flight news

my travel peeve:

• travel companions who feel obliged to make non-stop conversation. this is manifestly anti-social of me and J1 constantly says i am being unreasonably snooty, but hey i don't want to know about your travel plans your family life and work history i just want to read my book and play tetris.

my ideal seat:

• an aisle seat near the loo with my neighboring seat(s) empty.

on a lighter note, i luuurve airline food, as you would expect from an indiscriminating housewife who suddenly need not prepare serve or wash up.

in-flight tetris®

as anyone knows who has flown long haul with insufficient reading material and unenticing tv/movie/music offerings, i now have tetris bricks pouring out my ears populating my dreams and imprinted on the back of my eyelids.

el groucho

J2 is a mother bear with a sore head and missing cubs today, on account of her trying to get a head start on the jet lag by sleeping just three hours in the night.

ecclesiastes 3:1-8

today we fly off. this is the beginning of the journey to deliver J1 into the embrace of the sgp military, so this is effectively the end of family as we know it. in a sense, our relentlessly itinerant hopelessly fractured lifestyle comes to an end too, because it is no longer relevant. i am grateful now that we chose to dislodge together every time. there is a closeness of kin that blood ties alone cannot purchase which is forged by shared fears disappointments desires and hopes, which is our fair exchange for rootless instability.

there is a time, the teacher says, for everything under the sun; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. there is a time for the fledgling to start flying on his own.

a parting

J1's old buddy drives over from philly to say goodbye to him. P is a strapping ex-football player who grew up in asia south america and if i remember the middle east too, in addition to nice suburban america. perhaps third culture kids see friendship a little differently, so that their history of multiple partings makes a 150 mile winter drive reasonable. thank you, i say. he needs it, P tells me. i am humbled and blessed, and remember that J1 is a third culture kid too.

bananagrams®

today's selection.

after the storm

venturing onto the roads today, i notice one thing. we have an absolute entanglement of electrical cables freely low-strung around the neighborhood fighting for air space with numerous trees the branches and leaves of which are languidly draped over the cables and laden with snow. it occurs to me over and over again that the fact that we do not lose power is a matter of undeserved grace.

passage

i help J1 with his repatriation packing. we rummage through years of forgotten memories. the soccer uniform his homemade thai team gets tailored. his softball gear from acsi. baseball stuff from tx. generations of track uniforms from carroll and langley. the tony romo shirt J2 gets for him one christmas. multiple pairs of multi-hued sunglasses. he's leaving childhood behind, my firstborn child, as he leaves home behind for military service. you are welcome back always, i tell him. but we both hope that when he does, he returns as an adult.

ouch 2

i hurt specifically and especially at the base of my right fifth metacarpal on the palmar side just distal to the pisiform. being able to put a name to the agony does not make it any better.

ouch

as i see it, i spend a year religiously nursing my back watching my posture avoiding weights yada yada and then when the year is up and my back is noticeably better it's shoveling season again and my pains are back with a vengeance. right now i ache in bits of my body i wasn't aware were part of the skeletal system.

weather day

today, it appears, we get our money's worth of the weather smörgåsbord. rain sleet hail thunder lightning slush and now finally moving to full heavy wet snow. i really hope we can shovel our way out in time to fly off on our trip.

snow & ice

school's off. the day looms almost deliciously.

bananagrams® yeah!

today's selection, with some liberty. for the record, ken does not refer to barbie's friend.

diffr'nt strokes

i make cinnamon rolls for tea today. that is to say i decant the prepared dough rolls bake as directed then artfully drizzle with the bag of icing that comes in the pack. 

