People always say that this song or that book or some movie is a story about themselves in some way. One of my friends is truly determined that his life has been prophesied in the eight and a half minute rock-opera Paradise By The Dashboard Lights. My story was told in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but it wasn’t anything with as much grandeur, it was simply about a girl.

Interestingly enough, it’s not the stories themselves, but the details of each story that give them such relatable conviction. In Paradise By The Dashboard Lights, Meatloaf sings about a coerced commitment leading to an eventual eternity spent with the wrong person because of a stubborn, but more importantly moral, refusal to break a promise. The prognostication of these particulars sends my friend sweating whenever he hears the song.

For me, it took the form of pangs, from the details of Clementine’s character. The fucked up girl looking for her own peace of mind, who applies her personality in a paste. A person who keeps you off balance, always guessing, and constantly frustrated. A girl who sends off sirens in your brain telling you to run as far as you can before you get burned, but you stay anyway, against all logic, resigned to the eventual fate.

And here I was, waiting to be saved, thinking she’s a concept, or she’ll complete me, or she’s going to make me feel alive. When it didn’t work out, I used to say that it was for the best, that I was in it to have no regrets, but it was really because I couldn’t leave. I was drawn magnetically, inexplicably, to the last person to deserve even the effort of all the torn up thoughts.

On the weekend, I discovered that I could finally watch Eternal Sunshine without those pangs when I had felt them for so long, even when I already knew how important it is not to forget these experiences, as Joel figures out while hiding Clementine in his subconscious. All the residual emotions have passed, and now I can talk, and laugh, and think, and share the experience like an embarrassing adolescent memory. It only took two years.

Everybody’s gotta learn sometime.

Pita was over for the weekend. He had a competition in the city, in both Standard and Latin, and needed a place to crash. He tells me that he’s at the point where he’s stuck between achieving a higher level and prioritizing the sport as a recreation, especially after coming back empty-handed this weekend when he won two golds at the last competition. 25 is getting old for a competitive dancer, and his instructor, who’s the same age as him, is already the Canadian champion.

I have an interesting relationship with Pita. He was the first person I met when I moved to this city, sharing a room on the 15th floor of a residency. Similar interests and intellects meant that we got along much better than the other pairs of frosh roommates, most of whom got stuck with the crazy, the irrational, and the disgusting. We went separate ways the next year, but moved into an apartment together for the following two years. After parting ways as roommates, when he moved 12000 kilometres to the place he was born, before coming back to this country, we didn’t speak to each other for more than eighteen months.

Now, whenever I see him, whenever he’s in town visiting old friends or participating in competitions, we can greet each other without formalities and just pick up where we left off. It’s on odd state between acquaintance and friendship. We share ourselves, and what we’ve learned and how we’ve changed since last seeing each other, but never keep in touch otherwise. We also give each other perspective. He often speaks as if he’s asking for advice or guidance, without actually asking. I offer my point of view, which he always interprets in a different way than intended, and this keeps me on my toes.

Forget what went wrong. The tiffs, the tantrums, the tears.

Remember everything we had. The comfort of cradling under sheets in the summer, the quintessential excitement of the unknown, the rush of being saved from a prosaic life.

Show me which constellations you know.

And we’ll walk along the beach forever.

After a ten month hiatus, I’m back into my regular table tennis routine again. I started out extremely rusty, feeling as if I was learning how to play again, but now I’m almost at the level that I ended with. It feels like it’s advantageous to take a step back from playing so that I can forget all my bad habits while remembering all the theory, because I can tell exactly what I need to change to improve now. I wish I could say the same for my golf game when I get out on the courses every spring.

My bout with gastroenteritis left me with a smaller appetite and emaciated frame. The sudden weight loss — bringing my weight precariously close to 100 lbs. — has been rather noticeable; my sweaters are baggy, my rings slip off my fingers, and I’ve lost two notches on my belt. Most people struggle to lose weight, I struggle to gain it and stay above 120. Table tennis is one of the best things I can do to fix this. After every session, I’m ravenously hungry, and this usually continues through to the day after.

Table tennis is also one of the only sports that I enjoy enough to not have to drag my ass out every time, which is definitely an advantage when the venue is an hour away. Unfortunately, my schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays now consists of:

1. waking up at six thirty in the morning
2. going to work for eight and a half hours
3. coming home and sleeping for half an hour
4. eating a dinner which I’ve prepared earlier in the week (with no time to cook)
5. travelling to the gym
6. playing for two hours
7. travelling home
8. showering and falling asleep by midnight

There are no breaks in between, which means that I have to watch the clock during almost everything that I do. It’s a complete rush from start to finish. The upside is that when I’m at the gym, working on better short-ball control, or trying to achieve a backhand smash, I can forget everything else, which is something that doesn’t happen for me easily.

