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.

Open

I blog a lot about school. These posts usually contain excessive moaning about tests for which I'm too lazy to study in classes I never really wanted to take. No, I don't understand myself either.

But tonight was open house at this over-achieving public high school in Southern California. As a senior, I had no motivation to go and suck up to next year's teachers, so I decided to go for a nice long (painful 3-mile) run in the afternoon back to school just to troll my ASB friends who had to help set up and guide poor lost 8th grade parents around campus. My timing was off by just enough for me to miss virtually everyone I wanted to see, so I ran a painful 1.5 miles back home. Thoroughly unsatisfied with myself, I decided to attend open house just for the sake of attending and doing nothing. Besides, the alternative was me sitting in my room and staring at my laptop and the twenty million other things I've been putting off in favor of MUN.

I walked onto campus and exchanged snarky comments with one of my prom dates, then drifted around from the math department to the MUN simulation, where I stayed just long enough to snicker at the sophomores, and then I drifted back to the math department to meet up with my adoptive mother. For some odd, reason, I thought I should pay my Lit teacher a visit. I don't know. English teachers and I have a thing.

I walked into his classroom, and it was completely empty. He was standing up at his podium in a shirt and tie, idly thumbing through a book for his Lang class. I burst out laughing, and he pulled his customary wry face at me. Somehow, I ended up sitting on his table chattering about banana peels and ruptured testicles while he went crawling through one of his cabinets for a book that would make me "stop being depressed." Apparently, I'm to read Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. After his latest book recommendation (Sophie's World), I'm a little hesitant about this one. Oh well. We'll see how it goes.

Open house was winding down by now, the dim night lights flickering on under the eaves, looming shadows thrown out before and behind me as I savored a peculiar sense of freedom that only comes with being out alone at night and feeling perfectly content with life. I don't get that feeling so often anymore.

I helped MUN throw the library back into shape and was about to leave when I saw my physics teacher trudging out of the science building to his car, bags in each hand and a large backpack hanging from his shoulders. I've previously made no secret of how much I loathe my 4th period CP Physics class. But after our short, thirty-second exchange, I can't bring myself loathe the man himself. It is I who deserves the blame.

What's always been so attractive to me about school and the art of teaching is that under the veneer professionalism, there is a genuine human being that is more than a robot that doles out A's and B's and (heaven forbid) C's at  the semester. Sometimes, as students, we forget about that person and just look at the factual information with which we are presented by this robot, someone we can't care to know well at all. Sometimes, we forget that these robots can have uncertainties and doubts and fears that they can never show to us because we are students and we must learn the impersonal and the distant.

But then I look back on my fourteen years in school and remember that I've spent the majority of my life in the classroom, not at home, not with friends. I remember that some of the best friends I've had are teachers. Young teachers just getting married and popping out their first kids, old teachers with three times more teaching experience than I've had life experience, in-between teachers who've seen enough to understand but not enough to disregard.

We're all human, I guess. And it's human nature to forget. But there are some things we should always try to remember.

Blues

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Creeping,

Like stair-footsteps in the night,

Merciless.

Meaningless.

Like twisted sheets, they reach,

White hands so cold

And so bright

That all else dies.

And then I’m sinking,

Drowning,

Rushed along with the

Inevitable tide.

And then I’m lost,

Lost in white

That black becomes.

Blue.

And then it’s not.

It can’t be

Blue

Because blue is

Soft, and

Sky, and

Silk, but

This is

Hard, and

Feet, and

Glass.

Shivered.

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Loud,

Like the fall,

Proud, and

Small.

Day 7: Too Fast

I’m writing this on the plane from Baltimore to Phoenix, where we’ll make the transfer to John Wayne. I can’t believe that this trip went by so quickly. A week. Just like that. I went into this trip with no small amount of trepidation, what with everything that happened the week before I left. Now I realize that this is my senior trip, the last one I will ever have, and I let so many opportunities slip through my fingers. I let myself become preoccupied with what I have no control over, and I took so much for granted. I always feel like this on flights back home. Back to the routine, back to being normal.

As I was walking to morning session today (in 18-degree weather and freezing with the wind chill), I realized that I could very well be back in DC later this year. Permanently. Georgetown is my ultimate dream, somewhere far and unknown. I still don’t know if that is the best choice, but that’s what I want right at this moment. Maybe things will change.

I only have one MUN conference left in my high school career, and this one is for all the marbles: BMUN, which traditionally is the most distinguished and competitive conference on the West Coast.

