Thinks

Cal wasn't ever any good at goodbyes.

He just grins awkwardly, tosses some half-baked cliche over his shoulder, and scoots away as quickly as he can. Goodbyes are painful, no matter how long the ensuing absence.

Deep inside, he thinks that maybe there is a chance that this will be the last goodbye, that something might go terribly wrong.

He also thinks that maybe he reads the paper a little too much.

But he knows that there are infinitely more things that could go wrong than the things that needed to go right.

Cal thinks about Captain Ed Murphy and his law.

He wonders what would happen if he died. How many people had he forgotten to kiss goodbye? Oops.

In his mind, Cal remembers that goodbyes are always permanent because time doesn't stop changing people just because they've gone away, and since they're away and time passes, they change, but you're not there to see it, so the next time you see them, no matter how long it's been, they're not the same people you said goodbye to.

Those people are dead.

Cal wonders how many times he's died.

Sometimes, he thinks he's always dying.

He's too busy dying to live.

How about that?

I'm Not A Writer

When I was in the sixth grade, I wrote a twenty-two-page-long story about a lost prince named Damian who reclaims his (dead) father's throne. The whole shebang took place in the land of Tithaus, a place of unrest and lots of monologue-prone people with swords and cloaks.

Last winter break, I wrote a gajillion-page-long (help me out here, Tonya) story about a dude named Saul who starts a revolution in the middle of a snowy winter and then ends up killing himself. Sort of.

Last summer, I wrote a twenty-page-long story about some guy who runs around in the woods setting things on fire before (unfortunately) setting himself on fire.

I'm sure that all of these are related somehow.

The influence of The Lord of the Rings is pretty obvious. I am forever stuck in a land of bows and arrows (and sometimes magic). I once tried writing about some guy in the Army. That one made it to about thirty pages before dying an abrupt death of over-complicated plot.

The thing is, I don't think I'm a writer anymore. A writer... well, writes. I haven't written a piece of fiction I've liked since the sixth grade, and I don't really even think that counts anymore. Blogging isn't writing so much as it is typing whatever comes to mind and hoping that it makes sense. Essay writing isn't writing so much as it is gritting my teeth and plowing through structural criticism and passive voice. I feel like writing should be both spontaneous and critical. Right now, mine is neither.

I haven't stopped dreaming, though. Definitely not in the literal sense. I get up early because I can't go back to sleep and find myself staring at a blank piece of paper, which was once inviting but now is nothing more than processed wood.

In a sense, I'm scared to stop blogging because then I'd really be writing absolutely nothing. Days and days would pass without words. Weeks, maybe. That's truly terrifying. So for now, I suppose, this blog will go on.

How it will go on is an entirely different matter.

The Presidential Placemat

I (once again) have packed far too early and am sitting here with absolutely nothing substantive with which to entertain myself. I guess I'll just talk about The Presidential Placemat.

I have no idea where my mother found the many strange (but all somehow educational) placemats of my childhood that we still have stuffed into our pantry. They all miraculously appeared and disappeared beneath our breakfasts every morning, gleaming dully under the yellowed kitchen table plastic in the light of the $25 Tiffany lamp. Every bleary-eyed morning was spent staring sightlessly at these placemats as they paraded by under our eggs and sausages. There was one with a map of the United States plastered on one side in truly alarming colors. Little black dashes took the place of the state names. Flip it over and little black dashes replaced the capital names.

Our placemats appeared to be on permanent rotation until one day, I noticed that my placemat hadn't changed in several weeks. I stared. Forty-two white dudes stared back with varying amounts of animosity.

Such was the advent of The Presidential Placemat.

Every morning at breakfast, I'd stare at the presidents. I decided that William Henry Harrison did look rather frail. Taft did look large enough to get stuck in a bathtub. I learned every president's first, middle, and last name. After a while, though, the beady eyes began to creep me out. One day, I took the placemat and flipped it over. Over the years, I've read every little box at least a dozen times during tense meals at the kitchen table.

Off the top of my head, I remember that Franklin Pierce was responsible for Matthew C. Perry's trip to Japan, that Buchanan was the only unmarried president (interesting, that), and that there is a punctuation error in the little box talking about John Quincy Adams that has never failed to darken my foul mood.

I didn't realize how much of that information I'd somehow assimilated through this strange form of breakfast hypnopaedia until I took AP U.S. History during my junior year in high school. Some things I just knew. Most of it was really strange, useless information. Like how short James Madison was. But others were important. Whenever people think about presidential assassination, they think about Lincoln. Or JFK.

Were Garfield and McKinley so unimportant?

I thought it was common knowledge. Apparently not. The Presidential Placemat hurled me into a strange world of unconscious knowledge from unconscious learning. Of course Benjamin Harrison was William Henry Harrison's grandson. Of course John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826. It all made sense.

Strangely enough, The Presidential Placemat made me realize that learning was everything all the time. Whether unconscious or not, some part of whatever it is that I'm doing ends up sticking in my head for better or for worse. That's both exhilarating and terrifying.

The Presidential Placemat is in my dorm room, resting up against my bookshelf. I'm not entirely sure why I asked my mother to bring it to me, but it's here to stay. It's a sort of childhood relic. Old, familiar, comfortable. I still leave the forty-two white dudes face down, though. I can't stand the accusation.

My Life as a Fish Murderer

Homicidal tendencies manifested themselves early on in my childhood.

In other words, I was a fish murderer.

Twin cichlids christened Long Beach and Los Angeles by my then-five-year-old brother were the very first non-human members of the Chen household. Before my bloody entrance into this world, Long Beach and Los Angeles laid a crop of eggs. When the time came, Long Beach and Los Angeles committed a most gruesome infanticide of massive proportions, devouring all of their young within moments of their hatching.

And so it was, that on a dark and stormy night marked by rolling thunder and silently screaming fish babies, I made my grand entrance into this world. This did not bode well for my relations with the rest of this earth’s fauna.

Long Beach died soon after my birth (another macabre indication of my murderous tendencies), so I was raised alongside Los Angeles, who by this time was getting on in fish years. I ran over to the fish tank every day after my brother finished playing piano in order to watch him tap fish food into the lonely fish tank. I enjoyed sniffing the fish food, the sharp tangy scent reaching far beyond my olfactory bulb to my amygdala, setting off all sorts of primal instincts, the least of which involved throwing myself onto the floor and thrashing about like a beached whale. I became part fish.

As time passed, we determined that Los Angeles was lonely and that we should present unto him a worthy companion. My practical father decided on a garbage fish. The moment this first garbage fish latched onto the clear walls of the tank and I saw it sucking away algae, I knew that it had to go. I named him Oscar.

Los Angeles clearly shared my opinions on this new occupant of the tank and attacked it with a ferocity the world had not seen since the Infanticide of 1995. When I found Oscar floating belly up a few weeks later, I knew that we had been successful.

A string of garbage fish followed, all of them christened Oscar. They all met the same fate and toilet-flush funeral.

Los Angeles was now pushing thirteen human years and probably sixty million billion fish years, but in no way was his reign of The Tank questionable. My father decided that bringing in more cichlids would rein in this fiery temper. He was, unfortunately, a little too correct.

He took my teenaged brother and me to the tropical fish store one more time, and we each picked out a brightly-colored fish. Mine had a purple head and a yellow tail. I named him (or her—I really had no idea) Laker and congratulated myself on my clever word play. My brother picked the biggest, meanest fish out of the tank and named it Tangy after its brilliant orange color. I held the fish during the car ride back home, plastic bag pooling on my lap as Tangy and Laker twitched around.

We released them with two matching plops into the fuzzy, algae-polluted world of Los Angeles and waited.

Tangy dove straight for Los Angeles, mouth wide open.

What the hell? Los Angeles thought, racing to greet this rambunctious upstart, speed by no means diminished by age.

What followed was a battle of epic aqueous proportions. Round and round they circled, with Laker hovering uncertainly under some plastic seaweed. Once, he stumbled into Tangy’s path, and a sharp nip sent him spinning. The tangle of washed-out yellow and flashing orange continued, and even when my brother left the tank for some more violent game console entertainment, I remained on my knees, nose pressed to the glass, eyes wide.

