This wont hurt a bit
Author's blog

Beijing welcomes you
A review
Another review

With the description of the kinds of tricycles, the author shows us the montage one faces on China's roads.

A book left open

I bought 'Heavens Coast' a memoir by Mark Doty. i liked the book, I did nit want it finish, so I am not reading it now. Kind of like storing up on your favourite chocolte. I now have his Dog years. Hope I will finish that.

CFC syndrome

I had heard of The boy in the moon on npr.
Another review.

The book has been written well. I liked the authors approach to understand the disorder. When I read that kids with CFC didnt have cancer like the ones with Noonan and that being the reason for the research funding, it seemed like news with an impact.

When the author finds data about his son's brain, he grapples a bit with why his son is the way he is. The end of the book is an intense meditation of what his son's life means.

genetic science.. to the extent it unravels the human body, it dehumanizes it. - Dr. Denis Noble.

Buddhists idea of mind.

Innovative innovation

In The Sorcerers and their apprentices, author Frank Moss introduces us to new fields like Biomechatronics.
personal robots
OPera of the future
Lifelong kindergarten
New Media medicine
Affective computing
Cognitive machines
Speech+Mobility
Tangible Media
'to create a better future for everyone'.
This book works at two levels. On one hand the reader learns of what makes innovation happen at the MIT lab - the coming together of minds in solving problems faced by many and on the other how the problems are solved with applications that are products of the lab. Its inspiring to know how some scientists are fueled with the experiences from their own life to work towards technologies that make life easier for others.
Some of the projects like the City car were hard for me to understand. There is some repitition in the text. Curiosity about the projects will get you to the end.

At the Media lab, the scientists 'build,test and demonstrate' their inventions. some projects like the MIT Red balloon challenge and Roy's Speechome project have received lot of coverage in the media.
The author finds that most of the discoveries are serendipitous by nature. But once an invention is in place, it is unthinkable how one ability leads to another. A technology used to capture movement of a music artist is used in automoives to figure if a passenger is a small adult or a child for purposes of airbag deployment. the same technology went into gait analysis.
Roy's Speechome project analysis led way to look at early detection of autism and empowering the affected with social abilities.
Othotics
Nephrolithiasis

Earth apples. The book as a whole does not leave a great impression. Most of the poems are written in or of places Arizona.

Hostel

A small room with a cement counter all around to place our metal boxes. A bundle of all of our posessions into the hostel. oe goturs were filled with cardboard boxes of new dresses. I remember one red dress with a blue lace in front and a midband. That room was just to store our belongings. There was a bigger room for sleeping.
Once my classmate wore his elder sister's nightie. Being big for a fourth grader and larger, he was stuck in it for a while. He seemed to know more than a fourth grader of things in general. One morning we went to drop off a sister at the railway station. That day we had idli there with the chutney reeking of green chillies. I dont remember who paid for it.

Listening to an upbeat Punjabi song, I feel that is how I could take farewell from the world.

Early evening

A child jumping
up and down two
steps of an
open staircase

waiting for his
mother

As a kid, I was
ready with milk,
tea powder and sugar
ready on the stove
to turn it on
as soon as I
found her few houses
far

Life in things

A sweet box with an assortment of sweets. Some were slabs of two colors brown over cream color sweet or green over cream color. All made from milk. These were our treats from Shankerpally town during our summer holidays spent in Fatehpur village.

Unposted letters

From daughters to mothers

- the vague delight of being a stranger in a strange place. - Lynn Freed

Joseph cornell boxes in David Gaylan's 'boxes' essay in this anthology. A story by her. Of another writer inspired by ' The Incredible Appearing Man' story.

Pipestone paperweight in 'Unnaming the flowers' essay by Sonia Gernes.
What you hear in the dark?

Susan Griffin's essay is a revealing letter, embracing the miry relationship of a mother and daughter who have shared love only towards the end of it.

The land where you are the chief

Writers dreaming
A review
I liked the essays by John Nicols, Jack prelutsky, Reynolds Price.

Dreams may seem chaotic, but one can always create structure. - John Nicols
I liked the persona of John Nicols.

Prelutsky's essay shows us how dreams work into his poems for children. Writing with Jack Prelutsky. His poem froma dream.

Sometimes when I finish writing a poem, I look at it and say, What can I do with this, can I write the opposite? - Jack prelutsky

Reynolds Price linked his early childhood - trapped in a narrow tunnel dream to his experience of breech birth. His interview
Dreams are obviously the art of the artless. - Reynolds Price.

At Starbucks

A new mom is on a single chair
table
walked in with a stroller in left hand
and a 2 month old baby in her right
the boy drinking his milk from a bottle
was slinking into sleep

A mom is mixing coffee
'Zucar or Splenda'
son answers 'Zucar'
for father who wants 'Splenda'.

