Of Thorns and Fences

This blog needs a bit of a prologue, because it may not make complete sense with out a bit of context. The following is excerpts and adaptations of a letter I sent to my sister, but it explains a lot of why I haven’t been blogging for a rather long time, or at least leads to the areas of my life that have led to the non-bloggage. The original letter was a fair bit more transparent, but I don’t really want to share those details with community of readers, because it was a personal affair, and therefore ain’t none-yo dam buziness. There will be times (despite my efforts) that you’ll see the second person used in a very direct way. Its a letter, and there were times where changing the direction for a general audience would kill the meaning, so I left them. Otherwise, be aware that there are some gaps in this blog, but I hope that you can benefit from the roads that i’ve gone down in life. Here’s to growing, and becoming the person you want to be~ - - - - - - - - --- - - - - - - - - I’ve recently been reading the 5th Harry Potter (Order of the Phoenix) in Mandarin (like 20% through woop woop!). Towards the end of the 4th book I started thinking Harry was kind of a whiney bitch and I wasn’t really appreciating his attitude. However, as I get into book five I realize that maybe the reason I think he’s a whiney bitch is because I have the same line of reasoning that he does in a lot of situations, like an embarrassing amount of his inner dialogue in book 5 is stuff i’ve felt/thought before and or am thinking now. Maybe thats everybody, and that might explain why J.K. Rowling is the wealthiest author, I believe in the history of the world...She’s a saint in my eyes at least. I keep on walking down this path of life and I find that I’m not following the lessons i’ve learned from the past. There are nuggets of wisdom that i’ve been blessed to discover, or have had shown to me, and some of those things are as follows: feeling is better than not ~ even if it sucks communication is better than ignorance ~ always I was taking a shower a minute ago and had one of those stereotypical shower-epiphanies. I’ve been envying Harry Potter because of his legitimate shitty mood and I was wishing that I had good reasons to have a shitty mood. HAH! wrap your mind around that one for me if you will. Then it became conscious to me that I was envying him. Then I took one step further and asked myself why i’ve not been “living” enough to have mountains and valleys of feeling. And thats when I put my foot in the pile of a shitty situation that it is and accepted within myself that i’ve been putting up fences left and right to keep myself safe. I’m an old man. I’m now at a stage of life where I subconsciously believe that routine, fences and boundaries of many types make your life better. They help avoid destruction, and slow growth is better than destruction right? (The little ghost that hides in my ribs is making a ruckus telling me I’m full of shit.) On his soap-box a man who thought he was “setting me straight” told me that the difference between children and adults is impulse and habits. Children act on their impulses and just do whatever, and when you start making habits and get into a routine is when you become an adult. Its one definition, one that I totally reviled at the time of course, but he definitely has a sort of point. What I’m trying to get at with all this babble is that i’m an old man, but not the type of old man that I always wanted to be as that kid running around in a speedo. I’ve put up fences and decided that communicating with you is not the best thing for me to do. But here I am on the cusp of a cliff realizing that I’m killing off part of who I am by not communicating to some of the people closest to me because of burns that i’ve taken in some of the exchanges that i’ve been a part of. Its all my choice, whether I do or dont reach out for that communication. I’m not innocent. I’ve done my share of throwing fire too, but one learns either way to give wide breadth to a hot stove when they see one. My logic has been that 80-90% of the time I don’t have anything nice to say, so I just shouldn’t. Adding to that with my two cents is doing these people no service, and in fact is much more of a disservice in many cases. ~~~ I also feel it prudent at this second to say that i’ve only had 1 beer tonight, and even that was 4 hours ago so this isn’t booze talking. ~~~ Honestly ~ when I need to get something done, I have to channel you with my Ouija Board and black candles. For instance, when I had to defraud my last company in order to get money that I was contractually owed (therefore its not actually fraud... btw...). I had to book a flight, send the receipt to the HR department, call Delta, get to the right people, explain in my most composed customer service persona that I no longer needed the ticket, and thus get my money refunded in full. I myself and only me couldn’t or perhaps at least wouldn’t have done