moinker

Blog moved to http://www.wilph.luganophan.com/blog . Having my own web domain is exciting.

Whenever I imagine myself having a child, and perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here*, I've always thought I would be more comfortable having a girl than a boy.  This came up in conversation somehow and my friend quite naturally asked, "why?".  Because I wouldn't know what to do with a boy or how to raise him, I said.  I noticed the flaw in my reasoning a little before my friend pounced on it: "Why in the world do you think you'd know how to raise a little girl?"

So I thought about it some more, later.  I think my fear is that there is some archetype of Guy out there that I have never found.  My son would look up to me to find out everything he is supposed to be, and I would just have no clue.  I'm afraid of a conversation like this:

"Daddy, have you seen the new Porsche Maxima with dual turbo hydro engines and digital gear shift?"
"Little Timmy... I have to tell you something.  I don't really like cars, and I have no idea what you just said."
"waah! Mommy!" running off, "Daddy's a poser!"

But you know, I guess that really is a silly reason.  I'm going to have to either come up with a new reason or change my mind.

* Whenever my brother talks about children, I tell my brother he has to find someone willing to marry him first.  Then I snicker loudly.  It's only fair I do the same to myself.

It snowed today.
After a long day
my voice gets tired.
It's nice sometimes to
sit by the window
and watch the snow.

I've picked up the habit of "head wobbling" from my mentor at work.  It's essentially shaking your head from side to side in response to someone's comment, or when you're replying.  According to friends of mine, it's common in India (where my mentor is from).  It's kind of fun to find myself doing, but my mentor barely notices he does it himself.

"Is that a typically Indian thing?  Shaking your head from side to side like that to mean yes?"
"What?  When do I do that?"
"All the time."

I saw too that my manager gestures a lot with his right middle finger retracted.  After picking up on my mentor's head shake, I was feeling pretty good about my discerning eye.

"And that thing with your finger, you do that a lot.  Is that cultural?"
"No.  I injured my finger some years back."
"Oh."

Small Frogs Killed on the Highway
by James Wright

Still,
I would leap too
Into the light,
If I had the chance.
It is everything, the wet green stalk of the field
On the other side of the road.
They crouch there, too, faltering in terror
And take strange wing. Many
Of the dead never moved, but many
Of the dead are alive forever in the split second
Auto headlights more sudden
Than their drivers know.
The drivers burrow backward into dank pools
Where nothing begets
Nothing.

Across the road, tadpoles are dancing
On the quarter thumbnail
Of the moon. They can't see,
Not yet.

There is a teacher I read of who begins every term with this piece, encouraging her students to take the leap - hopefully not to die - into the life and work that interests them. Possibly dying in a blaze of glory, of course, may not appeal to everyone. Still,

...

Is it a happy poem? Luke interpreted the ending of the poem as, "Like. The tadpoles can't see yet. But when they grow up they'll look at all these dead frogs on the roads they have to cross and think, 'crap. Why did my parents have me'". haha.

College is a mix of strange and exciting, but overall very fun so far. Seniors, look forward to it ^_^. I would like to write more, but not at the moment. I will, soon.

I walked out onto the porch at 12:00 last night to see "a little closer" what the storm was like... oiy, you realize how nice it is to have a home. Watching the window shades on the wall flash blue while the thunder muffles through the walls, it's easy to laugh at the war outside. "HAHA, try and get ME you little lightning twerp, you can take our power but my laptop runs on batteries." When I walked onto the porch though, and I imagined what it must be like not to have a house nearby, to be in a field with a clear view of the sky and in the pouring rain, everything changes. That's not some twerp outside, that's an authentic force of nature, and it's much larger than you. Prehistoric-Will (as I was in my mind) sat there thinking, "Am I next? Is there a God?", and hunkered in the grass with the rest of the sodden tribe. It'd be impossible to sleep, with the flashes of light and the noise (the storm was very close). On my way back inside a particularly close strike made me scurry. My family all comforted our dog for a bit before finally returning to bed.

