Category: GENERAL

Proliferating Profiles…

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Try saying that three times in a row, as quickly as you can. Those who actually click through to the website will notice a few new icons have turned up in my sidebar among the social media links. I’ve started tracking my daily music practice in a public notebook at Evernote; I’ve got an about.me profile page up; and as of today I have also begun developing a clippings.me profile, for tracking nonfiction publications. The latter is missing a lot of stuff: I’ve only added my published book reviews, but there are a bunch of articles and columns I need …

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Out from the Sinews

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In a book I read long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Christopher Dewdney wrote in his book of poetry The Radiant Inventory about neurology, using the most brilliantly poetical and beautiful language. He wrote about all kinds of things, of course: books of poetry are like that. But among the things he discussed in the book was the neurobiology of break-ups, and why they are so difficult. I can’t quote the book, or even paraphrase it in any way I’d regard as trustworthy–my copy is somewhere in that other galaxy where I read it, in a box, floating …

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Can You Make Risotto with a Southeast-Asian-Twang?

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Apparently yes. I was dealing with some stuff so I wasn’t so into it, but other people who tried it liked it… I suppose that’s encouraging, this being my first risotto. (It was a bit too salty, though.) I basically followed Felicity Cloake’s advice, though: I had to use arborio rice–the other stuff wasn’t available. I forgot to get white cooking wine, so I just used red, which gave the risotto a pinkish color (deepened by the red bell pepper I threw in later). I ended up using a mix of cheddar and pecorino cheeses, again beause that’s what we …

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The Day I Made a Gumbo…

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… was today. My first gumbo, too. Vegetarian and gluten-free, because I was cooking for the house. Apparently a success. The gumbo itself is sort of a mishmash of recipes I saw online. I found such an incredible amount of diversity among the recipes that finally I decided, there is no such thing as a definitive gumbo recipe. Gumbo is conceptual: stew, with chunks. Herbs, spicy if you like that. Slow cooked. Okra and smoked sausage are nice, but not absolutely required. (The latter I’m omitting only because this meal is to be en famille.) Often served with rice. Beans …

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Immigration Officer Second, Zombie Fan First.

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So Mrs. Jiwaku and I have been in Saigon a little more than a week now. A million things have been happening, but the funniest and most blog-worthy at the moment was what happened at the Immigration desk, after I got my visa stamp and just before we exited out into the airport proper to be greeted by our friends Nick and Chris. Mrs. Jiwaku went first, and the immigration officer had nothing much to say to her–he just looked at her for a moment, fiddled with her passport, and stamped it. But then I stepped forward. I happened to …

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Patience Please…

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UPDATE (later the same day): In addition to the below, may also see old posts being accidentally republished as new ones. I’m clearing out a few old plugins and that means removing some stuff from a few posts, and republishing them. I’ll try make sure things are in the right time settings, but it may get borked a little here and there, temporarily. ORIGINAL POST: Despite no change in the number of visitors coming to my site, and despite having a cache enabled and stuff like that, I am experiencing a much higher server load at the moment. I’ve been …

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Winging It…

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If you can see this, then we’ve already left Korea, and are on a plane to Saigon–which you may not find on a modern map unless you look for Ho Chi Minh City, but the locals apparently call it Saigon. Our plans changed a few times over the last couple of months: first, we’d planned to fly to Berlin… then Chiang Mai, a place that still interests us even now… but finally, we’re going somewhere else. Just when we figured out our finances wouldn’t be quite as stellar as we’d hoped, we were contacted by friends who were in the …

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The Case of Park Chorong-Chorong-Bitnari, and the Anthropomorphization of Humans

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Caveat: I’m going off some of Mrs. Jiwaku’s (perhaps hazy) memories, and my own (imperfect) reading of some articles online, through a language barrier. I welcome corrections, as therefore there may be some mistakes in my understanding, or misreadings, or details that are off… A few years ago, I began writing this post, though I didn’t know what I wanted to say about it. Now, I think I do know, and it unsettles me. The story is somewhat disturbing, though I don’t do “trigger warnings.”

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Looking Back: “Erosion” (1999)

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In 2005, I hadn’t published much of anything, in any sense approaching a professional one. I mean, I’d gotten poems and short pieces into chapbooks, had published a couple of poems and a a small think piece in the university magazine were I did grad school, and a few short student articles in my undergrad campus newspaper; I’d even had a short piece of fiction included in a refugee awareness training program, though that was because my sister asked me to write something for the handbook she was compiling. But I had submitted a story to precisely one market in …

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On Academic Ecologies, Career Planning, and Worldbuilding,

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At my goodbye party last week, we were talking about the future collapse of the TEFL industry when brute-force autotranslation gets good enough that most people will only study foreign languages the way that some people still do math by hand. (I mean without a calculator–that is, out of academic requirements, a sense of old-fashionedness, or rare personal impetus to do so.) I commented that I think now is a pretty good time to distance oneself from TEFL altogether, and certainly a good time to get out of depending on jobs where one is directly teaching English.  (Unless one is …

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