soul splitting

Another blown-up episode, the biggest yet, involving third parties, the law, and formalities. I've chosen to intervene after the right time had passed. Had I intervened earlier, perhaps the later complications would not have come. And things would not have escalated. But I chose to withdraw. One friend described a similar, albeit more harrowing, experience, when she promptly chose a stand right in the middle of all the action. On the right side.

I'm reading a book about first year at law school, and being a lawyer in general, the author warned of the consequences in believing that the "right answer" does not matter, as law professors so assuredly insists. Rather, one must use reasoning to find support on both sides, and then instantly take the ground from under them by switching to the other army. It's a frenzied back and forth. A chess match played against the self. I relished in it. Now I see why. I see its ugly implications, purple and black like a bruise, in a panoramic and magnified view as I crash back to the real world.

Why do I love not picking a side? Why do I prize the tool--rationality--above the end it is helping to achieve? Detachment. Cowardice. Perhaps a more deeply rooted and subtle vice. I've tested out my principles with the hot iron of reason, but wielding them in the face of the enemy is quite another matter. Who was the enemy? I have a feeling I could know the answer if I wanted. Yet I never approach this last step of the game. Knowing my opponent would mean I would have to spring to action, or forever hold myself as a soul-split being, where even neutral rationality could not save me. I am not a being of action, but only of observation, perhaps even of judgment. But action. Action! Something reserved only for the brave and quick, eludes me. Or perhaps more accurately, I elude it. One day I fear some sort of undesirable event, akin to evil, will be brought into the world because of my allowances, one day I fear I will be defined by moral abdication. People always praise those who helped house the persecuted in the time of Nazism. I always knew I would not be one of them. I live in gratitude that I do not live in trying times, because the test of character will be one I will surely struggle with. And one I have a real possibility of failing.

**

collateral damage

I once wrote that being at home is the bread and butter to my writing. And that will continue to be true...so long as my writing remains angst-driven and teenage like. A regular Twilight novel, sans glittering skin in the sun. Being drafted into and allowed back from the war of first semester law school, it felt like a homecoming was the exact right remedy, and its sweet syrupy-ness should have lingered longer. But it wasn't. And it didn't. Again the protagonist is reduced to furious, incomprehensible salt drops in a locked bathroom, as only living with blood-bound relations can conjure. Over a fight that she wasn't even a part of. How can kids from divorces, the mother of all such fights, survive it? The spoils of a different kind of war, the children sit unnoticed amid the canon fumes. After the battle. After the conquer and divide. After the newly-minted declarations and anthems. Someone notices the kids again. Their silence the loudest all along. I wonder how they survive it. Because like a vaccine, these little bursts of regular, self-introduced venom keeps the real thing at bay. So tonight was only a decimal of what the true veterans have come back from. How do they survive their Vietnam when I can barely survive the empty words of the Cold War?

**

trial at chrismas time

I haven't written in a while, let's blame it on law school, which is, let's be fair, much more intense than undergrad, especially as we hurtle towards first round of finals. The other factor is that life has been boring as of late. But it's Christmas time, so I will do a blog post with what holiday cheer I can muster after expending much energy stressing uselessly about exams. Despite everyone's sighs over corny Christmas music, I happen to love the Christmas atmosphere. A Michael Buble rendition of a Christmas song, a hot cup of latte warming cold hands, it's hard not to smile about that picture. Santa Baby has been on replay in higher and higher frequency as I approach finals. It's the only thing that keeps me sane, that and talking with friends who are not in law school.

And let's face it, I haven't exactly let my guard down with anyone in law school yet, there haven't been any friendships that would allow me to talk about something non-law school related. I must confess this process is very very slow-starting. Maybe I'm too picky with friendships. Maybe I'm awkward around new people. Maybe I don't pick the right times and places. And it doesn't help when other people admit to running into the same blocks. (Well, it helps a little.) Because then what are we doing? We want the same things. We are in the same place. We have been whipped by the same cultural expectations and social handbooks for twenty some years. What more could there be besides motive, opportunity, and means? In law, they add up to misconduct beyond a reasonable doubt. In law school, they add up to no conduct plagued by self-doubt. When will the trial be over? Has it even started? Santa baby...bring me a winning verdict. I've been a very good law student this year.

**

red plastic cups

Sometimes I find myself longing for sparkling good times that belong to the other side of the spectrum. It was a club I couldn't crack into for a long time. In college, I did. In my giddiness, I soaked up the parties, all parties, all parties with stale beer stained air, laced with over-applied cologne and smoke from amateurishly lit cigarettes. Strobe lights whirled and gave me a headache, I whirled with them, sometimes strangers whirled with me. The moments were heady as promised. Then something happened, the fun became the same. Whenever Kanye's Stronger played for a second time, or said strangers moved on to my porcelain-skined friend, or the sticky floor had finally claimed the better part of my shoe, it was time to go home. But the more novelty slipped from me, the later I stayed. Like an addict, I needed larger doses to sustain the same high.