J2 makes an-pan pow's for our supper, which actually begin life as yeast burgeoning in a load of flour and sugar. the rolling pin and the marble slab make their appearance. this makes for authenticity an' all, but supper as expected is late.

futility

i have a fruitless time at the thrift store repeatedly rooting through their bookshelves. plenty of self-help quasi-psychology parenting guides and an unexpected selection in books on backache but nary a one that sings out to me. and why is it so difficult, i ask. i'm going to be traveling. i just want a couple of undemanding reasonably well-written dirt-cheap paperbacks to keep me company. bill bryson would be fantastic, but i could settle for nora roberts too.

psalm 27:1

the LORD is my light and my salvation... the LORD is the stronghold of my life.

there is a light cast upon the hidden shames and painful regrets of my past. there is a price paid in incomprehensible pain on a cross. it suffices to redeem me from my shadows and to purchase my freedom. there is a fortress around me that shields from buffeting winds and storms. it is a refuge to which i flee in distress need and disgrace.

i am cleansed

spoken for

cherished

protected

in spite of all

and just as i am

key malfunction

if you have ever had to manually lock a car at subfreezing temperatures outdoors with ungloved hands and had the key stick in the lock you would know it is no walk in the balmy park indeed.

in memoriam

we have sent a the activation number to your cellphone number ending -8644, says the message on the screen. this is because i am trying for the first time to use my singapore credit card for an online transaction. it is a security measure conceived for my good and bewilderment. 

there is a graveyard in my head where old telephone numbers reside. i suppose the cellphone number ending -8644 lives there now, although i cannot be completely certain, graveyards being what they are. there is a separate purgatory where non-immediate numbers float. whenever i travel, this is where my home telephone number can be found, just beyond the reach of my limbic system.

bananagrams®!

i'm really quite pleased with this.

on grief

an older woman and i get into a discussion in church today. she is a widow, and has found the sorrow unbearable at times. is it truly better, we ask each other, to have loved and lost than never to have loved? c.s.lewis' treatise on bereavement* comes to mind. one day, he says, when you have forgotten it can be, the pain of grief loses its sharp edge, and what remains is beautiful memory. 

the veil lifts, just a little, and haltingly, today, and i begin to see why a loving immortal God allows us to know mortal love with its finite termination in inescapable pain. perhaps because pain is not the end, because even in this life there is hope of grace beyond the agony. sorrow, to quote lewis, is not a state but a process*.

a grief observed (1961), which i have not summoned the courage to read through yet.

'bye

today. our. house. guest. leaves. it's. been. a. looong. two. months.

sickbed 2

the thing is, after an entire day on a diet of smoothie, i now have visions of hainanese chicken rice from that stall in maxwell market, thai fried chicken with cashew nuts and the malaysian wonton mee with black sauce, double helping please. i am nothing if not international in my comfort food preferences. my kitchen capabilities are more limited unfortunately. today's lunch, to the Js' disappointment, is going to be rice porridge.

virtue

HOM's chinatown jaunt in the heart of japan gets me thinking. for better or for worse, the chinese concept of honor is heavily laced with pragmatism, which perhaps is why you end up with a profitability-first paradigm. you have harakiri all the way to the world wars in the twentieth century. but for the chinese epitome of honor and loyalty you need to backtrack to the twelfth century, to the story of yue fei.

japanese day trip

HOM tells me he visits the japanese chinatown. was it good? he hesitates. it was very chinese, he says. cookie cutter snack stalls, masses of eateries, hard sell store holders, unsuspecting tourists. all chinese who have mastered japanese. which, in a nutshell, summarizes the chinese psyche, i say. heavy on food and profitability, capable of quality but not if it infringes on quantity. 

it serves you right, i tell HOM. the last place i would go to, as a chinese, in japan, is chinatown.

sickbed

J2 and i spend today alternately on our backs and hunched up before the toilet bowl. as i surface for air it occurs to me that:

• having a horse's constitution may not sound glamorous but is something to be grateful for,
• when i am dehydrated i get visions of the wild berry smoothie from macdonald's,
• it might be time to revise the five second rule.

cleaning up after Fido

Dog and i take a walk around the neighborhood. the sidewalk and grass verge turn out to be a veritable minefield of turds of varying pedigrees. to paraphrase someone, i love dogs. it's their owners i cannot stand.

