Category / Bunberry

by Sixer

Hello, 2014!

The Labyrinth, found in the Cathedral of Chartres. Rubbing taken from a gift

The Labyrinth, found in the Cathedral of Chartres. Rubbing taken from a gift


And the wheel starts a new revolution! Not a change – either in motion, direction, speed, or shape – just a restart. A reboot. A repetition. A continuation of all that has come before. A natural progression from one thing to another. From 2013 to 2014.

I had a lot of fun  reviewing my year last night. A lot of things happened in 2013: I went to two weddings, drove to Georgia (twice), went hiking in Asheville’s arboretum, actually finished a sewing project, and somehow found myself hosting a NaNo night. But some of the more impactful things have been more mundane, barely noticeable really. I started going to a Bible study, I played both D&D and WoD (every. week. for almost four months), reached new financial goals, and got a new roommate. Not huge red letters items, just every day things I adjusted to without thinking. Until now, of course. With this excuse to pause for a moment, at the zenith of the circle, you might say, I find myself itching for newness and longing for the familiar. I have Big Plans for 2014. Not for radical and outlandish adventures, but for quiet, simple, methodical, well thought-out developments. Winter inspires a nervous desire to break out boldly, and I want to funnel this impatient energy into something productive and lasting. To harness the power of the wheel and use it to build my dreams.

So here’s to another year together. And, for some of us, another year apart. Another year of progress and preservation. What dreams do you have for it? Will you guide them gently or let them freely fly?

Showing title instead?

 

by Sixer

A New Repetition

Every morning, for the past seven days, I’ve had the same word pop into my head unbidden.

 Wallpaper.

That’s right. I’ve never been a particular fan of wallpaper, but after this week I don’t think I’ll be able to meet it without smiling. All the same I feel a little strange about our relationship.

It’s complicated.

It started with G. K. Chesterton. I listen to him at work sometimes, when I feel like something edfying and snarky. You can’t really beat Chesterton for snark, to the extent that I sometimes feel his points are being sacrificed to cleverness. But it makes his work the perfect stimulation needed for data entry, and his witty one-liners make pausing the recording to answer the phone painless, whereas long-winded, comma-heavy works tend to leave me feeling lost after the third or forth consecutive call. At any rate, in one of his random short essays he goes on a tangent, much like this one, and throws out to the world the admission he has a abiding abhorrence to gaudy wallpaper. “The Bible must be referring to wallpaper,” he says, “when it says ‘use not vain repetitions.'”

Now, the verse about vain repetition actually isn’t aimed at wallpaper but at wordy prayers. A point which I have had drilled into me all this past week, as my Bible study has been looking at Matthew 6.

 “And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words”

        Matthew 6:7

So every morning, for the past week, I have come downstairs and read this verse and thought “wallpaper.”

It has been a little distracting.

It works well as a picture though, in that if your words are indistinguishable from background noise you might want to rethink them. Still, I was trying to find another analogy for “vain repetition,” since wallpaper seemed a little too hard to explain in a group setting, especially one where outside sources are banned. I still haven’t found one easier to explain than wallpaper, but in the process of trying I remembered that quite a few anime include prayers. Not just short “I wish X ” ones either, but formal, semi-spell like petitions. Naturally, being anime, most of these prayers are heavily stylized chants, drawn originally from shinto or buddhist traditions. Since I am using language study as my main reason for watching anime, coming across one of these prayers is always a little vexing because the subbers refuse to translate them. Sometimes they will go so far as to put the romanji – the English representation of the Japanese sounds – on the bottom of the screen, but they won’t bother conveying the meaning. There are two possible reasons for this that I have come up with. One is that the translators have no idea what is being said because it’s some ancient form of Japanese that pre-dates King James. The other is that the prayers really are just mumble jumbo words, like “hocus-pocus,” and everybody is supposed to recognize them as a powerful spell or chant and leave it at that.

In either case, whether it is the fault of the subber or the intent of the writers, what the people are saying in their prayers becomes unimportant. Their words become merely tools. Hammers and nails which produce a quantifuable result. The meaning behind them fading each time the incantation is repeated. Obviously, for words spoken by made-up people in a made-up world, this is doubly so. But I can think of too many times recently when the words that I myself have said have merely been symbols. Tools meant to get from point A to point B.

