The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett

Borrowed book from Overdrive through my New York Public Library online library card. The setting is some small town in Lousiana called Mallard. Riveting, the book revolves around the story of Desiree and Stella, twins growing up poor and could not wait to escape their home town populated by fair-skinned African Americans who could could pass as Caucasians. 

The Gungo Pea Princess

Fairy tales in the olden times can marry off a prince  living with his parents, who happens to be the king and queen  of course, to a wandering princess. Hans Christian Anderson (HCA), in his time, married off a whiny princess on the account of a pea hidden under a pile of mattresses. My twisted version of the "The Pea and Princess"  is for Christine who brought me a pound of gungo ( pronounced as gung-go) peas  from Jamaica as a token  for trading off my work schedule with her so she make the trip. 

Not all fairy tales I know starts with once upon a time so let me tell you about the gungo peas princess.  Gungo  peas are also known as pigeon peas in the US. It's also called "kardis" in the tongue I was born with, in other words, mother tongue or tongue ina. So let me name my gungo princess Cardice as I am reminded of Candice Anderson Smith who had  since moved to Tennesee to live with her brotbers and sisters  in Jesus at the Straightway Church with Pastor Dowell. 

Princess Kardice  did not know she was a real princess untill she was told so by an older couple who claimed they were real royalties of the  Gungo Kingdom. King and Queen and their adult unmarried  son Prince lived in a huge house they called their castle  in a vast ranch somewhere in the Jamaica. 

As HCA's story goes, Kardice came knocking on the front door of the huge house called castle one stormy night after she got lost in what she thought was a wetland preserve. 

"Poor sweetpea!" Queen exclaimed, feeling sorry for Kardice who looked like shit at the time.

Queen asked his son Prince to find some blankets for Kardice as she led the unexpected guest into the dining room.  After Kardice finished  the cup of noodle soup hastily heated by Queen on the microwave oven, she was led into one of the guestrooms by Queen. Prince went back to his bedroom as soon as he gave a blanket to Kardice to get back to his videogames. 

Queen liked Kardice so much for Prince, and so as the HCA story went, she too got several mattresses and stacked them together putting some  gungo peas in between the mattresses. Queen  expected to find out if Kardice was a real princess if she could not sleep because of those gungo peas

underneath the mattresses. 

In the morning at the breakfast table, Kardice still looked like shit from lack of sleep. She kept stifling a yawn. Prince himself looked tired. Queen was pleased knowing that her search for Prince' would-be bride is over. 

"Who me?" Kardice thought Queen was kidding. 

Prince who had yet to tell Queen he is gay looked pissed. 

The reason why Kardice looked tired was because she stayed up all night playing videogames with two other virtual players in Prince' room. Se had to tell Queen that she had an estranged husband deployed in Afghanistan who happens to be the father of her two beautiful children. Queen was disappointed but had to bid goodbye to Kardice that day as she had  to catch a plane back to New York later in the day so she could go back to her job as a licensed vocational nurse at an assisted living facility in Manhattan the following day. 

She was actually surpised to find the same gungo pea that Olga asked  her to bring back from Jamaica under the mattresses that Queen prepared for her to sleep on. Kardice is familiar with HCA's pea and the princess story find and she finds the the fairy tale corny. 

This twisted modern fairy tale is for Christine, one Carribean queen, in her own right. 

Jewels of Opar

Once upon a time  in Barangay¹ Urayong, there lived two friends named Ampalaya and Talinong.  The families of Ampalaya and Talinong were neighbors and as they grew up, they were always  compared and pitted against each other.  The friendship did not last as Ampalaya became very jealous every time  neighbors complimented Talinong of her  statuesque bearing  and her  pretty tiny pink flowers that mature into sapphire-colored globules.

Ampalaya grew  bitter because of many other things: her vines   crawl  on the ground unless there is a trellis or other plants nearby which she can cling on to and her leaves do not look as flawless and young as Talinong's.  She may have  golden-colored  flowers as beautiful as those of Talinong but Ampalaya's flowers  were either a male or a female.  Her bitterness grew while she  watched her male flowers wither and pass on. Unlike Talinong's flowers, Ampalaya's female flowers  need pollinators for them to mature, have seeds, and be able to reproduce. Ampalaya's female flowers are known to bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other pollinators  as Flor Amargo, meaning bitter flower,  like the name of the Mexican singer-composer who popularized the  song  "Tiempo"²

In spite of her bitterness, Ampalaya is well loved, popular and known all over the world as either Amargoso, bitter gourd, bitter cucumber, or even vegetable insulin, among many other names. For those who rarely  know Talinong, she is identified  mainly by her scientific name: Talinum paniculatum.  How beautiful and upright Talinong became Jewels of Opar is another unknown and likely forgotten story.

There is no such place as Opar. Opar is a fictitious name in a made-up place where Tarzan was born and raised. Tarzan, which means white ape in the  made-up language of Opar, is the main character in the series of books written by Edgar Rice Borroughs that debuted in 1912. Tarzan was a feral child rescued and raised by an intelligent ape named Kala. Kala lost her infant ape while fleeing  Kerchak, her ape chief during one of his rampages. Kala   came upon the newly-orphaned Tarzan after  Kerchak  killed Tarzan's widowed father  John Clayton. Tarzan's parents were the Viscount and Lady Greystoke of England  who embarked on a trip to Africa but unfortunately captured during a mutiny. Viscount and Lady Greystroke were marooned in  an African jungle that happened to be the territory of great apes led by Kerchak. Tarzan was born in the jungle and his mom, the late Alice Rutherford-Clayton died when Tarzan was exactly one-year old. Kala  who lost her infant ape and was still lactating nursed Tarzan with her breastmilk and pretended that the odd-looking white ape was her son.

"Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar" is the fifth book  by Edgar Rice Borroughs that was published in 1918 about the life and adventures of. Tarzan. The  white ape who was breastfed by Kala,  a very intelligent ape, had by then become a grown man. Tarzan had since gone back to England and claimed his noble birth designation as Earl of Greystroke. He had also married Jane Porter, an American woman who had initially gone to Africa with her father  to study apes. Tarzan hated living England so he went back to Africa with Jane and lived in the large Greystoke  estate in Opar.  The jewels of Opar that Tarzan referred  to as his "pretty pebbles" were recovered alongside  the ashes of a Belgian outlaw who perished after being  trapped inside the jewel room  of Tarzan and Jane's lavished home while trying to steal the jewels for himself. The whole Greystroke estate was torched when  Jane was kidnapped for ransom by a gang led by Achmet Zet, an Arab.

Nobody knew if a Talinong even grew from the site where the jewels of Opar were recovered. I saw  Talinong adorned with its sapphire-colored globules at the courtyard of Brooklyn borrough hall in New York City almost two years ago and we both agreed  we have come a long way from Barangay Urayong. My name is Ampalaya. 

¹Barangay, pronounced as ba-rang-guy, is the smallest administrative and political unit in the Philippines. It's is the equivalent of a village or community.

²Tiempo 

by Flor Amargo

Burroughs, E. R. (1918) Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. A. C. McClurg and Co. New York City

the opposite of child labor at Nomadland

I have had Amazon Prime longer that I have had Facebook. All these years I felt priveleged listening to

Prime Music, watching Prime Video and getting Prime orders delivered within 24 hours with my Amazon Prime membership.  Reading about Amazon's Workampers sonehow reminded me of  rhe swearshops, child labor, and harsh working conditions in developing countries monitored

by the International Labour Organization for compliance to decent and humane working condition  laws for workers' protection. Some love lost however cannot stop me for wanting water filters for the coffee maker, gel pen refills and every day deals I would fancy and having these delivered at my door step within 24 hours. 

How to Start Farming

I love going back to this essay  I wrote in my AFSCME Eng101 Free College Course Grid  Challenge last year.  Maybe Mr. B remembered this essay during the recent Robinhood App GME ruckus.  

Farming is more than the business of tilling the soil, growing crops, and raising livestock.    It also encompasses an understanding and application of business and economic concepts and the goal of farming to earn profitable returns of investments.  Farming which is investing, buying, selling, and making profits from your produce is the same as investing in the stock market.  The stock market is where you buy your seeds when you are ready to farm. Stock market indexes such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or simply referred to as Dow; the NASDAQ Composite or Nasdaq; and S&P 500 Index may sound very complicated at first but so are terms like labor-intensive ventures, irrigation, fertilizers, compost, and manure.  The following steps are simple pointers to make trading stocks sound a little less daunting by equating investing to farming:

1.    Do your research  

Your friend plants the seeds on your brain when he shares to you a link to the Robinhood app early this year.  You learn, with the help of search engines, that Robinhood app is a commission-free trading app that lets investors trade stocks, options, and exchange-traded funds. You decide not to create an account on the app when you realize that you have to link your bank account to that online trading tool. You wonder if that app is just another social media platform or legitimate. You call your friend but he is ecstatic over how much his Tesla stocks have gained over the last few months. He regrets buying only five shares when the price was just over $100 last April. Today, Tesla stocks are priced at $599.04 per share. You wake up.  The first step in investing is making a plan and setting your goals.

2.     Build your investing skills with more research

You link your bank account to the Robinhood app investing account you created and you learn to call it your brokerage account. You learn the difference between stocks and stock mutual funds. You build your skills by reading every business section of digital newspapers you could access to. You read somewhere that you are making the most out of the news by capitalizing on it. You learn about choosing good stocks for beginners like you. You learn about the best stock investments. You continue with your investment education and wondering how soon you can apply those investment theories you have come up to. You are beginning to relate to economics better than you understood Econ101. The second step in investing is knowing what you are getting into.

3.     Set a budget for your stock investments

You have been buying stocks that are considered strong or moderate buys based on analyst ratings, consensus, and forecast.  Your wife does not know that you have been investing on Robinhood app and you plan to surprise her one day when you earn your first million. You bought 20 shares of NIO at $27.39 a share last October but sold 10 shares at $32 a stock when you thought that this upcoming Chinese electric vehicle   is not Tesla. You smack yourself on the head when you read that a NIO share will have a median target of $300 and high estimate of $400 in the coming months. The truth is, you are getting hooked to investing and becoming a gambler instead. The third step in investing is setting a limit as to how much you can lose.

4.     Learn from your mistakes

You stop fretting over your bullish and bearish gambits that resulted to minimal gains or losses and go back to your investment education. Being bullish is being too optimistic and overly confident and sure that the price of the stocks you bought will soar like hawks in the sky looking for their prey. Bearish in stock market terms is being pessimistic and passive like a hibernating bear. Do not be bullish one day and be bearish the next.  Diversify your portfolio and keep studying the stocks you are planning to buy. The fourth step in investing is figuring out your own trading strategies by experiential learning.

5.      Do not leave your day job

It may be too soon to think of changing careers even if you strongly believe that you have become a very successful investor.  If you are doing well in your investing, be aware that you might be paying taxes about a third of the value of your capital gains if you plan to liquidate your assets and withdraw them.  In investing, think in terms of risks rather than returns. Another key word in investing is volatility which is defined as the market’s tendency to be unpredictable. The last step in investing is to continue to investing, watching your investments grow, and appreciating the things you normally do while looking for other diversions to enjoy, like getting a life!