Rhena Writes

Category: Daily Writing Prompt

  • Becoming unraveled with this question: leader or follower?

    Daily writing prompt
    Are you a leader or a follower?
    View all responses

    A few months ago, my husband bought a two-player cooperative video game called “Unravel Two.” Soon after, my son asked me to play it with him. I’m not a huge video game player. I’ll play the occasional round or two of Mario Cart and I think I might have an animal crossing account that hasn’t been opened in years. I sometimes like to watch the kids play something, but if it’s something they’re really excited about, I’d rather hear about it from their perspective.

    So sitting down to play with him was a novel experience for me. And for him.

    It’s a charming game centered around two small yarn creatures who are attached to each other with a string. They have to work in tandem to swing from place to place, build bridges, jump and climb through various scenes. It’s a bit like parkour. When we sat down to play, the duo was in a park and had somehow gotten so tangled up in what looked like a bike rack that we had no choice but to start the scene over. As a knitter, the whole thing was very relatable. As a non-gamer, it was, well, not.

    My son tried to teach me what buttons to push when and I managed to muddle through some sections. Thankfully, my character could also jump on his back sometimes and we could piggy back our way through bits and pieces. But that didn’t work for everything. Sometimes, he just took my controller and pushed the buttons to move my avatar. But there were times where both the little red one and the little blue one had to be moving simultaneously. Sometimes one had to lead and the other had to follow. Connected, as they were, with this yarn umbilicus, both had a role to play.

    My son was immensely patient with me. Probably far more patient than I sometimes am when I’m trying to get him to do something in person. This is in an of itself a lesson to me about leadership and much more.

    So what’s the answer to the question?

    I’m a leader following myself.

    *************************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • WordPress, will you love me if I reveal my five favorite fruits?

    Daily writing prompt
    List your top 5 favorite fruits.
    View all responses

    Will you ship crates overflowing with these delights? Will you sign me up for a monthly club?

    Of course I must begin with the Queen of Fruit: mangosteen. I cannot forget her king, durian.

    Their princess: the jackfruit.

    What is the custard apple’s role in this food court?

    Or what of the “regular” apple? Humble indeed. The one that we say about, “if an apple doesn’t seem appealing, then you’re not that hungry.” Honey crisp. Gala. All the pink-ladies-in-waiting, gauging hunger, keeping doctors away. And what about how it must share its name with that of a ubiquitous multinational corporation. Perpetually being autocapitalized and then accused of stepping above its station.

    Is that five now?

    But what about banana-blueberries-pomelo-avocado- longan- mango-raspberries-kiwi-cherries-pomegranate-grapes-lychee-tomato-persimmon-pear-kumquat-strawberries-canteloupe-pineapple-watermelon-peach-honeydew-rambutan-starfruit-black berries-oh, how can I stop?

    Why such a hierarchy of fruit?

    Do you love me now, WordPress?

    . 

  • Those who ignored, disregarded,counted me out

    Daily writing prompt
    Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
    View all responses

    Many upon a many a time … I was sharing something that I was excited and passionate about. Many upon a many a time, I was ignored. Or disregarded. Or told I was wrong and told that I’d never get it right. Maybe there was laughter, the cold kind. Sometimes there was a simple turning away. Sometimes there was a red pen, the words, “no it doesn’t”, an interruption.

    I’m not going to pretend that those moments didn’t hurt. They did. A chilly shot of the realization that this person couldn’t give me what I needed in that moment. But brief hurts were necessary to learn what I needed, to learn how to ease the pain or, better, replace it with joy. I had to learn how to warm myself up.

    Now I’ve learned that it’s those people who missed out.

    I learned, from them, how to care for myself, how to validate myself. And perhaps most importantly: how to see myself.

    The idea that “I can’t rely on anyone else” sounds cynical without the follow up of, “I can rely on myself.” And that’s what I’ve learned to be able to do. It’s not just relying on myself for material needs but for emotional needs too. I can’t harbor ill will towards these people. It was their actions that revealed to me just how awesome I am, after all.

