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

Tag: journal

  • prompt 211 – my #1 priority tomorrow

    What’s your #1 priority tomorrow?

    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.

  • On Netflix’s “Making a Murderer”

    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. 

  • prompt 208 on what brings me peace

    What brings you peace?

    The bliss of peace is made of these: a baby’s laughter, the soft flurry touches of my cats on my face, and their purring and meowing, listening to my favorite tunes and singing along alone, getting my hair done nicely, saying I love you to my cats with their little hearts on my heart.

    Peace may be transient, a precariously illusory daydreaming, or a timed reprieve from existential responsibilities. Still, peace is happiness when the breeze of peace envelopes me with a fragrance of acacia and takes me to the sea of skies.

    Peace be with you, readers.

  • Prompt 205 on what I am most worried

    What are you most worried about for the future?

    I am most worried about my future. And my future is not left much enough for me to be fancy-free and footless any longer.

    I am worried about how long I will keep the things I want to stay as long as possible. Or will I ever? If I vocalize what I like, it seems to disappear into the ether. Call it an illusion or hallucination even, but it’s only valid. If it is true, when will it end? Why is it always that my simplest wish is considered luxurious vanity? For example, I am worried about how long I will last at my present job. Will I survive another year here where people lose their jobs at the whims and caprice of the Big, middle, and small bosses?

    Especially to a person like me who is not gregarious about those I don’t feel comfortable with or relate to, surviving in such a work environment is uncertain, threatening the safety and security of my life.

  • prompt 204 on three books of life

    List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?

    Three books that have planted Tree of Golden Apples in my mind’s garden are the following elementals:

    1. Recollections: An Autobiography by Viktor Frankl – Dr. Frankl was the father of Logotherapy, one of the three Viennese Schools of Psychotherapies, who practiced what he believed and experienced. Far from an armchair scholar in the Ivory Tower out of touch with the crowd, Dr. Frankl gave hope, not as a delusional escape from the burdens of reality or dangerous daydream, such as Thuclides defined as the nature of hope, but as a beacon of light in the darkness of the soul crying for help. It’s because he was a survivor of the hell on earth, called Auschwitz, and other circles of hell under Nazi-ruled Austria. He wrote other books, which I have read, but this book pales others because it shows him not as a scholar but as a human soul whose spirit we all possess and, therefore, can relate to.

    2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – This is the book I can never get bored with. Since I received the book at the tender age of twelve in Korea, I have always loved it and returned to it when I feel lonely, very lonely, and lonely in this big, wide, cold world. Jane is my soul sister, and we have things in common. And I see what kind of woman Charlott Bronte was different from many people who like to claim. I like her works more than her contemporary peer, Jane Austen.

    3. Why I Write by George Orwell – This is a small pamphlet-like book. I carry it around when I feel like doing nothing, yet doing something resourceful and thoughtful to keep myself from mentally procrastinating. People tend to think writing belongs to intellectuals when it isn’t. It’s a record of personal existence through written communication to express one’s inner world within the outer world. But many people, including professionally established writers, like to think that writing is a form of art that belongs to the ether. It’s not, and the purpose of writing is simple. Orwell’s points of view agree with mine.

    These are the books that I always come back like trusty bosom friends who can keep secrets besides my two cats.

  • Prompt 203 on practicing my religion

    Do you practice religion?

    I hear every Sunday morning Mass at 7:00 with my mom, a paragon of a medieval pious Catholic woman who thinks not praying daily will not save a soul from disgrace. But I have not confessed since God knows when because I would feel more comfortable confiding in a paid listener with life experience than an unmarried man.

    To put more weight on blasphemy, I have paid more attention to daily fortune-telling according to my Zodiac animal sign. The amber of faith is still flickering in me, but the spirit revolts against no feedback from the most incredible man above. Sometimes, I wonder how many lives I have lived before being what and who I am when things are not going well. Will I step on a picture of Mother Mary if Christian persecution rises again?

    Amid waves of doubt and amiss, sometimes I am surprised to see myself sending a letter to God, pleading, complaining, demanding, requesting, and hardly thanking. And what about my exclamatory recourse to God when I feel scared after watching horror movies?

    So, does it evidence I still practice Catholicism?