[mah-mee-lah-pin-yah-tah-pie] 1. a look shared by two people who both wish to initiate something but who are both reluctant to suggest or offer themselves; 2. considered one of the most difficult words to translate succinctly; 3. I am head over heels in love with this word.
when You are
not here I am
missing a critical
part of my equation
something so basic
I only notice gone
when You are far
I am missing
a vital part of my
whole the contours
of Your profile have
been carved so
precisely to my
own when You
are not here I am
a clumsy flamingo
trying hard to stand
gracefully on one leg
when You are not
here I cannot do it
I feel a break —
an abiding ache
Out of bed but
not awake — a
fool and a fake.
I’ve grown a thick skin for emotionally-charged Internet propaganda (especially the ones accompanied by cute drawings) that prey on my vulnerable state of mind with false hopes, delusions of grandeur, and improbable, impossible, or vomit-inducing representations of “true” love. But every once in a while, I come across something that is worth sharing — or at least worth stopping and thinking about … collectively.
I got this one from someone on facebook who just added me. And, lo and behold, she’s already posting all kinds of great stuff (I just unfriended her — ended up being a fat old lady who bathed me when I was a baby — ew!). Who doesn’t love that?! My translation in the title is frugal, though. Translating it more fully would read: “The beautiful delights me. But the sincere, ah, it fascinates me.”
Trust me, it sounds much more pleasant on the ears and on the soul in Portuguese.
Tru dat.
Since I stumbled upon King Charles’s Wikipedia page a little more than a month ago in which he was described as an “occasional shaman who tramples the boundary of cool/not cool,” I knew I had found my next favorite singer/songwriter. Since I visited his page this January, the guy has been getting quite the buzz and with the buzz of a soaring music career comes a combover of one’s Wikipedia page which dispensed with the aforementioned description.
But with lyrics like this, who could stay away?
“Never let a woman go
Even when you know
She can always be replaced
She can always be replaced.”and
“You’ve the strength of the Greeks
You are God’s masterpiece
You’re every triumph, every victory
I believe in every breath you breathe.”
Check him out:
or
There once was a little English teacher in China who mistook himself for a linguist. Yeah, I know, horrible, right? He was often asked questions about English that he had no idea how to answer (i.e. What’s the difference between use and usage?).
So he did what every other expert around him has done at one time or another: He acted like he knew the answer and provided a highly ambiguous yet sobering academic response that confused and confounded his students — or colleagues — into never asking any more questions — ever! After all, when it comes down to securing a paycheck, it is better to stifle learning and creativity than being honest about your inability to perform professionally as an English teacher.
(The bad side of “fake it until you make it” is that you might have to fake it for the rest of your life, which is actually surprisingly easy to do as long as your bank account is refilled monthly.)
But he didn’t stop there. Oh no. At times he thought himself a philosopher and at others a theologian. Living in China has its perks beyond the obvious. When you look around everyday and you see so many people living such different lives, thinking such different thoughts, eating such different foods, and not being angry about such obvious nerve-wracking things, you can’t help but wonder about God and his (non)existence.
What was the little English teacher thinking? Doesn’t he know he’s just a little English teacher in China? Maybe he should stick to what he knows — although it may be greatly overestimated, I hear.
They lived in a dark world, in a remote corner of a remote island where they found refuge from the bombs and the bullets. It had been years, decades maybe. At some point, the elders gave up on keeping time, believing it to be a worthless concept — when the end is so constantly near, your priorities change and certain ideas of how a civilized person should live, time being one of them, were left behind buried deep in the rubble and debris of lost cities and past lives.
The encampment included no more than a few hundred people including families, couples old and young, and stragglers, but it had less than half the amount of shelter needed to provide for all. Days were dark and grew even darker at night. The skies swirled in black and sickening clouds keeping away the light. The sun, hidden behind a facade of sulfur and pain, was an object of the past reserved for nostalgia and children’s stories. Fire was once again primal and vital, more now than it had ever been in the past.
Although calendars and clocks no longer found a useful purpose with the people, time was still celebrated. A ritual developed among the elders when, at certain times, they would hold up a torch and start singing loudly while the fire blazed above their heads. This call for attention was just the beginning and was meant to gather attention. They lasted for hours and the bonfire often burned for days. Often it…
The colony gathered around the elders with the torch — all eyes on the fire. It was a magnificent time. It was this ritual of fire that kept their time not in a chronological sense but with a much more meaningful significance. This was a time for inspiration when hope burned hotter and the coldness and sorrow of the present and the past were pushed away, if at least momentarily.
All gathered and lifted their eyes upon the fire. Children were made to sit quietly and look. The were made to sit and imagine a world without shadows, a world that shined brightly from dawn to dusk. And they did. As the elder swung the torch and shared the fire with the other elders, the children along with their parents would gasp in surprise and enjoyment. They focused their eyes on the balls of fire.
The warmth of the flame increasingly grew more intense. The spectacle continued to do what it was meant to do — if only for a moment, hopelessness was revived and the human spirit was once again ignited from a spark. These fire dances gave light for them to see what was possible or what could be possible. It illuminated not only their surroundings but also their minds.
For Marrick and Jenna it was different though. Instead of focusing on the torches and the bonfire, on the sources of light, they focused on each other. As the strong yellow and orange light burned away, their eyes searched each other’s faces. Not only with their eyes they also searched with their hands.
Marrick held her face close sometimes gently meeting her forehead with his own, breathing deeply and quickly pulling away to trace the contours of her eyes, the bridge of her nose, the curl of her lips and up again towards her eyebrows. Passing his hands through her hair and pushing it back, he looked at her thin neck and the burn scars that found its way down her shoulder and her back. He looked at her shoulder before bringing his hand back to her chin again to hold her face in his hands.
In a way, while the fire gave others hope for the future, it gave them the freedom to see each other. It gave them the opportunity to appreciate each other and they spent that time not in embrace or holding one another with eyes closed but in complete honesty, holding each other in regard and searching in anxiety the other’s face for words a thousand times spoken.
Winter comes and goes quickly
But Shantou stays cold
All year round it is freezing
The long-expected culmination of my M.A. program came on Saturday, two years after I finished coursework for the degree. I spent 8 hours writing three essays for the comprehensive competency examinations. On the first, I applied a critical theory (deconstructionism and its extension: postcolonial theory) to the year’s common text, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. I wrote, quite eloquently although probably incoherently, on themes of convergence and liminality in the novel. I’d rank this essay second in the pile.
The second essay I produced dealt with practical/pedagogical issues in the profession–teaching freshmen writing, more specifically. Since I am not in that context (of prostituting myself as part-time adjunct writing instructor at two or three community colleges in the U.S. without money to pay the rent at the end of the month), I wrote on my experience of teaching College English abroad to foreign language learners. I think this was my best essay.
My least favorite essay, the last one I worked on, was actually supposed to be the easiest from the three (hence why I left it for last). It was based on one of three committee/student generated questions. The exam proctor, I guess, chose one question from the three at random and I was expected to use whatever I could from my M.A. reading list. The problem was that the one question chosen asked for an inverse response to the subject of my mentored scholarly paper on the benefits of a digital writing environment on L2 writing. My reading list didn’t contain ANYTHING that pertained to this topic. Without much mental energy left, I wrote this third, and least successful essay, based on my own experiences without any outside material being incorporated into my response.
We’ll see how it turns out.