My Jack O'Lantern 2006

All Hallows' Eve

In honor of the holiday, a poem in the voice of a ghost:

NOCTURNE
By Daleth Carey Hall

I am here, and not.
The difference is tiny:
A tilting of sunbeams, a settling of dust.

When you dream of my house,
I enter: rooms jumbled,
Dream-skewed,
Not at all as it was.
In your confusion I find
My chair, and sit gratefully.
If I wink, your eyes flutter.
You turn in your sleep.

When I left, in a step
I crossed galaxies. At the thought
Of returning, I returned,
But not to what I’d left:
You’re a flicker of pictures,
All shadow and light.
The skin beneath fingers, the heat
Of your breath,
Are beyond my ken.

As you sleep, I rest
In your dream-chair, the only one
That holds me, or walk
In the only house
Whose walls I don’t pass through.

When you wake, the hint of me
The memory of weight
Burns off in an instant
Like a night’s fog at sunrise,
Like a note that’s been sung.

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

Edited to add: published in Earth's Daughters issue #72, 2008

Pink Flamingos

Apparently the company that's been making the classic pink plastic lawn flamingo is going out of business after nearly 50 years, casting the future of kitschy lawn ornaments into doubt. Folks, there may not be any more pink plastic flamingos adorning America's lawns! People just aren't buying enough of them, so the company's going under!

But wait! I have an idea. Here's how to save the pink plastic lawn flamingo: make them out of recycled plastic; give them a woo-woo alternative lifestyle name (a la "Spirit of the Everglades"); and have them manufactured by some feel-good cooperative. Then sell them in a "rich hippy" lifestyle catalog such as Gaiam, like so:

Spirit of the Everglades: heal the earth while paying tribute to a wilder and more innocent America. These classic garden ornaments, in recycled plastic the vivid rose of a Caribbean dawn, are individually handcrafted by an indigenous women's cooperative high in the Andes. While evoking the spirit of Florida's wilderness--and the kitschy sincerity of Kennedy-era America--you can let the whole world know that you support recycling and economic independence for the native peoples of the Andes. $125.

Place your orders now, folks! Just visit www.cynicism.com!

Go, Madonna! And critics be damned.

The situation: a dirt-poor onion farmer and his wife, in an African nation shattered by poverty and AIDS, had their third child, David, in 2005. Their first two children had died of malaria as toddlers. Six days after David's birth, the mother dies. The father can't afford milk to feed David, and no extended-family network is available to help, because AIDS has destroyed that traditional safety net. So the father puts baby David in an orphanage, because there, at least, David will get food and basic medical care.

Recent developments: a self-made multi-millionaire and married mother of two--that is, Madonna--expresses interest in adopting David and bringing him to live with her family in London, where he will have a mom and dad, two siblings (one half-British, one half-Cuban--this is already a mixed, international family), a top-notch education, fantastic food and health care, and every opportunity in life that money can possibly buy. So instead of dying in childhood or becoming a hardscrabble farmer like his dad, maybe he'll be the next Barack Obama. Oh, also, Madonna and her husband want to make sure David stays in touch with his dad; they promise occasional visits. Also, they're donating $3,000,000 to orphanages throughout the country, to help the kids who will never be adopted.

How the nutjobs have reacted:
(1) So-called "children's rights" groups in Malawi have filed suit to block the adoption, over the objections of David's father, who asks, "Where were these people when David was struggling in the orphanage? As a father I have okayed this. Who are they to cause trouble?"
(2) Controversy explodes over the fact that a child with a living father is being adopted. Everyone seems to have forgotten that here in the developed world, that's how almost all adoptions work: children whose parents are both living are put up for adoption because the parents are unable or unwilling to raise them.
(3) And last but not least, wackjobs the world over have accused Madonna "of 'American colonialism' for transplanting the boy from an African orphanage to a life of western luxury." ("If that's colonialism," say the orphans of Africa, "sign me up!"). Analogies to slavery have been made, as have statements that interracial adoptions are selfish and unwise; Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema, who spoke to journalists in the apparent but inexplicable belief that his opinion was in some way relevant, compared David's adoption to a "kidnapping." And get this idiotic, breathtakingly arrogant blog posting by an NYU professor: "This Malawi child is leaving his heritage, his people, his language, his family. Yes, he is poor. But now he is also impoverished. The soul of the motherless child is co-opted... Sounds like colonialism to me."

