i am the rat

the finger

agamben's deft juggling of concepts like bare life and spoiled sovereignty elucidate a clearing in my brain- a meadow of defined shapes. maybe like murakami's crystalline descriptions of food. and yet i find my mind wandering away from the reading, again and again. my eyes unfocus and a barely perceptible feeling flies by, causing my thoughts to float into a neighboring place of quotidian things.

last night, we had an onativia street dinner with the usual host of characters seated at a long table at carl's place next door. i wore my house booties because we literally walk through the secret hallway adjoining the two units and arrive in carl's place without having to step outside. hanabi, carl's 6yr old daughter, gave rachel's little sister hannah the finger in her face for a long time as the table gradually fell silent in amused awkwardness. eventually someone asked hanabi if she knew what that meant. she said it means i'm mad. so we all tried to talk to her about curse words and whether or not she knew the worst one. she wouldn't say, but she was clearly lying. finally we all started to say fuck. and she whirled around toward emily and said, you say that word all the time! why do you say it all the time? and why do you always call cooper fuck? it was hilarious and also frightening how socially manipulative a 6yr old girl could be. rachel asked me how i would explain what fuck meant to micah, and i recounted the day that micah got in trouble all day in preschool for saying fuck to everyone, including the principal. when asked where he had learned it he said, from the L word! i don't know if the christian faculty would have been more offended by the f word or by the fact that he was watching a sexually explicit tv show about lesbians.

the great thing about micah is that he is open. that may change of course, but already it is a distinguishing attribute about him. he shoplifted one time with me at the local market in north park, san diego, and as soon as we left the store he couldn't help but proclaim to me that he had taken a packet of bubbalicious. the shady line is how much his ability to be hopelessly honest and his sensitivity to things that upset people will overlap and gradually create the morally ambiguous place of lying to protect. if only that place weren't so universally needed. if only it were less difficult to get through a day without hurting beloved ones or yourself. kj said, you are brave. oh, i hope.

film blog

kj and i have started a film blog at programmingcommittee.blogspot.com if you want to read about films we're seeing and thinking about...

new home

did you know that tabitha is secretly a perfect cat figurine?

and a provocateur?


and also a strange small owl?

highlights of the cross country road trip

colorado

wyoming! the sky is bigger and more beautiful.



eileen and ken in chicago


stacy! at daley's under the train tracks


leaving chicago...



on our way to sterling heights, detroit suburb, michigan






i got my fix of boys (i miss micah so much)
this here are the augustin boys- isaiah, ethan, owen


and this is matthew chan

road tripping through chicago

ken reminded us of the magic of the stars through his amazing tour of the Adler planetarium (the building on the right). i miss sunny winter days in chicago.

my ancestral village

these are photographs from my ancestral village Shaoxing, China. my great grandfather's house is still there, but partially in ruins from a fire last year. lacy mushrooms dot a burnt tree that grows out of one room up into the sky.