If you had a million dollars to give away, who would you give it to?
Sister Teresa of Calcutta said charity begins at home, and I agree with her wholeheartedly. If you do not care for those close to you, then you can’t care for others, even if you would deny it. But of course, that doesn’t mean my neighbors!
That said, if I should be so lucky – oh, so lucky! – to have a fortune to give away, I would first help my brother so that he could clear away his financial burdens and help him start his new family. Then, I will look for our relatives who may be struggling financially. Thereafter, I will donate funds to my church and ask the priest to help parishioners who are having difficulty with healthcare, housing, and educational costs.
I would love to say I would donate a million dollars to well-known charity organizations with noble causes, but these are my wishes to help people with my lucky fortune.
When I read the story of the stranded Beluga whale who died in France’s Seine River in 2022, I felt like my spirit was in communion with hers because I could feel what she might have felt—what was once hopeful turned into disappointment and loneliness.
No one knew what caused her to separate from her pod and end up in the river, but I think she wanted to see the world herself, with the images of kind humans she had once seen on the ocean in her memory. So she came to our world full of expectations for welcoming faces and smiles, but instead, she found herself in a murky gray urban river that made her loneliness more conspicuous, more incongruent.
Likewise, that’s how I feel when I find myself surrounded by crowds that make my presence awkwardly conspicuous, shielded by an invisible wall of willing ignorance.
I am a bonus reaper and record collector. I am a wonder-worker. No braggadocio. Without me, the team cannot get a bonus. That is my top priority tomorrow morning: meeting the quotas for getting a bonus added to the team’s next paycheck.
First, I should follow up on the request for the records made last Friday so that attorneys can send demand letters to insurance companies to settle the cases. After checking my daily incoming emails, sending email reminders will be my first task. Like Earl of Kent, the loyal servant to King Lear, which an ordinary man is qualified for, I am fit for, and the best of me is diligence. But my manager is not King Lear; therefore, she ignores the best of me and favors her favorite servant, who is a knave young man with youthful bravado and scornful hubris. But I believe one day, the truth is to be told because the truth is truth to the end of reckoning.
Nevertheless, I will reap my first priority tomorrow morning with the Earl of Kent’s diligence and Cordelia’s truthfulness.
I could do more by being less serious about myself and the things around me so that I can relieve myself from the yoke of anxiety and anxiousness. The more I think, the more I worry like a spinning potter’s wheel until it breaks and splatters mud all around.
Some wise men say you should laugh about things that you made mistakes about or made you mad about because then you wouldn’t feel so miserable or bitter about yourself. As I am getting ripen with the the numbers of moons and suns I have seen, I have begun to realize it has truth.
Life is too short to torture myself for things I can’t change in watching the phantasmagorical display of my life in the end, thinking, “Oh my, wasn’t I so serious about nothing!”
So, I could also practice laughing more and thinking less.
Brandan Dassey – “The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse” – Samuel Beckett
Maybe I should not have watched it, but alas, I did, and with the afterimages of the faces and scenes still haunting the brain chambers, refusing to leave, I am writing about the Netflix documentary to cast them out to the wilderness of forgetfulness – but with a voice of the heart.
The documentary revolves around the death of Teresa Halbach in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, who the county and the state justice believe was murdered by Steven Avery and Brandan Dassey. Since the stories about the accused are readily available online, I will not delve into whether they are innocent or guilty in this post. But I cannot help thinking this: Prejudice by social class prevails over the carriage of justice and the great cultural divide between rural and urban, working and middle classes, and state and federal governments in the States. America is arguably a country of no aristocrats, yet class distinctions are apparent, and stratification is broad.
In the case of Steven Avery and Brandan Dassey, although they were not poor, their parents were deemed fit to caricature characters of laborers equivalent to medieval serfs or pre-industrial European peasants speaking with the class jargon in heavy dialectical accents. Would the police and courts act differently toward the accused and their families were it not for their family backgrounds and social statuses? Hollywood celebrities and those with money and power can do anything and yet get away with their wrongdoings because they have the status and best lawyers who can make innocence of murderers, and vice versa.
That is why I’m not too fond of police profiling, which always seems to accuse those from unhappy childhoods tainted with physical and verbal abuse, especially and mostly from parents. It’s not only about sexual violence but, most of all, about parental verbal and physical abuses that bludgeon their children’s psychs. You can’t just typecast someone because they fit your profiling for a particular crime type. Where is the goddess of justice? Remember, even the goddess of fortune plays the Wheel of Fortune blindfolded to give everyone a fair chance of a lot because she can’t see who is rich, bright, or beautiful to look at.
I used it to watch “Knight Rider” and “MacGyver” as a kid in the 80s because they were adventurous and chivalrous, Indiana Jones-type protagonists with bona ride missions to accomplish assigned by their benign wise bosses, of mercenaries of good causes for the Pax Americana.
But regardless of the zeitgeist of the 80s, both shows were distinguished by their use of wits rather than guns. They were modern-day Western shows minus firearms and horses, in which good guys fought off bad guys and continued their journeys as romantic wanderers.
To calling back yesterday, there were remakes of my favorite TV shows, but alas, the spirit of yesterday was not summoned with a wishful bid time return. You can never go back to yesterday.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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