speach tree

I'm really into Lupe at the moment. So much in fact, that I even designed one of my main manga characters off of him. Avery takes a page from many of my former students (mostly black male high school students) but he is supposed to look like Lupe. OK, so given the dearth of realistic black characters in the manga of my youth, i have to disclaim the unnatural look of my black characters... Hopefully I'll be able to throw up some samples so you can judge for yourselves. But yeah, with practice, hopefully...

i was talking to DW the other night about random things, and the topic of how to reconnect with our past selves came up. i mentioned that the manga project has done a lot to reconnect me with my past in a way that soothes the pain, even as it brings back painful memories psychologically, spiritually, and somatically. what that means is that as i sat at my old desk in my grandmother's house at the end of august, i felt myself being dragged into old patterns of thinking, behavior, even sitting - in short, i felt the cells in my body as i used to feel them when i would sit at that desk as a 5th grader, hating the summer homework that i was doing at the time, feeling estranged from any community, swatting mosquitoes... it feels good to be drawing again. it's something i've done almost since i could hold a pencil, and it allows me to write and escape and even confront old mistakes and tragedies. i'm not good enough to tackle anything huge yet, but i want to get there.

i have many beautiful memories with bob marley's voice as my soundtrack: - 12 years old, sitting by a fake fireplace while my bro plays nintendo - 20 years old, singing with a truck full of american and malagasy students through the arid south to Faux-Cap - 23 years old, singing with KY in a deserted parking lot in Cleveland, OH and now, this: one night in Kochi, my dad and i went out to eat on my aunt's tab. we went to a fancy izakaya where i had the best seared bonito (katsuo no tataki) of my life. afterwards, just as i was getting sleepy, my aunt dragged us in a cab to the suburbs for a night of karaoke and whiskey. it was a one-room bar with 5-6 tables full of middle-aged men and women singing enka ballads as if they were on national television. i was probably the only person under 40. of course, everyone has to sing, so i pored through the tomes of songs for something i could possibly do justice to, which is when i found good old Bob. The problem is i can only really sing ...

- music is essential - the drawing arm gets tired quickly at first, but perseverance leads to the development of new muscles - the quality of light makes a huge difference in endurance - weight loss (loss of muscle mass?) is not uncommon - characters evolve constantly but it helps to have a real-life model in mind (for me at least) - it's actually a lot harder than it looks to create flashy action sequences without common tropes like magic, tournament fighting, rival youth gangs, etc.

it feels like i haven't had such a long vacation as this in 15 years, but of course that is a lie. there have been plenty of winter breaks, or summer breaks where i couldn't find a job. oh and of course in 2004 i peaced out and flew to mexico for 3 months. what have i done this month? have i learned to chill and let go of control? not really... will i ever learn? probably not... i don't feel guilty though. i started the vacation feeling mad guilty because it was right after a huge mobilization for the anti-gentrification campaign in chinatown and because i hadn't really done anything for the break the chains campaign. but why feel guilty? it doesn't solve anything and it gets in the way of really appreciating the time that i do have. once i got over my guilt, i ended up outlining 50 pages of my manga in one week. i only have one regret, which is that i was so intense about my manga that i didn't spend much one-on-one time with my grandmother. she is like me in t...

on august 29, there was a record-breaking storm in aichi prefecture, where my grandmother (momoe) lives in her pre-war row house. there are 2 rooms, not including the kitchen, the bathroom, and the room for the obutsudan . also there is a little hallway that is full of old stuff. the house used to just be one room, with a kitchen, until my grandmother created an annex for her knitting school. i think my grandmother's talent for design is a little extraordinary, but maybe that's because i like her a lot. but even my dad, who couldn't care less about these things, acknowledges her abilities. anyway, the house. after my mother left 36 years ago, the house has conformed to the shape of momoe's life. there are piles of things all over the place, but everything is exactly where it is supposed to be, and none of it gets in her way as she totters on her two unbending legs and her push-cart. she is, in a sense, completely alone. my mother left Japan right after her father passed...

My father just moved out of his rental and bought a house in Burke, VA. It's small. It is by a lake and the lake is very nice. I am excited about putting my new room together, but it is going very slowly and I have too many books. I want it to be a workspace for manga and story writing!!!! uh-oh my bro is home and i must get off his computer.

