Happy Moonstruck Festival! (Discursive Aside 16)
Above image: My teas, my mooncake, and me
The mooncakes are pretty heavy, and I´m on my third one, so it takes two sorts of tea to cut it. The left is white peony, and the right is rolled up little balls of green. The mooncake is filled with lotus root paste. The lotus is such a special flower with a meaning, because it comes out of the mud of the pond, but itself is pure and light.
My teas, my mooncakes, and me, makes think of (you already know one always leads to another in the little grey cells), well, makes me think of Vincent Fang´s lyrics “Coffee, tea, or me” in Jay Chou´s song 嘻哈空姐 (hip hop air stewardess).
You know who else the little grey cells bring up now that we are on air stewardesses? Ally McBeal.
Above she is, the character Nelle Porter from the show Ally McBeal, dressed in an air stewardess uniform inspired outfit, designed by her friend Ling Woo:
More Ling Woo:
More Ling Woo:
So that´s where the little grey cells have brought us, and they are not done. Agatha Christie´s detective Hercule Poirot spoke often of his little grey brain cells that do all the work. And they are wanderers, these little grey friends, from solving deaths on the Nile to transversing Eurasia on the Orient Express. They´ve brought us today from green tea to Jay Chou to stewardesses to, inevitably, Ally McBeal again. For the Goddess sings Ally´s rage, and she will not be denied.
There is a lot in common between Ally and Achilles. Let´s go into it a little bit more.
The whole Iliad is an Ally McBeal episode (maybe a two-part episode because it´s kinda long). The entire episode arc is: Achilles is really mad because he lost his girlfriend. He´s too upset to go to his job (of fighting the Trojans), and things fall apart at his workplace (the war with the Trojans). He tries to deal with the fallout.
Ally, too. She´s lost her boyfriend, and this has really devastated her. Bad things are happening at work (her ex-boyfriend and his new wife are her boss and colleague, respectively), and she emotionally falls apart a lot. She tries to date, a bunch of other men (over the seasons), but you can imagine how it tugs her heartstrings to be constantly working for and with her ex and his wife.
This is exactly the plot of the Iliad. Achilles loses his girlfriend also to his boss: Agamemnon. Sure, Achilles is offered other girlfriends, but he, too, has a lot of trouble at work given his girlfriend is now with his commander. He, too, cannot date properly under these circumstances. It´s hard to bounce back when these are the hands dealt you, no matter if you are Ally or Achilles.
And everyone at work is witness to everything happening! Imagine the awkwardness among the war tents, the bivouacs of gossip, the office wine-amphoroa chit-chat! Everyone knows you broke up, and everyone knows you are completely messed-up over it, just totally gutted. And you have to do battle (in the courtroom or on the field), and you just cannot bring your best self to work under these conditions! Not in the 11th century BC, not in the 20th century AD (the best Ally McBeal episodes were in 1998 and 1999).
What I´m saying is, it doesn´t take Hercule Poirot´s Belgian little grey cells to figure out that you can´t perform your best when your heart is rebroken every day at work, and you feel like it´s under the scrutiny of all your comrades/colleagues, and seeing your ex with her/his new flame under your nose is exactly what the Goddess was singing about, and will always be singing about. For that is the Homeric epic, the modern five-season TV show, the rage, the incalculable pain, and our hearts are dying of it.
This is all to say/announce: I´m working on a new secret writing project (because my own little grey cells, inadequate as they are, can´t stop jumping from this to that, like neurons synapsing completely without a plot/map/clue), in the singing of rage of the human heart, pretty much with the same plot as Achilles/Ally McBeal/all of human nature.
I hope you´ll like it, and I hope we´ll drink much from oenochoae over it.
Maybe because it´s a full moon. Happy moon festival!
Next page Tchaikovsky´s appointments and musings (Discursive Aside page 17)