that. But you left a mark. How dare you :p I really am a vindictive creature sometimes. My 2nd year in China helped me realize that a lot. That was when I was escaping my vicious boss, maybe you remember. The reason I realized how vindictive I could be is because I was able to anticipate all of the nasty things she would want to do after I left her company, and prepare for them or avoid them all-together. If I could anticipate those things and have incite into the way those thoughts work though, that shows you how much my brain can work that way though. Daniel (Lion’s den, that one....) had a phrase in one of this prayers that I really appreciated. When God revealed Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and its meaning he said... (among other things) “... he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. 2:22” I hope to be a person that “light dwells with,” but as of yet, there is still a lot of my heart that lies in darkness, and I can be a very bitter creature. Thats another of those fences that God is going to have to help me over, because otherwise part of me very much so wants to hold onto my bitterness. I find it validating. To grieve when you’re offended, to hate when you’ve been wronged, its what you’re entitled to right? those are the rules. The rules say I get to feel this way. Small consolation though, and in the end it doesn’t really bring you anything that you get to keep. You just get to stay at the same level, or go back, no moving forward. Its really the same problem that I had with Korea. I had my preconceived notions about what was going to happen. Those things didn’t happen, and instead, I got bitten like 50 times in the ass because of the way I was going about things. So instead of continuing to learn I subconsciously put up a granite wall, because why the @#(% would I want to persevere through that to better understand people I DONT like? Fuck that AND them. And that attitude RUINED a lot. It distracted me from the fact that I had a gazillion friends while I was in Korea, and had a large number of really unique experiences while I was there. But I burn’t my fingers on the stove, so fuck cooking! I went back to Korea last year for a friends wedding (after a year of being away from Korea) and I saw the country with a rather different set of eyes. I’d be lying if I said they were completely different, but its true that it was RATHER different. I met some amazing people, because of the friends that I was blessed with the first time around. And even tonight, as I sit here pulling this thorn out of my heart, I have to admit that I’m tangibly excited when I hear Korean, or see Korean people/ Korean things. Its like theres this awkward dichotomy between wanting to dislike them and at the same time having a sort of natural resonance with what they are. I think my personality and natural state is a little too close to Korean culture, but I wasn’t willing to adapt to some key issues in their way of viewing the world, and they (as a society) sure as hell weren’t willing to adapt to mine (hah~ what a farfetched notion eh? an entire society changing to fit my world-view...) All that is to say, Prejudice, Fences and lashing back at offenses that I TAKE are becoming more of a theme in my life, and its ruining whole swatches of my human experience. I can’t say that I’ll let down my guard, but I can say that I will keep looking for ways to get over and I don’t know how to finish that sentence. That was a really difficult and uncomfortable moment. I actually recoiled and my shoulders tightened as I tried to find the words to finish it. All this is like textbook explanation of the parable of the sower by the way. I never really understood it, but the more I wrestle with my decrepit values, the more I understand just how much I’m missing, and just how much I need what God is giving. So parable of the sower ~ scattering seed, some falls on the road to be eaten by birds, some falls on the rocky zone, grows up quickly and withers quickly b/c it has no root, some falls among the thorns ~ which also grow up, and choke the plants, and then there is the seed that grows in the good soil where it produces a massive crop. I am those thorns. Left to myself, without “the love I need to see me through” that Florence + the Machine sing about, i’d choke the life out of every last worthwhile thing. These thorns want to grow up too. As I go to write down in my little book the connection between the parable I was just writing about, I notice that not too long ago, there was another quote that caught my attention, and i’ll write it down here for you so that you can see some of the continuity that i’ve got going on in my life (at least on paper.). “Break up your unplowed ground, and do not sow among thorns... circumcise your hearts... or my wrath will break out and burn like fire because of the evil you have done - burn with no one to quench it.” (Jeremiah 4:3) So here is me, trying to pull up some of the thorns that I tend.

