Tonight my Iranian father-in-law is over cooking a classic feast, blasting our kitchen with wonderful Persian scents and telling little stories about his childhood. I’m waiting for things to come together. Our kitchen is small– too many cooks in there and it’s no good at all!
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Of Earnest, Lovely Efforts
Remember that super, super jejune time when you were fresh out of wherever or whatever it was you came from and you were newly ready to Take It On and Go For It because Now Is The Time? Yeah, that. Oooohhh. I love that. Because the world is Here but it needs to Change? So beautifully cringing now. But I want more of that!
So in an earnest, lovely effort to get more of that I am reminding myself today to please don’t beat the earnest heart from out the thrush only to leave it to die– pounded and bloody, so multiveined– in the driveway. No! Start a blogette, you see, and mount it on cyber wall for all ethered eternity. Yes!
I find on a clear morning you can hear the past quite well.
What it is: an addendum to this Washington Post piece produced in 2005 (the most earnest of all possible years, already eight years ago now) this for Scotland’s Radio Magnetic, which had a Beijing Bureau until, one day, it didn’t.
Poof. I turned in the keys!
Ps– do you also love that your 20s notebooks might just yield up a few still thriving poems that your heart can yet pick up from the driveway and you find it is all beating? You must keep these notebooks and their many treasures forever and always even if it is just to hold up the short end of the table and to remind you, yes, you! daily, of all awkward efforts and their many stern-faced attempts, however ongoing. Go on!
Subtle Ways
I still love this piece from a former student of my journalism class at Tsinghua University who went by the name Patrick.
Snow Day
Tons of white, a beautifully submerged Central Park, thick and light here, crystalized and dripping there, kids on sleds, their dads angling them just into position, just right, just here, okay, okay, now, “How do I steer this thing?” “Just pull on that rope, yeah, just like that. No, not like that, like this, see here? See, just pull like this. That’s all.”
Look At This Fierceness
When I was in high school I got scouted to model for Esprit. The company was (is?) based in San Francisco and did a lot of local looking around when it came to shooting for their campaigns. Continue reading
Outdoor Film
Here’s another student memory I’ve kept from when I taught English in China over a decade ago.
A Memory Worthy of an Aftertaste
Sometimes when you’re 22, you ask a room full of Chinese students an essay question and you get a bunch of hum-drum la de da. Once in a while, you get this.
I Am Quite Satisfied
From 1999-2000 I taught English at Tsinghua University in Beijing. I’m glad I kept a number of student pieces from that time. This response to the prompt “tell me about cooking your favorite dish” from my student Xu Dian still really cracks me up.
The Tunnels
From 1999-2000 I taught English at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It was my first job out of college and I’m glad I kept a number of student pieces from that time. To follow is one student’s response to the assignment: Share one of your earliest childhood memories.
Stephen Crane
“Eventually they entered a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against a hundred windows.
Caroline M Cooper 