Ultimately, this was not a battle decided that day. Or the day after that. Or even in the weeks or months that followed. I felt like I was in the Coliseum watching my noble gladiator rise to meet the challenge of a young, fresh-faced warrior from the countryside. I was very much entertained, yet a knot of worry settled itself in my stomach. Was there a chance I could lose?

No. Never.

Laker was the first to go, floating belly-up one morning as I came down for breakfast. I think I may have cried. I was twelve years old.

That left the two survivors a battle to the death.

Each day when my brother would feed them, I’d watch and try to judge who had the upper hand. It was never clear, both pairs of fins pumping madly, mouths equally quick in their darting motions.

In the end, the result was determined beyond the physical abilities of my two fighting cocks. The bulb on the tank light fizzled out one night, and I awoke the next morning to find a pale yellow smudge floating motionless in the plastic shrubbery, fins rigid, eyes wide and unseeing. I refused to believe that it was possible, but the very much alive orange streak that darted by, tail rippling tauntingly in the invisible current, confirmed my worst fears.

Los Angeles had indeed been frozen to death, and down the toilet he went to be washed out with the rest of the city’s filth.

I vehemently refused my father’s offer to replace Los Angeles. Nothing could replace Los Angeles. The stubborn old fish had lived to be older than I was. Nothing would ever beat that. Every time I finished playing piano now, I glared daggers at Tangy, the flaming orange fish from the burning pits of hell. I started trying to starve the darn thing out, shaking out only a few pieces of fish food into the tank every day, but that only made it meaner, made those hideous eyes bulge even farther out of that detestable skull.

Tangy stubbornly remained our only pet for the next year or so while I schemed away. I pretended that the orange salmon my mother cooked every month was the baked body of the meanest fish ever to swim the earth. I ruthlessly tapped the plastic sides of the tank, taking a sadistic pleasure in the frenzy of the orange devil. I had dreams about squeezing the life from the slimy thing’s lungs.

Then one day, I figured it out. The perfect murder. It was in the middle of a cold and hard January, long after Christmas had passed, but not so long that the ghosts of a cheerful time didn’t lurk around the shrouds of the past, flaunting the passage of time. My late-onset homicidal inner Scrooge snuck to the fish tank one night with only the light of the tank to guide me through the tangle of the living room couches.

I glared at the orange fish. It glared right back.

You’ve got no idea what you’ve got coming for you. I thought.

Bring it on. It replied.

I reached up slowly, slowly, slowly.

And snapped off the light.

I made my way through the darkness back to my room easily, as if guided by a familiar current.

Pictures after the jump:

Why I Don't Like Driving

I only started driving about a month ago, mostly because even my parents felt it was time for this layabout eighteen-year-old to get her license. It's not as if I didn't want my license. I just kept telling myself I was too busy to study for the test, that I could always take it later. And later. And later.

I didn't get my permit until only about a month before I graduated from high school. I drove to school with my mother in the passenger seat, warily avoiding the crazy morning rush. I got my license over the summer after employing some rather devious means of preparing for the driving test. I should have been excited with this new-found freedom. But I wasn't. Not really.

First off, I didn't have access to a car. All I'd really done was commandeer my father's car on the days he worked from home. When he was at work, well, I was stuck. Second, I didn't have insurance for almost a month, which pretty much nixed it all. Third, I really had no place to go. I wasn't allowed on the freeways. I had virtually no friends left in town, no really cool place around that I desperately needed to get to. I really had nothing to do except maybe drive to the library and bum about for a bit there.

I'd say that these are all pretty solid reasons for not driving, but they don't really explain why I don't like to drive.

To be honest, I'm terrified of driving.

A while ago, my mother was hit by a car backing out of its parking stall at our local Wal-Mart. It was going what, ten miles an hour at most? It scared the living daylights out of me. My mother had been hit by a car. The physical repercussions of that incident lasted a while for her, and I wondered: If ten miles an hour can do that, what would happen if I hit someone while going twenty-five? Forty? Sixty?

I don't like driving because I'm scared I'm going to do something stupid like reach over to my phone and think: Oh, I'm only going to change the song that's playing. No big deal. But then it is. I'm scared I'll misjudge the distance to the crosswalk and stomp on the brakes a little too late because I was distracted by what's come up over the radio. I'm scared that one day, I'll get too lazy about turn signals, and I'll just ease over into the next lane without even bothering to glance at my mirrors and see the biker on my shoulder.

Yes. I'm scared.

Maybe it's because I'm inexperienced. Maybe it's because I have terrible dreams. Or maybe it's just because I have a deep character flaw that has yet to see the light of day.

Maybe it's all of that.

All I know is that I'm scared.

And I'd rather be scared than sorry.

Strange Encounters

Today was the first day I heard Pastor John MacArthur speak. I was expecting some tiny little shriveled old man; after all, the dude is seventy something years old. But nope. No shriveled old guy. He spent his entire sermon defending the criticism that his Strange Fire conference and book created. It was pretty compelling - just the way he spoke and formulated his arguments. I don't think I've ever realized how much Sunday sermons could be a learning experience.

I ran into an old acquaintance of my brother's today. He was actually my ride to church, but I didn't realize he was from Cerritos until we got to the awkward, obligatory "Oh, so where are you from"s that are so common in a large public college. Once we got past that part, though, it was pretty surreal-they'd known each other since middle school.

We ended up talking over lunch, and he told stories I'm pretty sure my brother would not appreciate... Stories that will probably take a long, long while before they appear on here.

Why I Run

A while ago, I read this comic about running by The Oatmeal. It made me think.

A few days ago, this article titled "OK, You're a Runner. Get Over It" was published in The Wall Street Journal. It irritated me.

For the past week, I've been laid up with a sprained ankle (obtained by falling gracefully down the stairs with a dying sigh), so I've grown increasingly irritated with my inability to throw on some shoes and go out for a run. Today, I decided to forget everything I ever learned about RICE in my four years of high school cross country and run to the local CVS to buy athletic tape for my ankle so I could actually walk down the stairs around campus without holding up traffic. Perfectly logical.

I made about halfway down The Hill before I felt like screaming. And then I kept running. I'm still not entirely sure why.

I joined my high school cross country team the summer before my freshman year. I threw a fit the night before my mother drove me to practice at 6:15 AM in the middle of my summer vacation. I hated running. Why did I have to join cross country? All they did was run.

But my brother had run cross country in high school. So of course I would run cross country in high school.

I went to practice.

I stopped halfway through the workout and pretended to tie my shoe so I could catch my breath. Several shirtless guys raced passed me, and I lost count of how many times I'd been lapped. I was incredibly embarrassed.

But I went to practice the next day. And the day after that. I learned that no matter how hard you try, your socks will get soaked if you run greens at six in the morning. I learned that little puddles won't kill you. I learned that mud might. I learned that it's okay to be left behind to run on your own--when else will you find the peace of empty streets in a bustling suburb? I learned that after a while, everyone running is hurting too bad to care how slow or fast you're going.

I ran my first two-mile race at the end of the summer to a whopping 18:47. I was so happy to have finished at all that I didn't care that my friends were running fourteens and fifteens.

Have you ever been to a cross country race?

It's really something. People line up, eyes straining to catch sight of the first pack, cheering as they flash through this human gauntlet. After most of the runners pass, the crowd thins out, but always, a faithful few remain for the stragglers, the one the coaches aren't yelling at.

I don't know what's better: being part of that crowd, or being that one last runner.

And so somehow, I started loving cross country. And running.

I don't think it's something meant for explanation. Running just becomes a part of you in weird ways, just like when you realize that car turn signals don't flash in time with the clicky noise they make and the world suddenly makes sense.

I know I certainly don't run to look good. I look awful when I run, shoulders hunched, giant knee braces pinching tiny knees above monstrous calf muscles. No. I definitely don't decide to go parade down the street with my thighs jiggling all over the place to look good.

But do I feel good?

Heck yes.

Storyteller

I've always wanted to be a storyteller.

That's why I started this blog: I wanted this to be a sort of outlet for my increasingly disjointed memories and sudden rushes of fictional inspiration. There's a reason I don't just go around posting the link to my latest post on Facebook accompanied by the words "CHECK THIS OUT" or "I STARTED A BLOG, GUYSSSS." A lot of this blog is intensely personal, and as much as I try to distance myself from what I write, the more I realize that there is no writing without at least a little emotional investment.

