A Few Good Pens

Wicked Assumptions

2010-07-14T18:52:00.004-10:00

Assumption: anything accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof

In March, while in New York, I saw the Broadway play, Wicked. Back in my hotel room that night at the Park Central on 7th Avenue, I ruminated over the complexities of this Ozian play, adapted from Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. As I thought about poor Elphaba, the notorious WWW, I couldn’t get Kermit the Frog’s melancholic dirge out of my head: It’s Not Easy Being Green...

I loved everything about Wicked, especially the “innuendo, outuendo” word play built upon the rich anti-philosophical musings of Galinda, the “I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow!” Good Witch of the North: "Magic wands, need they have a point?" But underneath the deeply shallow layers of humor, civil rights, and animal cruelty, I stumbled upon my very own “bizarre and unexpected twister of fate”—a confirmation of a theme that I have been formulating over the past several months after a series of odd relationship blows. My theme revolves around the problem of assumption and the fallout that can occur from the mindless action of making both rational and irrational assumptions.

First of all, I have an innate aversion to the word. Assumption. It starts with the prefix, ass-, which reminds me of other unpleasant words: assail, assault, assassination. As an avid friend collector, (try 1,101 on my steadily growing facebook page), I make every effort to steer clear of making assumptions about people. If I’m perplexed over someone’s actions or appearance, I search for facts first, ignoring the temptation to lump everything into one big hairy assumption and jump to my own most-likely misguided conclusions. Concerning the two or three people in my life who have recently assailed me with their misguided assumptions, all I can say is that I wish they had gotten their facts straightened out before lashing out against me. It hurt quite a bit in each of these non-related incidents, but as vexed as I felt, I could not conjure enough anger within me to retaliate. This is probably because my rendition of Kermit’s song has always been It’s not easy being mean.

For Elphaba, her green complexion sets others off when they see her. People assume she’s been cursed and treat her accordingly. Because of this wicked assumption, Elphaba’s dedication to helping the helpless goes unnoticed. She has taken care of her wheelchair-bound sister, Nessarose, all her life. She also cares deeply about the mistreatment of animals to the extent that she is sure the Wizard of Oz can solve the problem. "After all," Elphaba says, "that's why we have a Wizard."

When she becomes outraged over a frightened lion cub in a cage, Elphaba casts a spell that causes everyone except her one admirer Fiyero to gyrate out of control. Elphaba and Fiyero then steal the cub and set it free in the woods. Then she casts a winged spell on a host of caged monkeys, only to discover that Oz is not a wizard after all, and that the flying monkeys will be used as spies to further oppress the rest of the animals.

Even Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose, turns against her after Elphaba saves a munchkin named Boq by turning him into the Tin Man. Boq assumes that Elphaba turned him into the Tin Man because she’s evil. The lion cub that Elphaba and Fiyero freed at Shiz becomes the Cowardly Lion, and everyone assumes his cowardice is Elphaba’s fault because "…if she had let him fight his own battles when he was young, he wouldn't be a coward today."

After these assumptions begin to haunt her, Elphaba tries to cast a spell to save Fiyero's life but thinking she has failed again, she sings “No Good Deed” and succumbs to her wicked status.

Ultimately, when the Scarecrow is revealed to be Fiyero, transformed by Elphaba's spell, Elphaba fakes her death, which must be kept secret even from her finally trusted friend, Galida-turned-Glinda, to protect her. Glinda mourns her green friend's death but the citizens of Oz celebrate it, while Elphaba and Fiyero secretly leave Oz forever.

L. Frank Baum would have marveled over the way Broadway has funneled his classic story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, into an interpretive whirlwind of true friendship, one that surpasses color and the wicked assumptions that have destroyed one green girl too many.

At least Kermit’s a frog, I thought to myself as I drifted off to sleep that night in New York. He’s supposed to be green…

Soul Food

2010-05-07T23:36:00.005-10:00

What’s most unique about the Bangkok Chef is that it’s built into a garage that used to be an obnoxious karaoke bar. I say obnoxious because for two years I lived in an apartment directly across the street from it, suffering through hours of nightly drunken serenading and middle of the night brawling, accompanied by sirens routinely howling into my interrupted dreams.

I eventually resorted to praying on my balcony before bedtime that the patrons would get tired earlier and go home, or that they’d all spread a bad case of laryngitis amongst each other. The praying became ritual, to the extent that I strategized with God for ways to transform the a-melodious hellhole into something more pleasant. Maybe the owners would convert to literary folk and transform the garage into a shabby-chic bookstore. Maybe they’d strike it big in Vegas and relocate to a more affluent, off-island location. More specifically, I simply prayed it would become a “fruitful” place.

After two horrific years of Englebert Humperdink and Mariah Carey wannabe’s, I caved in and moved out of the apartment, feeling somewhat defeated by the unanswered prayers. But less than a month after U-hauling it out of there, I drove into the shopping center’s parking lot and did a double take at what had been the infamous karaoke bar. Freshly painted green, the new sign in front of it read, OPEN MARKET. For the first time, the metal garage door was rolled wide open, so I peeked in and discovered the most direct answer to any prayer I’d ever offered.

(there's the apartment on the left of the sign)

Mangos, papayas, lychee, and bananas occupied every corner of the shop. An angelic chorus filled my head as I beheld a football-sized pineapple. The OPEN MARKET generated so much business that within a few months, not only were they selling fruit, but they also began to offer a simple array of home-cooked Thai food (my favorite eating genre), at a great price. The business instantly flourished. People lined up into the parking lot all day and night to buy sizzling hot crispy noodles, panang curries, and other traditional Thai specialties. I evangelized all my friends and co-workers to pay homage to the Bangkok Chef and led many hungry souls into this divine establishment.

The Bangkok Chef has become so fruitful that they have recently opened a second restaurant in the affluent Manoa Valley. I go there religiously and always leave with a satisfied smile and stomach full of praise.

(the Manoa Valley location)

Alice in Debraland

2010-03-06T21:54:00.009-10:00

I had to see Alice in Wonderland because I worked at Disneyland for five years as a “merchandise hostess” in the 1980s, and one of my favorite locations was the Mad Hatter hat shop in Fantasyland. With its Swiss Alps ambiance and Fantasyland charm, eight hours in this fast-paced shop always yielded a rewarding Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah kind of day. The only drawback (and it was a doozy of a drawback), was when the nauseated patrons of Alice’s Mad Tea Party ride would filter into the hat shop, green-faced, and puke all over the place. This would occur, without fail, at least once a day, and standard Disney protocol was to call for a custodian, who would arrive gallantly within minutes, bedecked in crisp white pants and tucked-in shirt, armed with a bag of pine-scented “Pixie Dust.” Because I have zero-tolerance for vomit, I would usually have to run out of the shop and hold my breath until I got the thumbs-up sign from gagging co-workers inside.

My fond Mad Hatter memories, combined with my love for Lewis Carroll and Johnny Depp, convinced me to see the film on opening night. In a nutshell, I enjoyed it. Tim Burton’s darkish chaos, combined with hookah-vibrant colors, produces a surreal half-dream, half-nightmare experience. My only serious complaint is that the scenes sometimes rush by at such a spinning teacup speed that I found myself questioning what it was that I had actually seen—a slithering fish butler?…a man with how many folded chins?...an aqua-colored vaporizing Cheshire Cat? The images tantalized me, but only for brief moments when I could accurately process them. The Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham Carter) stole my heart most. She was horridly fantastic with her demanding “Off with your head!” rants.

I’m sure left-brained critics out there will slam the film for its lack of plot and whatnot, but right-brained dreamers like me will hail the film for successfully spinning us down into the wonderful rabbit hole of harebrained tea parties and smoking caterpillars.

Lewis Carroll

Princess and the Peeves

2010-02-26T22:38:00.005-10:00

Falling asleep early has never been an easy task for me. On weeknights, I drag myself by the hair into bed before midnight, only to lie there, wondering why the traditional workday still begins at the crack of dawn. We’re not farmers anymore, so what’s the point? And don’t tell me it’s because the majority of people want it this way because I see them all in their cars at 7 am, and not a single one of them look happy to be out and about. Their faces all have that same I want my blankie look as they nurse a hot cup of chemical stimulation.

I am nocturnal through and through, and once I’ve tied up the uncounted sheep and forced Mr. Sandman into a submissive choke-hold, that’s when I let down my hair and bask in the moonlight. During those enchanted night hours, I usually ruminate on theoretical nonsense while knitting or writing. Sometimes I toss around catchy titles for new blog entries. Oftentimes I wrangle plot ideas and conjure up quirky characters. Still other times, when the creativity wanes, I make mental lists and categorize them by topics.

My pet peeve list covers a lot of ground—so much so that I could probably do individual blog entries for each one and have a full year of material. I’m no whiner, that’s for sure, but once a month or so I indulge on a good rant or two. Allow me to humor you with just a smidgen of what drives me batty.

Shirt tags. Even the softest, most innocent tags that barely brush my hyper-sensitive skin send me reeling around the room in search of scissors. If no scissors can be found, I will rip these itchy, scratchy little devils out with my bare hands, sometimes leaving a gaping hole where the diabolical tag once dwelt. Thank God for Old Navy, et al, who have learned to print the needed info directly onto the inside of the shirt.

Garment hanging straps. An annoying cousin of the shirt tag, these ridiculously long pieces of synthetic fusion are designed to help your dress not slip off the hanger. The problem is that they rarely ever stay in the dress while you’re wearing it. Or they get tangled in your bra and make you squirm all night (sorry men, you’ll have to just imagine this one).

Mechanical pencils. Someone’s making a fortune out there. The lead breaks every time I press the pencil to the paper. Refills are never to be found when I need them, and I need them constantly because those pantywaist pieces of lead only last for but a few words. I can buy 48 regular old #2 pencils and a sharpener for the price of one mechanical disaster of a pencil, and I’m set for life.

Chalk. For the first ten years of my teaching career, I had to use chalk every day, and every day, I had to shrug off the urge to throw my piece of yellow lung dust across the room, not only because of that scratchy sound it makes, but because it’s so…ewww…chalky. This was also a major problem during my gymnastics years, when I had to cake my hands with the ultra-dry stuff before mounting the uneven bars. Ew.

Dry erase pens. Oh these are much better than the chalk they have superseded, but what I discovered after my first day of teaching at a dry-erase board is that these multicolored felt wonders make me really HIGH! I remember a classroom full of bedazzled students, spinning and contorting after I wrote out a long Asimov passage on my brand new sparkly white board. Twenty-two faces all merged into one big academic blur and a crashing headache followed. Now they make “odorless” versions, which (perhaps psychosomatically) still give me an occasional psychedelic moment.

Newspaper. Thank God for the Internet! No more blackened fingers, ink-driven sneezes, and funky folding and unfolding of those large, awkward sheets of newsprint. No more annoying Sports sections assaulting me with those creepy escort ads. Thanks to my Mac, advertising pop-ups are never an intrusion, and I can juxtapose the L.A. Times with the Honolulu Advertiser in a few seconds flat. The only part of the actual newspaper I still handle with my bare hands is the crossword puzzle, which absolutely must be done old-school, with a pen—never at a keyboard.

Cling wrap. First of all, it’s dangerous. Those razor-sharp teeth are always primed to take a chunk out of my thumb while I’m picking around the roll trying to find the beginning, only to tear some off and salvage whatever isn’t clinging to itself. Foil may be more expensive, but it always does its job more efficiently, and it’s sparkly.

Spiral notebooks. Designed for right-handers, these torment us lefties when we write in them because the harsh metal loops dig into our delicate wrists. On rare occasion, I’ve been able to find one designed for troubled southpaws, but they cost way more than they’re worth.

Phony radio voices. Come on, do they really have to talk that way?

Phony anything. With the exception of faux fur and some silk plants, everything else that is not genuine makes me cringe. I especially loathe digital pianos, lip-sync-ers, and plastic stuff (especially faces).

One-sided communication. It’s like hitting the ball over the net and never getting it back.

Under-estimators. The only thing I like about them is when I get the delighting opportunity to see them slump when their negative predictions are derailed.

Snobs. Except for a few dutiful grammar snobs, all the rest should be forced to watch videos of themselves in action.

Political correctness. This oxymoronic phenomenon has sent everyone reeling into a verbal quandary that has caused more controversy than the issue itself.

Auto correct. This over-zealous digital task-master forces me to indent when I don’t want to and refuses to allow me to write e.e. cummings in lower-case. Trying to disengage Auto-Correct requires a PhD in Microsoft.

Lap-tops. Don’t get me wrong, I love my lap-top. It’s just that along with this handy portable wonder come three annoying conditions:

iburn. Caused by placing lap-top directly on bare lap. Symptoms include itchy, burning red spots that may last up to two hours.

ipinch. Caused by opening lap-top on bare lap. May result in a 12-inch blood blister.

icramp. Caused by spending hours on the lap-top, especially with excessive use of the itsy-bitsy mouse pad

Alarm clocks.

To Write a Novel

2010-02-08T23:18:00.003-10:00

After two and a half years of disciplined writing, I have completed the first draft of my novel, entitled Bum-bye. At 59,412 words, this quasi-memoir has both healed and wrenched me beyond expectation. In fact, if I had known how painful it would be to unearth key parts of the story, I would have never started the work. But somehow during my first MFA semester at Pacific University, under the wing of author John Rember, I abandoned a complicated piece of speculative fiction about a toxic stream and dove into what Rember claimed would be “…something people will want to read.”

In previous blog entries, I have posted a couple of snippets from Bum-bye and was pleased with the sparse but encouraging comments that came back to me (let it be known that writing is a lonely business, and getting feedback, even critical feedback, affirms that we are indeed being read by someone out there somewhere). Other artists—like potters and painters—have the benefit of being able to show off their work upon its completion. They don’t have to tell inquisitive onlookers to wait just a few more years to get a glimpse of their most recent creations. This is the rub we pen-wielders must endure.

So to celebrate (quietly), I am going to post the ninth chapter, one of my favorites, from Bum-bye.

CHEESE

I make it to my Wines and Foods of the World class ten minutes late and frazzled, but it doesn’t matter because the teacher isn’t here yet either. She’s a senior flight attendant with an undisclosed airline, so she’s been late a few times. She’s tough, too. I lost ten points for not spelling Cabernet Sauvignon and Gewurtztraminer correctly. Being Portuguese, I’ve been told that wine is in my blood. I believe it, but that doesn’t mean I’m a huge fan, especially if it’s cheap and tastes like dirty old wood. In fact, ever since I got plastered drunk in the eighth grade with a bunch of so-called friends, I’ve made an effort to steer away from alcohol.

What I remember from that nightmarish drinking experience are fragmented scenes. The new wild girl at my school named Gigi, whose dad was a popular TV news anchor, hired us a stretch limo to drive us to Skateway. In the limo, Gigi busted out six baby bottles and filled them up with Jack Daniels. She said, Ready, set, go! We sucked down our bottles, and I won, which meant they would have to pitch in and pay my way into the roller skating rink. Along came the chili cheese nachos, spinning around on the table where I tried to lace up my skates. Then in slow motion, when I stood up, took a few staggering strides on my skates, I lost my balance and grabbed onto the first thing I could find, which happened to be a towering guy wearing black spandex pants. Then there was vomit. Lots of vomit. All down the front of the spandex guy. Then blackness fading in and out—me propped up against the wall on the floor in a bathroom stall. More blackness. Then chilling wind slapping my face while riding in the back of a pick-up truck. Then a blurry bed. Then Gigi’s creepy dad. Then a head-crashing morning.

* * *

The class is an hour-and-a-half long, and I’m in the back of the room with my notebook. I open it to a blank page and start scribbling out random words in the margin.

Broken

Missing

Absent

Locked

Tired

Hungry

Lonely

Clock

I repeat these words to myself until it becomes a mantra. Broken. Missing. Absent. Locked. Tired. Hungry. Lonely. Clock. Broken. Missing. Absent. Locked…

The girl next to me nudges me awake when Ms. Senior Flight Attendant flounces into the room. She puts a small ice chest and a paper grocery bag on her desk and doesn’t apologize for being late. Instead, she projects on the screen a huge page of notes for us to copy, entitled, Cheese. Fromage. Queso.

Spread across the screen is a descriptive list of cheeses and their corresponding countries. Gouda—Holland. Brie, Camembert—France. Gorgonzola—Italy. Havarti—Holland. Feta—Greece. Swiss—United States (go figure). I copy the board, but it doesn’t register because all I can think about is what she’s got in that ice chest.

“Well,” our instructor says, “are you all ready for the tasting?”

The Asian guy on the other side of me says he’s lactose intolerant, and the gum-chewing girl says she hates cheese. Great, my stomach and I are agreeing, more for us.

The instructor bats her chunky false eyelashes as she tells us to line up behind the table, single file. With a flick of her wrist, she displays the gourmet crackers like a magician would display a deck of cards. She gives us ten small index cards with the names of the various cheeses on the table. We are to take a cracker and a slice of cheese and eat it, as she says, with contemplation. After each taste, we are to match the card with its corresponding cheese. I’m seventh in line, and I'm dizzy.

When I get to the first cheese, I put a piece on the cracker and my teeth sink into its butter-like softness. It must be Brie. The instructor reminds us to put our names on the back of our cards, so we can find out who gets the prize for labeling the most cheese samples correctly.

