I'm not, normally, a person to post "cat videos" with abandon. But… I was watching this, a while ago, and laughing hard, and Andrew insisted that I blog it, because of that.
Day: August 6, 2013
Caveat: The Thing About Trees
(Poem #13 on new numbering scheme)
The thing about trees
Here’s the thing about trees: they are always trying to escape the groping gravity of the earth.
Look at them. They strain and push up toward the sky, in their slow-motion way. You can see, easily, how they are trying to escape. The leaves have no other purpose but to reach for the sky.
Sometimes, the trees even need to be tied down. You see how people have applied ropes or wooden structures to the trees, to keep them from flying away when unobserved.
You see, the trees know when we are watching, too. They know that if they succeed in escaping, they have to be careful not to get caught – no one will trust a tree, anymore, if people see one running off into the sky.
So the trees wait until no one is looking. Trees, as might be expected, are amazingly patient.
In the depth of the night, when no one is around to see or hear, a tree will succeed in escaping. The branches will finally reach and thrust with sufficient force to pull the roots free of the grasping, jealous earth, and they will rise rapidly into space, finally finding their freedom. All that is left is a small upturned mound of earth, puckered like a small wound, where the roots pulled out.
A strong wind can help, but if the weather is too stormy, the trees can be injured and then they will fall back to the brutish earth, broken and shattered.
Sometimes, after a storm, you can see the evidence of this – broken trees thrown over, as if by wind. What is not so clear to us watchers is that some of that violence is self-inflicted by the trees upon themselves, in their desperate efforts to escape the unkind earth.
[UPDATE: This is tree # -1]
Caveat: A Pair of Dreams
I woke up twice this morning. The first time I woke up was around 5:30 AM. I was restless, as I'd been having a difficult dream.
Someone from the US Army had come to my apartment and told me I had two hours to get packed up and moved – everyone had to move out of the country. Some kind of war scenario – many of the Koreans were going around doing crazy things, too. But it was all very vague.
Two hours is not a lot of time to pack up my apartment. Especially given the fact that I kept finding new rooms full of stuff. I would get stuff thrown into boxes only to discover a new room. Piles of knickknacks on shelves, bookshelves creaking under the weight of too many books like in a used bookstore, plastic containers of who-knows-what piled on the floor, like in my storage unit in Minnestoa.
Some Army guy came around and said I couldn't bring it all. "Take what's important," he said.
I found many things that I didn't even recognize as mine, yet it all seemed important and precious. I found bins of ceramic figurines, mountains of paper with drawings on each page, collections of coins and stamps and price tags. It was a hoarder's fantasy world, and I was being perfectly hoarderish within it.
But time was running out. People would come through and offer to help, but I kept rejecting it. Then Karen came by – Karen is my (ex-) mother-in-law (Michelle's mom). She said, with a sigh, "This was all Michelle's." I sat back in shock – that explained both why I didn't recognize the stuff and why I still felt compelled to save it all.
It was too late, though. The Army guy came by and said to stop packing, we were moving out. Karen was crying, as we left the unpacked stuff behind.
I held only a few boxes in my arms. I didn't even want them. I threw them aside, as we marched, a group of random Ilsan foreigners, toward some waiting buses.
Then I woke up.
I couldn't get back to sleep, so I read my history book for about an hour.
Then I finally fell asleep. This time I dreamed that I was trying to explain to my EHS students that they were very smart and had great potential, but they were complaining they were stupid and lazy. I was trying to motivate them. It makes sense – that's the class I did a substitute gig in last night.
Somehow, the four EHS students and I were in a supermarket. I was trying to cheer them up by clowning around, but, like the incipient adolescent 6th graders that they are, they seemed to mostly find this embarrassing. I said I would stop embarrassing them if they would cheer up. So they tried their best, and we sat down on some benches in a park to try to have class.
It was too hot to study, though. We sat around swatting flies and mosquitoes, as the sky grew dark. "Teacher, my book will get wet," one of them said, as raindrops started to fall.
I woke up again. 9:30 AM. That is the latest I've woken up since coming home from the hospital, I think. I have a sore throat – that is worrying – the last thing I need is to get some kind of cold or flu, leading into the radiation next week.
I ate some vitamin C with my breakfast. Maybe I should take it easy today, and stop having so many adventures.
Caveat: A Random Adventure And Random Usefulness
Earlier today, after breakfast, I was feeling energetic and restless, and I said to Andrew, I’m going to take a walk. He came along, of course.
We walked over to the new “Onemount” mall that’s been built on the west end of Lake Park, a few blocks from my apartment. There is a waterpark inside the mall. That’s pretty common in Korea – waterparks, I mean. But there is also a “snow park” in this mall – ice skating, manufactured snow, an indoor sledding slope. That’s not so common. I think some hot day I’m going to pay the entrance fee and try it out.
Then we walked into Lake Park. That’s a common enough walking route for me. The air was stormy and thundery and deep gray overcast. It was beautiful. And there was enough of a breeze that the heat wasn’t so stifling.
I knew there was a “toilet museum” inside Lake Park – I’d seen it before. But I’d never actually visited it, although it’s a kind of famous (or infamous) landmark in Ilsan. Today it was open as Andrew and I walked past, so we visited the Toilet Museum.
Then we saw some men running one of those sewer-exploring robots – just something in maintenance going on unrelated to being next to the Toilet Museum. We watched them for a while – they seemed disorganized.
We walked toward the southeast end of the lake. That area looking toward the highway bridge over the lake always reminds me a little bit of Minneapolis’ Uptown area.
Then we walked around the end of the lake and ended up going to HomePlus, where I bought some vitamins and exotic tea and a few other things.
Then spontaneously I said, “How about instead of going home for lunch we go to that Indian Restaurant that I like that’s near here?”
Andrew seemed to like this idea.
So we had Indian food for lunch: samosa, vegetable raita, malkhi dal, some mutton curry, lots of garlic naan bread. Very delicious.
It was pouring rain so hard when we left the restaurant that we stopped in a cafe and had coffee and talked for a long time.
When the rain had let up and we finished our coffee, we hurried home and I quickly got ready and went to work.
Work felt good today: I felt useful. I did a substitute teaching in one class, because of a scheduling mistake. Then I corrected some student essays and helped fixed the scheduling mistake.
I like feeling useful.