The next day, friends with much more sense would ask what they missed, their eyes widen and crinkle at all the right moments. As I finish with a satisfying period (a kiss, a fumble, a line that went one too far), they answer with a laugh and a head shake. With each shake, I was pushed into the sparkling world I had desperately tried to crash.

One night we were the last ones whirling on the sticky floor. 3 a.m., in an overworked, floaty white skirt, I had finally reached the end. Stronger had already been played four times, or was it five? In the haze of a lone, purple light, we plummeted toward the other end of the arc. The couple in the corner started to leave, her hand in his. Two guys sluggishly went around the room, stacking used red plastic cups, pouring dull, yellowish liquid out. I looked around. The red cups were everywhere and identical. There were so many of them. What was the point? I exhaled. I could no longer smell the beer nor the cologne. The air had infused and merged with the air in my nostrils. I desperately wanted a drink to quench a thirst (of what, I wasn't sure), but I could not pick out my own red plastic cup. They all looked the same.

**

falling fall

Two years ago I wrote about seeing leaves falling from a window, followed by a recognition of fall. And today there was a deja vu moment when I saw the same colors and motions through a window, while a cutting breeze shot through an open door, and I suddenly re-realized fall, circa 2011, New York, where grass and trees are seldom around, let alone seen.

For me, fall is so much more complicated than simple summer, which consists only of lush greens and constant chaos. Fall, on the other hand, has varying paces, temperatures, and colors, a blanket of melancholic calm that is both welcome and deflating…

For our ancestors who reaped, fall was probably much simpler, both rewarding and inviting of work. We the privileged, (circa 2011, New York) must deal with an existential crisis borne because we reap nothing at all. Occupiers have sprang up in this appropriate season, perhaps feeling an agitation to match nature, who has produced rich, multi-colored beauty, while we circle on bleak, grey concrete, fighting against fall falling upon us, fighting to deserve its scarlets and golds.

**

zero to infinity

I've stumbled upon a beautiful writer, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (coincidentally, daughter of Steve Jobs).

"In my life, I am between landmarks" she writes, "after childhood, before a book, before marriage and children, all potential."

I, too, am immersed in this period, all potential. Like the moment when you're atop a swing, poised high above the ground, about to swoosh back to earth. The feeling is so universal and curious that imitators have popped up everywhere: roller coasters that pause before a plummet, doors in horror movies that take forever to open, blowing on dice before casting them on the table, closing our eyes before an impending kiss. We love to reproduce the feeling. It's not one of objective pleasure, because it is, by definition, neutral. Before the outcome is known, it is at once good and bad, yin and yang. It is Schrödinger's Cat. A moment of pure absence, not only of physical events but of intellectual knowledge, and emotional reaction. Besides, for the risk-averse like myself, the unknown might even carry a negative value.

For all these reasons, I am not sure what the allure is behind this moment. The most obvious answer, I think, is that we have a subconscious (irrational or otherwise) belief that the future is more likely to be good than bad. For the most part, I'd like to think the outcomes do tend to our favor. Projections of our futures, happily, mostly fall within the range of realistic expectation. But I'd like to offer another reason for our fascination. I think there is inherent value in this thing masquerading as pure emptiness. In math, we are taught that Positive and Negative add to zero. But in ancient folklore, we are taught that yin and yang is what the entire world is made of. It is not nothing, but everything. It blends what normally cannot co-exist together. We exhilarate in this rare symmetry. I fancy mathematicians secretly do too--there is undoubtedly a mundane history behind the symbol for infinity, but I prefer to look at it as two, perfectly symmetrical, zeros.

**

iWait

I once wrote that if there's anything closure needs, it is the element of surprise. Let me revise that. What closure needs is actually a beginning. The beginning of Y will help you tread backwards toward X. There is nothing we do so well as putting up tremendous resistance, especially in the face of our own fate. When life drags us forward, we dig deep into the ground, leaving trenches behind the heels of our feet, we can't help but look backwards. They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill...sometimes that side of the hill is the one we just came from. Even if what we face could be cultivated into something great, who wants a fresh field for plowing when we had one that already guaranteed harvest? Even if the reaping is done and we must wait a long, long time for the next one, waiting takes such little effort, and beginning anew takes so much.

There is a crop of Steve Jobs' quotes on the internet right now, one of them is, appropriately, from a commencement speech: "… You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

I'm not good at connecting the dots. I venture to guess that I'm not the only one. One by one, we have to pick our feet up from the trenches and move with the wind instead of against it. We the diggers of dirt all know this. Think of the time wasted in our futile and quixotic protests. We all know that too. Yet before every cycle's beginning, I stand still for a while. Some people sprint ahead so fast both feet leap off the ground, and the wind carry them forward in those magical split seconds. They are the Steve Jobs of the world. They fly.

I. Wait.

**

New Age Old Questions

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Why did the chicken cross the street? I have two things to say about these Age Old questions.

1. Why are they all about chicken?
2. Can I add some more questions: is it better to love or be loved? To chicken out and receive love or to risk loving someone who won't love you back? To be (a chicken) or not to be (a chicken)?

