wrapped in chords

Context. It’s 19°C in the house. I keep an elec­tric heat­ing pad under my hoodie, the gui­tar is slung around my body, and my head­phones are con­nected to the com­puter. I’m wrapped in chords, with a win­ter scene per­pet­u­ally out­side my window.

I know this won’t last for­ever, so I’m indulging in these lit­tle rit­u­als. Trying to enjoy all the lit­tle things I started tak­ing for granted, like car rides at night when the roads are clear and the car is warm. I’ve lost myself in the shuf­fle. I know I need to recen­tre myself, but I’m wait­ing for things to set­tle down first.

There’s so much I don’t say to my friends. Not because I don’t trust them, but because my news never feels impor­tant enough to bring up. It’s stuff they stopped talk­ing about years ago, cause they’ve moved on from this part of their lives. Well I’m still here, hop­ing everything’s going to work out in the end.

Magic: The Gathering prize

Martial Coup: Put X 1/1 white Soldier crea­ture tokens onto the bat­tle­field. If X is 5 or more, destroy all other crea­tures, and win a box, a booster, a pack of nice lands.

I real­ized that I don’t spend that much time with my core group any­more, but I do hang out with a revolv­ing group of friends. It seems like there’s always another per­son to catch up with, another meal to share, another night of gam­ing with the guys. It’s keep­ing me occu­pied, for which I’m thank­ful lately.

Otherwise, I’ve been think­ing a lit­tle bit about the past and a lot about the future. Trying to pic­ture where I’m going to end up, but it’s never some­thing I can fig­ure out.

coming up for air

I didn’t know I needed a week­end like this to feel again. To dance in those lit­tle moments between brush­ing your teeth and get­ting into bed. To pass on the right and speed away to a cho­rus that grows louder with every shadow cast by every street lamp.

I can’t say it’s been due to any one thing. There’s just so much that seems to be hap­pen­ing lately. The days pass faster than ever, and I’m left won­der­ing where life will take me next, cause I’m always sur­prised by every new friend and unex­pected experience.

Wild Boar pizza at Tennessy Willems

Wild boar pizza at Tennessy Willems, one of the few wood-burning pizze­rias in Ottawa. A com­bi­na­tion of boar sausage, caramelized apple, sage, roasted gar­lic, and sharp ched­dar. The sweet­ness of the apple and the savoury char­ac­ter of the sausage make for an inter­est­ing mélange, but the use of ched­dar is what really gives this pizza a unique taste.

When I’m drown­ing in emo­tion, it feels like I’m per­pet­u­ally com­ing out of the water, emp­ty­ing my stale lungs before tak­ing in as much air as I can again.

This is when every breath is beau­ti­ful. A rush of life com­ing at me.

nothing's burning

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I feel so dis­con­nected from the world lately. It’s not like I don’t have friends who care so much that they make me feel unwor­thy of the atten­tion. I just don’t relate to any­one around me. People with their lives on rails when I feel as uncer­tain as ever. It’s like I haven’t joined their world yet, this world of sta­bil­ity and reg­u­lar­ity, where every­thing just falls into place.

shadows outside a pub

Do pixie cuts ever make up for smoker’s hands?

I watch the movies that used to stir the depths of my emo­tions, lis­ten to the songs that would grab my heart and clench to the beat in hopes that I’ll feel some­thing more than this. Every night, every snow­fall, every pho­to­graph is telling me that some­thing needs to change, and I’m left try­ing to fig­ure out what or when or how it’s going to happen.

this modern love breaks me

My vice-of-the-moment is instant decaf cof­fee with loads of sugar and French vanilla non-dairy creamer; a chem­i­cal sludge I have every morn­ing like dessert for break­fast. That and long show­ers (and maybe a bit of the sauce every now and then) are the only things I indulge in nowadays.

