Found these songs today:

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I’ve been feeling better. I don’t know why. I can’t figure it out. I didn’t do actively do anything to fix myself.

Maybe it was Audra singing a verse on my answering machine, and promising to leave me a whole song some day. Or the fact that I was out of the house when the sun was out for the first time in as long as I can remember. Or even writing it all down and finally getting it off my chest, because explaining it forces me to rationalize things and view them objectively, instead of with a bias of depression.

It kind of scares me. I have a feeling this depression comes as easily as it goes.

Lately, the only thing I feel like doing is writing and practicing my ukulele, but I’m just glad I want to do something.

I would ingest potassium cyanide that I’d procure online or from a jewelery store. When I was young, I imagined myself using carbon monoxide fumes, but I don’t have a garage anymore. Sometimes, when I’m driving at night, I think a car will serve as well as a gun at 160km/hour, but it’s probably way too messy and uncertain. I’ve always wanted something as painless, clean, and quick as possible.

I’d do it in my house, and lie down in my bed in my boxers with the covers pulled over me. Probably listen to a playlist of Leonard Cohen’s albums from earliest to latest. If successful, it’d take three to five days for the police to find me, and it’d either be John or my work to call them. Maybe I’d set up some kind of trigger to call 911 after a day, so no one would have to deal with a gross decomposing body.

I have no idea if I’d leave a note. I can’t think of what I’d say.

Some people would be sad, but John would be most affected. It’d take him between one to three years to get over it. Everyone else would take less than a year.

John, Darren, Aaron, Louise, Rob and Mel, Pat and Jen, Trolley, my dad, possibly Joel, and maybe my uncle Joe would be at the funeral. Rana, Andrew and Alex, Jesse and Audra, Dan, Heather and Sergei, maybe even Frederic and Misun and my Tai Chi teacher, would be there too if they found out before the ceremony happened. My mom would be barred from attending. Any other family there would just be to make an appearance for my dad.

John would give the eulogy. I think he’d cry while delivering it, which would make me sad because I’ve never seen him cry before. Pat and maybe Aaron would want to say something too.

I’d let John decide what to do with my remains; whatever is easiest/cheapest for him to deal with. If I was cremated, I’d let him keep the ashes, but I’d allow him to give them to my dad if he chose to.

John would get almost everything in my estate; house, assets, RRSPs, life insurance policies, with the following exceptions:

• Darren would get Dolly, because he’s the one who would appreciate her most
• clothes would go to the Salvation Army
• all my computer equipment would go to Pat (aside from the Mac Mini and external drives, which would go to John for his home theatre system)
• Aaron would get my car and my Wacom tablet
• Frederic and Misun would get all my photographic prints (with the one exception below)
• Ryan would get my Canon Digital Rebel XT and 18-55mm lens and consoles
• Heather would get the rest of my photo gear
• My dad would get the painting Julie made of me
• My primary copy of the Tao Te Ching translated by Jonathan Star would go to Sam, my copy translated by Stephen Mitchell would go to the Tai Chi studio to be lent to anyone who wants to borrow it
• My copies of the Tao of Pooh, Te of Piglet, and illustrated copy of the Tao Te Ching by Martin Palmer, and Hoot would go to Bronwen
• My Mont Blanc Meisterstück Classique Rollerball, plant, and first copy of “Tomato Voice” would go to Julie
• My table tennis equipment and I Ching would go to Dan
• Jesse would get my ukulele
• My copies of Mind Over Mood and Reinventing Your Life would go to Jason
• My broadsword would go to Rob cause I bet he would think it was cool

And if my therapist ever found out, he would have wished that I continued my sessions.

I took these of Navid and Jess a little while back.

More recently, Navid called to let me know the childbirth went well, and now he has another adorable little half-Persian girl.

Rose is old enough to walk on her own now and give me kisses before she leaves.

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“Try to hold you in bed you shrug away instead oh I don’t know why.” I found this song during a recent transition, and it’s stayed with me since. It fits so many moods — contentment, sadness, lonliness, morning, mourning, and moulting.

In a way, I’m forcing myself grow and improve, and this scares me. In the book my therapist recommended, it explains “Change requires willingness to experience pain”, and I’m going through this exactly. I’m constantly stepping out of my comfort zone, and at this point, it’s much more trepidation than excitement. It’d be so much easier to fall into old mental habits, as unhealthy as they are.

On mornings like this, I sit in my living room with the curtains open. It makes me self-conscious to be sitting there with houses across the street getting a clear view of me in my PJs and mussed up hair. But it reminds me that someone else is out there. That the world is full of life, and vibrancy, and people just like me.