We have won delegation awards at BMUN for the past twenty-two years with the best senior team with can put together. This year, schools from the east coast are going to be coming over to compete, so competition will be even stiffer. This conference, along with Nationals, are the only two MUN conferences where perfect performance is absolutely expected, with no exceptions. For the juniors going to Nationals, preparation begins with the selection process in November and builds all the way through to March. For BMUN, prep starts later but is no less intense because all participants are expected to push themselves.

It is a school tradition to take the top few sophomores to BMUN in order to build up future classes. By some ridiculous stroke of luck, I was selected to go to BMUN as a sophomore two years ago, a decision that still has me mystified, given my spotty record in the awards arena. I was brought onto the team nearly a month late and partnered with a senior I barely knew. I spent that winter break slaving over the access to nuclear technology and research and the health risk standards of nuclear technology, topics that have become my MUN “specialty.” I almost picked the Food and Agricultural Organization. Things would certainly be different now if I had…

But I went off to Berkeley as a sophomore and conquered my fear of flying but failed miserably in committee. Our first committee session lasted until past eleven at night and I was thoroughly exhausted. And dejected. This was a caliber of competition I could not match. At the awards ceremony, my co-delegate and I were one of only two delegations in the entire team that didn’t bring anything back home.

I was a complete wreck. I was determined to quit MUN, despite the fact that being in the program had been my dream since primary school. It took a lot of long talks and a special meal at a quiet Chinese restaurant with cranberry juice to change my mind, and I am forever grateful to those who did so.

Last year, I was over the moon to be selected to the Nationals team and chosen as one of two Head Delegates at the UN for closing ceremonies. That was a complete dream come true, and all on the day before my birthday.

And now I’m going back as a single delegate in one of the most competitive committees at the conference: the European Union. I have no idea what I’m doing. The last time I was in the European Union, I was a sophomore at the UC Davis conference and instead of discussing the accession of Turkey to the EU, we had a “crisis” ten minutes in and ended up quelling a rebellion in Republika Srpska. Or something like that. And then it hailed and our chair came back from lunch drunk. Not a good experience.

But I had no choice. I apparently “don’t have the personality” to “co” or partner with others, so I’m one of only two single delegations… again. Let’s see how this goes.

That was an epic MUN reflection. I think I should do this more often before I graduate.

Epilogue

Today was brutal.

After spending two hours of mutilation and humiliation at the hands of my chem final, my fried brain had to face another two hours of 4th Period CP Physics. I fell asleep partway. I'm sure that that does not bode well for my borderline grades.

I made up for it by coming home and doing absolutely nothing for four hours but hacking away at another depressing addition to what appears to be a series of stories I'm writing about nothing in particular. I believe I can title this part an epilogue. And I've been listening to too much David Bowie lately.

Rememory 1

A utopia is not a place but a process.
"It is a memory to be remembered, rendering knowledge and experience to shape a sweeter tomorrow."

I spent much of my childhood with my grandparents, who stayed with us through the long, sweltering summer and autumn months before flying back to Taiwan in the spring when only a short, distant phone call every few weeks would connect us. They would come with suitcase after suitcase full of toys and food and clothing that created a veritable heaven for my young eyes. The entire family room floor would be covered with old cloths, new possessions carefully laid out; my own private marketplace.

There were those long, rainy mornings in the winter I spent hiding the dust pan from my grandfather as he endeavored to sweep the kitchen floor, resulting in a merry chase that always ended in the broom closet. He always ate two whole almonds every morning for breakfast, and my brother and I would take a fiendish delight in hiding his nutcracker, usually in the utensil drawer, the last place he would look with a waggle of his bushy eyebrows. Long talks in Chinese with my grandmother where I devoured every word she said about growing up with honor and dignity. I would play with her blood pressure medication, sorting the little white pills into little white mountains and inventing stories for the little white pill with the brown speckles to journey through the snowy landscape.

I would always cry when they left, impossibly large suitcases filled again with American almonds cushioned in Wal-Mart shopping bags. I would follow the little procession out onto our front porch, watch as my father loaded my world for four months into our Previa, and wave manfully as they drove away. Then as we turned to make our way back into our now too-empty house no longer bursting at the seams with my grandfather's old newspapers, my grandmother's fourteen-dish dinners, when I turned to face again the ordinary, I would cry. I don't believe I cried because I missed them. I cried because the months ahead were so long, so empty with the uncertainty of whether or not I would ever see them again.

Now, I hardly understand a word they say over the distant telephone, and when the news is not good I sit and pretend that I am ignorant of the words babbled above my head. Now, I sit silently at the plastic-covered table in the kitchen with the dusty floor, head and heart full of memories that shape a brighter history.