It’s a sign that instinct has taken me over. I do what I want, and I’m start­ing to sus­pect that you’re an adult when that also hap­pens to be the right thing. Not when you hit an arbi­trary age, or have kids, or a career, or a house. It’s when you start to take con­trol because part of grow­ing up is under­stand­ing that you’re respon­si­ble for the results in your life. When you dis­cover that there’s no room in this place for old-school roman­tics, so you’ve gotta play the game. When you lose your inno­cence after accept­ing that the world isn’t the way you thought it was or the way you wanted it to be.

Still, it’s unset­tling to be ven­tur­ing ahead amidst such uncer­tainty. I’ve learned that you can’t wait for every­thing to be per­fect in your life before tak­ing a risk, or you’ll be wait­ing for­ever. There will always be cycles of stag­nancy and change, calm and storm, hurt­ing and heal­ing. I don’t mind the changes, but part of me resents the inno­cence lost. Quixotism has always been a part of me, some­thing that’s defined so many of my thoughts and pas­sions and work. It’s like I’ve lost a part of myself — and a part I’ve always liked — to mes­sages unre­turned and the days in between.

homeostasis

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Everything is bal­anc­ing itself out. I’ve stopped try­ing to pre­dict or con­trol my cycles of intro­ver­sion and extro­ver­sion, pro­duc­tiv­ity and pro­cras­ti­na­tion. As Oscar Wilde once said: “The only way to get rid of temp­ta­tion is to yield to it”. By doing what I want when I feel like it, every need is met in turn.

Life doesn’t get more com­fort­able than this. It’s been a great summer.

baby eating on high chair

Now on mashed solids. Ruby at 11 months.

I’m glad I got here by myself, with­out the help of a friend, or lover, or wind­fall. It was some­thing I had to do on my own, so I’ll always know I’m strong enough to pick myself up and con­tinue growing.

The only thing that’s really miss­ing now is another cat (or two), but I already blew my kitty bud­get on Leonard’s vet bills. I’m not at the right place for a new adop­tion any­way, and I’ve decided to wait until my major projects are fin­ished (hope­fully some time around the end of the year) before I take on another life.

father and baby

It’s offi­cial; Kyden has the soft­est, pinchi­est cheeks ever at eight months.

I’ve been back from my trip for about a month and a half, but it feels more like a year. I’m so dif­fer­ent now from the per­son I was before I left. I was dying then, but I’m liv­ing now.

The only way I can tell how quickly time is truly pass­ing is in the faces of my friends’ babies. Each time I see them they’re mak­ing new sounds, say­ing new words, more con­scious and coher­ent. I used to envy the care­free inno­cence they have when run­ning about naked, the single-mindedness they pos­sess when engrossed with a new toy, but now I feel like one of them.

everybody's gotta learn sometime

It’s strange to feel like I’m ready for a rela­tion­ship at only this point in my life. It didn’t seem right that any­one should love me if I didn’t love myself, and that didn’t really start until recently.

It also took a good round of ther­apy to fig­ure out that I was sab­o­tag­ing my rela­tion­ships so no one could have the chance to hurt me. If I con­sider which ones would have worked out had that not been an issue that caused me to break up with my girl­friends in order to pro­tect myself, I can only think of one. But that was a long time ago, and while we may have worked then, it’s no guar­an­tee for the peo­ple we’ve become, as I’m sure there’s been a lot of growth on both our ends. It’s only now that I feel like my per­sonal evo­lu­tion has reached a peak, a place where I’m sat­is­fied with who I am, and there won’t likely be any more dras­tic changes that may affect the dynam­ics of a relationship.

I’ve been able to rec­og­nize that the risk of get­ting hurt is insep­a­ra­ble from the trust we place in the peo­ple we love, and that risk is always worth it. I’ve left behind my bag­gage, some­thing no one else should have to deal with, and I’ve had enough expe­ri­ence to know exactly what I’m look­ing for in a rela­tion­ship and what kind of peo­ple work with me.

Took me 30 years to fig­ure it all out, but everybody’s gotta learn sometime.

warm divinity

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Music sounds so good. It’s like every­thing has a beat I can dance to.