“What’s the prize?” I ask her.

“Cheese, of course,” she snaps at me like I’m a blazing idiot.

“How exquisite,” I say, batting my naked eyelashes.

She’s not impressed with me, and at this point, I could give a rip. I need to eat, but since I wasn’t paying much attention while I took notes, I’m going to go with my gut instinct and guess...with contemplation.

Each cheese has its own unique flavor, texture, and color. One is so smooth it tastes more like Velveeta, which cannot be possible at this fancy table. Another is brittle and tastes a hundred years old. The one I like most is smoky, like a bon fire. I’m in cheese heaven as I make my way to the last sample, which we’ve been warned is “strong.” When I bite into it, it bites back. Strong is an understatement. It’s more like demonic. I swallow it down anyway then take an extra handful of crackers with me to my desk.

The instructor is checking all of our cards, one by one, as we all sit around and chat. She turns to us and smiles like a tired flight attendant should smile.

“Well, I see we have a cheese connoisseur in the room. Let’s give a hand to Gabriella Johannon.” She pronounces my last name correctly, saying the J as a Y.

Everyone claps as I come up for my prize, which happens to be an assortment of all the cheeses we sampled, along with a box of those gourmet crackers.

“Gabriella guessed nine of the ten correctly,” she boasts. “I’m very impressed, Gabriella.”

“Thank you, Ms.…oh…crap. I forgot your name.”

“Pudenz. Inez Pudenz,” she says, emphasizing the second syllable of both names.

“Sorry, Ms. Pudenz. I’ve had a hard week,” I say to her in front of the class. Clutching the cheese and crackers to my chest, I force myself not to choke up. The gum-chewer girl stares at me like she’s watching a soap opera. After class, she catches up to me in the parking lot and says, “Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Want some?”

“No thanks. Remember, I’m the one who hates cheese. I almost barfed when I tasted the last one.”

“Me too,” I say.

“Well, I’ll see you next week then?” she says as she’s getting into her car.

“Hope so.” I get into my car and bust out the cheese and crackers before I start up the engine. Pungent

vapors are wafting out of the sealed package of the demonic cheese. Gorgonzola. I’d throw it out if I knew where the next meal would come from.

I Get That A Lot

2010-01-24T22:06:00.023-10:00

A couple weeks ago, I watched a semi-lame TV show called I Get That A Lot, where celebrities pretend to be working folk and try to fake out unknowing customers. Chef Rachel Ray cooked up a great performance as a nondescript dry cleaner. Rock star Gene Simmons psyched out everyone as a guru in a crystal shop. Self-made celebrity Paris Hilton struggled to be a humble gas station attendant, and hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg convinced everyone that he was a low-income parking-lot attendant. Every time a customer would tell them how much they looked like the celebrities that they actually are, the celebrity would give the “I get that a lot” response and continue the charade.

While the show is not going to land in my top-ten, I did allow a self-indulgent blog entry to bloom out of it because of the many times I have been told I look like someone I’m not.

It started when I was a young teen at the beach. An older lifeguard told me once that I reminded him of Sally Field in the 1965 sitcom Gidget. Since I only knew Sally Field from TV's The Flying Nun, I had a hard time making the connection until a few years later when I saw a Gidget rerun.

Then came the Valerie Bertinelli phase, whom I know is much prettier than me, so whenever people would compare me to her I would joke that perhaps I could pass as her homely younger sister. Although now that we are older and more…let’s say…distinguished, I can see a closer resemblance. Perhaps when we're in our 80's, no one will know who the real Valerie is...

1980's

One incident that still cracks me up happened in the mid-nineties when I was rushing to get to a bathroom in the San Francisco airport. Two women were shuffling behind me, whispering loudly to each other. “Just ask her,” one of them said, while I sat there, perplexed. “You ask her,” the other said. I had another flight to catch, so I hurried out of the stall, lugging my carry-on, and washed my hands. That’s when I was confronted with the big question: “Aren’t you Jennifer Jason Leigh?”

“Who?” I replied. They looked at each other and sort of giggled.

“The girl from Delores Claiborne.”

I immediately pictured Kathy Bates as I glanced at my travel-worn face in the mirror.

“You don’t mean Kathy Bates, right?” I tried to clarify.

“No,” one of them said. “You look exactly like the other whacked out girl in that movie.”

“Oh great,” I said. “Sorry.” We parted awkwardly and I barely made my connecting flight.

But it doesn’t end there. When I became a teacher in 1995, I had to put up with comparisons to Xena (ya-ya-ya!) Warrior Princess...

Spidey’s main squeeze, Kirsten Dunst (I wish)...

really out-there Icelandic singer, Bjork...

and yes, rock star, Axel Rose...

And for a few months in 2008, it was rogue politician Sarah Palin.

My personal favorite comparison, however, came from my sweet little boy Noah when he was about four years old. He had been watching the DVD Mighty Joe Young, starring (ready for this?) Charlize Theron.

“Mommy!” he came storming into my bedroom. “The lady in the gorilla movie looks just like you!” Then he took a closer look at me and added, “Except she has a perfect face.”

Finally, to end this blog on a non-self-absorbed note, here are two family members who also have uncanny likenesses. My pretty cousin Cheryl and her counterpoint, Eva Longoria...

And lastly, my now nineteen year-old son Ryan and the ever-so-cute Anakin Skywalker...

"Hey, aren't you that Anakin guy?" He gets that a lot!

Mc Sweeney's Loss

2010-01-19T23:30:00.005-10:00

McSweeney's offers a place to submit "open letters to people or entities who are unlikely to respond." So I took a shot and submitted the following letter to them. They sweetly rejected it, but I still think it's kind of funny...

An Open Letter to My Genes

Dear Genes,

In spite of inheriting my mother’s left-handedness in a predominately right-handed world, I have managed to adapt with only a modicum of grief and frustration over the years, primarily in school where I had to twist a full forty-five degrees in my desk to write properly. And while all the righties were gluing their perfectly cut sunflowers, I was stuck in my angular position, manhandling those diabolical right-handed scissors in my left hand, which didn’t cut, but rather perforated my sweat-soaked construction paper.

I even accepted the dyslexic gene you allowed to sneak in from my dad’s pool because, while it has been a challenge at times when I have needed to decipher a map or put my ATM card in the right way, I have learned to resource my dyslexia to my advantage. Mirror writing, for example, is a by-product of this genetic quirk and has proven itself a great icebreaker in tense social settings, like attending an awkward Thanksgiving dinner with skeptical pre-in-laws or standing in a long post office line behind my gynecologist.

And the right eye being less hazel than the left is okay, too.

But when Mr. Lung, my redheaded biology teacher, brought it to my attention that I could not curl my tongue while the majority of the world can, I began to hold a grudge. All my tenth grade classmates showed off their tongue-curling skills, including some that could fashion three-leaf clovers and other impressive shapes, but I just sat there with this lifeless blob in my mouth. I even went home, locked myself in the bathroom, and in front of the mirror tried my darnedest, ultimately using my fingers, to unsuccessfully mold and shape my lingual member into a cylindrical tube. The best I could come up with was a ladle of sorts—more like a waterlogged wooden spoon.

Genes, why couldn’t you have given me something more desirable, like my dad’s chin dimple or his widow’s peak? Or even better, why not my mom’s impressive C-cup?

Spindless Moonerisms=Mindless Spoonerisms

2010-01-13T22:46:00.009-10:00

The other night, Jay Leno conducted his weekly Jaywalking segment, where he ventures onto the streets of LA, showing pictures of famous people to random passersby. I was surprised that none of them could identify Libyan Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi.

Some saw pictures of Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, who was mistaken for American Idol reject/phenom William Hung.

And former vice president Dick Cheney was coined by one jaywalker as Dick Tracy.

But the one that finally got me laughing out loud was the smartest girl of the night who knew the picture of Mr. Cheney, but called him Chick Deney. A classic Spoonerism.

As a chronic dyslexic—or dronic chyslexic, I have dished out my fair share of spilarious Hoonerisms...especially in the classroom...with my students’ names. Students such as Sharon Wu became Waron Shu. Patrick Matthews—Matrick Patthews. And this year there’s Shane Witsell, which I refuse to put down in writing (go ahead…figure it out…I’ll wait).

Sometimes after a really bad one, I’ll bust out my favorite rendition of Cinderella—a la Spooner—called Rindercella.

Once uton a pime there lived a geautiful birl named Rindercella, who lived with her mugly step-other and her two sad bisters. When she went to the bancy fall, she pranced with a dansom hince, but when the sock clucked nidmight, she had to heave in a lurry and slopped her dripper on her way to the corse and harriage…etc, etc…

This usually gets everyone rolling on the floor laughing—or lolling on the roor flaughing, which makes it difficult to continue my lesson on sarts of peech—parts of speech: vouns, nerbs, and joncunctions!

One day, if I’m ever in Couthern Salifornia, walking down Bilshire Woulevard, I hope to bump into Lay Jeno. Maybe he’ll show me some pictures, and I’ll know them all because I’m bruch a sainiac: Boe Jiden, Parah Salin, [K]ill Blinton. Pro noblem!

An Epiphany on Epiphany

2010-01-06T21:59:00.007-10:00

So I saw this bumper sticker on a car that said, “Mean People Suck!”

I nodded with my blinker on.
And on this January the sixth, this day of Epiphany,
When umpteen wise men went home a different way,
So too did I.
(it doesn’t say anywhere there were only three of them)
But they were wise,
And Jewel was on
A composite Christmas CD from Jerry
My Virginian brother-in-law,
And she sang about how
In the end, only
Kindness matters.
(and I haven’t listened to Jewel in such a long time).

And it’s my mom’s birthday today.
She would have been 88,
My favorite number.
She (and all who knew her) would have agreed with Jewel
That in the end
Only kindness mattered.

So I bought a mess of Chinese take-out
Because it’s my mom’s birthday
And she loved Chinese food.
Lamb stew with bean curd
Beef broccoli with crispy noodle
Bitter melon with pork
Fried rice
Cold ginger chicken with a sauce that sings.

And the lady who has owned Pauoa Chop Suey
Since forever
Made me smile my forty dollars away
Because as always, she was kind
(she gives lollipops while we wait).

And in the end
It’s very true
That only kindness matters.

Tomorrow's Sweet Sorrow

2010-01-04T23:34:00.012-10:00

In exactly twelve hours, I’ll be back in the middle-school saddle again. The bell to begin homeroom will spin me back into a teacher at exactly 7:35 in the (holy cannoli, that’s early) morning. I love my job…I really do. It’s just hard to kiss goodbye some of the frivolous luxuries that I so indulge myself in during the Christmas break. Sleeping-in is painfully the first to go, which means it’s adios to my post-midnight writing antics. Solo sessions at the piano are out the window. Hasta la vista to surfing, too—both web and otherwise. Facebook forays, shopping shenanigans, and mindless meanderings—adieu.

But the most painful departure, the one that always leaves me all balled up inside, is the shelving of my knitting needles. Over the past two weeks, I have finished and sent off Joe Llama to author (and friend), Claire Davis.

Joe Llama

Joe would have been sent off months ago, but after he lost a rhinestone eyeball, I had to go on a fruitless mission to find a perfect match. Ultimately, I did an eyeball transplant from Comma, my second llama, who, God bless him, had already lost an ear in the molten felting process.

(Comma the Llama II)

Next, I tackled the Dolly Llama—a gift for Alina, my favorite two-year old in So Cal. To my pleasant surprise, Dolly came out much hairier than my other critters, probably the result of three-stranding with Peruvian wool, mohair, and cashmere.

Yes, Dolly’s an expensive girl!

(The Dolly Llama)

She would be soaring across the Pacific right now if I didn’t run into yet another llama crisis two days ago, when I trekked over to Ala Moana Shopping Center in hot pursuit of a heart beater from the Build-a-Bear shop. I began adding these when I discovered them this summer at the Downtown Disney shop for a doable five dollars.

Taxi the LuckyAlpaca, whose owner is New York author (and friend), John Gorman, has a heartbeat, as does Claire’s Joe Llama.

(Taxi the Lucky Alpaca)

Much to my horror, the Build-a-Bear shop has been replaced by some unnecessary skateboarding shop, which now leaves the Dolly Llama heartless. Fortunately, I discovered the online Build-a-Bear shop sells these five-dollar coronary treasures, but the shipping of course is going to ramp up the price tag yet another notch. I’ve decided to purchase a dozen of them…for the llamas and alpacas of the future.

While waiting for the hearts to be medivacked from a warehouse in St. Louis, Missouri, I have begun shaping up a new alpaca in aqua for my cousin Jan, an artist in Gaston, Oregon. So far, Aqualicious only has a bulbous booty to show for herself, and with school resuming tomorrow, she may be stuck this way until spring break.

(Aqualicious' rear end)

Now the ultimate apex of my fourteen-day respite took place tonight, when Noah, my bold and daring knitter of a son (or son of a knitter), begged me to teach him how to knit up a hand puppet.

He persisted, even after I explained to him that it would require using not the usual two needles, but rather four, double-pointed bad boys all at the same time. “No problem,” he stated. “I can do it.”

So I took a breather from this bittersweet blogging effort, gathered up the needed materials, and hunkered down with him in my room to show him the ropes. It’s been over a year since Noah brandished a pair of knitting needles, but he secured his slipknot and proceeded to cast-on thirty-four stitches. I showed him how to divvy up the stitches onto the three needles and helped him to join it together and start the six rows of knit-1, purl-1 circular ribbing. It’s no easy task to wrangle four needles at once, but Noah proved himself 100% capable. I started one of these puppets myself as a model, but he doesn’t seem to need much guidance at this point. He went to bed at 10 (an hour past his bedtime), after completing eight rows of circular knitting!

So here I am, back at the laptop at 11:20. The homeroom bell’s gonna blow in eight hours, but I’m bound and determined to finish this blog as a swansong of my glorious, but much too brief, holiday reprieve.

Goodnight, goodnight, my precious notions and yarns, parting (until spring) is such sweet sorrow.

…and also with you

2009-12-24T00:17:00.008-10:00

Of the many Christmas Eve memories I have stored up over the years, the one that brings me the most joy has nothing to do with stuffed stockings or present peeking or Santa appearances—all of which I do remember, but not with much fervor. Of course presents were of superior importance to me, especially back in small-kid days. There was this Barbie Townhouse that I had hounded my parents about from one Christmas to the next, and perhaps after my well-rehearsed begging session, they caved in and allowed me to open the Big Giftie on the Christmas Eve before I turned eight.

Upon shredding the pristinely wrapped box, I beheld the object of my longing. I was eternally overjoyed with this pink palace of Barbie wonderland—unaware that in a few days it would became the SWAT headquarters on my cul-de-sac for the mud-caked GI Joe’s, owned by the all-boy encampment that surrounded my house.

It was after the unveiling of my townhouse that we sipped the traditional hot eggnog, peppered with nutmeg. Then out of nowhere, my mom handed me my warmest coat and told me to get in the car. It was late—close to midnight, and I had no idea what we were doing. Since my mom didn’t drive, my dad navigated us through a thick curtain of California fog, into the heart of Los Alamitos, where he pulled into the parking lot of St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church. My mom and I got out, leaving behind my church-phobic dad to sit in the car, listening to his late-night yuletide radio.

Inside the small church, the dimmed lighting and Gregorian chorus had convinced me that we had entered a place perhaps even more sacred than Disneyland. My mom dipped her hand into a water basin and crossed herself. Oblivious, I followed her lead. We found a seat and took off our coats.

Most of the service made little sense to me, especially since parts of it were delivered in Latin. We stood. We sat. We stood again. We kneeled. My mom nudged me every time I yawned as the priest, Father McCarthy (I think), spoke in monotonic phrases. People surrounding me were repeating his words, and since I loved participating in everything, I kicked in and tried my best to repeat whatever it was he said.

The choir resumed when the incense man entered, waving a smoky metal ball, followed by more standing, sitting, and kneeling. After repeating more verses and whatnot, a gentle guitar began to strum a simple tune. Father McCarthy stepped forward and became wholly human to me when he said, “Peace be with you.” I was about to copy, but the response this time was different.

“…and also with you.”

He said it again. “Peace…be with you.”

We responded, and before I could process the scenario, a woman in front of us had turned to me, took my hand into hers, and said, “Peace be with you.” My mom prompted me to return the blessing, which I did wholeheartedly. With the guitar still strumming, we continued exchanging peace with everyone around us. I soaked up the hugs, the pats, and the words, literally basking in the omnipresence of peace.

The service ended with an a cappella singing of Silent Night. My mom, with her deep raspy voice, sang along softly. I wanted to sing, but the all-encompassing awe kept me silent.

After the service, we found my dad in the car, dozed off in his own heavenly peace, and went home. I don’t remember anything specific about the following morning. Christmas morning. Perhaps my dude neighbor friends came over with their new GI Joe’s to hang with my Barbie in her new lofty dwelling place. Who’s to say?

My mom and I continued to visit St. Hedwig’s and made every effort to attend midnight mass each year. After she died, I only went once more on my own. The “Peace be with you’s” still meant the world to me, and singing Silent Night brought my soul back to life.

And it’s still with me—this peace that passes all understanding.

May it be also with you.

(this is not St. Hedwig's)

(this is)

Who Cares?

