Poetry 1

19Jun09

Just some of my favorite poetry. Each one moves me in different ways.

Mother by Nagase Kyoko

I am always aware of my mother,
ominous, threatening,
a pain in the depths of my consciousness.
My mother is like a shell,
so easily broken.
Yet the fact that I was born
bearing my mother’s shadow
cannot be changed.
She is like a cherished, bitter dream
my nerves cannot forget
even after I awake.
She prevents all freedom of movement.
If I move she quickly breaks,
and the splinters stab me.

Your Catfish Friend | Richard Brautigan
If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, “It’s beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,”
I’d love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, “I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them.”

(”The Quiet World”) | Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long
distance lover and proudly say
I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, I know
she’s used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

“To Love Life” | Ellen Bass
The thing is
to love life
to love it even when you have no
stomach for it, when everything you’ve held
dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands
and your throat is filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you so heavily
it’s like heat, tropical, moist
thickening the air so it’s heavy like water
more fit for gills than lungs.
When grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief.
How long can a body withstand this? you think,
and yet you hold life like a face between your palms,
a plain face, with no charming smile
or twinkle in her eye,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you again

“Resignation” | Nikki Giovanni
I love you
because the earth turns round the sun
because the North wind blows north
sometimes
because the Pope is Catholic
and most Rabbis Jewish
because winters flow into springs
and the air clears after a storm
because only my love for you
despite the charms of gravity
keeps me from falling off this Earth
into another dimension
I love you
because it is the natural order of things

I love you
like the habit I picked up in college
of sleeping through lectures
or saying I’m sorry
when I get stopped for speeding
because I drink a glass of water
in the morning
and chain-smoke cigarettes
all through the day
because I take my coffee Black
and my milk with chocolate
because you keep my feet warm
though my life a mess
I love you
because I don’t want it
any other way.

I am helpless
in my love for you
It makes me so happy
to hear you call my name
I am amazed you can resist
locking me in an echo chamber
where your voice reverberates
through the four walls
sending me into spasmatic ecstasy
I love you
because it’s been so good
for so long
that if I didn’t love you
I’d have to be born again
and that is not a theological statement
I am pitiful in my love for you

The Dells tell me Love
is so simple
the thought though of you
sends indescribably delicious multitudinous
thrills throughout and through-in my body
I love you
because no two snowflakes are alike
and it is possible
if you stand tippy-toe
to walk between the raindrops
I love you
because I am afraid of the dark
and can’t sleep in the light
because I rub my eyes
when I wake up in the morning
and find you there
because you with all your magic powers were
determined that
I should love you
because there was nothing for you but that
I would love you

I love you
because you made me
want to love you
more than I love my privacy
my freedom my commitments
and responsibilities
I love you ’cause I changed my life
to love you
because you saw me one friday
afternoon and decided that I would
love you
I love you I love you I love you


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Grief by Mathew Dickman

06Jun09

I got this poem from exceptindreams.livejournal.com and I liked it alot. Especially when he talks about grief or a significant other as a purple gorilla.

“Grief”
Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.


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Curry Tarts, Kasutera and other treats

06Jun09

I made some curry tarts the other day. I need to fix my recipe for my curry filling though. It was a mixture of curry paste, coconut milk, beef, carrots, peas and raisins. I added a little bit of corn starch to thicken it. I refrigerated afterwards so that it would harden and then wrapped them with puff pastry. I then brushed egg yolk over them. I used puff pastry sheets by Partridge. here are some pictures of it, but the ones my brother made came apart since he didn’t seal them well enough

I also tried to make Matcha Kasutera, but it didn’t come out as well as I thought it would be. It didn’t have the same fluffiness as the storebought ones. I don’t know what what happened, but here are the pictures. I used Pichet Ong’s recipe.



I wish I was brave enough to make a Gruyère…

but, I made a carrot cake and I thought it would be cool to put cherry blossom shaped candied carrots on top of the carrot cake. unfortunately the frosting was too sweet.

I tried to make chocolate pudding with bananas on top but it didn’t work out. it tasted pretty nasty.

here’s my candied cherry blossom carrot pieces!

Mamon. How i love mamon. it’s basically a buttery sponge cake.