Lately, I've been feeling that hardly anything I post on here has meaning anymore. It's all just become a bit of an online diary. Oh look! Pictures of my dog, followed by pithy comments about her psychiatric state. Oh look! A YouTube video of crazy people doing crazy things. Oh look! A paragraph about Doctor Who. Look! Look! LOOK!

As a highly visual learner (if the number of Post-Its I've got around my desk at this moment can be considered any proof), I certainly understand the merits of literal illustration, but it seems as if I've gotten a bit lazy. I'm here to write, not post.

I restarted this blog over a year ago just as I was entering my senior year in high school. Now, I'm in college, living on my own for the first time in my life. What could be more interesting than that? Every moment should be fodder for my imagination. I just need to look.

Today was my brother's birthday, and it's the first time I wasn't  been home to celebrate it with him. As my parents sent me pictures by the minute as he cut his cake and posed with The Girlfriend, grin wider than I've ever seen, I was suddenly struck by this overwhelming sense of family and belonging. I grew up with this guy, so I should know him better than anyone else on the planet, right?

That's why I've decided to take this back. Call it a homecoming. Or a home-remembering. There's nothing I know better.

Not-Rows

I had a bit of a row with my mother today. Except she doesn't really know that. That's what typically happens when I have a row with someone. I sit there and fume in silence for a few minutes before stomping away to prevent anything more embarrassing than usual from coming out of my mouth. Technically, I suppose, we did not have a "noisy, acrimonious quarrel." It was plenty bitter on my part, though.

I buried myself in my room again this morning, determined to finish off Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold, one of my assigned readings for my introductory psychology class. I'd started it a while ago, but found Saks's approach quite different from Jamison's (An Unquiet Mind) and so was rather disoriented. In my goal-oriented haze, I figured that the best way I would get the thing done would be to sit and read it straight on through. So I did. It was a fascinatingly horrifying account of Saks's struggle with schizophrenia, painfully frank and in turns humorous and frightening. I finished the book just in time for lunch, during which I told my mother about what I'd read. 

I should have known that she'd drag the incident at the Navy Yard into this and go off on her spiel about gun control and mental illnesses (we'd had an earlier not-row about Second Amendment rights that I terminated the moment she said she didn't care what any amendments anywhere said - people should just not be allowed to carry guns). I did know that hearing her ramble on about this would upset me. So I inhaled the rest of my lunch, scurried back to my room, and impetuously sent her a link of Saks doing a TED talk. I'd found it especially compelling to hear her tell her own story, and I hoped maybe it would be enough for my mother.

Well, it wasn't. My mother said Saks looked "scary," and "couldn't she at least have combed her hair?" I got quite angry then, but, as usual, I stormed off before I could say anything. It was as if the "fight" part of my autonomic response had disappeared. I fumed in my room for the rest of the afternoon, bitterly angry at my mother, who had no idea that I was sending daggers down at her from on high, but also frustrated with myself. I knew that this would have been a good opportunity to talk about my own thoughts, my own experience with mental illnesses, but I was too frightened by her callous dismissal of a subject that has grown quite dear to me. So, in a sense, I had a not-row with myself.

Maybe I feel like she could never understand. It certainly appears as if she could never want to understand. There's still this tremendous stigma associated with mental illnesses, the underlying belief that by sheer power of will, one might overcome the voices brought about by genetics and biochemistry.

It's just as what Saks said: "When you have cancer, people send flowers; when you lose your mind, they don't."


Here's the TED talk:

Boooooks

I spent a while this afternoon trying to pick out what books I would be bringing with me to school. Sadly enough, even though I own only enough books to fill one shelf, it took me quite some time to narrow it down to a manageable chunk, but... I managed.

I was in the third grade when I first read Where the Red Fern Grows. I found it awful in a wonderful way. Every time I read that last bit when the red fern grows over their graves... I turn into some sort of blubbering puddle of gloop. That book also started me on my depressing-childhood-books-about-tragically-dying-animal-companions series: Old Yeller, Sounder, and The Yearling. By the time I read that last one, I was just about done with the world. 

I got into Bradbury way too early. That's always been a problem with me - my appetite for reading was always exponentially greater than the number of age-appropriate books available to me. I read The Illustrated Man when I was in the first or second grade. It was so wonderfully written that I finished it in one afternoon - then promptly had nightmares for the rest of the week. There was something about Bradbury's writing that really drew me into  world of science fiction, though. I read Fahrenheit 451 around the same time my older brother was reading it for school. I'd always wanted to be just like him, and there was my chance. I didn't really understand it until I read 1984 a while later. Since then, it's become a bit more than the one book of Bradbury's that I actually own.

I have no idea why I read Rebecca. It wasn't required reading or anything, and I'd had (multiple) earlier false starts with other novels of the same genre ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of good fortune should be in want of a wife," anyone?) For some reason, the very first words of this particular book drew me in: "Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me." The book was one long, wonderful dream, and the incredible climax chilled me to the bone the first time - and every time since.

Embarrassingly enough, Vonnegut was a recent discovery of mine. I'd never gotten into his writing until I found this book at the library's free book table. I thought I might as well read it. And I did. And I loved it. So it goes (not really).

I don't think I'll ever really know how much Lois Lowry shaped my childhood. The Giver was required reading one year - second or third grade? - and I found the story immensely sad and immensely interesting. I wondered if our memories could ever work like that - I dearly wished they would.

After my "success" with Rebecca, I found Wuthering Heights buried in an old box of donations from some family friends who knew of my love for reading. I decided to give it a try but eventually set it aside after about the first half, completely annoyed by Catherine's antics. Many years later (which goes to show how ridiculously young and idiotic I was when I first tried to read it), I dug it up again and sailed on through. It was amazing. Alternately downright creepy and wonderfully lush (sometimes, I still think I can see Catherine's face in the window on a dark night), this was another one of the classics that I absolutely enjoyed.

When I went to watch Finding Nemo with my mother, I told her that Pixar had plagiarized Jules Verne. A few years later, I ended up writing a very long, confusing story about being stuck on an alien spaceship that had many similar qualities to the Nautilus. I'm only just beginning to realize that perhaps my Star Trek obsession isn't completely unfounded.

Mick Harte was Here. But now he's gone. This book meant a lot to me when I first read it. That was before I'd even learned to bike. It was the book that introduced me to death. I still read it a lot, mostly to keep myself grounded.

Leo Lionni and Eric Carle were my favorite authors when I was picture-book-little. The Hungry Caterpillar. Swimmy. Frederick. That was the art of my childhood. Sadly enough, I've never owned an Eric Carle book, so I'm taking Swimmy with me.

Everything came down to a tough choice between my complete The Lord of the Rings trilogy with all the appendices and footnotes and a battered old Sherlock Holmes anthology filled with Sidney Paget's original illustrations from The Strand Magazine. I could only bribe my father into letting me lug one huge non-academic book off to school with me. The Lord of the Rings was my childhood. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis created amazing worlds for me that I would later find mirrored in the Redwall of Brian Jacques. One year, I even memorized The Tale of Tinuviel. If you know what that is, then you know how crazy I was. If not... just pretend that I never said anything about memorizing a poem about a fantasy land. Because of all this, I decided that I'd take my Holmes with me. Consider it a melodramatic, metaphorical discarding of childhood. 

But it's not as if I regret my decision. One summer, I went to the library and checked out this true monster of a book - it was well over a thousand pages strong, each page covered in tiny font. It contained anything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had ever written about the man Sherlock Holmes. From A Study in Scarlet to The Hound of the Baskervilles, everything was in there - the Adventures, the Memoirs, the Return, His Last Bow, the Case-book, everything. And I devoured it. I fell in love more with John Watson than I did the aquiline, ratty-dressing-gowned hero. I loved the idea of living with a brilliant man making notes by day and clattering down cobblestone streets by night, to write all of it down and tell the wonderful stories that would come of our adventures. I envied John Watson. Sherlock Holmes could keep his intellect for all I cared. All I wanted were stories. 

And I've got them all.

