A blog is about commitment...

Ok, so I realized where I'm going wrong here. I seem to think I need to post something great of overwhelmingly amazing quality, but what I end up doing is not posting anything at all. I think what I should do is just get used to making small posts, if only to get me to write a little something every day.

I like to overshare, but I don't necessarily like that I like to overshare, plus I'm trying to get away from being that person who is obsessed about their personal lives and their events, people and situations. Plus, it's the interwebz, you never know who is going to read your blog (read: co-workers, bosses, potential employers) so I'm going to challenge myself to muse on things unrelated to my personal life or if so, in a very broad and abstract way.

Let's see if I can keep this about writing, folks!

Free Writing for the day

So why am I stressed. A number of reasons. Writing is supposed to be therapeutic, right? Hell, I can even work at dialogue or practicing my show not tell. I’m busy. What’s a better way to say I’m busy is that I’ve been working late every night, juggling an online writing class with reading and writing assignments, occasionally taking on contract work, and overall dealing with the fact that by nature I’m a very lazy person. I enjoy days where I have nothing scheduled, where nothing is expected of me, where for long stretches of time I can lie on the floor of my bedroom and stare at the ceiling, should I feel like it, or take long walk with the dog and not worry about what I need to be doing next.

Part of the problem I chalk up to my inability to live in the moment and take it for what it is. A friend of mine who recently returned from a trip to the south of Italy remarked to me how she was glad to return home because of a chance remark someone had made to her while she was there. Apparently there’s not much industry in the south of Italy; the majority of their business is involved in the tourism trade. She had asked this Italian if he had ever considered moving somewhere else, where more was going on, and he had said no, he was happy where he was. She, in turn, was disgusted and asked me, “If you were him, wouldn’t you want to live a more meaningful life?”

But the thing is, I don’t think my life is any more meaningful than that man’s. In fact, I envy this man the ability to be content with his lot in life. I think anybody can be happy with the proper attitude and strength of inner conviction. Look at kids running through the filthy streets of any poverty-ridden community. They don’t know they are dirty. They don’t know that they are poor. They’ve just found a soccer ball lying in the street and all they can think about is how much fun they are going to have with the other street urchins, kicking around a wilting soccer ball, with part of the stitching coming loose.

I read recently about a famous Holocaust survivor, I don’t remember his name and for the purposes of this free-write, I don’t feel like looking him up, but he talked about how he was imprisoned in a concentration camp, forced to deal with death and worse than death every single day, he realized he didn’t have to be there. That the Nazis could only control so much and that though the Nazis could do what they wanted to his physical body, he could control his mind and what was inside. I think the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People author also mentions this story. Then I started thinking about all the East Asian mystics, the dudes with long white beards sitting in their mountain retreat with absolutely nothing, spring water and roots, giving up everything and achieving everything. Perhaps it’s just a romantic notion, but part of me really digs the idea that everything you need, you can find within yourself. (Besides sex, ice cream, and Korean dramas).

I get so worked up about things. Past incidents that have no bearing on the present. Irritating people who really, in the scheme of things, are completely irrelevant to my life or anything I do. I also have a really hard time letting go of things. I keep looping events, incidents, conversations and the like over and over in my head sometime. The worse my anxiety gets, the more I do it.

So I sit there and I meditate. The first 10 minutes are always the hardest. Trying to calm my mind, trying to calm my body. I notice that I jerk around a great deal, twitching around the shoulders and the neck. I try and fight the feeling of numbness as my legs and feet fall asleep under me and think of...nothing.

My point is, wanting things, desire, dissatisfaction, worry, fear, anger, and all these sorts of negative emotions make me twitchy, restless. They drive me forward. They make me feel like I need to do all these things, things being taking on more than I can chew, fighting my naturally indolent nature to strive, to achieve, to be somebody, to accomplish something, to be meaningful, significant, impressive to my partner, to my friends, to the world.

What I really crave is the strength of character and mind to derive validation and meaning from myself. To push myself to succeed from somewhere inside, to do things for the sake of doing and not for the sake of fulfilling desire or garnering approval from others. I know that’s how most of the world is, but I envy the samurai that can achieve satori, the Italian man who is perfectly content to live somewhere and enjoy things for what they are, not how they could be, not how they should be, not how they want it to be, but simply to exist and be happy with that.

