One of my favorite photos is where the girl in the hijab is facing
the camera w an extremely exuberant expression. I don’t have a right to
post that one. I met her in feb. ‘22 with zero english. She was in my
3rd grade 22-23 at a kindergarten reading level. She changed schools in
23-24 and i sent an email to her teacher to express my appreciation for
her learning spirit. She was eating english alive, clawing her way
through it! She shared a 2 page piece of writing with me in may ‘24. It
started out “i love my family!”, was sprinkled with emojis, and wandered
around through random experiences. What a great kid! Sonah Aziz. Photo
in my classroom. Would be a middle schooler 26-27
What
we need: systematic, waterless, large scale composting of excrement.
Waterless reclamation of urine as fertilizer. Passive cooling for
housing. Very large scale non-fossil fuel electric power. A shift from
quaint walkable spaces as amusement parks and tourist destinations to
ordinary live/work neighborhoods. For starters.
What we get:
standard self-closing tailgates on kars as big as trucks. Bikes you
ain’t gotta pedal. Hi-def talking heads on the news. Boba in the burbs.
Piercing, tattoos and blue hair for the masses. Video games about toys
based on spaceship fantasy movies.
Is Hawai'i a postracial society? I mean, _except_ for anglos.
Nations
that mirror esch other: US/ Canada. Hrvatska/Srpska. Germany/ Austria.
Kievan, Muscovy, and White Rus for triplets. Others?
India puts caste to effective social use. They do not waste its effects.
The
submachinegun raises thequestion of whether other objects can take the
same modifier. Submachine car? Submachine learning? Submachine
cityscape?
"survivalism" is just another form of consumerism.
I
go tidepooling in the magical underwater world. 3 guys sit up top on
the rocks discussing God. What a waste, to talk about God amid such
stunning natural beauty as this!!-2011
I am unsure why i wrote gOD like that.
Went to professional conference. Had Most Visible Hair of conference.-2016
reminding
daughter actively to acquire german phrases not used by her admittedly
somewhat fossilised parents while in Meiningen and München. her
response: 'oh, you mean words like Pißnelke?" [term indicates, as I
understand, a not very amicable woman, and translates literally as
"urine-carnation"]
Me: no worries, poison _ivy_ only happens in the Far East. I'm in California.
Utah poison ivy: helloooo, sailor!
Me: vampire bats are terrifying, but I'm in el Norte, and they live down there in Latin America.
Guatemala: sleep tight there with your sheet and a window with no glass and too hot to stay covered!
Me: Pff!! Hurricanes! They happen over there in the islands.
Beryl: you really wanna scoff at me??
recently
heard an author described as the kind of person who would take a
history of the guillotine to the beach. i brought Iris Chang's "The Rape
of Nanking" to Hawai'i-- does that count? :)
Henry,
60 yr. olde Berkeley bicycle man-about-town, a serious
down-for-the-cause kinda guy. Featured in some kinda slide show I saw a
few years ago about what a bicycle wonderland Northern Europe is. The
narrative to the slide about the Netherlands' lovely bike paths spoke to
the fact that while there, he pissed people off-- by riding fast. We
aren't talking neon-spandex-drop-bar-energy-shot agro here, just about a
man who uses a bike for effect. Funny.
Dolezal:
verb: To identify as an ethnic group to which you demonstrably do not
belong. To appropriate ethnic identity. "He Dolezals being Chicano, but
really he's just a White kid from Pomona."
I
assume that a good part of the practice of Judaism consists in the
study, for lack of a better word, of the venerable history of... of
whatever it is that Judaism is. Creed? Antisemites, or those whose views
verge on antisemitism, would do well to study the history of their
whatever-it-is. If you talk about the "Jewish dominated media" now, you
really should reach back to the Judengasse in Frankfurt in the 17th C, I
believe, where visitors were greeted with a fictitious portrayal of
Jews consuming the faeces of a pig, this being only the surface
representation of desperately hateful social repression.
Changing
in the car in the parking lot at Hapuna State Beach, a 4 year old girl
says "alo-HA" to my daughter in a totally guileless way. For the first
time, I finally hear aloha. Also, it melts my heart.