Gothic Hipster

Should Americans Learn Foreign Languages? In my classes we’ve been doing a lot of debates, and i’ve become overly fond of being the devil’s advocate just so that there’s at long last some meaning in the debates. Whorishly pathetic reasoning sometimes. I suppose I and mine were like that when we first went through debate classes though... and we had a full semester to do it (and that was just high school). I won’t say that this is the same scenario. You can guess if you want ^_^ .(still... your guess may or may not be true. I’ll give no statistics at this time.) Should Americans learn foreign languages? I’ve got this splinter of a question working its way into my bones right now. Its kind of excruciating and I was hiding under three layers of covers last night as a juvenile comfort from the question I was asking and had already half-way answered. Actually... I think i’d 75% answered it and was mostly refusing to fully acknowledge my answer. It burns... like The Clap... in some not nice places (not quite the same place mind you). But enough of skirting, because I enjoy it plenty, but its bound to be frustrating as hell for anyone who’d actually go through the effort to read through this. There are those of us who are white as bread, and equally as devoid of origin. We are nothing like wheat, even though we’d like to be. Bleached and “refined” and then moulded into a shape that is pleasing to somebody with a nice fluffy texture. But we are not as wheat was. We dont have the same taste or value even. We do not nourish, no matter how hard we try, and healthy additives are just a joke. Why wouldn’t you just go with whole wheat to begin with? What is this crack-pot metaphor about actually ~ lets parable it down a notch. As Americans, we can ethnically be divided into about 3 groups (4 if you want to dig a bit more). 1) Advanced age Recent arrivals with a different mother tongue than English, 2) 2nd Generations or those who came young with a different mother tongue but through sweat and toil get to a stage where they are bi-lingual(+) in a way that would shake the foundations of the cosmos and, 3) white breads who have either some or no interest in language learning: the best of which get pretty good, but members of the 1st language (that is to say the members of the community of the foreign language that they studied) may still carry a divisive disdain for their language level and or efforts. (the fourth group would be the theoretical possibility of those who are distinctly from a different mother tongue, but become good enough to sneak into position #2 where the 1st language community doesn’t recognize much of a language difference. Dunno about these folks.) White bread though (“other” mother-tongue speakers... or the average American) may celebrate or despise their “refinement” and there is of course the whole spectrum in between. My predicament, and leukemia grade bone poisoning quandary is whether or not white-bread has any place even joining the bakery for competition in hope for sale. Does white bread want to go home and be consumed by the obese consumer with no palate? White bread wants to be enjoyed and appreciated for its own fullness too? I think white bread is afraid of being seen as having no fullness. {Maybe} it even goes so far as to say that white bread is afraid of having no fullness ~ and of the possibility of waking up to a reality where hope is the same thing as delusion. ---------- I went on top of my mountain today. I like to call it my mountain because there’s rocks on top. I don’t think it actually has to do very much with its actual height. I might very much enjoy going back to the North American West-Coast region and have my definition adjusted. I love it on that height because truth seems more truthful. The wind tears out of nowhere b/c its the highest thing close by and I could see the sun set before me and the moon was rising in near-fullness behind me... The White Face as Gollum would call it. Theres a bit (which i’ve actually yet to come-across in this re-read of the “trilogy”) where Gollum says: “They do not see what lies ahead when sun has failed and moon is dead.” and that is how I feel. It is no comfort to me. Neither is it the seal on my scroll of despair, b/c there is a suspicion that b/c I do not know.. there is in fact something to know. One of the moments of clarity I experienced while I was in my barren place was that i’ve become much more treacherously patient than I was a few years ago, but i’ve also become much more desperately polar than I was. (i’ve taken a liking to the words barren and desolate since before I went to Korea when I was flying over the north-pole in winter. Put that on your bucket list, its one of the most impacting things i’ve ever seen.) I say treacherously patient because I used to be so exasperated by a lack of calling, but I have been developing into this “place” where I have become more willing