People have said that love is about looking. They are right. Is there anything so painful as looking at someone you love? Is there anything so pleasurable as being on the other end? Is it so bad to be in someone else's gaze, rather than being the one gazing? What if you can't have it all, and you must choose? Why not choose to be looked at?

What's so great about crossing the road anyway?

**

candlelights and skylines

I just realized there were no candles at my birthday this year, which means I can't do the traditional corny candles post. In a desperate attempt at a substitute metaphor, I will turn to city lights. There's just something about New York City's skyline that everyone falls in love with. Chicago. Los Angeles. None of them hold a candle (bad pun intended) to my newly adopted city.

I tried really hard not to talk New York up to myself. In some ways, I was successful. I'm realistic about its grime, its narrow spaces, and its isolation, but really, all I have done is accelerate from a crush to a love affair. Because one sees nothing and the other sees everything yet loves despite the seeing. It's like New York has taken place of the friendships that should be blossoming. It's much easier to love a city than a person.

I suppose that's what I miss from the past life. The last two years were filled with a pleasant buzz of satisfaction, grinding into the crevices, getting comfortable. Those were the candlelight years, warm, yellow, and small. Now, the lights are colder, bluer, and infinitely more powerful. The wheel has been re-invented. Granted, the beginning is always more exciting, but also more exhausting. So for one day I wished candles were back in my life again. I wished the coming revolution could fast-forward just a little bit. I wished we could skip to the next candlelight period. But then, maybe I'd be missing the bigger picture. The much bigger picture. Maybe even a whole skyline's worth.

**

stuck on B+

There's an episode of How I Met Your Mother, where Barney has a moment of rare clarity after a scotch. And he says: "I'm an B+."

That line resonated with me long after it should have been forgotten. In my elementary school, our grades (and in turn, our self-worth) hinged on one test each semester. I was always 2nd in my class. This became a joke for everyone in my family except my mother. I was always met with a slightly crestfallen face after coming home. No reprimands. No ecstatic exclaims either. Just B+.

The very last grades I had ever received in China, I was number 1 for ten minutes, until a kid yelled out his tablemate's scores, who was sick and wasn't there--the absentee had scored 3 points higher than I did. My teacher instinctively looked at me with protective pity. At that time, my dad was mere weeks away from leaving for America. And I was not to be far behind. Did it matter who was number one? Moreover, did it matter if my parents would never find out?

Still, it didn't occur to me to tell my dad anything but the truth. But when I got to the part where I had seemingly taken that elusive title, he interrupted me. "You got it!", he said gleefully. His face was pure happiness. It was so unadulterated, so simple. I did not want to dilute it.

"Yes!"

What happened next deserves its own story. To sum up, my parents found out when my friend came over and spilled the beans. I received the most memorable beating of my life, while my friend watched from our worn, blue couch. Suffice to say my lies decreased drastically after that. Lesson learned.

The other lesson, the murkier one, is that I resigned to my fate a little that day. My high school grades consisted of unblemished good grades save one French class. Then, three out of the five ivy leagues I applied to waitlisted me. Next up, law schools. Second tier. Without a first tier school, it is 99.9% certain that my dream job five decades down the road is also out of reach.

Over the summer someone said if my GPA had been better, I'd be at a better law school. Others are appalled upon hearing this, but I received it with mostly indifference. It is true. It is also too late. Not only in the sense that I cannot change my college grades, but in the sense that in the fifth grade, part of this fate had already been woven into place.

At twenty-one years old, I am too young to think anything is sealed. Consciously, I don't allow myself to think this way. But once in a while, a Barney moment escapes. And I get stuck on B+.

**

Postscript: I just reread this post and it sounds terribly whiny. I run around accusing my mother of thinking anything but the best is crap, when I am guilty of it myself. This is exactly why I found Holden from Catcher in the Rye intolerable. Is there anyone more hypocritical than the one who has everything?

**

side effects

You know that feeling when you know you’re having a great time, and you sort of leap out of that moment, float above yourself for a while, while sounds of the scene seem to have their volume lowered? And you--this floating you--think: this is happiness. When this moment is over I will remember it as happiness. You know that feeling? Of course you know it, every Lifetime movie exploits this.

I wonder if anyone's recognized happiness without dissociating this way, without separating themselves by time (memory retrieval), or by perspectives (feeling someone else's joy). It seems that happiness, that flighty temptress, must be viewed with one degree of separation. Like it's an explosive we must wear protective goggles for. Like looking directly at it would be blinding. Like it is sunshine. Or a basilisk.

I wonder what happiness, pure and unfiltered, would taste like. When someone first discovered pure oxygen, he inhaled it and found it so delicious he said it must be what the gods breathed. Of course, as a human, it also made him highly flammable. I wonder if there could be a similar ambrosia for happiness. I wonder what its consequences would be.