“How are you today?”

“How can I help?”

“Sorry.”

 If I can remember them you know it must mean I’ve said it in the past week, because my memory doesn’t really extend much farther back then that.

Now, I don’t think every wall in a house has to have a great piece of art on it, nor does everything I say need to be of such importance that people wouldn’t be able to follow the plot of my life unless it were translated, but I do appreciate the reminder that  – whether it be a wall in your house, or your day-to-day interactions with God and people – you should be mindful of how you are using filler.

And if we must use wallpaper, please, let’s not pick something like this. 

by Sixer

Words, Words, Words
Hello World!

My favorite month of the year has past as fast as a summer’s dawn and now we’re really in the thick of fall, which just happens to be my favorite season. I’m starting to eye the sweaters in my closet, hoping one will look thin enough for a walk out. I did break down and wear one this week, but it’s pretty light for a sweater so I’m not sure if it counts.

This post today is brought to you by my dad’s camera. I’ve borrowed it for the week and will be taking pictures and then slowly rationing them out over the next few posts. Today you get pictures of tomatoes. Here is the bush:

The cucumbers are next to this, but I was trying to avoid the ugly AirCon unit.

When I planted my veggies in the spring I had the idea of neat lines growing up and then stopping. The cucumbers and tomatoes did not get this message, and have not only grown up but out. What’s more, they have actually put roots down through the drainage holes in their containers and attached themselves to the ground proper. Their actions are eerily sentient  – if they start demanding blood sacrifices I’m pulling out the weed-o. Though tomatoes have been producing  a few fruits here and there since August, this was the first time I got such an impressive harvest at one time. And there are plenty more green ones left. What should I do with them all?

I call these plum tomatoes, but I've noticed most people refer to them as "teardrops."

 

 

My cucumber plant has been producing all summer too, but so far only one or two cucumbers at a time. I think I’ve harvested a total of six to date, not counting the weird orange one which I pulled but did not eat.

My dad has a new camera lens - can you tell I was out of my depth (of field)?

My dad has a new camera lens – can you tell I was out of my depth (of field)?

There are always lots of the flowers and gherkins on the vine (expect for when I was taking these pictures, naturally) so I think something must be knocking the babies off the plant before they have a chance to mature. Certainly, once they get big enough for me to notice them the bugs seem to leave them alone. The early cukes were a bit bitter, but the last two I had tasted just like your average grocery store cucumber. Yum. There are at least two more coming my way soon.

 

And finally, it’s too late to show you the blossoms, but here are the alien seed pods of the nigella, or love-in-the-mist. Pretty weird, huh? No wonder they call them ragged ladies.

I managed to focus on the tendrils and not the pod in every picture I took

The pretty blues and purples are the flowers from my sister’s wedding back in May. I was really surprised by how the bright blues kept their coloring even after being dried. For some reason the nigella pods outside are larger and more green-purple. I like these mini tan and pink ones better, but I think it’s wild that there’s such a marked difference between house breed and element exposed.

 

Now that fall is here I’m starting to think about gardens again and what I’ll do differently next year. If all goes well I’ll finally get my fig tree, lavender, and some mints. I’m going to try planting chamomile again too – maybe it will actually flower this time. I tried growing it on my window sill this sumer and got strange, rubbery foliage instead. It did smell good when brushed though, so I know it was at least the right seeds. I’ve also been eyeing more decorative plants, the ones I turned my nose up at this spring, like pussy willows and chinese lanterns. And gerber daisies. Someone brought a pot into the office with these big, impossibly colored flowers and my heart fell. Ah, so much for the witch’s herb garden idea, bring on the madcap faeries.

by Sixer

Final Products

The picture of quiche caught my eye and and held it, showing it off.  “Look at yourself,” it said, “I’m all the things you want.”