On Friendship and My Mother

I went shopping with my mother today. Thankfully, no groceries were involved. Most of the trip consisted of my mother trying to persuade me to buy a pair of boots. I wondered why she was so adamant about me buying a pair of shoes that made me bulge in all the wrong places.

When we got home, she told me a long, rambling story over our lunch of yesterday's leftovers.

"When I was freshman in college," she began slowly in English, eyeing the wad of spinach trapped between her chopsticks, "My friends and I went on a trip," she paused and gave me the Mother Glare, "Let me just say now that I have no idea what my parents were thinking, letting me go - I mean, I wouldn't give you permission to go," she stuck the spinach in her mouth and chewed contemplatively, switching into Chinese, "In October or November of my freshman year, we went on a trip to Dansui. There were about twenty of us, and one night,  we decided to walk from Taipei to Dansui."

I gagged on my rice.

"You walked to from where to where!?" I choked in English. I remembered that Dansui was at least a good half-hour train ride from Taipei.

"We walked to Dansui," my mother repeated, "And it was already in the middle of the night. Past midnight, I think, and we were all so tired by the time we got there that we didn't have the energy to walk to the bus stop to catch a ride back. So we just sat there like a bunch of homeless people. By the time I got home, the sun had come up." She shook her head. "We were crazy," she half-laughed, "I'd just bought this pair of boots. Good thing I didn't wear them all the way to Dansui."

I nodded absently, and we continued eating in silence for a while.

"You know," she continued suddenly, "in the two weeks before that trip, your grandfather woke me up every morning, sometimes even before six in the morning, so we could play badminton together." She smiled at my look of bewilderment, "I think he wanted to make sure I was in good enough shape."

I tried and failed to reconcile the image of my absent-minded, ninety-something-year-old grandfather with my mother's description of an active, badminton-playing young man.

"Was he any good?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," my mother replied, "He's the one that taught me how to play badminton in the first place. After that, though..." she shrugged and smirked, "I became the master of aces and beat him so badly he didn't want to play with me anymore."

In Chinese, the word "ace" is a homophone of the word "kill." 

I laughed, picturing my vengeful mother pelting my grandfather with white-feathered birdies as he ran around absently, waving his racket over his head.

"Badminton was really popular in Taiwan," my mother said musingly, nearly done with lunch now, "So, from time to time, we'd have competitions."

I nodded, figuring badminton was to Taiwan as basketball was to the U.S.

My mother set her chopsticks down and sat back in her chair, "There was this boy in my year who was the top of the class every semester except for the last one, when your mother was number one."

My apple juice went down the wrong pipe.

"You?" I spluttered, "You were first in your class?"

My mother laughed, "Yes. I was. And I felt so bad - I didn't know how it happened!" she smiled fondly again, "So one day, we were having some sort of badminton tournament, and all my friends were telling me that I should go play against him. Of course I said no, and I watched as another girl went up to him and started their match. He was good. He'd serve, and - pheeew," she traced her finger through the air, "The birdie would be on the ground before you'd even see it. My friends and I were watching, and one of them grumbled, 'If this guy is so good, if he's always number one, why didn't he go to TaiDa?' That was the school your father's father went to. The number one college in Taiwan. Someone walked by and, hearing them, said, 'He's here so he can be number one!'"

I smiled. Chinese logic at its best.

"Anyways, he went to America for graduate school and got something..." my mother paused to think, switching back again to English, "A masters of something. Probably M.B.A." she stopped again and said slowly, "He went to go work in New York. In the World Trade Center."

I stiffened in my seat, not daring to ask.

"When 9/11 happened," my mother continued, "I remembered he was there. Working in a bank or something. I check his address and his address was in the World Trade Center. So I called him. I think we were both surprised when he picked up the phone. He said that out of all his college classmates, I was the only one who called him. It turns out that he'd moved to New Jersey."

I sat back in my chair, fiddling with my fork.

"Well, you know that not long after 9/11, there was a plane crash in New Jersey."

Is there no sense in the world? I thought.

"I call him again, and he said again that I was the only one from his college days who had called him. He said he was fine," my mother hesitated again, "I have no idea where he is now," she stood, gathering her dishes, and I scooted my chair back too, moving the remains of our lunch off the kitchen table as my mother continued in Chinese, "The last I'd heard, he'd gone back to Taiwan because his wife was ill."

I set the plates and bowls and chopsticks in the sink and turned on the faucet.

"Make good friends in college," my mother said, "Make good friends."

I grunted my typical long-suffering, "Yes, mom," but thought that perhaps this was the first time my mother's advice actually made sense. I couldn't help but think back twelve years to that terrifying morning when my brother's teacher ran out hysterically into the parking lot, telling everyone to go home because there had been an attack and that we were all going to die. I remember the silence in the car, broken only by the crackling of the newscaster as he struggled to relate the horror of what had happened. I remember my mother smiling and reassuring me as she left me in the capable hands of my first grade teacher. She didn't let me watch the news that night, but I heard the rumbling and the screaming from my room. 

For the child whose parents grew up in war-torn China, I can only imagine what was going through her mind. All I remember was the uncertainty. Who had done this? Why had they done this? 

My parents talked quietly about getting Taiwanese passports for my brother and me. They told us to work hard on our Chinese. I didn't understand any of this. All of it was too strange, too unfamiliar, and I resented the sudden insecurity. It took me years to realize that my mother was as frightened as she had ever been. I'd just never realized why. All those stories she'd told me - those of her mother walking across China during the Japanese occupation to find her father, those of her father in his days as a government agent. All her fears were multiplied exponentially because of what she knew could happen. What she knew had happened.

It is difficult for us to get along sometimes. I like to sit in my room and read, maybe putter about with my guitar, a pen, and a piece of paper. She's always in a flurry of motion - preparing meat for the freezer, researching stocks, catching up with Chinese news. She's always prepared for the worst, and I typically fail to realize that her nagging, her never-ending cautions against going running at night or in the morning or in the evening are all just a part of how she was raised. Sometimes, we go at it as only mothers and daughters can, and sometimes, we're the best of friends. 

I find that all the stories she's told me are ways for me to understand where she's from, not just geographically, but culturally and personally as well. Her stories are fascinating, telling of a world long gone, when Taiwan was covered in rice paddies and a farm brushed shoulders with the airport. There's a longing in her that's somehow become a part of me. I miss what I've never had, and that's what draws us together - a longing for the past that none but the two us can ever understand. 

I guess that's why she's always telling me to "make friends." Maybe a friend is someone that's unlike you just enough to balance out the stuff you could get lost in. Someone who doesn't know you as well and can keep you grounded when you're in danger of floating away. Like a good pair of boots.

Drinking Buddies

Today, I was confronted by a baffling mystery: the disappearance of all my underwear. After digging through my mother's drawers, thinking that perhaps my brother had done the laundry this time, I was still many pairs short. I don't believe this bodes well for my continued existence in college.

My mother ran into an old family friend while out shopping today. She told me all about it when she got back, and I was surprised to feel a pang of envy. These are old, old, old family friends. We used to go to the same stuffy old church for what felt like a million years when I was younger. Every week - a Friday or Saturday night, I can't remember - several families from church would gather at their house in Downey, and the parents would do a bible study while we, the kids, ran wild through the sprawling house. There were five of us little ones. My brother, being five years older than me, was the outlier. The rest of us were relatively close in age. I was the closest to the boy my age - our mothers went way back, talked for hours on the phone with each other, and were virtually peas in a pod. We were raised almost side by side. There's a picture of us as babies in our little chairs next to each other, milk bottles in hand. We became known as "drinking buddies." 

Together, we dreamed up brilliant journeys, fighting our ways through dungeons dark and deep, monsters both hideous and marvelous. Our last stand would always be at his parents' minibar located right smack in the family room. We'd snap the swinging door shut and crouch down, breathing heavily as we imagined the room shake, the walls tremble as our greatest foe approached us in the dark. 

With a roar, we'd rise up together, cap guns in hand, shooting madly at the furious monster as it reared far above us. We'd stand triumphant on top of the bar, shouting in victory until our parents came to snatch us down from our dizzying heights and remind us not to split our heads open.

