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?
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