to wait until my potential matures into reality. The rough thing is that this “maturation” is coming as I am becoming more paranoid about my limitations and how much closer the ground my potential seems. This is not a comparison with my contemporaries. I am not quite so much concerned with what people around me have or are capable of doing. I’m disturbed by what could be done. If there are those who can and do have mastery over languages and cultures and are offering them to pharaoh, then what is it to keep me, the amateur, from making bricks?? And then there is Harriet Tubman--- Moses... Who not only defied pharaoh and the bricks he demanded, the structure he wanted to build and the laws that he would lay, and became one of the most heroic people of all time. She defied her position as a slave and managed to not only lead a gazillion slaves to freedom, but put a slack-ass would-be husband in her past, wrote her place in history and stamped her intricate sigil on the hearts of many... though far fewer acknowledge her than she actually deserved. Idiots... and petty interests... are what have put that woman in a lesser place than she deserves. Most (some) Americans know that Ms. Tubman led a large number of her people to freedom, but what many do not know is that she was so effective in scouting and espionage that she was put in charge of hundreds plus (ranging into the thousands range I believe... lacking sources at the moment) to do raids during the civil war... AND she died at the ripe old age of 93 from pneumonia. Few have her verve - even less who were dealt a shittier hand of cards. --------- One of the things that has been coming with me on this descent into age and morbid wisdom is a preoccupation with “bones”. There is a phrase in Chinese that I heard in my chinese version of Harry Potter that literally means to hate something to the bone. Now when I talk about my preoccupation, I am not always talking about hate. What I am talking about though is that more and more, questions seem to be shaking and questioning the foundation of what I am. More and more it is like my structure and my foundation are threatened ~ if not simply called into question (same thing). And I find that I am in fact a very fragile creature. One moment I feel like I can control the cosmos with my fingertips and the next, I’m blown over and shattered. I am a gothic hipster. I had a gloriously foul tuesday(my mid-week weekend) two or three weeks ago. I realized that I was a gothic hipster when I finally broke and went to Pizza Hut b/c I was craving crispy carbs (all they’ve got in this interpretation of chinese food is chewy carbs). Some yokel was goading his kid into saying hello to me and I was having none of it. So what did I do? like a refined, tactful North-American, I took out my ipod and made a minor show of putting in my ear buds and also took out my moleskin journal and designer pen. (this is where the genuinely interesting people say --- you hipster trash!) That nipped that notion in the bud right effectively. I ordered my pizza and ate it... and then payed for it... and then left. But in the process of sitting there and waiting for the thing to arrive so i’d have something to do with my mouth for once, I started writing exactly what was going through my head. I was feeling really base at the moment, so I wasn’t exactly thinking through things, but things just sort of “came.” I asked myself, “why do they have to stare at me like i’m some sort of animal in the zoo?” And before I even finished writing the sentence, it struck me: “Why do I assume that they have to stare at me like I’m an animal in the zoo?” ~Do I need validation so much that I am imagining gawking and (not at that moment... but in others) downright ill-will so that at least someone is focusing on me enough to give me ill will? I realized that im a total “gothic hipster”, because I am seeking for validation by being so un-known and misunderstood that I am envisioning scenarios where people are too boobish or boring to actually interact with me. Holy crap... I’m the theme of many a vengeful song by broken hearted girls. Dido sings one called “See you when you’re 40” Katy Perry “You’re so gay” (no judging!! : p) Well... the answer... as with many problems... is alcohol... eccentric prayer... and sleep. It may not BRING answers in a timely fashion... but it is at least an answer to the problem (otherwise known as a response.) --- So I suppose I should go full circle and answer my first question, at least in some capacity. Should American’s learn another language. Hell... if it fires your sun- absolutely. If you’re stuck too far in that corner of the room that you call life... YAH -- figure out there are more people in the room than you. You might like some of them. If your sense of meaning and self-worth is based on the your knowledge or capacity to learn (another/other) language(s) ... I don’t want to answer this one.

