Tag: water

485: “Okay bring it in” (Jinkx Monsoon)

                “Okay. Okay bring it in.”
                -Jinkx Monsoon, in a quick aside while singing “One Day More” from Les Misérables

                More than a year ago, a friend and I tried to follow a creek that runs through the neighborhoods where we lived. Some of the creek’s beneath housing developments just now, pushed down into what I assume are cement pipes. Other portions are landscaped, curated: that’s how it is near the Engineering Quad on campus. Pretty walkways and bridges. Other portions of the creek are confined in these deep channels, and we put our heads over the fences, looking down. As we followed the current we kept running into roads with no walkways, into paved places where you couldn’t tell where the creek was, into no trespassing signs from the National Guard. It would’ve been fun to follow the creek past city limits, but we turned back at those signs.
                I love when singers spin around the genre for a song lots of people know. “Hot’n’cold” as polka. “Defying Gravity” as funk. I love when someone tries out a different kind of singing, and we get to listen, cheering them on. I think it’s partly because Jinkz Monsoon is so playfully inhabiting different genres, different performances, of being human: she’s playing back into the steps and hips rolls and shoulder wiggles that are supposed to be “him” or “her,” supposed to define the social persona in which someone walks along as a barkeep or a detective or a lover. It reminds me a little of the creek pushed into so many shapes by the construction projects of Urbana, IL. And  the water flowing along, down from clouds, out into prairies, not held by our shapes (not really, not forever). Dancing. I hope I’ll get to go back and continue that walk.

by Azlan

482: “All The Water” of Us (Sayaka Murata)

                “‘[…] there’s a different air about you.’”
                […] Yukari was right I thought. After all, I absorbed the world around me, and that’s changing all the time. Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too. When we last met a few years ago, most of the store workers were laid-back university students, so of course my way of speaking was different then.
                ‘I guess. Yes, I have probably changed,’ I said with a smile, not elaborating.” – Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

                Earlier today my sister-in-law, Fa, and I ended up chatting over the different ways we see ourselves in our friends and family. She told me about meeting one of her roommate’s sisters: “Just wait,” the roommate said, “meeting my sister is going tell you so much about me.” And it did. In their mannerisms, their phrases, their playfulness, Fa recognized the sisters by seeing them together.
                I often feel that way. There’s a kind of American individualism that’s really attached to an inner, essential, solitary self, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that—but sitting here now, what I feel is the wash of water as different people fill me. My parents, of course, and my siblings. Even from thousands of miles away I was looking at a palm tree today, and the way I looked at it came in part from my dad. I said hello to someone who passed and my mom’s phrasing washed through me. And then there’s my spouse, my spouse’s siblings, my friends, the other people I meet. In the last few days I’ve met a lot of my partner’s cousins, uncles, and aunts, and already I hear new phrases on my tongue. I find myself making new jokes. It’s fun.
                I used to love jumping into puddles. The splash. The reflection. The game. I’d stand and watch the changing water, too, the rippling tree branches and the sky. Sitting here I splash and reflect and play, my own little puddle self. Smiling, just like Sayaka Murata’s character.

by Azlan