    One day last, I was in the waiting room of the cancer center not too long after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I knew that a mastectomy was possibly in the cards for me. Another woman, a bit older than me, walked past me to her seat and I noticed that she had one breast. The top she was wearing made it very obvious: it was a stretchy knit with horizontal stripes. In other words, she wasn’t doing anything to disguise her mastectomy. She looked healthy and strong. She looked like she was just going about her daily business.

    Over the months since then, I’ve thought about that woman often. And I still feel, at times, a little bit uncomfortable with my new body. I worry that I’m going to make other people uncomfortable or that someone is going to ask me questions that I don’t feel prepared to answer. Still, I have to go out in the world. And so I think about that woman in the waiting room and how I didn’t even have to exchange words with her. Just her presence, being out in the world without apology makes me feel like I can do it too.

    Today, as I was walking my son to school, I noticed another woman doing a double take when she saw my chest. I started to reach for my shirt to straighten it out and make it less obvious. But then I remembered the woman in the waiting room, just going about her business and also that I had more important things, like chatting with my son to do. Thinking about the woman who was surprised by my uneven chest as I was walking home, I thought that the look on her face probably mirrored mine when I saw the woman wearing the striped shirt in the waiting room. And so I decided that perhaps the woman who was looking at my chest this morning maybe also was recently diagnosed or has a loved one who was diagnosed. Maybe me being out in the world without a breast reconstruction, without really trying to hide my lopsidedness, looking relatively healthy and strong … maybe my presence gave her a little spark of hope in a dark time. Just as the woman in the waiting room passed her candle flame on to me, I hope that I’m able to pass it on to other women.

    And so we carry on. One light at a time.

    ************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • Free your mind…

    Daily writing prompt
    What does freedom mean to you?
    View all responses

    …and the rest will follow. — En Vogue, Free Your Mind

    Emancipate yourself from mental slavery

    None but ourselves can free our minds.

    –Bob Marley, Redemption Song

    After reading the daily prompt, I was thinking about different song lyrics that spoke to freedom. A few crossed my mind and I decided I would put them in my post, but first I wanted to listen to the music in my music player. If nothing else, to double check that I had the lyrics correct. But also just because I like these songs and wanted to listen to them.

    I opened up my music player on my computer and everything looked different. Well, not everything, but just enough that I couldn’t figure out how to search for specific songs, something that I’d done just a day ago. Unfamiliar. I was lost and frustrated. I wanted the system to work the way that I was used to, the way that I had expected it to. And it wasn’t.

    I was internally raging at the designers who made this music player, who changed it so often as to make it impossible for me to keep up who made it so NOT intuitive.

    And behind that, I was raging at myself. Annoyed that I wasn’t able to keep up with rapidly changing technology. Regretting that over the years I’ve sold off all of my CDs. It was so easy back then when I could just find the album I wanted and pop it in the CD player. Past me should have tried harder to keep everything the same for future me. Arrrgh!

    I know. It’s ridiculous. Take a breath.

    Because now me actually doesn’t want to have stacks and stacks of CDs to store and maintain. (No matter how satisfyingly familiar the clack clack of jewel case against jewel case sounds, no matter how much I relish unfolding the liner notes.) Present me really, really enjoys the convenience of being able to pull up music.

    No. This internal rage was something else. It was me demanding that I “get it right.” I’ve listened to both songs, Free Your Mind and Redemption Song, perhaps dozens of times in my life. And yet, still, part of me felt that in order to write about them properly today, I needed to listen to them again. In other words, my lived experience is never enough. Even for my own blog.

    Where does this come from?

    Something that someone once said to me popped into my head. I was in high school and I was wearing a new dress. This person came up to me and said, “I liked your dress until I saw that it had pockets.”

    At the time, I didn’t realize what an odd thing that was to say. And I suspect it’s because when day after day, people are commenting (overtly and covertly) on your clothes, the way you look, how you sound, and your body in general, one comment more comment doesn’t particularly warrant attention in the moment.

    But now-me can see how truly strange it is that someone might comment on someone else’s clothes in this way with an air of taking offense that a dress might have pockets and that said-pockets might be used and useful.

    This was far before the “it has pockets!” meme. Perhaps it is was this meme that made me realize just how “out of pocket” that comment was. (Yes. I did just have to write that.)

