Raspberry Edition

21 June 2026

A lot going on today. Summer solstice. Father’s Day. National Indigenous Peoples Day. Yesterday, I had my first backyard raspberry of the season. Not the raspberry where someone sticks their tongue out at you. Or the raspberry from scraping your knee on the pavement from falling off your bike. The sweet and juicy kind. And the seeds are not so hard.

Monday

My neighbourhood library does not often have literary events. And literary events do not often feature Asian Canadian writers. So I was intrigued to see this one (for free!) featuring Keiko Hondo and Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho. Just before attending this event, my cousin Suzanne Hartmann had told me that she was visiting Vancouver and planning an evening with Keiko. I had also heard of The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street. I live near Dunbar street, but did not expect that a widely publicized book would actually be about the same area where I lived. So hearing these two writers turned out to be an particularly relevant afternoon for me.

Tuesday

While not wasting my time scrolling, I was thinking about what made it so difficult to stop. I used to like going to parties and meeting interesting people. My Instagram algorithm seems to be giving me interesting, attractive people telling me about ideas that make me feel smart, without me having to make any effort. To figure out how to get over this, I suppose I’ll have to watch some more clips.

Wednesday

Some people are dismissive of sports as a distraction. Now that everything seems to be a distraction, maybe it is losing some of its live action appeal. I think that the unpredictability of sports and sincere effort was the point. But now I just watch the recorded highlights without the commitment. I had not watched a whole hockey game on Hockey Night in Canada for a long time. Do you watch sports?

Thursday

We have had this suitcase for maybe twenty years. It seemed to be mostly alright, except for this broken swivel. I feel bad about throwing things away, so I decided to see if I could get this repaired. I suppose I might have looked into doing it myself, but that did not hold much appeal. The guy also offered to replace a missing label, but since that made no functional difference, I passed. He claimed it should be good for another twenty years, so we’ll see if the luggage outlasts me.

Friday

The vibe around town has some of the jubilance of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Back then, I remember wandering with the crowds. Now when I see an ocean of humanity, I think mostly about the soup of germs from all over the world. So we subscribed to Crave to sit and home and watch. Also I found out they had another Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight in the Seven Kingdoms, based on The Hedge Knight by G.R.R. Martin. I wonder if he is still planning to finish the Game of Thrones series.

Saturday

The bottle came as a free gift when my spouse bought a new suitcase, so I didn’t know it was a fancy gadget. I was partial to it because it was called Kiyo, which means “pure” in Japanese and happens to be the first part of my Japanese name Kiyoshi (pure spirit). I gather it is good for sterilizing biological material like bacteria and viruses, but I’m not sure about inorganic toxins. Seems a little risky to use in extreme situations, but maybe for places where you’re just not sure about their tap water?

Sunday

This is an episode from my graphic memoir in progress, Not Made in Japan, about when I was studying marine biology in southern Japan when I was in my twenties back in the 1980s. This was part of a little adventure in Okinawa for a marine ecology conference with fellow grad students Nishihama-san and Asakura-san. I thought it was funny that those two native Japanese could not understand what was on the radio in Okinawa. Eventually, the driver turned it to a Japanese language station. I should probably say something insightful about colonization here, but that would take work.

That was my week. I hope you had a good one, with a better one to come.