Like A Waking Dream

Early morning drive from back when I was still working for L.A. County.  A strangely dreamy-looking sky overlooking some very down-to-earth traffic made for a rather surreal juxtaposition.

Pot O'Gold?

Since the Leprechaun has made darn certain it'll be really hard to dig up, why not just relax and enjoy the rare sight of a "rainbow" on the sidewalk instead...😊

Like Puppies And Kittens

Or goldfish -- just look at those "mouths"!

Construction crane attracting the attention of curious sky creatures.

Coming Home

I was just ascending the steps to the lobby when I caught sight of this shadow of myself, created by some indirect source behind me. 

It's another one of those images that mysteriously put me in a wistful and somewhat melancholy frame of mind.  

Well, perhaps in this case I can venture a guess as to one possible reason:  the backwards ballcap, the t-shirt, the knee shorts and the silhouette lacking features -- all conspired to erase age and make my shadow-self appear like the kid I have not been in many, many years.  Kind of like Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" in reverse.  But unlike the title of this post, I can never go home again.

A Dream III

 

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Before mom became too ill to continue, we had this semi-ritualized routine where on Fridays I would pick her up for lunch, then we would go to this cafe for tea, and follow it up with a shopping trip to the Koreatown Plaza Market.  The Korean manager there often stationed himself by the door to greet customers, and amusingly enough, he always greeted us in Japanese -"Konnichiwa!".

[Interestingly, this also happened several years before this when we took a trip to Seoul.  Shopkeepers at the Namdaemun Market often greeted us in Japanese.  And once a group of schoolgirls struck up a conversation with us in Japanese, as they were learning Japanese in school and wanted to practice.  I can see how a certain foreignness about us might have stood out in Korea... but in L.A.?]

Anyway, so we made a point of talking to the man in Korean, just to set him straight, but I think that just served to confuse him, because he then started to talk to us in English.  I've since read stories about funny mix-ups like this happening to other people as well;  I guess when people have convinced themselves of something and suddenly expectation is met by a different reality, the result can be a bit of chaos.

A couple of weeks later, we're back at the market and we see him again, manning a register this time, and he must have forgotten what happened last time because he again said "Konnichiwa!".  So this time mom spoke to him in Japanese, bless her heart^^ -- and he asked me, in English, what she said^^.  So I told him what little I understood of it: that it was good of him, a senior staffer, to help out on the floor -- and he bowed to mom and said to her in Korean that he helps out however he can when things get busy.  Then he said to me, back in English, Thank you, what a nice lady she is, and smilingly bade us goodbye.

What the hey, I think he had so convinced himself we were Japanese that hearing us speak Korean didn't really register, and when we pushed the point it was just confusing -- like, Wait, that sounded like Korean... these Japanese people can speak Korean?  Great!

It's kind of like when mom, her gentleman friend and I were together : I spoke Korean to her, she spoke Japanese to him (he was Japanese-American), and he spoke English to me.  He told me on a number of  occasions how mom's Japanese was excellent, just like a high-class Tokyo native's, must be because she learned "correct" Japanese in school.

Mom is the sassy-looking cutie on the right

EDIT:  How could I forget about this!  Years after the series of incidents with the market manager, I sent away for an analysis of my DNA sample.  It was just idle curiosity, largely a lark, but when the results came back I was flabbergasted -- according to 23andMe, I'm pretty much equal parts Korean and Japanese (39% and 36%)!  So that's why people have been telling me that I "look Japanese" -- whatever that would mean -- all my life.  Apparently, within the last 200 years or so there was an influx of Japanese genes somewhere in my family tree.  There was no other explanation and I never wrote back to ask for a more in-depth analysis, but my guess is it was on my father's side, as his family was based in Daegu, in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula, which faces Japan and some Japanese merchants lived there even before Japan took over Korea from 1910 to 1945 (but this is pure speculation on my part).  And BTW my parents grew up during the period of Japanese occupation, which is why mom spoke excellent Japanese, and was actually more comfortable speaking Japanese than Korean in some ways.

The Crawfordsville Monster Returns

Bird in peril of being swallowed up by giant one-eyed sky creature!