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My therapist has the curious habit of pushing his lower lip into his upper gums when thinking. He also has a very particular way of talking, and sometimes I wonder if I could imitate him.

I went into my session feeling great, and left with a little more modesty than when I started. I may pride myself on my self-awareness, but he’s always there to remind me that some problems are rooted in my subconscious. While my feeling of emptiness has disappeared, there are still a few underlying issues, such as why I started to feel that emptiness in the first place. He said that when we meet again that it should be on a regular basis, and I shouldn’t wait for a crisis to begin fixing issues. I agreed, but wanted to give things a chance on my own first, armed with this new-found enlightenment.

He approaches my situation from such a perpendicular perspective. It’s always a view I’ve never considered before. When I first went to see him, it was for my anxiety attacks. Not for the other deep-rooted emotional problems I had (and was unaware of). Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where he’ll say to me, “You know what, Jeff, I don’t think you need to come here anymore.”

As I was writing notes for therapy tomorrow¹, I was doing some research on lifetraps and came across a short paragraph that cleared up everything for me to the point where I didn’t feel like I needed to keep my appointment. It was the answer I didn’t even know I was looking for.

Now the feeling of emptiness that’s followed me for so long is gone, and everything makes sense. I feel stable again, though there’s still a hint of doubt because I’ve been here before but it’s never been anything permanent.

I’m still going tomorrow so I can solidify my new-found understanding. I don’t think it’s going to be a regular thing again, I just need the bit of guidance he gives me that lets me fix myself. I can’t explain how good it felt to make the appointment, knowing I had someone with a professional education and years of experience in this to give me an objective view. My friends are always there to support me, but they don’t make sense of the world for me the way my therapist does.

1. This is the first time I’ll be bringing notes, only because I’m trying to cover such a complex topic that I want to be sure I’m not missing anything. [↑]

My Tai Chi teacher recently added the Yang style broadsword to the curriculum. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t ecstatic, as I’ve waited quite a while to learn a weapon form. There’s something romantic and exotic about wielding one of the four great Chinese weapons. I find it delightfully ironic that it’s a gweilo who’s catalyzed such an interest in my own culture. Take THAT, my racist and sexist Chinese ancestors.

As for the ukulele, one day I found out how inexpensive they can be and bought one right away. It’s a Mahalo Les Paul style ukulele (right down to the square tuning pegs) with an extended neck for higher register notes. In many ways, the ukulele is the perfect instrument for me right now; cheap, easy enough that I can teach myself¹, and not too hard on the fingers².

It feels fucking fantastic to be playing music in some form again. I did years of piano and flute lessons in elementary school to high school, and took a very long hiatus from then till now. And that was mostly in band, when I couldn’t choose the music I wanted to play. Now I can play the songs I like, and the advantage is that I’ve probably heard them a few hundred times so I already know them inside-out.

With my years of music lessons and performances from my youth, it’s not like I’m learning music from scratch, I’m simply figuring out how to apply what I already know about tone, posture, tuning, volume, fingering³, timing, and intonation, to another instrument. Admittedly, it’s been very slow going, and it’s like I’m learning a new language as I train my fingers to achieve a dexterity that was never there before.

The interesting thing is that my last few years practicing Tai Chi has helped me learn the ukulele. In my Tai Chi class, I’ve gained the patience and perseverance required to practice the same moves over and over again until they become a natural part of my muscle memory. In the beginning, it was a lot of concentration spent just trying to remember what to do next in the form, but now that I don’t need to think about them when I practice, my concentration goes into fine-tuning the little details. The same principles can be applied to the ukulele (or any instrument, for that matter), and I’m trying to get to the point where I don’t need to think about what my fingers should be doing, and just concentrate on playing with the right kind of expressiveness.

Which is why I have a broadsword and a ukulele resting on the wall next to my desk. Any time I need a break, I pick up one of them and practice for a few minutes.

1. Because I really don’t have time for another time-consuming hobby [↑]
2. The strings are nylon, instead of the metal of guitars, so the callouses aren’t as bad. The health of my hands is also an important thing to me. [↑]
3. Though the fingering for a stringed instrument is really different from piano and flute. [↑]

In my last year of high school — which was also my first year at that school, so no one really knew me — I had a creative English class. We were given 15 minutes of free writing time at the beginning of each class, of which I mostly spent making verbal doodles to any kind of cinema stimulation I had recently seen at the time. Around then, it would have been quotes from Monty Python and lines from Casino. Anyone could put a CD in the stereo for everyone to hear, so one week I put my most recent mix in.

In the middle was Creep by Radiohead , and another guy in class suddenly exclaimed, “A great song!”, amidst the silence of our working minds. Everyone looked at him, then at me, and I felt a redness flush on my face.