I was paging through the vasts collection of Cooks Illustrated that my father had given me, looking for the biscotti recipe that I had used only a few months ago. Keeping an eye out all the while for a recipe for custard or pudding or something that would use up all the eggs and milk I had on hand, something I could pour the whey into, that unwanted byproduct of a paneer experiment. And then, suddenly, there was the quicehe. Eight eggs and 3 cups of dairy. It was exactly what I wanted. Still, as I made my way into the kitchen, I worried. Two cups of onions. Why do I never have onions around? Bacon – had this house ever had bacon in it? I couldn’t remember ever eating it here. I glanced at my fridge, seeing its insides by memory. My mind, always anxious to clean out and make room for new opportunities, whispered into my ear. “The kmichi, the kimchi. It’s over four months old now. You’ve got to find a place to use it. You know you’ll never get around to making kimchi soup – not with a flatmate to be considerate of.” Kimchi had as much flavor as onion – as much as bacon too. Though I thought of it as cool and crunchy, my favorite application of it was actually on grilled cheese. Preferably with some kind of crusty bread, broiled in the oven. Maybe with thick slabs of ham. Next to that I did primarily eat it cold, for breakfast.

I rustled around in my freezer for some spinach and came across a ball of pie crust. Perfect. And so the quiche was begun. The pie crust was rolled out and stretched to fit the cake pan. It was much too small, but I stuck it too the edges here and there and put a plate on it to keep it from puffing up. Into the oven it went. I started to close the door and the edges collapsed onto the plate. Two seconds to decide what to do, three to lift the plate up with butter knives and then put it back down over the sides. The bottom was really all I needed for a crust. I mixed the eggs and the milk and the fatless whey together and wondered if this would work without the heavy cream. I added in the potato starch and the nutmeg and the crushed korean red pepper in lieu of cayenne. I chopped the kimchi. I pulled out the cake pan with it’s golden crust and dumped out the shredded cheese – packets from the freezer stowed to keep them from going bad. I shoveled in the kimchi and spinach, started pouring the egg mixture. It was not all going to fit. How much could I get in? I poured a little and stopped. A little more. A little more. Feeling recklessly nervous I lifted the pan into the oven. One small river of liquid teared over the edge onto the hot oven door. Instant scrambled eggs. I tried to scrub it up with cloth and sponge while the whole time the pan kept weeping in one solid streak. I put a cookie sheet under it, the one I didn’t like. The rimless one.

Idiot.

The egg pooled and diverged and spilled over onto the oven’s bottom. I snatched out that pan and replaced it with the one I used as a tray. Then I closed the door and turned on the vent fan. The smell and the noise drove me upstaris. Twenty minutes late I came down and switched out the pans. The pool of egg was temptingly yellow, with brown, ugly edges. I dug into it with a fork – custard perfection! So delicately flavored. So well balanced. Now I mourned the half cup of egg mixture I had poured down the drain, to keep myself from the temptation of adding just a wee bit more.  I finally sighed, knowing that whatever its past this quiche would be just fine.

Later – when I pulled it out and, impatient again, cut it whille still burning hot and marveled that it did not weep or fill the pan with liquid, and then sat and ate, in forty seconds flat, one peice and ran down the stairs to get myself another – that’s when I wondered how  I could be so silly as to think anything could ruin quiche. Not half frozen spinach, not kimchi, not the smell of burning eggs mixed with the smell of freshly baked chocolate cookies. Quiche was a wonderful metaphor for life, I decided, exhausted but justified. No matter what goes into it, life is a precious thing, and only sad when it ends too soon or, worse, passes by you with only a whiff of heaven and the sight of a buttery-gold crust.

by Sixer

Sketch: Going to the Doctor

Good Morning Everybody! I have the first sketch for you. I wanted to put one up that was sweet or funny, but what to do? All my sketches seem to have suddenly sprouted dark humor like some kind of fungus. Maybe I’ll post one of those for you next time. Until then I did find this oddity. Tell me what you think of it, particularly the ending. I hate ending things and I’m curious to see if this one feels complete to others.

Enjoy!

The Doctor came out with a long face – about eight inches long, which was .5 inches longer than he had went in with. But then, his mouth had been closed before and now it was partly open to speak.

“There seems to have been a loss of her Optic Presence.”

“You mean she can’t see, Doctor?” I knew that wasn’t her problem.

