Asakiyume mita

We eat rice almost every night, so I buy it in 20-pound bags--Goya medium-grain rice. For us, it's pretty much as good as Japanese short-grain rice and less expensive. (Sometimes we have different rice--basmati or jasmine or wild rice, or any style of brown rice, but generally it's white Goya medium-grain rice.)

I like the look of the bags, and I thought it would be fun to use an empty bag as a bag ... and finally I got round to making one:

Here's the front, with a fold-over flap



And here's the back



Might take it grocery shopping with me next time I go!

In 2018, Wakanomori and I went for the first time to Colombia. We went just as an election was happening. We were in Bogotá, and we ended up walking through rallies for both candidates--the progressive ex-guerrilla and the conservative son of privilege. We ended up with some of the flyers for the progressive guy--they were bright and optimistic, and I made them into postcards:







We didn't know much about Colombian politics at the time, but we hoped he'd win:

But he lost. The conservative candidate, Iván Duque, won.

But then in 2022, the progressive ex-guerrilla won. And that's Gustavo Petro, who's in office now. So you know ... change does happen.

( My microfiction for today was partially inspired by the memory of picking up those flyers. )

Cumbia
Sometimes I have perfectly wonderful dreams--this morning, for example. I dreamed I was invited onto the dance floor to dance cumbia. I've had exactly one cumbia lesson in my life--not even a whole lesson; it was tacked onto a salsa lesson. But in the dream, I put aside all timidity, joined my partner, and it was perfect. We were so in sync; we improvised--I can catch the feeling just writing these words. This had the same joy as dreams of flying: incredible, freeing movement.

Krucial
The cashier was a young guy with fluffy hair pulled back in a pony tail. His name tag said "Krucial."
"That's an awesome name," I said.
"My mom gave it to me. It was on a wrapper," he said. [Maybe related to this: Krucial Rapid Response]
"That's great," I said. "You're crucial for your mom!"
"Awww, thank you!" he said, and and we high-fived.

Snowy Owl
A snowy owl has been hanging out near where I live. All the birders in the area are going there and taking pictures of it, and some of these have filtered into my social media, and they're magnificent, like this one, by someone named Dale Woods:


Sturgeon
Elsewhere on social media someone recommended the story "The Man Who Lost the Sea" (1959), by Theodore Sturgeon. I've never actually read anything by him, and the person linked to a 2009 reprint in Strange Horizons, so I gave it a read. The poster said it involved a surprising twist. Well not really: I understood the situation halfway through. But I liked the story all the same: the writing was lovely, and I wanted to see how the main character would realize the truth. This, very near the end, struck me especially:

For no farmer who fingers the soil with love and knowledge, no poet who sings of it, artist, contractor, engineer, even child bursting into tears at the inexpressible beauty of a field of daffodils—none of these is as intimate with Earth as those who live on, live with, breathe and drift in its seas.

If you want to read it, here's the link: "The Man Who Lost the Sea."

Landline

From the age of three until I went to college, I lived in the same town. We moved house once, but our telephone number stayed the same. When technology moved from rotary dial to push-button, I came to know the sound of that phone number by heart. I could "sing" it.

Even after I and my siblings left home, my parents stayed in that house and kept that number. My mother died, but my dad stayed in the house--with that number. He got a cell phone, but kept the landline too.

Now he lives elsewhere, closer to me and one of my siblings. That house has been sold, and the landline disconnected. But I still call it from my own landline from time to time just to hear the push-button tune. So far, the number hasn't been reassigned.

Reporting for Duty

Reporting for Duty is the English-language title of a Brazilian comedy cop show on Netflix, in which a gentle, laid-back guy from a sleepy district gets reassigned to be police chief in a mafia-plagued central Rio precinct. It's pretty hilarious so far. The second episode, "Good Cop, Better Cop," sees the new police chief, Suzano, and the precinct's second-in-command, Mantovani, interrogating a suspect. "Let's do good cop, bad cop," Mantovani suggests. Suzano agrees, and they go in. Mantovani offers the suspect water. Suzano follows with "Some lemonade? A soda? A cold beer?"





Mantovani is getting more and more flabbergasted. When Suzano offers a charcuterie board, Mantovani asks if she can have a word with him. Turns out he didn't recognize her good cop as good cop. "If you're more comfortable being the good cop," she begins, but he says no no no, he can do bad cop. He storms back in. "You think you're getting coffee? Well no! No coffee because the coffee machine is broken!" [established earlier in the episode]. "And no massages, either, except for maybe shiatsu for your health." --And he proceeds to massage out the guy's tensed muscles.



It's a very cute show, and the guy who plays Suzano's sidekick who's come with him from his old precinct has a style of Brazilian accent I really like and have only heard from a guy who teaches ancient Tupi on Instagram.

Diamond and Misty

One of Wakanomori's former students is married and keeps chickens now. He gave W a quartet of eggs, and the carton comes with this cute label that lets you write in what chickens laid the eggs. Ours were laid by Diamond and Misty.

I've been reading Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo because it was our book group book. Usually I can take or leave (or prefer to leave) our book group books, but this one I expected I'd like, because I loved Acevedo's The Poet X (ended up teaching that one in the jail). And I am liking it! So much that although the book group date came and went, I've kept on reading it because I want to finish it.