My favorite ice cream. I changed the color on photoshop because this is what it looks like in real life. well, that’s what i thought. well, maybe i’m colorblind. but this is supposed to be ube ice cream.

I made these chocolate/white swirl oatmeal cookies also.

I saw this on a website, and went pumpkin crazy. it’s a cream cheese pumpkin cake. the pumpkin cake tasted fine but the cream cheese was just plain weird. i just have to put less if there’s a next time.

Ube ice cream with mochi balls in a tapioca coconut desert/soup. My favorite.

Here’s a few pictures of my favorite asian buns from Canada. I think we bought it at Yaohan. I think below is the custard bun, but i’m not sure.

Here’s a green onion bun

This one is the curry bun…

This is the Indian curry bun. I didn’t know what the difference was between this one and the one above…

Ah! Chocolate Molasses cookies! I got the recipe from Martha Stewart. Soooo good. It simply melts in your mouth and it’s nice and spicy.



My favorite strawberry gummies from Pike place market. really sugary though. It’s actually dried strawberries, but it tastes like they put gelatin in it.


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Break….Will be back in a bit

21Oct08

School is just stressful at the moment and I need to manage my time better. I did have a few entries with many pictures on the back burner but I just got caught up with real life… 

 

besides, it’s not like anybody actually reads my blog. lol…


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Just my week and random stuff

18Aug08


I really like this book, which you can find here:
 
http://www.amazon.com/Dawoud-Bey-Pictures-Jock-Reynolds/dp/1597110434/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219087527&sr=8-1

It’s a collection of photographs of teenagers and a little essay by them, describing themselves and how others look at them. I like this one the most, especially the last two sentences:

Omar

I know that I shouldn’t but sometimes I wonder how other people look at me. What do they see first? My brown-ness, my beard, my cap, my clothes, the color of my eyes, the design of my T-shirt? I think that people see my skin color first. They probably see me as a brown guy. Then, they might see my black beard and my white kufi (prayer cap) and figure out I am Muslim. They see my most early qualities first. Brown, that’s the very color of the earth, the mud from which God created us. Sometimes I wonder what color my soul is. I hope that it’s the color of heaven.

I recently bought a Lomography Fisheye 2 camera and am very excited to see the results. I almost vowed not to buy anything, or at least not to withdraw any more money…but I don’t know anymore considering I want to buy the colorsplash part of the camera and also a Holga. that would be cool.

What would be even cooler would be a digital camera that has all these features of a Holga, Fisheye, SLR, and an automatic camera. Someone should make that. Unless, someone already did and I just don’t know about it.
Well, they do have a fisheye digital lens..but extremely expensive.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0506/05063001olympus_fisheye.asp

There is a tutorial to make it in less than $20 though.

http://www.dphotojournal.com/diy-make-a-fisheye-digital-camera-for-20/

And I also found that there is a way to make the Holga effects with a digital camera…

But still! they should combine all these elements without switching lenses and paying more money! Just like a simple digital camera! Maybe in 50 or 100 years. I hope to live to see the day.

I also went to see the opera Aida at Mccaw hall yesterday (sunday). The ticket price was really good because of Teen Tix. $7 only! (including tax) The singing was really good, but I don’t think I appreciated it as much as I could have if I was more awake. It was 3 hours long after all. There was this couple who dressed really modern…or at least spent alot of time on their hair. The only problem is that I was in the second row and I had to stretch my neck to see the subtitles. After 2 hours…my neck began to ache.

I was dying…simply dying on Friday. It was much too hot. I was carrying this humongo piece of graphic tablet and three bags while treking from pioneer square to a couple blocks north of the convention center in downtown. Okay, I confess, the distance wasn’t that bad, but the heat! the heat made me want to faint at some point. I felt my heart pumping blood into my head and I had a pounding headache. I guess my reward for doing all this excercise and feeling horribly achy the next morning, is eating crepes, getting new clothes, and seeing my friends. Oh, what I do for the people I care for. At the same time, I’m so out of shape and haven’t done like zero excercise

Oh yeah, I thought this was funny, it’s from the August 2008 copy of Vanity Fair:

 


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