all the coffee cakes!!



Such a beautiful color! And the flavor is **delicious**. Wakanomori had made fresh coffee, so we actually ate our slices of coffee cake with coffee--as Stipulated By Law!



All that would have been a wonderful, satisfying experience. But then there was this note, and I just fell apart.



I want to save everybody, everything. Here is a link to Ninong's online shop.

(I'm aware that it's ironic that I'm supporting a café in LA when I'm on the other side of the country. But I'm supporting local businesses too, and the proceeds from The Gown of Harmonies is going to a local food bank. We're all one nation, all in this together, so I think it's all good.)

Thank you, everyone, for your good wishes last entry. The healing angel is recovering quite nicely, though still with lingering joint pain. Hope that goes away for him. This week is winter vacation, so that gives him more time to recuperate without missing more school (he's already missed two weeks).

In English he's supposed to be reading The Kite Runner. Although I was pleasantly surprised by his last book, Angela's Ashes, this one is every bit as awesomely depressing as Good-for-You English-class books come. We've been reading it out loud, and to get us through the current chapter (we're still in the very early part of the book), we together created a drinking game--but with the drink being ginger ale.

Behold:



The check marks represent how many times the thing in question came up (and consequently how many times we took a drink). Hassan is the narrator's childhood playmate and servant, whom the narrator treats rottenly. The narrator's got Big Regret about this as the adult telling the story, but right now we've been working up to whatever Really Terrible thing he's going to do to Hassan. Hence drinking game prompt no. 1: take a drink every time the narrator makes a dark allusion to the thing that made him what he is today.

Drinking game prompt no. 2 and no. 4 are self-explanatory. No. 3 is my shorthand for "disappointment in failing to receive his father's love"--the narrator's father is emotionally distant and not very interested in his son. Drinking game prompt no. 5, Hazaras, means take a drink every time Hazaras, the despised ethnic group that Hassan belongs to, are mentioned.

(In writing this entry I went and looked at a plot summary to see just how bad a thing we're in for. Oh. My. God.)

Let's change the subject. Here is a photo of a fire hydrant with a metal marker on it. It looks sort of like the hydrant is a child holding a balloon. If the snow gets high, the idea is that the metal marker is still visible, so (a) snowplows will be careful and (b) people will dig it out. As you can see, one of the neighbors did indeed dig it out. Thank you, civic-minded neighbor!



For a couple of years, someone or ones went around bending and twisting the markers . . . but that person (or those people) must have lost interest in that very mild form of troublemaking, because there's the marker, tall and straight.

Sometimes I drift to sleep, or drift toward waking, with the news on in the background, and the results are always strange.

The BBC was talking about the cold, and about the sea freezing from the top down (unusual, bad), and in my dream, Tokyo Bay was freezing--

--but this was manifested by men marching to shore, two by two, brandishing machetes of ice, which they banged against the ground, loud, ringing strikes, as they came.

Athena Andreadis very generously let me speak about Pen Pal on her blog; she asked about cultures and why I wrote the story (link here). Very grateful for that opportunity--thank you, Athena!

I'm a bit under the weather right now and not keeping up with things, or feeling very much myself, so please forgive slowness to respond, both to posts and to comments. I will pick up soon, no doubt.