Sometimes I start writ­ing an entry based on notes from a few weeks ago, but I end up dis­card­ing most of them cause I don’t feel the same way any­more. It’s like I’m con­stantly shed­ding skin in the words I delete.

I tend not to over-think things now. My deci­sions are based on what I want at any spe­cific moment, instead on the future, or the con­se­quences, or what may hap­pen as a result. This regres­sion has been one of the most impor­tant (and dif­fi­cult) things I’ve learned to do. It feels like I’ve been going in the wrong direc­tion for 30 years, but at least I was able to fig­ure that out before much longer. Now I under­stand Picasso when he said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a life­time to paint like a child.”

Pat grilling

Pat on his new grill. He’s still fig­ur­ing out the hot spots.

I don’t even prac­tice gui­tar any­more, but I’ll put on a song I’m addicted to and pre­tend I’m play­ing with my favourite singers for hours. It’s not help­ing me improve (which is usu­ally what I enjoy), but by god is it fun.

The weeks lead­ing up to my trip were full-tilt cause I couldn’t stand being by myself. It was never that bad before. I even bought an iPad app that lets me watch ran­dom web­cams from around the world, just so I could have some­thing hap­pen­ing live next to me, even if it was two-thirty in the morn­ing. Usually it was a buf­falo chips restau­rant in Florida with mus­tard table­cloths, a beach resort by the sea in Italy, or an over­head cam of a sushi chef in Tokyo1.

Nowadays, I don’t mind the soli­tude or the com­pany. I’m feel­ing unwound and have set­tled into old habits; not get­ting enough sleep, eat­ing at the wrong times, never going out. The main dif­fer­ence is that I get so much less of John nowa­days, which means I feel so much more alone, but I’m strong enough to be okay with that now.

The days are bright. Like a boy, I find it hard to con­cen­trate on work when the sun fills the house with warm light.

  1. This is how I learn that sushi chefs puree wasabi using only a chef’s knife and a great deal of patience. []

Protected: our journeys

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My other Chinese parents

I called Norm tonight. As an inter­na­tional ref­eree1, he’s a fix­ture in the Ottawa table ten­nis com­mu­nity, and runs one of the recre­ational venues in the city. I’ve been try­ing to get in shape for a big project that’ll have me run­ning around a bunch of cam­era gear, and since I’ve given up on find­ing decent Tai Chi instruc­tion for now, it made sense that I go back to the only car­dio exer­cise that didn’t bore me out of my mind.

I haven’t been to this club — or played any kind of table ten­nis, for that mat­ter — in about five years. I missed it as much as I miss make­outs, and it’s prob­a­bly been about just as long. The only peo­ple who were still there were Norm and his wife, Virsanna, as well as two hoary old ladies who must be in their 80s but still man­age to keep up with the rest of us, their teal sweat­pants adorably pulled up past their bellies.

Read the rest of this entry »

  1. Basically a level 7 umpire, which is the high­est level, mean­ing he offi­ci­ates the top matches like the World Championships and Commonwealth Games. []

The Process (or why a tree is not a tree)

Take a leaf off a tree. Is it still a tree? Take a sin­gle twig off a tree. Is it still a tree? Remove an entire branch from a tree. Is it still a tree? Take off half of the branches. Is it still a tree? Cut down the whole tree, leav­ing only the stump. Is it still a tree? Many peo­ple would say no, it is no longer a tree, though the roots may still be in the ground. Well, where did the tree go? Removing a leaf, it remains a tree, but not by remov­ing all of the branches and the trunk?

In the real world, there aren’t any things as we com­monly think of them. A ‘thing’ as we refer to it is only a noun. A noun is merely an idea, a men­tal con­struct. These ‘things’ exist only in our minds. There is no tree, there is only the idea of a tree.