**

dobbin

I’m reading Vanity Fair. There’s this character, honest Dobbin, who loves another girl unconditionally, but she has given her heart away to a man who treats her like dirt. I just finished a scene where he leaves for a long time, and she doesn’t even ask where, because she, although a nice girl (perhaps the nicest in a 'novel without a hero', is too wrapped up in her good-for-nothing husband and the child he left behind. Here, Dobbin comes to bid goodbye to kind Amelia and her son.

“The cruellest looks could not have wounded him more than that glance of hopeless kindness. He bent over the child and mother. He could not speak for a moment. And it was with all his strength that he could force himself to say a God bless you. “God bless you,” said Amelia, and held up her face and kissed him.”

Thackeray always manages to distill human nature to only the essential. Who hasn’t had a Dobbin they’ve passed up? Who hasn’t been a Dobbin themselves? My heart breaks for him when she kissed him not knowing how important it was, how even the best of us get so absorbed in their own egocentric ignorance! How one-sided even the most intimate moments of life can be.

**

reptilian living

I went through my old college journal tonight, with actual handwritten entries for the first half. It's amazing how much was forgotten, or suppressed. I was so groundless for a while. The sense of being lost was almost leaping off the page. And I actually felt a kind of anxiety to save that girl from a directionlessness whose magnitude even she did not grasp. It didn't matter that I knew, rationally, that the girl was the one leafing through the pages, and she is fine.

The stickiness and lingering criss-crossing strands between the past and the present have always frustrated me. It would be so much easier if time were discrete, and not continuous, like somehow the artificial units of hours and weeks and time zones we impose upon it actually chopped it up. But I've yet to find anything as unforgiving, unrelenting, and immutable (including my tiger mother) as time.

Yet, seeing as how much I view this past girl as a separate person, it's almost as if time had loosened its iron-grip claws for a second, and the not-so-distant past had broken free. It feels so gratuitous, I hardly know if it is to be believed. Are versions of the self really so easily shed and discarded? Can one slither away unscathed? Or is it a practice only suitable to reptiles, while Eve looks on in jealousy?

**

opening closures

I haven't written about graduation yet, in fact, I haven't written much at all lately. I'm just not sure how to approach such a topic, it's too big for my delicate scalpels, usually reserved for surgeries on the tiniest and most useless of organs. They deal with the appendix, not the heart.

College is the school where I've spent more time than any other...coming to this realization during one of my rare, unrushed showers in the last few weeks, I feel ill-prepared for the incoming nostalgia.

I thought the processing would begin with a good cry on graduation day, but no such luck amid the straggling lines, hundreds of mispronounced names, and chilling mist. Something similar happened (or didn't happen) the night when I left China for America, I remember standing motionlessly in front of my cousin. Are you excited? She asked. I said nothing. Not really. I finally offered. And that was that.

We always think these landmarks will open some sort of magical, emotional gate. But we don't live in a Kodak commercial. We don't cry in the tearjerker moments movies have dog-eared for us, but we do for the loss of an old necklace we haven't worn in years, or a picture of a simple bench in a hometown we haven't stepped foot in for a decade, or an honor that passed us by that we didn't even realize we wanted.

The thing about these moments is that they're unexpected. It is not so much like an arrival at a forked road as it is like running smack into an impenetrable wall. Planned goodbyes, organized convocations, event X at time Y, who wastes a tear on them? Someone once said: “Don’t rush or force the ending… All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.” He meant it as a way of writing. But it is also of life. To write badly is to rush an ending. To write well is to know the next scene. And to write with any conviction of truth, is to first realize you know nothing of what's coming. And so it also is with the rare moments of clarity in life.

If there is one thing the start of closure needs, it is the element of surprise.

**

the other side of utopia

There is a great article on nytimes right now about technology, 'liking', and how they are erasing the proper education to 'loving', self-realization, and being human in general. Of the strands in the article (there are many), there is one about pain:

“And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill...pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.”

I can't decide if he is saying something fundamentally true or just short-sighted. Why can't we, armed with technology, create an absolutely resistance-free world, where there is no natural disasters, no murder, no pain? And to mirror such a world, maybe we will also transform from the imperfect, good-evil, yin-yang creatures that we are, to purely content ones, not so ecstatic nor fantastic, but perfectly 'good' nonetheless. We are taught by novels like Brave New World that such utopias are to be rejected and treated with contempt, but might that just be the author's bias for masochism? Might it be simply his own secret addiction to pain that he is imposing on our Old World? If the world can be so changed that Nature no longer bequeaths any misfortunes on humans, isn't it plausible that within such a revolution, humans will evolve as well? Perhaps we will find meaningful ways to live without pain. Let us not bet, prematurely, on our inability to be rid of our evils. As we are eradicating the pain the outside world causes us, perhaps we can eradicate our need for it as well.

The writer of nytimes and Aldous Huxley might call me a coward for attempting to run away from evil altogether. Their arguments are eloquent and convincing, until we consider their underlying assumption that we could not succeed, but what if, in spite of their insistence on the fixed, unevolving nature of humans, we could?

**

taste test

People have said to me that love is about looking. I assume they're mainly talking about looking at the one you love. But I want to talk about looking at looking. Second-degree looking. Looking Squared, if you will. Here is how it goes: imagine, despite books and films that laud heroic declarations, that you, instead of loving, chose to be loved.

