This is so awesome.

Adam Bobrow (the player in blue) times his loop perfectly in the middle of a series of defensive lobs against the smash of his opponent, throwing off his opponents offensive rhythm, and causing him to drive the ball into the net.

I generally don’t post stuff like this (i.e. content that isn’t mine, as I don’t want to have a tumblelog), but I couldn’t resist. As an avid lover of table tennis (who has since given up practices for a love for Tai Chi because they’re on conflicting nights), and as a player who frequently gets destroyed by opponents in the league, I understand exactly how good it feels to get a single point when it’s match point for the other guy. After all, it’s not a complete thrashing if you don’t have zero points. You can tell the ref isn’t impressed, but he doesn’t hand out a yellow card for misconduct.

I want to see someone do this after winning in push hands.

Warning: This may be a little too much information for some. I find it funny that almost a year ago, Tiana crowned herself the winner of our inadvertent competition on gross-out bodily function blogging, and specifically mentioned that to top her period-blogging I would need to do a live blogging of a colonoscopy. I was too sedated to do a live blogging, so this is a night-of blogging.

Bishop takes rook-pawn, Tiana. Your move.

Before

The first (overnight) laxative is to clean out your colon of all solid wastes. It doesn’t kick in overnight, it starts working in about an hour, which means you aren’t going to get much sleep.

The second laxative (magnesium citrate) makes your intestine absorb water through osmosis, so that you start passing liquid for a more thorough cleaning. The magnesium citrate wasn’t as bad tasting as I expected (sort of a chemically sour lemonade), but that, along with having to drink ten glasses of water to make it effective, did make me slightly nauseous.

When liquid comes out of you from this end, it doesn’t make a nice contained splosh. No, it goes everywhere. I lost track of how many times I went to the bathroom, and used almost two rolls of toilet paper in two days. And when you wipe this many times, even three-ply, ultra-soft toilet paper feels like it’s coated in diamond dust and dipped in acid.

I was able to get through a decent chunk of my novel, The Last Light of the Sun, and learned from GQ how to “Work That Tan”, why Shia LaBeouf is the upcoming bad boy of Hollywood, and that Rolex makes a $37,500 nautical watch.

You really don’t feel like doing anything but lie around when going through this. As such, I was able to finish God of War 2, and unlocked the awesome Cod of War costume, which still makes me laugh every time a Greek soldier addresses Kratos as “My lord!” when he’s wearing it.

During

Every person I spoke to who had a colonoscopy said that it was a breeze. Not so for me.

Pretty much as soon as they injected the sedative into my IV, I passed out, only to be awoken by bouts of agony. I’d say that for the entire procedure I was only conscious for about two minutes in total, but those two minutes were not fun. I don’t think I would have woken up if it wasn’t for the pain.

Part of the discomfort is supposed to come from injecting air into the colon so they can better see the colon. I couldn’t tell if it was that, the instrument they used to do it, or the endoscope itself snaking into my colon, but I felt a sharp pressure on both the anal cavity, and inside the colon.

I remember screaming through gritted teeth, grabbing the handles of the bed, swearing, and thinking that I should have better manners before passing out again.

At one point, someone also had to hold me down, and uttered comforting words, but I couldn’t make out what he said.

After

Since the colon is inflated with air, I was warned that I’d be passing gas for a while after the procedure. This is true, and very involuntary.

I have severe ulceritive colitis, which is an inflammatory bowel disease. The doctor showed me pictures of my colon; the right side is fine, but the left side is so inflamed that it’s black, red, and bleeding. All the information is being sent to another specialist, whom I’m very glad to be able to see soon.

I was pretty groggy for a while after, partially because I hadn’t eaten in two days, and partially because of the sedative. Every time I stood up, I felt like I was going to pass out.

Right now, I have to take 12 pills a day, one of them being prednisone, a steroid to suppress the overactive immune system responses, the other being mesalamine, an anti-inflammitory drug to bring the swelling under control. These drugs are scary. The side effects are pretty bad, but the doctor judged the benefits to outweigh the potential risks.

I may have to take pills (considered “maintenance medications” to prevent relapse) for the rest of my life. While I feel this lowers my quality of life, it’s much better than dealing with the flare-ups and side effects of colitis. Aside from that, the only cure is to have part of my colon removed in surgery, which I really don’t want to do.

The diagnosis of having a chronic digestive disease is not great, but I’m very relieved to have an explanation of the mystery pains, along with a treatment plan.

I hate, hate, hate being alone when I’m feeling sick. My stomach still feels very funny and unsettled. So Julie came over last night to hang out a bit and to take my mind off everything, and watch some Robson Arms.