2009-12-12T22:42:00.005-10:00

Almost two years ago, Matthew Higa threw a twenty-three month-old baby off the Miller overpass onto to the H-1 freeway in Honolulu. Twelve years before that, Matthew was a seventh-grader in my homeroom and English class. I have taught over 1,500 students, and Matthew is one that has made a lasting impression on me from the first day I met him.

His mom had died before he started seventh grade, and over the course of that one school year, I observed his thick black hair become streaked with gray. It was obvious that he was distressed, but no one really knew what to do for him. He struggled academically and was a bit on the shy side around teachers, but his peers liked him, especially for his random sense of humor. Because of his large frame, we all referred to him as a big teddy bear of a guy.

Now, after almost two years in prison, Matthew’s case is on trial. I saw him on the news Thursday night and felt the same surge in my gut as I did two years ago when he first appeared on the news, high on crystal meth, shouting at cops and reporters "Thank you for everything!"

The details are complicated, but the bottom line is that the baby died as a result of crystal meth abuse. Little Cyrus had no one sober enough to care for him, and perhaps in Matthew’s crazed mind, he thought there was no hope for a baby surrounded by addicts. It continuously haunts me that maybe I could have done something back in Matthew’s seventh grade year to prevent him from diving into a life that spiraled him out of control.

When I read Peter Høeg’s book Borderliners, I couldn’t help but connect it to my experience with Matthew. Høeg defines a borderliner as “someone who could not finish the tests in time.” His tragic story takes place in a private academy for orphans in Denmark, a place of strict rules and abuse, where a child is not granted the right to speak out against its leaders. While Matthew was not an orphan, and our academy was not abusive, he was still a borderliner, a struggler who had to fend for himself and seemed to lack the emotional support he needed at home.

Høeg claims that when children cry, you talk to them about “tomorrow.” I never saw Matthew cry, but several times I remember seeing an expression on his face that would prompt me to chat with him about whatever was on his mind. He wouldn’t say much, and I wouldn’t prod any deeper than I knew he was comfortable with. Many times I wanted to talk to Matthew about his future to try to divert him from his sadness, but it never felt right to single him out that way. Instead, I tried to help him by simply treating him like I treated everyone else, hoping he might enjoy the feeling of being part of the norm.

I want to believe that Matthew knew I cared—that I worried about his PE clothes getting washed so he wouldn’t get a bad grade in an easy class—that I pinned reminders on his backpack to get forms signed and to do his English homework. It rarely ever paid off. He was always late with everything, and whatever he did turn in was never quite right. I’m sure Matthew has no idea that I cried in my empty classroom several times when the students all went home after school to their families, while I imagined Matthew going home to an unbearable emptiness. Høeg believes that if you have once sensed that someone cares for you, then you will never sink again. Perhaps I could have shown Matthew that I cared more. I could have brought him to my house once in a while so he could hang out with my family and learn how to play Scrabble or chess. It just didn’t seem right to interfere, but now I can only wonder.

“What does it mean to fail a child?” Høeg asks. I have seen over the years that it begins with underestimating and ends with indifference. Our school made it too difficult for Matthew to hang on past the eighth grade, so off he went to a gritty public school, where he got lost in the shuffle and eventually wound up on drugs. The second blow came when he was sixteen, racing on the freeway, which resulted in a crash that killed one of his friends. From that point, I have to believe that Matthew gave up.

I am hoping to visit Matthew when his court hearing is over. He will be detained somewhere for the rest of his life, which is what he deserves, but he should not be left alone, without a support system. Høeg adds, “If a man becomes totally, totally alone, then he is lost,” so I want to make sure that Matthew knows he is not alone, that I have been an absent presence in his life all these years.

http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2008/Jan/23/ln/hawaii801230410.html

Zumba!

2009-12-08T23:06:00.004-10:00

Since August, I have been busting moves on the Zumba dance floors in Honolulu. Two to three times a week, for one solid hour of pure sweat, I have samba’d and mamboed and cha-cha-cha’d myself silly—all in an effort to prevent those diabolical blood clots from returning to my thick-blooded arteries.

According to http://www.zumbacize.com, an hour of Zumba burns approximately 600-1000 calories if done with full-out effort, which is hard not to do if you have an instructor that demands it. My Monday/Friday class is taught by professional dance instructor Chelsey, a ponytail-whipping fireball who makes one hour feel like ten minutes. She cranks out Latino and Middle Eastern moves and winds us down with two of the choreographed dances from Slumdog Millionaire, transforming the large room into a Bollywood production.

My Thursday instructor at 24-hour Fitness is Zumba Maniac, Wendy. She’s 100% Latina, and 100% fun! Wendy takes us from Mexico to Brazil to Spain and beyond. She blends pulsating Regaeton with suave Flamenco, and as soon as the music starts to blast, so do we. When the hour comes to a sweat-drenched end, all of us—young and old, men and women—look as if we have just completed day one of a Cuban boot camp.

At night I find myself in bed, counting out steps…in Spanish. Uno, dos, tres, cuatro--paso a la derecha…cinco, seis, siete, ocho--paso a la izquierda. Hip swivel, little dip, cha-cha-cha!

What Happens in the Classroom...

2009-12-03T20:28:00.007-10:00

What happens when you turn loose 119 eighth graders during the month of November to write with reckless abandon--free of strict rules and boundaries? 1,784,571 words! And what does an English teacher do on December 1st with over a million collected words? She teaches the art of revision and scouts out novels that show streaks of brilliance that may one day land on an agent's desk, as was the case a few years ago with my noveling golden child, Kyle Jones with his sci-fi drama entitled, "The Dragonboard Conspiracy." http://fighttheconspiracy.blogspot.com/

And then there is Keri Kodama, a senior now, who has dillgently worked at not only the novel she started in my class four years ago, but also a second novel--both of which I am sure will find their way onto the best-seller lists of the future.

Now if you do your math right, you will see that this year's students averaged 14,996 words each. Most of them kept their counts as close to the 10,000-word requirement as possible, but three of them not only broke the prestigious 50,000 word "winner" status, but climbed to word counts that exceed most adult NaNo-ers. Here's the scoop on these three literary prodigies:

Mary Yeh's Nearly Departed (100,435 words)
Alex Mai's (81,960 words)
Bri'el Kashiwamura's Bittersweet Melancholy (81,936 words)

What's all the more impressive is that beyond their heavy-weight word counts, these three authors have written complete plot-driven stories that have do-able revision potential.

I guess you could say I have made it my quest as a teacher to never underestimate what a student can do with just a little bit (okay, a lot) of motivation...and perhaps a little bit (okay, a lot) of prayer.

NaNoWriMo Recap

2009-12-01T00:16:00.002-10:00

I feel I have been reduced to a heap of literary rubble now that I am an official “WINNER” of this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). For thirty days in a row I have poured out pages upon pages of mostly bad writing—at times so bad that (against NaNoWriMo’s unwritten code of ethics), I actually had to delete parts out of sheer horror that I could, God forbid, die before month’s end and have some morbidly curious critic read my puke-prose and publicize that I was indeed the worst writer of the 21st century. Truth be told, I have roughly 43,000 words of coherent story telling, followed by a 7,000-word hodgepodge of ruminations and stage directions.

The good news? I am well on my way with a story that one month ago had seemed larger than life.

The bad news? The story is larger than life. I have long line to tow before it ever winds up on a winner’s block.

Near the end of the month, I noticed I was walking about in a cross-eyed stupor of sorts, randomly asking random people, let’s say at soccer games or in grocery lines, if they knew anything about Romanian twin-engine bomber planes or what exactly was Turkish Delight. By Thanksgiving weekend, I was obsessing over whether or not there were flushing toilets by 1944 in Ankara, Turkey. And where exactly is Ankara, Turkey? Well, I now know that it’s about an hour and a half from Istanbul, which is a precarious little piece of property that is both Europe and Asia.

The highlight of the month came last week when I was in such a hurry to get my main character, Lucia, out of the Turkish taxi and into the house she had exiled to that I literally forgot her two year-old son, Ioan, in the back seat—after the taxi drove off! I decided to work that into the story, and it not only piqued the tension, but it boosted my word count by an extra thousand.

Tonight I have harvested a sampling of sentences gleaned from a quick scanning over my newest field of words…

1st Place Best:

Ten years ago, Mircika used this workplace to assemble his invention of the machine gun turret—to Lucia, it was a chair basically that could turn in every direction with a vigorous set of bullets all lined up and poised to throw men into their pre-ordained body bags.

2nd Place Best:

Pawns may not sleep, her mind whispered, but queens do.

3rd Place Best:

After all, she reasoned, a secret is no longer a secret, even if told to a husband.

1st Place Worst:

She hadn’t eaten herself and wasn’t planning to either.

2nd Place Worst:

The rain had ceased and the sun was struggling to expose itself.

3rd Place Worst:

The hand flusher was the envy of many of their friends who were still wrestling with the bucket dumper thing.

Dishonorable Mention:

She turned on the hot water and let it pour down onto her head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…eyes and ears and mouth and nose.

So there it is…the best and worst of a month long written marathon. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s statistical post on the 119 novels that I will have collected from my equally exhausted 8th graders!

Hot Malasadas

2009-11-19T17:34:00.007-10:00

Back in April of '02, Island Scene published a narrative of mine in their "I Remember When" segment. Here is a revised version:

One morning my mom brought down the old deep fryer, and I knew within a few hours the house would be filled with the warm, yeasty aroma of hot malasadas. It would take all day to make these Portuguese doughnuts, but it would be worth the wait.

As she kneaded the dough, the familiar stories about Vovo began to roll. Vovo, meaning “Grandmother” in Portuguese, raised fourteen children on Ohai lane in the Pauoa valley of Honolulu. Times were rough in the ‘30’s, so when she made malasadas it was a big deal.

My mom spooned each drop of dough into the crackling hot oil, telling me how her brothers and sisters would anxiously watch the malasadas transform into various shapes. I listened as I watched the sizzling dough twitch and contort in the oil, trying to imagine which auntie or uncle would claim which of the randomly shaped animals.

Auntie Kiki’s three-footed pig ... Uncle Malin’s pregnant chicken ... Uncle Ben’s plump, bobbing seahorse ...

“Vovo, she’s one one saint, you know,” my mom said with her deep, raspy voice. “Raising all us kids and nevah complaining. She took us all Blessed Sacrament Church up Pauoa road every Sunday, and every day she wen’ pray laddat. Cuz you know, hahd times for her and Papa. Aye, all da beatings!”

“Mom, can I do the glazing this time?”

“Here,” she handed me a pair of metal tongs. “Careful yeah, da buggah’s hot.”

One by one, I dipped the golden creatures into the hot sugar glaze and lined them up on a paper towel. My mom pulled her apron up to her face to wipe her eyes.

“Sweat,” she said.

Tears, I thought.

At sunset, we sat out in our California back yard by the pool with some cold milk and devoured the hot malasadas.

“Mom, look, a two-headed turkey.”

“Aye, da cute. Eh, look mine. It’s one naked sheep.” I busted out a laugh so hard the milk sprayed from my mouth. We laughed and ate and laughed some more. Closing my eyes, I saw Vovo there on Ohai lane, gathering up her flock and heading for church.

Ironing Man/Ironing Maiden

2009-11-15T00:27:00.007-10:00

I think it was a gift for my 22nd birthday. An unromantic Sunbeam iron and ironing board from my soon-to-be starch-ridden spouse. I was not impressed, mainly because I had made it known right from the get-go that I did not get along with irons. I'm predominantly left-handed, and no matter what right-handed ironers say, it is more awkward (and dangerous) for us south-paws to wield one of those fire-breathing appliances. And I had the scars to prove it, one of which was emblazoned on my stomach from an attempt to iron a dance costume...albeit, while actually wearing the costume.

Future Spouse, aka The Ironing Man, ironed everything under the sun. Empty cans of starch lined his laundry counter like trophies. So after the I-do's were said and done, I made a few lovingly unsuccessful attempts to press his garments, which tragically wound up costing him more to replace than the value of the iron itself. I had over-zealously burned the hell out of more than one of his favorite shirts, leaving an array of Star Trek shaped emblems in undesirable locations.

So I kept my distance from that Sunbeam...until years later, after moving to Hawaii. Our munchkin Ryan was two years old and was sleeping peacefully in his bed. I was up late, perhaps working on a new piano song, when I went downstairs to use the bathroom. It was dark, and with my poor vision, I caught a glimpse of what looked like something scurrying toward Ryan's bedroom. I flipped on the light switch and there on the carpet, underneath the ironing board was a six-inch long centipede. It stopped moving when I turned on the light, so I used the foot of the ironing board to temporarily pin the beasty creature, which began to wriggle every which way in frantic desperation to eat me alive.

I had to think quick and upon noticing that Mr. Ironing Man had left his appliance plugged in, I cranked it up to the highest setting and after a few seconds, I gave it the old finger-saliva sizzle test. It was ready, but I wasn't as I made eye-contact with one angry centipede that was bound and determined to escape and wreak havoc on me and my home.

Finally, feeling like Xena, Warrior Princess, I felt a surge of adrenaline as I raised the steaming hot iron over the centipede's head (or maybe it was its tail as it's hard to tell one end from the other). In one fell swoop, I seared that buggah good. Stinking, burning centipede flesh consumed the air. In horror, I watched the other end twist and contort, so to put it out of its misery, I finished him off.

When it was all over, I turned off the Sunbeam and left the charred remains of the centipede there on the carpet as a caveat to any of his devilish friends. I went to bed with one eye opened that night, and after a long night of patrolling the graveyard shift, my husband in his stiffly pressed uniform came home in the morning to a crime scene unlike any he'd seen before. I assigned him to clean-up duty, which upon removal of the body, he would discover a permanent imprint of the centipede's mutilated form on the carpet. The imprint served as a permanent reminder to Ironing Man not to ever entrust his wife with such an appliance ever again.

To Grieve: Perchance To Sleep

2009-11-11T03:45:00.002-10:00

My eight year-old son Noah’s nine year-old friend Jack died on Sunday, but we didn’t find out what happened until today, and now here I am at 2:30 in the morning unable to process this tragic loss, let alone sleep with this flooding of emotion that keeps rolling through me.

Noah and Jack were after-school care friends for the past two years. Jack, who was one grade older, tried to teach Noah his times tables last year, and I remember Noah telling me how nice Jack was to try so hard to teach him such a difficult subject. Tonight when Noah brought it up again and was trying so hard to be optimistic about Jack’s passing, I had to do whatever I could to not cave in.

Noah has only two really good friends at his school, and Jack was one of them. He described Jack as “whiter than me,” which means that most of the kids at his public school are more local looking, and because of this, kids like Noah and Jack do not always get the popular approval from the darker majority. Noah told me how he saw Jack this past Friday and they played together just like any other day, and now he’s gone. Just like that.

The grief I’m experiencing tonight is multifaceted.

As a mother…I feel the agony that Jack’s mom must be experiencing. More than likely, she too is wide awake right now, thinking over all the memories and lack of memories to come. This is November. What will she do with Christmas? What will we do with Christmas?

As Noah’s mother…I feel his loss probably more so than he does right now as I know how death works on a person’s mind, especially as time passes. I lost my first boyfriend Paul when I was fourteen. He was killed on his bike by a drunk driver. We were out roller skating together the night it happened, but I didn’t find out until the next day. It didn’t make any sense to me at all. I didn’t even go to the funeral.

As a teacher…I feel the loss in Jack’s classroom. The empty desk will be empty for the rest of the school year. His teacher will see his name on the rosters until it is deleted, and then she’ll see the absence of his name.

I’m typing with my eyes closed. My face is overwhelmed with tears. I want to climb up the ladder into Noah’s new loft bed and hold him until he’s an old man.

Prior to writing this entry, I tried a number of distractions to keep myself from dealing with this gaping hole in my heart. I played around on Facebook, commenting on pictures and bantering with some students on my wall. I went to bed but it was too quiet, so I turned on my ipod and put it on shuffle. The first song that came on was by Casting Crowns. The song finally broke me.

I once was lost, but now I’m found
I once was lost, but now I’m found
So far away, but I’m home now
I once was lost, but now I’m found
And now my life song sings

I once was blind, but now I see
I once was blind, but now I see
I don’t know how, but when He touched me
I once was blind, but now I see

And now my life song sings

I once was dead, but now I live
I once was dead, but now I live
Now my life to You I give
Now my life to You I give
Now my life to You I give

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Let my life song sing to You

So it’s 3:30 now. The noises outside are few. A brewing storm. An occasional car. A moped. A chirping gecko. A baby. A dog. The clock on the wall. My own breathing…

Goodnight Jack. Hold me a spot, k?

A Few Good Songs

2009-11-08T00:41:00.004-10:00

As the end of NaNoWriMo's week-one approaches, I feel the need to share some of the songs that have generated the right momentum to keep the word count flowing (just under 8k right now). And while I don't usually listen to music while I'm hammering out my half-brilliant works of near genius, I do listen to my CD d' jour while I'm zipping around in my car all over the place. This is where my muse likes to visit me most, and if the music is just right, she'll flood me with new scenes and rampant dialogue to the point that I sometimes have to jot stuff down at stop lights. It's a messier situation when she visits in the shower, but let's not go there.

In the past, I have tried to set up the romanticized writing environment, complete with oil lamps, cozy pillows, and carefully burned CDs; but perhaps because I'm a closet musician, I usually catch myself analyzing the metrics and circle of fifths, which in turn usually ruins my stream of consciousness--also known as "the zone."