You are in front of the person who loves you. And you're looking. You're looking at someone who’s looking at you. Someone who's looking in that way you've always wanted to be looked at. And you feel that sweet, sweet guilt. Like you're not giving back enough. Like you're cheating somehow. But also like something insanely precious is taking place.

I read somewhere that love is what inspired the term "bittersweet". That the creators put "bitter" first because love is mostly bitter. That love is mostly painful. That love is mostly about wanting something that you don't have. Well, this other form of looking. This looking to the second degree. It's mostly sweet, though less pungent than its counterpart. Along with a faint aftertaste of a guilty conscience. But we needn't wait for that to hit the taste buds. We could skip it altogether, if you wish. We could swallow it whole, no savoring of the alkaline flavor required. Would you think this is better? Or do we simply not have a palette for it?

**

heart of the matter

This post is going to be really short. I had tons of resentment bubbling up for an hour, which usually sprouts into vague and ambiguous sentences, and then this one person came along and said to me, in four words: don't be so insecure. And that pretty much cut through all the bullshit.

Took all the fun out of it though.

I still like watching Woody Allen films, even though all the neuroses can be solved with 3 minutes, 2 lines, and 1 scotch. Or is that just me?

It's probably just me.

Or is it?

Oh god.

**

origami

My creative writing teacher told me today that I was a good writer...when it comes to annotations. But the long piece just doesn't work, he says matter of fact-ly. The advice that ensued was supremely vague: Just write like your annotations, he says. But here is the thing:

Annotations are easy, because they are just like blog posts. They are short, free-styled, and need no plot nor arc. Can one say the same for an eight-to-ten page paper that will only garner a coveted A (they were so easy to come by in middle school!) when it's at publishable level? The same problem extends to academic papers: give me two paragraphs, I can write 3 focused pages. Give me an entire work, and tell me to write 10...I'm suddenly left flopping on the page, like a freshly caught silver trout, bouncing high yet going nowhere.

The thing about reflection is...it is just an elegant edit of your streaming thoughts. Streaming. -Ing. -I...n...g. Present Progressive Tense. There is no plot because I haven't seen the ending yet. When I write philosophy papers I write the introduction last. When I write blog posts I come up with a title after I finish. These things give the illusion of an arc. Like I was going somewhere. But how can I do it for an eight-to-ten? Are my reflections supposed to unfold past the length of an internet ramble, but finish with a flourish when the header page number displays '10'? Is the crane's beak always so easily produced as the finishing touch? And what if after you nimbly fold down that delicate, last corner, you realize that the very first crease--on a previously perfectly square, perfectly un-wrinkled sheet of paper--was crooked? What will you do then? Will you take it apart, and start all over again?

But the creases have already been made.

**

forever twenty-one

I just read Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That, where she details a long, consuming, painful disillusion with New York.

I wish Joan had called spoiler alert before she plowed on with her essay, because in a few months I will start a life there, at twenty-one years old, the exact same age Joan started her disastrous love affair with the city. Twenty-one. It’s a special number. Joan was right in picking twenty-one.

Twenty-one is when you are steeped in youth and aware of its fleetingness at the same time. Twenty-one is when your number of romances is still in the single digits, but your number of escapades is sure not to be. Twenty-one is standing on the precipice of a cliff, when all you have known is the arduous and steady hike to get up here—surviving parents and high school—and all you are about to know is a long, suspended freefall, after which you land in a world of bills and mandatory pantyhose.

I supposed this is why New York appeals to the twenty-ones. It doesn’t promise quality living, or good living, or even decent living. It simply promises possibilities. Until one day the tape begins to replay itself. Until the possibilities symbolically run out when you overhear the same man complaining about his same domestic problems with his same damn wife. Then you got yourself a real problem.

You charge into New York and the beginning of the end of your youth, wanting to figure life out. You find so many unknowns you think bare skimming is an acceptable practice. You think that if you come across what you’re looking for, you’ll know and you’ll stop. But what if you reach the end without once having applied the brakes? Somewhere, you had already seen where you were supposed to be, when you were supposed to be there, and what you were supposed to become—it's just that you tossed it before you knew. You look at the piles and think of all the re-cataloguing that need to be done. And you worry that when you finally re-find The Thing, you might be too late, too worn, too old.

Hours. Afternoons. Years. Even while we seem to have it all, their edges already appear in the horizon. And here is what New York represents to those of us who don’t yet know better: permanent youth. New York is twenty-one preserved in a jar. So we pack our bags for New York, hoping its youth serum will diffuse into our skin. But alas! Joan Didion needed only four pages to tell me this is not so. She is right, of course. But I still wish she had called spoiler alert.

