stories

My first writing class was today. I had half an hour between work/dinner and class, so I walked around campus. Not too many people around in the evening, so I could capture all the wide open spaces as an unabashed tourist. I think the continuous sunshine has gotten to me lately. I love it of course, but is it strange to say that sometimes it depresses me a little? There’s no sense of change, and I so easily slip into identifying with my surroundings that I also begin to feel like I’m the same, yesterday and tomorrow. I told Andrew about it and he said that it was thundering in Virginia, and I thought that was nice. It also reminded me of War of the Worlds, which I had just seen, when all that lightning was coming down and Tom Cruise asks, “Where’s the thunder?” But anyway, tonight the warmth and light felt more malleable, more like home, more spacious.

We spent most of class telling and listening to stories. We had to tell a neighbor a story and later introduce our neighbor to the rest of the class by summarizing the story. A common icebreaker, but this one was memorable for a few reasons. We spent a really long time talking, and people remembered and told the stories in great detail. And since it’s a continuing studies course, I’m by far the youngest in the class. There are two other post-grad students who are several years older, then the bulk of the class spans the thirties-sixties range. Older people seem more frank, and free-flowing, and willing to share. Unlike those awkward first sections in college, where everyone harbors some degree of anxiety about speaking up, these people talk and talk, comfortably and without reserve. And the most striking thing was that as adults…they had adult stories, like wars and marriage and business ventures and grandchildren and real true successes and failures.

I thought about the cancer patients I met last week, and about how what I loved and remembered most about that was hearing about what they did. Steph asked me what kind of cancers they had, and I blanked because the first thing that registered in my mind were their faces and their stories. I thought: music store owner and guitar player (from heavy metal to country, he said with a matter-of-fact smile), world RV-traveler (he lived out of one with his wife and their last trip was a month in Alaska), a family sports bar owner with tattoos of the American flag down his arms as a remembrance of his time as a Marine and in Vietnam (and who sought physical therapy advice from a former Miss America), and probably the one that touched me most deeply, an elderly Korean man (retired from running a supermarket with his wife) who reminded me so much of my dad. He didn’t speak much English and tried to compensate by smiling often, and he was so genuinely huggable. Anyway, all of that made me think again that I want to work with older people, because there is something so poignant about that time in your life, with all those experiences behind you.

I heard twenty-four other stories, and left with so many sad, amusing, bittersweet, complicated images. One man got out of mandatory military training by bribing his instructors, and he and his friends would hole themselves up in the tanks they were supposed to be learning to drive to play cards. “It was the best place in the world to play cards; it was so quiet.” I can’t get that line out of my head. That was my favorite story (it went on about how he had no idea how to actually drive a tank during boot camp because he’d spent the three years of training playing cards, and more after that, but that beginning part was the best). Another man described being in the middle of the ocean and being entirely alone in every direction. One woman hopped on a train for a day-trip to Paris and had a movie-scene experience of twenty gorgeous men packed in her train cabin filling the air with their cigarette smoke. Another woman talked about the smell of India when she returned to her home after two years in the States, familiar and new. While I had tried to find just one incident, the stories of a lot of people felt like the stories of their entire lives. A woman talked about her conflicting responsibilities as daughter, wife, and mother and how all the important people in her life were in different cities and she had no idea where she should be, literally. Those stories gave a certain sense of weight and lightness at once. I can recognize the ease of past, and foresee the difficulty of future.

My story was a trivial one. I told my neighbor the story about how my brother caused the death of my favorite mouse. I told him that being the baby of the family, and the only girl and the one people were supposed to protect, I’d always wanted to take care of things and this translated into having a string of pets when I was a kid, including countless mice. I wasn’t very good at taking care of things, and I’m still not (this worries me often), and they kept dying. The first one was sick when I got it, so it wasn’t my fault, and I don’t recall if the others were my fault or not, but without any facts, I sense that they were. This one mouse I had was brown and white, with a spotted face and brown spots on its tail. All the other mice were white and I swear they discriminated against her, and she was always fighting on her own against the two or three others. So naturally I aligned myself with her, and her vulnerability. I told my neighbor about how my brother and I always fought as kids, and how one day he put my mice cage outside in the summer heat, and how by the time I found them, one had died and my brown one was near-death and how I tried to revive her with water and how she woke up but died an hour or so later. I said that I knew my brother had done it but I never talked to him about it or asked why. I can’t remember if he was mad at me for some reason, I don’t think so, but it could have been general spite—or maybe it was unintentional or just forgetful or whatever. There are a million more important things that he and I never discuss, but for some reason that incident feels emblematic of the silence between us.