[The Crawfordsville Monster was a weird flying creature that terrified the residents of Crawfordsville, Indiana, for two nights in late 19th century;  it was described as a large, amorphous entity with what looked like fins and one "fiery" eye, that hovered a few hundred  feet in the air over the town, writhing "as if in agony";  today, it is explained away in some circles as having been some unusual but natural phenomenon, perhaps a dense flock of killdeer (a kind of plover) that was confused by the presence of newly installed electric lighting;  maybe so, but come on -- surely the town's residents were well used to the sight of killdeer flocks; would they have been fooled into taking one to be a never-before-seen monster?  I don't think so!] 

A Bit Eerie

From a couple of years ago.  I was feeling somewhat adventurous and took a random subway ride to a far place I'd never been to before.  Having ended up at Uijeongbu (this place was mentioned in the episode of the M.A.S.H. TV series where Hawkeye sustains a concussion in a road accident and is helped by a kind farmer's family;  boy, I feel like such a nerd -- and an aging one at that^), I emerged from the station and encountered this scene.  How it was, that the whole street was so bereft of human traffic in broad day, I'll never know.  And that leaden sky!  Makes me think of apocalyptic scenarios in 'end-of -the-world' movies.

How Amusing

Just realized that my 'seal' (displayed at the top of the page in the blog intro)

bears an accidental resemblance to the Chinese character for 'picture', 'painting', or 'image'.

圖

Me, the art major with a master's in painting.  Who runs a blog of images.

Blooming Darkness

Two evenings ago I watched with a mixture of awe, fascination.., and yes, a little fear, as this piece of darkness in the sky grew and grew with amazing speed.  This set of images records only a couple of minutes, if even that.  It was almost like watching a living thing grow from infancy to old age, living out a very fast, volatile, gaseous life.

Feeling Un-PC Makes Me Feel Old

Three favorite old pipes.

Yeah, I know... but I still miss the ignorant bad old days when a man could just light up his pipe and take a few puffs openly.  I love the smell of tobacco smoke.

What The Weird Heck

The things you notice when you suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and have to look at every little thing twice, just to make sure you saw it.

I was just walking by when I happened to notice something truly odd.  This little trickle of water (or whatever it was) -- it looked exactly as if it had set out to flow downstream, in a perfectly ordinary, uniform manner, but then suddenly decided to duck below the surface of the road for a spell, as if that section of the pavement were something like a blanket, before re-emerging and pooling at the end.

Like I said, "What the heck?"

Черные глаза

Today I had occasion to experience something that is strange and unusual, perhaps even unique -- a girl with the most extraordinary eyes.

I was rattling along on the line 3 subway train.  At a stop I don't remember, this young woman got on with her mama or auntie (maybe) and sat across from me.  She was pretty attractive and of course I noticed^.  At first I thought she might be a foreigner because of a certain cast to her face, but maybe she wasn't, as the older woman she was with was quite 'ordinary' looking (of course, I don't mean that in a derogatory way).  Anyway, I kept stealing glances at her because -- well, you know, just because^ -- but didn't really note anything unusual beyond her pretty features;  but then she turned to glance at me, and I was transfixed!

Her eyes were... I don't know how to describe what I saw.  They seemed amazingly deep and dark -- at least that's how they impressed me at the time -- it was almost like looking at the big black eyes of old-time cartoon characters, only "blacker than black".  That's the only way I can describe it -- her eyes were "blacker than black".  What the heck, I was just spellbound.  How is it possible to encounter something like this in real life, on a living person?  On a noisy subway train full of distractions, no less?  After that first shocking eye-lock I kept looking at her, and yes, even when she wasn't looking at me directly, her eyes seemed huge and "blacker than black".

I don't know, maybe she was one of those human-disguised extraterrestrials the ET-nuts are always going on about;  or maybe I was recognizing someone I knew in a past life (my go-to explanation when a stranger stands out from a crowd).

Call me sentimental, sure, maybe even kitchy, but it may well be that similar collective experiences of others before me have resulted in this well-known song, "Очи чёрные" (Dark Eyes):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quA5c2oOa_8

Of An Early Afternoon In Seoul

If I was religious I'd probably have something "rapturous" to say^.