My response, a.k.a. the only rational response: Nutjobs, shut the hell up. It is not your business if a child's only living parent gives him up for adoption. It is not your business if the kid's father, having seen his wife and first two children die, decides that life with an adoptive family in London is preferable to life in an African orphanage. If you're not going to step in and support this child yourself, shut up.

The best summary of the situation: Andrina Mchiela, of the Malawi Welfare Ministry, compared the decision David's father made to the story of baby Moses being placed in a basket and floated downriver in hopes that someone would save him. Moses, a Jewish child, was rescued by an Egyptian princess and raised in luxury in a foreign land; he grew up to become the liberator of his people. I, for one, agree with Mchiela and with David's dad that David should be given the same chance.

How Do You Say "Hell" in Japanese?

You don't need to. It is understood from context: everything is hell in Japanese. Let me illustrate how to look up new words, for instance:

The scene: Me at my desk with a 430-page coursepack, which I have to review in its entirety before moving on to the actual work I have to do for class. "Review" is a misnomer, as I have never laid eyes on this coursepack before. This is what I get for convincing a teacher to teach me a class for which I never took the prerequisite.

Some background for those mercifully unfamiliar with Japanese: This fine language has two different alphabets (hey, why not? the more the better) and thousands of Chinese characters ("kanji"). In any given sentence, all these elements may be thrown together in an orgy of linguistic confusion. Kanji do not seem to follow any pronunciation rules whatsoever; the exact same character may have three or four completely different pronunciations. Not satisfied with this level of complexity, well-meaning western teachers have also transliterated written Japanese into "romaji" (the Roman alphabet). Unfortunately they disagree on how to transliterate it, so, for example, in different romaji dictionaries, "zyaa" and "ja" might actually be the same word. Perhaps the romaji dictionaries are just trying to prepare you mentally for the sheer frustration of Japanese itself.

The issue: This coursepack is full of kanji I have never seen before (the teacher's explanation: "we get so many Chinese and other Asian students studying Japanese, and since they already know kanji, we start out at a high level.") In other words, those of us who don't already read another Asian language just have to figure this out for ourselves. The kanji are printed in text 1/8th of an inch tall; many of them look like nothing so much as tiny centipedes crushed flat on the page. There is a conspicuous absence of handy-dandy furigana (phonetic characters), so I have no idea how the kanji are pronounced, so I can't even try to look them up in the only dictionary I have, which is in romaji (though it has Japanese writing next to every word). So in addition to not knowing how they're pronounced, I don't know what they mean.

The solution: Complicated. Breaking the process down, it goes like so: (1) attempt to count how many strokes were used to write the teeny-tiny, crushed-centipede kanji. If there's another kanji next to it that might happen to be considered part of the same kanji, count those teeny-tiny strokes, too. The usual result is that it might be, say, 13 strokes, although it could also be 12 or 14. (2) Look in the small kanji-pronunciation dictionary in the back of my textbook, under 13-stroke kanji. When I don't find it, look under 12 and 14 strokes too. In the unlikely event that I find it, move to step 3; otherwise skip to step 5. (3) Read the hiragana (phonetic Japanese) next to the kanji in the back of said textbook; then (4), having transliterated the hiragana into the Roman alphabet, look the word up in my romaji dictionary. Or (5) if I don't find the exact kanji I'm looking up, but I find the first big chunk of it contained within other kanji, notice the multitude of ways in which that chunk can be pronounced; say, for example, it could be pronounced shin or ka or ga. Then (6) start looking in the romaji dictionary: read every word that starts with shin, then every word that starts with ka, then ga... and hope I find it.

The result: This method ain't pretty, but it more or less works. On the other hand, spending an evening this way is roughly as much fun as spending it getting into a bar fight and being rushed to the hospital minus your handbag and two pints of blood. I think I am beginning to understand the high suicide rate in Japan--is that what they mean when they say learning a foreign language teaches you about the culture, too?