    So how does all of this relate to freedom and what it means to me? Some days, it feels like I’m caught under this massive pile of these sorts of comments and experiences that make me question myself. Comments from teachers and professors that infer that I’m not trying hard enough or that I’m not enough; implicitly messaging of the society that I live in that disregards bodies that look and behave like mine; the culture of comparison and competition that seeps in everywhere. It takes a great deal of my mental, physical, emotional energy to overcome these comments and expectations.

    But increasingly, I’ve been able to see where I’m getting a helping hand. People who wear dresses are suddenly on-line espousing the benefits of pockets and are genuinely excited about something so simple. This provides the ammunition I need to shoot down the “I like the ‘I liked your dress until’ comment.” Or better yet, to just ignore it. Focus, instead, on how much my daughters enjoy pockets. I’ll read a line from a book and it will feel like the writer reached out and lifted one of these expectations I’ve been living under. (As with Cole Arthur Riley’s reminder, “I am no one’s burden. I am no one’s savior.”)

    Or, yes, sometimes it’s a song. As with En Vogue’s Free Your Mind, “Before you can read me, you got to learn how to see me. I said.”

    In the end, it comes down to me. It’s, in part, up to me to write myself down so that there’s something there to be read, something to be seen.

    In other words, as Bob Marley asks, “Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?”

    ***********************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • I’m the public figure.

    Daily writing prompt
    What public figure do you disagree with the most?
    View all responses

    The public figure I disagree with the most is myself.

    That is, my outward facing persona is, frankly, phony baloney.

    She’s always trying to guess at what other people — the “public” in other words — thinks and wants and needs. She’s always trying to please them, these other people who are not her. Are not me.

    I, my real self, I disagree with this type of people pleasing behavior. Sometimes, I feel like I’m just along for the ride: cringing every time she says or does something that she thinks will make someone else happy or at least not displeased.

    I’m tired of her ignoring me, the way she goes out into the world making decisions that effect the both of us without consulting me. Sometimes I’ve resorted to berating her. Why did you say that? Don’t you realize how stupid you made us sound? You just shouldn’t be speaking at all! Or wearing that… or thinking that… or doing that weird thing you always do with your hands or face or walking with that strange, strange posture…!

    But all of this disagreement? The end result is that we are both sad.

    We are one, after all.

    So what do I do?

    Begin again.

    Breathe.

    I am human. She is human too.

    “What do you want?” she asks me.

    “I want you to see me,” I tell her. “I want you to do what pleases me.”

    I listen. She listens.

    We agree.

    **********

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • Career fast track.

    Daily writing prompt
    What is your career plan?
    View all responses

    I am on the fast track to becoming an elder.

    I’m not entirely sure I had any choice in the matter. Wasn’t this always the plan?

    Mere years away from getting to sit down in a proper chair for family photos, being served first at dinner, being offered a hand up and down.

    Before you know it, I’ll be saying cryptic phrases like, “well, no dog ever howled at the moon without a good enough reason”

    In turn, the youngsters will whisper that I’m wise, senile, annoying, hilarious, cute, or just plain ol’ old.

    I won’t mind.

    The backs of my hands will tell my age: roadwork of veins, puddles of pigment, papery pools. “Ah, yes, this is a liver spot, this is an IV scar, another where I cut myself with a butter knife.”

    I will sing and strum and pluck guitar string and perhaps my eyebrows. And I will hand out clippings from house plants and warm slices of quick breads, fresh out of the oven.

    Is aging a career?

    I will slide gently into myself even as I rise through the ranks.

    Boss of self. VP of me. CEO of this whole damn corpus.

    ************************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Oh, and have a great weekend! God helg! (PS I’m learning some Norske.)

  • Is all the world a stage?

    Daily writing prompt
    What was the last live performance you saw?
    View all responses

    Last weekend.

    I went to a local street fest and they had some bands playing. I saw one of them and they were entertaining. Anyway, it’s always nice to be able to hear live music. Sometimes, I wish that I lived some place where there were more buskers and street entertainment. But, alas, sometimes I have to create my own live performances.