Is there anything so wrong in that?

On Furniture, Memories, and Sadness

I drove up to Silicon Valley to see my old house on a whimsy, several years back. I hadn’t been back since my family moved away when I was in the sixth grade and I was curious to see the place. I didn’t remember how to get to my old house, since I had moved away too young, but my friend had brought a mobile GPS system with him and I still remembered the address.

I was fond of my old house. My parents, or at least my mother, now live in a small two bedroom condo housed in a building that looks like a retirement home. All the tenants’ doors face into a hallway that smells of baby powder and someone’s cooking. In my mother’s condo, some of our old furniture has survived--an old floral still-life that I remembered, a side table in a rich warm wood, a framed Degas print. But many of these relics from the past are crowded out by the newer, cheaper furniture my parents bought as the years passed by.

I remember so many little details about our house, silly things like the hanging plants my parents kept around the house or our carpet. Ours was a dove color, or at least I think it was to begin with, but I only remembered it dirty, so that at some spots it looked more grey-green, with textures shaped like rose cabbages woven into them. When we had professionals come to clean and restore our carpets, to get the house ready to put on the market, I remember running my hands in awe over the newly cleaned carpet. I didn’t know it would feel so thick and woolly. I remember lying on the carpet outside my bedroom door while listening to my parents argue, usually early in the morning. Sometimes I would hear my mom weeping and I would pad softly across the dirty rose cabbage carpet hallway and slip into my parent’s room to comfort her. I said my first bad word, fuck, when I hurt my finger trying to turn on a lamp in their room. A little part of me died when God did not strike me down for saying a bad word.

I can say nothing with certainty about my house because I think I lived there before I learned to make judgments about houses and furniture and amenities. In retrospect, I think it must have been a very nice house. Now that I know the costs of things, the cost of decks and slate paving, of carpets and hardwood floors, of sunken living rooms, recreation rooms, and swimming pools, I realized what a nice house I must have lived in. But I don’t remember that it was nice, I only remember things like the octagonal window seat with ivory striped cushions where I sat and read books upon books, crunching on half a red delicious apple that I would rub with lemons from our backyard, because I hated how the pale flesh of the apple would turn brown.

I remember how the door always seemed to stick and the glittery slate rocks that made up the porch and the paved path that led up to the front door. The overhang provided a perfect garden house. My best friend and I used to play in the bushes that framed the paved path. Her father was an engineer, like mine, and our elementary school sat right behind Apple headquarters. This was before the iPod and the iPhone had revived Apple’s stock and won back Silicon Valley’s approval. This was when Intel and IBM were still gods, when Microsoft was still flapping its fledgling wings.

We played in the garden and played house in the bushes, with the berries and vines that grew all over the place. I live in semi-desert country now and I miss the smell of green, growing things. Next to our driveway, across from our lawn, there was a bare patch of rock and dirt. My best friend and I would ride our bikes to the local nursery, Bonsai Nursery I think it was called, and spend our weekly allowance to buy marigolds, snapdragons, and petunias to terraform that little patch of land. We charged neighbors ten cents to tour the garden. I didn’t like petunias because fat caterpillars would eat them, oozing pink or purple ichor when squished, depending on what color blossom they had been eating.

I remember our living room where we slept after the big earthquake hit. My parents spread out blankets and comforters and we all snuggled down together on the living room floor. We had a beautiful, richly colored Oriental rug in the living room with sofas and loveseats upholstered in cream silk with pale pink and green irises embroidered on them. My piano sat in the corner, by the fireplace, where the oil painting of some famous artist hung. I sometimes see other paintings by this artist floating around but I’ve never found out his/her name. The living room was the nicest room in the house. The sofas and loveseats must have been very expensive; I wonder if my mother misses them. Now that I have a house of my own, I wouldn’t mind furniture like that.

I spent a great deal of time in the living room, practicing piano, reading, playing under the dining room table. I liked to sit near the fireplace. When my father was in one of his moods, I would sit slumped down in one of the blue silk armchairs and hold very still and hope he wouldn’t catch me, because I hated it when he hit me. I sat there when he told me we were moving, that we were selling this house, that he had lost his job and all our money and that we were moving to start a new life somewhere near Los Angeles. I didn’t know anything about Los Angeles except that was where a black man named Rodney King had been beaten and had caused riots all through the city. When the news about the LA riots broke, we were on vacation at Disneyland and I didn’t know that Los Angeles was an hour away from Anaheim.

