Told wife today that one reason I didn't pursue journalism was a fear of reality. I don't write anything about the world, mostly because I don't have much new or original to say. The only thing I know any more about than anyone else is my own life, sadly. But in addition to all the immediate coverage, reading the flurry of links sent about Israel & Palestine from friends the past day or so, well, I still don't have anything new to say...but it does make me think about choices and how things we do on a daily basis seep into the world as a whole.
It is unbelievable to me how natural it is for people to cling to status quo even, and even especially, in the face of overwhelming reason to change. And how hard it is to commit to a principle rather than a side. To realize that though context does affect what's right and what's wrong, there are absolute rights and wrongs we have agreed upon. Among some friends the phrase "path of least resistance" has come up some times this year, not in relation to current events, but I find it apt for the awful craziness of what's going on in the Middle East. And back here, we continue the way we've been because it's easy.
The phrase came up in relation to me as a person. In recently asking a wonderful friend for some reassurance, of a kind thankfully rarely needed, he told me I'm a crazy person, a mix of immediate relentlessness and everlasting patience. It's true that this doesn't make for an easy personality, that patience simply being a euphemism for the neurotic relentlessness. Aside from pure stubbornness, I hope that the difficulty stems from certain value, and I am thankful every day for the people and things in my life that make me feel that. I've never been and probably will never be the path of least resistance. And I don't want to be, even if were to make me the path that's taken.
But for the world, let's not make this an exception, let's please take the harder route this time and the next.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
my mom
My mom turns 67 today. It was only recently that I realized that she was three years older than her officially documented age (this changed her age to me by two, since I'd previously thought she was only one year older than her official age). Growing up in Northern Vietnam while the Communists were fighting to oust the French, she stopped going to school for a few years during the fighting. When it was time to return, they tried to put people back in the grades corresponding to their age, but they were all behind. My grandparents lowered my mom's age, so she could be in the grade in which she belonged. Growing up, she was a daddy's girl, and later, she tells me, she had many suitors (I believe her). She worked as an accountant for the government for awhile and married my dad, and then taught high school history, and somewhere in there gave birth to four boys in seven years. She took them, carrying the baby whom she fed powdered milk, through fields and marshes and sea to Thailand and to Germany and eventually to here. Her dad passed away in Vietnam before she left, and her mom passed away there too, but when my mom was in America, when I was five and remember her crying in the hallway. In California she made clothes, helped my dad run the bakery and then the convenience store and then the wine store, was and is still a receptionist at my aunt's pediatric office, and gave birth to me. When I was a kid she worried I'd never grow much hair. Once when I was in elementary school and she found out about something really bad I'd done, she didn't yell with anger; she cried with disappointment. In high school before I could drive and I wanted to volunteer at a hospital 40 minutes from home, she'd take me there after school and wait there for three hours until I was done, to take me home. When she saw me off for college, she wouldn't leave to go to the bathroom until after I passed the security gate. In med school when we had to interview a relative with an illness I talked to her about the heart surgery she had when I was thirteen, when she stayed home for a few months and we gave her a bell to call us if she needed anything. She doesn't like chocolate, butter, sweet things or any non-Vietnamese food. She likes jewelry, watching National Geographic and Animal Planet, posing for pictures, and talking to anyone. I don't know that many concrete details about her life before the time that I noticed details, and it took a long time after noticing before I started asking. I hope to know.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
intimacy
We just finished a week long obstetric-gynecology module, and I really enjoyed it. Before school ob-gyn never crossed my mind and upon entering, I didn't imagine it being something that would appeal to me. But it was the perfect subject to greet us post-break, a point of all time low as far as motivation goes. Because ob-gyn makes very apparently clear one of the elements of medicine most valuable to me--intimacy. It does this in large part because it deals with sexuality, which people immediately connect to intimacy in mind and practice. I once called our high school lockers "intimate" because we were in block of 8 half-lockers in a small space, and my friends laughed at the connotation. But in learning this past week, I'm reminded that intimacy doesn't stem directly from physicality at all. Intimacy is feeling safe when vulnerable. And that vulnerability comes in many forms. Ob-gyn makes it obvious with physically uncovering what we normally protect, but that's just a conduit for all the other things we keep close, things that are there whenever you become connected to someone else.
In workshop we had a case on a miscarriage, and after going over the symptoms of abnormal bleeding and the treatment required to clear her system, I realized that I'd never fully considered what a miscarriage entails. I thought of it in simple terms of something going wrong that prevents you from continuing your pregnancy, and then it's gone. But I never once thought of the fact that there was something inside of you, that is no longer living, and it has to go somewhere. Meaning that the place that once held it, has to let it go. And not to be graphic but for reality, there's blood, and pain, and someone has to open you and physically remove what they call "products of conception" (your baby), and it's less like plucking an egg out of a basket and more like undoing the interlaced weaving. How visceral, how traumatic. Without ever having had gained or lost anything quite like that, to imagine hurts.
When doing the pelvic exam, I was really nervous to be given responsibility to handle what's intimate. At one point we were told that we'd "feel the uterus between your hands." I was a little taken aback by how amazing I found that thought. My hands? The ones that a few minutes of chipping icy snow off my windshield render red and dry? Yes, mine. The ones that also felt the pulse of the ovarian artery. Besides the fulfillment that comes with learning concrete things after so much academia, these solid things are tied to people...their relationships with their bodies, the notions of family and your ties to others known and not yet known to you, the intricacies of conception and its complications and emotions, or even just those of being made to conceive.
