Wing Luke

This city, probably like most sizeable cities, is home to a host of specialty museums.  Yesterday I knocked another item off the Someday list by going with a girlfriend to one of them: the Wing Luke Museum in the International District.  It describes itself as the only pan-Asian Pacific American community-based museum in the United States, which focuses on the culture, art, and history of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.

Wing Luke himself was a ground-breaking, quietly inspiring lawyer and politician.  He was bullied in school as the only Asian in his class, but was able to transform his bullies into friends by doing drawings of them depicting them as superheroes.  In fact, he became so popular that he was voted Student Body President.

After much-decorated military service, he served as assistant attorney general of Washington state in its civil rights division and was later a member of the Seattle City Council.  He was the first Asian-American to hold elected office in the state.  Sadly, he was killed in a plane crash at the age of 40.

The museum is mostly historical in significance, offering perspectives from quite a few different Asian cultures.  A tour guided us through an adjacent former grocery store that has been preserved just as it was when it was active and open, even including its stock of glass jars of various dried or salted herbs, candies, fruits, etc, and actual packaged and jarred items from that older time.  We also toured what was left of an old flophouse above the store and museum, a place that used to have 155 single occupant rooms, which sometimes housed entire families.  All occupants of those 155 rooms shared 4 bathrooms.

The collective information offered, without bitterness, by the museum was challenging to me as a white/European American, because of course this country's deep-seated racism is highlighted at every turn, on every placard.  My girlfriend and I later had a conversation over dim sum about guilt and discomfiture and how to deal with them.  My attitude toward guilt has always been that it's a complete waste of emotional energy.  When I feel guilty, I look to see if I've done something wrong, and if I have, to correct it, and if I haven't, or if it's so far in the past as to be uncorrectable, to let go of the guilt and move on.  I guess the same is true of discomfort.  What is it that I'm uncomfortable about?  What does it reveal to me about my assumptions, opinions, values, and beliefs?  I feel very strongly that rather than trying to protect children from discomfort, as seems to be a GOP trend these days, a more effective approach is to teach them to examine their discomfort, to learn to understand, address, and navigate it.  But that's just me.  I'm not a parent nor a teacher so I suppose my opinion about it doesn't hold much water.

Cookies!

Being laid low for several weeks with COVID, not terribly sick, but fatigued and coughing, I admit that I haven't done an much that's new for a while.  I did read several books I've had on my radar since forever (Sinclair Lewis Arrowsmith, Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God, and about a third into All Quiet on the Western Front), and although I turned to a lot of old favorite movies (Shane, Rebecca, Stupid Crazy Love), I  did watch one we've had in our collection for decades, the documentary Grass, which is about this country's history with and attitudes toward marijuana.

However, yesterday I did something that definitely goes on the Something New list.  I had a recipe for rugelach cookies that I've been wanting to make, but a) it seemed sort of complicated and b) I don't bake cookies much any more because Sweet Hubby and I don't want to have them around too often.  But friends were coming over for a nice visit on the deck, so I did it.  I made rugelach.  

They're not really complicated so much as time-consuming and difficult to work with.  They entail rolling some very stiff, sticky dough into a circle, adding the fillings, and rolling wedges into croissant shapes.  They came out delicious and rich, but didn't look at all like the recipe photos, and were instead all sorts of sloppy, saggy, lumpy shapes.  Still, I got a lot of satisfaction out of doing something I'd been avoiding, and fortunately there are only a few left.  Which SH will eat one bite per day and I'll wolf down if I'm not very, very strict with myself.

It's nice to be almost back to human.

New, new, nothin' but new

The last month or so has been so packed with new experiences, I haven't even had a chance to blog about it all.  Mostly good and great, some a bit more yucky.

For almost two weeks I raced from one film to another during Seattle's annual film festival.  Such a glut of cinematic possibilities; I only managed to see about a tenth of what was being screened.  I saw, in no particular order: documentaries about whales, Donna Summer, Mary Tyler Moore, the first 20 days of Russia's attack on Mariupol, an extraordinary photographer named George Platt Lynes, the history of the movie camera, fishermen in India, the Chopin piano competition, a dance program that is brought to children in homeless shelters in New York.  And narrative films: a Spanish film about a young boy who knows he is actually a girl but doesn't know how to tell his family; a Croatian film about the aftermath of the Bosnian war, played out during a dating event; another Spanish film about ancient times in the Pyrenees when Basque warriors turned to a pagan girl in order to find a treasure; an Japanese film which imagines a future in which old people are invited to let themselves be euthanized in order to decrease the financial burden on the younger generations.  Also a collection of short films by and about women, as well as two films I can't say anything about because of a legally binding NDA.

Soon after that, Sweet Hubby and I went to Seward, Alaska for his best friend's daughter's wedding.  SH and I have not traveled together much in the past because we don't like to leave the kitties, but thanks to a wonderful friend who was willing to come stay at our house while we were gone, we were able to leave with confidence that Angel and Bandy would not just be fed, but also given the attention they crave.  Even my wary SH knew he could trust this friend to be careful, considerate, and honest.

Seward is a small town of not quite 3,000.  There isn't a lot to do if one isn't in AK for the hiking, boating, camping, and other outdoorsy activities, but there is a great Sea Life Center where we spent several hours.  We took walks, went out to eat, and of course there was the wedding.  The ceremony itself was outdoors in the woods, beautiful despite a light rain.  The reception was in a big tent, lots of food, including king crab legs, and dancing to a live band.  Jolly fun.  I enjoyed spending time in this town, getting to know it a bit.

We got home late after a delayed flight, and the next morning I had to get up at 5am to get to a university by 7am where I was one of several standardized patients taking part in OSCEs (observed standardized clinical exams) for nurse trainees.  My character was an older woman (of course) with a urinary tract infection, so for 10.5 hours each two days straight, I got to talk to one nurse trainee after another about my pee, as they were observed by an examiner.  This was definitely the most rigorous of any of the standardized patient work I've done because of the long hours and repetition of the scenario, but each trainee brought in a different personality and level of skill, so it was tiring but not dull.

The training was scheduled for one more half day, but the night of the second day, what I thought was a bad cold came on fast and hard.  And yes, it was (and is) COVID.  We found out later from SH's friend that the wedding ended up being a superspreader event.  I had one of the worst days I've ever had, but thanks to Paxlovid, I'm already feeling almost human.  SH has been such a helpmate, picking up meds, doing laundry, running errands.  Now we're sort of holding our breath to see if the ogre bites him too.