01.28.09
We’re reading Malinowski’s Baloma where he focuses on how the native Trobriand Islanders view spirits of the dead. The difference between a baloma and a kosi is, as one of the subjects explained, that of a reflection and a shadow. Neither are causes of alarm, they’re mere extensions of oneself. The baloma holds the soul of the person, and that spirit lives a parallel life on an island of Tuma. The kosi is a brief irritation, perhaps to spook young children, and disappears a few days later.
Given the subjects of ghosts and the afterlife in Western thought, I find it poetic to make the comparison between a reflection and a shadow. Obviously, in the reflection we have both appearance and movement, in the shadow there is only the latter, in blurred, murky form.
He presents a profound question (phrased as a statement) later in his piece, “I was always under the impression that such answers were not so much a definition as a simile.”
01.25.09
Last week my mother bought me a frozen pizza to bring to school, thinking I could cook it when I had no time to make real food. The problem was that the pizza was too big to fit in my refrigerator, let alone freezer, so I had to cook it right away.
And then I realized I had no tray. For those of you who were around at my moment of panic, a million questions surged through me. Honestly I wasn’t going to throw the pizza out, that would have been wasteful. Could I cook it in the microwave? Yes, but it would be disgusting. Could I just cook it without a tray? Yes, but it already thawed and was flappy, there’s no way the thing wouldn’t fall apart in the oven.
Okay, so I needed a tray. There was a tray in one of cupboards in the communal kitchen, and I knew the owner of that shelf of stuff. I knocked on her door, but she wasn’t in, and nobody else was back at school yet. I would have just borrowed the tray and cleaned it, except the packaging was still intact, and it would have been poor form to use the brand new tray when it was obvious it couldn’t be returned to its original condition.
I don’t know many people on my floor purely for the fact that I went into room selection by myself in my crazy harrowing time two semesters ago, and nobody else I knew had a tray. My pride swallowed, I eventually went to the kitchen one floor down, saw that people were cooking in there who appeared to have two of those temporary foil trays stacked on one another. I asked if I could borrow one, and I had my pizza.
All good, correct? Well, in my madness of living with a week’s worth of built-up filth, at half-past midnight I decided I should finally wash that stack of dishes that’s been piling up. (And my rice cooker and skillet and pot.) I’d read about 300 pages worth of reading already and desperately needed to clean. So I did, and upon returning them to my drawer, WHAT DO I FIND?
Guess, I dare you.
I found a tray. A bloody tray! In my own drawer all this time!
Granted, it is a fair bit smaller for the pizza, but at that point it was thawed and I could have sliced it and stored bits in the freezer. My mother had packed it for me at the beginning of the year.
I’m such a pile of fail sometimes. This nearly encompasses to the time in 9th grade health class when I thought I’d lost my egg-baby and it was in my backpack all along.