I've felt safe at my most vulnerable rarely enough to remember and feel the feeling distinctly and vividly. To find a presence with whom you are able to bare yourself, in whatever sense that might mean to you, and then to feel safe, without ever losing the sense of fragility and value that made safety necessary in the first place. I've only known that to happen for me after long cultivation with time and trust and test. Now, to think of that as a mutual goal for every stranger you meet as your patient, closes some of the distance and isolation that studying can nourish. In broadening something defined by smallness, I find I have more of it.
In workshop we had a case on a miscarriage, and after going over the symptoms of abnormal bleeding and the treatment required to clear her system, I realized that I'd never fully considered what a miscarriage entails. I thought of it in simple terms of something going wrong that prevents you from continuing your pregnancy, and then it's gone. But I never once thought of the fact that there was something inside of you, that is no longer living, and it has to go somewhere. Meaning that the place that once held it, has to let it go. And not to be graphic but for reality, there's blood, and pain, and someone has to open you and physically remove what they call "products of conception" (your baby), and it's less like plucking an egg out of a basket and more like undoing the interlaced weaving. How visceral, how traumatic. Without ever having had gained or lost anything quite like that, to imagine hurts.
When doing the pelvic exam, I was really nervous to be given responsibility to handle what's intimate. At one point we were told that we'd "feel the uterus between your hands." I was a little taken aback by how amazing I found that thought. My hands? The ones that a few minutes of chipping icy snow off my windshield render red and dry? Yes, mine. The ones that also felt the pulse of the ovarian artery. Besides the fulfillment that comes with learning concrete things after so much academia, these solid things are tied to people...their relationships with their bodies, the notions of family and your ties to others known and not yet known to you, the intricacies of conception and its complications and emotions, or even just those of being made to conceive.
I've felt safe at my most vulnerable rarely enough to remember and feel the feeling distinctly and vividly. To find a presence with whom you are able to bare yourself, in whatever sense that might mean to you, and then to feel safe, without ever losing the sense of fragility and value that made safety necessary in the first place. I've only known that to happen for me after long cultivation with time and trust and test. Now, to think of that as a mutual goal for every stranger you meet as your patient, closes some of the distance and isolation that studying can nourish. In broadening something defined by smallness, I find I have more of it.
Friday, January 9, 2009
to love words
Old English, translated; foreign languages, translated; foreign writers writing in English; English. Florid stream of consciousness, bare bones stream of consciousness, lush detail, spare journalistic or iceberg style. Three word sentences, or forty page monologues. Straightforward plot and storytelling, or postmodern abstraction. First person, third person, ambiguous. Spans a day, or a lifetime, or generations, about the past or future. All feeling, all conversations, all thoughts, or page-turning plot. Contemporary cynicism or 19th century sentimentalism, archetypes or individuals, gritty realism or talking cats, magical realism and surrealism and fairy tales, domestic or worldly, social commentary or personal story. Picture books and tomes, flashbacks and predictions, pretending and extrapolating, light or dense, funny or bleak. Children, adolescents, twenty somethings, middle-agers, older, oldest. Moody, surging, monotone. Trips and stalemates, poetic or hardy, vignettes or chapters, loose ties and randomness and patterns. Chronological or insensible, quick or langorous, girly or tough guy, symbolic or concrete. In most any form and context, they give the ineffable.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
the abcs of 2008
I stole this idea from Victo, who did it several years ago.
Ayden met the world August 12, and brought us together for our first full family Thanksgiving celebration in snowy Colorado.
Bon Iver holed himself up in Wisconsin in the depths of winter to recover from a rough year, and ended up recording the ineffable album that’s been my constant companion in 2008’s winter, the sounds to my first snowfall and its cold snowy run past icy creeks and flake drenched roads. Wife & I were front row in concert, bought our first vinyl records (still in need of a player), complete with autographs due to the kindness of a roadie.
Chapel Street, where lies our new residence, is home. Our roomy kitchen’s been host to big planned group dinners, roomie meals, smatterings of guests, which means Nupur’s spice-filled veggie Indian with bread from scratch, my mom’s crack chicken and noodles with fish sauce and crispy 2 AM egg rolls, and Jen’s comfort Chinese and strawberry banana smoothies and friends cooking in our kitchen, pancakes and Korean rice and pastas.
Dani California was the theme song to our summer cross country drive from California to Connecticut: “Black bandanna, sweet Louisiana/robbin’ on a bank in the state of Indiana/Never made it up to Minnesota/North Dakota man was a gunnin' for the quota/Down in the Badlands she was savin the best for last/It only hurts when I laugh/gone too fast.” We didn’t rob in true Thelma & Louise style or see Louisiana, but we did bask in the surreal Badlands that, from seemingly nowhere become surreal canyon, and we DID drive straight through the entire span of Minnesota.
Elected Obama and for once felt good to be a part of the current events of this generation, and to know that long stuggles are worth something and will continue, because “what began in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.”
Friendship pushed me to act on what it really means to be there for those close to you, to put someone else before what can hurt you. Goes without saying that friendship requires give and take, but normally what’s good and happy for one is mutual for the other. It doesn’t usually require you to give up something really, really valuable. But this year, I let go of a friendship that I want in my life and will always tangibly miss, and worked everything in me to its worn edges to keep another. Knowing it’s best for people you care about is worth the effort, even if it doesn’t take away moments of difficult and sad, and there is the reward of a best friendship. Knowing this is easy; actually being tested and doing it wasn’t, for me. But that’s what 2008 gave me for the first time, and twice. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish circumstances had been easier, but given this, I’m glad for the challenge and the hope that I’m capable.