Using earphones makes it worse. When I got my first ipod a few years ago, I thought I had died and gone to music heaven as I dug up hundreds of obscure songs for a mere .99 cents a pop, which soon turned into (gasp) hundreds of dollars over a six-month period. I had to cut back, but now am glad I made, and still make, the investment. So there I was one night in my picture-perfect writing environment, trying to write a scene where my main character was making a life-or-death decision--while in my ears Leonard Cohen (whom I love) was singing (sort of) about Suzanne, who is half-crazy as she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. My pen (or keyboard) had to shut down while I imagined how nice it would be to have some tea and oranges from China as I listened to the rest of the song:

And just when you mean to tell her
You have no love to give her
She gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer
That you've always been her lover...

See? I'm doing it right now...trying to write a decent blog entry without getting lost in a song!

So before I go off on another meandering tangent, here's the current list of what I've been listening to and some of the lines that make it happen...

1. Bulletproof Weeks by Matt Nathanson.

So what happened to bullet proof weeks in your arms
What happened to feelin' cheap radio songs
What happened to thinking the world was flat
Yeah what happened to that

2. Down by Rakim Y Ken-Y.
(also one of the best reggaeton songs to Zumba to!)

Pero todo fallo en todos los intentos (gotta hear it to fully appreciate it)
Translation: But everything went wrong in every attempt

3. Summer Again by The Afters
(absolute poetics set to music)

As she falls I try to catch her
For one last touch of warmth from summer
As one thing leaves to become another again
I remember when
Oh to be with summer again
The days were warm and we wore them like skin
Now I feel the effects of October again

4. Writing to Remember by Matt Brauwer
(has a slight country feel but it throws a powerful punch)

They say that you can’t go back
I wouldn’t try even if I could
Cause somehow in the darkest hours
Something always came around for good

5. Sky Blue and Black by Jackson Browne
(I'll never grow tired of this song...)

You're the color of the sky
Reflected in each store-front window pane
You're the whispering and the sighing
Of my tires in the rain
You're the hidden cost and the thing that's lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I'll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows
And the faces on the avenue
That's the way love is
That's the way love is
That's the way love is
Sky blue and black

Other songs I'm listening to this month are directly and intentionally selected to give me a feel for the time and place element of my Romanian setting. I'll be adding Turkish tunes soon as well as Brazilian as my story progresses...

6. Romania by Elana Timaru
(a lullabye sang in Romanian)

7. Dark Eyes by Zoltan and His Gypsy Ensamble
(an instrumental--love it!)

8. Romania by Gary Sills from his album, Restless Hearts
(a piano piece that I must learn--in December! It's not the same song as #6)

9. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes; I Love You Sweetheart of My Dreams; & Ask Me Now by Thelonious Monk
(I can imagine these three in the movie!)

10. Solace & Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin
(Joplin is my soul mate!)

So there it is, my top-10 (13)...

Noapte buna si Dumnezeu miluieste!
(Goodnight and God bless)

An Introduction to Lucia

2009-11-03T23:34:00.009-10:00

Coincidence or Fate? You decide. It was May of 2008, prom night for my eighteen year-old son Ryan. His date was Cristina G., a beautiful blonde senior from another high school. We were invited by Cristina’s parents John and Cathy to come to their house for a pre-prom photo gathering. When we arrived, the spectacular view from their home in the coveted neighborhood of Hawaii Loa Ridge took my breath away. I had never before seen Lēʻahi (more famously known as the Diamond Head crater), from this lofty angle. I tried to imagine its last eruption, estimated over 150,000 years ago and was grateful for its permanent state of dormancy, being that I live only a few miles away from it. The panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean reminded me that I live on a very small and isolated speck, yet the place from where I stood created a dichotomic sensation of immensity.

As the other prom-goers arrived, we enjoyed chocolate chip cookies and guava juice out by the pool. The girls, dressed to the nines, paired up with their respective dates, and we snapped an onslaught of pictures by the pool and in the house. Cristina, dressed in a sleek red with white polka-dotted dress, confessed her love of all things Disney, especially Minnie Mouse. After all, she told us, her dad used to work at Disneyland. Of course, since I used to work there, I jumped in and asked her dad about his Magic Kingdom career, which he admitted was probably before I was born, which it was. This conversation led us into an unusual discovery of beyond coincidental circumstances.

Cristina’s dad John told me he had lived in Long Beach, California. I told him I was born in Long Beach and lived there until I was three. He asked me where specifically, and I told him, “West First Street.” He responded, “I lived on East First Street.”

“What years did you live there?” he asked.

“1965 to 1968. You?”

“1957 to 1966. But,” he added, “my parents remained there for the rest of their lives.”

So we lived on the same street for one year, but that was just the beginning. John told me he went to St. Anthony’s, a Catholic School in Long Beach, and graduated in 1960, which happens to be one year after my half-brother Miles graduated—FROM THE SAME SCHOOL! Needless to say, we were both stunned by this amazing discovery.

“What are the chances of that?” John asked.

“It’s a small world after all,” I chuckled.

He agreed.

Our conversation drifted when I noticed Cristina had donned a sequined pair of Minnie Mouse ears. I had to get more pictures, so I left John to converse with my husband, and this is where it gets unbelievable.

Somehow in their conversation, the topic came up that I am a writer. This alone is weird because anyone who knows my husband knows that he has not been one to boast about my wanna-be writing career. Perhaps he mentioned that I was working on a masters, which could have possibly lead him to say that I was a writer of sorts, but for whatever reason, his statement sparked an immediate response from John, who proceeded to tell my husband that he had been looking for a writer who could create a novel based on the true story of his Romanian parents and himself having to suddenly and permanently flee in 1944 from the incoming Russian Communists, leaving behind their family estate and loved ones in Romania.

I had wandered back inside to catch the tail end of this conversation and was immediately intrigued with the idea of creating such a story. The rest, as they say, is history—Romanian history, that is.

John asked me if I knew anything about ghostwriting or co-authorship projects and if it was something I would be interested in doing. I told him honestly that I didn’t know much about the legal technicalities, but that I was definitely interested in retelling the story for him. I explained to him that without conscientious intention, most of my stories have a common motif of displaced persons, so his story is right up my proverbial alley (except for the fact that I knew nothing at the time about Romania or its involvement in World War II). John then told me he had envisioned this story to be reminiscent of the classic Casa Blanca, starring Ingrid Bergman.

“Well,” I told John, “my maiden name is Bergman, and my favorite black-and-white film has always been, and always will be, Casa Blanca.”

We exchanged numbers and made plans to meet up right away, which we did and have done several times since. John and his wife Cathy have worked hard to keep the documents and photographs preserved. They also have shown me the few family heirlooms that were salvaged from his parents’ estate in Romania and traveled with them to Turkey, then to Rio de Janeiro, across the Atlantic to New York, then to Ohio, across the United States to California, and now dwell safely in Hawaii. What has helped me most, however, is the four-hour video footage of John’s mother Lucia talking at age ninety-two about her remarkable life. I have watched and re-watched this video, taking extensive notes and generating in my mind the voice of an astute, even perhaps sneaky woman who has lived out a plot that I could have never generated on my own.

If done right, this writing endeavor will deliver a riveting plot, a rich exposé of Romania’s ambivalence toward World War II alliances, and a mind-blowing twist of fate at the end. I see it as a film and am writing it with a screenplay in the forefront of my mind.

So as they say in Romania, “Nu lasa pe maine ce poti face astazi” (Don’t leave for tomorrow what you can do today).

Procrastinators Unite...Tomorrow!

2009-10-31T21:16:00.011-10:00

When the laundry is piling up and the bills need to be paid, and there's no motivation to start either, what do I do? I create a cover for my novel. This one is my third, and most favorite, attempt so far.

From what I understand about publishers, they have an underground syndicate of cover masters who do not want authors to interfere with the artistic process of cover design. This is probably because they know what's best, or at least think they do.

As one who reads a lot, I usually don't take covers too seriously, especially if I already know the book is going to deliver. But if I'm strolling Borders without a specific mission, you can bet that I'm picking up books with covers that draw my attention. Case and point. While browsing online for books on Shelfari, one book immediately caught my eye. Robert Olen Butler's Hell has a cover that screams for attention...
How does one ignore that cover? I have not yet read it, but since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Good Scent From a Strange Mountain is on my top-ten favorite books, I will be reading this one after I finish the three other books I am currently reading, which are going to be shelved during November as I NaNoWriMo myself into oblivion and beyond.

So now I've got two hours before I start writing my new novel to decide if I will fold the heap of laundry on my sofa or pay the neglected bills that are sitting right here in front of me. Maybe I'll make that important decision tomorrow. Maybe not.

Nota Bene: Bum-bye means "later on some other day...bye and bye"

NaNoWriMo Begins 24 Hours From Right Now!

2009-10-30T23:24:00.005-10:00

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Tonight I attended the Honolulu regional kick-off party for this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) craze. Held at Zippy’s on King Street, the eclectic gathering totaled over 30 brave participants committed to writing toward a goal of 50,000 words in 30 days.

This will be my (gasp) seventh attempt to break the 50k and become a “Winner” as deemed by founder Chris Baty and his impressive team of dedicated novel-generators. While I’ve never been crowned "Winner" yet, the fruit of my NaNo labor consists of four novels in various states of completion, the most recent also serving as a portion of my MFA thesis. At 49,000 words currently, this baby is just a few words away from an agent’s desk.

My NaNo nerves this year are at an all-time high as I am using the upcoming month of madness to pen/pound out a historical fiction piece that I’m being commissioned to write. It’s an epic plotline based on a true story of fleeing Romania during WWII. I’ve been researching for this since May of ‘08. I can even speak a few important sentences in Romanian, like, Am de fucut niste comparaturi, which means, I need to do some shopping. I also have a handful of Romanian recipes to try in order to get a literal taste of the land. And the music, it’s well, how do you say, so Romanian.

Now not only am I taking on the challenge myself, but for the past five years I have been inflicting NaNoWriMo on my English students. This year, all 119 of them are signed on with the young writer program and are (for the most part) psyched (scared out of their minds) to begin this Sunday. I listened to their plot ideas today in class, and wow, I’m so impressed with the wild outpouring of genuine creativity. Their minimum word count requirement for an A is 10,000 words, but every year I have at least one student who breaks the 50k. The record, held by current sophomore Kyle Park, stands at 63k words of sheer brilliance.

The kick-off party served its purpose. Our two delightful ML’s (Municipal Liaisons) are brand new to the state—one from somewhere in the south and the other from Long Island, New York—but they are raring to launch our mid-Pacific state into NaNo-land. We will be having word wars against Los Angeles and Long Island, two high-volume cities in previous years, as well as some other city I cannot recall at the moment. It will be exciting to see how we tally up at the end of the month.

In the meantime, I’m wondering how my blog will fare during my 30-day pilgrimage to NaNo-land. Given the collaborative nature of my Romanian mission, I probably won’t be putting up any significant excerpts, but I may resort to posting interesting pictures of my month-long journey, ie: This is me tearing out my hair strand by strand on November 29 with 8,888 words to reach the goal by midnight.

Let the madness begin!

Chunky Monkey

2009-10-27T23:58:00.004-10:00

Let me keep this short and sweet.

I'm not sure what compelled me to buy this one-pinter of Ben & Jerry's tonight. I never buy ice cream for myself. Ever. But it was late. I was tired, and it looked so innocent just sitting there in the cold. It was lonely.

I actually walked away from it once, thinking to myself, What kind of woman would buy something called "Chunky Monkey"? Geez! So I went back to see if it was still there, and since it was, I assumed it was meant to be mine--all mine. The nutrition facts say it has only 290 calories--for 1/2 cup. Truth be told, there are four servings in that pint-sized cup. That's 290 x 4=1160 calories! It would take a solid hour and a half of serious sweat to burn that off.

So I brought it home. Everyone was already sleeping. There'd be no threats to share. After letting it thaw a little, I ate half the pint: 580 calories. The other half is right here next to me, but it's going to spend the night in my freezer (behind the frozen okra).

So I'm going to bed now. Tomorrow night I'll be at the gym for an hour and a half, grappling with my chunky-monkey hips and thighs.

Sky Anxiety

2009-10-25T16:47:00.010-10:00

Last weekend my son Ryan piloted a four-seater airplane under the supervision of his girlfriend's father who flies for Hawaiian Airlines. After a full day of soaring over the islands, Ryan was able to successfully take off and land the plane on his own. The thrill of it confirmed his desire to consider a potential career in the sky.

Ryan has always loved flying--with or without an airplane. The proof is in the pictures. If there's a pool to dive into, Ryan will look for a rooftop to launch off from.

If there are waves on the South Shore, Ryan will figure out how to defy them.

He even invents his own airborne methods to enable optimum thrills.

I have to believe Ryan inherited this love of air from me. As a gymnast in high school, my favorite apparatus was the uneven parallel bars. The slow-motion delays in mid-air before sticking a dismount always delivered an adrenaline surge beyond words. Sure, the ever-present fear of landing on anything besides feet threatened to steal my focus, but even after several bad falls and a broken tailbone, the quest to become airborne prevailed.

Unlike Ryan, however, I don't think I would get the same high in the cockpit. I love traveling by air. I even pursued a career as a flight attendant out of high school. But somewhere along the way, I have developed an annoying aircraft phobia. It's not the fear of crashing that haunts me as I can always rationalize that driving on a freeway is far more dangerous. My fear is more irrational, more agoraphobic than the common complaint of passengers feeling too confined. Unlike most air travelers, I actually enjoy the enclosed feeling in the aircraft. It's a camaraderie of sorts to me. Like we're all on one big happy journey over the clouds together. September 11 put a damper on this pie-in-the-sky mentality of mine, but not entirely.

It wasn't until a really long trek from Honolulu to St. Louis that I contracted my first in-flight case of agoraphobia. I remember settling in with a good book and a NY Times crossword puzzle. I read for a solid two hours then gave in to the drowsy hum of the plane's engine and slept just long enough to start dreaming. That's when the plane turned into a sickening carnival ride. The flight attendant announced that due to a [diabolical] storm system, we would be experiencing [death-defying and tumultuous] turbulence for a little while. Try three hours.

Trying to reason with my inner flight attendant, I reminded her that we wanted to do this for a living, but she shouted back to me as I looked out the window that we were suspended by absolutely nothing...in the middle of the entire sky. This clammy epiphany made me uncomfortable. It was like the feeling I once had playing outfield in a softball game. It's hard to explain, but it's like being trapped in a wide open space.

Using the crossword puzzle as a distraction, I racked my brain to complete half of it, which I now regret as the jarring motion, combined with the straining eye work of the puzzle, spun me ad nauseam into a dizzying state. I put the puzzle away, closed my eyes, and breathed deeply. This helped, but not enough when someone behind me hurled. I was next in what would become a domino-effect of puking passengers.

As soon as we landed, we had to rush to catch the next plane to Orlando. Wishing for a set of sea legs, I pitched and reeled my way into a shop and bought a pack of Dramamine. I took four then boarded the next plane.

All I remember from that flight is the older man next to me. He was wearing a turban, and I woke up twice with my head on his shoulder. When we landed in Orlando, I tried to gather myself and apologize to the man with a soft shoulder. In his melodic New Delhi accent he told me it was no problem and that he had a daughter about my age. I was hoping I didn't slobber all over him or snore, but decided not to ask.

So ever since that harrowing ordeal, I have flown with trace elements of fear wrangling in the back of my thoughts. And now with the vision of my crazed son taking off into the wild blue yonder, I have to completely regather my senses and try to think happy thoughts.

Look! It's a bird...It's a plane...No, it's Flyin' Ryan!

A Royal Night With Maunalua

2009-10-22T23:06:00.009-10:00

http://www.maunalua.com/

Tonight I became a princess as an evening production at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki proved itself the most regal setting in Hawaii's musical kingdom. In the most vintage of Hawaii's settings, I was serenaded by not only one handsome prince, but by the three handsome and seriously talented princes of Maunalua.

Maunalua has put the Hawaii back into Hawaiian music. Comprised of lead singer (and my so-called long-lost Portagee cousin) Bobby Moderow Jr; bassist/vocalist Kahi Kaonohi; and guitarist/ukuleleist/vocalist Richard Gideon, Maunalua has won three Na Hoku Awards (the Hawaiian equivalent of the Grammy), and this past January, they jammed at the inauguration luau for our first "local boy" President, Barack Obama.

Held in the nostalgic Monarch Room of the newly refurbished Royal Hawaiian Hotel, this one-hour performance begins with the traditional blowing of the conch shell and a bone-chilling oli (chanted greeting). The stage is set to look like a typical Hawaiian home out in the country, complete with flower-bedecked front porch and corrugated tin roof.

Bobby first takes his spot on the front steps and plays solo as if warming up for an upcoming luau. Kahi and Richard join him on the porch and banter with each other local style before they launch into their first song. From this point, everything seems suitably impromptu as hula dancers join in and the jesting between songs continues. The vocal harmonies and leo ki'eki'e (falsetto), blend so perfectly that the three voices become one.

The songs range from traditional Hawaiian to a rendition of the Crosby, Stills & Nash song, Teach Your Children. Two Shadows, written by Bobby Moderow Jr, has me hoping for more original pieces in the future.

