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

Tag: journals

  • Prompt 106 on Drink

    What is your favorite drink?

    As some people go to bars to drink, I go to the Green Mermaid’s Coffee Tavern, aka Starbucks, for my favorite drinks with a Kindle and an iPad. Their menu is inventive and innovative, welcoming new additions. These drinks are my sprit drinks.

    My first favorite drink is Iced Hazelnut Oatmilk Shaken Espresso. Because of its oat milk, the flavor is wonderfully smooth, richly silky, and beneficially wholesome. It’s my comfort drink.

    My second favorite drink is Iced Caffe Americano, my staple morning must-have to perk me up. And it is always iced because I find Americano tastes better when cold.

    My third favorite drink is Iced Passion Tango Tea Lemonade. The color says it all about the prettiness of the flavor, which isn’t too sweet but refreshingly delicious and refreshing because it is added with lemonade. Without it, the tea will not be as lovely as it is.

    I believe we should all have favorite drinks because, without them, life would be all gray and grim. Mine happens to be the above-referenced drinks from Starbucks. I am not affiliated with Starbucks to write this column, but I read Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz (you are welcome to click and read on the link.) with relish.

  • prompt 105

    Who are your favorite people to be around?

    My Camille and Toro from left to right

    I don’t trust a man, a woman, the young, the old, the good or the bad. People are not to be trusted, as Albert Einstein himself observed it too. So, I don’t have favorite people, which is also meritocratic and egoistic. Loves, I have, and they are my cats who appraoch me and want to play with me, even if people don’t.

    People may be kind at first, but they change their feelings toward you depending on who and what you are. People talk of love as a gadget, such as a smartphone, when they do not realize what love is. So, I do not beg it and desperately seek a society of my favorite people because today’s favorite people may give you cold shoulders tomorrow.

    Yet my cats are different. They come to me when I go to bed at night or wherever I am at home. They bunt their little heads forcibly against my hands or legs as though to confirm I am loved. And they listen to me attentively when I talk to them. I know my cats have souls, and we will depart this world together for the distant star, our final destination. I don’t covet Goddess Freya with her chariot driven by the two cats, for my cats are not my subjects or pets but love.

  • prompt 96

    Describe your most ideal day from beginning to end.

    I want to say my ideal whole day is traveling, hiking, getting together with families or writing and reading profusely. That’s what people think the ideal response should be, or it may seem so. But my ideal day is anything but the ideal, far from glamorous, but existential and small.

    My ideal day would be free from duties and obligations as a Daughter and an Employee at home with my cats. That said, my ideal day lasts from Friday evening till Saturday evening, during which I don’t have to do anything but watch movie after movie with intermissions of playing with my babies. It will be perfect if it is raining during the pleasure time, but it has to be when I am home, not outside.

    Ancient Germanic tribes would drink barrels of beer during the lull in battles with the Romans, according to Tacitus. So, this is my way of unwinding the overdosed adrenaline in the mind and spirit.

  • Recollection of the Alhambra

    Alhambra (Alhambra de Granada): image credit from viator.com
    He came down from the throne of the crescent moon
    with the key to the paradise his ancestors gardened
    for eight hundred years of harmony in Saracen haven
    to the hands of the pious proud king and queen posing
    to accept it as the Christian champions emboldened
    by the surrender of the ruler of the Iberian paradise; 

    Yesterdays, yesteryears, and to the last of the time
    crept upon the waters of the palatial fountains thence
    and began to fill the heart of the sultan of the palace
    whose eyes billowed streams of nostalgia’s longings
    on his hallow cheeks and to the back of his horse
    together, leaving the fortress of a thousand memories; 

    And Fate, whose wings did he fly? Now, all’s bygone-
    Those melodies of sweet sojourns beneath visting suns
    in the neverending abundance of warmth and mirth-
    when every regret, every sorrow turned back his looks, 
    Every look shed tears in the shadow of the evening sun,
    lingering in the recollection of the Alhambra Palace.

  • Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (Netflix- Manga and Live-Action film) – 1-minute Film review

    Zombie flicks are in vogue. From Netflix to Hulu and others, they are roaming across the boundaries of the digital world, hungry for popularity and craving high ratings. But none of them is ingeniously fresh, and all are infallibly doomed. If you hold on to it, apocalypse doesn’t necessarily kill off a human spirit. A dystopian world may overwhelm your sensory perception, but it won’t kill you if you don’t dwell on it with humor, a handmaid to strength and hope. That is what this film is about.

    The story develops around Akira Tendo, a young office worker fresh out of college, who soon becomes disenchanted with his innocent vision of the work he does because of the unreasonably demanding high workload and gaslighting of his boss. So, when he wakes up the next day and finds himself living among zombies because of an unexpected bio-weaponry disaster, Tendo becomes ecstatic, lest he should go to work any longer. The optimism galvanizes him to pen a bucket list of 100 things to do before he succumbs to the pandemic. What a jolt to live!

    The film stands out from all other dystopian worlds of zombies with humor, hope, and hooray. It weaves a unique perspective to a heartfelt story about a man finding meaning to live amid hopeless situations and ways to huddle through life’s challenging moments, which we can all relate to daily. Nietzsche was right. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

  • Prompt 22

    What does freedom mean to you?

    People think of freedom as a philosophical concept in belief when it is the fundamental right to exercise humanness, the state of being human. Freedom is not a prerogative of specific class or status or group, but a sovereign privilege of every human being to be who they are and to express themselves under the aegis of regard for individualities that can be at their most creative and effective when well-guarded by enlightened society with humanism.

    Freedom to speak against injustice, freedom to keep one’s character, or freedom to think differently defines freedom in a civilized society characterized by low unemployment and high long-term employment rates. Unlike Europeans, Americans are unashamedly puritanical about the rights of at-will workers, meaning they are always expendable at the whims and caprice of tyrannical employers. Here in the States, an employer can let an employee go any time out of the blue. A yearly leave of absence with pay averages ten days, which can’t be used at once but sporadically. Would it be a bit of a stretch to see a feudalistic or ancient slavery system in today’s American employee-employer, which includes all those foreign-born doing business in the States, relationship?

    Jean Jacque Rousseau lamented that we were born free but are in chains everywhere. Activists clamorously campaign for Freedom” to showcase their political causes in the media, but they may also have been perpetrators of someone’s freedom. Freedom is not a cause celebre but a fundamental right to practice a will to live. Abraham Lincoln called the “Jewel of Freedom in the Family of Liberty.” Ditto. Freedom is accessible only in a civilized society.