Guson’s camera, which I had to borrow for Puerto Rico because my faithful college digital camera died (which became obsolete within months but served me for years), got me to give myself an SLR, to document summer and future travels. With such sensitivity to light, images are no longer lost in the dark.
Harvard reunions with the roomies nearby in New York, Henry coming back from South Africa, Jen coming by New York. Visiting, as I have annually in the fall-winter since I’ve left, for the Game, visited the old dorm, tunnels, library, dining hall and Bernard. The snow-in-a-can still sticks to our fireplace brick, and they’ve put a new DVD return box in the Adams library.
Iron & Wine, our Halloween costume to mirror our namesakes. Made a flowy thing out of burgundy curtain and a tissue paper wine label (Gamay Rouge, made in California for most likeness as possible), and Jen went crazy attaching metal things to herself (utensils, safety pins, jewelry).
Jojo’s, the dark reddish coffee shop with pillows on the next block from home, joins my list of favorite study spots (with Koffee Too and the architecture library). Each has things to endear (window ledges, warmth, good chai, open space, sun-pouring windows, quiet/noise) and things that bother (dimness at night, cold, quiet/noise, crowds), and where I go at a particular moment depends on a number of these things.
Kites stole a corner of my affection,seeing hundreds of them in the sky in the big grassy field at El Morro, where we dispersed to the edges of the grass to the water and stood on walls, watching families fly so many that they felt like stars. Then flying them on the island of Vieques, standing in the ocean somewhere where the Atlantic merges with the Caribbean (we never could decide where we were standing), the first time I flew a kite in the ocean and the first time, at twenty four, G. flew a kite at all. Then in Vietnam where my favorite photograph is of my favorite person there looking up at one, as she told me how kites work, how you run and release and there it goes, up.
Learned the physical exam and will continue to find new ways to mess it up.
Music reached the height of addiction (this I realize when I get a little physically anxious studying without it). There’s little that can be felt that music doesn’t feel too. It’s kind of amazing that sounds can do that. Books, movies, even food makes sense; we make, as a society and individuals, associations with words, images, tastes; but why are songs in minor key darker and more somber than those in major? Why does a certain bow across a certain string make something in you move too? For that phenomenon…concerts include Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova, Built to Spill, Thao Nguyen, The National, Rachael Yamagata and Bon Iver.
New Mexico tickets bought one week before flying, for my oldest brother’s no-frills-but-beautiful wedding where I made my first speech for the person who raised me with such love and care.
Older, like every year. I can’t remember when I stopped feeling my age but this year was no different in that either.
Published Atrium, the first volume of our literary magazine. Its coming out party consisted of Bar pizza and wine, live music and readings from my classmates and people from the nursing and public health schools, and the majority of our class supporting.
Quit writing only about myself and started writing more about other people, granted because they made me feel or think. This happened because I learned a lot about people outside my friends and family, and in an entirely new setting. The chance to meet, even for a moment, such variety and depth in real people, even though I see the limitations (now and in the future), was the best thing med school’s given me so far.
Richard got married, my first very close friend from high school to do so. Despite this grown up rite, a long California drive and night of champagne and dancing with the girls whose lockers were next to mine for years made me feel how young we are, despite time passed.
Spring break in Puerto Rico was the best week of first year, obviously. Kayaking in a the bioluminescent bay, hiking in the rainforest, ferrying to the beach island of Vieques, lazying on a different beach each day and the hot tub at night. To be outdoors all the time, in weather that rendered lotion unnecessary, was insanely happy.
Turned carrots into carrot cake (“wait, does carrot cake have REAL carrots?” asked an innocent first year), after eating so much of Claire’s carrot cake, and apples into apple pie and flour into pie crust and so on. I love sugar.
Undid the epic knot in my hair, which was particularly unruly due to being wavy and very long this year, and required the long, assiduous work of several friends. 2008 was host to my first distinct hairstyle (that I liked, thus excepting my 6th grade perm). I’ll miss long wavy hair, even if tangled to the point of oblivion.
Vietnam was the place of many firsts: meeting my uncle and relatives, spending a summer abroad, completing the public health project, hot humid days on end without electricity, finding how quickly you adapt to sleeping on back-aching slabs of wood, seeing my dad’s countryside village, riding motobikes with strangers. Best first experience.
Writing has gone slowly: began half a dozen trains of thoughts, finished not close to one. Because I didn’t do it and because it was the one thing I wanted to do most, writing more is my one concrete resolution for this year.
Xiphoid process, an extension of the sternum, was what Allison came up with for an “X” word, when we played the alphabet game night driving through Colorado (after I told her it was not likely we’d spot a “xenophobe”--not being able to see anything, we just guessed at what we might see if it were daytime), showing how much we learned in anatomy.
Yale Med was my life, 2008 being my first full year of being a medical student. It’s hard work, and hard sometimes to learn and cooped up with yourself without being able to do much with it. Though as med students issues of balance, usefulness, and ability arise often, finding a swelling sense purpose in the people, science, and experience reminds me of how lucky I am.
Zero is how many times I talked to strangers, my one resolution for 2008. Oops.
Ayden met the world August 12, and brought us together for our first full family Thanksgiving celebration in snowy Colorado.