—Anonymous

I’ve been writ­ing here for almost a decade, pour­ing 10 years of my life into this blog. I recently con­sid­ered clean­ing up the con­tent by delet­ing a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of my old entries; I’m not the same per­son as when I wrote them, and I don’t even like who I was back then. Not to men­tion the fact that some are rather embar­rass­ing, like read­ing your old diary in high school when the biggest prob­lem was what peo­ple thought when you wore your uni­form cause you for­got it was a Civvies Day.

The prob­lem I was faced with was decid­ing what should be deleted. People aren’t sta­tic; they’re processes, events, evo­lu­tions, made up of cells that con­tin­u­ally renew them­selves on a daily basis. At what defin­able point can I say these entries are no longer me? It could be argued that even posts as recent as a few months ago aren’t an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion, though there may still rem­nants of the old me in the habits of my thoughts.

Then I came across this pas­sage in The Tao by Mark Forstater, on the sub­ject of how using human lan­guage to encom­pass and describe a con­cept such as the Tao is log­i­cally sus­pect: “Reality can’t be enclosed and described by words. Symbols aren’t real in the way that a tree is real, and how­ever much we may delude our­selves that they are, we’ll even­tu­ally find that the word ‘water’ won’t quench our thirst.”

I came to accept that the things I write here have never been and never will be a com­plete reflec­tion of who I am, so I’ve decided to keep all the entries. The ones writ­ten by my old self serve as a reminder of who I was, and at the very least, they tell me where I’ve been and how far I’ve come.

mission

I’ve been on auto-pilot.

It’s nice be able to stop think­ing cause I’m on a mis­sion to make sure every­thing goes well, to be able to put aside my own inse­cu­ri­ties and ner­vous­ness for the sake of get­ting shit done, and be happy with the per­son I am when I can pull it all off.

writing thank you cards

Energy for the day, with chicken-apple sausages and the cutest single-serving bot­tle of Heinz ketchup.

Alayna booked me a room at the Hilton cause it’s lit­er­ally a block away from the venue, and she knew I was com­ing from out of town. It was only John and I at the hotel that night, a lit­tle bit of pri­vacy and peace we had together that worked to our advan­tage. The fact that he wasn’t ner­vous made me ner­vous, even though I knew that meant he was mar­ry­ing the right one. While I wish I could have filmed the entire event, I knew my role was more impor­tant than that.

I finally got to meet his core group at the bach­e­lor week­end, and I fuck­ing love them. They’re amaz­ing peo­ple1 with such intel­li­gence and con­fi­dence and inten­sity, and I’m so proud that John can count them as among his clos­est. But I took the most pride in the fact that I was best man out of the wed­ding party of 16 peo­ple, as well as the only one going back to his ele­men­tary school and even high school days.

Hilton view

A view of City Hall, Nathan Philips Square, and John’s office in the finan­cial dis­trict from the 27th floor. Toronto always seduces me at night.

It was great to see all of John’s fam­ily in one place; usu­ally it’s scat­tered cou­ples and kids at the cot­tage. Heather’s girls are grow­ing up, and even Grandma Currie was able to make it despite the fact that she hasn’t been in good health.

The only time John choked up in the day was dur­ing in his speech at the recep­tion, as he explained his dad’s influ­ence on his life. When I’m com­mis­er­at­ing with him, he always takes enough time between his words for the emo­tion to clear from his head, but when he was up at that podium he lost pace and the words got caught in his throat.

John reads the bible

Reading Genesis in the Trinity College chapel at John’s old University of Toronto stomp­ing grounds, as we wait for guests to be ush­ered to their pews.

It was only the sec­ond day I didn’t pick up the gui­tar since I got it. And while I haven’t been inspired to play every day, I’d still touch the strings at least once out of habit before going to bed. My fin­gers feel like they’ve already lost some flex­i­bil­ity, but at the same time I think the break reset some of my bad fret­ting habits.

Chinese rice noodles

Rice noo­dles smoth­ered in peanut but­ter and soya sauce and sesame seeds. There’s so much com­fort to be found in this food.

The more I come back to Toronto, the more I want to stay. I feel like there’s so much I want to leave behind in Ottawa. So many mem­o­ries and emo­tions I’m try­ing to escape.