Dalian and The Lorax

Beer-sickles may be the most entertaining thing all day. Maybe not the most fulfilling, but probably the most entertaining (but its only 2 o’clock so who knows whats around the river bend. Pocahontas maybe.) Yesterday I put several cans o’beer in the freezer because they were room temperature, and the little mini-fridge/freezer hadn’t been plugged in. This was around 3pm I proceeded to pass out like the suffering jet-lagger I am, and boopitie shoobop ~ twilight comes around and I realize i’ve doomed my sleep schedule. Gotta start making good habits while you can but... aaaah heck ~ toss the repercussions... im tired. One thing leads to another I wake up at 1:30am and I go through the night until the sun starts to come up again around 5:00 and then take a nap and wake up at 7:30. I finally realize that I should brave the freezer and see if all my cans-o-beer have exploded. What magic ~ not a one of them did. So I moved them to my fridge in the morning and went to climb this mountain/ steep hill thats on campus. its about a 10 minute jaunt to the top of it (past the heaps of peoples trash : / and the cellphone tower : / ... the Lorax would not be pleased im sure). At the top is one of the more breath-taking views of the open sea that i’ve seen in quite a while. I’ll get you all pictures the next time I go up and take my camera (might be a while... or might be very soon ~ the crux is me remembering to take the camera. If only I had an iphone eh?) So anyhow, after lunch I took one out ~ still yet unbusted and put it in my New Zealand cozy and flicked the top twice. The question going through my head with my finger on the tab (Chinese beer cans have the pull tabs by the way~ the oldschool ones that actually pull off the metal opening completely) ~the question was... when beer is frozen... what happens to the carbon dioxide. WELL! It didn’t bust so lets find out. SCHPLAT! some how this pressurized vessel managed a 360* splash zone from a small hole in the top. My glasses, my computer screen, the wall, the closet... we all got spritzed. Evidently its still got some spunk even when its been frozen. Also... alcohol and water freeze a different temperatures (water freezes first...). One of the quirks of a beer-cicle is that once you pop the fun dont stop... no seriously... you kind of have to steadily drink it or the ice will displace too much liquid and it’ll flow all over your desk as it melts. SEEEE?!?!! science is fun. －－－ But a little bit about the city I live in: Dalian The first person I met when I got to the airport and fetched my luggage (praise be, it was all there) was a super awesome guy named James. He’s from inner-mongolia, which pretty much instantly makes him famous in my eyes. All you have to do is say it and I’m all eyes and ears. And then he has to go and seal the deal by being interesting on his own. Shucks. We take a taxi through a kind of ghetto part of town that evidently sells funeral supply stuff. I asked if the next area was gonna be babies and then weddings: get the whole spectrum of life right?. (so darn clever of me) All the while there are 2-3 things ringing in my head: this is real China and they’re not trying to hide it, the air is clear and I can actually breathe (a step up from my previous city for sure), and finally ~ there is so much potential for this place to be a great new stomping grounds for me. We got me to my apartment which is on campus and “cozy.” now I just have to make it homey : / Where’s that box with all my flags that I mailed here...? I’ll have to ask someone about that on monday. The place is swarming with dragon flies and I mean by the thousands. And my personal favourite common bird: the Azure-winged Magpie. Though I do really like crows too. --- Randomalia aside I have a question for everyone: do you think emotional susceptibility changes based on other events that happen in your life? For example ~ people like me have an irritation-o-meter and the more irritated we get, the more likely we are to blow up about small insignificant things. But the same applies for other emotions too. Like the other day I came in and saw Dalian for the first time, and I was so elated that the ghetto-ness of my apartment even made me laugh. (there is a booby-trap switch out of the three for the bathroom that will flip the circuit breaker... that seems to be its only function: to mess up your midnight bathroom trip...) These are two fairly superficial examples, but I think (and for myself I know) that it applies for deeper more shaking emotions too. To be transparent - I’ve left home to cross the big water 3 times now. Each time