Bon Iver holed himself up in Wisconsin in the depths of winter to recover from a rough year, and ended up recording the ineffable album that’s been my constant companion in 2008’s winter, the sounds to my first snowfall and its cold snowy run past icy creeks and flake drenched roads. Wife & I were front row in concert, bought our first vinyl records (still in need of a player), complete with autographs due to the kindness of a roadie.
Chapel Street, where lies our new residence, is home. Our roomy kitchen’s been host to big planned group dinners, roomie meals, smatterings of guests, which means Nupur’s spice-filled veggie Indian with bread from scratch, my mom’s crack chicken and noodles with fish sauce and crispy 2 AM egg rolls, and Jen’s comfort Chinese and strawberry banana smoothies and friends cooking in our kitchen, pancakes and Korean rice and pastas.
Dani California was the theme song to our summer cross country drive from California to Connecticut: “Black bandanna, sweet Louisiana/robbin’ on a bank in the state of Indiana/Never made it up to Minnesota/North Dakota man was a gunnin' for the quota/Down in the Badlands she was savin the best for last/It only hurts when I laugh/gone too fast.” We didn’t rob in true Thelma & Louise style or see Louisiana, but we did bask in the surreal Badlands that, from seemingly nowhere become surreal canyon, and we DID drive straight through the entire span of Minnesota.
Elected Obama and for once felt good to be a part of the current events of this generation, and to know that long stuggles are worth something and will continue, because “what began in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.”
Friendship pushed me to act on what it really means to be there for those close to you, to put someone else before what can hurt you. Goes without saying that friendship requires give and take, but normally what’s good and happy for one is mutual for the other. It doesn’t usually require you to give up something really, really valuable. But this year, I let go of a friendship that I want in my life and will always tangibly miss, and worked everything in me to its worn edges to keep another. Knowing it’s best for people you care about is worth the effort, even if it doesn’t take away moments of difficult and sad, and there is the reward of a best friendship. Knowing this is easy; actually being tested and doing it wasn’t, for me. But that’s what 2008 gave me for the first time, and twice. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish circumstances had been easier, but given this, I’m glad for the challenge and the hope that I’m capable.
Guson’s camera, which I had to borrow for Puerto Rico because my faithful college digital camera died (which became obsolete within months but served me for years), got me to give myself an SLR, to document summer and future travels. With such sensitivity to light, images are no longer lost in the dark.
Harvard reunions with the roomies nearby in New York, Henry coming back from South Africa, Jen coming by New York. Visiting, as I have annually in the fall-winter since I’ve left, for the Game, visited the old dorm, tunnels, library, dining hall and Bernard. The snow-in-a-can still sticks to our fireplace brick, and they’ve put a new DVD return box in the Adams library.
Iron & Wine, our Halloween costume to mirror our namesakes. Made a flowy thing out of burgundy curtain and a tissue paper wine label (Gamay Rouge, made in California for most likeness as possible), and Jen went crazy attaching metal things to herself (utensils, safety pins, jewelry).
Jojo’s, the dark reddish coffee shop with pillows on the next block from home, joins my list of favorite study spots (with Koffee Too and the architecture library). Each has things to endear (window ledges, warmth, good chai, open space, sun-pouring windows, quiet/noise) and things that bother (dimness at night, cold, quiet/noise, crowds), and where I go at a particular moment depends on a number of these things.
Kites stole a corner of my affection,seeing hundreds of them in the sky in the big grassy field at El Morro, where we dispersed to the edges of the grass to the water and stood on walls, watching families fly so many that they felt like stars. Then flying them on the island of Vieques, standing in the ocean somewhere where the Atlantic merges with the Caribbean (we never could decide where we were standing), the first time I flew a kite in the ocean and the first time, at twenty four, G. flew a kite at all. Then in Vietnam where my favorite photograph is of my favorite person there looking up at one, as she told me how kites work, how you run and release and there it goes, up.
Learned the physical exam and will continue to find new ways to mess it up.
Music reached the height of addiction (this I realize when I get a little physically anxious studying without it). There’s little that can be felt that music doesn’t feel too. It’s kind of amazing that sounds can do that. Books, movies, even food makes sense; we make, as a society and individuals, associations with words, images, tastes; but why are songs in minor key darker and more somber than those in major? Why does a certain bow across a certain string make something in you move too? For that phenomenon…concerts include Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova, Built to Spill, Thao Nguyen, The National, Rachael Yamagata and Bon Iver.
New Mexico tickets bought one week before flying, for my oldest brother’s no-frills-but-beautiful wedding where I made my first speech for the person who raised me with such love and care.
Older, like every year. I can’t remember when I stopped feeling my age but this year was no different in that either.
Published Atrium, the first volume of our literary magazine. Its coming out party consisted of Bar pizza and wine, live music and readings from my classmates and people from the nursing and public health schools, and the majority of our class supporting.
Quit writing only about myself and started writing more about other people, granted because they made me feel or think. This happened because I learned a lot about people outside my friends and family, and in an entirely new setting. The chance to meet, even for a moment, such variety and depth in real people, even though I see the limitations (now and in the future), was the best thing med school’s given me so far.
Richard got married, my first very close friend from high school to do so. Despite this grown up rite, a long California drive and night of champagne and dancing with the girls whose lockers were next to mine for years made me feel how young we are, despite time passed.