OMG i have to interrupt the adventures mini-blog to talk about omuraisu. I am so excited to make and eat it tonight that I just have to share: http://cookpad.com/recipe/514964 To find out what is omuraisu, go to wikipedia .

on saturday (9/13?) i met up with a friend from mexico city who i really get along with - she is bilingual like me and is the only person in the world who seems to personally understand all the identity crises i've had over the years. anyway we got pleasantly drunk over shochu - which i had orginally bought for A & Y, but A said "you realize after hosting i've become pretty selective about my alcohol," so i didnt feel bad about drinking half the bottle - and caught up on the 2 or 3 years worth of history since the last time we had seen each other in Yokohama. It's hard to explain how much I appreciate J-chan, who can understand my elementary Japanese and my gringo-Spanish and my English in a pinch. She is like the older sister or cousin I never had who not only understands my ridiculously specific and unique suffering as an estranged nisei living on the opposite side of the world from Japan, but she also has lots of valuable advice on relevant topics like sex ...

I went with my father to visit my uncle Toshiki, who is dying from alcoholism. He swears he is no longer drinking, but he looked like a purple version of a person who drinks non-alcoholic beverages when they wake up in the morning. In fact he is beginning to look more and more like his father. His son, Kunihiko (37), was in the office when we arrived. He directs the installation of water and gas pipes in new houses. He has three children - a girl, a boy, and another girl. He smokes and drinks. He said to my father, The last time I saw you there was a little baby - is this her? Later, he tried to ask me what I do for a living. It's hard to explain what I do on staff at Chinese Staff & Workers' Assoc., but I basically told him about press conferences, undocumented immigrant workers in Chinatown, etc. He said, There are a lot of different jobs out there, aren't there...

I'm not sure exactly what went down, but a couple of days before I was supposed to leave Tokyo for DC, I got an email from CSWA folks about some Chinese women who had been hired through a subcontracting firm to work for a medical laundry in Japan. They eventually came out in mid-September against their company, technoclean, for stealing their wages and for exposing them to long hours of hard labor with no protection against the toxic waste resulting from the laundry. My mission was to go out and meet the women, but all I had was a Chinese article and the name of the journalist who wrote it up. For those of you who can read Chinese, I think you can read about it here: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1697213.html Nevertheless, it was exciting to hear about workers standing up in Japan. The people I stayed with in Tokyo both had some interesting stories about how they - white european men with work permits - had been blackmailed and exploited by their Japanese bosses/the Japanese immigr...

After a long hiatus during which deadlines, anti-gentrification campaigns, and a trip to Japan made blogging seem like a post-retirement activity, I am happy to say that I have caught the blug (blog-bug) again and have something new to write about. Please choose from the following (in no particular order): - my mission from cswa - meeting one of my cousins for the first time since 1985 - salsa dancing in Roppongi with J-chan until 6am - my grandma's pre-war house getting flooded - getting kicked out of AR's house the night before my flight - singing Bob Marley "One Love" to a room full of middle aged semi-professional enka singers in Shikoku

Just finished reading A Van Jordan's MACNOLIA (2004). I thought this was a useful critique by Tim Morris. I agree with him that the more interesting poems were the dictionary-definition format poems "to", "with", and "from." Though I am no formalist, I am warming up to using forms to teach poetry. I don't know if persona poetry is considered formal, but it usually gets people to write. But I digress. Below is a sestina that I want to use in a lesson, but I'll have to work out the lesson later - too tired at the moment. NB: 1. Fanny Brice, the longtime star of the Ziegfield Follies, was known for her talents as a comedienne as well as a singer. 2. Princess Tam Tam was a film starring Josephine Baker, produced in 1935. 3. "My Man" was a popular song written by Maurice Yvain as "Mon Homme." Later, the English version was written by Channing Pollock for the Ziegfield Follies. 4. Pepito was Josephine Baker's fiance from 1935...