It's about two generations of Dominican women, whose life stories we get in bits and pieces around the occasion of a living wake that one of them is throwing for herself. The characters, their lives, the language--it's all so vivid. I marked this, one woman (older generation) talking about her older sister:

The person I've hugged most in the world, beside my own offspring, has been Flor. It was she who carried me on her hip. As a child, hers was the first body I remember vining around, the way climbing plants claim homes.

Also, the women all have gifts. One has dreams that foretell when someone will die. Another can tell if someone is lying. Another can salsa like nobody's business. And one has an alpha vagina ;-)

( cut for frank talk about down-there )

I've been surprised and delighted by how much I'm enjoying this character's thoughts and experiences with her gift. The book is overall super sensual and VERY sex positive.

I'm also still reading and enjoying Breath, Warmth, and Dream, by Zig Zag Claybourne, but I had to put it aside to read this one. But this one is nearly done, and Breath, Warmth, and Dream is very easy to fall back into.

I don't like to go so long without posting! Just offline stuff piling on (nothing personally dire, though). The offline stuff is doing a number on my ability to write, but I still manage to squeeze out microfictions, though not quite daily. Here's one from a few days ago:

I dreamed of a pharaoh, awaking after death and arranging to his liking the various precious items buried with him.

"You've got quite an ego," I snapped at him (dream-me is apparently rude to people's faces), "having this massive pyramid built just so people would remember you."

"That's not why I had it built. It's for all the stories that collect around it. Adventures, time travel, curses, beings from the stars--I hear them all, and they entertain me," he replied.

And here's a sweet video my tutor sent me of Martin, a pygmy marmoset monkey, whining at Gordo-the-dog, who's relaxing.

Posting two days in a row, what?? Is this 2010?

But I wanted to share this quote from Zig Zag Claybourne's Breath, Warmth, and Dream, which I'm reading at a very leisurely pace:


"'There was once'--Orsys stopped to think--'that I taught a child queen to print her name in all the alphabets of her land.'"

Now that's a worthy thing for a child queen to learn. And after learning to write her name, she can learn to write the names of people who use these alphabets, can learn to conform her mouth to their names. But not all alphabets are human-made. Maybe the child queen also learned the alphabet of leaf miners, or the alphabet of animal tracks across a snowy field, or the alphabet of clam siphon holes in the sand.

What language and alphabet would you like to learn to write your name in?

Earlier this month my mother's old sewing basket ended up with me. It had so many spools of thread, including ancient wooden spools that were sold, back in the day, for just 55 cents. These old wooden spools had a message stamped on them:

FAST
TO
BOILING



This blue thread swears to you that it will hold fast, will not turn fugitive and fade or run, even in the face of boiling water. What a heroic promise! In the face of torture this thread will remain (stead)fast.

If I sew with this thread, I'll do so with reverence for its commitment.

A mutual on Mastodon shared this mind-blowing Youtube video about creating a dress based on the earliest surviving version (1564) of the ballad "Greensleeves." It was fascinating for all the details about Elizabethan dressmaking (and also food--there's a verse about food, too; 18 verses in all). The way the expert creators researched their piece of the overall outfit (silk smock, crimson stockings, pumps as white as milk, gown of grassy green), the decisions they made (e.g., in the whole inventory of Elizabethan garments, there is no extant silk smock or record of one, so they interpreted the lyric as meaning a linen smock embroidered with silk), and then the techniques used to create the items were just fascinating.

So here's that video--long! But worth it, I thought. There are guinea pigs with ruffs! It was filmed at a stately home in Dorset!



They also made a music video--also long! (almost 10 minutes), in which you can seen Lady Greensleeves gradually acquiring her costume while still rebuffing the suitor. Here's a link.

Was feeling somewhat November down but cheered myself immensely by watching Bad Bunny in an SNL skit about K-Pop Demon Hunters (which film I watched to keep up with the under-twelve crowd and ended up taking a shine to). I followed this up by getting some of the tracks from the film and then had my day completely made by the fact that I could also purchase the songs in Portuguese. So now I can listen to "Golden" ... or I can listen to "Brilho." {~ ~WINNING~ ~} I didn't care so much for the demon boy-band's main song, but it gains a certain je ne sais quoi (or eu não sei o quê) when sung in Portuguese.

Today at Y's house I asked her middle (13) and youngest (9) sons if they'd heard of the film (OH yes) and if they thought it was just for girls or for everyone. "It's for everyone," declared the nine-year-old. "Play 'Takedown.'" So I played 'Takedown,' and he started singing along.

Speaking of that song, one thing I liked in the movie was the lead singer questioning (for selfish reasons, but still) its no-holds-barred hate of demons. She fools around with changing "When your patterns start to show / It makes the hatred wanna grow" to "When your patterns start to show / I see the pain that lies below," and when her bandmate questions her tinkering, she asks, "Do you really think this is the right song to beat [the demon lord]?" In a meta sense, I think it's interesting to have a work of art, especially one as highly processed and focus-grouped as this one must have been, talking explicitly about messaging and what artists put out in the world.

LOL, how to nerd out over the poppiest of pop culture.