Spring break in Puerto Rico was the best week of first year, obviously. Kayaking in a the bioluminescent bay, hiking in the rainforest, ferrying to the beach island of Vieques, lazying on a different beach each day and the hot tub at night. To be outdoors all the time, in weather that rendered lotion unnecessary, was insanely happy.
Turned carrots into carrot cake (“wait, does carrot cake have REAL carrots?” asked an innocent first year), after eating so much of Claire’s carrot cake, and apples into apple pie and flour into pie crust and so on. I love sugar.
Undid the epic knot in my hair, which was particularly unruly due to being wavy and very long this year, and required the long, assiduous work of several friends. 2008 was host to my first distinct hairstyle (that I liked, thus excepting my 6th grade perm). I’ll miss long wavy hair, even if tangled to the point of oblivion.
Vietnam was the place of many firsts: meeting my uncle and relatives, spending a summer abroad, completing the public health project, hot humid days on end without electricity, finding how quickly you adapt to sleeping on back-aching slabs of wood, seeing my dad’s countryside village, riding motobikes with strangers. Best first experience.
Writing has gone slowly: began half a dozen trains of thoughts, finished not close to one. Because I didn’t do it and because it was the one thing I wanted to do most, writing more is my one concrete resolution for this year.
Xiphoid process, an extension of the sternum, was what Allison came up with for an “X” word, when we played the alphabet game night driving through Colorado (after I told her it was not likely we’d spot a “xenophobe”--not being able to see anything, we just guessed at what we might see if it were daytime), showing how much we learned in anatomy.
Yale Med was my life, 2008 being my first full year of being a medical student. It’s hard work, and hard sometimes to learn and cooped up with yourself without being able to do much with it. Though as med students issues of balance, usefulness, and ability arise often, finding a swelling sense purpose in the people, science, and experience reminds me of how lucky I am.
Zero is how many times I talked to strangers, my one resolution for 2008. Oops.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
transition
Synaesthesia describes one sense stimulating another, and in my mind, how they get mixed up; how inhaling the lingering warmth of a pillow recalls the sun's texture long after it's sunk for the day.
I thought for a long time about how to make this transition, mostly about what I wanted to do with my old entries. My instinct was to import my Livejournal, begun in April 2004, to a new site. But after settling on this name and URL, I looked at the fresh, empty pages and thought maybe it would be better, and easier, to move on.
But I've never been built to forget, or to compartmentalize. So since there is no easy way to import my old journal to blogspot, I copied and pasted every old entry into this new blog (I did find a program that purported to import, but as computer illiterate as I am, figuring this out would take as long as my way). With each entry, I had to change the date to reflect when I wrote it, and after posting thirty odd entries, blogspot made me word-verify each entry (and some of those are so hard to read, I feel like I'm taking a test). I'm uselessly adaptive when it comes to doing monotonous tasks for extended periods of time, so that I can finish something I've set my mind to, even though it could be done more efficiently. Though the day, month and year of these past entries are accurate, the hour and minute reflect the time I recently posted them. So I traversed 4 and a half years in an hour and a half, as you can see by the 2:53 AM posting of the first entry, and the 4:25 AM posting of the one before this. I'm up this late because I was compelled to be, and because there is finally nowhere to go tomorrow.
I left everything as it was. Kept the silly beginning posts, when I wrote often and about nothing at all; the less frequent, longer posts that were also nothings, just more; the painful ones where I was at my worst and the ones with memories past. Still, I am making the change to another place to store these things. Things changed in the switch. The pictures that disappeared after I graduated college, leaving behind the storage space they gave us, now appear as little boxes. Font and color and width are different. To preserve certain things, I had to change format. For a long time I had an entry title, then a photograph, then a titled link that you clicked to see the actual entry. I can't do the titled link thing here, so sometimes I put whatever words were in the link in parentheses after the entry. If I felt it was important; I didn't do this for all of them. Didn't think that was straying too much from the original, since in any case I had to change what the original looked/felt like. This probably makes no sense unless you've seen my old entries on Livejournal (which are still there, where they started). Couldn't transfer comments from the few & faithful; those stay on LJ as well.
I got pretty proficient at copying and pasting, even after word verification was required for each entry, so the old words flew by me. But having to type out each title, write in the date, and scroll through to highlight made for a re-experience. Even though everything is felt differently, slightly or by a whole lot, it's still very much there.
A very good friend told me on New Year's Eve that she reads life too symbolically, that she takes everything as a sign to apply to her life. She thought it was a bad thing, to let the outside and inanimate influence how she feels, but I think in the end these things come from us. A couple weeks before break I sprained my right ankle running in the rain (not from one motion but from repetitive accommodation of slippery road), so that it hurt to just walk, and it recently recovered around Christmastime. On New Year's Eve, in an excited dance move a very large man brought his foot down on my left, and the pain I thought would wear away slid into the new year, in the form of a bulging purple fourth toe.
And so while I look forward to new things, more changes, bettering and likely lapses and more bettering, with this blog and with 2009...I also know I carry everything. They don't completely shed their old coverings but they find another kind of place, and it's all connected by synaesthesia. Someday I'd like to more subtly, accurately express this in a story.
It's near dawn now and I'm growing tired, the effects of the evening's chai tea wearing away. This time and from now on I don't have to change the date on my automatically dated post, and so here's to continuing.
I thought for a long time about how to make this transition, mostly about what I wanted to do with my old entries. My instinct was to import my Livejournal, begun in April 2004, to a new site. But after settling on this name and URL, I looked at the fresh, empty pages and thought maybe it would be better, and easier, to move on.