After my father told me we were moving, I sat in the blue armchair for a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever sat that still for so long. My father had been looking for me but I didn’t say anything when he called my name, I just sat and thought about leaving behind my garden, my sun-bleached window seat, the golden specks embedded in the bathroom counter, the kitchen that overlooked the sunken living room with its fancy karaoke systems and blue furniture, the rec room with its cold tan, yellow, and brown linoleum where I built forts and stared at our jade plants with tiny pink blossoms, the kumquat trees that overlooked our backyard fence into Mike Estrada’s house, a kid who was in my third-grade class. He works for Microsoft now. When my dad finally found me, still sitting in the blue armchair, he was angry but he didn’t hit me like I thought he would.

I miss my old house but I realized what I miss is mostly in my head. When I walked up that path, several years ago, all I saw was a house that looked like it was shrinking in on itself in its old age. The subsequent owners had torn up the glittery rock path and had installed a new garage door. Our old garage door wasn’t even a garage, it was four stable doors lined up together with blurry yellow glass windows that were popular in the 60’s. The plum tree out front was gone. My best friend’s family, who still lived across the street, had remodeled their home so much that I didn’t even recognize it when I was invited in later.

I don’t know what happened to all the nice things my parents must have once owned. I remember a beautiful round side table that I would have loved to own today. The wood was so dense yet smooth, like soap, that it must have cost a fortune. I own nicer furniture than my parents now. I don’t know what happened to that side table. My father lives in Shanghai now. I don’t speak to him unless I have to. When he comes back to visit I’m always too busy working. I wonder if our lives would have been different if we had stayed in that house, if I could have grown up there. I wonder if my parents mourn what they left behind in that house, too.

Ye Gods, I Promise to Start Posting Regularly

I started an online writing class. It's been great for motivating me to write, but may be too early to tell. Work has been punching me in the face for the past two months, but really, who am I kidding, I wasn't writing regularly before that anyway.

Either way, since I have to do homework assignments for this writing class, I might as well post the stuff and get in the habit of regularly updating this blog.

Random Dialogue

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Long in the Tooth

Today while changing in the gym, I took advantage of the spotless full-length wall mirror to take a good long look at myself. Normally, I'd be grimacing at my love handles or flexing my biceps to see if all that working out has made me any more visibly buff, but today was different. Today, I was fixated on my teeth.

At first, it was sheer narcissistic curiosity that had me staring at my own teeth under the bright fluorescent lights. But it was while I was appraising the color of my teeth and evaluating the landmarks of past dental work, I noticed that something was odd about a spot on my front right tooth. This spot of matte whiteness, which several dentists have hemmed and hawed over before declaring it a calcium deposit stain, had once been flush along my gumline. It had also been the source of self-conscious pre-pubescent angst, because the whiteness of the spot cast a dingy, yellow tinge on the rest of my front teeth by contrast. Though my subsequent discovery of teeth whiteners helped some, in the end, I gave up and resigned myself to my funny calcium spot. Who cares? After all, it was only noticeable when I yawned. Or laughed. Or smiled. Or any normal activity that involved me opening my mouth.

But on this particular occasion, that is to say, self-absorbed half naked examinations of self in the women’s locker room, I realized that my spot was no longer flush with my gum line. In fact, it would be more accurate to say the spot had somehow migrated one-third of the way down my front tooth. And then I noticed that the rest of my teeth, though whiter and better cared for than in earlier years, seemed to have a lengthier quality to them. I smiled experimentally. Yes, that grin was quite a bit toothier than I remembered. Years of negligent dental care, a smoking habit I had only managed to kick a few years ago, and a general fear of dentists (and their bills) had taken its toll on my teeth. There was no way around it; I was getting long in the tooth.

GASP.

Long in the tooth? Who uses that phrase any more? My penchant for Agatha Christie (reference Aimee Griffith in The Moving Finger) was starting to bleed over into my every day speech patterns.

I don't flatter myself that I possess any secret fund of knowledge when it comes to language, idioms and what-not. But I'm reasonably assured that that phrase is outdated and become more so. To prove it, I tested the phrase on my boyfriend to see his reaction.

"Wait, what? What does that even mean?" was the predictable response.