In an effort to try to clean up the house - get rid of old papers etc - I came across a little pad of paper from Free Minds Collective days. We must have been brainstorming some ground-rules or something. Here is the list: confidentiality speak from personal experience, not from sweeping generalizations step up, step back respect support have an open mind: don't be thinking about a response while someone is still talking reflect keep the goals in mind check your body language Here are some other notes... Interventions: 1. use positive reinforcement 2. make the student a leader 3. provide choices 4. deal with sickness, not symptoms 5. build trust but don't confuse building trust with being friends 6. find and encourage passion 7. know the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards 8. sometimes you have to be tough - a mommy (??) [sometimes my own notes confuse me.] Responding to different learning styles: 1. kinesthetic - with your hands 2. present the same concept in di...

but luckily I have hard nails and it didn't hurt. My father is moving out of his rental house in the suburbs of northern VA (into another house of equal size and shape in the same suburb of VA). I am frantically going through my reams of print-outs, books, notes, journals, field-notes, letters, pay-stubs, magazine articles, sketchbooks, receipts, thesis drafts, and mangas dating back to before the millennium. D, R, and I recently discussed our attachment to material objects that - in addition to taking up space - give us access to privilege. What do I mean? Well... For example, my books. I have all these ridiculously articulate books about literary theory, poverty in America, Native cultures, immigration law and theory, and sewing machines, most of which I have not read, but which place me in the (over)educated class, one marker of which is that we have more than 100 books in a personal collection. For more on the educated class, read the liner notes for College Dropout by Kanye a...

some words i have recently re-discovered and with which i have rekindled a romance: hummingbird morsels porcupine crave skitter pumps rush ponytail stem astringent sinister condensation dominate battle mushroom yum words that have lost favor with me recently: space feel syllable tail challenge script descent race class press guilt like futile suicide waterproof sorry I tried to explain the four writing systems in Japanese today with my middle school students. I guess the basic one would be hiragana - a script that indicates different sounds arranged in syllables, which can be rearranged to form words. Katakana , the other basic script is a counterpart sound-script that looks edgier and is used only for foreign words. The third script is kanji , Chinese characters that signal both a sound and a meaning - some kanji characters are associated with multiple sounds and multiple meanings. The final script is romaji , based on the alphabet, used for the transliteration of Japanese words as we...

a bad date is like trying to turn on a lamp that isn't plugged into the wall. changing cities or houses is sometimes like a singer who has to keep the same name over the years despite how much she grows. trying to learn inDesign, photoshop, and illustrator is like having a muscle ache that gives you a headache. you don't know how they could be related but anyway it's a pain in the ass. unexpectedly getting the afternoon off from work is like having brownies for dinner. it's what you wanted, but not when you wanted it.

R and I were talking about Louise Erdrich, one of my literary heroes, and her character Fleur Pillager. R raised the issue of self-exotification, a problem I had been thinking about specifically with respect to Erdrich's work ever since I finished reading Four Souls and moved on to Tracks . N and I had talked about the voyeuristic relationship of the reader to the text, something that is not necessarily exoticist but it's certainly a trope that encourages exoticism, I think. We also talked about how the stories Erdrich relates are not living stories - they are often of the past, and thus it is easy to remove one's responsibility and relation to the text. In any case, I feel that the intimacy of the stories penned by Erdrich are a result of her own upbringing as a writer and as a person, and I don't want her to write differently, but I have to acknowledge this trap of self-exotification... I guess my argument though with that assessment is that Erdrich doesn't just p...

Last night ND called me out of the blue as he was walking to the Rock to finish a paper for a class I never took but always wanted to take while at Brown, mostly to watch how Prof. DK taught the class. Everyone I know who has taken that class has said that DK is a Good Teacher, and I am inclined to believe them. They say he gets a class talking to each other about what they got out of the books, without imposing a lot of his own agenda. It is said that he asks a lot of good questions and listens to what students say. I had a lovely conversation about books, and I realized today that I love talking about books! Especially novels, I think. Maybe I should be a Lit teacher after all... But I like talking about what I like about books more than I like leading a discussion about books... and YT told me I should think about being an art teacher instead. In any case it was very nice to talk to ND about books we had read or wanted to read. If my spirit animal was not already a lion who is tryi...