But I've never been built to forget, or to compartmentalize. So since there is no easy way to import my old journal to blogspot, I copied and pasted every old entry into this new blog (I did find a program that purported to import, but as computer illiterate as I am, figuring this out would take as long as my way). With each entry, I had to change the date to reflect when I wrote it, and after posting thirty odd entries, blogspot made me word-verify each entry (and some of those are so hard to read, I feel like I'm taking a test). I'm uselessly adaptive when it comes to doing monotonous tasks for extended periods of time, so that I can finish something I've set my mind to, even though it could be done more efficiently. Though the day, month and year of these past entries are accurate, the hour and minute reflect the time I recently posted them. So I traversed 4 and a half years in an hour and a half, as you can see by the 2:53 AM posting of the first entry, and the 4:25 AM posting of the one before this. I'm up this late because I was compelled to be, and because there is finally nowhere to go tomorrow.
I left everything as it was. Kept the silly beginning posts, when I wrote often and about nothing at all; the less frequent, longer posts that were also nothings, just more; the painful ones where I was at my worst and the ones with memories past. Still, I am making the change to another place to store these things. Things changed in the switch. The pictures that disappeared after I graduated college, leaving behind the storage space they gave us, now appear as little boxes. Font and color and width are different. To preserve certain things, I had to change format. For a long time I had an entry title, then a photograph, then a titled link that you clicked to see the actual entry. I can't do the titled link thing here, so sometimes I put whatever words were in the link in parentheses after the entry. If I felt it was important; I didn't do this for all of them. Didn't think that was straying too much from the original, since in any case I had to change what the original looked/felt like. This probably makes no sense unless you've seen my old entries on Livejournal (which are still there, where they started). Couldn't transfer comments from the few & faithful; those stay on LJ as well.
I got pretty proficient at copying and pasting, even after word verification was required for each entry, so the old words flew by me. But having to type out each title, write in the date, and scroll through to highlight made for a re-experience. Even though everything is felt differently, slightly or by a whole lot, it's still very much there.
A very good friend told me on New Year's Eve that she reads life too symbolically, that she takes everything as a sign to apply to her life. She thought it was a bad thing, to let the outside and inanimate influence how she feels, but I think in the end these things come from us. A couple weeks before break I sprained my right ankle running in the rain (not from one motion but from repetitive accommodation of slippery road), so that it hurt to just walk, and it recently recovered around Christmastime. On New Year's Eve, in an excited dance move a very large man brought his foot down on my left, and the pain I thought would wear away slid into the new year, in the form of a bulging purple fourth toe.
And so while I look forward to new things, more changes, bettering and likely lapses and more bettering, with this blog and with 2009...I also know I carry everything. They don't completely shed their old coverings but they find another kind of place, and it's all connected by synaesthesia. Someday I'd like to more subtly, accurately express this in a story.
It's near dawn now and I'm growing tired, the effects of the evening's chai tea wearing away. This time and from now on I don't have to change the date on my automatically dated post, and so here's to continuing.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
maggie
This semester I pathetically finished one novel (Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler), only because I read about a third of it while traveling home for break (which, with train ride + subway ride + airtrain + plane flight, all in all takes a crazy 12 hours). Next semester it’ll be short stories, because losing the flow of a book by stealing a few pages here and there when I’m not intellectually or physically or emotionally drained (rarely) pretty much sucks the life out of it. When references were made to little things that came before, I had to neurotically search for the first mention of them because I couldn’t remember. Despite this, the character of Maggie emerged with palpable tenderness, and is now one I hold close. While the story was engaging enough and its feelings nuanced, and there were moments of the kind of writing that surprises with descriptions unusual and perfectly accurate (do you know what I mean? When something you’ve felt is encapsulated exactly right, in a way you’ve never thought before, and you wonder how it can be so far from your vocabulary and thought, and yet so right)…most of that wasn’t too special for me. For me it was Maggie.
Even though she’s a married woman in her late forties, with two grown children and a whole life to look back on and contemplate, in many ways she still lives by a philosophy cultivated before experience set in. To that quality in her I’m attached, if only because I foresee the same for myself, for better or worse. These are the things I love in Maggie, not necessarily because they are good things but because they give shape to strange things I’ve felt, whose tangibility I sometimes question. And more than a relation to myself, the value lies in knowing that they exist, on their own, elsewhere.
disheveled/clumsy: Maggie digs through her purse trying to find the same things that have inhabited it for years, because she’s never formed a system where each thing has its place. I often tell myself that I should just designate a certain coat pocket for my keys, phone, etc., so that I always know where to look, but when it comes down to the moment I reach for whatever feels convenient, which isn’t consistent. Maggie’s husband, Ira, and children sometimes perceive her as bumbling, silly in a way: “She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.” I’m a little more straightlaced than that, but I can relate to having a messy demeanor, to being not-put-together. And while Ira sees it as not taking life seriously enough, I think it’s that Maggie takes so much to heart, it’s hard to find focus.
not too good at cultivating:Along the same lines, Maggie doesn’t have a knack for taking care of things, like her homegrown tomatoes that are always “bulbous” despite years of trying different kinds. She senses that people attribute the failure to Maggie herself, with her “knobby, fumbling way.” I’m awful at taking care of plants and my possessions in general (much to the chagrin of B. who helps me with each of my computer problems and N. who hates the torn insides of my peacoat), and I worry sometimes about whether this will translate to other things that require care, whether it does have to do with something internal.