Next Thursday at 7 pm will be the last of Maunalua's nine appearances at the Monarch Room as part of the Curators of Hawaiian Music Concert Series. Contact me if you're interested in going as Bobby gave me the thumbs up to comp "Tenney's Twenty".

My hope is that the Royal Hawaiian Hotel staff will in the near future bring Maunalua back to the Monarch Room as a permanent fixture.

(The Royal Hawaii at dusk, snapped w/ my iphone from the parking garage)

(one of the magestic hallways at the Royal)

Richard Gideon , Bobby Moderow, (me), and Kahi Kaonohi

Jesus Does Not Love You and I

2009-10-20T22:14:00.003-10:00

That's right. He loves you and me--even when we screw up our pronouns.

But I'm not as forgiving. I have sat in many a church service, wedding, and funeral and have heard the most sincere orators flub it all up: God just wants to bless you and I...He loves you and I...I ask that you pray for my wife and I. No! No! No!

Somehow, perhaps out of a deep-seated fear of not being proper enough, people have resorted to using "you and I" no matter where it shows up in a sentence. This is a mortal sin in the literary world, a sin so bad that it will make those of us who know the rule (or in my case, teach the rule), cringe in our pews.

The rule is simple. If you were to take out the "you and" or "my wife and" from the above sentences, you would be left with the following: Jesus loves I...God just wants to bless I...I ask that you pray for I.

See the problem? The logical solution is to replace the "I" with "me": Jesus loves you and me...God wants to bless you and me...I ask that you pray for my wife and me.

The only time "You and I" is used is when it comes before the main verb of the sentence. Again, this is pure logic: Jenni and I love Jesus...You and I have been blessed...My wife and I will pray for you. Go ahead and take out the "Jenni and", "You and", and "My wife and"...see what's left? This is why it is never acceptable to say Me and Jesus have a good thing going on; or Me and my friends love Jesus. Unless you're an unschooled caveman, you would never say, Me love Jesus.

Now, for the love of Jesus and me, go and sin no more.

Where The Wild Things Are—Hawaiian Style

2009-10-18T23:34:00.004-10:00

Yesterday in the shower, I encountered a wild thing. A small wild thing, but a wild thing none-the-less. He first appeared next to my Aussie shampoo bottle, and since I don’t shower with my glasses on, I couldn’t tell right away if he was dead or alive. I jiggled the shampoo bottle and watched him wiggle top speed up the tiles until he came eye-to-eye with me. Even without my glasses, I could see his little reptilian chest pounding through his color-changing skin. I know if he could speak at this point, he’d be saying, “What! You no like geckos?” I wanted to tell him that I love geckos, especially the cute baby ones like himself and even though his enormous extended family that live behind the clock in my living room are not as cute, I’m still grateful to them for eating all the nasty cock-a-roaches that sneak in.

With my loofah hanging next to him, I wondered how I would remove it from the hook without once again terrifying my little shower friend. Like a speeding figure eight, he scurried back to the Aussie bottle. I lathered. I scrubbed. I rinsed, leaving the lizard alone, but the real drama began when I turned off the water and stepped out. Because it’s an old house, the drain takes its sweet time, leaving a few inches of water to slowly work its way down and out.

Towel-wrapped, I decided I needed to capture the little guy and set him free outside, fearing otherwise he’d become a play toy for our serial-killer cat, Blue (more on him in the future). I crouched down and cupped my hands around the lizard, but in a fitful rage he escaped through a crack between my two thumbs and plunged headfirst into the draining tub. Much to my surprise, he swam with Michael Phelps finesse. He even flipped himself upside-down twice in order to rest a second before flipping back over to finish his cross-tub journey.

Once to the other side, perhaps out of pure exhaustion, he couldn’t get himself attached to the slippery tub, so I intervened again and tried to scoop him out. This is when he released his wiggling tail into the water—a survival device—making it impossible for him to continue swimming. Panicked, I cupped the poor little tailless critter and tossed him onto the tile floor. His limp little body didn’t move, and I was sure he was tragically dead. I tapped him with my pinky finger, and he twitched. There was hope. I blew on him, tapped again, and off he went to the far corner of the bathroom.

Relieved, I left him alone…just long enough to grab my new iphone. He hadn’t moved much, but his eyes were wide open as I knelt in front of him to snap his mug shot. This time I could hear him telling me off. “Eh, what you doing now? My tail going take t’ree weeks for grow back laddat, and now you going take my pict-cha? You like me say Cheese, too?”

When I opened the bathroom door, my waterlogged friend stammered out into the hall, heading toward the sleeping cat.

I got dressed, dried my hair, and headed out to the movies to see “Where The Wild Things Are.” It was okay.

In bed last night I imagined being awakened by an angry tailless gecko. “I tell you where da kine, wild things stay,” he’d whisper. “I stay looking at one wild buggah right hea!”

Let the wild rumpus start!

Zaffron Tonight

2009-10-17T01:05:00.004-10:00

Whenever an invitation from Zaffron proprietor Tai Khan comes our way, I fast after breakfast then head off at dinnertime for his Indian buffet in Downtown Honolulu. Tonight we dined with Tai, his wife Sheila, and friends Jason, Priya, and Stefan. The food as always delivered the best of North Indian flavors. The basmati rice topped with egg curry and spicy tomato chutney hit the epicurean spot, as did the keema beef curry, aloo sabzi, garbanzo beans, and fragrant biryani rice. The naan (white or wheat) was served steaming hot from their tandoor oven. I sampled the assortment of chutneys, and found the pineapple variety added the perfect punch to their tofu curry. As if that weren't enough, Tai and his wife Sheila reminded us to delve into the halwa for desert. Served piping hot, this semolina-based bowl of pure cardamom comfort, coupled with a second cup of homemade hot chai, lulled me into a blissful state of Indian La-La Land.

All the while, I'm sitting in front of a wall-to-wall Rajasthani horse mural on cloth, thinking to myself, I've got to find one of these on ebay...

Our dinner mates also lent to the magic. Jason and Priya, both scientists, gave us a taste of their technical lives as Priya described what exactly she does with computers, which unfortunately I cannot put into my own words...something to do with...it's beyond me. Jason teaches nuclear physics at UH, so I didn't even attempt to go there with him.

(Priya and Jason)

Tai Khan is originally from Fiji and plays soccer with my husband. He gets to wear the gold shorts as he is past the age of 60, which I find hard to believe when watching him play. When his soccer buddy Stefan showed up, the conversation quickly turned into a mixed plate of soccer, rugby, and global warming. I had to snap a shot of the three of them and their matching hairdos...

(Tai, Noel, and Stefan)

We continued on for three hours, enjoying the food, the company, and the homey atmosphere. Noah felt so at home that he gave up on us and retreated to his sleeping quarters...

Since Tai's wife Sheila is also a teacher, we relished in the idea of Fall break. And somehow when the conversation turned to the eating of bats as an Asian delicacy, we both agreed that no matter how tasty they might be, we would have to pass. Even though I'm known as the one who will try anything once, bats would have to be one of those rare exceptions.

(Tai, me, and Sheila)

If you live in Hawaii and want to eat some real, down-home Indian food, get on over to Zaffron on the corner of King and Smith Street. Get there after 6:30 so you can park free on King and not get towed. When you go there, tell them Deb Tenney sent you.

Namaste.

Now I Lay (or Lie) Me Down to Sleep?

2009-10-14T23:39:00.004-10:00

If you have an aversion to grammar lessons, then don't read this. But if you have always wondered about the "lay/lie" dilemma and want to start using these two devilish words correctly, then take a deep breath and continue reading.

Disclaimer: I am not a big bad grammar snob, in fact, I make all sorts of mistakes, especially when speaking to important people (or at least to people who thrust their importance at me). It's only because I have taught grammar for fifteen years to resistant teenagers that I feel entitled to offer, sacrificially, what I do know about this mean and scary subject.

So here it is, plain and simple.

Lay means to place and must have a noun connected to it. Example:

The chicken lays an egg.

If you want to use it in the past tense, then simply change it to laid. Example:

Yesterday, the chicken laid an egg.

Other examples of lay used correctly:

The student lays her books on the table.

I need to lay this tile in the bathroom.

INCORRECT: (but this is how everyone says it...)

I need to lay down.

I laid down yesterday.

See, there's no specific thing to place anywhere?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Now, let's deal with lie, which means to recline. Example:

I must lie down.

Changing it to the PAST TENSE is where we all start to go astray. Example:

Yesterday, I lay down under the tree.

Last month, the protesters lay across the road.

If you listen carefully, you'll hear this grammar blunder in many popular songs, which always bums me out if I happen to like the song.

Bonnie Raitt did it: Lay down with me/tell me no lies/just hold me close/and don't patronize me...

Chasing Cars did it in their ethereal "Snow Patrol": If I lay here/If I just lay here/would you lie with me/and just forget the world? (notice lie is correct)

A few years ago, one brilliant student of mine posed the million-dollar question:

"What about the verb "to lie" when you're talking about telling a lie?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"In the past tense, we don't say, 'I lay about my age last weekend to get into an R-rated movie.'" He continued, "Shouldn't we then be able to say, 'I lied down under the mango tree last night'"?
"No," I answered."
"Why?" he persisted.
"I don't know...I just work here," I told him and moved on to a feisty rant about why English teachers are all nuts.

The Italian Job and Then Some

2009-10-11T02:02:00.013-10:00

Yes, I drive a Mini Cooper, but no, this is not going to be a post about how wonderful it is to zoom around Hawaii in the cutest car ever made. No, this post is a tribute to all the jobs I’ve held over the past twenty-nine years. Yes, I started young.

Job #1: At fourteen-and-a-half years old, I received my first bona-fide paycheck from Los Alamitos Fish and Chip. Owned and operated by an ambitious Vietnamese family, LA Fish and Chip offered all the expected London fare with a South East Asian twist. My job was to fry up the orders in the back kitchen as they were shouted at me. The language barrier caused the most grief as I tried in earnest to decipher what exactly it was that I was supposed to prepare. Let’s say someone ordered one fish and chips, one shrimp/no chips, and two fish with extra chips—it sounded like this: One feesh cheep, one sheep no cheep, two feesh eshra cheep. Now say it really fast—a few dozen times, and there you have it. Thank God for Farrah, their four year old daughter, who would stand next to me and interpret.

Job #2: I have no idea what it was called, but it was a ritzy ice-cream parlor in Seal Beach, praised for their fine espressos and lattes. The owner was rarely ever there, and I worked alone most of the time. The five-mile bike ride, the loneliness, the forearm cramps from scooping ice cream, and the wrist burns from the milk steamer made me almost miss the feesh, cheep, and sheep job.

Job #3: Mr. T’s Auto Parts. I delivered auto parts every Saturday morning in a bright yellow Volkswagen Rabbit diesel truck all over the backstreets of Long Beach, Compton, Lynwood, and Watts (remember now, this is before the security of cell phones). At first I felt like a pony-tailed bimbo, but once I got my bearings (and ball-bearings) straightened out, I whipped around town dropping off axles and pistons and rack n’ pinions to macho mechanics who grew to respect me for my expert knowledge of gaskets and heads and hoses and fuses.

(this is not the actual truck, but it looked exactly like it)

Job #4: Le Polynesia. For ten years, I had the privilege of being a performer with this crème de le Polynesian crème of a dance troupe. We frequented yacht clubs, restaurants, and conventions as well as benefit shows for hospitals, veterans, and community fund raisers. Under the faithful instruction and leadership of Jr. and Ilima Montgomery, we were taught to preserve the languages and authentic dance forms of Tahiti, Hawaii, New Zealand, and Samoa. My most embarrassing moment on stage caught me with a huge chunk of my Tahitian skirt missing as I turbo-danced in front of a rowdy group of military dudes. Thankfully this happened before Youtube.

Linda, Claudia, Darlene, Renee, (me), & Guy

The Dynamic Duo: (me) & Claudia

Job #5: Bookstore clerk at Cypress College. Not fun.

Job #6: Ricabob’s Restaurant. Located directly across the street from the Los Alamitos Horse Race Track, this place taught me how to carry a lot of food on one arm and how to say no to wealthy gamblers with impossible promises. I also learned how to spill a Bloody Mary on Evel Knievel’s lap.

Job #7: Marri’s Pizza. My true Italian job, this was the real McCoy, New York pizza joint, and by far, the scariest of all my jobs. The mostaccioli, served flambé, singed my long hair more than once, and the proposals were, how do you say—adangeroso!

Job #8: Disneyland. During my five years at the “Happiest Place On Earth,” I sold skulls and snakes in Adventureland, Daniel Boone hats and rifles in Frontierland, light sabers in Tomorrowland, and Matson shiploads of stuffed Mickey’s and Minnie’s everywhere else. I also personalized hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those felted mouse-ear hats. My biggest challenge was trying to fit names like “Sharayahkenika” or “Mahealaninuikealoha” in the small space on the back of those popular hats. My last two years as lead/scheduler on the east side of Main Street taught me to appreciate people who never called in sick, especially the magicians. Let’s just say, I don’t do magic—at least not on purpose.

Job #9: Travelodge—across the street from Disneyland. I worked there while simultaneously working at Disney, mainly because I needed a place to stay for a while. The funny part was driving a huge shuttle bus full of tourists to Disney, only to have them see me later in the evening, working in the park, thinking I had a twin shuttle-driving sister.

Job #10: Aloha Animal Hospital. My first job in Hawaii, where I sat behind a receptionist counter, checking in a menagerie of wealthy animals with hangnails and chipped teeth. It was there that I fell head-over-heels in love with Sam, the Newfoundlander with enormous webbed feet and enough drool to create a slip n’ slide for all the dainty-footed Pomeranians and Pekinese puff balls.

(this is not Sam, but he looked exactly like this bad boy)

Job #11: Liberty House (now unfortunately Macy’s). I managed the Christmas department while six months pregnant for my first son and continued working/waddling there until I birthed my ten-pound wonder boy, Ryan (thank God for c-sections!)

Job #12: Private nanny. ‘Nough said.

Job #13: Preschool assistant. Ditto.

Job #14: Writer for University of Hawaii’s OPELE office (see my earlier blog post Angel in the Infield).

Job #15: English teacher—15 years and counting. Almost 1,600 students later, I can still say it’s the best job ever!

Job #16: Curriculum writer for Ohana Learning Foundation. Earned loads of money creating on-line lesson plans during my maternity leave for son #2. In spite of the generous non-fiction income, I'm sticking with the poor folks of fiction.

It’s been a wild ride, that’s for sure, but worth every clocked-in hour of it.

Six months ago tonight...

2009-10-08T01:05:00.004-10:00

...in the critical care unit at Honolulu’s Straub Medical Center, I didn’t know if I’d wake up the next morning here or on the other side of eternity. The day before, I left work early and drove myself to the ER because I had a sinking suspicion that something sinister had invaded my lungs. I even told my general practitioner that it felt like a baseball was rolling around in my left lung. She didn’t seem too concerned but told me, since I had a minor blood clot in my leg a few years back, to get a nuclear scan…just in case.

Good thing I did because it was during that radioactive scanning session that I suddenly lost the ability to breathe properly. Flat on my back, I lay there in the basement of the hospital, unable to notify the nuclear tech girl that I was in trouble. Strangely, I didn’t panic, but I did pray. It was the Monday before Good Friday, and I likened my discomfort to what I imagined the Lord went through while suffocating on the cross. When I silently asked what I should do, I saw Him (like a vision) there on the cross, twisting his upper body to breathe. So I did the same thing. Without much wiggle-room, I twisted as much as I could within the strict confines of the scanning machine. Nuclear Girl alerted me to remain still, and I tried to wave my hand at her. To my surprise, the twisting worked. Air was able to siphon into my lungs with each painful twist.

I must not have looked too well because when Nuclear Girl finally approached me, she instantly lugged me onto a wheelchair and whisked me down a long hallway, up an elevator, down another long hall and straightway into the ER. The pain in my chest was insurmountable, and the only way I could get air in was to continue using the Jesus-twist. Before I could blink twice, my clothes were being ripped (literally) off my body. I could almost hear my mom’s voice from Heaven saying, See? I told you for wear nice- kine panties ‘cause you nevah know when someone going see dem, laddat! Unfortunately, I could not remember which undergarments I had put on that morning. Being that it was a school day, I’m assuming they were suitable for a medical audience.

The next eight hours in the ER are more like vague snippets of a House episode. None of the ER doctors seemed to know what to make of me, this outwardly healthy-looking girl who couldn’t breathe; but when the blood/oxygen-level machine revealed that I was going down fast, chaos took over. It was at this point that I remember an ambulance medic bursting into my little curtained abode with an enormous hypodermic needle. As he shot me in the upper arm, I heard someone’s cell phone ringing with the Indiana Jones theme song, which somehow comforted me. Within a minute or so after my knight-and-shining ambulance medic’s shot, I was able to take in more air with less pain. This was a good thing, as I needed to make a few phone calls.

At some point, a nuclear specialist stood above me and told me I had a pulmonary embolism, and that it was very serious. A whole team of random people joined us and began asking me questions. Do you want a priest or a chaplain?...Do you have a living will?...Can we phone anyone for you?