Anyway, after my neighbor relayed my story to the class, the woman behind me says to me, “You should read Julie Orringer’s ‘How to Breathe Underwater.’” I can’t quite describe how that made me feel. It wasn’t a happy, or an excited, or even surprise. Not only is that one of my favorite favorite books, but I knew exactly which story in the collection she was talking about. And I’d thought of my brother and my mouse story when I’d first read it a couple of years ago. I loved it so much that I made Richard read it. When you find something really truly worthy of love, you want to share it. It’s that desire to connect stories that’s the never-ending source of my happiness and my weakness, that way of always saying “That reminds me of…” And this woman echoed it. The feeling I had was somewhat like one of things being right, that the way I am is meant to be, and that the way people are is just, the way people are and it’s supposed to be that way.

One of my teacher’s goals is to “encourage anti-social behavior.” When he said that a lot of people in the class thought he implied hostility, but I knew what he actually meant because I’m already like that. He said that the world is noisy and it’s important to be by yourself and quiet it down on your own. I see how this would be conducive to writing. But I don’t think it’s possible for me to be any more introverted than I already am. I mean, all day I considered not going to the class at all—avoid the new faces and new situation and instead go home, sit in my room, and listen to music while I arrange photos into albums that I’ll likely show three people in my life. I want to write to connect, not to isolate. I’m naturally quiet and I naturally find quiet. I don’t want to subdue the noise, I want to mold it into a communicable shape and give it away in a way that makes it louder to you and to me too.

routine frenzy

My first creative nonfiction writing class is next week. This weekend I plan to purchase a guitar tuner so that I can tell whether I'm making any sort of progress teaching myself to play the guitar. I also want new sheet music for the piano. I also have to get enough groceries to feed two boys (and myself I suppose) for the next few weeks. I'm reviewing all the activities and research and STUFF from my entire life so that I don't flounder during interviews. I'm anxiously waiting to finish the last application for one of the few schools I'm actively excited about. Tomorrow I will meet cancer patients. The weather has been gorgeous, and I've been driving down 19th Avenue with my windows down. My car, however, is quickly and surely falling apart. I talked to Frank today and hope to see him in DC in October, and to see my roomies in New York in December. I got a long voicemail from Yonina and hope to chat with that crazy girl soon. And as though my mind and heart were not already stretched to their limits, Andrew is visiting, not once but twice, before he leaves the country.

I thought more time would mean savoring things, but really it just means more things. It's funny how we say we don't have time, or we have more time, when really, we always have the same amount of time. It may be that there is no absolute right pace of life. It's all right. Sometimes it's just hard. Other times it's hard, but it's mine and it's lovely. Everything is astir.

anticipating someday

A few days ago I read that NY Times article about how researchers found evidence of mental activity in an unconscious woman. They said that she was transitioning from a vegetative condition to a “minimally conscious state.” I learned that 100,000 Americans “exist in this state of partial consciousness.” Partial consciousness. That phrase struck me, and I was hit by a sudden sorrow. It’s one thing to be entirely numb, and perhaps more lamentable than to maintain a little something. But to be numb, with glimpses of awareness and snatches of thoughts? Just out of touch? I read a quote somewhere by someone about how mankind’s greatest source of unhappiness is the ability to conceive of ideals that it cannot attain. I’ve often felt that way about myself, doesn’t everyone.

Just before reading that article, I had already planned on writing an entry about how I’ve wanted to relish everything since college ended, to absorb every sensation, to take time to think, to feel things to their fullest intensity—in effect, to be conscious. But contemplating partial consciousness made me more acutely thankful for the capacity to be acutely aware. Oddly, it wasn’t the complete opposite of consciousness—the vegetative state—that induced gratitude, but this idea of partial. Maybe it’s because while it’s hard for healthy people to fully mirror that state of vegetation, I can easily see normal people, myself included, perpetuating a kind of partial consciousness in their daily lives, and not even realizing how very sad that is.

Senior year, especially the end, was such a blur, not any less intense for going by quickly. I am grateful for being immersed in school, in people, in him, in the East Coast, in that Big Important Time of Our Lives. A big burst of happy, bittersweet, pouring forth experience. A waterfall. I pretty much got drenched. But now that it’s all over, I want to feel each little thing a bit more carefully, a bit more slowly. Relishing drops, the way you blink when you feel one sprinkle graze your cheek during a drizzle, and stick out your tongue to catch it on its way to your lips.

