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

Tag: journal

  • i speak

    Look not with the eyes but with the mind

    To write a litany of daily woes is not my priority, nor do I feel proud for sure, but if I just bear it with a grin today, I may fall apart. So, I want to leave it in words. After all, I am my own counsel, defending myself against injustice and abuse forced on me just because of who I am.

    It’s been over two months since I started my new job as a case manager’s assistant at a personal injury law firm. I like my job, and I am a good worker, always willing to perform my tasks given diligently, even if I may make mistakes because I am also learning a new trade on my own. But my case manager denies this, magnifying every mistake I make as if it were fatal because she is relatively new, feeling overwhelmed by a heavy workload. She vents her frustration upon me, assailing my introverted personality, diagnosing it as a mental case, and belittling my entire personal ability and outward appearance. Besides, she mistreats me with contempt and criticism under the pretext of toughning my sensitivity. Everyday is like being in a toture room of the Inquisition.

    Today she told me I did not comprehend English very well, upsetting her. That was a massive mental blow akin to verbal abuse enough to dispirit my will to write and read. True that English is my second language, and due to my insufficient social interaction with others, my verbal expression may seem inhibited. Still, I have a BA degree in English from Rutgers University with a decent GPA, and my letters to an editor of a British history magazine have been published more than five times. In addition, my book review of a certain well-known novelist got a raving compliment from the author himself. Yes, I am proud of these facts because I love the English language and always strive to be a better writer. But to hear such a callous rant from her plunged my spirit so low that I could not help but sink into the abyss of finiteness, then into a pit of the bottomless pit. People told me to be tough, but that’s disrespectful of individualities because otherwise, there would be no poets, essayists, or novelists whose eyes and sensibilities, and senses are exceptional from the melee.

    I am so tired of all these abuses from the people who pride themselves in being the survivors of the fittest. My mind is a river of tears, and my heart is broken to pieces repeatedly. I wish I had someone who would always be on my side and support me. Maybe, it’s my fate to suffer, but I want to be happy. Is it too much to wish for?

  • Prompt 20

    List the people you admire and look to for advice…

    There used to be a section in the New York Times Book Review where an established writer was asked whom they would invite for dinner, alive or dead. So today’s prompt is relevant to the dinner list, (well for me lunch or coffee time list is more fitting) which comprises people I wish to have as wise and pleasant counsel.

    I want to have people who are well-read, open-minded, understanding, cultured, patient, and confident, with a sense of humor devoid of sarcasm. I want them to be older than I am, at the Judge or old stage according to Shakespeare’s seven stages of life, because they have withered the vicissitudes of life to live to tell. Of course, not all mature people are wise. However, still, I would feel more comfortable being in company with them to talk about the woes of life than with MZ generations who regard the preceding ones as something medieval, if not ancient or prehistoric.

    Therapists or counselors are paid to give us advice, but what if you don’t have the resource or are unlucky to meet a good one who can show you precise feedback with a touch of humanity? So I envy those who have people whom they can turn to for wisdom, not criticism under the pretense of grain of salt.

  • Sound of Wind – Vol 1

    Mountains landscape in Vorarlberg, Austria

    Monday, May 1st, 2023

    Today’s Article: Labyrinth

    Have you ever felt that no matter how hard you tried not to make the same mistakes, you would turn a full circle as if trapped in a labyrinth? If you have, then you are not alone, and you are not uniquely flawed. Put it bluntly, you are not a loser and will never be. 

    We live in a society – or in an era inclusively – where uniformed measurement of success in status represents who you are regardless of how long a way you have come despite everything, Unlike Ancient Greeks who valued what individuals had endured and achieved as much as they possibly could under the most depraved circumstances, we look at what our eyes see in the face of the mind because of the misguided belief that only the fittest will survive in the Darwinian theory of evolution. Here in the States, people believe those subsisting on welfare are lazy losers because they are uneducated or less educated. But that’s not the case. People with college degrees also find themselves mired in the rut of life, eager to get even a mime-waged job just to get by lest they should be thrown out to the streets. Sometimes educated people live in poverty, not because they are substance abusers or mentally deranged, but because they have different personal reasons that are not to be generalized under specific circumstances. We are all different, and different people have different needs. Didn’t Depeche Mode sing in “People are people?”

    Failure discriminates against none, embraces everyone, and we are one in it. The Beckettian philosophy of failure as a championing, not championed juggernaut of doom echoes the Nietzschean credo of what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. Try again, fail again, succeed again. Or fail worse. Better worse. Fail worst. Till you get sick of it for good. Throw up for good, ad nauseam. If you are doing it, you are not alone; I am not alone. We are not alone. Don’t forget about it.

  • Prompt 18

    What job would you do for free?

    I would work for something attending to the welfare of cats pro bono. With All My Soul, All My Might, and All My Spirit. The best place for me to do this is probably in a shelter or a rescue center where I can devote myself to cats needing help with my undivided love for man’s best consort.

    Being a cat person not made of the crude materials of this world, I feel most comfortable with my two cats, Toro and Nero, at home. Who says that cats are aloof and egoistic? Hardly so. Cats are so affectionate and kind and beautiful both externally and internally. Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables, was a cat lover who averred the beauty of the feline folk: “I love them. They are so nice and selfish. Dogs are TOO good and unselfish. They make me feel uncomfortable. But cats are gloriously human.” Indeed so, for when I am crestfallen because of the woes of daily life in this world, my cats come next to me and nestle their little furry body and soft head under my arms, purring, consoling, and allaying my fury and disappointment and sadness. Unlike my fellow human species, my cats know me well and accept me for who I am. They say animals can see the true colors of our characters. True, especially in the case of cats who can see spirits.

    I have noticed that people dislike cats with a sense of pride as if there were some peculiar virtue in expressing such shameless disapproval of cats. So be it because cat people are a particular tribe whose sensitive nature and delicate sensibility fit those of cats. Edgar Allen Poe and the Brontë Sisters would ditto in the constellation of literary stars excellently bright in heaven with their cats in their arms, purring and meowing. Therefore, in light of those mentioned above, why wouldn’t I willingly work tending cats free of charge?

  • 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 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.