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.
**
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
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.
**
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.
**
Saturday, April 30, 2011
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
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
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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?
**
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?
**
Sunday, April 3, 2011
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.
**
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.
**
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
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.
**
**
Monday, March 21, 2011
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?
**
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?
**
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