    The band played a lot of the classics — like Sweet Caroline and Journey — and I think I remember some Dua Lipa in there? They reminded me a bit of when my daughters were younger. They’d put on performances in our living room all the time — singing and dancing, mostly. They had an imagined backing band and stage names. Sometimes even costumes and something to stand in for a microphone. And performance is still a part of what all my kids do sometimes. Imaginative play is a performance after all, as is the storytelling that they do at the dinner table or around the kitchen when they try to bring some sense of meaning to what’s happened over the course of their days.

    There were two American Sign Language interpreters at the performance this weekend. Honestly, they seemed to be having the most fun of anyway, including the band. I read not too long ago that sometimes ASL interpreters work in pairs: one hearing interpreter who sits with the “audience” and signs for the other interpreter who is deaf and for whom ASL is their first language. This allows for a richer, more detailed and nuanced interpretation.

    I don’t know if this is what the pair of interpreters was doing this weekend. It’s possible that they were both hearing and taking turns simply because it was a long performance. I wasn’t focused on them for long enough to figure it out. I just noticed them because they looked like they were enjoying themselves so much. Was this part of their “performance”? Were they interpreting the band’s aural energy? Does ASL interpretation “count” as a “performance”? I’m not sure about any of this. But I do know that their presence only added to the live performance for me.

    The last time I went to a theater performance, live, was to see The Brothers Paranormal, a few years ago now. It was stunning.

    On Tuesday, I had a guitar lesson. It certainly felt like I was giving a performance. I was even on camera. (ha! The lesson was virtual.) And my teacher asked me to sing along with my guitar playing which made me essentially feel like I was patting my head and rubbing my tummy and walking and chewing gum all at the same time. But, honestly, it got me singing in front of her, which is kind of a big deal to me. I was so focused on the guitar that I couldn’t really worry about what I sounded like. I mean, I didn’t really sing through the whole song, but I say a few bars here and there. Does that count as a performance? I’m going to say yes. Yes. It counts as a live performance. And maybe even my own guitar practicing does too.

    It was the bard himself who wrote, after all, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” Which is my cue for my exit.

  • “The community” of one.

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you do to be involved in the community?
    View all responses

    I definitely do not understand the what is meant by “the community”. And this is one of things that I do to be involved: I wonder at the meaning of things, I spend time parsing language, and I write.

    I do a lot of other things too, but this is what this daily prompt has inspired me to think about.

    Which community is being referred to here? The neighborhood I live in? The county? The state? The country? The global community of humanity? All of earth and every living thing? Depending on what is meant by “community”, either everything I do is to be “involved” or none of it is.

    I have an uncomfortable relationship with the word “community”. Sometimes I’ll read it or hear it in the context of “Asian-American community”, of which I am supposed to be a member. But I never asked to be a member of that community nor was I ever “invited”. There is no central council of Asian Americans who decide who’s in and who’s out. Or, at least, not that I’m aware of. Maybe there is one, but they decided that, in spite of my heritage, I’m not a member. Of course, the reality is that that term, Asian-American “community”, is usually just lazy, white supremacist journalism or writing or speech by whoever is using it. What the (often white) speaker usually mean is that they spoke to one or two people who they’ve identified as being “Asian American” and decided that they spoke for an entire group of people who may or may not personally identify as Asian American. In other words, when a racialized group is referred to as a “community”, it’s usually white supremacy in action.

    I’ve had to participate in “community building” activities several times for work or school. Are these “the communities” that this question is referring to? These fleeing, temporary groups of people brought together briefly because they all happen to work or go to school in the same place? I never really felt like this “community building” activities ever connected me to my co-workers or fellow students. Primarily, they worked to connect me to the institution or organization or even the manager, administrator, or teacher that was leading the activities. Isn’t community supposed to be about lateral connection, not hierarchical? “Community-building” is often used as soft language to mask a much more nefarious indoctrination.

    So when do I feel a part of a community? Or when do I feel like I’m involving myself in community? Well, blogging, is one way that I attempt to involve myself in the world outside of myself. I have many pages of notebooks and docs that are for me, but when I come here to post and write, it’s for someone else. In other words, it’s for “the community”. (Along these lines, I published a post this morning that included two book recommendations and a discussion of “the white gaze”. It was NOT a response to a daily writing prompt.)