**

letter

Dear Stinger:

You said today that no one knows love except you. We don't know it but you're here to tell us. You are like Moses. Or Socrates. And you have a message. That message is: I cannot convey to you what you think you know, except that you don't really know it. Did this disturb no one else but me? Everyone scoffed the dust of your message away. It was so easy to dismiss. But the more I defend you the more I am pulled in. And now I've worked myself into a whirlpool of disturbance. I am deeply worried by your preposterous claims. Like your hero and mine, you have put me in a state of aporia. Stung me and flown away. You fly away unharmed, back to the side of your lover, I suppose. And I'm left with an insect sting, the locus of pain slowly traveling outwards. You would be pleased, because you've already found the antidote, and so you get out safe and sound, while I sit here examining the small puncture in my skin.

Why is it that only I felt this effect? Like a honeybee, you had only one sting, and I was the recipient. How did everyone else manage to get away sting free? You want to know what I think? I think it's because you and I are the same. We are selfish people who want to be loved. We are selfish because we think no one is like us. We think more about ourselves than anyone else, because we think we're the most interesting. Unselfish people do not have this problem. And selfish people who do not need to be loved do not have this problem. But we have this problem. You said we love a particular. And you are right, I do love a particular, and I have given her so much analysis that her particular is more and more apparent to me the more I fall. And I might never find this particular in anyone else, and so I might never love another, and so I might never be loved. And here is what you said to me today: "I have found someone to love me. And because of it, I know the odds are even slimmer than we have imagined. Today, I dig the hole you are in a little deeper, after that, I will fly upwards and outwards while you look on in your winglessness and jealousy. Today, I am leaving you." I watch you with so much fascination I don't realize I am watching alone. I wish you hadn't done that. I wish you hadn't done that to me.

Love, (isn't it ironic how that word sounds now?)

Me

frankenstenian creations

I'm currently reading Notes of a Native Son. (Before you become mildly impressed by my literary curiosities, let me confess that it is for a class, for though I'd love nothing more than to be the person who reads great things for pleasure, the spare hours of my time are mainly devoted to facebook instead.)

Back to James Baldwin, a self-proclaimed black writer who writes of his awe of his father. He is certainly preaching to the converted with me. I hold something similar for my own mother. I used to be unable to explain it to my American friends, but thanks to a currently popular memoir, the term "Tiger Mother" now seems adequate enough. Before the Yale Law tiger mom came forward, the closest anyone came to speaking my words was Amy Tan. My mom read her first, a story out of The Joy Luck Club. She hated it. "This is how she repays her mom?" She said, her outrage spilling into a hard look that she gave me, as if daring me to write a story as well. I promptly got her the entire novel for Mother's Day. My own cowardly form of taunting. It sits unread by her to this day. I, on the other hand, lapped up the book's contents voraciously.

Asian-American transitions, however, is not where I envision my final destination as a writer. I desperately immersed myself in Tan in hopes of moving past it, of writing something more universal, politically-void, and beyond cultural lines.

I'm afraid of being cast into the realm of Amy Tan before I can even do any such thing. Maybe I really am an Asian American writer before I am a female writer, or a college-educated writer, or a funny writer. But am I the person who gets to figure that out? Maybe it will turn out that the critic (the proverbial failed writer--"those who can't write, become critics") gets to decide. Or maybe it will be the public. Or the ink flowing from my pen. At the risk of sounding deterministic, my most hated of all philosophies...

do I write my subject or has it already written me?

**

gate doors

One of the biggest dreams on my bucket list is dangerously teetering on the edge of possibility. More insultingly, it's about to be thwarted by something totally unforeseen. When the problem you are confronted with is supposed to have been the smoothest part of your ride, there's something extra pungent about its odiousness.

Like the cliche about a rug being pulled from under you, there is a moment of suspension as you hover unsupported in fragile air, the weight of gravity looming underneath, taking its delicious time to inflict inevitable bruises. Realizing that something is only merely possible when you have taken it as unquestionably certain--it is the most destabilizing of all problems. It is in these moments that you learn how important some dreams are--the moment they seem unable to be realized, not when you planned, not a little later than you planned, maybe not at all in the visible horizon.

We are young enough that unfulfilled dreams can always be postponed into the future, rather than written off entirely. But as we transition into the more permanent stages of an adult life, are some gates threatening to close before us? Will they start deadbolting their black, iron bars instead of hanging up "come back later" signs? Is the luxury of indecision merely a introductory price rather than a fixed rate?

Time time time. Youth always thinks you were partners till death do you part, youth just never thought he'd do the parting.

**

tailwind

Today I saw someone I used to like with this beautiful girl, and my first thought was: “go f—- yourself.” Haha. I promise I don’t have such violent thoughts often, but when I do, it’s usually only reserved for those I have fell for. I really hate how romance is so tightly linked with all these negative emotions: possessiveness, jealousy, rage. Moreover, they usually last longer than the pure flighty air of romantic desire, so that it seems utterly irrational to have such thoughts. How can you hate something you no longer love? Shouldn’t one be gone the same time the other has been let go? What makes us hold on to the bad when the good has already escaped us? Vengeance is always so easy to breed…and goodwill so hard.