To these questions, I answered respectively: No. No. Yes, I need to call my sub. We’re supposed to start Shakespeare tomorrow…oh and my husband…and Tina, my unofficial secretary who knows how to contact aliens on Uranus. The living-will lady came back at some point to pursue the issue. Look, I told her, all I have is a Mini Cooper, so just make sure my 19 year-old doesn’t get that because he can’t drive a stick. She left without another word.

The specialist came back and told me I had a 50/50 chance to survive this—that basically if the blood-thinners don’t thin fast enough, I’m doomed. At that point, I think my family had joined me, along with Tina, who assured me I was being covered in prayer by everyone she could contact. I pictured the Uranus dwellers on bended knee for me and again, felt comforted.

After I was deemed stable enough to be moved, I was delivered to the ICU for a sleepless night of constant attention. My personal nurse catered to me as if I were his favorite movie star. He checked on me constantly, and when he finished his middle-of-the-night rounds, he gave me a five-star foot and neck massage. I wanted to sleep, but I didn’t. What if I didn’t wake up here? What would happen to Noah? He’s only eight. Ryan will be okay. Husband even better. But Noah, my little guy, he needs me. And I need him to need me. I stayed awake by choice and watched the morning sneak in. The woman in the room next to me didn’t make it, and I had to listen to the family weep, the quiet voices, and then the rolling away of her bed.

The pain subsided quite a bit, so they upgraded me to critical care. I got a new room with a nicer view. My room had quickly become a forest of flowers from students and friends. The dozen yellow tulips from my faithful Vicki all mysteriously turned with bended stems to face me that night. At first I thought it was perhaps because of all the nuclear radiation within me, but then reasoned it must be because of the light glowing from behind my bed.

That same day, a new, super-specialist gave me the specific details of my condition. Wide-eyed, she explained that I had not just one blood clot, but several in both lungs, the largest consuming 30% of my left lung—baseball sized. She educated me on the ins and outs of blood clots, but I couldn’t process it all because I was TIRED! All I remember now is the way she explained that these clots had to travel through my heart first and then build up over time, like snowballs. It all started to make sense as I remembered how weary I’d been feeling over the past year. She also told me it would take at least a few months for the clots to reabsorb into my lungs.

The white areas show oxygen intake.
The black areas are the sinister clots (there's the mondo baseball one above)

So that was on the 7th of April. I remained there until the 13th. Two weeks after that I went in for a new scan, and to everyone's surprise, my lungs were clot-free. The super-specialist deemed it an "unexplainable and extraordinary case." The source of the clots still remains a mystery. I’m still on Coumadin, the main ingredient to poison rats, which means I still can’t shave my legs (Veet works best, but it’s expensive and it stinks).

Tonight, after my hip-hop class, I worked out…harder than normal. The guy on the treadmill in front of me wore a shirt that said, “Carpe Diem.” I spiked up my elliptical trainer to the highest level and thought to myself between deep breaths, You got that right. And I will continue to carpe as many diems as possible.

Lions and Tigers and Corporate Thugs, Oh My!

2009-10-02T22:42:00.008-10:00

Up the street from where I work, over a dozen businesses will be bulldozed next month to make way for a new Walgreens, and while I’m not the activist type by nature, I am tempted to prostrate myself in the parking lot or go on a Gandhi-esque hunger strike in order to keep Walgreens and their big, bad corporate thugs from disturbing our quaint little Nuuanu Shopping Plaza.

Radio Shack, Subway, TCBY, Supercuts, and Dominoes Pizza will probably relocate without much grief, but the rest—the family-owned small businesses—will most likely fall into the growing pit of mom-and-pop-shop fatalities. The Hungry Lion restaurant with its ancient banyan tree growing out of its rooftop will stay, as will the beloved Bangkok Chef—the unanimously best-rated Thai food joint on the island.

Unfortunately Huckleberry Farms, a down-home, grass-rootsy health-food establishment didn’t make the cut. I have frequented this operation for over fifteen years, enjoying the country-bumpkin feeling it offered, not to mention the hearty homemade soups, sandwiches, and Greek salads. The thought of not being able to run into Huck’s to grab some fresh herbs and couscous leaves me with an unexpected surge of insecurity and loss.

I’ll especially miss the expert consultants who have been able to tell me which natural remedy works best for upset stomachs, migraine headaches, insomnia, and just about any other plague that strikes. I remember being advised to try gingko to cure writer’s block, which either worked, or at least I believed it worked, as I finished writing my third (still unpublished) novel. Will the new Whole Foods establishment across town be able to fill this void? I doubt it. Down to Earth across from U. H. is more likely to get my business, but their spacey New Age spin sometimes gives me the willies.

I went to Huck’s after work this evening, and when I wrote my last check to this humble little store, I noticed everyone wandering about the half-empty aisles with that detached gaze often seen at funerals. From my car, I took a picture, and my eight year-old son asked me why they were going out of business. “Thugs,” I told him. “Big, bad, Walgreen thugs.” I know he didn’t totally understand, but his reply was profound.

“Well, I’m never going there,” he said. “Nobody should.”

http://www.starbulletin.com/business/20091001_Huckleberry_Farms_to_close_up_shop.html

Silence of the Man

2009-09-29T21:11:00.001-10:00

John Mayer cruised with me in my car this afternoon, crooning his Say What You Need To Say, and as I shifted into fifth gear, I cranked him up and joined in. The chorus repeats dozens of times and with John’s smooth set of pipes, the song, coupled with my rolling tires, accelerated me into a state of highway hypnosis.

There we were on the H-1 singing our duet, when I caught myself thinking I should have written the song first. Ever since I could formulate a word on my lips, it’s been my life’s motto, and those who really know me know that I rarely ever bite my tongue, even when silence seems the safer choice.

John Mayer would probably agree with me that silence has its time and place. I love silence so much that I actually schedule it into my busy life. It’s a necessity when you do what I do for a living. But when applied to human communication, silence usually proves itself the wimp. I have gone so far as to use silence as a weapon, which can wound a person far more deeply than a set of spoken words, but I’ve found the byproduct leaves me unsettled and unsatisfied. It’s like a sentence without a period

Don’t get me wrong. I do exercise caution, to such an extent that my favorite English teacher in high school used to call me a “cautious Bohemian.” I didn’t even know what that meant, didn’t really care either, but I get it now, and she was right. I’m unconventional enough, but not stupid.

So when it comes to the social ebb and flow of human communication, I lean on the windy side of care. I speak as I please, welcoming a keen verbal volley with anyone willing to play with me. People who get easily riled up over heated issues amuse me far more than they frustrate me. I’ll jump in wholeheartedly if the topic matters enough, or if I think I can illuminate an unseen facet, but don’t expect me to get all hot headed if there’s a disagreement. I’m a tame debater, unless of course you catch me on a bad day (especially if hormones are involved), and if I know I’m 100% right about the topic at hand, then look out below—I’m going to deal it out straight.

I’m not impetuous though, especially with weighty subject matter—like politics or religion. I have learned more about my own convictions when I listen constructively to the differing viewpoints of others. If the discussion turns into a verbal manslaughter, then (and only then), do I bite my tongue—but not clean off. I’ll usually change the subject by saying something along the lines of, “Hmmm, I wonder what Hannibal Lecter would have to say about all this?” It’s hilarious to observe the reactions—from quizzical laughter to an in-depth discourse on how Anthony Hopkins did way too good a job in that cannibalistic role.

The traffic slowed to a creeping crawl as John and I sang, You better know that in the end, It's better to say too much, than never to say what you need to say again. So what if the guy in the car next to me is watching me sing my way through bumper-to-bumper madness. Downshift, baby. Say what you need to say…

For the Love of Words

2009-09-28T18:33:00.009-10:00

William Safire packed up his pen and left us this past weekend. His passing will leave a gaping hole in the fabric of fine writing.

Every quarter, I dish out 32 words for my students to devour. It starts on the floor with sheets of butcher paper, colored pens and pencils, and an outpouring of adolescent ingenuity. These are not mere words that will be memorized and dumped after a multiple-choice test. No, these 32 words become a part of the daily vernacular, in class and out.

The posters, made in groups of three, never cease to impress me. I post them all over the classroom walls and refer to them often, and by the end of each quarter, most students have adopted their own pet words and go to great measures to work them into their teen lingo.

This quarter's favorite word? Palpable. I've heard it used at its best-- Mrs. Tenney's irritation is palpable when we don't shut up, and at its worst--Man, that fart was so palpable!

In honor of Word Master William Safire, I'm posting a few of this quarters' best vocab posters:

and my personal favorite:

First quarter ends this Friday. I'm brewing up a new batch of words for second quarter's word feast...

To Kill a Cock-a-Roach

2009-09-27T19:13:00.010-10:00

I slipped into a deep, blissful sleep last night, the kind that guarantees grandiose dreams of riding bareback on a polar bear through a chocolate forest—until somewhere around three in the morning I awoke to a Friday-the-13th mega-freak scream coming from the bathroom. While my always on-duty spouse investigated, a surge of intense perfume bombarded my bedroom, which at first made me question if I was actually awake.

Apparently my little guy Noah, while making a middle-of-the-night potty run, was attacked by a B-52, dive-bombing cock-a-roach (that’s how we say it here, cock-a-roach), and in his groggy state of bladder-relieving horror, he armed himself with my most revered bottle of perfume. He could have, should have, used the can of Scrubbing Bubbles and shot the six-legged terrorist with a blast of foaming fury, but no—he chose Burberry London, leaving not only the bathroom, but the entire house smelling of its aromatic aftermath.

Before being finished off by the size-12 rubbah slippah, the roach lay there dying on the bathroom floor, backstroking in a pool of Burberry.

What the Flush?

2009-09-24T22:52:00.003-10:00

I’ll never forget the first time I encountered an automatic toilet flusher. My friend and I entered the bathroom at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, completely unwarned. When I stood up to button my jeans, the toilet did the unthinkable and flushed itself. I leapt off the floor, landing a half-twist to face the conspicuous bowl. In the stall next to me, my friend’s toilet flushed, and I heard a shrill “Oh!” Then, because she’s 100% vision-impaired, she shouted, “Hey, who flushed my toilet?”

“Must be the same person who flushed mine,” I answered, knocking on her door to alert her.

Her door flew open and there she was looking befuddled. We went to wash our hands and discovered the shiny new faucets had no handles. The woman next to me waved her hand in front of the spigot, and miraculous water poured forth. I showed this to my 100% vision-impaired friend, and she liked it so much that she washed and rewashed.

We laughed it off as I proposed my theory that the mall must have a guy sitting in a dark room with monitors that show when to push the flush buttons. Scratching his hairy belly, he just sits there all day with a bag of chips and a beer, waiting for the innocent potty people to stand up. “Say cheese, sucker,” he says then pushes his little red button. My friend added that it must be Toilet Man’s wife who does the hand washing.

That was at least ten years ago, and now at the new (3 year old) campus where I teach, we have an impressive LEED certified, fully “green” faculty bathroom, designed to conserve water and keep our environment from going down the proverbial toilet. Yes, the toilet has an automatic flusher, but this is no ordinary deal. This faculty flusher behaves overzealously every time you sit down, flushing upon any movement whatsoever. So if the potty person wants to read something, he better not turn the page. It’s so annoying that I resorted to using Post-it notes to cover up the sensor until I was good and ready. Little did I know that doing this would trip up the system, resulting in an endless series of flushes, hence depleting the Honolulu Board of Water Supply’s supply.

It’s enough to send me to the outhouse, where, knowing my luck, there’ll be an automatic bidet ready, willing, and able.

Angel in the Infield

2009-09-22T21:11:00.004-10:00

Don’t ask me how this happened, but as an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii back in 1994, I wound up writing for the on-campus OPELE Foundation, an organization designed to recognize and empower the African-American community. My work revolved around the quarterly newsletter, where I mostly edited drafts of student interviews and current-events articles. Grant proposals were not my kuliana/forte, but I gave at it when needed.

Being half-Mediterranean, I’d never seen myself as entirely white, but in the OPELE office, I was hands-down the whitest person there. I did, however, enjoy the spirit of inclusion. I never felt like the unpicked player on the softball team. Sure there were inquiries. Was I Chuck’s girlfriend? No. Was I radical left-winger who wanted to immerse myself in racially heated issues? No. Was I a wanna-be Sweet Honey In The Rock gospel singer? Sort of. But in all honesty, I think I was just there to chunk off some tuition debt via work-study.

The perks that came along with the job abounded. I rubbed shoulders with Maya Angelou at her divinely appointed visitation, along with Sweet Honey in the Rock, at Andrew’s Amphitheater. I sat in on a down-and-dirty lecture given by Walter Dean Myers. But the zenith of my OPELE career involved coordinating a weeklong humdinger—fully loaded with inspirational readings and live entertainment. The culminating soiree at the Campus Center ballroom strutted a line of noteworthy guests including Anita Pointer, Hiawatha Hemphill, Sonya Wiley, and (gasp!) Danny Glover.

Aside from all the pre-event phone calls and red-tape paper trailing, my primary duty was to whip up the evening program and handcraft the written introduction for Mr. Glover, which after several hundred revisions, I had finally felt satisfied to hand over to one of my most-admired actors.

That’s when the hard drive crashed.

I lost everything before I had a chance to save it on one of those early 90’s floppy disc thingies. The event was two days away and I was curling into the thumb-sucking fetal position underneath the carcass of yet another crashed PC.

I rewrote the program and the introduction, and on the eve of Mr. Glover’s arrival, it was brought to our attention that we needed to provide his transportation from the airport to the campus. With our budget maxed, we had to think fast, and after calling several pricey limo services and upscale taxi companies, I found the solution living under my own roof: my very own, built-in police escort. Much to his delight, my HPD spouse became Danny Glover’s personal chauffeur.

The evening was a raving success. I savored my brief but meaningful moments with Danny. His warm laugh and sincere eyes made a lasting impression. The after-party, held at Ralph Lauren, gave me ample time to hob-nob with the others since Danny left early with his (and my) HPD escort to a hotel suite in Waikiki.

Tucked away somewhere in a box of college memorabilia is my OPELE program with Danny’s handwritten words of inspiration and encouragement.

Autumn, Schmautumn!

2009-09-21T22:44:00.005-10:00

Tonight is the last night of summer, which means absolutely nothing here in the land of eternal sunshine. It's 11:36, the moon's thin silver sliver hangs low in the sky, and a sweaty heat creeps around my leather chair as my hair clings to the back of my perspiring neck. Forget the idiom that warrants women as not sweating but rather glowing--here it's pure, last-night-of-summer sweat. Sure, it's tropical, but it's thirty minutes before Fall and nothing is falling, except for maybe a few transplanted shower trees from India, a beautiful sight, nonetheless.

No, I won't be buying a new sweater anytime soon, but it's the last night of summer and the pikake flower, cousin of the night-blooming jasmine, wafts heavy through my window and settles here with me in this quiet, waxing crescent of nightfall.

A Groovy Kind Of Job

2009-09-19T23:56:00.008-10:00

Francis Ford Coppola’s 3-D Captain EO, starring Michael Jackson, made its debut at Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Anaheim exactly twenty-three years ago yesterday, on September 18, 1986.

Amongst a team of privileged Disney employees, I was scheduled in to work a special 8-hour shift at the brand new, but not quite ready to open Star-Trader gift shop in Tomorrowland. Closed to the general public for this by-invitation-only event, the park would be inundated with celebrities and bigwigs a-plenty.

Bedecked in brand new red and gray (ugly and uncomfortable) costumes that made us look more like starchy outer-space flight attendants than merchandise vendors, my co-workers and I stood around during an official briefing on the protocol we were to strictly follow during this high-security, media-absorbed event. Our countertops were to remain spotless at all times, fully stocked with Captain EO everything, and as I had already learned from the extensive new-hire training/brainwashing I received two years prior, we would not be allowed to ask celebrities for autographs, nor would we be allowed to take pictures of, or with, anyone. In other words, we were expected to dehumanize ourselves and become a seamless part of Walt’s wild world of utopia.

Prior to this event, I’d had only one celebrity encounter to boast about, and it was one worth boasting about because it involved one of my favorite musicians and a pair of Minnie Mouse socks. It was a slow day at the park, and I was bored stiff, working in the Character Shop (soon to be transformed into the Star Trader). I had rearranged the souvenir bins, wiped and re-wiped the counters, and was about to go on break when an ordinary man with a proper British accent approached my register, asking if I could ring him up. He handed me a small pair of Minnie Mouse socks and his American Express card. I rang it up, bagged it then swiped his card through the credit machine. When I lifted the carbon sheet to check the hard copy of the draft, I saw the name Phil Collins. With my back facing him, I began to shake. I tried to take a deep breath to no avail. My mouth went dry as I turned to have him sign for his purchase. I stared at him while he signed away, and when he finished, I fumbled with the papers and tore off the top copy and handed it to him. “May I have my card back?” he asked me with an adorable smile. My insides melted as I pictured him singing “Take Me Home” in a private concert in the stock room. I handed him the card and wanted to say something normal, like “Have a nice day.” Instead, I said, “Um, thank you, Mr. Collins,” and giggled freakishly. He smiled again and walked away. I locked up my register, tempted first to rub the carbon signature on a paper but didn’t want to risk my job or something worse…

So as the Captain EO party started to roll, the celebrities began to surface in my shop. Sylvester Stallone and his Nordic blonde girlfriend/wife strolled by first. Then came Whoopi Goldberg, Nell Carter, and Cheryl Ladd. No one purchased anything for the longest time, until a woman who looked familiar approached my register to buy something. She was friendly and we chatted long enough for me to figure out she was Jo Anne Worley. I used to watch her on Laugh-In and Hollywood Squares. After Jo Anne came Chris Evert-Lloyd. Again, I don’t remember what she bought, but I do remember running her Visa through and checking to confirm that it was indeed her.
Like Joanne, Chris was very nice, too. She said she was excited to be there, and I told her I was excited to be there as well. It was all very surreal, and as the night wore on, I saw more famous people, including George Lucas, Francis Ford-Coppola, and (I think) Nicholas Cage. I didn’t see Michael Jackson though because I took my dinner break at the wrong time.

