Trice > Recent Status Updates

😮🥺😢🤯😳🥹😮

255: Aram smiled. “The tattoo that I would like to have is a gorgeous fig tree. But, unlike other trees, this one is upside down. My fig tree has all its roots up in the air. Instead of the earth, it is rooted in the sky. It is displaced but not placeless.”
Auntie Zeliha: “The fig tree is an ominous sign. It does not bring good luck.”

Armanoush’s online friend BB seems esply controlling + judgmental amid a group similarly so
That scene in the cafe tho, Asya in the mood for confrontation + argument, attacks the gf, someone who’s alone among a group of his friends, + intentionally makes her feel like sh*t abt sth that cld have been an interesting convo + then tows Armanoush into the middle of it + turns it into a fight over gen cide

Terrible narrator
I knew it was coming but Canth and F’nor’s flight to the Red Star still destroys me. It’s been so many years since I’ve read the dragon books and they felt so different, but that part 🤦‍♀️. The fire lizards stirred in terror; Ramoth and Mnementh alone on the heights and then the whole Weyr taking flight at once trying to save a falling dragon

And another wow btw, bc tragic histories and family complications and so on but ultimately it’s been ordinary ordinary ordinary and suddenly MAGIC, and we see Auntie Banu talking with her 2 djinni that were mentioned in passing to be each on one of her shoulders but seemed…a silliness connected to her fortune telling. Here they’re real, and 1 rather scary tho the fear is abt terrible knowledge

191-2: Wow on the historical info flood + I feel ignorant - didn’t know the visigoths were in Spain but of course as Roman allies to deal w/other Germanic tribes that had come thru but then were around downfall of Roman Empire
Describing the power and longevity of one of Auntie Banu’s djinni familiars, Mr. Bitter, a galyabani djinn (very old, powerful, knowledgeable about + around for battles + terrible events)

Auntie Banu saw the light on and brought Armanoush an orange, peeled and sliced, just like the father on the list of “you know you’re Armenian” 🥹

Two narratives coming together! *glee*
Armanoush’s recounting of her family’s experience of the genocide seemed…unnatural - more like what you’d write in a report than share at dinner…massive it was the awkwardness of sharing with a Turkish family of having it translated in process, but didn’t quite feel spoken. Otherwise I’m so drawn in to both Armanoush’s search for past + Asya’s need for meaning

Armanoush has left me with a bunch of books I need/want to read, some on my shelves and some I’m now looking for copies of
She’s going to Turkiye! Not surprised but wondering + excited for her
Funny that both she + Asya have these cafes of a few friends where they talk life + philosophy + identity
Loving all the family parallels too

Finally getting into it
Every chapter named after food, and within the interactions centered around eating and cooking and the traditional foods of each, Turkish, US American, Armenian

Argh
The name mispronunciations are so annoying - have to correct them every time to try to keep his versions out of my head. Every g he pronounces as j and vice versa, not to mention the stress errors
Kylara is disturbing partly bc some of her behavior is a reaction to real misogyny, individual and societal/systemic; but mostly bc she’s such a selfish, greedy, power hungry and abusive narcissist of a doll

Ahhhh
Firelizard impression
Nothing like
And I do believe Canth is one of my favorites of the dragons and yes F’nor
Noting how Wirenth is barely a character - I think she gets one minor convo with Brekke later on but otherwise she is background and then grief

Restarted my reread 😂
Needed the comfort/inspire read

Hm

Aiya. PKD with the blank female character this time. At least she has a name and a secretarial part if she couldn’t be a real person and since she was the only female in the whole story full of men in various capacities
Time scoop and time mirror
Hmmm

Minority Report: Hmmm
Almost the reverse of the movie I think, though it’s a very faint memory at this point
The precogs are much more dehumanized
Love how there /was/ no minority report in the end, just 3 with differing levels of foreknowledge on behalf of the individuals involved

This is so many things full

One small thing is that this has what Blood Over Bright Haven lacked

But again, it was so full and so itself, it’s beyond comparison. So much even in the imagery of the tower of Babel that echoes backward and forward in time and through the Now

This moment rings

“It was like an exercise in hope…. Loving her, I mean. Sometimes I’d think she’d come around. Sometimes I’d look her in the eyes and think that I was looking at a true friend. Then she’d say something, make some off-the-cuff comment, and the whole cycle would begin all over again. It was like pouring sand into a sieve. Nothing stuck.”

Small flickers of hope but truly mostly…that they went into it w/no planning - “we thot we’d be dead” - or supplies for even themselves let alone the few who stayed with them, no contacts, no support. Really this is on the older org members who brought them into nothing then left them with grief and intent alone against an empire. I can’t out my finger on my current emotion bc it supports but criticizes

The 2 sides of anti/de colonialism so clear

Finally able to pick it up and open it again today
Despite them leaving the beginnings of the opium war and the monstrous officiousness of the English merchants in their wake.

Now a return and a new crisis but surprisingly less heartrending - one who’s heart is evil vs millions condemned for their people-ness

Well I was thinking ukulele, but I still think the guitar =correct guess
Glad she included that last scene with there previous part. Felt right
Sorry there wasn’t any of the numinous - there was so much room for it with the god of the woods and Peter IV/Bear going missing (Peter Pan anyone?). Oh well

😮“the Mohawks had 3 clan towns - Bear, Wolf, + Turtle - named for the 3 clans that all members of the League shared…. All persons of the same crest, in whatever nation, acted as if they were indeed siblings, and welcomed each other in their respective lodges”
I think I thot it was the other way around
Also “lineage consisting of a core of mothers, sisters, and daughters who were a longhouse family”

Aiya - talking methodology and whether the things are the same or different through history. Hopefully soon it gets to talking about the actual *things*

Starting 1st essay thinking mark that down as a 1st paragraph that wld NVR be written today
“I have hrd the old ppl + the youngr ‘Indian lawyers’ declaim abt the treaties + our failure to observe their stipulatns. Altho at times these recitatns of wrongs+assertns of rights grew tiresome🤦‍♀️ one cld not but b impressed by the eruditn+memories of the narrators +wonder abt the poss merits of their claims

Loved this interaction but also makes me want to cry
I both feel better and bad again about teaching English here bc my students developed good skills, needed skills in many ways, but I hate what English has done and been used for and…how it could affect their selves

😂 they got off the boat at Jackass point 😂
Asking a HK friend if that’s still there but it’s so appropriate for the amount of ridiculously hypocritical colonizer language that’s getting tossed around. They’re ‘barbarous’; how dare they police what we bring in to sell (dr*gs, spec’ly opi*m). 🙄 we’ll knock them down to size these arrogant blah blah blah
This is before the opi*m w*rs of course

Frustrated for Robin. They literally ran away leaving him holding the bag FOR THEM when he wasn’t even involved and he got caught, and now they’re mad at him bc he didn’t tell them about the super secret org that he was supposed to tell no one of?!