So each day is this kind of venture. It’s hardest to appreciate mornings; most of the time I try to avoid the anxiety and hurt that mornings often bring. Most days I spend a half hour to an hour before getting out of a bed in a consciously unasleep state. I hate it. So from the very beginning of the day I’m asked to give the most effort. For awhile, I thought I could gloss over this segment, to not include it. But embracing feeling means every feeling. Only very recently—maybe only when I read that article—have I been really grateful for hurt. I’m reminded of Garden State’s sentiment of pain over numbness, and partial consciousness makes it all the more real. So I try not to tuck it away.

By the time I’m driving in the city and on the 280 freeway, it’s easier. There is no way to not love that drive. Junipero Serra, the country’s most beautiful highway, as its sign says, is one of the most purely gorgeous things I have had in my life. That’s where the photo is from; I haven’t ventured more successful attempts to capture it. That blanket of cloud often rests in the middle of the trees, making it look more like mountain than air. I relish everything about that drive. How the scene changes with a turn, how the clouds cling to the trees in different shapes every day, how the fog races, how mist drapes the middle section of the sky, how the sun resembles the moon except then it gets too bright and now you know it’s the sun after all. How fast the drivers are, how I get caught in a flow of smooth traffic, how the speed makes things communal. I appreciate the time. I am close to long drives, and the near-hour merges into a sublime minute even as every inch of the drive is distinct. I like that I can listen to full albums again, without the background of homework or even laundry. I don’t think of music as background. Most musicians I like have albums that I listen to all the way through. Not because every song is fantastic but because a real album feels like a book, and people have stories to tell. The lesser songs add texture to the whole, but besides the contribution to an entire collection, in a good, personal album where someone has felt something or has something to share, each song has something. I want that full experience, to live and make in my own way the connections that someone else has lived and made. I just like that sense of whole, and creation. I’d like to make something like that someday.

Once I get to work, I relish doing things with concrete results, and with more nebulous aspirations. It is hard work, learning a great deal at once, and I’m working so hard to get to the point of a job well done. I was overcome by a sense of incompetence at first, but it is a strangely satisfying experience, to need to go through so many mistakes and repeats to get something right. It reminds me that I consider this important, and also that it matters to do anything you pursue as well as you can, even if you’re not naturally inclined to be good at it. I like physically doing things, performing semi-exact procedures; it recalls the simple and core fulfillment that I had from dusting the shelves or restocking drinks at my dad’s store. At the same time it’s nice to also try and understand what I’m doing, scientifically. I like thinking there is some kind of underlying system to all of this, and imagining how it might function. I love knowing that there are real patients behind this work; how odd and touching it is to follow the story of something going on inside of someone. As small of an impact it may be, I am scared of being accountable to people other than myself. I am gingerly enjoying this fright. It sounds and feels more important than it is, which makes me look forward to actually doing this—working—on a larger, more real scale someday.

The drive home is the same but different from the drive away from home. Usually there is an abrupt change from sun to clouds as I enter South San Francisco, and get whisked away in the fog that is my neighborhood. San Francisco is never hot. On hot days elsewhere in the Bay, it is either a tingling cool or a comforting warm in San Francisco. I try to avoid the numbing effect that California’s constant sunshine can have; besides enjoying SF’s frequent grayness (though September has been gorgeous), feeling the air warm my arms reminds me that each day’s warmth is a new one. Even here, I try to remember that one sunny day doesn’t guarantee one tomorrow. On cool days, the fog in the city sometimes lies close to the ground, and you wonder at how the sky has overflowed at your feet. I savor coming home tired and having an evening away from the day. Sometimes I take a shower before making dinner, or awhile after eating. I prefer the former if there’s time, because I like getting clean, putting on clean pajamas and getting my hands messy again with food. I’ve found that cooking satisfies each of the five senses. As it’s easy to be overwhelmed, I’m learning to concentrate on certain things at a time. I’ve always relished the sound and feel of cutting vegetables. There are so many ways to cut things, and I like seeing barriers vanish as I peel and slice. The sounds of crisp and squish and chop are so satisfying. When I taste spinach sauteed in balsamic vinegar and soy sauce, I anticipate the flavor because I half-put it there and I hear again the crackle of the pan and the little black bubbles rising from the stove’s heat that came shortly before. I like to add the following things to everything: onions, garlic, soy sauce, oyster sauce, chicken broth. I’ve progressed from a terror in the kitchen to a not-horrible cook (I’ve accepted my forever non-domestic status), and I like feeding my brothers.