Today I had a wonderful time strolling the sneezy Brooklyn Botanic Garden with my Japanese students (mostly middle school), getting to know them while enjoying the beautiful plant-life. What I did not enjoy so thoroughly was the Sakura Matsuri (The Cherry Blossom Festival) itself. Here is what I am going to put up on my public blog: Spending my childhood summers in Japan, some of my favorite memories come from the neighborhood festivals in Nagoya and Kochi . There were carts with middle-aged men and dumpy women yelling "Hai IRASSHAI!" ("Step right up!") which really fast always sounded like "HAIRASSHAI!!", hawking plastic festival masks, goldfish-scooping games, mitarashi dango, and takoyaki from hastily erected stalls lining the main walkways. There would be snotty children running around bumping into things and screaming, yukata-clad women looking coy for the men, and older men in belly-warmers and sandals traveling in clouds of smoke, a glowing cigarett...

these days it's after i've had a shot of rum, after being out of the house from 10am to 11pm, after bouncing around a classroom feeding off the energy derived from a can of soda, instant coffee, bright-eyed young people fueled by their own youth. today i explained japan's cultural obsession with cherry-blossoms, how a tree totally devoted to the production of beauty (the absence of even a single photosynthesizing leaf) can inspire so much poetry. how entire offices will take an afternoon to picnic and get drunk under the falling blossoms, how some people will go flower-viewing just for the food. it was a "Namiko Abe" moment. (see my earlier post dated april 23.) i also succumb to these moments, although i do identify with the ones who show up just to get drunk and eat the rice cakes. i am learning that my writing identity is becoming more and more estranged from my daytime identity. is this a problem?

too crazy high-tension to sleep, even though i must. i must! i got another offer to sit on a 2009 AWP panel, this time on the process of translation. i'm really interested in socialist women poets of the tokyo literary scene of the 1920's. want to get more into their stuff, but have no time. i feel kind of phony thinking about sitting on a translation panel when i haven't even finished any of my 3 translation projects, let alone new projects, however dreamy they may be. reading louise erdrich is both inspiring and paralyzing for a writer who suffers from chronic loneliness. close to yet just outside of reach of mythical homeland, a.k.a. "The Community." i am slowly getting to know my characters, during time stolen on train rides, between jobs, and long walks between here and there. sometimes it's their names that come to me first, other times, their histories. sometimes i recognize them through their faces, their scars, sometimes their speech patterns. i am tr...

i just learned that someone i respect and look to for hope - someone i just met but feel so comfortable with and can already feel frustrated about and then appreciate all over again - is totally depressed. even as he puts himself out there day after day, arguing, pleading, demanding radical change, he speaks quietly (so that only a few people can hear) of how everything drains him. then i learned that he isn't alone, that so many people who seem to be so fierce are on the verge of suicide. how can i return even a little inspiration to the bottomless pool of despair? i think young people hold a lot of potential in their fresh, clear eyes, to see through the smoke and the clouds. wouldn't it be great to have a school for baby revolutionaries? wouldn't it be amazing to see the world through their eyes?

there is so much to prepare and mobilize for may 1 . and of course, there will be much more to do after may 1. in the meantime, i am trying to stay rested, fed, and productive. somehow i can't seem to focus on my day-jobs, though. i did finish reading other people's children by lisa delpit, however. i am mentally patting myself. i'm going to write my thoughts on it as soon as i can get enough sleep to stay awake through the writing of it.

april: this is the month when hate blooms staining my gut but it is also the month of wisteria. april (08): I imagine the pink and white buds bursting out of trees this month as the knuckles on my flailing fists. I am furious. I bleed longer and more. I eat red things. I eat dark black and purple things. the teeth in my mouth sharpen around harsh words and hot thoughts that emerge as air. I hurt us because I hate us. this is the month I yearn to stab a blossoming tree into a white shirt. this abuse doesn’t hurt me more than it hurts you. the ovaries churn. the entrails heave. I am a rage that will leave me exhausted and spent, repentant, by may.

I keep landing on this woman's blog when I try to look something up related to Japan. decided to check her out, and on first glance she seems to be another japanese woman performing (not insincerely) japanese femininity in a subtle and inoccuous way. i have nightmares of becoming like her, but i have to admit, her posts are quite poetic. part of me almost believes that there is a team of writers who are writing under the name "Namiko Abe" with a picture of a random japanese model on the header. i should explain what i have just written, but this is my blog and i don't feel like it. just check out the other posts tagged "Fu Manchu" i guess...

one really nice thing about being affiliated with the public school system is all the days off. today is the last of my little days off, and i have thoroughly enjoyed myself. i went to a little lake and walked around it with my dad. We were viewing a house he wants to buy at Lake Braddock after a decade of renting his current place. There were many birds and turtles. it was strange walking around in someone else's house, inspecting the ceilings for water spots, walking into closets to check out the size, sniffing the air for dampness. i went to DC to pick up an anthology for a writing workshop i was a part of last year. it's called Writers on the Green Line Vol 1 and i am on page 20. my dad and i had coffee and green tea bing soo at our local korean parisian-style cafe. see above. i then deposited my tax returns. at home, i helped do a spanish translation for NMASS. then i made anchovy pasta which i destroyed with too much salt.