Before we jump to conclusions about my possibly questionable taste in men, the boyfriend is a brilliant artist, but also one of those guys whose eyes glaze over when required to read anything not an instruction manual. So it may be that my population sampling is a bit skewed, but hey, he was close by and I needed an immediate test subject.

But my lesser half's question raises some crucial issues: what does it mean? What does tooth length have to do with age? And is there a reason beyond blatant sexism that explains why that phrase is applied to women, and not to men? In my stream-of-consciousness loopy fashion I always thought of the saber tooth tiger when the phrase came up. Considering the prehistoric era in which that long-dead kitty roamed the earth, was it a reference to age? Or perhaps I’m overthinking the science-history part and the phrase is just a reference to the modern day cougar of the two-legged variety? But then again, I don't think Dame Christie was around when they came up with that one, so that washes that idea right out.

Undaunted, I opened my mouth to take another look. Yes, the signs were unmistakable. I could trace the original, smaller shape of my tooth by the white stain, as if someone had spray painted a patina of dingy and removed the stencil, leaving several millimeters of clean, virgin tooth untouched right below the gumline. To me, the contrast was like looking at the marks of waves on a beach, where the tide has left behind waterlogged driftwood and wet stretches of sand. Only in this case, my gums had receded, leaving me with gleaming lengths of tooth.

I stared at myself in the mirror again, but this time with my mouth closed so I could study my face in the glass. As silly as it sounds, I’m one of those women who can’t help but feel a little bit smug every time I’m mistaken for a high schooler. I always titter with embarrassed self-satisfaction when servers make a fuss about how I don’t look like I could possibly be old enough to drink alcohol. (Note, I am also far from what anybody would consider old.) What can I say, we all have our pathetic vanities, and mine is that last little bit of smug youth. But I couldn't help feeling just a tiny bit sad as I stared at my face. Somewhere, at some point, while I was completely unaware, the first flush of youth had slipped out from underneath me. Sure, my friends jokingly called me Grandma, mocked my early-to-bed habits and my tendency to pass out first at parties. But nobody could actually call me an older woman.

But now, there, unmistakably etched in my TEETH of all places, was proof positive; I should probably pay more attention to taking care of my gums and yes, I was getting long in the tooth.

Note: I actually went back and edited the post!

A la Noir? I think so.

Jerry had always been a big name in the industry. He'd headed up a lot of big projects, wrangled some big game, and talked the talk with the best of 'em. Really driven the bottom line if you know what I mean. I had a lot of respect for Jerry. He was always a man who walked too close to the line, but he watched out for his guys. I know he generally tried to do the right thing, but in this crazy world, sometimes you got to watch out for yourself first. If his nose wasn't as clean as it should have been, we were all willing to look the other way. After all, business is business and a man's gotta feed his family.

Nobody was surprised when he left to do his own thing. Jerry was a man with big ideas and sometimes you could see him getting impatient-like trying to squeeze things past the big cheeses upstairs. So when he walked, we all wished him good luck. So it was business as usual and from time to time we would hear from little Jimmy that he was doing ok with his new gig. Funny business, poor Jimmy. That kid was pretty cut up when Jerry walked. I think he really depended on him and it broke his heart when Jerry left. Jimmy wasn't really a bad sort, reminded me of a scared little rabbit, but with a good head on his shoulders. He'd been here a long time but I think he was real happy just dishing out stuff. He never wanted to be a big mover and shaker. So when Boss called him into his office and told him to start taking on some of Jerry's old duties, that poor kid turned three shades of pale and came out shaking like an autumn leaf.

That kid didn't want to be Jerry. Hell, I think he would have given anything to have Jerry back. He didn't want to have to get up and tell every Tom, Dick and Harry on the floor what to do. The thought terrified him, all of us could see that. None of us could figure what the Boss was aiming at, pulling a stunt like that with Jimmy. Yeah, so what if the kid had been here a long time. But anyone with half a bean upstairs could see the kid was scared shitless. But if there's one thing you learn at the Company, you don't question the boss.

Now me, I just keep my head down and my eyes open. I've been around the block, so to speak, and I'd done all sorts of crazy shit in my time. Coming to the Company was like coming back home to say howdy-doody to the folks. I knew I had a sweet deal and I wasn't going to sour the pot by jawing in, so to speak.