asakiyume | Entries tagged with small things

This day had some marvel to it. The neighborhood felt very festive--the neighbors next to us and diagonally across the street had both put up tents for their kids to play in, and the across-the-street neighbors were sitting outside all day, chatting with various visitors, masked. Their little boy and the next-door little boy were playing together, masked, so let it not be said that little kids won't wear masks.

Here's the next-door neighbor, posing for me:

His little sister wasn't wearing a mask at this moment, but later on she was sporting a disposable one:

The tall one came over, first time since the plague struck, and the healing angel and her significant other came over too, and we toasted marshmallows and had lettuce that another neighbor had given us, and tomatoes and pickles and sausages and eggs. The wood from the fire smelled as fragrant as incense.

Coming home from dropping the tall one back at his apartment, I saw the full moon, blushing pink. This photo is a poor snapshot--I know you will find beautiful photos of tonight's moon if you look. But I pulled into an empty parking lot to get this one. Sometimes blurry is just right.

And then later this evening, someone in the apartment complex through the woods from us was shooting off pretty serious fireworks, and you could make them out through the nighttime trees, and they were beautiful. This doesn't capture it, except to give you the feel of mysterious lights in the darkness:

Have people watched Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts? We just finished season one, and I loved the soundtrack so much! I played everyone the song from the last episode in season one, "Purple Jaguar Eye"
Oh purple jaguar eye
Open up and be alive
See the world in vivid colors
There's no turning back
You've got all the love you need
To run surefooted, newly freed

Current Music: Sterling K Brown: Purple Jaguar Eye

I have three books I'm reading right now. Two are ebooks (Partner, by Lia Silver, and The Worth of a Shell, by M.C.A. Hogarth), so I can read them at my desk. I don't have a portable ereader, though, so I like a physical book for when I'm standing around stirring a pot in the kitchen. That book had been The Night Circus, but after giving up on it, I had to pick something else, so I got The Bees, by Laline Paull. The worldbuilding--the sense of actually being a bee and living in a hive--is wonderful, and I'm loving it, though I do have a couple of reservations (for one, the plot is a bit scattered--you might think of the flight of bees or butterflies over a meadow).

I got The Bees out of the library. It came with a bookmark--an appropriate one:

And, this is a bit random, but the other day I noticed I'd somehow bought semi-fancy toilet paper. And I found myself thinking, this is really kind of pretty. It's kind of wonderful how someone, somewhere, wanted even toilet paper to be pretty. For some reason, I was able to avoid engaging Analytical Brain at that point, and I didn't think cynical thoughts about marketing and price points. I just thought, Someone designed this, and it's a simple, but pretty, design.

Oh, and something from yesterday: a book advertised as "gentle dystopian fiction." I think I get what they mean--maybe a story without lots and lots of gruesome death and torture, but still dystopic? And yet, I think that description misses something fundamental about what dystopia means. Unhappiness, privation, limitations, injustice--these can take forms that don't involve physical harm, and yet when they're present, the situation isn't really gentle. ... In other news, The Bees is called a dystopia in some places, and yet I'm not sure I agree. Or, conversely, is every society that's not a utopia a dystopia?

Current Music: Atlas Lab: Castellana

So here's the jail story that I've been meaning to tell.

The clock in the room where I do essay tutoring hadn't been changed for daylight savings time. It hadn't been changed the previous week, either. J--, one of the women I was working with, made a remark about things never getting done there, but R--, the other woman said, "Oh, but Ms. H-- changed the clock in the kitchen. I guess it's just that no one's gotten around to changing it in this room."

All three of us looked at the clock. It was a typical classroom clock, big and plain.

"Sometimes they have a knob in the center that you can turn to move the hands, but I don't see one on this clock," I said. It was smooth plastic on the outside.

We looked at it a minute more.

I'm pretty passive. Normally I'd just let it tell the wrong time. But R-- had said that someone changed the clock in the kitchen. So I reached up and tried to lift the clock off the wall. It came right off--it was so light! In the back was a little box for a battery, and a knob for changing the time.

"I can't do this without my glasses," I said. I passed the clock to J--. She turned the knob, and I put it back up on the wall.

"We did it!" I said. I felt really exhilarated. "We're empowered," said R--, smiling.

And even though it's a really small thing, it really *did* feel empowering. At least, it did for me, and I think maybe it did for them, too. We made a difference in our environment. It was a tiny difference, but it was a difference all the same.

When I was in first grade, they gave us all big, round blue pencils with no erasers on them. I liked the blue pencils; I liked them especially when they were sharpened. They made nice, dark lines.

This one is not sharpened. Picture taken from pencilsnmore.com

What I really liked, though, were the slim, hexagonal yellow pencils that grown-ups used. They said competence and maturity to me. I liked these ones, because of the bright red stripe on the little metal cap that holds the eraser:

Image from officezilla.com

Best of all, though, were the copyediting pencils my mother used. They were red, and better than that, they wrote red. (I did not yet know you could get colored pencils and color with them the way you did with crayons.)

Image from pajamaproductivity.com

At some point, my mother gave me one, and I was so proud of it. Then I somehow lost it in the classroom and made a big fuss. I probably cried, though I don't remember for sure. A boy kindly offered me a pencil, painted red, but with an ordinary black graphite lead in it. NOT GOOD ENOUGH! NOT THE REAL THING! The teacher scolded me for being an ungrateful brat. Which I was totally being. I wish I could go back and get a good look at that boy who was nice enough to offer me a red pencil.

... This comes to mind for two reasons. One, I'm thinking of bringing pencils and pens to East Timor when I go, and I was thinking of all the ways in which they can be special. Two, I'm remembering an incident at the jail the other day. At the end of a GED session, one of the women asked if she could hold onto the pencil. Usually I use just ordinary Ticonderoga pencils (yes, I've switched allegiance from Mirado classic to Dixon Ticonderoga--brand consciousness!), but I also have a couple of foil pencils in the mix. They're pretty:

DSCN3761

I said, no, I couldn't, because that wouldn't be fair, because I don't have very many of those (which was the wrong reason to give: more importantly, I'm not supposed to give anything to anyone ever).

"Aw, no one will notice," she said.

"Oh yes they will," said the other woman, and then it transpired in discussion that those foil pencils were known and remembered in the units.

Small things have value for all kinds of reasons.

Current Music: Rick Ross D Sturner: Innocent - Sorry for me

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with small things

July 4 2020

found items, small things ... and a question about dystopia

we're empowered

Pencils

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January 2026

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