On evenings driving home or weekends driving to Fremont, I look out my car window and see an expanse of time and opportunity unfamiliar to me. I can go out, read books, watch movies, see friends, explore new music, write journal entries—at the instant I feel like it. Well, perhaps the freedom is not as wide as the “year off” I had envisioned. Applications to finish, interviews to prepare for; weekends go by fast when instead of a morning lecture you have an eight hour work day scheduled for Monday; even nights aren’t such a long stretch when you’re not done with dinner until eight and you have to go to bed by midnight and you’re too tired to do anything until a couple hours into that gap of time. But still, when I want to do something, I usually can. Reading as I choose is a calm comfort and an itching prospect. I can’t foresee another book becoming as close to me in this upcoming year as “Norwegian Wood” did in the first month I was back home. His language so easily mingled with my thoughts, his sentiments so reflective and discerning and sensitive. The urge to write, the shape of memory, the delicacy of feelings, the sad beauty of loss, the nature of introversion—I can’t think of a more perfect book to have read at that time in my life. Then I was stalled by a resolve to finish “White Teeth.” As infatuated I am with Zadie Smith (the most striking woman I’ve ever seen in real life!), I had only rare moments of connection with a few sentences and slight interest in its broad ideas. So it took me awhile to get through that, but have a promising one in store with “My Antonia.” I’ve also seen probably twenty movies since I’ve been home. We don’t have television and my brother and I have been going crazy with Blockbuster and Netflix free trial subscriptions. Noteworthy ones include Shopgirl, Nobody Knows, Infernal Affairs, Failan, The Classic, Tony Takitani. A lot of Asian movies-Korean, Japanese, Chinese. Somehow things that might come across as sappy or overdone in English are sweet and sincere in another language, Asian ones in particular when it comes to love stories; even images very manufactured to emphasize their sugary and romantic colors appear more genuine in an Asian film medium. I’m not sure why that is, maybe because parameters change from culture to culture.

I am lucky to have people who make it worthwhile to leave my cocoon of fiction. I was so happy to see a lot of Victoria while she was here and to have many a lazy day: one at the lake that we spent chatting on a blanket that we kept moving to keep in the shade, and where we took a few turns jetskiing on choppy water (I often looked over her, so small on her jetski and imagine that I must look much the same and I would smile at this image of the two of us that I couldn’t really see); one in the Sunset district, trekking the mosaic steps of Moraga Street to catch a view of the city, then being beach bums for the afternoon, and then party couch potatoes later that night; one night spent commenting on celebrities at the VMA’s and falling asleep after watching amusing music videos and partaking in usual sleepover gab.

Concerts have been highlights. Death Cab with my brothers, Chili Peppers with Sarah (I was a little buzzed, she a little high; we were a little nuts and the show was a big amazing...my favorite moment: the encore that was Soul to Squeeze), and soon James Blunt with Steph. She lives exactly a mile away from me, and it’s been cozy to just hang out (dinner, movie and shopping outings). I haven’t bought new clothes for a year in an effort to save for summer travels and school, and I indulged in spending part of my first paycheck on frivolous items. My favorite find: little black dress. I am also happy to have been present for less shallow events like Steph’s white coat ceremony. All the medical students looked so much older and more mature than my fellow college graduates of just a few months ago, and this made me a little melancholy until I saw Steph walk across the stage and fit into her coat, a little girl with a huge smile. I can’t believe how we’ve grown and are growing, and how we are going to take care of people. I can’t wait to do that, someday.

After everything else, there is sleep. Oh sleep. It gets cold here, which reminds me of Boston and how much I appreciated my down comforter in college. Creating that pocket of warmth feels like such an accomplishment. Somewhere between that and the re-arrival of cold in the morning, there’s doubt. There is the danger of crossing the line from absorbing to wallowing, when your toes and fingers cease happily taking up water little by little because it’s gotten to be too much and instead passively resist and then actively fight back…and you continue to soak anyway, even while you’re lamenting how your hands end in wrinkly prunes. Balance is so difficult, and there’s much bittersweet to take in along with the wonderful. There’s disconnection and loneliness and above all, missing. I miss Cambridge, Harvard, Adams House, my blockmates, people, him. It’s a struggle to maintain this damn osmosis of letting in, letting out. But I do feel its worth.

Can you see how the photograph is not quite clear? Obscured by strokes travelling in various arcs? I took it while driving. My windshield isn’t clean, but isn’t the view nice?