The mind, knowing something painful or unpleasant is going to happen to the body, can prepare for such situations. Which is why I wasn’t ready for this. I didn’t wake up this morning, and think, “At some point today, someone will put a plastic tube in my ass, and shine a flashlight into it”.

Yet this is exactly what happened. With a lack of formality, after telling me to “Just relax”, the doctor inserts a speculum (in this case, the aptly named “anoscope”) in my anal cavity.

Unprepared for the sensation, I brace myself and grab the edge of the bed. I wouldn’t say that the feeling was painful as much as…unsavory.

“Just try to relax”, he repeats, with words added about an attempt. I thought he was already all the way in. I was wrong. With a thrust, he goes deeper.

I can’t stop laughing. It’s half nervous, half hysterical. This doctor must think I’m enjoying this.

But no doctor has ever done this before, or been so thorough in going over my symptoms, and it’s a far cry from the healthcare I’ve been getting before. So, after he literally wipes of my ass of the excess lubrication and I’m tucking the tails of my dress shirt into my pants, I thank him.

Wait. I hope he doesn’t take that the wrong way.

He tells me I need a colonoscopy. As I’m booking my appointment, the receptionist hands me a colonoscopy kit (at $25) which includes:

• 2 bottles of magnesium citrate (a saline laxative)
• 2 bisacodyl tablets (an overnight drug laxative)
• 2 dimenhydrinatel tablets (used to prevent nausea)

The laxatives are to completely clean out my system so they can see what’s going on inside my colon. The nausea tablets are to counteract the unpleasant taste of the magnesium citrate. I haven’t been able to eat anything with seeds three days prior, and nothing but clear liquids at two days until the procedure. Unfortunately, I’m off for two days from work and a night of Tai Chi, as the first round of laxatives has me running to the bathroom at frequent intervals. Louise is driving me to the clinic and back, as I’ll be given two sedatives during the procedure: one to relax me, and one to make me groggy. I’m just hoping that I’ll pass out, and wake up when it’s over.

Continue reading

I’m almost ready for spring. The winter isn’t getting on my nerves quite yet. The only thing I miss right now is being able to drive comfortably without a heavy coat on.

I’ve been feeling terribly helpless lately. There are so many things in my life that are out of my control — health, love, money, work — that I’ve actually considered doing a thought record for the first time since I finished therapy. Last week I woke up choking in the middle of the night. Then half way through the day I started developing moderate chest pains. I try not to worry when I’m awake, but at night, in my sleep, everything comes out. Maybe everything is starting to get to me.

I want things to happen quickly. I’m impatient. I want to be proactive, but there’s not much I can do. Verse 42 of the Tao Te Ching has been speaking to me:

Who knows what fate may bring —
  one day your loss may be your fortune
  one day your fortune may be your loss

While I usually crave the flux between constancy and change, I prefer it in one thing at a time. It feels like I’m going through another transition period. Nothing around me is settled.

All I can do is wait to see where I end up.

This is the first painting I’ve ever made. I’ll suffix that with “in my adult life”, because I probably did something with my hands when I was a kid.

Julie, who’s very familiar with the medium, got me to sit down and paint with her. I was able to play around with different techniques of strokes and the like. It was interesting to discover the way the colours bleed, the consistency of the paint, and the texture of the canvas.

It’s definitely abstract. I agree with Dan’s astrology reading, in which he said that I see colours differently, but that doesn’t mean I can create them. Frédéric once told me that it’s easier for him to paint than photograph, because if he needs a certain colour, he can just add it to the painting by hand, whereas you can’t do this with a scene in photography. My forté seems to be in capturing instead.

Painting doesn’t come naturally to me. In elementary and high school, I went direction of music (guitar, voice, flute, and piano) instead of visual art. In university, when I wasn’t playing in bands anymore, I stuck with the written word, and eventually moved to photography and video when that wasn’t enough.

So the painting currently remains untitled. Partially because I can’t put a name to it, and partially because I haven’t decided what it is. Which seems a little silly to me, as my need to create has always come from the need to express. Even though Jackson Pollock once said, “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing”, his paintings still had a direction, a life of their own, much like an improvised jazz solo.

Leave your suggestions in the comments, and I’ll choose a winner next Friday. The winner will win the painting! Yes, I’ll even ship it to you. The dimensions are roughly 8.5″×11″ (or 21.6cm×28cm).

I’ve come to realize that I cling to pain and yearning because they give me inspiration. They may not be the sole source, but certainly a great deal. I always listen to Leonard Cohen and Elliot Smith during such moods, as they have the ability to intensify and deepen the sadness.

I can tell it’s something of a destructive habit. It’s almost like I subconsciously choose to dwell on things that have been resolved for the sake of something to write about.

