complicated

 

Someone once said that I was as complicated as the blood supply to the stomach. At the time I thought that was kind of cool. Layers and connections and difficulties, all that. You can click the picture to see the actual names of the arteries (I know no one actually wants to know them). Currently attempting to cram 500 pages of such concepts in my head, few days before test time. Stomach, you are unnecessarily mixed up and wordy.

scene

There are a lot of famous scenes in the Godfather trilogy; some for shock and gore, some for cinematography, some for telling one-liners, others for plot-turning points or moments of betrayal. I love all of these, but in my opinion the brilliance also lies in the fillers, and even more so, in how the world of the movie extends beyond just the scenes that you see. It may be the best movie I know of that makes itself so palpable and rich, that you find yourself creeping in the unshown corners of the characters' lives and environments. It's like when a friend tells you a story about something that happened to them as a kid, and you can imagine not only the story itself and what your friend was like before you saw and knew her; based on her story--but also what may have happened before and after, how she might feel about other things similar and different; based on the time and space you've occupied together.

I can't do justice to this feeling, to describe it exactly or how incredible it is, but it's one reason why my favorite scene in all of the Godfather trilogy is a sliver of a moment. It takes place in Part II, during the flashback of Vito Corleone as a young man, before he's become the Godfather. The appreciation for the scene partly arises from what comes before and after. He's working in a grocery store, and the rising power of the mob sprinkles around him in smatterings. Vito gets laid off from his job because the mafia made his boss take on a relative instead. His boss tries to give Vito some groceries as an offering, but he thanks his boss for all his goodness and doesn't take it. Prior to getting laid off, Vito incidentally and innocently gets in the middle of some mafia drama. This happens while he's still working as a grocer, but after he's laid off someone offers to repay Vito for a favor by stealing a fancy rug for him to bring home to his wife. And because you've seen Part I where Vito isn't a grocer but the Godfather, you can see how the Corleone empire unravels from this humble ball of yarn. My favorite scene is right after Vito comes home from getting laid off, right before he acquires the rug from the mafia.

He returns home to their small apartment. It's dimly lit but warm with browns and yellows. It has this quietly lush quality about it that I love, because the lush comes from so little. The doors flanking the dining room make it so you really only see Vito and his wife standing and facing each other around a dining table, creating a slim rectangle in the middle of the screen. He unwraps a pear from some crumpled paper and sets it on the table. "What a nice pear!" she says, he kisses her, and the scene fades, leaving them in their small space with their small meal.

People generally dislike Part III; it's true that it's not as well made as the others. But completing the story makes scenes like this one in Part II all the richer. Enmeshed in grandeur and suffering and the massive drama of the rest brings you back to these moments, and you wonder, even as you know, how did we get from here to there?

I think we all wonder that too sometimes about our lives. Someone once commented on an entry, that it's funny how our lives take on logical trajectories and narratives given all the different choices we might take and random things that might happen. And while it is true that things connect each of our days to the next, I feel that when we each near twenty-five years like I am, we look at where we're sitting or standing or moving and say, this rug? What happened to my pear?

While it may seem otherwise, I'm not saying I think the pear is always better than the rug; it all depends. I never foresaw that I would be doing what I'm doing right now (at this very moment or during this larger timeframe) or that I'd be the kind of person I am now. Everything has its rough edges and rough centers, me and my life, but I'm incredibly grateful for what has become of both. And because there is so much to come, I know that despite all the changes and growth (and perpetual epiphanies of the need for more growth), growing up isn't about replacement. Working to achieve things is hard; I think achieving them while keeping what came before is harder, but possible, and better.

translation

I don't remember what we were doing when this came up, but last summer one of the people working with me on my research project said something in Vietnamese, paused, and asked what the English equivalent would be (he spoke English well). We thought about it and couldn't think of anything. The phrase (xuong qua) is an expression of happiness or contentment, and is versatile. It might describe a much relished vacation or a satisfying daily routine. You might use it for a moment, like while eating ice cream on a hot day, or for a state of being, like being married with a good job and cute kids.

There's also a phrase that can be considered its opposite: ko qua. Qua is in both, because it's a modifier to mean "a lot" or "too much." The contrasting words, xuong and ko, contrast in sound too, the "x" of xuong being a soft s-sound and the "k" of ko being a hard k-sound. Ko qua, which can be loosely thought of as an expression of suffering or pain, is also used liberally. My mom has used it to describe everything from picking apart shrimp shells for a meal to my weeks of studying to losing her brother during their escape from home. A day or so before my great-aunt passed, my mom went to visit her in the morning. At this point she wasn't as cognizant of the people around her but could still communicate pretty well. She didn't say too much, but she did say, ko qua.

Trying to capture one is as hard as the other. In thinking about writing about this, and in writing this, I find that maybe there's something that can allude to both of these elusive sentiments: what life this is.

embryology

I have four or five half-done entries saved here. Despite doing nothing of importance over the past month (actually, probably because) I have a lot of stray thoughts I wanted to aggregate here. Instead of finishing them, I've been studying or rather, thinking about how I should study.

For example, I'm supposed to learn some embryology. In theory, embryology--to learn how we grow from one cell to what we are--is pretty awesome. But because we never learned it in school as a complete concept, because I'm bad at spatial visualization, because I learn slowly and need countless repetition, and because we're required to know a smattering of facts to which I thus have to allocate my limited mental space and energy, I can't describe to you this process or even really feel its core substance, the stuff that's supposed to come before the fray details.

Instead, I know which parts of the body arise from the neural crest: autonomic nervous system (ANS), dorsal root ganglion, melanocytes, chromaffin cells of adrenal medulla, enterochromaffin cells, pia and arachnoid, celiac ganglion, Schwann cells, odontoblasts, parafollicular C cells of thyroid, laryngeal cartilage, bones of the skull.

I came up with this crude (as in unadorned) story to remember: Aunts (ANS) are my roots (dorsal root/as in my ancestry), but why do I have more melanocytes (if you know me in real life you know I'm much darker than my family)? They (the color) come from chromaffin cells (which stain brown) and enterochromaffin cells. But if you peel off the layers (pia and arachnoid, layers overlying the brain), you find we're still a steely gang (celiac ganglion). We'll go on Swan boats (Schwann cells; my relatives in Vietnam took me on a Swan boat last summer), and have a blast (odontoblast), go parachuting (parafollicular cells; I like hot air balloons and parachutes seemed close enough), and scream (laryngeal cartilage) for fear of breaking our skulls (...skull bones).

I like science and I like stories. But if you multiply the above information by say, ten thousand, that might estimate what we're supposed to know. So if I come up with ten thousand semi-sensible stories for these lists, and then remember them, I might know what I need to know for the Boards. In conclusion I would just like to say...wtf.

Of course science is founded upon inherent stories that exist outside my unimaginative imagination, and we're supposed to know a lot of that too. Still, at this point in our education there are many things whose structures are too enmeshed in mere fact and jargon to see, at least for someone like me who needs a fair amount of time and struggle to understand. It's the embryological state I would really like to understand, and to see through to completion. Like my fragments of entries.