Any day you give away a running bicycle to someone who'll ride it is a good one.
what
this cuntry needs is more training for young people on how to act when a
legally sanctioned killer is pointing a gun at your face, or smashing
your fingers to a pulp on a barricade with a nightstick [uc berkeley
about 5 years ago] or dabbing pepper spray inside your eyelids [humboldt
co. about 10 years ago] or tazing you, or twisting your arm or giving
incomprehensible orders. physical education. i am sure we could squeeze
it in sometime in the afternoon when teachers recognise that kids are
totally cashed, and don;t teach them important curricula like how to
read, but only secondary stuff like how people;s feet bled on the UFW;s
march up the entire length of the central valley back when their teacher
was a kid, or how very angry european americans must have been when
they put MLK in his grave.
Previous list of
forbidden words: "eats", "grub", "chow". Add to that "vittles". New,
related list: "duds", "togs". Also, "digs". And "booze" goes without
saying.
Dear Louisiana schools: there really
isn't much to those 10 commandments. A lot of weird, jealous from this
unnamed god, but really only 6 important commands. #s 2 and 3 are not
very kid friendly. The rest definitely are.
1. Be good to your mom and dad.
2. Don’t kill.
3. Don’t cheat on your partner.
4. Don’t steal.
5. Don’t lie about your neighbor.
6. Don’t covet what your neighbor has.
Dear
theist friends: i know you have a baby in that bathwater, but there
sure is a lot of bathwater, and it hurts me, and i really need to throw
it out.
“Delphina: she’s a Hell’s Angel!” — her colleague, describing riding bicycles w her for the first time in Porto
“The Royal Navy and U.K. will always call out states that do not follow international order,” he added. “That’s our mission.”
This
is not the first thing that comes to mind as the purpose of a navy,
especially as has to do with a peninsula on an inland sea.
contemplating while picking up plums next to the dogpoop on 3 neighbours' driveways:
free
food: if you see free food at a buffet, you load up and pig out. if you
see free food on a tree or popping out of the ground like an onion, you
throw it at your buddies and giggle a lot.
First there is a mountain, then wow that's a rilly big mountain.
On
the eve of dia de são joão, i lie completely out of sight next to a
frog pond where i do not have permission to be, with lots orange glimmer
in the west at 9:20 pm on one of the longest days of the year. I’ve hit
all my marks for the day. As my anti-mosquito joss sticks send twinting
coils of smoke on 2 sides of my sleeping bag, i contemplate my mother’s
completion of her return to nonexistence on yesterday’s near-solstice,
having become a sliver of the universe experiencing itself 86 1/2 years
ago on the opposite near-solstice.
USA to poor,
brown people requesting asylum: you're not allowed here. You are
required to live in this cage. You don't need soap or toothbrushes. USA
to poor, often brown people in USA: you are bad because you are poor.
You are not allowed to live in a house, or a tent, or sleep on a
sidewalk. You are bad because you don't wash or brush your teeth.
The
guy sitting 2 aisles back [though they're technically called something
else here] is sitting in a church. I am not sitting in a church. I am
sitting on a bench. In my mind.
Reminder: George Floyd is dead, but he is also innocent in perpetuity of any presumed fraud for which he was killed.
I
see electric bicycles, which i regard as unaffordable, helping people
get themselves up into the berkeley hills. That's cool. I also see them
ridden on mostly flat bike paths and being driven in pickup trucks to
the beach. I think that's really wack.-2020
If
you live in a leafy green suburb like Fuckin’ Irvine where I currently
sit on a park bench, it might be possible to think The System is
Working. Eek. Salsipuedes!
Woman in Hayward
looks at me long, hard, and quizzical. Me: Was your child my student?
Her: Yes: what was her name? Me: ... Jayme?? Her: Correct!
Phew!! She was my kindergartner. She graduated high school this year. -2019
When
you’re in a bar in country A watching them play soccer against country
B, whose language you are speaking, and the score hits 4-1 for country
B, it’s time to drain your glass and leave.
not quite sure yet if this whole aloha and mahalo thing gives me a rash. i think i'll just keep my mouth shut for a while.