On a clearly unrelated note, The Sandman by Neil Gaiman is quite well done.

Going into a bookstore on my own is a bad idea. It feels akin to how I imagine going into a bar to get drunk by one's lonesome feels: I'm passably content while I'm there, and feel terrible and terribly lonely when I get out. There are things I wanted to do today, dammit! And instead of hanging out with some good friends, I stagger home in a sort of drunken stupor, bleary-eyed from too much reading.

Anyway, dwelling on it isn't worth much either. But I'm staying out of bookstores on my own for the rest of the summer.

We dropped out of Seevak last week, which was a little sad. Anyone who is still in it who reads this… actually, you all dropped out too, dincha? Muahaha. We will have to wait until next week to tell Ms. Freeman though, since she's gone to Eastern Europe.

I've started to feel, just that tiny bit, that high school is almost over, and carry my camera around with me to school now. I told curlyswirlzz, though I doubt she remembers, that I'm sentimental only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I do like pictures. Yesterday was a good day for them. I used to come out "introverted" on online Myers-Briggs tests, before high school, and though in some ways that hasn't changed - I still feel out of sorts in large groups, and I prefer my books and corners sometimes - I definitely enjoy myself with people more now. Yeah, that's you guys. So anyway (to use Frankie's signature segue), it was nice to take a break off yesterday, after school, to hang with everyone, just hang. Thanks ya'll.

People say that Ithaca is out in the middle of no where, and that's really not true. It's in the middle of hills and woods and lakes, and if you're not used to it that might mean "in the middle of nothing to do", but you are definitely somewhere. I mentioned it to some of my friends, but when I travel by car or by bus to Ithaca, and I start seeing the hills and the trees of upstate New York, I always feel like I'm returning home.

This is the view from the house of a friend.
Not that I think Boston is all that bad either.

Stormy days like these should be spent:

1) walking home.
2) by the window.

Poem in my thoughts:

Autumn Song
The firelight glows
The embers sigh,
We dream and
Doze--
The cat and I.
The kitten purrs,
The kettle sings,
The heart remembers,
Little things.

-Margurite Kingman

For those who know Frankie's lj, I'll just link you over to our vacation escapade

comic in my thoughts

Do you like the icon? For the third, and perhaps final year, Bruce and I sent Valentine's to a bunch of our friends, and this picture was one of six. Several people couldn't stop laughing, and several people thought we were just weird, hahaha.

Very often, telemarketers mistake me for a girl. I like to pretend it's a pet peeve, but I've actually become accustomed to it. Take the following conversation from yesterday, for instance:

"Hello, is An Phan there?"
"No, may I take a message?"
"Yes, we are...." (they give their message)
"Got it."
"Thank you, ma'am. Is she your mother?"
"Yep! She is."

Usually the conversation ends with the "thank you, ma'am". The telemarketer blurts out the offending "ma'am" and hangs up before I can growl at them in my deepest, harshest, meanest, most masculine voice. But although I've gotten used to being mistaken for a girl, I'm not quite used to being mistaken for someone a little older...

"Well, ma'am, your daughter..."
"my what?! sorry. Did you say, is she your mother, or is this the mother?"
"The latter."
"ah."

Several growls later, things were back to normal. The telemarketer no longer believed I was my own grandmother... just my mom's daughter.

http://www.members.tripod.com/lethe01/college.html

( My Princeton Supplemental Essays )

Thanks Connie, that made my day. ^_^

... they really meant it. MIT deferred me at 12 midnight today. I do hope my materials coming in late didn't have anything to do with it, although I guess it doesn't matter.

So I'll have to wait for regular.

Good luck on Tue., the rest of you!

What happens to an application deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?

I will defer that question until December 12.

What happens to a question about an application deferred?
...
bah!

In Praise of My Sister
by: Wislawa Szymborska

My sister doesn't write poems,
and it's unlikely that she'll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn't write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn't write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister's roof:
my sister's husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as
repetitive as Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister's desk drawers don't hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn't hold new ones.
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn't want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn't spill on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it's hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success,
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.