When I drove home that night, I remember being grateful for having such a cool job, but wishing I could have seen Mr. Collins again so I could say something more meaningful to him, but that would have been against all odds, right?

Ring of Fire

2009-09-18T00:01:00.008-10:00

Tonight my son Ryan took me on a "date" to the quaint Kumu Kahua Theatre in the heart of Downtown Honolulu to see The Statehood Project, a live performance with six actors dishing out 18 mini-dramas, each centered around the installment of Hawaii as the 50th state. The U. S. territory was admitted to the Union on August 21, 1959, and this year marks the 50th anniversary of this heated and controversy-ridden event.

Each of the 18 performances offered cutting-edge talent, coupled with raw, mid-Pacific ingenuity. My favorite of them, "Ballad of the Oldest Goat on Kaho'olawe," left me shivering in my seat after the line, "A bomb has no soul." It resonated between me and my almost-all-grown-up boy, and both of us sighed with the rest of the tiny audience in this tiny but sold-out theater when the monologue ended with, "Hawaii cannot attract tourists without Hawaiians."

Our island chain sits dead-center in the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by what geologists call the ring of fire. It's a vulnerable place to live, and over the past 20 years, I occasionally get inundated with these disturbing "what if..." thoughts:

What if the ring of fire explodes at the same time? What if the whole state gets covered by a mega-death tsunami? What if Hawaii loses its statehood and North Korea comes a-knocking? But worst of all: What if my first-born son only brought me, his literary mom, to the theater because he has a two-page expository paper to write up about the production, and he knew I'd be there taking notes?

Ghosts

2009-09-14T22:57:00.007-10:00

When I first saw the movie Ghost in 1990, I had been married for three years to a man who can fashion a piece of clay on a wheel into whatever he sets out to create. Bowls, mugs, vases, and my favorite: teapots. The process mind-boggled me. How he could take a lump of earth and slab it onto a wheel, add some water, and within minutes have something that will have a meaningful existence. I asked him once or twice to show me how he does it, but my feudal attempts only produced lop-sided, wobbling disasters that I redeemed in the name of abstract sculpture. Porcelain pinch-pots became my forte, but they cowered on the drying shelf next to his masterpieces.

Success at the wheel has something to do with consistency and balanced pressure--something that I have zero ability to do. Nothing about my personality is consistent, and the most balance I've ever experienced was on a gymnastics beam. Symetricality, which I'm sure is not a real word, does not exist in my topsy-turvy world.

So obviously, when I saw Patrick Swayze behind Demi Moore, guiding her clay-covered hands, I felt a surge of renewed hope. Perhaps I could learn this way, I thought while sitting next to my personal potter. We may have been holding hands in the theater, I can't remember, but for whatever reason, I let the idea run away. Maybe it's due to intimidation (he is a cop, after all), or maybe it's just my lack of patience; either way, I have remained the observer, or at best, the glazer.

Patrick Swayze has moved on today. He danced a good dance and stayed married to the same woman for 34 years. I was never a huge fan of Swayze's films, but he could dance, and a fine-dancing man deserves admiration.

I'm thinking it's a good time to buy a fresh bag of porcelain and gets some hands-on instruction. Here's to you, Patrick...

11 seconds

2009-09-11T23:06:00.003-10:00

It was 4:15 in the morning when I got out of bed, bleary-eyed, and stood in front of the t.v. My husband said something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center tower. I strained to focus on the images in front of me, and it soon registered that something unthinkable was happening.

My then eleven year-old son Ryan was on the north shore at sixth-grade camp while my other son Noah, eleven months old, slept away soundly in the still-dark morning. I didn't sit down until I saw the second plane crash into the other tower. That's when the numbness kicked in. It was hard to think, and while yes, I was thousands of miles away from ground zero, I was 100% there.

I could smell it, feel it, taste it, and when I saw the footage of a woman falling to her death after jumping from somewhere high above the inferno, I closed my eyes and held my breath as I recalled my physics professor eight years prior challenging us to apply Galileo's rate of acceleration equation to figure out how long it takes for an object to hit the ground after being dropped from a specific height. I figured in my head that it must have taken about eleven seconds to fall from a 110-story building.

Eleven seconds. It doesn't seem like a very long time until you actually put yourself there in a smoke-laden office with the realization that there would be no chance of rescue and then start the clock as you live out the eleven-second decent. It's an eternity, and what has haunted me over the past eight years is what each of those who jumped must have thought about during those final eleven seconds. I've even stopped in my tracks a few times and tried to imagine what I would think about during my last eleven seconds. My kids. My dog. The unforgivable dirty dishes. The impact. The phone call I should have returned to a friend, but didn't.

Go ahead and time it.

september 10

2009-09-09T22:17:00.007-10:00

The 50th State

2009-09-07T23:57:00.003-10:00

A good friend of mine who used to live here in Hawaii is in town for a week. With her is her daughter, grand daughter, friend, and friend's daughter. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas to figure out where to hang on Labor Day and wound up doing the Honolulu Zoo for the little one's sake (and mine), then on to Waikiki Beach, where we baked and swam for a good two or so hours.

At some point in our conversation, we were talking about the places visitors should avoid. Here's my take:

1. Starbucks--I'm not a coffee drinker, but I suggest Mocha Java at Ward Centre or Honolulu Coffee Company (locations at Ala Moana Shopping Center, 3rd floor; Moana Hotel in Waikiki; Sheraton Hotel in Waikiki; or Bishop Square in Downtown Honolulu at Bishop and King Street). These coffee shops are locally owned and operated and have much better Konas.

2. Walmart--yes, they sell cheap Hawaiian souvenirs, but come on, it's WALMART. Instead, plan a trip to the Aloha Stadium on a Saturday or Wednesday and buy from local vendors, many of which sell unique wares not to be found even in tourist-laden Waikiki.

3. Neiman Marcus--just don't go there.

4. Tanning salons--hello.

5. Taco Bell, McDonalds, Jack-n-the-Box, Burger King, Pizza Hut, et al--instead try Zippy's, Hawaii's own locally established fast-food joint. Against my local grain, I will recommend California Pizza Kitchen at Kahala Mall only because my son works there. Otherwise I'd say, "pass" on this place as well because we're in Hawaii, not California. Thank God!

There are plenty of other great places to visit here in the Aloha state. One of my favorites: Ice Palace in Aiea. It's the only bona fide ice skating rink in the state, a place to go when you really want to put on a sweater and mittens and show off some blade action. You can even see your breath when you exhale!

...and then there was the time I

2009-09-04T08:23:00.000-10:00

baked corn-on-the-cob. I was tired. Brutally exhausted from cramming the night before for a Wines and Foods of the World exam (I was majoring in travel careers at the time with high hopes of landing an airline job).

I buttered up the first ear of raw corn, sprinkled it with cayenne pepper, and tore off a sheet of aluminum foil. It was then that I remembered the last time I had made corn, how I had blistered my fingers trying to insert those plastic corn holders, the ones that look like miniature cobs, into a steaming hot ear. The blisters were so bad that I was unable to play the piano for two weeks. No, I would not let that happen again.

After rummaging through the utensil drawer, I found the plastic holders. I needed eight but could only find seven. So one ear would only have one holder, which would have to suffice. In a premeditated act of near brilliance, I proceeded to plug the holders into their respective ears. I then securely wrapped each cob in foil and placed the four shiny subjects into my 400-degree, preheated oven.

My date, whom I later married, arrived hungry after a soccer game. He sat down by me on the couch and showed me his newest injuries. His back was sore, so I was about to offer a massage when he perked up his head, deer-like, and said he smelled smoke. I smelled it too--a toxic smoke, like burning rubber. That's when the black billowing puffs appeared out of the four corners of the oven.

With the swiftness of an L. A. firefighter, I dashed to the oven and opened it. I had recently learned in my air-safety class all the ways to extinguish various types of fires, but when I saw the black smoke barraging the kitchen, I couldn't conclude which type of extinguisher was designed to put out plastic corn holders. Seeing there was no actual fire, I turned off the oven, turned on the kitchen fan, opened the windows and doors, then peered inside at the charred remains. My date, whom I later married, remained nonplussed.

After the smoke cleared, I assessed the damage. Oozing out of each foil-wrapped ear were globs of yellowish-black melted plastic. Hopeful that the actual corn had survived, I grabbed--bare-handed--one of the cobs, reburning the same fingers from the last corn-cooking catastrophe. Remembering that my date, whom I later married, didn't like women who swore, I took a deep breath, looked at him from across the kitchen, and said, "Shucks!"

Perhaps due to the psychological ramifications of this disaster, what I don't remember now is what we actually ate that night. Or if we eat at all.

My Caption Was Selected For The Top Three!

2009-08-31T11:53:00.012-10:00

I just discovered that The New Yorker keeps a personal archive of all the captions I've submitted over the years. How nice of them. So here they all are.

50,000 Dollar Baby

2009-08-30T20:47:00.006-10:00

It's hard to imagine punching out someone named Jesus, but last night Hawaii's own Brian Viloria duked it out with Mexico's Jesus Iribe and won the IBF light flyweight world title.

Over 3,000 showed up at the Neil Blaisdell Arena to watch Brian and Jesus go at it, Hawaiian style. Viloria entered the ring, the Hawaii Five-O theme song blasting, with a line of hula dancers and supporters carrying both the Hawaiian and Philippine flags.

Viloria stated in the Honolulu Advertiser, "Jesus came to fight, man...he was no walkover. He brought his A game. Luckily, I brought my A game and we got to put on a great show."

So why would a girl like me be so excited about a boxing match like this? It's in my blood...literally. Out of the six uncles on my mom's side, four of them were competitive boxers, one being my beloved uncle Ben Avilla (below), who put up his dukes to cancer but sadly lost the match in 05. No doubt he would have been there last night. Uncle Splint (also a boxer) is the last living of the 14 Avillas. I need to call him this week to see if he was there. I'm betting that if he was, his imagination would have put him in the ring, glove to glove with Jesus.

Viloria received $50,000 for the bout. Iribe received $10,000. Less than they deserve, that's for sure, but it's never about the money, is it?

If I Could See Dead People...

2009-08-28T23:38:00.006-10:00

I got to thinking the other night about who really deserves to be on my list of dead people I wish I could have met. Originally, I had T. S. Eliot as my leading dead man with Edith Wharton right behind him, but then I remembered John the Apostle and his exile to the Greek island of Patmos and realized he is definitely more important to me than my wannbe husband, T. S. Eliot. So after a long walk in the wind with my dog tonight, here is the list as I now see it:

1. John the Apostle (oh the questions I'd want to ask him...)

2. T. S. Eliot (I'd be very giddy, perhaps near hyperventilation, just to be in the same room with him)

3. Edith Wharton (we'd totally hit it off, I'm sure)

4. King Solomon (by far one of the best poets in all of recorded history, I'd want to hear him in his Hebrew native tongue read the entire Song of Solomon to me)

5. William Shakespeare (I would have to impress him with my recitation of Beatrice's lines from Much Ado About Nothing--after teaching it every year for 15 years, I've got nearly the entire play memorized..."What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true? Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much? Contempt, farewell. And maiden pride, adieu. No glory lives behind the back of such. And Benedick, love on. I will requite thee, taming my wild heart into thy loving hand...yadda yadda)

6. Rich Mullins (he'd have to sing "These Days" for me then I'd have him teach me how to play the hammer dulcimer)

7. My maternal grandmother (vovo) Mary Avilla (I'd hug her and give her a neck rub--she gave birth to 14 children!)

8. My paternal grandmother Beda Johanson (she's from Lapland, part of the Sami tribe, so I'd have a lot to learn from her--she gave birth to 9 children and died when my dad was 5)

9. Leonardo Da Vinci (to show him how I can mirror write as good as he did)

10. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (I'd cook up my best vindaloo masala, sans the chicken, for him and try to learn something about passive resistance)

I guess that about wraps it up for tonight. I'm expecting weird dreams tonight...

More Food For Thought

2009-08-27T13:59:00.004-10:00

Because so many people liked my cat tuna tale, I feel compelled to spill the beans all over the page and purge myself of yet another tragic kitchen catastrophe.

As one of my most memorable mishaps, this one has to do with my first attempt at trying to cut up a whole chicken. Since I'm using this real-life scene as the opener for my novel Bum-bye, I'll do a quick cut/paste job of my first three paragraphs:

Cleaver in hand, I psyche myself up for the slaughter. I’m staring at a dead chicken sprawled out on my mom’s old cutting board. Its wings are bent in a way that say, “I surrender. You win.” I bought it this way at the grocery store, instead of a precut one because it costs $1.29 less to buy it whole. My mom always made it look so simple. I asked her to teach me many times, but she would wave me off and say in her Portuguese-Hawaiian pidgin, “Eh, no worries. Bum-bye, I teach you.” But she got sick in June of ‘84 and died Thanksgiving night, leaving me here six months later in her kitchen, not even knowing how to boil an egg or make a pot of rice.

I really don’t want to do this but I’m sick of Top Ramen and Pop-tarts, so with an uneasy breath, I take a swing at the pink heap of raw carnage. The blunt chop on the wooden board sends a splattering of bloody liquid to my upper lip, which I wipe with my sleeve. The left leg comes off clean and I’m feeling a surge of adrenaline, so I go for the right leg, which unfortunately does not come off. The leg is still attached by threads of muscle and tendon between the thigh joint and the body, so I grasp it and twist. The bone clicks out of the socket, and a blue rubbery vein dangles out. The clammy pimpled chicken skin is pulling back from its flesh, and yellow fat globules are clinging to each other. With both hands, I pull and twist in desperation, but the crunching of bone and tendon is freaking me out.

Reaching into the body cavity, I grasp onto the ribcage and hurl the whole thing across the kitchen. It lands with a splat on the floor by the fridge. I plunge the cleaver into the sink and run my trembling hands through my hair, until I remember they are covered in chicken slime. Crouching beside the counter on the brown linoleum floor, I can’t control my breathing. “Come on,” I say out loud. “It’s just a chicken.” Retrieving the mutilated carcass, I scoop it up and take it to the sink. I wash it off with hot water and a dab of Palmolive dish soap and place it with its half-severed leg on a cookie sheet.

While the novel is fiction, this scene is not. Neither is the next scene where Gabi gets confronted by her half-baked, soon-to-be stepmother, Wanda, and the chicken never gets cooked because the oven never gets turned on. If you want to know what will happen from there, you'll have to pray the book will get published so you can read it.

In the mean time, let me confess that I have yet to cut up a whole chicken. In fact, preparing chicken of any fashion still gives me the willies if I think too hard about it. I have many other culinary malfunctions up my apron, but those will come later.

Bon appetit!

I Be Normal

2009-08-26T15:43:00.003-10:00

The one and only time I saw Young Frankenstein I was about nine or ten, and what I remember from it (besides the cool Puttin' on the Ritz music), was the way Marty Feldman's eyes bulged in opposite directions while being strangled by Mel Brooks upon realizing that the brain Feldman had retrieved was not that of a genius scientist, but that of a mysterious person named Abby Normal. The misnomer had me cracking up for days after. After school today, I youtubed the scene, and there they were in pseudo black and white, funny as ever. I'll be Blockbustering that one this weekend.

What prompted me to remember this flick was a student who saw me mirror writing on my white board. She shook her head and said, "That's not normal!" I retorted with, "Hey, I be normal!" She wandered out of my room perplexed.

Zero is No Hero: A One-Minute Rant

2009-08-25T11:53:00.002-10:00

The school where I teach has abolished all sugary drinks, which means I can no longer wash down my mystery meat school lunch surprise with a traditional Coca-Cola on ice. So today I took my chances on a Coca-Cola Zero, and that's exactly what I got. ZERO! I'm baffled by this new product that tastes and looks like a chemical-laden cup of brown Perrier. It's an insult to Asa Griggs Candler, founder of Coca-Cola. You can see it in his eyes that he would have never tolerated such a product, let alone expected anyone to buy something that consists of nothing.

I know this rant has ZERO to do with anything literary, but how can I be literary when I'm left with such a bad taste in my mouth?

Julia's Child

2009-08-24T22:08:00.001-10:00

Leaving behind 60 ungraded papers on a Sunday evening to go to the movies could justify someone to tag me as an irresponsible teacher, but I did it anyway because that's what friends are for. Jenny and I went to Ward Theater last night to see Julie Julia, and I'm glad we did. The cuteness of it alone made it almost worth the $10 ticket, but watching Meryl Streep replicate Julia Child made it a cinematic souffle.

Growing up, I spent many a night with my mom watching Julia Child and her male TV counterpart, The Galloping Gourmet. These two earthy gourmands never failed to dish out an evening of caramelized comedy and lemon-zest laughs.