she takes care of people: I think Maggie’s scared of the same thing because she tries really hard to take care of people. Instead of going to college, she continues her high school job as an aide in a nursing home, where concrete tasks make her feel capable and she knows when to laugh or nod during conversations. She tries to take care of those around her even when it’s not up to her or outside of her capacity…it’s a significant problem, leading to misunderstandings and misplaced feelings. I think it’s natural to try to impact others’ happiness in part because it affects our own, but Maggie can’t let go of the interconnections.
guilt causes overthinking, and vice versa: She feels bad about things, all the time. When placing a long distance call from another person’s home she considers leaving them some change. After playing a prank on a bad driver, she’s worried he’s been overly affected and makes her husband go back and check on him. Allison once said that she thinks guilt is a good thing, a sign of consideration for others. I think this has truth but I think, for me, guilt can be a kind of copout, a way of trying to keep your good after you’ve done something bad. Maggie, I think, is better than that; her regrets don’t stem from initial selfishness but instead from good intentions gone wrong, or from human responses. Even when she consciously sets out to right her ways, she’s horrible at not repeating her mistakes, because her characteristics are so ingrained, and man do I know something about that.
emotionally neurotic and impulsive: Maggie debates every emotional maneuver, and then in the moment her instincts take over, and they’re not always good ones. An image or thought can take hold of her so completely that she will feel that someone she doesn’t actually know is the most wonderful person she’s ever known, and it will be true because she feels it so.
easily affected: She forms incomprehensibly strong, oft impulsive connections to people removed from her, and she’s easily moved. In a hospital waiting room she encounters an elderly couple and across from them a burly man in coveralls. A nurse is asking the near deaf elderly man for a urine sample, and has to shout, “Pee in this cup!” The elderly woman is visibly embarrassed, explaining how deaf her husband has become, and Maggie doesn’t know what to say. The burly man shifts his weight and comments on how funny it is, he can pick up the nurse’s voice, but really, can’t make out her words at all. At this Maggie tears up. He asks her if she’s okay: “She couldn’t tell him it was his kindness that had undone her—such delicacy, in such an unlikely-looking person.”
acutely aware of presence and loss: On the loss of her cat: “His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence….But here was something even stupider: A month or so later, when cold weather set in, Maggie switched off the basement dehumidifier as she did every year and even that absence had struck her. She had mourned in the most personal way the silencing of the steady, faithful whir that used to thrum the floorboards.”
can’t give up even when it could be the right thing to do: She can’t give up on people she loves, to a fault, because she relies on what she knows they feel, and knows that they feel genuinely and kindly; rather than their actions and words, which are often not so kind. Her husband says that she believes the people she loves are better than they are. I’ve been told I do this too, but I don’t think it’s such an altruistic thing. It stems from the fact that I know my own faults but I like to think I’m still passably okay, and to believe this requires understanding others’ faults. At one point Maggie wonders whether she’s been a bad mother, too forgiving of her children because she remembers so strongly what it’s like to be a child. I really believe in understanding other people’s context, to know why flaws exist and persist, probably because I can get so complicated that I need that sort of understanding from other people. Sometimes, though, in allowing so much room for complexity, you miss the basics that are as much a part of people as the layers.
she believes in romance: Not just the pretty things in the right place romance, but the idea that through all the crap and non-ideals, people will love each other enough to make it work and be consciously happy. Even when she doubts this for herself she thinks she’s just missed out and it’s still to be had in this world. Sometimes you might get the sense that Maggie’s trying to find refuge, making it easier on herself by always trying and not accepting the hurtful truth. But who’s to say what’s reality, or that her refuge is any easier than the accepted reality (sometimes it’s damn harder)? In my own experience there’s been no shortage of crap and non-ideals but I’m grateful for the incredible amount of good that comes along in spite of and because of. My past connections, few and not straightforward but valuable and full, have played part in shaping what I can and should give, and what I seek, want, need. And it’s funny, this makes me think both how hard it will be find, and how amazing it will be to someday have.
**
I don’t know if things really work out for Maggie, and whether this is because of all the above. I get the sense that as you’re reading, you might get annoyed with Maggie’s meddling and desire to right things that aren’t meant to be controlled. You might want to tell her that sometimes beauty is past. You might want to stop her from perpetuating her poorly implemented good intentions, to dread the impending disasters that end in large disappointment for her and those she loves. But that doesn’t work, because it’s not about how fixing flaws would make life easier to accept, or to live. It’s about facing the difficult because you’re trying to preserve value, even if it’s stupid and mistaken and fails. I don’t know if it’s right, but for Maggie it’s true.