Wet Day In Jongno

Probably the last big rain of this summer.  The monsoon season was declared over long before.

A Trick Of Perspective?

Gee, didn't know airplanes could do that.

Angular turns are more of a UFO specialty; but flying saucers aren't famous for leaving condensation trails.

Sky Creatures

They tend to congregate around energy sources.  Here, they are attracted to a transmission tower.

Funniest Thing Seen In A While

Wait, I actually meant to say The Saddest And Most Heart-Rending Thing!  A tree has had all its branches lopped off and is deeply, deeply resentful.  It seems to be appealing to heaven with its stumpy fingers and and crying, "Why? Why?"

Go ahead tree, scream and weep your eyes out, curse the perpetrator who has done this to you -- even though I fear there is nothing that can be done to restore your lost limbs.

So just grow them back😆.

From Hands To Feet

My toes and a dragonfly.

Suddenly Sad

I took this shot as a lark.  I happened to pass by the guard shack at my building (not as ominous as it sounds -- the "guards" are mostly retired old men who are more like groundskeepers than security personnel), saw the shadow of its roof and thought my hand sticking out of it would be kind of funny.

But when I opened the image for editing it struck an unexpected chord ;  the hand looked like a desperate appeal for help, or perhaps a melancholy reaching-out for a response, any response...

I guess it's just a matter of your state of mind at the time you see the image, but I'm reminded of Goya's lonely dog.

 

JANISCHEWITZ?

I don't know if other people are like this, but I've always had trouble recalling certain words. Not "difficult" words, either ; just plain ordinary words; like "mulberry", and... and.., see? Well, I'd completely forgotten about this interesting dream I had, but Facebook threw this memory of it up, from a few years ago today.

O.K., this not-being-able-to-reremember-certain-words thing is carrying over into my dreams now. Early this morning I had a dream about a soccer player who mistook a cliff for flat ground and fell several stories, and in it I could not remember the word "Manischewitz". I don't remember what the connection was, but I remember used-car king Cal Worthington, bless his soul (for those of you who grew up in SoCal), was in the dream, and then so was my friend Evelyn, who happens to be Jewish, so maybe she was the prompt. Anyway, in the dream I remembered the square shape of the bottle but thought the name of the wine started with a 'J' -- so I tried various J words, like Janischewitz, Janissaries, JanisJoplin and even JaschaHeifetz, to no avail. Then I woke up and almost immediately realized I'd been dreaming about Manischewitz. Hmm, now I want some.

Cicada And Moth

Sounds like an Aesop fable, doesn't it😊  Actually, there's some work going on in the building, so the staff have put up hard plastic sheeting in the elevator to protect the walls from all the equipment and material being ferried.  Then I noticed this cicada

under the plastic.  I wanted to free it, dead or alive, but to my surprise I could not find any openings or gaps anywhere through which it could have entered.  How the cicada managed to get itself trapped in there is a small mystery.  Days later, it's still there.  Then, yesterday I got on the elevator and on the side opposite the cicada there was this very pretty moth

just sitting there, pretty as you please, and not under the plastic.  It was clearly a live moth, perhaps taking refuge from the birds that populate the trees downstairs (but it probably just wandered in at random).  I left it alone and exited the elevator in the lobby, but then I ducked right back in -- to shoo the moth off its perch and out of the elevator.  It couldn't stay in the elevator, obviously -- what happened to the cicada might happen to it, too, or some thoughtless person might kill it.  Anyway, so there.

We Give You Full Control

There's no way that sign is literally true.  Come on.

Napoleon's Last Soldier

 

What To Do, What To Do...

O.K., so I've got hoarder-ish inclinations.  I did have a vague idea before about using a few of these cicada nymph shells in a wall sculpture;  I gave up on that plan because it proved difficult to implement for various reasons, but I still kept collecting the shells.  Now I've got almost three dozen of these buggers (see what I did there?^).  At one point there actually were an even three dozen, but I accidentally damaged a couple and had to discard them.  Now I don't know what to do with them, except that I don't want to throw them out.