oishi

J2 and i have a dinner date at the miyagi again. by now we have the routine down pat. we slip in early, at a time when other people are thinking tea. this gets us a nice table in the matchbox cafe. the napkins get shaken out we murmur iced water glance obligatorily through the menu, and then we both order the sakura sashimi. this meal is always a challenge to our default gobbling speed. we perforce take smaller bites chat more pace ourselves and eat the garnish just so the food can last longer.

for a relationship that goes back to stormy seas battering winds staggering blindsides and much vertigo J2 and i have come some ways i guess. i'm not entirely sure how, but i'm infinitely grateful.

the morning after

the sun is back today. the air is snappy and sharp and everything glistens and crepitates with the sound of cracking ice. 

it proves surprisingly easy to liberate my car from its chamber of ice. unlike snow which splats onto the windshield and then sticks on for dear life, with nascently melting ice you just chip the huge encasing sheets into smaller sheets and heave them off. the difficult part, it turns out, is getting the car to climb the ascending slopes on tires that have forgotten how to grip.

ze piano

there is a faint metallic buzz on the upper registers of the piano that is slowly driving me around the bend. this in spite of quarterly health visits for pitch issues sticking notes and now, mysterious extra sounds.

the church piano, by comparison, is indestructible in the face of enthusiastic hammering by a succession of conscripted pianists. growing up, our battered yamaha got tuned when it audibly lost its pitch, which wasn't too often, to put it nicely.

perhaps this is the intergenerational decline due to a coddled lifestyle that amy chua talks about.

ode to housework

after i empty most of the dishwasher into my cabinets the remaining plates and flatware begin to feel distinctly unctuous. it occurs to me that i may have omitted to start the machine last night. running through the extended denial and self persuasion prior to acknowledging that awful sinking feeling, it occurs to me that a dishwasher is an acceptable metaphor for life.

bananagrams® 3

yesss.

bananagrams® 2

the anagrams are driving me bananas.

freezing rain

we awaken to a stiff all-encasing prettiness and a crackling sound in the air. on such a day, with HOM away and the rest of us sleeping in, the most welcome announcement is the one from the school district cancelling school for the day. wooo hooo!

facebook (rehash)

after joining friending re-connecting enthusing cringing ignoring and blocking now there's the question of who to unfriend. so i am unfriending these:

• those i barely remember and hardly know, in truth and virtually,
• those who block me, offspring excepted.

you could say facebook meets flowers for algernon.

sunset

when we've been there ten thousand years/ bright shining as the sun/ we've no less days to sing God's praise/ than when we first begun.

our family's song offering in church today. this is our last sunday together before HOM goes off on business tomorrow and J1 enlists next month. we have so much to be ineffably grateful about, which may be why there is an indescribable heaviness in our hearts. if it were not so sweet i suppose it would not be so bitter.

battle hymn of the tiger mother - amy chua (2011)

ripping memoir of an american chinese woman's highly authoritarian maximum involvement type of parenting and how her views and family change over sixteen years. it strikes me that she is impossibly energetic to be able to hold down a full time job write acclaimed books travel and give talks as well as minutely monitor her daughters on the piano and violin. her jewish husband, not sharing the same cultural history, must be unbelievably long suffering or henpecked or he must be a total convert to the chinese way. amy chua is a blessed woman to still have a husband and daughters like hers after such sixteen years. i hope she realizes this.

what this book does is it makes me reflect on why i parent the way i do. odd that i question what i believe what i practice what i eat how i vote but parent mostly by the seat of my pants.

bananagrams®

the game that has J2 and me hooked currently. which is to say, the game that J2 owns that i am hooked on.

linguine aglio e olio

my offering for dinner last night, and one of my more successful efforts. this simply reinforces certain unpalatable lessons, viz.:

• expensive pasta tastes better than cheap,
• more oil tastes better,
• butter tastes better than oil,
• salted tastes better than unsalted, and
• finely chopping the garlic means fewer complaints.

happy returns

i can't believe it's turning ten in two days. just ten? these days it's hard to remember life before wiki.

you could say, like bata used to, first to wiki, then to school.

