Tasting Apple, Tasting Life

Our family visited Wilson's Orchard on a late August afternoon. An old man and his tractor gave us a fun ride from the entrance area to a land covered with thousands of apple trees. It was the best time to pick Ginger Gold and William's Pride.

With either a pale green or a soft yellow peel, the Ginger Gold apple looked smooth and tasted fresh with the last flavor of its rawness. Passing the lanes of the Ginger Gold, there were the Honeycrisp, our favorite kind of apple from supermarket. We had to taste them despite they don't ripen until the first week of September. Crisp, juicy, each bite of a Honeycrisp seduced our taste buds with its sweet-tart flavor. We then found the Paula Red, an unknown kind that was surprisingly irresistable for its color and taste. After putting many of them in our baskets, we wished to take home more of theses dark-red apples. But, that didn't happen. Red Free, red as the Paula Red, didn't have any crunchiness in it. Burgundy, looking enticingly beautiful, tasted unbearably tart. Maybe they are only for making Christmas wreaths with red berries to decorate doors.

The aroma wasn't all that pleasant on the site. Few apple varieties that ripened during the previous weeks were rotten and smelly, living the last stage of the life cycle. But next to this scene of decay was the sign of harvest on most of the trees around. Apple time is in September. No wonder Song of September is named for one of the varieties.

After filling our baskets with three or four varieties, we were back in the store at the entrance. More goodies were waiting for us. We picked two jars of jam, one strawberry and one golden apricot. Four fresh-baked apple turnovers for our snacking and a 11-inch apple pie to go into the trunk.

While leaving Wilson's Orchard, we saw the old man again driving his tractor slowly up the hill, back to pick up more apple pickers. A happy old man, who knows every tree and every inch of the land in this orchard. His work simply makes apple and life both taste a bit sweeter.

Ice-cream Social at Daycare

The daycare's teacher tells me that from the next week Lo-lin will "jump" from the Green Group to the Red Group, which is usually for the kids who are at least 6 months older than her. She is thought to be "mature" enough to do activities that are challenging for her. I also learned that at daycare Lo-lin is usually a big breakfast-eater, and she does try various kinds of food served for lunch. This is a very comforting message, for I worried about her eating habit. She is too skinny.

Indian Bazzar 印度園遊會

週末帶小琳和小麗去參加印度園遊會, 看到我的同事表演專業級傳統印度舞, 品嚐到一些印度小吃, 也有機會做了許多手工藝, 如自製精美書籤卡片, 做沙畫, 學自己的印度名字, 還有機會留下一組印度服裝照.

有一天, 我們會去印度走一趟.

Raleigh, Lo-lin and I went to the Indian Bazzar at the Johnson County Fairground last Saturday. These are some of the things that we did but you don't see in pictures:

1. Saw Chitra dancing in traditional Indian custom. She is a professionally trained dancer who is also my colleague from UI;

2. Tasted Masala Dosa, spicy patatoes wrapped in paper-thin pancakes, and Mango Lasse, a yogurt drink. Among the three of us, only I thought they were delicious;

3. Got our names written in Hindi. I assumed they were correct;

4. Accidently stepped on a Indian flag;

5. Talked with a man sitting next to us , and heard that he worked as director of an orphanage in Hong Kong for three years in the early 60s. What a chance to meet a stranger who was at your home before you were even born.

6. Learned that Indians call themselves the largest democracy in the world, and their life expectancy is 65.

India is one of the countires I want to visit the most. I love its dance, music, old Bollywood, pushminas and silk garments, curry, etc. You don't have to watch movies to find so many gorgeous-looking Indian men and women.

Some Interesting Analogies

A little girl got a talking doll and became obsessed with it. Soon the doll would't talk back to her.

A teenager without his own computer found a cyber bar nearby. He spent days and nights there playing video games until he collapsed.

A man got a new set of electric hair-trimming kit. He had too much fun with it at first, and then got the hair above his left ear completely shaved off.

A TV news team purchased expensive SNG equipment and hired a group of people to operate them. Then, live coverage of silly and insignificant events began to appear.

A university offered its students new and comfortable dorm buildings, with private bathrooms in each suite. But, the rent skyrocketed and many poor students had no choice but to use their tuition money for housing. And the university ended up being short on the tuition fee.

In warfares, a countries with high-tech weapons turned war into graphic charts and computer games, leaving out signs of human casuality.

Whether funny or regretful, practical or sad, these different aspects of our experience remind us of a simple lesson: learn your tool well, see what it can do for you, and don't overuse it.

Admiring Clouds

A permanent canvas exists for me. That is the sky. The clouds generously fill and fix my eyes as they appear as drawings. I'll never forget a magnificent sky picture I saw 15 years ago as I was approaching Las Vegas on a desert road at dusk. The colorful sunset with its clouds wanted to prove that Vegas was nothing but bunches of artificial glitter and shimmer.

