Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

A Fair

     cotton candy scent & teenaged stale beer
     lights come on when we used to leave the fair
     but our parents aren't here
                      half of them are dead
                    which isn't the point
     the lights

begin to move
              too fast to see your face
in the shapes of wheels & screams
                                  & swings
that frightened my mother enough to ban me

               only the moon is unchanged
we'll take the sky
ride over the roller coaster & gravitron
let the fireworks begin

                                          to blur
                                          & smoke
                                          & we're
                                          too old
to

It may seem a little strange for a vegan to be bothered by the funding decisions of a seafood restaurant, and yet I was deeply saddened to read about the cancellation of the Four-of-Jul-Ivar’s fireworks display over Elliot Bay. While there always smaller shows over the lakes or various suburban parks, this was the one my family attended every year when I was growing up.

If the weather was clear, you had to arrive early to get a spot anywhere near the water and because you could only leave Myrtle Edwards Park by a gate setup for purposes of crowd control, it would take forever just to get to the streets—and then there was the traffic on the way home. If it was raining, the crowds would be thinner, and you’d be shivering by the time you made it back to the warmth of the car, but I always thought that the clouding of the light accentuated the display.

My sadness about the discontinuation of this display goes deeper than childhood memories, however. Ivar Haglund, who founded Ivar’s and  began its sponsorship of the display was a true Seattleite, an unrepentant eccentric who once brought a seal to see Santa and, more importantly, promoted folk music in the region.

Next thing you know they’ll start shooting the seagulls on the waterfront.

Last night we marked the Lantern Festival, the end of the Spring Festival begun with the Lunar New Year. Despite the night market being greatly constricted due to the absence of students (the bulk should be arriving this weekend), vendors had set out tables of firecrackers. Nonetheless, the students who have already returned didn’t manage to raise the level of explosions beyond the usual racket. This was in marked contrast to last year when a constant bombardment struck the campus, but if I recall correctly, more students had returned by then.

1) In grading the midterms from my movie classes, I’ve found numerous nearly identical answers despite taking precautions in seating students with spaces between them and not allowing them to have anything on their desks but pens. I knew right away that this was because the students had found essays about the films we watched and memorized them. Unfortunately, the essays most of them memorized weren’t really relevant to the questions asked.

I’ve tried to explain to them why this is an inefficient way to study. I hope that those who scored poorly because of it listen to me when it’s time for the final instead of just deciding that they should memorize more.

2) Professional grade fireworks are available for sale right in Longhu. My main question on seeing that another teacher had bought a box of them was how much they had payed so that I could decide if I wanted to spend the cash to set off sky flowers from the road myself.

3) On a much sadder and more serious note, I knew exactly what one of my students meant when she asked me if there were “baby police” in the US. I responded that no, in the US, women can generally have as many or as few babies as they want. (The reality of that is more complicated, of course, but even just saying there’s more reproductive freedom would be to understate the difference.)