Anyone who knew my mom would tell you that not only was she a born comedienne, but her cooking never failed to deliver either. Garlic and onions took over the entire house when she'd spark up the stove, and everything she cooked, even the modest recipes from Ms. Child's TV show, always took on an exotic Portuguese flair. Picture here a traditional Thanksgiving stuffing topped with chopped yellow chili pepper and sizzling Portuguese sausage.

Now one would think with all this exposure I had to the culinary arts, I would perhaps through osmosis have become at least proficient in front of the stove. Sadly though, I must confess that while I love the idea of cooking...the hunting for ingredients, the prep bowls, the mortar and pestle...I am all thumbs. In fact, I almost lost one of my thumbs while chopping an onion with my favorite Cutco chef's knife. I also sliced through the nail of my middle finger with a 14-inch serrated knife oozing with raw chicken goo. That one sent me to the ER for a tetanus shot and antibiotics.

And then there was the tuna casserole. It was my first solo attempt, and I was in a hurry, hoping to impress my date with a savory home-cooked meal and must not have been paying close enough attention to what I was doing. My date (let's call him Joe), arrived to a romantically lit dining room fully bedecked with my mom's fine linen, expensive German crystal, and authentic Japanese china. I know he was impressed because he sat down and said, "Wow."

Before serving up the casserole, I drizzled hot butter and sprinkled crispy pretzels on top. The recipe called for those crispy onion things that come in a can, but upon realizing I didn't get those, I substituted the pretzels in their place. Guys love pretzels anyway, right? So we sat there at the table, sipping Canada Dry ginger ale in the crystal wine glasses and he made a toast: "To Debra!" I blushed then sipped delicately. He grabbed his fork and dug in. I watched for his reaction, for his approval, but what I got was not an "Mmm," but more of a "Hmm." I took a bite and to my horror found the texture and the flavor to be not right at all. I took another bite, drank some more ginger ale then tried it again. My taste buds detected something along the lines of rotting fish, and the gristly texture only added to the nightmare-in-progress. Joe didn't say anything while he chomped away mouthfuls of the stuff, and when I couldn't take it any longer, I told him I was sorry it didn't turn out right. But Joe, God bless him, continued eating to the last bite. I don't know how he did it.

I took our plates to the sink, and when I flipped open the lid of the trashcan, I gasped at the sight of the two empty cans of tuna I had used. They were those white with blue label generic cans, and the label shouted out at me from the depths of the garbage, "CAT TUNA!" I hid the evidence by scraping the demonic contents of my plate on top of the cans. Joe snuck up behind me and gave me a gracious hug, and I swear I heard him purr in my ear. I couldn't let the cat out of the bag, so I didn't. I never did. We went out for ice cream after he helped me with the dishes, and I had a triple scoop of something minty, just in case there would be a goodnight kiss, which there was.

Right about now I'm wondering whatever happened to Joe. If he's married, his wife is a lucky woman. I just hope she cooks better than I do.

Do my survey at the bottom of this page...

2009-08-24T01:01:00.002-10:00

I just discovered a way to add surveys...what fun! I'll try to put more creative ones up next week. I've been to 21 states so far...29 to go!

Invisible Mom

2009-08-23T01:00:00.004-10:00

So next to Edith Wharton is Ralph Ellison and his Invisible Man. I have read it twice, and I've yet to scratch the surface of its true depth. Basically Ellison's nameless protagonist goes about life in Harlem as a black man in a white man's world. His intellect and pure drive to succeed get him nowhere, except another step closer to the impenetrable glass ceiling.

But the scene that wrenches my heart most takes place on a frigid winter evening when the main character watches an elderly black couple getting evicted from their apartment (chapter 13). All of their belongs line the curbside: straightening iron, miniature Statue of Liberty, an old cracked breast pump, amongst many other personal items. Snow is falling, and this couple can do nothing else but watch. The scene is so real to me that I feel I know this couple and that I should have been able to take them in until they figured things out. After all, I went through a much similar ordeal, sans the snow, when my mom died and I wound up living out of my car.

My mom would have never let the eviction take place, neither to me nor to the old couple. She took in strangers all the time. Because she didn't drive, she met all sorts of people around the neighborhood, and many times I would come home from school only to find a new person sitting on my couch or at the kitchen table. These were almost always people who were down and out--single moms or lonely wives. I had no idea how many of these people she really knew until her funeral, when over 250 people showed up and signed the guest book. Many of these were women who tearfully introduced themselves to me as one of Irene's friends. It was overwhelming to not know so many people at such in intimate moment, but I was proud of her for never turning down someone in need.

It's been twenty-five years of not being able to see my mom. Twenty-five years of trying to be more like her and less like my selfish old self.

More on Time

2009-08-21T18:53:00.003-10:00

A Choice

It’s just me and one cricket now
and the clock on the wall
cricket, clock, and me
three rhythms
one choice

Even the lonely bars and their windowless sadness
sleep now
emptied bottles,
cold worn floors,
and forgotten phone numbers
a sickening silence of bad choices

Steady into the night now
I match the clock,
but the cricket is faster
What a disaster is sleep

The cricket just stopped
Now it’s between me
and this clock.

--Deb E. Tenney, 2006

One more

2009-08-20T22:52:00.002-10:00

This one obviously didn't go over well with the New Yorker, but how could I resist?

Killing Time

2009-08-20T15:23:00.011-10:00

According to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics, I have a life-expectancy of 77.9 years. That’s 28,433.5 days. I can subtract 9,477 days for an ideal eight hours of sleep per night, and that leaves me with 18,956.5 days to do whatever I must do.

Due to the nature of my life—(up at 6 am, in class by 7:15, teach five classes of eighth grade English in a row till 2:15, attend meetings, grade myriad papers, contact desperate parents, chat with students both past and present who come in share with me what’s going on in their lives...then pick up third-grade son before 5, make dinner (or buy something), grade more papers, edit police reports, wrestle one kid to take a shower and the other to do the dishes, tell a story or two in bed and/or sing a song by 9, pray, then take out my reading materials (Dickens' Bleak House right now) and read with my one good eye till 11)—I usually write well past midnight.

By the end of the first paragraph of Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm, I could smell smoke-–not tragic burning-house smoke, but that of a fireplace in an old library. It took me two solid days to read the eleven-page excerpt one time through, and upon completing it, I felt like a child who had been lost all day in a corn maze and came out hours later at dusk, only to discover another corn maze.

Dillard says, “We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild." T. S. Eliot (my dead lover) confirms this by saying, “If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable." So I cannot buy back time after I spend it, but as a person of letters, I choose to spend a large chunk of my FREE-time with pen in hand, ready to capture images that beg to be recorded on paper, if not for anyone else’s pleasure but my own.

George Orwell’s advice to scrupulous writers is to ask four questions: “What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?” He adds that they will probably ask two more: “Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” While asking these questions expends more of my limited minutes, the outcome, if applied well, will produce writing that will save my readers from wasting their time.

Ever since digital technology has invaded my home, I have wrestled against the temptations to stare for hours at a pixilated monitor, playing online Scrabble or searching Ebay for an antique typewriter, which I did find for $100—a 1950’s Royal, aqua blue gem.

But I never stare at a blank screen. No time to. Lucky for me, I have an energetic muse, sneaking around throughout my day, giving me new plot directions and settings and so forth. She and I work together like cats: dormantly lounging about on the mental windowsills of my day, thinking about the kill later on when the moon comes out. When the noises around us have subsided, we get that urge to pounce the keyboard. It’s a wild game of stalk the idea and attack. Stalk…Attack! If it’s not a school night, we can do this past 2 am. It may not be an ideal way to work, but it works.

I may kill time by playing the piano, knitting a sweater, or repairing a toilet. Whatever it is I’ve done with my time, I make sure I at least do it wholeheartedly. If I kill time by doing such actions without my senses fully engaged, then I’m a second-hand murderer, and as Eliot would say, “We had the experience but missed the meaning." If I miss the meaning behind what it is that I’m doing, then I may as well put my pen away for good and sell my soul to the highest bidder.

From Annie Dillard, I am learning the importance of images. Dillard’s grotesque image of a dead moth burning for hours like a candle seared my mind for days, and if I closed my eyes, I saw with even more clarity, how “when it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs." Now, nearly two years after the initial shock of reading it, I still see the image, but my feelings about it have changed. The burning moth is my time: “This spectacular skeleton began to act as a wick." My time may burn on a wick for 77.9 years, give or take a few, and after a close-call in April, I have to accept that fact that I will at some point be blown out.

Eliot’s Four Quartets, especially at the beginning of the East Coker chapter, uses clear ecclesiastical images to depict the passing of time: "Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf/Houses live and die: there is a time for building/And a time for living and for generation/And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane/And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots/And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto."

When I rub a moth’s wings they turn to dust. My body, likewise, will turn to dust when my clock stops. There’s no time in dust, but the smoke lingers in the library long after the writers have gone.

Captioning

2009-08-20T09:11:00.003-10:00

While this has very little to do with film, I'm posting it anyway. Every once in awhile, I enter the New Yorker's caption contest. This is one of my captions, which unfortunately did not make the cut. Check out this week's contest at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/caption/

I entered this week and want to hear how others would captionize it...

My Little Bite on Twilight

2009-08-19T16:38:00.004-10:00

Stephanie Meyer is earning way too much money. While clearly pop-fiction and not in anyway literary (note: six ghastly adverbs on page 173, two of which are “frostily” and “minutely”), the writing spirals downward and lands with a thud on page 459: “’Shhhh,’ he shushed me. ‘Everything’s all right now.’” No, Ms. Meyers, it's not all right. That's just plain bad writing.

Freakish Update

2009-08-18T20:09:00.004-10:00

Okay, so I went on google to see if there's any info about Wharton's estate, and I not only found their website, but I found their blog, which freakishly uses the same blogspot template as mine:

http://helpsavethemount.blogspot.com

According their website (http://www.edithwharton.org/), the funds have been raised to avoid foreclosure, so The Mount will prevail! I'm going to become a financial supporter, and one day I'm going to go there...come hell or high water!

Smiles.

A House of Worth

2009-08-18T11:18:00.008-10:00

Speaking of Edith Wharton, she's #2 on my top-ten list of dead people I wish I could have met. T. S. Eliot is, and always will be, my #1 dead person I not only wish I could have met, but he's also the man I wish I could have married. Unfortunately, he died the year I was born. But Edith, who is like a sinister, dichotomous stepsister of Jane Austin, would be my ultimate BFF--the one to whom I would tell my darkest secrets while devouring hot cinnamon scones and chai at the estate she designed and built in 1902 in Lennox, Massachusetts called The Mount (see pic).

According to Wikipedia, the house and its gardens are still open to the public from May through October although the house/museum has been threatened to foreclose. This is Edith's real-life House of Mirth, a place where one could find the "ah-ness" of living. How tragic it would be to board up the doors of this signature piece of her treasure.

A Page of Innocence

2009-08-16T12:46:00.002-10:00

When I applied for the MFA program at Pacific University, my critical essay on this timeless piece of fine literature is what secured my ticket...

To appreciate Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Age of Innocence, you have to understand the almost forgotten practice of moral obligation. In our “Sex in the City” subculture, moral obligation means breaking up one short-term relationship via email ten minutes before having sex with a next-door neighbor. Even if the chocolate fountain, the ice sculpture, and the rainbow-tinted doves have been reserved, a simple click on the internet can delete all evidence of the mishap, and a few regretful emails can notify everyone that the wedding plans are off until further notice.

Set in upper-class New York City of the 1870s, the story revolves around a time when marriage rituals, especially of the wealthy, were sacred, unmovable, and intentionally frozen in an unbreakable mold. Through the events and imagery of this story, however, Wharton's tremulous undercurrent warns that blind adherence to this matrimonial taskmaster will eventually bring about unnecessary suffering and loss.

Scorsese's film version of this, my all-time favorite book and film, shows Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) having relentless self-control to walk away from his unquenchable passion for one woman, the scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) to consider the best interest of another, namely his puritanical fiance, May Welland (Winona Ryder).

Even when Newland notes how May “burns like a young maple in the frost, and how he was proud of the glances others turned on her," he fails to recognize that his lack of warmth for May while she’s in her best form would cause this young maple in time to dry up and wither, leaving behind only the bitter frost of rejection.

Newland’s decision to continue with the marriage plans not only deprives him of his own future happiness; it likewise forces May into a cold and loveless marriage where she would only represent the “steadying sense of an unescapable duty” (208). The Countess Olenska, May’s not yet divorced cousin, tries to break out of the system by asking Newland if he is very much in love with May. But instead of a direct answer, Newland responds, “As much as a man can be." Obviously, since he could not bring himself to admit to the countess that he was indeed in love with May Welland, then May Welland is the last person Newland Archer should be marrying.

Shortly before the inevitable wedding, Newland helplessly confesses to Countess Olenska: “But you are the woman I would have married if it would have been possible for either of us." Olenska painfully rebukes him: “And you say that––when it’s you who‘ve made it impossible?” Countess Olenska rightfully blames Newland for his tepid ignorance in abiding by the rules of the moral taskmaster, yet she also allows his loyalty to tradition to shatter their chances of happiness and convinces him to stay with May.

Newland Archer, May Welland, and Countess Olenska all suffer the losses of painful decision-making. As Newland staggers off from his wedding day, which was “fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust," he winds up in a dustbowl of regrets, leaving him with morbid thoughts toward his new wife: “Yes, May might die––people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might die and set him suddenly free." In the meantime, Countess Olenska becomes “almost unthinkable, remaining in Newland’s memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts."

Even though Newland Archer promises Countess Olenska that “nothing’s done that can’t be undone," he chooses to follow the predestined ghosts of his frozen ancestors. After a long-enough time, May Welland eventually dies––with one hand on the frigid innocence of hope and the other on the frozen bitterness of duty.

The last scene of this mind-boggling story has a much older Newland Archer with his grown-up son, standing in front of Ellen Olenska's window. I will not comment on what he does next as I would hate to spoil the ending for those hapless souls who have not yet read the book.

After reading this story four times over a sixteen-year period, it still remains on my shelf as one of the most "plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts."

Hairy Potter

2009-08-13T23:55:00.002-10:00

I've got this great blog title but not enough direction to write something meaningful about it. I saw the most recent HP film last weekend and was impressed with the overall effect, in spite of my lack of interest in the wizard/muggle world. I noted that Harry's all grown up now. His baby face from the first film has grown more angular, and he shaves. (I'll have to finish this when I can further extend the Hairy metaphor...)

2009-03-23T15:17:00.002-10:00

Goodwill Hunter (a mini saga of exactly 50 words)

I zoom in on this week’s half-price tag color. Red. My target: the dress rack, fully stocked. Honing in with inbred bargain instinct, I locate a retro-floral Betsy Johnson. Medium. Red tag. Bill bags it for $3.50. Later, my Neiman’s friend inquires. “Goodwill,” I boast. “They’ve got killer deals.”

A Few Good Pens

2009-03-12T16:25:00.002-10:00

Just like Dawson in A Few Good Men learns that he doesn't need to wear a badge on his arm to have honor, so too have I learned that I do not need an external ornament to obtain honor. In fact, I resist honor from anyone in the first place. That's where people go wrong...when they start convincing themselves that they deserve something that cannot be obtained. True honor is momentary and unexpected. It's more than a salute, but less than worship. It is impossible to live up to, and as soon as I start to believe that I deserve honor, or anything else to feed my ego for that matter, I will be on a crash-course with disappointment.

No, I don't need a badge or a salute, but what I do need is a few good moments to put down a few good words. I need a few good notepads and a wooden box filled with a few good pens.

Saturdays are for trying not to look busy...

2009-01-31T20:44:00.007-10:00

So I wake up at 9 and stare at the ceiling for at least 7 minutes, then I wander out of bed and wander back to bed, thinking, It's Saturday...geez. Then my friend Kathy, far away in Michigan, calls on my land line because my cell is broken (dead and buried), and I want to share my poem with her, which is impossible because my boy Noah sprayed Windex on the keyboard yesterday to clean it and fried the system. So we just blabbed until I realized I had to go to my eye doctor, which is all the way in Kaneohe (like 9 miles or something). We hung up and I bumped my appointment to 2:30 so I could tackle my mega-stack of dishes, add a new scene in my novel, and take a real shower. All the while, I'm thinking, Some Saturday.

I grab the dog and head out on my trek over the Pali, through the Koolaus, to Dr. Sakka's we go. The dog is happy, and I'm happy that he's happy. Husband and son are at their respective soccer games all day, so I'm in no real rush, except for the 2:30 appointment. I get there at 2:29. They let me bring Duke in, probably because he's so cute. After a slough of small adjustments, I got some new contacts...+450 for my left eye...+75 for my right. Still not enough depth perception, but much better overall. Then 9 miles back through the Koolaus, I listened to Maunalua's "Kaleohano", which made the drive more beautiful. The song has given me a vision for my Master's reading and critical intro. I feel inspired now.

After dropping Duke off at home, I headed back out to order a new cell phone, and to see if my keyboard could be resuscitated. It couldn't, so $80 later, I leave the Apple store feeling like buying something pretty. I prance into Betsy Johnson, look at the sale rack, then slump out. I go home, where I am now, and hook up my new keyboard, and we are. It's getting late, and I'm tired, and it's Saturday...geez!