Another mom with
a wide stroller
bulldozed the chairs
and people in her way

From the colour of it
I could tell the
white choc mocha wasnt good

Odd one out

The ear bud
looked extra white
It wasnt so every day
I opened the drawer
From a box of pink
ones I had picked a
spare white

Nightmares of a mom to be

A snake breaks the latch
of a big blue drum
theres another in a
cardboard box used to
deliver flowers
The mom was convinced
before ordering them
snakes that they were
easy to dispose with
The first snake didnt
seem vile
only curious about
whats going to happen
The mom walked into the
patio with her husband
to discuss their POA.

The next nightmare:
Hands with eczema
strangely no pain

The next nightmare:
Husband is lost in
a sea of relatives
back home

Mother knows - womanhood, motherhood, selfhood.
Frost: A love story

A review that includes this book.

Ackee in Coconut lady

Holidays in heck
Lava gull

Games people play

Transactional analysis

Today I saw a kid playing with an alphabetic caterpillar at Ross.
Marshalls has cloth diapers.

My Oedipus complex ncluded in iIn praise of mothers anthology is hilarious. The anthology also includes Jane Goodall's story Mothers and daughters about chimpanzees. A quirky behavior.Its amazing that studies have been done on chimpanzees to the extent we know how the mother-daughter relation saga plays out with different personalities of daughters.

The war was the most peaceful period of my life - kid character in the story by Frank O Connor.

The Leap by Louise Erdrich has a hook with 'My mother once said that I'd be amazed at how many things a person can do within the act of falling'.

Fenstad's mother

Happiness

Songs my mother taught me - Hortense Calisher
The Good Deed by Pearl S Buck.

With few letters

wilderness, wildness.
Thinking of wilderness, the moment I like to recall is the time I was birdwatching at Catalina mountains where I heard a Bewick wren sing. It was on a branch at my eye level. I felt like a giant led into the toy city.

The other day I was thinking about lighting and lightning.

Assassin bugs
Spinner bugs. Thinking about this I was reminded of a story where a drowning ant's life is saved by a leaf thrown into the water by a friend.

Walking is almost an ambulation of mind. - Gretel Ehrlich.

Miners lettuce
Cirque

windsounds becoming watersounds - Gretel Ehrlich

I like the word meltwater.

A ticket to Tanzania
Terrazzo
Makonde art
ngoma
Mohamed Amin
Wilfred Thesiger
Mirella Ricciardi

Traveling anyhow

Traveling is fun when you are in the best of your health and no luggage. But if a kid is in the car, in or out of your body, its a different scenario.

Granny shoots the rapids

Baby on board. Taking months baby on a long drive. When my friends took us visiting to las Vegas, I appreciate their willingness to tackle all the hassles that go with it.

'Going your own way' is the real adventure section in this travel book. In 'Alone at Sea', Tania Aebi, looks back on the day she started her voyage and finds her erstwhile self 'a frightened girl'.
Helen Thayer's account of a 'polar bear' visit is a gripping tale. You can feel the polar bear pass you by. I can almost feel kicking myself for not having a way to interact with the bear in a friendly fashion for lack of a common language to communicate that I mean no harm. The author did learn a lot about wolves by letting her dog Charlie interact with them.
In 'Endurance on Ice', Anne Dal Vera finds that 'skiing to the South Pole provided her with the challenges she needed to learn about herself in relation to the land, and in relation to a small group of women'.

Two quotes I liked by Mary Russell about
women risking the life they nurture and the challenge that women see in single sailing

Story line not up to writing style

Several perceptions

If you can dissect a book, and enjoy a group of words, for the way they have been framed and not expect these sentences to lead into an interesting or usual, expected occurences, then this book is for you.
The writing style is impressive, despite the lack of purposeful action expected in a novel.

Aug 20, 2005
3/5

Learning to bike

Reading of bike sharing system, I was reminded of how we rented bikes before we learnt how to ride them. We stayed at one end of the town. To get to a rental place we had to walk a good mile. And after returning the bike, we had to walk it all back. I dont think this ever deterred us from renting them. At first we rented tiny bikes so we could put our feet on earth whenever we felt we were about to fall. When I looked at a big rock in front of me. Instead of averting it, how much ever I wanted to, I realised that the bike would only go in that direction.
Its remarkable how some kids learn to ride bicycles bigger than them by managing to put their feet on the pedals but without sitting. Its referref to as 'kainchi' or the scissor style.

Home what it means and why it matters

good pictures

Far and Away
Vimy memorial

Making

sitting out beneath the moon again, nursing
I will introduce you
to the sun, moon,
winds,clouds
feel the pride
of the creator

Rama holds the moon pg378
Many moons

The one not to flee

A prisoner of love
needs no locks
no bars

A safety pin
On a white paper
traces the
black magnet
moving underneath

Shaping

At a 1yr old's birthday
party, an expecting lady
in maternity clothes is
greeted with
'you look symmetrical'from A
'when would you not look symmetrical' from B

when you wear only a
lower body fat suit
like Amy sedaris.