We'd laugh, and the moment they left, the lights dimmed again, and we could feel the cold walls of the sewer closing in around us, an eerie drip of water the tell-tale sign of a monster that lurked in the shadows.

When I was in the second grade, an immense scandal erupted at our church, and our little family of families scattered. I was thrust into a completely alien world of Hawaiian-shirted, flip-flop-wearing church-goers. The familiarity of these strangers was frightening, and I missed the constant presence of my best friend, who called me his honorary cousin. 

We grew older and apart, seeing each other only at Christmas and maybe once or twice during the summer. We'd greet each other shyly after these long absences, but then the moment I jabbed him in the ribs, he'd giggle back, and I knew that we'd be on our way to more adventures.

Things started to change, though. I sailed by in school, effortlessly reading several years beyond my grade level while he struggled with his dyslexia in a school that treated him as if he were an alien. He became more withdrawn, and I overcompensated, becoming loud and boisterous to fill the silence that suddenly vanquished the monsters and turned on the lights, all the adventure dead and gone.

One Christmas, divorce tore apart our little family of families, and from then on, the visits grew fewer and fewer, and less reason there was to make the half-hour drive. 

And so it went.

There was a massive six-year gap in communication between the two of us. We entered middle school. We finished middle school. We started high school. I hardly remembered who he was.

Some news still trickled through the cracks in the brick wall time had built, and I learned that he had become an incredible tennis player, shooting up several feet to rival his father's six-foot-plus frame. He'd won numerous awards in the sciences. He'd even written his own computer program. He bought his first car, a battered, old stick-shift, with his own money. We still got Christmas letters from all the families, little laminated photographs with red and green backdrops. My mother still put them up on the mantelpiece. 

During my sophomore year, I was just finishing up a night race with my cross country team when, impossibly, I heard a familiar voice calling me from the stands. Turns out my little drinking buddy had joined his school's cross country team to pile on some conditioning for tennis season. I hardly reached his shoulder now as he bent over to receive my awkward, sweaty hug. I caught up with his mother, who was vaguely disappointed that my mother wasn't in attendance, and we talked for a while across the chain link fence about what had happened in our lives. It was so odd. Of all the places we should meet again, it would be on a dimly-lit track hours from either of our homes in the middle of the night. I didn't realize how much I actually missed them up until that point.

We saw each other again sporadically at other large meets. I'd always slip away from my team to go look for the maroon and gold of his school's canopy, and I'd always be disappointed if I didn't see it. When I did find him, I realized that time had made us cautious, too cautious, of falling back together into the familiar rhythm our childhood, and our exchanges were short and stilted.

I haven't seen them for over a year now, but my mother's chance encounter with them (at a Kohl's of all places) just reminded me of how close we used to be. He's going off to college next week to study computer engineering and won't be coming home for several months at a time. We're all growing up, grown up, growing away.

But he will always be the boy that helped me conquer my fear of water in his parents' pool, diving up and down the deep end, splashing me impishly as I sat shivering on the edge. He will always be the boy that taught me what a shish kabob was, during those long, hot barbecues we had together. He will always be the boy that introduced me to Star Wars and the power of The Force. He will always be the boy that I'd tickle to the point of tears - both his and mine. 

Those were the days of Nerf wars and magnetic darts and living room handball with yoga balls. They're over now, but they'll never be gone.

A Trip to Summer

I was going to write about my trip to the barber's today, but it's a nice summer evening, and I've got the window open and soft music playing, so my trip to the barber's, as adventerous as it was, doesn't really fit.

Instead, I'll tell you about a book. 

I went to the library to return my horrific load of Freud's works that I never finished because of the advent of The Unfortunate Internship (I've finally settled on a name for it). As is what typically happens when I go to the library for any reason at all, I ended up taking a book home with me. I've read this book before, many times, in fact, but I've been stuck in a bit of a rut recently, and I guess I thought a re-read might help me out. So I skimmed the recently disorganized shelves, flying past the A's to the B's, slowing down until I reached the very end of the row. There. Top shelf. The familiar faded spine. I stuck a finger in behind the hard cover, pulling it down off the shelf and tucking it under my arm without checking the title. The weight and shape were familiar in my hand.

Sometimes I wonder why I've never bothered to buy this book. I've read it nearly every year, and every time I do so, I make the short trek to the library and poke about amongst the shelves for that familiar face. There must be something said about the journey and the expected discovery.

While sitting in the car on the way to the barber's, I stared at the front cover of my book where the vivid peaches and creams had begun to fade to plain orange and beige. Will this still mean anything to me? I wondered. I hoped it would. I really hoped it would.

And so I sat down at my desk this evening just as the heat began to fade from the day, the sun no more than a bold shadow on the neighbor's roof. Opening my window, I let the warm breeze filter through the silence, work its way through the thrum of a hundred thousand cars a stone's throw away, and settle somewhere deep in the cherry wood of my desk, the synthetic cushions of my office chair, imbuing these lifeless objects with a freedom of their own.

I pulled open the cover and meandered through the crinkled yellow pages to the words I thought I'd forgotten but remembered so well.

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

I guess my summer's finally begun. 

Disillusionment

Today was difficult.

I was stationed in the PICU again this morning, but I spent most of my time down at the Burn Unit. I didn't deal very well with the Burn Unit yesterday, and today was really no better, though I was completely decked out in PPG (personal protective gear) the entire time, which was, initially, exciting. 

Then I walked into a patient's room.

I didn't know whether I wanted to puke or cry. Both, probably. There were about seven of us crammed into that tiny little room at one point - two doctors, a few nurses, an RT guy, some residents, and me. I watched the nurses change the dressings on the five-year-old girl with third-degree burns on 80% of her body for about a half hour. I lasted alright when they started off bandaging her legs, but then they got to the hands, and all I wanted to do was scream, shout anything to drown out that little girl's wordless cries of pain. I couldn't take watching her anymore.

And then, of course, they decided to intubate her.

I stayed through all that too. 

The whole thing left me rather shaken. Sitting here, though, I can take a step back and think. What did I expect to find when I decided to go work at a hospital? Happiness? Who am I kidding? People only end up in hospitals if things have gone wrong. There's no happiness there. We just all act like there is. If we don't, we'd all go insane. It's seeing the kids that's the worst, though. Little kids, brought to this place by their parents in the hope that they will emerge all better. Little kids, hit by cars, stricken by some rare illness, the poor children of plain ill luck. The sad thing is, we don't send them home all better. Something hidden always remains. Psychological, social, physical. It'll always be there. And we can't ever fix it. 

Just pretend we did.

Words as Art

I like to use my hands.

Perhaps this can be attributed to my early years in Saturday morning art class. We'd spend each month studying a different genra of art, from still life to wire sculptures, from oil pastels to pottery. All of this was run out of a kind woman's little house by a park where the leaves changed dramatically every fall. I still distinctly remember making the turn onto her street and being just blasted by the sheer color of the trees. We don't get very much of that in Southern California.

I started these lessons when I was very small - I think it was around the same time that I started playing piano. I told myself that I'd grow up to be an author who illustrated her own books. How grand would that be? So I sketched away, HB, 2B, 6B, stringy erasers, abstract art, my first watercolor, a bloated mess of purples and browns. I was so proud of it, though. Every completed work on a canvas that was almost as tall as I was, every masterpiece painted and hot-glued together. 

All of it was my own work, and all of it was tangible. With writing, one has to strain to see, to feel the words and the shape they were meant to take. It was a different form of art, one I loved just the same, but one that, at times, took far too much effort.

I once crafted a snail from clay. I squished the body flat with my thumbs and coiled a separate piece of clay for the shell, just like I'd watched my grandmother make noodles. I had some spare time, so I crafted a little duck and a little snowman and stuck it onto the snail's back. After it was fired but before the glaze was added, I painted my snail a pale sort of pink with a green shell.

It came back to me the next Saturday glossy and smooth, never mind the lumps in the clay. It was something I'd made. Something beautiful.

When I grew older, my parents set aside my love for art, wrapped it up tight in a carboard box, and stuck it on a shelf in the garage alongside my love for life. Art was a child's fancy, they said. I would never make a living from fooling around with paint and clay. I remember the day my mother came to pick me up from my last art lesson. I cried.

