Skip to main content

Last day of spring break


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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

obaachan

something came over me just now, as i finished writing holiday cards to ppl in japan. my grandmother is in a private hospital, blowing all her decades of savings in the high-income ward where she was placed when she collapsed from diabetes complications. she cycles in an out of good health according to my mother, who flies back and forth between DC and nagoya in the final months of her 30-year employment at the world bank. my mom bikes back and forth from the hospital to the little wooden row-house (長屋) that survived air-raids during WWII, virtually untouched since that time. back and forth in and out up and down how to break free of this incessant cycle of death and rebirth? only through struggle...
3 comments
Read more

Japanese Class Downtown (Week of 10/23)

This week, we got around to talking about the indigenous peoples of Japan. Concepts that we touched on: - “Assimilation” - “History is written by the winners,” and therefore - “Losers are depicted by the winners.” - “ethnic groups” - “minorities” In the first half of the class, we watched a movie – 『もののけ姫』(Princess Mononoke) – which was the most popular movie in Japan until Titanic came out afterwards. It was also the most expensive animated movie to make, up until its release date (2004), at a production cost of about $20 million. I introduced the movie by talking about the setting – Muromachi Period (1336-1573), roughly contemporary with the Ming Dynasty and the arrival of C. Columbus in what is now known as the Caribbean. The main character of the movie is an Emishi prince, from a clan of natives who have continued to resist the Japanese Shogunal government. (Historians say that the Emishi natives were all assimilated by 1300.) The main character of the movie is based on a historica...
3 comments
Read more

Secret Message Writing Exercise (Epistolary Poem)

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 ...
4 comments
Read more