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.

**