And so it was that I learned to lose myself in words. Thankfully, my lessons in letters and stories and books continued because those, at least, could be considered useful to my future well-being. It wasn't until many years later that music became another panacea for my increasing distrust of the world. Now these two are my constants.

I've had my flings, though. First it was crocheting. I crocheted stable blankets for my plastic horses, all in the same pale blue. Then I dabbled in acrylics for a bit, forever painting the same landscape but never quite recreating it. Then I sewed. That didn't last too long, but at least now I can sew buttons and create buttonholes without my mother's worrisome assistance. Then I dabbled in jewelry. Tiger Tail wire, crimps, tiny round-nose pliers and chain-nose pliers, seed beads galore. It was something grand to see it all completed. It always was.

Maybe I have too much nervous energy. Or maybe I've just been reading too much Freud. 

Either way, I still write. By hand. Which recently nearly drove my latest English teacher to tears. There's something that just disappears when I stare at a flickering screen and tap tap tap away. Everything becomes so impersonal. There's no character to the shape of the words, just a mass of uniformity that's more than just a little frightening. I guess I'm just saying that there's less art to typing than there is to writing, though the words may be the same. What are words but art?

Showers and Stuff

When I'm in the shower, I tend to do everything loudly. I sing loudly. I talk loudly. I scream loudly. I even think loudly. For some reason, I am under the impression that when the shower is on, no one on this great planet Earth can make out what I'm saying over the drum of hot water.

I get strange ideas in the shower sometimes. Usually, these strange ideas turn into strange stories that I'm quite fond of never finishing. Once, I was inspired by a twenty-minute steaming session to turn my Vicodin-inspired dream about a giant powder-breathing, purple-and-yellow sea horse with wings into a short story that somehow slipped through the cracks of my remarkably efficient filing system of Throw It In A Crate And Stack It Because There Is No Floorspace Left. What I gained from that experience, however, was a valuable piece of knowledge: stuff one does while half-lucid typically turns out less than half lucid.  The ratio's a bit screwy.

I did gain a great deal from my adventures with Vicodin, though, namely that crying hysterically while not on Vicodin will lead an equally hysterical mother to shove strong opioids down my throat. I'm pretty sure that none of this valuable information has stuck in my porous excuse for a brain, however, because Vicodin and steamy, lonely showers aside, I have yet to find a cure for my debilitating Short-Story-Writing  Syndrome. It's some kind of bug.that sometimes seems more symbiotic than parasitic - it gets hard to tell the difference. Sometimes, it doesn't even take a shower to launch rabid ideas into my brain that strike with all the power of John Henry's bulging biceps but twenty pages later disappear without the faintest whiff of a plot.

It's a miserable existence, dreaming up wonderful worlds and people to mold and watch grow and develop before the inevitable sudden return to reality that sees one's imagination whisp away. Can I not grasp them with a tighter clasp? Poe I am not, but that doesn't mean I can't be downright gloomy just as he was.

It's A New Age, America

Now I remember why I hate driving with my family. But it's the Fourth of July, so I have to be patriotic in spirit and forgiving of heart.

But I'm really neither. So you'll  just have to settle for reading a story that isn't really true.

There is a man at the end of my street who rides a bicycle. Every time I see him, he has this white polo and baseball cap on. He rides very slowly, as if he has never before seen the trees around him through his tinted glasses. He never smiles, never waves, even when acknowledged. He's a lot like the angry man I saw that fine Sunday morning.

A friend who lives down the street across from The Bicycle Man says that he sometimes drops off fresh fruit. My friend appears to be under the impression that The Bicycle/Fruit Man is a friendly human being.

I beg to differ. This is a suspicious man doing suspicious things. I mean, who even rides a bicycle around anymore? Who's got time to do that? And fresh fruit? What!? Fresh fruit is stuff that the cavemen survived on. Excuse me, but we're living comfortably with our GMO's and other processed foods. I could never survive without my hot dogs.

The Bicycle/Fruit Man is a menace to society. We must report him to the police immediately so he can face the proper consequences for existing as a Old-Fashioned Human Being.

It's a new age, America.

The Search for Richard Clayderman

Back when I used to do the CM, every February and March became a sort of musical hell for me. I'd frantically try to memorize a year's worth of music theory, cram down the mixolydian and phrygian and locrian and dorian and whatever modes, and feverishly practice my pieces. The MTAC is really strict about what music we are allowed to play, and all scores we hand to our evaluators (the creepy person who sits in the room and hacks and coughs with every mistake you make) must be from legitimately published material, not illegally scanned sheet music (which is a huge hassle, if you think about it). In other words, books, not paper.

One, year, my brother played a piece by this guy called Richard Clayderman. Here he is (Richard Clayderman, not my brother).

Isn't he such a charming guy? 

Unfortunately for my brother, however, the arrangement of the Richard Clayderman piece that he (my brother) was playing came from a really ultra-limited edition Richard Clayderman book that was not available in the U.S. Mostly because his piano teacher was Chinese and all her books were more or less in Chinese. When I started lessons under her, I learned Mozart in Chinese, for crying out loud. 

Anyways, in the month before my brother's CM test, we realized that we would somehow have to find a way to get a hold of this ultra, super-limited-edition Chinese piano book of some French guy's arrangement of this one piece that he didn't even write.

I know that my Chinese-language reading skills are virtually nonexistent, but even I might suspect plagiarism if I find a note-for-note facsimile of the "Moonlight Sonata" within the pages of a book without the name "Beethoven" mentioned anywhere else. It probably does say Beethoven somewhere. But it's not like I could read it anyways. So what's the point in that?

Anyways, my mother got all panicky and realized that once again, her son didn't have a book for his CM test  (this was most certainly not the first time this has happened). So she called her parents back in Taiwan and sent them on a mission of epic proportions.

Their goal: to find this book:

You see, my grandparents do not own a computer. They happily make do with an apartment my grandfather built when my mother was a toddler. They have several thousand minutes' worth of talking time saved up on their cell phones. They do not know their home phone number.

So they went and looked for this book by hand. Or foot. Something like that.

For the next few weeks, my grandparents literally went to every hole-in-the-wall bookshop, bookstore, teahouse, library, whatever looking for this plagiarized book by some French guy pretending to be Beethoven. Somehow, by the power of dedicated grandparents, they found it. And mailed it back to my brother, who promptly took it to his CM testing, used it once, and never touched it again.

Many years and an unhappy piano-teacher-switch later, it was my turn to take my Advanced Level CM test (the last level for normal people like me). And I was to play a Richard Clayderman piece. I think it might have been one that he actually wrote. Nearly everyday, I'd hurl the book into the living room sofa in frustration, my tiny hands utterly failing to reach the eighths in "Lyphard Melody" (in which Mr. Clayderman boldly cheated on his CD recording by having some strings do that godawful chromatic run in the beginning). By the time I went to take my test, the book looked like this:

I loved this book to pieces.

I passed by the skin of my teeth. 

A few days ago, I plopped myself down on the piano bench for the first time in way too long and decided it would be a good idea to go through what I remembered from my days of classical training. Not much Beethoven or Mozart or (heaven forbid!) Chopin remained, but Richard Clayderman... His pieces are disgustingly catchy and simple, even now, three years removed as I am from anything resembling lessons. It's strange, that. 

Can we say, then, that Mr. Clayderman has been more successful than Beethoven in inspiring music that lasts within us? Or has he created a sort of musical negative feedback loop in which music is only remembered for being so uniquely terrible? 

I'll leave my insipid commentary at that.

(But here. Really. He cheats.)

The CD Version:

The Chinese-Richard-Clayderman-Piano-Book Version:

My Musical Love Affair

I never derived any joy from playing the flute.

It wasn't that I disliked it-elementary school band was an easy ticket out of the stifling classroom environment filled with too many brightly-colored pictures and not enough actual learning. Band was fun. The flute just... Never stuck.

I'd never worked well with others (and still don't), but band was a little different. We made sounds together, individually, but we were inextricably linked to the person next to us, the person on the other side of the room, the person behind us. We were independent. But somehow dependent.

It was a weird thing.

I'd wanted to take up alto sax in the fourth grade, but my mother (I remember this very vividly. I think I may still be rather bitter about this.) threw a flute at me and told me that I was a girl, and saxophones were "for boys." Ooooh. I was not happy.