***********
Shiner like a Diamond, David Sedaris - also included in 'Scoot iver skinny'.

Motherhood and childbirth

women are born twice - Anne Sexton

But its like childbirth. The results erase
the process and you cant remember a before.
- Marge Piercy, The diminishing addition.

Another poems book by Marge Piercy

Mars and her Children

In Applesauce for Eve, Runt Vigor, Core memory, the fruit apple, tree and its core are the connecting images.

'Cast skins' poem begins with an indifferent snake casting its skin and then going about with its new bright skin. Worn out gloves recall the mos absent hands. The poet progresses onto clothes at thrift stores and the invisible but present voices of the erstwhile wearers of the clothes.

'Up and Out', '1. The foot gnawed off', what you cant leave even when you think you are leaving your place of past for good.

'3. when I was a caddy'
Mehitzah

'4.Toward a good rooting Medium' -
'I've known families who farmed their soil
and gave their bones to it .'
Lenni Lenape


author's article

In 'The ex in the supermarket',
I cannot walk the dog of the past at my
convenience.

At a two year old's birthday party, during dinner one young lady was trying to figure which dishes had onion in them, so she could relinquish them. She was trying to follow Sattvic diet. Another lady swore by onions and garlics in the dishes. Bite into the onion is a homage to the onion.

Tin House

Volume 12, Number 1. 'Class in America' is an uninteresting theme like politics. But Peasants by Geoff Nicholson, deals with food of different classes and how fast food is flooding away those boundaries.

In 'A typical Japanese Woman' essay, Cathy N Davidson says that she read of one hour bath having the same physiological effect as four hours of sleep.
Sento

Alaska Quarterly review, Fall & Winter 2007

Hemicorporectomy

Peter Selgin,
trying to decipher those mysterious blue shapes floating way out there in 'Playing It Out'.
when we are in a new place, we take a moment, silent, watch whats around, sort the clouds, mountains and then we speak.

I found further reading difficult. No poems.

Conversations with artists

Mark Tobey

A Blizzard under the blue sky, Pam Houston.

One of the things I love most about the natural world is the way it gives you whats good for you even if you dont know it at the time. Talking about winter camping, author Pam Houston sums best the role of nature in resetting our human system. all those visits to the national parks or even the local lake that tidy up the cup with tea dripping on the sides.

With sentences like 'clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky', she makes the reader appreciate the immutability of certain things, the so called universal truths which fix our dithering daily boats.

Out of Habit, I start apologizing, also included in Scoot over Skinny.

Culture

One of the basic functions of culture: to lay out a predictable world in which the individual is firmly oriented. - LaRay M Barna.

A westerner I know, appreciates the eastern culture of parents arranging marriage for kids and the respect elders get. She has a 1D disapproval for the higher divorce rates.

house owner should welcome visitor - international student.

Social time: heartbeat of a culture. When the authors found that language wasnt lending itself to pose questions like they wanted to in surveys, they looked at definite durations of certain activities for comaprision.
The analog time in the house clock with no numbers, subject to approximation is behind the precise one in the car.

Guidelines A Cross Cultural Reading/Writing Text.

Guidelines, A Cross Cultural Reading/Writing Text.
Stumbling blocks in Intercultural communication
In some cultures, also, it is polite to refuse the first or second offer of refreshment. - LaRay M Barna
We had a story in our nondetail in which an elder sister takes her brother along for a birthday party only if he promises to behave. He is supposed to refuse offer for any food atleast three times before accepting. The mischievous kid says no three times to the first offer, so he can enjoy the food.
In high school, my sister and I were at a dinner reception. They had egg curry being served. We were asked to eat. Being the elder sister I answered that we were not hungry. I felt highbrow refusing. My sister would have liked to eat. Now I remember to leave the onus of accepting/refusing a food offer to whoever is with me. Sometimes, even after I have made my mind that I will not find myself having anything to do with cake at birthday party after having had the first serving, I will say 'no' to taking cake for the road. I will say 'maybe my husband will like that'. After all these internal dramas, as soon as we get home, we finished up the cake in few seconds. A vanilla banana, strawberry cake. Its USP was its softness of the cake layers as well as the filling. The cake was mistakenly made girly with pink lettering and pink flowers. Not a hit with parents, but with all the little girls who attended the party, who also happened to be the majority. All the girls were asking was if they could have a flower. Must be the first time that a cake was trumped at the birthday party by kids. Well, a little boy too asked for a flower for his sister. I have seen at yet another birthday party where a kid asked for a balloon for his younger sister.Kids can be distracted with the auxiliaries on the cake but adults have their focus on it. I managed to have a serving of the cake and didnt go for more, although I was reminded of the baby shower cake which I had enjoyed then except for the minor unequally thawed filling the cake. I had seconds with that one. This cake was better and cost half less. The baker of the cake that cost half more is no longer in business.

