Right Hand Drawn by Miki Huynh

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snow pie

November 19, 2008 by miki

As per tradition, I must enter in an entry for the first snow of the season. Like last year, the bit of flurry decorated the sky more than it did the ground. However, there are some mighty chilly winds blowing through even now, and it’s keeping things cold and winterlike. So, I’m huddling by the heating unit at home gathering courage before I suck it up and head on out the door again later tonight.

Earlier during work today, I received a request from my friend the school nurse to double-check her English translations of a play written by another friend of hers teaching at an elementary school in the mountains. A bit of correcting phrases with red ink eventually led to me being filmed while enacting the script with stuffed animals and puppets. How proud I feel taking some responsibility for a production where one of the lines is “I need to go poo-poo,” followed later by… “Then Oshyosan (the priest) went to poop. And while he was pooping…”

The poo is essential to the play you see. In the end, the evil Onibaba (an old lady that eats children) in the play is reborn (our chosen English word) out of the Oshyosan’s poo as a fly. That needs no further explanation, does it? C’mon it’s Japan, afterall. The most poo-obsessed country out there… and if you don’t believe me just google “Japan” and “poo” and I’m sure you’ll get a shitload of hits. Literally.

Anyway, I’m a little afraid what will happen if that video ever ends up shown to the wrong people. Like my friends. I know those people would never let me live it down.

The things you do for the children…

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Wednesday workdays mean Tuesday nights

November 5, 2008 by miki

The expats are a cheering over here in Hamada as throughout our humpday afternoons we watched the results for the presidential election via the internet. Part of me is still nervous about the days to come, waiting for all the rhetoric about change and new futures to actually produce some results… I’m naturally skeptical of big talkers with vague proclamations… so what am I doing following American politics, right?… but the more working class-minded (and only slightly more socialist) approach to the future definitely fills me with some positivity and general good feeling.

The event also warms my insides with thoughts of Chicago. I wish I could have been there in Grant Park to see all the excitement while Tuesday night was taking place. Four years entitles me to feel some hometown pride, right? I can remember the days of listening to crazy Alan Keyes while commuting around the south side, trying not to drive straight into baby carriages, carrying babies, that southside mothers love to push out ahead of themselves in order to barge across the busy street. Those were the days. While browsing around the net on the history of the candidates, I even stumbled upon the fact that Obama casted his vote at his alma mater, Beulah Shoesmith Elementary School, a little school in Hyde Park where I used to work part time through U of C’s Neighborhood Schools Program. Well! What d’ya know? So, as corny as could be, the revelation made my day just a little bit more special.

However I’m not so proud of my voting state of California right this moment. Good to see that Prop 2 is a yes, but holy bullcrap, has Prop 8 won by a slim margin as well? So we in Cali believe more in the freedom of chickens than we do gay and lesbian people? How goddamn conservative is this state? If yes-voters can miss the underlying cruelty behind dictating another person’s ability to choose and making laws just to officiate how different a person should feel because of sexual orientation, why should I believe that some of same voters can empathize with poor li’l poultry with any ounce of conviction? It’s completely fucked up.

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