“No,” he bent his relatively short neck and turned his attention to his charts, “I mean she has lost her vision.”

“Isn’t vision just sight?” I tried to keep the acid out of my voice – it’s a daily struggle.

“Vision is to sight as feeling is to touch. You can have one without the other, but it is more important to feel than to touch.”

I knew it. I told her I didn’t want to take her to a quack, but she insisted a PH.D in Literature was just the kind of doctor she needed. We had read his thesis on the way over. Its title was “The Universality of Fictional Philosophies and the Singularity of Society: How Generalizations Help form Cultural Individuality.” That alone was enough for me to want to get off at the next exit and try homeopathy first. But: “I’ve been self medicating on ice cream and english muffins for weeks.” she said. And so into the office we went, and I let them take her away into an room that seemed to double as a second hand bookshop. And now I was being quite literally talked down to by a man who could only tell me she had lost her motivation. I knew that, that’s why I bought her in!

“How,” I replied cautiously, “can we help her regain her Optic Presence?” And I was careful to capitalize as he had.

“Usually the Presence fades when it is overtired. Tell me, has she recently experienced something that she has been looking forward to for a while? A parade, perhaps, or a book signing?”

“There was a performance by the choir a few weeks ago, and she was responsible for the headdresses. But everything went well, even if she didn’t finish until the morning of.”

“Ah. And did she enjoy this event immensely?”

I wanted to ask him what he had been talking about with her for so long that he hadn’t gotten around to asking her these questions. How was I supposed to know what degree of enjoyment she attained?

“I wouldn’t say immensely – it was a nice event. Everything went smoothly and they liked the flowers.”

“Ah.” His face finally came up out of his notes. It’s length horribly abbreviated by a surprisingly wide, yet thin, smile. It looked like a a fresh paper cut on the tip of an index finger.

“The best thing you can do for her is help her see.” The doctor made the word “see” seem vast, inflated beyond the bounds of normalcy. “See and do. When the hands are busy the mind sleeps. When the eyes are busy it dreams. And what are dreams but – ” He paused expectantly, as if waiting for his off-screen audience to shout out “visions!” I staunchly held my silence, taking a step back to make sure I didn’t catch whatever madness he had. As if deciding that one of us must have said it allowed and he was just too preoccupied to hear it, the doctor looked back down at his notes and tore off a small purple square. “Here, I’m prescribing her some books. Don’t let her into them until she as had three full days of looking and doing, and make sure she’s doodling at least twice a day. If her Optic Presence doesn’t come back to her in a fortnight then I’m nothing than a bookworm.”

I resisted the urge to agree with him and just smiled and accepted the paper. It said “Library: YA, SCFI, FTSY”

I tried not to roll my eyes.

I gathered her up and rushed us to the metro and onto our returning train. If there were no delays, I decided, we could start the “Doctor’s” orders right away by making those pies I promised for the prayer meeting. She seemed awfully bubbly already, I had to admit, and finally I gave in and asked “How was it?”

“Oh!” Since she was normally in raptures this “oh” was a little flat. Still, there was certainly an exclamation point behind it  “Oh!, he had the most wonderful office. Just books, books, books. And you know, I realized that I’d been trying to do, do, do so much lately I forgot to just be, be, be. He had one in particular I’d like to read, because the font was the same color as the marigolds outside our house.”

“We can got to the library Thursday,” I offered, casually.

“Oh thank you! I don’t know what I’ll do with myself until then.”

“Bake pies,” I offered, and then threw away caution as if it were the wrapper on a good idea, keeping it safe until I was ready to use it, and added “Clean your room, organize your bookshelves, take apart the seams of that pillow and try again. And sweep.”

She wrinkled her nose and stared out the window with suddenly greedy eyes. “I don’t know about the sweeping.” She said. “But pies sound wonderful. I wonder – if we added turmeric to banana cream would the pie come out properly yellow instead of that awful beige-brown?”

She was lost in her own thoughts now and I gladly left her to them. The trip had done it’s job and offered her a change of pace. In a few days she would be as full of spark as ever and then I’d never get any rest. A small smile escaped with the thought and I settled down farther in my seat. Might as well get a little extra shut-eye now.