mere hours after writing the below list of wonderful things i was going to do this summer, i spoke with MMH, who asked me to seriously consider working in maryland. she said that if i'm not making time to write and to translate and to draw right now , then will i really do it in my "free time"? she has a point. thus i have been reduced to the proverbial flip-flop of 2004 notoriety. my goal then is to post something on at least one of my blogs every week-day from now until... august. because i am going to japan in august. sigh.

I'm going to spend the summer writing and drawing my comic. I will have to dip into my savings but... that's what they're for, right!? Ahhh I feel so much better. Here is a list of what I WANT to do this summer*: - Work on translations of Jose Watanabe's un-translated poetry. - Prepare a presentation of Watanabe's work, based on my undergrad thesis. - Work on translations of Ryoko Sekiguchi's untranslated poetry. - Finish enough pages of my web-comic to launch in the fall. - Work on my speach tree poetry project. - Prepare for living in Japan in 2009. - Create a set of submissions from old poems - and actually submit them. - Practice and perfect my presentation on the history of anime reception in the US. - Prepare for the coming year so I don't have to scramble in the fall. - Do more for the Break the Chains campaign to repeal Employer Sanctions, restore equal rights for all workers, etc. - Do aikido on a regular basis and find a sparring partner. *Note: wh...

Wow! Creating those new blogs (I'm also working on a blog that's specifically for my students learning Japanese. It isn't ready yet so I won't announce it until it has more meat) really frees up speach tree to be more of a bloggy blog! I've been in a funk lately, and not the good kind of funk. April is a fighting month for me, probably starting with the extravagant fights I used to have with my mother as a teenager. In Providence, a lot of the hate crimes, the police brutality, the street harassment happened to us students of color around this time of the year, when the weather started warming up and people stopped bundling up so much. On my way home to VA on sunday, I got into a screaming match with the ladies who hawk tickets for the chinatown bus - 2000coach to be exact - after they forced me out of the bus and shut the door in my face. I'll spare you the gruesome details but I felt both ashamed for the ugly display and also strangely invigorated by the fight...

http://kinosei.wordpress.com/ I decided to make a separate, more "edited" (ie: censored) blog for the nitty gritty stuff and the stuff I want to show to people who... don't know me that well... The working title is "The Animator" Please take a look around - please also forgive the haphazard and the absurd in it. Definitely a work-in-progress. I hope you find it useful to your work in any way, and that you will share with anyone else interested in education and this particular manifestation of contemporary pop-culture.

Day 3: Kids' Day Sunday April 20 The NYCC blog (MediumAtLarge.net) reports a preliminary count of more than 64,000 attendees for the weekend. Pretty huge. I only made it to 2 panels today, but I met cool people and swiped a lot of SWAG so it was OK. I went to Harold & Kumar, where Kal Penn (who played Kumar), Neil Patrick Harris (who played Neil Patrick Harris), and the writer/directors sat and talked about making the movie, laughing at racists, and shipping in a woman with "the biggest tits in the world." Very enlightening stuff. Interestingly, the first movie did poorly in theaters but the DVD sales alone made it possible for them to make a sequel. Then I went to the Show Floor, where I met an art teacher in the Bronx. I was initially drawn to his historical/historical-fiction comic Bronx Heroes, calling for accurate representation of the Bronx and also for resistance to gentrification. We talked about lesson plans for students learning the art of comics, where to f...

A relatively small crowd patiently waits for the appearance of a perfectly coiffed Japanese pop legend. T.M. Revolution's fame in the U.S. is owed largely to a certain red-haired anime swordsman... 11:30am Arrive at Javits Center and meander to the events hall. I'm too late to get into whatever movie is being featured in the IGN.COM theater (the main stage) so I float around and eventually settle into Del Rey's panel. The Del Rey team announces its new releases for this year and the coming year. Some highlights: Fairy Tail by the creator of One Piece; a collaboration mystery/fantasy suspense by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan; and Me and the Devil Blues about a (historical) legendary blues singer who is said to have been so good that he must have made a pact with the devil. 1:00 pm I peek into the "Comics Writers Talk about Writing" panel but it's a bunch of people I don't know and don't care about so I head over to the Show Room on the upper level. The S...