**

tax season

Another obligatory entry about home, where no catastrophes are in sight, but somehow rough grains underneath your feet work their way inside your skin anyway. It's taxing. That's all I can say to sum it up. Actually, I can (and have) summed it up in a million ways, maybe even too much. But why throw away something that gives you so much material each time? As a writer, the electricity-laced air is practically my bread and butter.

I can't explain any of these million ways to anyone else. Because people understand concrete, time-measured events. And I understand only the things that are never said--the truest revealed intentions (or so I've been taught). More importantly, I understand the things that are never said to outsiders. No one practices the art of hiding dirty laundry quite as well as the one who rules this house. On this point we are vastly different--say it out loud! i always rush to campaign. there can never be enough words. words! words?

Still, I can't tell if this is an innate difference or simply the symptoms of youthful rebellion. Raw, bleeding, and fresh from the slaughterhouse, stamped with a 'best-if-used-by' date. Maybe not far from now, all the tinged blood will dry and all the meaty substance will expire. Maybe someday we'll merge in our ways of insidiousness, and my daughter will write the same lines as I do tonight, while the house drowns in things unsaid. What will I think then? Will half my life, and all my trusted words, have been in vain?

**

opening night

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night)

This theme keeps coming up today, the idea that we all put up a “theatrical” self to everyone, except when we’re alone. I don’t think this makes the “selves” we present to others any less authentic though. Because, really, what are we like when we are by ourselves? Utterly boring and filled with incoherent and (mostly) insignificant thoughts, if nothing else, an audience forces us to organize into distinguishable objects, rather than lumps of raw material. We are only art after we go on stage.

**

yin yang mentality

So there's this sexual pathology called sacrificial ethos, where you engage in something terrible and ominous like sadomasochism or unprotected sex with an HIV positive person, in order to serve yourself up like a lamb for slaughter, chasing pain for pain, negativity for negativity, and death for death.

Maybe they're walking the line between living and dying, I say. Maybe they only desire it for the foreclosed (but still remembered) possibility of pleasure. Without contrast, there is no meaning, I insist.

There doesn't have to be meaning, you say. No need for meaning for wanting pain. They want it to want it, no need to ground it, no rhyme to it, and no reason for it. You rattle this off like a rap song that rattles the conservatives in Alabama.

There is no shadow if there is no light! I shout inside my head as the rattle enters deeper layers of my gray matter. Because we are rational creatures tethered to animal passions, so we are doomed for imperfection, and will always fall from grace, and always have dark and light, and will always try to understand that which we cannot. So we need paradoxes of meaning and meaninglessness, so shadow alone is not an option, so your nihilism will never come to be. Retreat, with your serpent and its clinking tail! Your rattles will not get to me.

**

inception

I just came from a slam poetry reading for the first time. It evoked far more than I imagined it could, and now I can feel the last wisps of creativity leaving me as I desperately try to weave that aura into something that can live. Poetry has never been my thing. It was always someone else's thing, someone else's thing I stole for a while and put back on the nightstand. I wish I could write lines like those that were uttered tonight, and I wish I could instill the images somehow so that I can regurgitate them back to silent applause, but I'd always know that they were stolen, so I don't lay my greedy fingers on them in the first place. But if I could come up with those images on my own I'd share them a thousand times over. Someone wanted to ask if these poets get tired of reading the same thing over and over, but as long as the image is comprehensible and imagination and understanding are in play like Kant promised then everything would be just as alive as when the ink first bled to the other side of the page, maybe they could become even more so when they tumble out of the dark hollows of the mouths that first whispered them to sisters lying on old comforters, and still more when they are first shouted to the unblinking eyes of strangers sitting on wooden chairs while unintelligible salty drops form inside the under folds of their eyelids. And maybe I can steal that fire like Prometheus did even if just for a pirated copy's worth before it degrades into the next cliché of my ever ever growing list of things I've loved to death, each buried under the crinkling pages and pages that never see light.

**

pit stop

So this is the first week I've had to adjust to a new schedule...with vast amounts of free time. I guess I've been lucky enough to come across a few events that filled it up better. However, I can't help but feel like this newfound euphoria of unfilled slots will wear off soon. Like the second month of summer, a lack of structure has always bored, frustrated, and slightly terrified me. There is, of course, work that has been neglected, work I almost can't bear to face because of how abandoned I've left them.

That's the thing--when you're racing along a road threatening to reach a million forks, it's okay if a few projects bounce out of the back trunk. But now that some forks have closed, and I'm forced to step out and examine a flat tire, all I can see are the empty spaces where my baggage used to be, the barely visible dots of my belongings that litter the road I've conquered, and the long, stretching, gray snake of a line beyond me. As I stand under a dry, heated sun, I begin to fear the last hundreds of miles might not have counted at all.