That was followed by One by Metallica, and again he said, “Another great song!”, and the same chain of events happened as last time.

He was that edgy kid with bleached blond hair and always got in trouble for wearing walking shoes with his uniform. He did his own thing, had his own tastes, and fit in with the crowds he wanted, not necessarily the crowds that wanted him. I was that awkward kid who had no real friends, had a mop for hair, and a perpetually taciturn demeanour. To have him acknowledge my taste for two songs in a row had suddenly given me some kind of street cred because he was far more popular than me.

Some of the other kids started looking at me differently from then on.

I’ve been trying to write a letter to her mother. Something like this:

I was going to stop by on my last trip to Toronto, but part of me realized it may have made things complicated, since it’d be the first time since we stopped talking to each other. Not that I was scared you would take a side, but because I didn’t want you to think I was forcing that decision on you.

All I want to say is that I miss all of you terribly, she was special, and it’s a pity things didn’t work out. But it was much beyond our control. I don’t know if either of us will ever grow out of these differences that hold us back.

The last time I came to visit, it was almost 2pm on a Tuesday and you were both at work. I scratched a note on the back of a notepad to let you know I stopped by, and she told me you liked me so much, you stuck it on your fridge. That always meant a lot.

Thanks for everything.

But all of it comes out sounding defensive. I wish I could explain how I’m not angry but sad, which is a testament to how great they were. I can’t figure out how to put the ball in their court, to let them know that if they’re okay with it, and she’s okay with it, we can still be friends. I really don’t know how appropriate that would be anyway.

Sometimes, the hardest part of giving up the girls is giving up their parents too.

It’s a voice that slays us, her tone dark and mysterious, her vibrato delicate and succinct. Yet snide. Flippant, even, cause fuckers, she’s not going anywhere.

This is what pulls our hearts out of our chests.

You know it sucks, realizing that everything you believed in is complete bullshit.

—Some guy sitting on a bench in some movie

This is how I’ve been feeling lately. I’ve lost the plot. I’m wandering and wondering. Aimless. Floating. Disconnected. Questioning what it’s all for.

It’s not that I haven’t been able to keep myself occupied. My calendar until March is quite busy actually. But I feel like a spectre, floating through the world; ethereal, immaterial, intangible, and unable to be touched or affected by anything.

On the other hand, music is hitting me pretty hard right now. I tend to dance a lot, mostly in my room. I actually recorded myself dancing to see what it looks like. I can only imagine that it’s on the same level of embarrassment as getting caught masturbating to furries (yep, there’s a porn for that) with bean dip smeared on my chest.

I’m in a No Motiv state-of-mind; that strange period between Jacky and Louise, when I was living on Island Park with Trolley, and we would go for car rides in the summer to Diagram for Healing. But it’s And The Sadness Prevails that I’m rediscovering, hearing the songs from a different point in my life very different from when I last gave the album a thorough listen.

When John asks me how my day was, it seems like my answer is always somewhere between “shitty” and “like someone took a giant shit on my face¹”. And when he asks what happened, I can never give him a specific incident. It’s just this depression, this sagging feeling that’s been weighing so heavily on me, because I haven’t been able to let go as easily as I’d like.

I’m trying to find my footing in the Tao Te Ching. Verse 44 in particular is speaking to me right now:

One’s own reputation — why the fuss?
One’s own wealth — why the concern?
I say, what you gain is more trouble than what you lose
Love is the fruit of sacrifice
Wealth is the fruit of generosity
Be content, rest in your own fullness —
You will not suffer from loss
You’ll avoid the snare of this world
You’ll have long life and endless blessings

The transition continues.

1. I should postscript this with a note that I wouldn’t enjoy this [↑]

This week I’ve been seeing images when I wake up in the middle of the night. Usually in the form of slow, flesh ripping decapitation, or bullets entering non-vital parts of my body, like my arms. Not of self-mutilation but mutilation of the self. These images, in some form or another, have followed me my whole life, and went away after I started therapy¹. Now they’re back.

There’s been a new one lately though.

I have a one-inch thick, two meter pole through the heart, sticking out perpendicularly to my body in both directions evenly. My heart and lungs have grown and healed around this pole, and even a gentle impact on either end, due to the mechanical-force multiplying nature of the fulcrum that is my heart, could disrupt my organs and kill me.

So as I’m trying to fall asleep again, I see myself going about any regular day, stumbling around with this unwieldy pole, hoping I don’t trip, and no one bumps into it.

1. Or perhaps, co-incidentally from something/someone else. [↑]

I had been waiting for the right one to come along my whole life. My mistake was thinking she was waiting for me too.