Chello.

Just got back from running to the drugstore to pick up some ibuprofen for the child at school. She often complains of small maladies like headaches or stomach aches to go down to the nurse's office. They take her temperature, tell her she's OK and then send her back to class. However, I've been meaning to drop off some medication to the school, just so they can have it on hand in the event she actually does have a headache, so I just ran over to take care of it. Of course, by the time I got there, she didn't have a headache anymore. She does something similar in church, she'll inexplicably have to go to the bathroom five times during mass. I think she does this just for a change of scenery. I think she's doing the same thing at school--she decides she's been sitting in the same chair for long enough and wants to take a little walk. Hand goes up,"Mrs, M. I have a headache."

Sometimes I think it would be nice if I could do that at work, raise my hand and be excused for a little while. I often think of the Farside cartoon where the microcephalic kid raises his hand in class and asks to be excused because his brain is full. That would be cool if we could get away with it in real life, heh, heh, heh. Maxine Hong Kingston will be reading in town next week and I'm am tres excited. We don't often get really, really well-known writers in these parts, especially ones I'm interested in listening to, so it should be very enlightening. I'm particularly found of Maxine Hong Kingston because she was one of the first writers I read when I consciously decided to start reading works by asian-american writiers. I read Woman Warrior and discovered myself in the pages of a book for the first time. Although her ethnic background is Chinese rather than Korean, there are similarities in the cultural experiences of all asian people in America. Also, there's not a huge amount of writing by Korean-Americans yet. We haven't been here long enough and our voice is only just emerging. Whereas Chinese- and Japanese-Americans have been here for several generations already and have had the time to voice their stories.