I guess I'll call it the Dave Chappelle Effect for now. I don't think that Chappelle ever came out and said that he left Comedy Central because he was uncomfortable with performing a black caricature for his audience of (by that time) mostly white people. I think he was a little more tactful, choosing instead to highlight the discomfort he felt about how his fame was affecting his private time with his family. But the effect I'm talking about is something best articulated in "YELLING AT THE SCREEN: An Open Letter From Dave Chappelle to His White Fans" (a parody by a blogger whose name I forget), and also in all the internet gossip about his conversation with Oprah after his return from South Africa... In any case, it's not just Chappelle. More than a few critics say that Chinua Achebe, Amy Tan, Nawal El Saadawi and a few other well-known and well-critiqued writers write more for the benefit of white audiences than for non-whites. Of course, I am no exception. ...

Reading bell hooks and Lisa Delpit back to back is like being slapped and hugged at the same time with two sets of arms and hands. But I'm the kind of buddhist that doesn't (theoretically) have a problem with being bashed with a stick in the pursuit of enlightenment (although I've never actually meditated with Rinzai folks.) What I'm trying to say is that I am finding it so hard to align myself with the actively loving pedagogy that I adhere to intellectually and to some extent emotionally as well. In my classrooms I often resort to harsh words and stern faces, standard edited English, and "punishment". I am only able to negotiate with one of my groups right now, and sometimes I feel that I am doing them a disservice too by being over-indulgent and not expecting enough of them. a tidbit from Lisa Delpit: "Let there be no doubt: a 'skilled' minority person who is not also capable of critical analysis becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of ...

The New York Comic Convention is a 3-day annual pop-culture event attended by 1000s of comic/cartoon/video-game/anime/manga/graphic novel fans from New York and beyond. This is my first time attending, and I'm also chaperoning a group of 5 high school students from my Anime and Japanese after-school clubs. It's interesting to compare the Comic Con to last December's Anime Festival (both held at Jacob Javits Convention Center at 34th & 12th in Manhattan). We arrived at 3pm, in time for General Programs. (The morning activities were only for professionals and industry folks.) I attended bits and pieces of the following panels: America: Through the Eyes of the Graphic Novel a panel of white men talking about America. I (and my students) left after hearing that they were working on a bunch of projects on the "sad events following 9-11," and other projects commissioned by the Department of Defense for the repatriation of Iraq War veterans. I had been excited about...

Must remember... I teach for critical thinking... critical thinking... I've always known that this was what my teaching was supposed to be about, but I think it's taken me close to a year to come close to understanding what this means. What I'm trying to say is that so far, I have been nothing but an entertainer.

In the past five or six months since I started working with (& teaching & learning with) students, I have noticed a greater capacity in me to recognize the immaturities, weaknesses, and insecurities in myself, not just as a teacher, but as a person living in the floating world. Today I feel inspired to share some of these weaknesses with you, my dear readers, because (a) I had a bad day and I need to vent (b) I have been working on my anime curriculum so much that I haven't posted in many days, and more importantly: (c) I hope you will find my analyses useful. What Not To Do When You Have a Class Full of High School Students After School: 1. Gripe to Them about How Little Your Agency Pays You & Make Them Feel Bad about It. Yes it sucks big butt that you don't get compensated for all the work that you do outside of the classroom and outside of the alotted time in your workweek and that your co-workers expect you to suck it up because "everyone else does" i...

This is a great writing activity that I learned from DW, but I’ve modified it a little bit so that it will be easier to use with my poetry students. (D, please feel free to post your own version or other versions you have heard of.) materials: lined paper tracing paper instructions: at the top of the sheet of lined paper, write Dear ___________ (fill in the blank with whatever. this will be your reader, your audience, and you will write a letter as if to _______________.) write a secret message to someone that you’ve been meaning to tell but never had the guts to do it. (1 – 2 sentences, but they don’t have to be full sentences). write it on the lined paper so that the message is scattered on the page but so that you can still read it top to bottom and left to right. now forget your secret message when the moderator begins to keep time, start writing and don’t stop. write anything you want but don’t stop, even if you get stuck. if you can’t think of anything, just write nonsense until ...

It's been quite a while since I last posted, but trust me, the posts are coming...