My friends are busy with their own mar­riages and kids, and I never see them any­more. I think mov­ing will solve the occa­sional bouts of lone­li­ness. But in the back of my head, I know it’s really my own intro­verted ten­den­cies that keep me from explor­ing out­side of my com­fort zone, and I won­der if it’s my city that needs chang­ing, or me.

  1. One of whom has already had an award-winning CTV movie made about his life, star­ring Graham Greene. []

nowhere near as morbid as it sounds

All I want to do lately is go out and shoot and edit and post, but I have no sto­ries to tell. I’m still try­ing to write them, so I can put them in these cuts and look back and live for­ever in the mem­o­ries. To dance among the motion and glim­mer, and blink against the bright­ness of the sun.

I’ve been filled with such tremen­dous inten­sity, and hope, and excite­ment, buoyed by the fact that I’ll always have a gui­tar and a dis­arm­ing smile.

burlesque cake

 

Peace has been made with this new-self. It’s as if every change, every cycle I go through, takes time for me to get used to the new skin. I know I’ll always be flawed. I’ll always make mis­takes, but that means I’ll always be learning.

I’ve had enough of crazy devel­op­ments. I’ll be happy once the dust set­tles and I’m back to my reg­u­lar life again, some point beyond the sum­mer. The spring is never remark­able; it’s just a haze between the heat and the snow. It already smells like hot sum­mers nights, a com­fort­ing mix of pollen and con­crete. It’s gonna be oh so good.

old habit

  • Rob: Sometimes it still hurts. You know how it is, man. It’s like, you wake up every day and it hurts a lit­tle bit less, and then you wake up one day and it doesn’t hurt at all. And the funny thing is, is that, this is kinda wierd, but it’s like, it’s like you almost miss that pain.
  • Mike: You miss the pain?
  • Rob: Yeah, for the same rea­son that you missed her… because you lived with it for so long.

—Swingers

I’m in my last days of high-school again. Pretty much this. Feeling like I have the rest of my life ahead of me with so much to look for­ward to, but only cause I’m try­ing to shed every­thing that hap­pened in the final dis­as­trous year.

I remem­ber writ­ing a lot back then in this black note­book. It was filled with all these ver­bal scrib­bles, short pas­sages of text, words, lyrics, emo­tions I couldn’t con­tain. My thoughts were a jum­ble, lost some­where between the pain and the love of how it made me feel alive.

That’s how I feel now. Old habits break hard.

About once every two years I uncer­e­mo­ni­ously threw it out and bought a new one, because I hated every­thing in it. I never wanted to think of myself as the per­son who wrote all the things in there. Sometimes I won­der if I’ll look back on these entries one day and think the same.

Protected: when the sunshine don't work, the good lord bring the rain in

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until tomorrow

The days go on con­tin­u­ously, mea­sured in beats-per-minute. Winter’s here in all it’s bright glory, but the sun sets a lit­tle later every day, mark­ing the change of sea­sons. It’s the only way for me to keep track of the pass­ing time.

So many days are spent alone, yet I don’t feel lonely. The only prob­lem with iso­la­tion is that it lets me spend too much time with my own thoughts. This, com­bined with my intro­verted ten­den­cies (which means my stim­u­la­tion comes from mem­o­ries), makes me feel like I’m trapped in the past. I sup­pose it’s not all bad, but it cer­tainly does make it harder for me to heal.

Bronwen puts on makeup

 

I don’t know what to write. There isn’t the same strug­gle or need to vent. I find myself sit­ting and star­ing at a blank screen for hours at a time. It’s not like I feel the need to say some­thing for the sake of it. There are still thoughts and ideas that linger, things to get off my chest, but they’re either too too sim­ple to men­tion, or too com­plex to put down.

It’s strange to see this path laid out before me. I could wan­der off and explore new things, but I’m still too comfortable.

Things don’t change, but I don’t think I mind so much anymore.