It makes me think of the last lines from King Missile’s song Ed:

“Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it’s better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this.”

Is this how I feel alive, a way of bringing significance to my life? Or is this the way I truly feel, and I’m simply a slow healer, and too much of a thinker?

Or perhaps the better question is this: does happiness inspire me just as much?

I called my dad on his birthday this week. After the divorce I would never call him, special occasion or not, simply because I needed to distance myself from the situation. He did call me on mine last year though, which reestablishes a sort of precedence and ritual, and he actually thanked me for the call.

We made the usual small talk, about work and home.

He told me he bought a car: a 2006 Mercedes Benz SLK 55 AMG hard-top convertible with 18″ rims and 7-speed-automatic transmission. He’s going to keep the Beemer for winter driving. It filled my heart with quiet joy when he said I could drive it the next time I visited him. Not so much because he was letting me (for I was always allowed to drive the Sportline 300CE while living at home), but because I could tell in his voice that he wanted me to try it.

I asked him if there’s any history of colorectal cancer in the family, which the doctor wanted to know at my last appointment, to which my dad answered, thankfully, no. He shared with me his own health concerns, the medical terms of which he only knows in Chinese. These are things I avoid asking about when I visit him, as he pops some pills from a bottle kept with the dishes in the kitchen, and I realize that I’m learning more about my dad than ever. It’s not so much out of a need for privacy or avoidance of embarrassment, but simply out of convenience, as these topics would never get brought up.

I remember him trying to teach me photography when I was younger, but he soon lost interest, in both photography and me¹. Maybe it’s the distance that makes us appreciate each other more, and it wouldn’t be the same if we lived in the same city.

In a way, I’m glad to have the relationship now, and I’m able to forget that I’ve never had it for most of my life.

1. As such, all my photography is self-taught, aside from one trick used to zoom a lens towards the subject so that the edges are blurred that he showed me at the Statue of Liberty. [↑]

I want the view. The city lights beneath me, blinking in red and white, to remind me that life still goes on even as we’re unconscious of it.

I want to be in the café with Darren, talking about that which only we could understand about each other.

I want to be looking out the open window of my uncle’s apartment in Hong Kong, to hear the people talking, even through the night. I want to smell the age of the wood, the sterility of the concrete.

I want the strings to be playing just for me. To guide me, through layers of resolution after resolution.

I want to stay on the beachfront. To feel the cool, moist wind blowing through open curtains and doors, completely trusting of the world. To feel the darkness and quiet swallowing me whole.

I want to be rolled up in my sheets with her, pressed together on the couch, naked as we came, as the morning light begins to glow through the blinds.

I want to be downtown in the warmth of summer, with the energy of those around me as if the night would never end.

I want the rituals accorded to those who love and are loved in return.

I want to walk out of the theatre into the deafening night air, my mind racing and humbled from the performance.

I want to ride with John. To speak without thinking. To feel without caring. To confide without worrying.

I want this feeling to last forever.

Yep, there’s a turkey roaming around the parking lot at work. And in sub-zero temperatures, no less. People try to shoo him away, scared that he might get run over, but he just weaves in and out of the cars in circles. At one point, he even perched himself on the spoiler of one them. It was a lawyer’s car, so no one cared. Except the lawyer of course.

I remember an online buddy driving here to visiting me from Illinois back in 2002. It was his first time in Canada, and he remarked that the scenery was really nice, with lots of trees and wildlife, unlike the concrete jungle of American cities. I guess I take Canadian nature for granted.

What began as an attempt to move my router and modem from their precarious positions on top of my (top-opening) deep freezer, turned into a complete reorganizing of all the closet space on the bedroom level of my house over the weekend. This means I had to pull everything out to see what I was dealing with, decide how to sort it all, and buy shelving units and storage bins to store them.

It was a race to get everything packed away (or thrown out) and off the floors of the bedrooms and hallways before the weekend was over so I wouldn’t have to sleep surrounded by the mess. I disturbed many a spider’s home this weekend, and in doing so, had to kill the spiders as well.

But it didn’t stop there, oh no. At 10:30 last night, with my bedtime closely approaching — and my eyes drying out from the exhaustion — I got my ironing done, and my latest batch of music added to my iPod.

It seems like it’s another weekend gone, chipping my nails, damaging my fingers. Non-stop, save a phone call with John.

The last few weekends was literally spent in bed with my muse, so I guess I was just making up for productive time that I haven’t had in a while.

Bronwen and I agreed to try to see each other at least once a month. Which doesn’t seem like a lot at only 12 times a year, but I think of the last time I saw Pat or Aaron, and it was on New Years.

