I just had a great idea….

… for an amazing blog. Except of course I cannot say anything about it because, well, it’s a great idea. Hell, maybe could even get some advertising and make some money? It’d be a multi-author thing and I think it might be a damn cool site either way. Better even than Jack and my idea of an Onion-like website called University of Rejection.

That came about when we were all Teacher’s Assistants (read: part-time profs) and someone’s undegrad student wrote the following sentence:

I just got my Letter, from the University, of Rejection.

This was a French student, I believe, and what he was trying to say was,

I just got my letter of rejection from the University…

but we thought it would be the most hilarious title for a website dedicated to academic spoofery. Maybe it would be the sort of thing professors and grad students would go check out occasionally for humor of the academic variety, but I think it would be difficult to actually make something like that work on a long-term scale.

Whereas, this other idea I have, I think I could make it work over a period of years, especially if I could get a few other writers in on it. There would be a few threads tying things together, and I think it could probably develop a readership pretty rapidly if it was done right. I don’t know whether I could do it myself and maintain anything like decent posting on my main blog or the other blogs I’m in on, but I would love to administrate it and post regularly… and I’d be happy to share whatever profits would come from eventual publication, on a fair per-contribution basis.

I’ll think about it a little more and write to some friends. Who knows, maybe in a few months you will see a plug for some kind of new crazy site out there? Here’s hoping. It’s creative, anyway, and I don’t think anything like it is out there yet.

Ondol

I think it’s called an ondol, but I could be spelling that wrong (I always seem to hear a vowel wrong these days). It’s a system of heating a room from below, and it uses hot water to do so. There’s usually one under the floor of apartments, and when you sleep on the floor on a yo (a floor-pad) like I do, the warmth radiates up out of the floor and permeates everything… the room, your body. My back feels so good the morning after I sleep on the warm floor, even when it’s on the lowest heat possible.

Sometimes in restaurants the ondol is on too high and the result is a stuffy, oppressively hot room, a place I want to get out of right away. I’ve trained myself to relax, sit on the floor, and just take off my jacket and sweater and adjust to the heat. But it sometimes is just too hot, and the restaurant owner notices this poor white guy sweating and turns the heat down. The problem is, the heat still radiates a long time after you turn it down or off, so usually it’s only cooler by the time I finish eating.

But even so, I love the ondol and I think it’s the best way to heat a space if you’re sleeping on the floor.

Homesickness

I’m not homesick these days, but I know what it feels like. Wanting to make everything simpler, to settle into that room that was always yours to sleep in, the wish to hear those voices that are so familiar even after so long being away. Not just the laughter but also the arguments, the disagreements, and the chores: everything is precious to you.

I have a friend who is feeling homesick now. I hope she has a chance to go home and recharge her emotional batteries… we all need to do that sometimes. I hope I didn’t contribute to some of that emotional drain, but I have to wonder if something I said added to her strain. I hope not… and more important, I hope she gets a chance to get home and enjoy her family again soon. When you get back home, you can see where you came from, and you see how good life really is. For me, these days, even just remembering my folks in the kitchen helps me feel that way.

I haven’t been to my parents’ house since December 2001, and I don’t have a solid plan to go back there for a Christmas visit before December 2004, so for me it’s memory that has to give me my trips home.

I can see my parents’ kitchen, my father playing with the dog by holding a dog cookie up, dancing this weird skittish dance that tells the dog he is playing. The dog leaps up and misses the cookie, and then he starts to bark, a deep, powerful booming bark that seems to come from deep inside him. My mother, sitting at the kitchen table, says what she always says in a situation like this, in her strong French accent: “Oh, dam-MET, man! Why do you tease him like ‘dat?”

My baby sister, now all grown up and working in another province but back for the holidays, comes up the stairs in my imagination, and smiles this grin that tell us all that once again she didn’t sleep enough last night. But she looks happy, and goes right into the cupboard to find some cereal for breakfast.

My other sister and her husband ring the doorbell, and come in from the snowy cold of winter into a warm and welcoming home. They are a bustle, a new generation, a family of their own, all sound and excitement and so much of the right words at the right time, over tea with milk in the living room. That’s what my sisters are all about, the right word at the right time. I appreciate that about them, even if I myself am much more about the fumbled word at the wrong time, grasping at something that doesn’t fit inside a house like this. But I still miss them, and sometimes I really wish I could just be there for a couple of hours, just to drop in and be there.

I don’t know what it will be like when I do visit my parents’ house. Life without chopsticks. No kimchi in the fridge. They don’t even have a rice cooker! I will have to steam them some goguma (sweet potatoes) and get some kimchi from somewhere… and of course bring a few bottles of bok bun ja ju (wild raspberry wine). And maybe I’ll pick them up some nice chopsticks before I go, enough for everyone in the family (except of course the dog).

I think it will be good to see them, but I think I will be reminded of why I don’t not live there… that my real life is somewhere else, doing something else. But, I still can’t wait to see them again, and I miss them. I miss the look of the walls, the feel of their carpet on my feet, the sound of their voices in the evening and the smell of dad’s latest weird cooking project. I miss it all, not in an aching way but in a quiet, patient, content way… because I know that missing something means something good is waiting there for me when I come back to visit.

Northern Lights

I was looking on the blog of another Friday Fiver and saw the most amazingly beautiful picture of the Northern Lights. It made me remember when I was a kid and my dad was driving us home to Prince Albert from a day of music lessons in Saskatoon. Sometimes at night it would get so dark we could see out across our arm of of the Milky Way, the ocean of miniscule lights. One night, I don’t remember why, he stopped and I remember looking off into the haze of light far past the distinct points of light. I remember wondering what it was, and so of course I could not have known about the dust and the oceans of stars out there. I just thought it was pretty.

But normally we did not see the Northn Lights this way, standing in the cold, staring up. Usually I had to steal glances out the window of the car stealing across the night landscape. It was always on the coldest nights that the sky gave us the most beautiful show, and I always wanted to stop the car and look at the most beautiful thing the sky ever does. But of course we had to get home, and so Inever asked him to stop. I just craned my head and stared through the glass, up into the wild carousing beauty of it. It looked like huge majestic drawings being sketched across the canvas of the sky above us, and erased as quickly as they were drawn. It made me dream wonderful things the nights when we saw it.

The beautiful northern lights.

Pretty picture stolen from NASA, via Epiphany in c