Door dash: no. Über:acceptable for instances of cannabis paralysis. Air BnB: niiiiize!!
Redhead stands in desert,
squinting. Desert screams,
"You do not belong here!!"
Guy
named Hernandez (sic) playing for France? I’ve seen this before.
Blowing off Spanish accent marks while enforcing their own accent agoud
and grave. Passive aggressive?
If your state ranks 47th in education, maybe you should require schools to post the ABCs instead of the 10 commandments.
‘“Hindi’ gets its name from ‘Hindustani’, which in means “of the land of Hindus.”
‘Hindu’,
derived from the Sanskrit word Sindhu, was the local name for the Indus
River in northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. It was further
popularized by the Arabic term al-Hind referring to the land of the
people who live across Ind”
Draw a circle on the face of the planet. In it you will find 100 things.
It don’t say how big the circle is.
Marginally
helpful medical bureaucrat, as we begin to tell our rather too-long
story about pur daughter’s needs and situation; “fala, fala,fala, fala
Brexit?”
Me, interjecting: “Não somos ingleses!”
"It was almost a golazo, !pero no!" -my daughter, 2014
"In
more than 30 years of European Cup and World Cup soccer, I have never
missed a game of [unnamed European country]. As I said, it was always
possible to watch the games in [Asian third world countries] or wherever
I traveled in the last 20 years. On ****day, I am supposed to go to
[unnamed city] just as [said unnamed European country] plays in the
xxxx-finals. Apparently, we can't change this appointment to ******day.
I
don't know to what degree you [still] understand what it means to be a
[national of aforementioned European country] . On ****day, about X
million [nationals of that European country] will be watching that
soccer game. It is not at all like that weird Superbowl in the United
States, where they only cheer when they are told to. That is synthetic
like so much in the USA."-Claudia’s boss, about Germany
Really enjoying the high-pitched battle cries of the women in the world cup.
Copied
from a facebook friend: "There are many among us who eat too many
cheeseburgers. They eat multiple meals at McDonald’s and don’t exercise
the recommended 30 minutes a day. Some might call that a “choice.”
There are also many among us who use substances like alcohol and heroin
to Band-Aid the pain of severe childhood trauma. People, including
those who eat too many cheeseburgers, call that a “CHOICE.” However,
when the substance using person lands in the hospital due to overdose or
delirium tremens, we chastise them and call them “addicts.” When the
person who ate too many cheeseburgers lands in the ED with a heart
attack, we give them aspirin, morphine, a stat EKG, and prepare them for
a vascular procedure. Can someone please tell me the difference? Why
is one patient chastised while the other receives quick intervention and
care?" Andrew?
Both kids watchng Me'xico vs. Alemania. Their citizenship is affirmed. 2018
i
can go to olympia on amtrak, but my bike can't cause bikes need to be
checked luggage and that station is unmanned. so i rebooked to
centralia. now they say they can't put my bike off at centralia either
b/c it's closed then. so i can get off at centralia and then i am up a
creek without a bicycle while the bike goes on to seattle and returns
the next day to centralia. where i don;t want to be. well, at least
amtrak turns a profit for the taxpayer. -2015
Hypothesis:
abysmal acts of stupidity are a prime mover in history. Brexit. Sub
standard lab security measures in Wuhan. Bottling up troops in Dien Bien
Phu. Attacking Iraq in 2003. Expanding frontlines all across Europe in
the 1940s using a 1930s air force. Defending France with a static
defense line that ended at the Belgian border. Any others?
I know from experience that "to cry oneself to sleep" is not an abstraction.
Thank you to anyone who has planted, cared for, or simply had present on their property, a monkey-puzzle tree.
Left
LA: friend, lt. col. in military, still views piles of garbage at
kerbside as resource. thinks about mpg in cars. can stand to listen to
pacifica radio. there is hope. was successful raid on LA.
In case you have a low-rider car club that needs a name, I have one: Unfortunate Juxtapositons.
