Tidbits

Adding some minced fresh ginger to my usual vegetable-egg-noodle stir-fry does wonderful things.

I’m proofreading Al’s essay on The Call of the Wild for her core class and I am amazed at how well she writes. I would post the whole essay, but I don’t have her permission and I don’t think she’d give it. Instead, here’s a sample. I hope she won’t mind. Remember this is a draft.

During the time period when this book was written, there was an obvious lust for gold. Many men were trying their luck to find that gold metal in the freezing Yukon Territory. Dogs were in high demand since they were needed to pull the sleds over the snow. Even the most content of men were subjected to this greed, this hunger for gold that would make them rich. Unfortunately, [those] looking for gold would also have a price to pay. Many men died trying.

Was I so articulate in seventh grade? I can’t believe I might have been.

I miss Michael. (Nylan. Orland, too, but he’s here, and Michael’s in Princeton.)

I had a dream last night that was actually analyzeable. I went to a yoga class in San Jose, feeling fit and knowledgeable and happy about being there, but the instructor was completely incompetent. Some of the other students (there was an entire gymful of them) were also disappointed, but others couldn’t care less. I approached some of the other disgruntled ones and began to teach them myself, horse stance: “Stand with your feet slightly wider than hip width apart. Turn your feet out at a forty five degree angle. Inhale, draw your arms over your head and press your palms together. Exhale, bend your knees and draw your hands down to rest over your chest.” They were impressed and grateful, and even more disgusted at the teacher’s incompetence. I wasn’t infallible, though, so this dream wasn’t completely egotistical: one of the girls I was teaching had an injury that prevented her from doing the standard pose and I didn’t know what to tell her, and the other girls in the class who didn’t care about properly doing yoga thought I was stuck-up and told each other so, loudly enough that I could hear: “What a brat!” Later, the instructor wanted us to take a group photograph in dress clothing (further evidence of her complete insanity). After we did so, I helped clean up the kitchen (what kitchen, you ask; I don’t know either) with some older African-Americans, a man and a woman, who took some of the leftover food to feed their kids. I had made cornbread that day (this reflects not the association of cornbread with Southern cooking, but that I had actually made cornbread earlier in the week and had some left over) and so I offered them the rest of the cornbread. They took it gratefully. I remember thinking in my dream, I feel entirely too much like the “sympathetic whites” who helped slaves in the antebellum South, but in the dream I decided my actions were more representative of a still-racist society than of old racial attitudes on my part. When I woke up I realized that this part of my dream was probably prompted by Erik’s and my donation yesterday to some Afro-American high school students having a bake sale in front of Safeway to raise money for a tour of East Coast colleges.

I have a new addition to my photo page. It’s the topmost link under January, or click here to go there directly. [links broken]

currently eating: gold pineapple which I bought yesterday at Andronico’s and cut up all by myself. Oddly, but perhaps not surprisingly given our record, Jackie and I both were eating pineapple tonight, just an hour or so apart. She called me and asked what I was doing, and I replied that I was eating pineapple. It turns out she was at the store tonight buying groceries and the pineapple seemed to be calling to her. That’s the same way I felt about this pineapple when I bought it–you can ask Erik. It was on sale for eighty-nine cents a pound, which turned out to be not that cheap, but I felt like I just had to have pineapple. Now I guess I know why.

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com.]