Skip to main content

New direction

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. I've got issues man!

I think that writing is helping to redirect my negative energy in a more constructive direction. I will put up an old poem here, plus a new one on the subject of violence in april.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Japanese Class in NYC - first lesson!!!!!!!!!!!!

(It's been a while since my last post! I have just begun my first job in NYC!!! Teaching after-school classes in Japanese Language and Anime Culture in a inner-city high school in dowtown manhattan! Welcome to the first installment...) "You better have a leg in it," said N__ when she heard how many students I had in my Japanese class: over 30. I had to ask what that meant, but I wasn't feeling any kind of ominous energy from the students who had signed up for after-school Japanese Language Club. What I mean is: Who signs up to stay at school for 3 extra hours unless they really want to be there??? After trying (and failing) to set up a DVD for the first hour, waiting for the students to trickle in, and being herded into a corner by a Student Government meeting, I began class. The first order of the day was to break up into groups and brainstorm what the students expected of each other, of themselves, and of me as a teacher. Many of them said the same things: for the t
5 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

postcard poetry: here are some of my favorite postcards that i've sent to people so far 1

providence can be a brutal city, just like any other. in this glass box I watched the ocean fall in sheets outside computer clusters, braid inside the gutters. umbrellas made no difference. this is the version i actually ended up using: Providence can be and has been just as brutal as any other city in the country, but i was safe and desperately warm within the glass cage, watching the Atlantic fall in sheets, watching the acid rain braid itself into the gut- ters, wringing words like fair- trade coffee from my strained eyeballs to stain the imaginary page on my computer screen.
2 comments
Read more