Ditat Deus

Arizona's motto
Organic act

I chose this book Leaning into the wood over Eudora welty's short story collection. I wanted to listen to new voices. The pieces are very short and hook you with their lack of fabrication and the directedness of their life choices for place to associate with.

*******

This time at the library, imagine my horror when I found my sacred shelves of poetry and non-fiction littered with trashy books. Somebody got an idea to compress the books from different sections into one. It must be that the funding has dwindled and so the new books can now do with less shelf space.

**************

Winter song by Mary Kathryn Stillwell.
Planting trees - Twyla Hansen

Response to Sally Tisdale's 'Letting Myself Go'

It doesnt matter that whole human epochs have celebrated big men and women, because the breif period in which I live does not;.....
The author is looking to the society for the kind of person she has to be to be accepted. When you are on the block, you could be accepted or not. In a society like America, not 'fitting in' has never stopped people from self assertion.

In trying always to lose weight, we've lost hope of simply being seen for ourselves.
Can our fat self and thin self reconcile? How do we know that the fat version is our true self. Does body have the lesson of 'balance' inbuilt?

For ages humans believed that the body helped create the personality..... The modern culture of dieting is based on the idea that the personality creates the body.
What unsettles the author is how the world thinks now. If one accepts the general thoughts from ages, one should feel more at ease with current day norms.

Now, I try to imagine a world where we eat only food we need, and it seems inhuman.
What animal on this planet eats for pleasure other than satisfying hunger? Why are we shying away from accepting that our indulgences can have consequences?

I felt no joy in being thin - it was just work, something I had to do.... I hated the very idea of maintenance.. but at the same time the author 'used to be attracted to the sharp angles of the chronic dieter' and 'dreamed of having a boy's body, smooth, hipless,lean'. Maintaining weight takes effort. If it were easy would the talk on how fat people are viewed in the society be different? I cannot imagine how much more accusatory the glances would be.

By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room. By letting myself go, I go places.
On the contrary, having an unhealthy relationship with food will limit movement in no time.

I felt truly reduced then, reduced to being just a body and nothing more. Yet we want to revel in our bodies, not all too perfect. Its our idea of beauty and perfectness that needs fixing.

Books say that

women follow their mothers in birthing
the mother had seen the baby's lung spring
into action even if to stop after a day
the daughter had fears of what might happen
of wanting a girl and not having enough
to know even if it was a girl or a boy
She is still a mother cause she cared
about the baby.

"Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist." Michael Levine

After reading 'Letting myself go' by Sally Tisdale Scoot over skinny, I wished she had a different viewpoint about losing weight.
A shorter version of that article.
Sympathetic pregnancies
Couvade
The man who could not stop overeating
response to fat like him essay
In the Fat lady essay, countertransference, process and content in therapy,not to keep news of a parent's illness from kids, sympathy fast, 'pounds flowed off in rivulets'.
Dagwood sandwich
I couldnt go on reading Big game hunters and Big time. For some reason I thought the latter was by a woman even after reading the line about the author's difficulty with women.
In 'Fatland' Stephen Kuusisto says that 'no one who visits that country ever forgets it' and that he 'was only a tourist in the world of fat'. A reflection on how a body's existence is transitory in the fat land. With his newly attained fat by choice, people start noticing him. This popularity contrasts the oblivion faced by Natalie Kusz in 'on Being Invisible'. Being the designer of fat, he has the same cockiness as Stephen Shaw in Fat guys kick ass.
In 'Hunger', from Anne Lamott's therapist..'If I(AL) was feeling very other, sad and....'
The other sounds less like unknown more like the avoided.
Queen of the gym

***************
Force field of fat in This is why I am fat
Fat acceptance movement

Jungle activity

Reading Fires by Rick Bass in The Big Sky reader, the initial description of the hare activity takes me back to the sunday mornings we watched Mowgli, especially the water sounds, the birds, hops of the animals.

In Sparrow, I couldnt connect to the poems initially. Towards the later half, the subjects of people and birds became more relatable.

The child had
to believe
the father was
righteous
to build virtue on own

The house in France
pedalo
Portofino

Morning, noon and night

Perri Klass with her 'different narratives' in Becoming a Doctor, recognises a patient not just as a victim of a disease but as a person in a family, a carrier og gene pool and all the other threads of stories that a person carries in him/her.
Lauren Slater

When a billion chinese jump

Baiji
soft shell turtles
Zipingpu dam