He admitted to me that in his car, when he’s driving alone, there’s a compulsion to put together the details of his father as he writes in his mind the speech for the eventual day that a eulogy will need to be delivered. The only other person he’s admitted this to is his girlfriend, who’s labeled the practice as rather disturbing. Morbid, I’ll agree, as his father is far from passing, but not as strange as she makes it out to be. In return, I admit to him that I do the same thing when I piece together stories of his life for the speech I’ll be delivering as best man at his wedding, an event just as grave, and every bit as tragic.

He humorously finds relief in this.

Cats are always curious in the snow. As they sniff, the touch of their noses melt the snowflakes, and their tongues come out to lick away the moisture. They cautiously walk into it and inspect their paws, wondering how they suddenly became wet.

As for me, I’m comfortable at home with a warm drink and the glow of my monitors. The week has me burned out nowadays, and the weekends have become the only time for me to relax, the only time I can enjoy the sunlight during the shortened winter days. You can always recognize a winter sky by its paleness, causing particularly bright days and orange nights.

Christmas will be here soon. Vacation and trips home and family and the spirit of the season. Fall has come and gone. How does the time pass so quickly? Did I imagine I’d be here, at this stage in life, a year ago? Not at all.

I never realized how much I missed the winter, until the snow started falling.

Last week I was so sick that it felt like my brain was slowly leaking out of my head through my nose. I’ve had a jar of lingzhi, or powdered reishi mushroom, sitting on my kitchen counter for months, but I never felt like I was sick enough to have any until then. After one glass of “tea” and a night of decent sleep, I felt better than after anything else I tried. My sinuses cleared, my nose dried up, the headache at the back of my neck went away, and the only thing left was the scratchiness in my throat.

I’d heard of lingzhi before, as my dad started drinking it daily a few years ago, but never really understood, or believed, it’s magical properties until now. As a child growing up in a Chinese family, it’s not uncommon to be exposed to all sorts of esoteric appendages and vegetation, but nothing was as revered as the reishi mushroom, not even ginseng. It turns out that it has a history as the oldest mushroom to be used in medicine over 4000 years ago, and peasants were once executed for consuming such a valuable resource as it was reserved exclusively for the emperor and his family.

As described in Wikipedia:

Lingzhi is anti-tumor, immunomodulating and immunotherapeutic. It is also adaptogenic, anti-allergin and anti-hypertensive due to the presence of triterpenes. Apart from these properties, lingzhi has also been found to be anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-parasitic, anti-fungal, anti-diabetic, anti-hypotensive, and hepatoprotective. It has also been found to inhibit platelet aggregations, and to lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar.

It makes me quite proud to have such a significant substance as a part of my cultural history, a little secret known only to those lucky enough. Perhaps I may feel the same way about tiger penises some day.

The only downside is the taste. I’m sure it’s nothing like eating cockroaches on Fear Factor, but it’s definitely a play on the palate that takes a bit of getting used to. The smell reminds me of the musty scent of old, dried, golden coloured lumber, that’s crumbly and falling apart. This comes as no surprise, as it only grows on the trunks of dead trees. Even though it comes in (clumpy) powder form, it doesn’t exactly dissolve in water. At all. The picture of the mug is after a good stir and five minutes of settling. For some reason, half of it sinks and half of it floats. I tried to describe it to John, and the best I could come up with is that somehow it’s an entire glass of dregs.

I received a birthday reminder two days ago in the form of a card from my parents (a Richard Scarry-esque drawing of a crowd of cats, cell-phones to their ears, with the line inside, “Can you hear me meow?”). I had mostly forgotten, although it came to mind about a month ago, and the thought remained dormant until Pat brought it up today.

During the week I made plans to meet Pat and Jen for dim sum, not knowing that they secretly invited Aaron and Karen as well, and that it was really to take me out for my birthday. Afterwards, we came back here to play some Donkey Konga and Mario Party. As simple as it may seem to sit around playing games with a bunch of friends, it’s rare to find a day that our schedules match. It’s even more rare to hang out with a group of people I can totally relax with and just have a good time, let alone be able to indulge in the pleasure of a bunch of addictive party games with them. These are real friends, people who remind me how good it is to laugh, and help me realize that I don’t do it nearly enough anymore.

On a day that I ask for nothing, I was given everything that I could have wanted.

Aaron and Karen adopted another cat, and named her Lacey. She’s a tiny thing, with downy white hair and ears like satellite dishes. So far she’s a bit shy, as Chaos follows her around often, but I think she’ll get used to it.

Until Lacey came along, I would have never suspected how much the cats look like their owners, but the resemblance, as difficult as it was to put my finger on at first, is striking. Chaos is the nearly overweight cat who sometimes has a goofy look on his face like he’s saying “WHATSGOINGONOVERHEREGUYS??”, and Lacey is much smaller with big ears and delicate features.