    Didn’t Jesus say something about how he is present anywhere two or more are gathered in his name? If we apply this to this daily prompt, am I suggesting that anywhere two or more individuals are gathered for “the community” (for, in other words, the greater good of humanity) is “the community” present? Yes. I am suggesting that.

    Here’s the other thing I am suggesting: community doesn’t have to be human bodies/ minds coming together. I can experience community with the tree outside my window, the birds that I can hear, the blades of grass, the sunlight. I can gather with someone else by reading their words in a book or, yes, even on the computer. Eating that bagel I had for breakfast? Yes, I am in community with the people who grew and harvest the wheat. All the way to the drivers who delivered it to my local grocery store where. And then some.

    And lastly, of course, I can be a community of one. Jesus did not say that he is ONLY present where two people or more are gathered in his name. Every time I tend to myself, care for myself, listen to myself, I am doing all those things as a way to involve myself in the community of myself.

    *****************************

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • Keeper of all knowledge…

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
    View all responses

    … of myself. (If you’ve been following my posts, you saw that coming.)

    I’ve sometimes thought that it would be nice to be a postal delivery person. They walk a lot of miles. I enjoy walking. And I like the idea that maybe I’ll be delivering a love letter or a postcard from some far-flung destination or a homesick lament from sleep away camp. But then I remember that most mail is bills. And advertisements. And I remember how much my dog hates delivery people and that that and the weather must make their jobs very hard. I talk myself out of it.

    So maybe I’d like to be a wizard for a day. Or a bullet proof shield, able to place myself around American and Palestinian children alike. All the children, in fact. But then I remember that one day would not be enough.

    Maybe I’d like to be a fan, strong enough to blow away all the climate change (but not so strong as to throw us back into an ice age). I think it would take less than a day. But is a fan really a job? Or just an object?

    I think I’d like to be a people pleaser and when I say people, I mean myself. I’d like to be a greeter like at Walmart — but just greeting myself, continually all day. Asking myself if I need any help and then giving it to myself.

    For 24 hours, I’d like to be a park ranger. I’d like to be an elder. An ancestor. I’d like to be a child again, imagining like it was my job. I’d like to be a swimmer.

    I’d like, for 24 hours, to be a connector, like of ideas. Did you ever notice that both Joel from The Last of Us and Hopper from Stranger Things are father figures in fraught relationships with super-powered teenage girls and a variation of the name Elle (Ellie and Eleven) AND they both have biological daughters named Sarah who died? I would like to connect these sorts of ideas for people because clearly SOMETHING is going on here and I cannot be the only person who is thinking about it.

    For 24 hours, I’d like to be a weaver. An illustrator. A singer and musician. A storyteller. A shaman. A healer. I’d like a day to heal the world or at least the little patch of nature outside my back door. That would probably be enough for me. I’m no one’s burden, after all. I’m no one’s savior. Are we talking about jobs? Or skills?

    If I had a day to be any job, I’d like be the keeper of the flame.

    **********

    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. 

  • I am my favorite brand, of course.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your favorite brands and why?
    View all responses

    I mean, at this point it goes without saying that “me, myself, and I” is going to be the answer to pretty much every daily prompt. It wouldn’t be very on brand of me to do anything else.

    To be honest, I don’t really know what a brand is. I think it has something to do with having a product that is recognizable and trusted and to mean something to people. And if that is correct, then I suppose that I really am currently in the process of building a brand of myself for myself.

    My understanding is that the word as we currently understand it comes from the process of burning a symbol onto the flank of cattle so that they could be recognized as belonging to a specific rancher. Enslaved people throughout history (and most recently in the US era of slavery) have been branded. I fear that our modern use of the term “brand” erases that awful history.

    Well, I was quite keen to delve into this term “brand” and how it relates to my current religion of the self and getting to know myself. But full disclosure, I’m about two weeks post final radiation treatment and I’m in a fair amount of pain and discomfort. In addition to the fatigue. It’s making it rather hard to sit up and type on the computer. So, I’m going to hit publish, hydrate, and take a break. And that, friends, is very on-brand.