Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Category: Miscellany

Anything that’s on my mind.

  • Prompt 17

    Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?

    Oscar Wilde was right in saying, “Be yourself; everyone is taken.” A person’s uniqueness results from the courage to express oneself, confidence in being oneself, and love of oneself without making oneself parallel to the outlook of others for their beauty or power.

    Nowadays, women’s beauty has never been so outrageously uninformed than before, thanks to social media, where famous or not pretentiously show off their surgically created beauties to mold into a standard beauty manufactured and advertised by the media in the form of celebrities. As Edgar Allan Poe averred, “There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in proportion,” no beauty is perfect, no one is perfectly beautiful as Plato confirmed we live in the imperfect world, where no perfect beauty exists. I think everyone of us in this world has one thing or more beautiful internally as well as externally if each of us looks into the eye of one another, whether it is a stranger or acquaintance. But in this millennials, Generations Z and Alpha dominated 21st century, my talk of the simple and sophisticated beauty at once is only an outcry of a madwoman, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

    As times go by with the leaves of my tree falling off in my season of life, I am disheartened by people’s comments about the years passed manifesting on the external castle of my soul, which I always retort with a quick denial because age cannot wither me away, nor custom can stale my unique character reflecting on the windows of my soul! I would rather be a lonely beautiful witch than a cantankerous woman complacent with her stage of life, always gossiping and crude.

  • Prompt 16

    What’s something most people don’t understand?

    Oscar Wilde admired beauty. So much so that he proudly proclaimed that he chose his friends for their good looks, his acquaintances for their characters, and his enemies for their intellect. But at least he’s honest about it, vocalizing what most people do when judging one another based on what the eyes, not the minds, see for the instant recognition of optical illusion morphed into reality.

    Our society favors gregarious extroverts, not reticent introverts nestled in the shade of anonymity, not because they are antisocial but simply because that’s how they are. Not everyone is uniformly outgoing. Nobody is impossibly happy go lucky. I always find it scary that having a happy face all the time is a specialty of a psychopath in disguise. But people do not usually warm to those who are lonely, quiet, or not so attractive, instead pinning them down as anti-social, incompetent, or negative to stay away from them. It amazes me to see people gossip about or ostracize unpopular, reticent people the way people falsely accused innocent women of practicing witchcraft in the past because they were in their selves. Or are they still? Come to think of it; if I had been born during the days of heightened witch-hunting, I would have been burned at the stake.

    I feel that people do not like to talk to me because I don’t have the face of Helen of Troy to launch a thousand ships or do not open up a conversation first, or because of my race being Asian, a race stereotyped as being docile, if not submissive, to voice out what’s kept inside. Notwithstanding the account above, I do not want to force myself to become someone I am not, cannot, and will not because, as Wilde pinpointed, I am myself since others are already taken. I am not a negative person who always accounts for a litany of woes. Instead, I can see people’s ills in the swing of things around me and how they affect me. If discussing the malaise of what’s happening in my life when I need a company to share grief in halves, I call it cruelly erroneous and unjust.

  • Prompt 15

    How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?

    There are differences between a sycophant and a yes man/woman. The former curries favor from an influential person employing flattering, whereas the latter- usually the meek and vulnerable- tries to protect a self from retaliation or bullying by sacrificing even a little leisure of comfort within a castle of own as a luxury to survive in their rule of the jungle. In that regard, I consider myself the latter who hardly says no to egoists.

    I am something of Diana, the beautiful friend of Anne Shirley of the Green Gables, the sweet but also fiercely passionate literary blue-stocking girl whose headstrong pride and vividly adventurous spirit put her soft-spoken, amiable bosom friend in trouble. Diana’s fragile sensitivity and delicate femininity deter her from voicing out her mind. Hence she is seen as meek or less intellectual even than Anne, who is a vivid talker able to account a thread of stories woven by her trademark imaginativeness. But that’s not what it seems, and we know it. Well, at least I do because I relate myself to Diana in terms of timidity translated into self-consciousness. But then it is also a quick and painless way to judge one’s character based on the appearance and social backgrounds. Isn’t it so?

    I say yes to those who bully, dislike, and disregard me to avoid unnecessary confrontations that will shatter the windows of my glass heart. No, I am not a coward, never, because a coward blindly gives into the will of the other.

  • Prompt 14

    What do you wish you could do more every day?

    I wish I could do more writing every day than I do now. Things are not the same any longer: until last year, I always found myself to write just about anything after work at night or even during my lunchtime at work. But gone are the days.

    Maybe it’s because the routine of my work at my job changed. But then, I guess it’s just my lame excuse for not exerting myself to express myself in writing, which I love doing. I often wonder if this is my becoming disaffected with the quality of my writing, which used to be better than now. Some say it’s due to stress from work and attending to my infirm elderly mother at home, or both. Maybe so.

    Elsie Robinson, who wrote the popular column “Listen, World” in the early and mid-20th century, encouraged her readers to write anything daily, like writing an article for a newspaper or magazine of their own. I think it’s a great idea. So maybe I should do the same every day.

  • Prompt 13

    What is one word that describes you?

    One word is insufficient, for you and I are not a manufactured byproduct of living organisms. So I will defy it with the following parade of words that tells about me: munificent, seI am sentimental, sympathetic, compassionate, funny (in a delightful way), naive (but more leaning toward gullible), agerasia, Renaissance, timid, introverted, vivacious (only when I am in the mood under right conditions with right company), blue-stocking, independent, unreconstructed, passionate when talking about books and history with kindred spirits, ambitious, neverending, resilent, optimistic, silly, sometimes pretty when my spirit is high, sybil, Cassadra, ancient, cosmopolitan, spiritual, witch (a good one), dreamer, laid-back, warm, dilligent, genuine, trusty, mysterious, and hopeful.

  • Prompt 12

    What was the best compliment you’ve received?

    I am an analytical, sophisticated thinker capable of applying a concept, idea, or philosophy to things I read and experience. That compliment was a comment made on my term paper by my Colonial and Post-Colonial literature seminar class professor at Rutgers University. It was about George Orwell’s Burmese Days.

    Other compliments I have heard are thus: that I am well-read, a good writer with poet’s rhythm, and a good egg. They all pertain to my writing, which I regard as intellectual, which means I have something to think about. Then in terms of my appearance, I have been told that I have the aura of someone famous and that I am sultry when I converse about the subject of interest, which piques my mind’s flair for sharing knowledge with like-minded people.

    But some compliments are inwardly unappreciative, such as “You are so nice,” not in the least because it sounds like a superficial cliche that ignores the person’s virtue. Once you are seen as nice, you must remain nice, always smiling and being a yes girl. I’d rather be myself than a mindless servile, yes, girl.

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