Over breakfast, a generous gorging of sausage links, over easy, and hashed browns, the realization dawns on me that out of the eight people seated, four of us have worked in the same office.

In fact, three of us had the same job; while Aaron was working as a developer, Pat was brought in to replace Jacques, and I was hired when Pat left. What a small world. That’s how Pat and I met Aaron, how Aaron met Jacques, and it was only on that day, four years later, that Pat was introduced to Jacques.

Now we can sit around a breakfast table, filling ourselves with greasy food and caffeine in preparation for a weekend of gaming.

How long ago those days seem, working in an unmotivated government office, dating someone I thought I wanted to make my wife. I remarked to Pat how funny it was to believe back then that I knew what I wanted in life, and with a smirk, he asked me, “You think you know what you want now?”.

The question was rhetorical, of course. Sometimes Pat knows me better than I know myself. In his way, he was reminding me that even now, after all my contemplation and all my conclusions, I still may not have figured that out yet.

Do I really know what I want?

Not really. In my career, my relationships, my short-term life I can say that there’s a path I’m moving towards, but I also know that this will most likely change. As I learn and grow, as new goals are met and made, what I want changes too.

And perhaps being sure of this is what I really want.

I called in sick again today, but this time I didn’t go in.

In Psych 101, you learn that a group of students are sprayed in the face with the cold bacteria during their exams, while a control group is sprayed during the regular school year. The result is that the students going through their finals are more than twice as likely to get sick. Stress lowers the immune system, and the lesson here is that there’s a direct connection between the health of the mind and the body.

Knowing this isn’t enough to prevent it. Sometimes it all adds up, and you get worn down.

Little surprises come in the form of friends offering to pick things up from the pharmacy, people I’ve never even spoken to asking if I’m okay, or care packages from ex-girlfriends, consisting of chocolate bars, vitamin C drops, African peanut soup, a DVD of BMW shorts, and even a get-well-soon card.

A couple of shots (no pun intended) from Trolley’s birthday celebration, also marking my first forray into the digital SLR camera world. I had no idea how much was involved in photography until I started going fully manual (quite a change from my simple point-and-shoot Elph), but just trying to achieve what’s “technically” correct has made me appreciate both what the professionals go through and what the artists try to express.

It’s been rough going the last few weeks. Every day is a conflict between doing something relaxing, doing the chores that will make me feel comfortable, or going to bed. Even now I can’t relax. I clean my mirrors of fingerprints in between sentences, or brush Dolly of excess fur as she forcefully nudges my wrists in mirth, and only continue writing when I come up with the next idea.

A sore throat and weary body had me calling in sick today (I suspect that I caught something from petting the same cat as Karen yesterday, who’s seems sick as a dog), although I ended up going in and working six hours anyway. All the extra curricular things are slowly wearing me down. There’s the two side-businesses, the new effort of learning as much as I can about my new Canon Rebel XT by photographing everything, and the blogging. I also started table tennis again, although I’m not sure how often I can attend, taking four hours out of a weekday. The one reprieve is a LAN party I’ve had planned since September that starts tomorrow, and even though it’ll be a good weekend of gaming, it’ll still mean little rest. Normally I’m planned, prepared, and practiced for a LAN, but this time it’ll all be improvised.

I’m being tested, and even though I know that I’ll get through this, it’s still difficult. I’m forced to deal with people I’ve avoided my entire life. I’m pushing myself past the limits of anything I’ve ever gone through. To be honest, it’s a little easier than I would have imagined. The strength and confidence that I’ve gained over the last two years has helped tremendously. Knowing that things get done in their own time keeps me from being overwhelmed. If I can make it through this, I’ll be stronger than ever.

The concert was quite amazing. The set lasted just over an hour and a half. Nothing was performed off the first album, which makes me think that Thrice actually knows how weak an LP it was. They did two encores, one of which was Dustin playing an acoustic version of Staring At The Sun, and the other which was a short little piece from the middle of The Abolition Of Man, where Dustin actually hands off his guitar to a guy who comes on stage with a grey hoodie, and walks into the crowd to scream the last few bars. Unfortunately, my memory card ran out of space during the LAST WORD, ultimately ruining the clip.

It was good to see that people knew all the words to Artist In The Ambulance, and Deadbolt (which they didn’t play until everyone was yelling it in chorus).

On his celebrity, Dustin once said, “It’s pretty awesome. A lot of people throw underwear at bands, but our kids bring us books”. If I ever had the chance, I’d give him Huis-Clos by Jean-Paul Sartre.

There’s more that can be said, but I think I’ll put this to rest for now.

Thrice is Love.

The Thrice = Love Series

1. Introduction
2. The Journey
3. As The Crucible
4. Rock It
5. The Rush
6. Far From The End