white – hannah ananas

Bread

When I correctly answered spontaneous trivia questions posed to the audience at a Taiwanese tea ceremony presentation this morning, my coworker turned to me – he’s white Anglo, but a Mandarin teacher – and asked, “How do you know all this stuff?” Yesterday had been a surprising exposure of my Día de Muertos knowledge and experience, and a few other things had come up in the past week to show how I had grown up participating in many cultures. And, while I sat in on his Mandarin I class last week and this week and blew him away with my random knowledge of Mandarin and of character radicals, I am certainly not part of the Mandarin department, and have never been to or studied about China or Taiwan.

I smiled and said to him, “My family is very not-white.”

To solidify such a statement, let me merely add that my hand is covered in mehndi right now, as I helped my mom for a presentation and event she was doing tonight for Diwali, and I wanted to play with some henna just for fun, since I’m wearing an Indian outfit tomorrow… As I said, we are very not-white… 😛

Happy Diwali, y’all!! 😉

Post-a-day 2021

Smiles

I am always overjoyed and heartened whenever I am granted the opportunity to experience these beautiful smiles from beautiful people with beautifully arranged, pretty teeth.

It makes me see that fixing up my own teeth actually could have the potential of bringing a similar breathtaking joy to those around me…

Kind of puts a new perspective on the whole idea, as opposed to its being merely a point of vanity and self-confidence for myself…

Something new to consider, I suppose… 😛

Post-a-day 2019

Freshly Sliced

I am the epitome of sliced white bread, as I enter campus. I have on my dance top and shorts and my hipster tie-dye Oakley sunglasses. I am eating a Trader Joe’s snack bar and holding a large bottle of cold Trader Joe’s electrolyte water, and am walking with a cool green backpack on my back, and my dirty blonde hair in a messy bun on top of my head.

Two black guys are walking towards me. The larger of the two, a very large and very dark guy, asks me how I’m doing and what I do here. I tell him that I go to school. He asks if I do any sports or anything, because I look like I do long-distance running; I look very thin and fit. I say that I did. He says that ‘you see there, I was right – you look like it’. I notice that I’m also wearing running shoes – the ones I used to wear for all my walking and bike riding at my Japan job – and that I haven’t just been doing exercise, despite my complete outfit for it. He hands me a flyer while saying that they hope I can join them on the 20th, and then I continue onward. Based on the flyer, it looks like some sort of DJ dance party with stereotypical black advertising and expected attendees. Not that I’m opposed to the party, but I’m not exactly the target audience of the flyer, making it surprising that this guy would have stopped to invite me…I mean, did he see me? Again, not opposed to it. I’m in full support of it. I’m just a little surprised by it. However, I recall that this is a college campus, so they’re probably inviting just about any girl they can find (who doesn’t look like a total nerd, that is), and my surprise lessens significantly.

After a few hundred yards of walking onward, I see what I originally think is a dead snake on the ground. As I approach it, I see that it is a strand of weave, of false hair. A gurgling chuckle rises within me. This is definitely not my typical territory, and I feel as though my thoughts of being stereotypical white bread have just been proven by my surroundings of very much black culture – not to mention the fact that almost everyone I can see is black to some degree – showing up in stark contrast to me.

And then I remember that I also am wearing a drape-y scarf, despite the fact that it is still technically summertime. I’m even more white bread than I had thought.

Post-a-day 2018

Snow in Houston, Texas (and t-rex Christmas cards)

Last night, it snowed here. In Houston, Texas. It happened yet again. What miracles lie before us? It began after I went to sleep, and didn’t begin to stick until after I woke up for a bathroom break in the middle of the night. So, I woke up to snow covering everything that wasn’t concrete this morning. Which, when you think about it, is kind of the best kind of snow – you don’t have to shovel or worry about tire chains or anything, but you get to have beautiful snow everywhere around you.

The hit of the morning was arriving to school. My mom drove me in, because we were going to a Christkindlmarkt (German Christmas market) together after school, and the market was too far away for me to drive home first and then go, and it didn’t make sense for us to drive two cars out there. She was staying for a bit, because we had Mass at school for the Immaculate Conception, and this was a chance for her to see the school a little bit. Pulling into the parking lot (vacant of teachers, because we were so early), we discovered a sort of snowball fight happening in the picnic table area next to the lot. We didn’t have much snow on the ground, but the kids were making some snowballs out of it, and throwing them around at one another. It was adorable.

Naturally, my mom declared that I had to make a snowball, as we were leaving the car. I grabbed an already-made snowball from the ground, which had lost only a bit after originally falling there, and showed it to her. As she eyed me up while she finished off her own snowball, I realized that she intended to throw hers at me.

And so the fight began.

My mom and I, shuffling around a parking lot and a small grassy area with snow about it, picking up and throwing odd snowballs at one another, practically screeching with delight. When I was turned away, a snowball hit her square in the back of the head. No one was too near us, though, so it had come a long way. And these were a little tough for regular snowballs, so it definitely hurt her a bit in the moment (stung, perhaps, is the appropriate word here). It didn’t ruin out fun, of course, but merely added to the silliness of the whole affair – one of my students had attacked my mother with a snowball*. No part of that declaration makes sense for living here, in Houston, Texas. 😛

In class, before Mass, kids lined up at the windows to stare at the snow in the courtyard below and on the roofs within view. This was only the second time in their lives that it has snowed here, so their fascination with it was completely understandable, and utterly adorable.

Today had some magic, that’s for sure.

*I found out later that the student who hit my mom actually was a student of mine. He asked me ‘who that teacher was, walking with me earlier,’ and, when I asked for clarification, he described the morning snowball affair. “That was my mom.” In shock, he declared that he thought it was a teacher and asked me to tell my mom that he was sorry for what he did to her. (My mom and I laughed at the thought that he apologized for having hit my mom, but that is seems to be the case that he willingly would hit a teacher in the head with a hard snowball, without question.)

P.S. My task today was to “[d]raw a Christmas card”. So, I drew one on the roof of my mom’s car tonight as we were leaving the Christkindlmarkt. Frost had begun to reappear all over the place.

Post-a-day 2017