Fragmented

Regular strawberry or organic strawberry? They taste the same. If there’s any difference, it must be due to the power of imagination. Regular soy milk or organic soy milk? I don’t understand. Can genetically modified soy be considered organic? Are all the soy crops genetically modified? And all the corns? Should I make parsley dumpling, dill dumpling, or just plain chicken dumpling this weekend? That popular book with a lot of praises piled on is not interesting and I can’t continue to read it. How to bribe one’s mind to let it do what you want it to do? Will dumpling do the trick? Too time consuming to make.

Finally get hold of five face masks made of cotton and I can breathe easier. I once tried to DIY a mask and cut up a cotton shirt just for this purpose, but my sartorial skill is nonexistent and the result looked so hideous that I had to abandon it. My hands are so awkward that anything requires any kind of hand skills are beyond my grasp. Stitching, sewing, knitting, paper-cutting are out of the question. Even making model ships is difficult. My hands just go sleepy and the very simple task of applying glue to a little piece of wood and stick it to the top of the deck would take me a long time to complete. I had to quit that popular club at school. Now I can’t even remember the name of the club. My grandmother is so skilled with her hands. She did everything by hands, and she even made shoes. Every winter, she knitted for me and my cousins. It’s either a shawl, a hand warmer, or a sweater. The fact that she raised 9 children on very meager salary is quite unthinkable. If she becomes a heroine of a story, I would be the first to object. I am against those stories that portray women to be so moral, so blameless, so smart, so diligent, so suffering but so pure, and all those good qualities–unfortunately I can find such examples in many books. My grandmother is actually such a woman and I am glad she is not in any story and I will never write a story about her. The reason is simple–such stories are depressing and serving as social sticks to “beat” average women like me. And there are already enough of such depressing stories around that I don’t want to add any to the pile.

Watching an animal video on you tube. The hapless giraffe got itself entangled in a wire fence. I wonder why there have to be fences in South Africa in the area surrounding the Kruger. Probably the private game reserve owner doesn’t want animals to roam too freely to damage business profits. Anyway, the giraffe was finally rescued by a group of twenty men and its deep wounds on the neck were attended to. It is easy to think it is giraffe’s fault since it should avoid wire fences in the first place. It makes me think of those social fences, while not easily visible to our senses, can and will and have hurt us. And we are left to lick our own wounds. However I can’t come up with an example right now. There must be one somewhere.