**

fight after flight

I am about to be at the breaking point. This week just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The difference between life's previous swift punches and today's--is that in the former case I had felt helpless and passive, and I had saved myself only by licking my wounds after the fact with people who were there for me (suffice to say I'm so very grateful for this). However, in today's dealings, I've decided to take a decidedly more active approach. This injustice I will fight for. I'm so sick of the same people sensing passivity on my part and drawing whatever damn implications they want and forming underhanded moves from it. The things is, the consequences might pan out the same way as if I had done nothing at all. However, I've tasted the thrill of standing my ground when it comes to territory I thought I've already won, and defending it tonight felt maddening, but also empowering, and, dare I say it? Enlivening. Agency feels just as good as another's soothing caresses and well intentioned words. Better I've found it now, I suppose, before dust can settle, than finding myself in some post-war situation, where pieces flutter and litter all around, while the camera pans towards me, sitting on the ground, not having bothered to stand up at all.

**

writing wrongs

I could write a song a hundred miles long, that's where you belong and you belong with me.

-Coldplay

Some things just belong on pages, can only breathe in between sheets of wrinkling paper. Mr. Darcy, first glances, the American Dream, do they really exist? If there were even half so much magnificence in this dimension, the world's seams would burst as dramatically as the evangelicals predict. So men try to fit them neatly on lines and lines instead. People, commitments, hurt, all neatly compartmentalized into rows of 26 symbols, that's where these things all belong. And they can neither leap out of the pages nor can they bother you again once you transfer them to these white spaces. Right? Write?

**

humbert humbert

So here's why I love and despise Humbert Humbert from Lolita. The same reason why we love and despise anything: because they reflect aspects of ourselves. And these love-hate relationships are more uncommon than you'd think: it's not the one with a romantic partner, because it's unsustainable, it's not someone you're jealous of, because you don't love them, it's not anyone you love and hate, but for different reasons. No. This is a relation of a singular focus.

Humbert Humbert and I, for example, share one thing, obsessive narcissism, in the form of post-facto analysis. We believe firmly that every occurrence defines not only the present, but re-defines everything that preceded it. Think how exponentially complex this becomes by pure mathematical reasoning alone! It's too much to think about. You know what's not too much to think about? How every thought currently produced by our minds transforms who we are. As we speak, that transformation's already done and filed away, only to be retrieved in the following second, still sticky and glued to the one before it. HH's ability to take a still scene, infinitesimally discountable in time, and write pieces and pieces of gorgeousness about, at, from, and beyond it, such that every composed sentence reveals beauty but also the fact that it's carefully doctored, it's such a profound waste of time, yet the only way we (and by "we" I mean only HH and I, and half of us is fictional) can truly tell if something warrants the term 'meaningful'.

**

underneath the pond

So yesterday I read this great sentence: "Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live." The entire article is about how silence is misconstrued as powerlessness, when really, speech, discourse, and analysis can make us even more entangled in a past that need not exist into the present.

Maybe silence is sometimes the best option available to us. What is so interesting about ordinary days, ordinary thoughts, and ordinary people? What is so significant about them that merits so so so many words in proliferating memoirs, reality shows, blogs? Wasn't speech invented for bridging a gap between I and the other? When did it become a tool for making an insignificant, self-important distinction (and thus, barrier) between me and the next? Has it really become so perverse that it now completely serves an opposite purpose to its original one? Have words now, spearheaded by an obsession with Freud's id, Madonna's self-exhibition, and the overuse of terms like "special snowflake", become the chosen tool of an egocentric generation, sharpened into a shiny, colorless point?

Its edges are so sharply defined, its reflective surface so smooth and vacant, its stabs at the defenseless air so persistent and never-ending, its sound(lessness) and fury signifying nothing nothing nothing at all. Is this what words have been reduced to and imploded into? Where has the silence gone? If it's indeed a "drowned" thing, does it still "live"? What would it mean to live underneath such a pond? It's been unthinkably long since I bathed in silence with another. For all I know, the world of communicated silence could have evolved into literal firework shows between two sets of widened eyes, and I would have no idea, because I choose to wade in uncommunicated noise instead.

**

the examined life

“I never talk about feelings with anyone but you…because you think about these things…and you’re so wise about them.”

This is one of the most flattering things I’ve heard about myself, because well, the main struggle in my life is my overthinking, so it’s nice to know there’s some sort of an up side to that. However, this doesn’t change the fact that this approach to emotions (thinking rather than feeling them) probably prevents me from experiencing them in the right capacity. But this is perhaps the price I’m willing to pay in order to note happiness felt, that I might preserve it for later, instead of simply being present in the moment, perhaps made greater and more magnificent, unsaddled by concurrent mental analysis, only to be left with fleeting shadows afterwards. Or perhaps it is the price I pay for a kind of insurance premium, against the risk of not knowing where feelings come from, or horror of horrors, feeling wrongly. Feeling content when I should be indignant, jealous when I should be grateful, etc etc.

Ignorance is bliss, how I loathe those words! I’d trade it a thousand times over for knowledge of what is true. Happiness is never the end goal, only truth. And somewhere in the unilluminated shadows, there lurks the fear that the truth will not turn out to be beautiful, nor simple, nor happy at all. Every path, whether the destination be happiness or otherwise, has a burden to bear, though for the truth-obsessed, the seeker is made all the more painfully aware of it.

**