has been different, and this time has been incredibly potent. I suppose part of me expected it to be easier (the second time was pretty easy, but this third time was about as potent and moving for me as the first.) Without getting into the details of how that happened, we’ll say for now that I was basically in mourning over leaving my people this time. OK I guess i’ll give some of the why and how. I never really expected to be as close to my family as i’ve gotten. That might confuse you, but I don’t care. Be shocked and amazed if you want. But each step forward that I take in finding who I am, I have also found that i’ve taken another step closer to understanding and wanting to understand these incredible people in my nuclear family (sorry extended family... you’re still on audition : / ) And so to leave them, even though it was completely of my own doing and volition, and definitely the healthy step that I need and want to take, was a separation that I really lament. I started writing something on the topic earlier and i’ll copy paste that in here now. Some of it will be redundant, but it might interest you to see some of the differences in my writing that show up when I write in different moods: ----------------- It always feel so funerary when im about to cross the big water. There’s this feeling like you know the end of what you’re doing now is coming to the end, and you can feel yourself carried towards this “wall of the end” but never know what to expect next. You don’t feel like there is the other side, nor that there isn’t another side, but all you know is that this right now - is ending. I’ve been so touched this last trip home, because I saw, felt and over-all experienced such an immense love and closeness with my people. I never really thought that i’d be in that boat~ where I was so emotionally moved by that kind of separating from my family. This is the third time. And this time in some ways has been the most potent. I think its one of the most healthy and sobering things to feel sadness every so often. And as I have dealt with my sadness today I chose instead of suppressing it, to let it wash over me. Not to wallow in it and count it a misfortune, but to bathe in the feeling and let it remind me of how deeply loved I truly am. Sorrow in most situations is a recognition of lacking or loss. We talk of mourning, but you can’t mourn unless you had something worth having in the first place; so it was a deep and extensive reserve that breached the boundaries of its container within me today: because I have been so blessed and loved so well as to be worth mourning. And I consider that power. I consider that a measure of wealth that has been invested in our lives. And I want as much of that joy and the mourning as my little bones can take. I think to limit our experience of emotion and what they are there to tell us, is a form of robbery. We pillage and loot the depth of what we have had, and are having, and will have if we are so fortunate~ if we don’t recognize and embrace our emotions and seek to understand them. --- I watched a movie about C.S. Lewis and his coping with the death of his wife by cancer. He made a statement in their letters ~ one of which was along the lines of: We are only living in a world of shadows, real life has not yet begun. ---------------------- So thats another part of me for you, not that I imagine it surprises anyone that im super emotional (part of being a drama-queen I suppose). And to round this bit off and finish asking my question about my emotional susceptibility theory... I just watched the Lorax on recommendation of my sister and a friend from Zhengzhou... well he’s from Mexico but anyhow... And I was moved to tears by certain parts of it, and im pretty sure it wasn’t just the movie itself. I tried to explain my take on emotions to someone in the past few months and one of the metaphors that I really stick with is the door in the chest idea. It all goes back to love I think. happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, infatuation, theres a whole slew of “emotions” that come and go without your bidding, and you can’t really do much about them. You can bottle them, or you can experience them. Sometimes that means ulcers, sometimes that means venting them ~ and how you do that is your business. But love, in its many varieties, has a profound effect on, i would venture to say, all of those other emotions. It imbues and augments each of the emotions in a different way. So im here watching the Lorax, and these things that i’d normally brush off my shoulders are all the sudden bringing me to the brink of tears. What gives yo?