I’m also trying to make documentary nights and Sunday brunches a regular thing. The frequency of regular remains to be seen.

It seems like even my relaxing time needs to be planned and scheduled. I’m taking a break from God of War 2 to play Black and White 2, which I never finished. My next booking with Dan is over a month from now, but I just received notification that it has to moved back to accommodate for other venture.

I’m still going with projects, starting new ones before the old ones are finished. I’ve decided that I can’t stop the creative process, and that forcing myself to stick with one until completion makes it a chore. I like to have my fingers in several pies at once, so that I can take a break from one but still be productive by moving to another.

It seems like the busyness never ends. Is this what being an adult is like?

 

Tim is, as he puts it, cut from the same cloth as his uncle, insofar as they both enjoy entertaining. They also live in a four-storey house, which is perfect for such a thing.

So every Sunday, people come together for a casual pot luck brunch, where guests are invited to bring food, the idea being that it’s be easier to bring a dish somewhere and share with everyone than sit at home and make breakfast for yourself. Last time, I got to try fancy smoked bacon, and a pancake-batter-cooked-in-bacon-grease experiment.

At this point, enough people know about it that no one has to mention ahead of time whether they’ll be coming, but there’s enough food for all.

Tim described this pretty well in a recent e-mail:

Dear Everyone,

I’m fascinated by coordination problems.

Coordination problems are situations where all the actors involved are more or less on the same side, but there is imperfect information. Everyone wants the same general outcome but isn’t sure how everyone else is going to get at it.

Driving is a solved coordination problem. No one wants an accident so we all want to drive on the same side of the road, but there is nothing special about choosing the left or the right side. How do people pick?

In 1958, Thomas Schelling ran this experiment on a group of university students in Connecticut: “Imagine that you are to meet someone in New York City at noon, but you don’t know where and you can’t get in touch with them in advance. Where do you go?”

Without consulting one another, the majority of them picked the same location. I wonder if you can guess what it was (where would you go?).

Every week, we solve and re-solve a coordination problem with brunch. Everyone wants a good and varied brunch spread. Different people come every week and no one RSVPs, so you can never be sure what other people will bring. We don’t consult in advance, I don’t assign dishes or types of dishes. The only information we have is what was at brunch the previous week and my written suggestion about fruits, which is mercifully ignored by most of you.

Yet every week brunch has a wide range of delicious foods. Isn’t that amazing?

I think it’s amazing.

Hope to see you on Sunday,

Tim

If I was participating in Schelling’s experiment, I would have chosen to meet at the clock in Grand Central Station; it’s always stood out to me because of the way it was prominently featured in the fantasy waltz sequence done by Terry Gilliam in The Fisher King. I had no idea that this was also the information booth, and it’s this place exactly that most students chose.

And it goes with the people at brunch as well. When one person eats, another will get up to cook. When everyone is done eating, the dishes are all put away, the pans are all cleaned. With the wisdom of crowds, nothing needs to be said.

I think it’s amazing too.

Every song is a time stamp. A place in life, marked by the exact moment that it’s first heard. In this moment, your surroundings, circumstances, and emotions all become attached.

There’s a song for everything, from a single moment — like losing your virginity — to an entire year — like your last one in high school. Perhaps my childhood is such a blur because I never started listening to music until I was about 14; there was no anchor for my mind to associate with my experiences.

In preparation for my housewarming party, Trolley and I decided on a set of music to be played during the festivities. It was my idea to split the songs into two categories, day and night, to take us from the afternoon to the evening. We sat at his computer, and as we went through the list, I told him how to categorize each song. It seemed like such an arbitrary act to him, but for me, there was a distinguishing tone to each song that made it appropriate for a certain time of day.

Two examples:

The quintessential night, Bring Me the Disco King, by David Bowie, (featuring Maynard James Keenan & John Frusciante).

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And the quintessential day, Another Sunny Day by Belle & Sebastian.

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I wonder if I’m the only who can hear it, because of my experiences and when I heard these songs first, or whether the order of certain notes express a certain connotation of sun and moon.

The connotation then comes from this person’s experiences, your relationship with them, or both. You hear the song through their ears. It changes the notes, the chords, the core sound of what you’re listening to. From someone like Darren, a song is totally different than from Julie.

Music is thus another form of memory.

My introduction to French toast with cinnamon and vanilla and fresh fruit. When I was young, my mom would make French Toast, but it was plain eggs and bread.

It’s not what you’re thinking though. The bottle of Crown Royal is filled with real maple syrup. Not whiskey((Coincidentally enough though, both liquids are Canadian icons.)).

God, it’s nice to have someone cook for you in your own home.