Another sky view that took my breath away was in Montana. Against the fainted blue air, thousands of bodies of shiny clouds wanted to break off the bind of the sky and come down to earth. They utterly covered the horizon. The only way I could respond from sitting in a car on a roadtrip was to offer my admirable gaze.

Then, there was the southwest skies in Oklahoma. I remember that every early summer evening, the sky was so beautiful that it inspired a lousy painter like me to paint the sky in a collection of water color.

I once had an assistant at work. Her name was 如雲 (As Clouds).

Those are all in the past. Now my digital camera helps keep some clouds for me. These are some of the recent ones.

Seeing Mars in a Peach

Subtle Treatments on TV

Mel Gibson made a damagingly mistaken anti-semite remark when he was drunk. His behaviors deserve to be criticized. But when Barbara Walters' show, The View, juxtaposed Gibson's heavily-bearded look with Saddam Hussein's image to get our laugh, the gesture not only overestimated Gibson's influence but also minimized Hussein's crime. Sometimes, a subtle manipulation or an implied message damages more than the obvious vice.

Lama's wisdom

I found this lovely poem posted by a young Chinese blogger who is now on his trip to Tibet. According to him, the poem was written by the sixth Dalai Lama (六世达赖喇嘛) named 仓央嘉措.

First best not to see
Then mind won't be captivated
Next, best not to become intimate
Then mind won't be trapped

A Chinese translation was added:

压根儿没见最好的，也省得情思萦绕。
原来不熟也好，就不会这般颠倒。

In a world that people say seeing is believing, and confuse representation with the presence simple and pure, this poem does make us to ponder. Most of us tend to be captivated and trapped easily by things and creatures. Human are weak and soft by nature. We cling to images and think they speak the truth; we hold on to memories and remember them as the evidence of being. It takes courage to reach beyond the things that captivate us, to look into the depth of our experience. And it takes wisdom to make ourselves connected and engaged to other beings without being trapped. We catch and be caught, touch and be touched at the very same moment.

Being Human and Digital

We live in a digital age. According to Nicholas Negroponte, a founder and the director of the MIT's Media Lab and the author of Being Digital , the digital age, like a force of nature, cannot be denied or stopped. And there are four powerful qualities in being digital: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering. Obviousbly, this is one more rosy and promising picture of technological development painted by another social and technological optimist. In contrast to this sort of utopian view, however, critic Wu Bofan (吳伯凡) warns us that human beings are now transforming into digital beings, and that the digital environments make our lives increasingly "light," in Milan Kundera's insight, thus more unbearable. Similar to the feeling of detaching ourselves from the earth, the ground, and losing our sense of gravity, in Wu's view, our immersion in digital technologies takes us farther away from our own physical capabilities and biological sensibilities. We allow the machines to take over our bodily functions. And we are happy about it.

I think that we now are both human beings and digital beings. Our bodily senses still function, but in different ways from how people perceived with these senses in the past. The multi-media objects make our senses intertwined. The virtual world not only creates fantastic pseudo-realities, but also prompts us to appreciate our natural environments with deeper gratitudes. The fake will make the real more desirable; the natural will make the artificial more imaginative. We will learn, through media literacy and self-reflection, to make the proper switches between surfing on the cyberspace and living in the physical, material world. I don't think the digital being is necessarily groundless and unbearable, but given the fact that media and technology can definately change our sense of self and other, and transform human consciousness, we simply cannot overlook the effort that contemplates on how that transformation happens with what significant consequences.

But for now, what interests me is that I am able to find various kinds of video clips for my entertainment on Youtube. com. My favorite concert highlights, movie scenes, and TV moments all become free video on demand materials, showing up on my computer screen at the moment I want them. I am waiting for the day when I will have the access to any book I need in electronic libraries. But, then I won't have the excuse for not finding the resource needed for my work. And that will be the burden, the "heaviness," that is embedded in the freedom, the "lightness," that the digital world offers.

As Wu reminds us of the Italian writer Italo Calvino's view, humans should strive to live a life as light and free as birds, flying high in the sky, rather than turn their lives into feathers, wandering and eventually being lost in the wind. Let's think about technology as wings that help us soar higher like birds. Though technology may have the power to take over the human brain and guide our minds, I believe that we have the wisdom and capability to make better judgments on the technological impacts. If machines allow us to develop new and fresh visions in life, give us the opportunities to understand and accept other human beings more, and open our minds and hearts to other creatures that we thought were strange and insignificant, then we should do ourselves a favor by embracing the screens, the robots, the fiber optics, etc. We let technologies participate in our own process of reaching to a higher level of human spirit and quality of life. It is absolutely important to pinpoint all the negative impacts of digital technology on human lives, but it's more constructive to learn and teach how to utilize the cyberspace in order to widen our own inner world and meet the challenges in all the new frontiers.