My first band director was a gently greying man whose soft voice still somehow managed to subdue an entire room of bubbling fourth-through-sixth-graders. I made it to fourth chair as a flutist, then we changed band directors the next year and everything just kind of went haywire.

Then, middle school rolled around. I had no particular interest in participating in the "elective wheel" of Home Ec, Art, and Something-Else-I-Can't-Quite-Remember, so I kept up with band, even though I was bumped to Intermediate Band because of the annual numbers issue.

I bumped along with flute until Christmas break (I remember this because I also very vividly screeching "Frosty the Snowman" at a family gathering. I enjoyed it at the time. I am mortified now.). Then I decided to take up bassoon. All of this, of course, without parent consent. But they hadn't said that I couldn't take up bassoon.

I became a convert.

It gave me no end of joy to reach my hands all the way around the wing joints to hit that super-low B-flat. Playing bassoon gave me a power, a thrumming between my hands that made my silver Gemeinhardt seem like a cheap penny whistle in comparison. I loved the double reed, the funny little tooting noises it would make when I took it off the bocal. It sounded like a kazoo. A very nice kazoo.

I got calluses on my hands from lugging the cloth case around, and the fingers on my left hand became especially flat. But it was so. Much. Fun.

The first time I hit the low B-flat, my mother gave me a look that would have withered the sprightliest dandelion. I hit it again. She sighed.

I fondly referred to my bassoon, a rather old, creaky, rusting school rental affair, as my "dying whale." I loved it, loved polishing the wood, opening the case and smelling the scent of... music. The best were the nights when I had the time to take the entire thing apart and carefully polish every key, every lever, every wire. It would gleam in the yellowish family room light.

I got into Honor Band as the sole bassoonist and spent a delirious day in happiness at Disneyland in the stinging rain as a result.

Then, I decided that the bassoon was not enough. So I picked up the bari sax. I'm sure this was a subconscious decision.

For those of you who don't know, bari saxes are these bloated, enormously heavy (it's the brassiest, woodwind around) versions of the traditional alto sax, which is probably the most common sax around. The bassoon was as tall as I was. The bari was about as wide. The sax (and its case) were so heavy that I'd only bring it home to practice over the weekends. I had to make two trips from the band room to my mother's car. Once with all my school stuff and my bassoon, then one more for the bari sax, which required all of my muscular ninety-pound weight to lug the fifty meters to my mother's car. I'd hold up traffic.

I took the bari to jazz band and was a regular member for the last three-quarters of my middle school life.

Then came the French Horn.

I'd really wanted to learn the trumpet, but the school didn't have any I could take out, so I settled for French Horn, which is arguably the most difficult brass instrument to conquer (what kind of funnel-shaped mouthpiece was that?). I never did get the hang of the muffling stuff.

In my final concert of my band career, we played a Lord of the Rings medley, and I switched from bassoon to French Horn midway through. It was so fun.

I miss band a lot. Without it, I'd never appreciate half the music I love now, wouldn't have continued band at the community college (though I had to stop after a year because my braces seriously got out of hand), wouldn't have struggled valiantly through my last year of the CM, wouldn't have kept up with my music long after my classical training ended. I wonder what I'd be like if I'd continued band through high school. I wouldn't be in cross country. I probably wouldn't even be in MUN. But I'd have music.


I played this bassoon solo in my dreams. I was the second bassoon at the community college (a music major was the first chair), so I never did get to play it. But I dreamed about it. And thoroughly enjoyed it when the trumpets behind me blasted out my ears every single time.

I never really got into jazz, but the range of the bari is so awesome. I found this random guy on Youtube. 

And just for the sake of it, have a subcontrabass:

Waiting

This was written during an excruciating three-hour wait at LAC+USC. The font's bound to be screwy because this is all from my phone, so happy reading.


There are five of us in this bland room whose walls were once pink but are now a kind of tired, sagging bloody beige with the scuffed wallpaper peeling of in chunks and hastily plastered over by pieces of white tagboard. The light is two dim to even be considered fluorescent. They must be bygone relics of the time of incandescence.

There are four people at the table. Two male. Two female. I'm standing off to the side simply because there only four chairs at the table. There's a stack of chairs in the corner that reaches up above my head, but I can't be bothered with walking all the way across this tiny room to set one down at the two tables whose edges don't quite meet.

The swinging doors open, and now there are four.

It irks me that one table is a dark mahogany with darker legs while the other is a pale, bleached beige. Did no one think to match fake wood types? None of the four chairs match either, though the ones in the large stack in the corner on the far side of the room are faceless in their hard, black, plastic unity. I half expect the floor tiles to suddenly change from speckled off-white to some psychedelic rendering of Travolta's dance floor. Flashing lights included.

There is a blue streamer trapped in a ceiling panel. It's one of those cheap, pre-wrinkled ones that comes in huge rolls that are never fully used. It adds a much-needed splash of color to the pink room.

The whiteboard is something else completely. On it, demanding immediate attention, is an anterior view of the human knee with all the parts labelled. MCL. PCL. ACL. LCL. I feel last year's AP Biology kicking in. Around it are scribbles: calculations for a CrCl (Chromium Chloride?), which is to be administered (according to a splattering of blue scribbles) at 54 liters per hour (or 90 milliliters per minute); neater, bluer scribbles are boxed in on the left, but all I can make out from this side of the room are ESTROGEN and PROGESTERONE written just like that in all caps; there are arrows pointing either up on down, with the word "risk" after each of them, and I see words like OVARIAN CA and ENVIRONMENTAL CA; at the very bottom is a large RISKS which is also underlined rather crookedly, followed by MI/STROKE and VTE/CUT. I come to the conclusion that this is the room where people come to die. There are just too many risks.

A girl screeches outside (or are those just the wheels of some poorly-maintained piece of death-defying machinery?).

Above the board, in foot-high capitals, a sign reads CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, followed by a large, yellow smiley face.

The yellowed clock face follows the red hand around.

Below that is a long double row of X-ray backlights. There are four individual panels and eight clips to each panel. Thirty-two lives could be decided here all at once. Strangely, though, there is only one socket for the four panels. Perhaps that will cut down on the death rate.

There are five of us again now.

A minuscule television sits on top of a rolling trolley by the X-ray backlights. A sign is taped over the screen: THIS TV/DVD BELONGS TO BREAST/MAMMO DEPT AT CLINIC TOWER followed by a name and a phone number. Women are so possessive. It may be just my perspective, but the trolley seems a little bent out of shape.

I just realized that the doors are blue. A kind of washed-out blue, though, not like the forced dying pink-beige of the walls.

The blue doors bang open again, but after a fluttering of paperwork, there are still five of us. Waiting.

The white trash can in the corner has a serious design flaw. It's base is less than a quarter the size of its lid. It is an inverted trapezoid. What will happen when the step-lever is stepped on? The trash can will tip over, that's what, held upright only by the weight of the stepper's foot. What will happen when the stepper steps off the step-lever? Well, the trash can will wobble precariously for a few moments, and one of two things will happen: 1) the trash can will remain standing, or b) the trash can will fall over with a crash and everyone will die for a moment.

There are no red emergency sockets in here. But I suppose this is just a conference room. So there would be no need for life-support machinery in here. But what if the blue doors somehow got stuck and we were trapped in here forever with only the minuscule television with the sign taped over the screen as our only form of entertainment? What if the only thing in the DVD player was of someone's mammogram? Would we watch it for the rest of our lives in this dying-pink room? What if there was a tumor in the mammogram? Would we be able to tell? Would be able to say, right then and there, as we were dying in this conference room that the person whose mammogram we were watching was going to die? If the lights went out and the emergency generators failed, would we sit alone in here and take comfort in knowing that someone out there was dying too?

The atmosphere in here is still a sullen silence sullied by the screeching of the girl (or machine) in the hall beyond the blue doors.

Absurdly, I realize that the telephone on the wall opposite matches the dying-pink of the walls. It's as if they died (or are dying-I'm no expert on the death of inanimate objects) together.