Even though she’s a married woman in her late forties, with two grown children and a whole life to look back on and contemplate, in many ways she still lives by a philosophy cultivated before experience set in. To that quality in her I’m attached, if only because I foresee the same for myself, for better or worse. These are the things I love in Maggie, not necessarily because they are good things but because they give shape to strange things I’ve felt, whose tangibility I sometimes question. And more than a relation to myself, the value lies in knowing that they exist, on their own, elsewhere.
disheveled/clumsy: Maggie digs through her purse trying to find the same things that have inhabited it for years, because she’s never formed a system where each thing has its place. I often tell myself that I should just designate a certain coat pocket for my keys, phone, etc., so that I always know where to look, but when it comes down to the moment I reach for whatever feels convenient, which isn’t consistent. Maggie’s husband, Ira, and children sometimes perceive her as bumbling, silly in a way: “She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.” I’m a little more straightlaced than that, but I can relate to having a messy demeanor, to being not-put-together. And while Ira sees it as not taking life seriously enough, I think it’s that Maggie takes so much to heart, it’s hard to find focus.
not too good at cultivating:Along the same lines, Maggie doesn’t have a knack for taking care of things, like her homegrown tomatoes that are always “bulbous” despite years of trying different kinds. She senses that people attribute the failure to Maggie herself, with her “knobby, fumbling way.” I’m awful at taking care of plants and my possessions in general (much to the chagrin of B. who helps me with each of my computer problems and N. who hates the torn insides of my peacoat), and I worry sometimes about whether this will translate to other things that require care, whether it does have to do with something internal.
she takes care of people: I think Maggie’s scared of the same thing because she tries really hard to take care of people. Instead of going to college, she continues her high school job as an aide in a nursing home, where concrete tasks make her feel capable and she knows when to laugh or nod during conversations. She tries to take care of those around her even when it’s not up to her or outside of her capacity…it’s a significant problem, leading to misunderstandings and misplaced feelings. I think it’s natural to try to impact others’ happiness in part because it affects our own, but Maggie can’t let go of the interconnections.
guilt causes overthinking, and vice versa: She feels bad about things, all the time. When placing a long distance call from another person’s home she considers leaving them some change. After playing a prank on a bad driver, she’s worried he’s been overly affected and makes her husband go back and check on him. Allison once said that she thinks guilt is a good thing, a sign of consideration for others. I think this has truth but I think, for me, guilt can be a kind of copout, a way of trying to keep your good after you’ve done something bad. Maggie, I think, is better than that; her regrets don’t stem from initial selfishness but instead from good intentions gone wrong, or from human responses. Even when she consciously sets out to right her ways, she’s horrible at not repeating her mistakes, because her characteristics are so ingrained, and man do I know something about that.
emotionally neurotic and impulsive: Maggie debates every emotional maneuver, and then in the moment her instincts take over, and they’re not always good ones. An image or thought can take hold of her so completely that she will feel that someone she doesn’t actually know is the most wonderful person she’s ever known, and it will be true because she feels it so.
easily affected: She forms incomprehensibly strong, oft impulsive connections to people removed from her, and she’s easily moved. In a hospital waiting room she encounters an elderly couple and across from them a burly man in coveralls. A nurse is asking the near deaf elderly man for a urine sample, and has to shout, “Pee in this cup!” The elderly woman is visibly embarrassed, explaining how deaf her husband has become, and Maggie doesn’t know what to say. The burly man shifts his weight and comments on how funny it is, he can pick up the nurse’s voice, but really, can’t make out her words at all. At this Maggie tears up. He asks her if she’s okay: “She couldn’t tell him it was his kindness that had undone her—such delicacy, in such an unlikely-looking person.”
acutely aware of presence and loss: On the loss of her cat: “His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence….But here was something even stupider: A month or so later, when cold weather set in, Maggie switched off the basement dehumidifier as she did every year and even that absence had struck her. She had mourned in the most personal way the silencing of the steady, faithful whir that used to thrum the floorboards.”
can’t give up even when it could be the right thing to do: She can’t give up on people she loves, to a fault, because she relies on what she knows they feel, and knows that they feel genuinely and kindly; rather than their actions and words, which are often not so kind. Her husband says that she believes the people she loves are better than they are. I’ve been told I do this too, but I don’t think it’s such an altruistic thing. It stems from the fact that I know my own faults but I like to think I’m still passably okay, and to believe this requires understanding others’ faults. At one point Maggie wonders whether she’s been a bad mother, too forgiving of her children because she remembers so strongly what it’s like to be a child. I really believe in understanding other people’s context, to know why flaws exist and persist, probably because I can get so complicated that I need that sort of understanding from other people. Sometimes, though, in allowing so much room for complexity, you miss the basics that are as much a part of people as the layers.
she believes in romance: Not just the pretty things in the right place romance, but the idea that through all the crap and non-ideals, people will love each other enough to make it work and be consciously happy. Even when she doubts this for herself she thinks she’s just missed out and it’s still to be had in this world. Sometimes you might get the sense that Maggie’s trying to find refuge, making it easier on herself by always trying and not accepting the hurtful truth. But who’s to say what’s reality, or that her refuge is any easier than the accepted reality (sometimes it’s damn harder)? In my own experience there’s been no shortage of crap and non-ideals but I’m grateful for the incredible amount of good that comes along in spite of and because of. My past connections, few and not straightforward but valuable and full, have played part in shaping what I can and should give, and what I seek, want, need. And it’s funny, this makes me think both how hard it will be find, and how amazing it will be to someday have.
**
I don’t know if things really work out for Maggie, and whether this is because of all the above. I get the sense that as you’re reading, you might get annoyed with Maggie’s meddling and desire to right things that aren’t meant to be controlled. You might want to tell her that sometimes beauty is past. You might want to stop her from perpetuating her poorly implemented good intentions, to dread the impending disasters that end in large disappointment for her and those she loves. But that doesn’t work, because it’s not about how fixing flaws would make life easier to accept, or to live. It’s about facing the difficult because you’re trying to preserve value, even if it’s stupid and mistaken and fails. I don’t know if it’s right, but for Maggie it’s true.
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