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

Tag: thoughts

  • 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.

  • prompt 210 – what i could do more of

    What could you do more of?

    Illustration from Dreamsite

    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.

  • 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 209 on my favorite tv shows

    What TV shows did you watch as a kid?

    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.

  • Captive spirit

    Don’t say good night,
    for you will not see it,
    you’d better not say it
    it’s better that way
    so your spirit won’t
    leave for a night’s work
    across the starry skies
    riding on the moonlit
    waves of silence
    to the ghosts, it knows
    from your pasts
    you know not
    to inform them
    of your secrets
    deepest, darkest.
    So, you see it
    better that way
    that you say not
    good night
    at least for a while
    and let not your spirit
    tell it all to the ghosts
    haunting you even if
    you do not want.

  • 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.