*clip art link here.

huff and puff

J2 rails at the inequality and iniquity that abound between the covers of her history book. do i not see? am i not angered? have i stopped caring? no, i have not, i say. time was when her mother was a bundle of righteous indignation too. but with time, primary colors acquire shades, and the larger picture becomes a beautiful confusing kaleidoscope. if i had stopped caring, i would not rejoice in your caring now, i want to tell her. only, child, remember that humans are a depraved lot, all of us, and choose your battles wisely. also, remember that we are an imperfect lot, and none of us has the correct answer.

yellow blooms

they are selling daffodils at the grocer's. now botany is not my strong suit, but i can recognize daffodils, and everybody knows that when they appear at the grocer's then spring isn't far away. which is reason for my heart to skip just a little delightedly today.

the prize - daniel yergin (2009)

the most splendidly satisfying account of modern history i have read since thomas friedman's the world is flat, and this surpasses that. it describes a commodity i did not know i was so dependent on as it traverses times and spaces i was unaware of being part of, and weaves together events that previously lingered at the very periphery of my awareness. at the end of it i feel newly engaged in and freshly informed about my world. it's magnificent.

applied theology

if someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.  -matt 5:41-42

the question is, where does kindness end and spinelessness begin? where does peacability peter off and doormatting take over? where does righteous indignation give way to wounded pride? what do you do when you have a sneaky suspicion you are being freeloaded on?

Christ Jesus, who, being in  very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,  -phil 2:6

the bible has an inconvenient way of putting things.

new best friend

this is the first of HOM's man-car toys that i happily relate to. on a chilly day with the windshield encased in ice i am particularly grateful. 

operation guitar

continuing the saga of cecilia, as she gets a new set of pots and a general sprucing up. you could consider this the equivalent of valve replacement surgery.

somewhere, my love

yellow lighting. coffee. good company. snowfall. white scenery. something about this combination bestirs warm homey feelings in me. growing up, snow scenes in the taiwanese tear jerkers were harbingers of privation and all other manner of evil. you could say this is an example of pavlovian re-conditioning.

domestic goddess

the alarm fails to go off today. this means that i awaken eventually feeling unusually rested, HOM gets summarily pulled out of bed, and J2 assembles her own breakfast. J1 does not partake of early morning activities and is unaffected. our house guest does not appear to partake of morning at all, which may well be the way to cope with a timepiece malfunction.

confession

there is a distinct tinge of the palest pink on HOM's white dress shirt after a tumble in the wash with my new red sweater. i am torn between guilt and denial. HOM, bless his eyes, is unable to make out any shirt that looks different from his other whites. he is torn between five apparently identical shirts.

time of my life

my wayward tongue escapes me again and i end up apologizing to J2 who returns the gesture. when it comes to parenting a teenager, what i say is, these are the worst of times, these are the best of times.

letting go

today i fill in the blanks of our calendar with flight details. J1's military enlistment approaches rapidly and inexorably. i would hold on yet a little longer to my child before he leaves innocence behind for good. i would hear him sing me another song, strum us another  ditty. i would have my family intact for just a while longer, but the fledgling needs to spread his wings. it's been a privilege to have a young life to steward for a few years, to teach to show and perhaps to inspire, before one phase is quickly over. as a new mother grappling with diapers and feeds i had no idea it would be so lovely, or so painful.

old friends

a friend sends us new year wishes with a photograph of his daughter. she begins high school this fall. can this be the little mop haired bean sprout from our barbary walk days? we are separated by years and continents and now, it appears, by our memories too. some people come to us at a younger time and then somehow remain there.

we are growing older now, her father writes, and we hope that God will give us strength for our days. he is lined and grey as we have become. how did this happen when his little girl is still little?

yum!

my supper tonight, from that bakery in d.c. around which snake lines of hungry tourists. J1 gets me two but J2 quickly makes off with one. and i'll tell you this, i shouldn't have let her.

1.1.11

same view, fresh slate. perhaps.