Sleeping is Giving In

Insomnia, that dirty fucker. Can't sleep, decided to clean out my inbox and consequently found a lot of old essays I wrote for school or college applications. Tempted to post some up (you call it narcissistic, I call it efficient archiving). I also rediscovered a great poem featured in one of my fave movies: Harold and Kumar. It's a love poem hehe.

The Square Root of 3 by Dave Feinberg

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

Prompt: Describe the voice of a loved one.


When asked to describe my mother’s voice, I'm actually describing my mother. If there’s one thing to pinpoint my mother it's her voice. When she speaks English, people tend to think that my mother’s actually shouting, but that’s because they haven’t heard her shout, yet. Two steps away from being shrill, my mother’s voice will always be that of a saleswoman—loud, confidant, exuberant, demanding, and playful. It grows with her excitement, and it should be known that she gets excited by talking. Frequently overlapping, or overpowering, someone else’s, my mother’s voice is looking for a fight but won’t take no for an answer. Her English is a living record for the places she’s been: vowels from Sheffield mixed in with a pleasant Midwestern drawl and an underlying Chinese accent.


But it’s her Chinese that epitomizes her the best. When my mother speaks Cantonese, her voice does become shrill. It sounds as if nothing else in the world is happening because my mother stopped it with her voice. Or like a little boy just discovered a twelve-piece drumset and he really really likes the cymbals. Every syllable is bursting with energy that is then transposed into hand gestures and pacing.


And yet, I’ve never heard anyone else speak Mandarin so beautifully. Like poetry, or music, every word is clean and crisp, while maintaining a certain softness. She has a perfect Beijing dialect, meaning she doesn’t have one, making her Mandarin universal. Hearing her speak Mandarin makes me wish I remembered more.


My mother’s voice is painted red; alive with passion, full of fighting love.