It's strange, the symmetry I now find in this room. The black floor trim matches the black of the non-emergency electrical sockets, some of which are upside-down like the exposed electrical cord next to me which is a sad tan-ish color like the hinges on the blue door, which is the only blue in the room except for the blue scribbles on the board that dictate risk and chromium chloride or the blue streamer hanging from the ceiling panel that is a much happier blue than either the door or the scribbles, but not as happy as the yellow smiling face after CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, which only emphasizes the dying-pink-ness of the walls.

Raised silver panels, also trapezoidal in shape, run waist-high around the room. I do not know what they are for and it irks me.

I'm still standing next to the waist-high silver trapezoidal panel. I think it might be electrically charged. Shiny silver things have a habit of being electrically charged.

None of this makes any sense.

Fifty-nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, I have gone through a decade-old issue of the American Journal of Nursing and read a particularly unenlightening article about bowel sounds. I now know that there are four abdominal quadrants and that gastrointestinal motility returns in the small intestine after two to four hours, to the stomach in three days, and to the colon in six days. Bowel sounds are heard through the stethoscope, and the recommended listening time per quadrant is five minutes, for a total of twenty minutes of bowel-listening. This is why bowel sounds are being called into question as a means of patient diagnosis. They take too long.

I've given up. I'm sitting down in a chair now. At the table. I feel as if my legs do not belong to me anymore. Can I listen for leg sounds?

I just stepped on the step-lever of the trapezoidal trash can. It's a great deal heavier than it looks. It didn't even wobble.

Noise

Today, I saw a man walking down a street in my neighborhood with a murderous look ill-concealed by a pair of rather large, ostentatious sunglasses. He gripped an also rather large pair of vine cutters in his hand. In fact, everything about this man was large. Except for himself.

His ill-fitting, rather washed-out yellow polo shirt hung past his elbows and flapped sadly with the violence of his motion, shaking their heads in resignation. His cargo shorts swished around his knees in a sort of counter-motion to the polo sleeves so there became an opposing balance to this man's hardly contained fury. Sleeves flap forward, shorts flap back, sleeves forward, shorts back, forward, back, forward, back.

Then his tired shoelaces joined in the chorus, plastic ends slapping against the synthetic uppers of shoes that had terribly scuffed heels, though not from any sort of physical activity. Socks drooped still lower.

Where was he going? Where had he been? Was he going to return the pliers to some erstwhile neighbor as my mother, naive in so many ways, believed? Or was he out to perpetrate the grisly murder of some former friend who had wronged him dreadfully? Perhaps there was a scandal involved. Perhaps the woman running an intersection behind him was his wife, frantically seeking forgiveness and an end to this madness.

But maybe he was just a guy in a big shirt who was really unhappy about having to carry a large vine cutter around on a Sunday morning. I can't say that I blame him.

Show

Cal stared at the numbers swimming by on blank paper. There was nothing left in his head, just a few empty thoughts rolling around in a deep sea of vague resentment. The door creaked open, then thudded shut, rattling the large plastic window above the handle. The beige wall gazed silently past the glare of the fluorescent lights. Cal ducked his head under the visual warfare and pretended to scribble.

He distantly heard two of the other occupants of the room start to talk quietly, the absence of authority prompting that which would not have been censured, just chided. Their voices released some of the tension of silence, and Cal slumped back in his seat, tossing his pencil with a sharp clack onto the chipped wooden surface.

The whiteboard at the front of the room was uncharacteristically bare, but no less than characteristically clean, polished by the alcohol that cleaned and corroded and made Cal a little giddy every time he breathed in. Sometimes, he would take a few extra breaths before the smell could fade.

The voices behind him grew louder, but Cal didn't turn around. He lowered his eyes back to the smudged page before him, shoving himself back upright, and snatching up his pencil, tapping a plastic end against his chin. The two behind him suddenly grew quiet, and Cal froze, staring nowhere.

One lowered voice broke the silence.

"Hey, want to see the video of the fight? I have it on my phone."

The other replied, fast and guilt-low.

"Yeah, sure."

"It's HD, man."

"Wow."

"It's pretty tight."

"Where was it?"

"Vernon Park."

"You went?"

"No, I... I didn't go. Wait, wait. You have to see this part. I'll tell you when Michael dislocates his shoulder."

"Why'd they fight?"

"Because Michael and Rodney, they... You know. They had this thing and... I don't know."

"There a lot of people there?"

"Yeah. Oh wait. Wait. There."

"Oooh."

"See, Michael's trying to punch, but he can't."

"Shit."

"And then he breaks Rodney's nose right... there."

"Wait, he broke his nose!?"

"Yeah. If you wait, you'll see this huge thing of blood on the ground."

"Oh, man."

"They say that when Michael got home, he was covered in blood and stuff and he passed out and ended up in the ER."

"Holy-"

"-There, you see it? The blood?"

"What-oh."

The door creaked open again, and Cal sensed a flurry of movement behind him. He sank back down in his seat, pencil dropping again from twitching fingers. He breathed deeply, once.

The show was over.

Loneliness

Loneliness once had a glass. He'd kept it polished so that the struggling rays that filtered through the musty air would fall through the glass and with their final, dying breaths, scatter themselves around the dark room like the dancing personalities Loneliness once knew. Loneliness would hold lengthy conversations with his glass, for he had noticed the pale, drawn face at the bottom that surely must have indicated a shy character; it disappeared if Loneliness but glanced aside. The face at the bottom of the glass never replied to Loneliness's questions, but Loneliness was glad that he had a good listener as a friend.

One day, Loneliness tried to fill his glass with brackish water from the well. He thought that perhaps the glass was thirsty, for it always seemed that the face at the bottom of the glass was speaking back to him, but Loneliness never heard a sound. Loneliness set the glass gently down and peered into the swirling water. A terrible misshapen face, constantly undulating, gazed back at him. Horrified, Loneliness thought, "I've killed my only friend!"

Dashing back to the well, he hurled the water from the glass, but his trembling fingers slipped, and Loneliness watched it tumble into the murky waters of the half-empty well. Petrified, Loneliness stared at the pale face that appeared far below, a terrified expression written across its wide eyes.

"I will save you!" Loneliness cried, gathering himself - never before had his heart hammered so! - and threw himself into the well.

As the darkness closed in around him like so many accusing eyes, Loneliness absently realized that he did not remember how to swim.


I cheated. I wrote this yesterday. But I'm too beat today to do anything else.

Dream

I still very vividly remember the last baseball game I ever attended. It was in the waning years of the Dodgers, after Steve Finley and the back-to-back-to-back home runs that had me amazed over Sunday's dumpling lunch. It was after José Lima and Paul Lo Duca and Shawn Green and Adrián Beltré and the sweaty palms that came with Eric Gagné and those brilliant ninth-inning saves.

My father had gotten the four of us seats right behind the right field foul pole, and I remember spending most of the game straining to see around its bright yellow bulk. It came to be, then, after the hard, bright field lights had come on and the blazing sunset had given way to a cool early-summer chill, that the Dodgers were down by one in the bottom of the ninth. Oh, it was tense. There was one man on first and one out to go. Quiet whispers rustled through the stands as the final batter stepped to the plate. A pinch hitter. Jim Thome.

One foot in the box. One toe digging in. The other foot followed. I thought I could hear the crunching of his cleats over the muted roar of the crowd. He hitched up his right shirtsleeve with his left hand, bat pointed straight down the line, loosening up his wrists, settling in. We thrummed with excitement.

The man on the mound drew back, settled, glove to his mouth as all eyes in the stadium glared daggers at his back. The wind up. The pitch.

And Jim Thome cocked his foot, reared back, and the resounding crack echoed through the field, through the hearts of a thousand breathless dreamers who arched back to follow the streaking white ball as it streaked across the blackness, straight towards the center field wall, and going, and going, and

dropping just short into the glove of the center fielder whose cleats ground the dirt of the warning track.

Jim Thome slowly turned his jog away from second base back to the dugout as the other dreamers beside me gathered their things and stopped dreaming about high fly balls and started worrying about traffic and how congested the 605 would be and wouldn't it be better to take the 5 at this time of the day.

As I trailed behind my family as we oozed up the stairs, I cast one last glimpse over my shoulder at the field, a green patch of mundane wonder, a haven of brightness that kept away the night, and, if only for a moment, allowed a man to dream.