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this modern love breaks me

8

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.

Date  January 12, 2012
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Categories  Random

frame of mine

22

I’ve made peace with this body. It hasn’t been an easy peace to come by, as I seem to get con­stant reminders about the diminu­tive size of my stature. Most recently, I met an older Chinese woman who admit­ted that she thought I looked sick and weak only after she dis­cov­ered I had col­i­tis. It was as if she thought col­i­tis caused some kind of mal­nu­tri­tion that stunted my growth, and she didn’t want to bring up the fact that I was this size because it would have been too embar­rass­ing unless it was caused by a med­ical condition.

Asian male self portrait

 

I’ve been deal­ing with all kinds of sim­i­lar com­ments since I was a kid, so when a girl­friend would say that she liked a par­tic­u­lar part or por­tion of my body, I always thought they were just blinded by love. Eventually I real­ized that if they could come to love this body, then I could too. It will never look right in any­thing but slim-fit extra smalls from Mexx. It will never be good enough for my par­ents. But it will always be who I am, and I’ve learned to accept that.

Date  November 9, 2011
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Categories  Photos Thoughts

a short break in adolescence

6

I’ve been feel­ing like an adult.

This isn’t due to my fis­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties or my tidy home or any other things I used to use as a mea­sure for matu­rity, but from feel­ing like every­thing makes sense. Like I have all the answers the way adults seem to do, because I can see the big pic­ture, I under­stand what truly mat­ters, and I don’t sweat the small things anymore.

It’s only now that I’m at a point where I feel like a grown up. Like this is finally who I’ll be for the rest of my life.

That’s not to say I’ve fin­ished grow­ing, that I’m not human or infal­li­ble, but there aren’t the same strug­gles or changes that I used to have, so my emo­tions and atti­tudes have evened out.

For a while I won­dered if I’d just become another turning-30 cliché, but I real­ized it was never about age. Various things have brought me to this matu­rity, from con­ver­sa­tions to rela­tion­ships to trips far away. It all hap­pened to be around the begin­ning of a new decade in my life.

Maybe I’ve been feel­ing this way only because things are going so well. It’ll take some hard­ship to test how far I’ve truly come as an adult, but until then I’ll try to live like a child, cause too often youth is wasted on the young.

Date  October 5, 2011
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homeostasis

9

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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.

Date  August 5, 2011
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Categories  Daily Life Photos Random

the art of longing's over

0

So the great affair is over but who­ever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed

On a sleep­less night in Paris, I came upon the sud­den real­iza­tion that the last thing I should be think­ing of was a per­son I hadn’t spo­ken to in more than half a year.

It brought to mind some­thing Jason told me once, about a pol­icy his life-coach has for his ses­sions (which are very forward-focused): if you bring up some­thing neg­a­tive from the past three times, the life-coach would end the work­ing rela­tion­ship cause it’s in indi­ca­tion that you’re hold­ing on to some­thing that keeps you from mov­ing forward.

So there’s three things you can do:

  • change the situation
  • change your­self
  • noth­ing (which implies that you stop bring­ing it up, because you’re not doing any­thing to improve the situation)

For so long, hope meant that I’d been try­ing to change the sit­u­a­tion. And when I finally, finally, finally under­stood the futil­ity of it all, I knew I had to change myself, and come to terms with what I didn’t seem capa­ble of accept­ing. Being in another coun­try, sur­rounded by an indul­gent, hedo­nis­tic cul­ture and filled to the brim with hap­pi­ness, was exactly what I needed to gal­va­nize myself into that change, and end things on my terms.

I’ve been set­tling back into my reg­u­lar life, and I don’t feel much of any­thing now, except free. Like I’m finally in con­trol, above water, instead of tread­ing it.

Date  July 3, 2011
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Protected: our journeys

6

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Date  May 1, 2011
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Categories  Random Thoughts

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

2

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.

Date  April 12, 2011
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Protected: tie up my hands

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Date  April 6, 2011
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Categories  Daily Life Random

i know i found the recipe for me

2

All I do nowa­days is dance. Not in any coor­di­nated man­ner, mind you, and cer­tainly not in the pres­ence of any­one else.

I’m only now start­ing to real­ize how nec­es­sary it was for me to sur­vive that cru­cible last year, and how impor­tant it was for me to save myself. It hasn’t tem­pered the extremes, but they don’t last as long anymore.

Blue Mountain village at night

 

It’s com­fort­ing to know I’ve been through this before. It wasn’t all for noth­ing. I’m a lit­tle wiser now, and I’m not going to make the same mis­takes again.

This win­ter hit us heavy once more, and like it I refuse to die.

Date  March 22, 2011
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Protected: when the sunshine don't work, the good lord bring the rain in

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Date  March 12, 2011
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returns

2

The only thing I bought in Britain was this tea can­dle shade of the London sky­line, found in a shop filled with baubles and knick knacks where Mike and Emma took me. They had a feel­ing it was my kind of thing. Funny to think that they knew me so well already in those three days. I love watch­ing the shad­ows dance across the shade in warm colours.

I went through an entire spec­trum of emo­tions there. Through all the won­der and excite­ment were still moments of weak­ness, gid­di­ness, sad­ness, and inse­cu­rity, because there are things you can’t escape by fly­ing to the other side of the world.

I’ve since set­tled back into my old life. The trip didn’t change me, not in any epiphanic way at least. It was more of an affir­ma­tion of myself and the way I’ve been see­ing things.

There were so many times that I was far out of my com­fort zone, thrust into inde­pen­dence, push­ing my lim­its, and that forced me to be objec­tive to keep my wits about me. In those objec­tive moments were objec­tive views of myself, where I began to under­stand that I was respon­si­ble for every­thing that was hap­pen­ing. For all the mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ences and footage and friendships.

And sud­denly, I real­ized, I like me.

Date  February 19, 2011
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Protected: contentment or complacency

13

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Date  January 20, 2011
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stability or stagnancy

7

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I’m liv­ing a drama-free life.

John used to tease me about my drama, con­vinced that I loved it because I always seemed to be cre­at­ing it. But drama is just a by-product of the strug­gle when you’re dis­cov­er­ing your­self and try­ing to become the per­son you’re meant to be. It’s never an easy path; oth­er­wise, you’d already be that person.

I don’t have bad days any­more either, but I can’t tell if it’s because I’m han­dling things bet­ter or if I’m not chal­leng­ing myself enough.

And now that there’s no more drama, it feels like I’m fin­ished. Like there’s no next step for me to take and nowhere else to go, because I’m here. All that’s left is to enjoy this existence.

That’s not to say my life is with­out a touch of inner insta­bil­ity. I still have mem­o­ries, thoughts, lust, and love, and they’re enough to fill the mind for an entire day. But now I know everything’s gonna be okay.

cats in sunbeam

 

Now that I’m work­ing from home full-time, I barely step out­side. Living like Foul Bachelor Frog, cause yesterday’s pants are today’s pants if they have the belt in them. There’s noth­ing for me out there. It’s never worth the trou­ble any­more. I’d go out if I wasn’t so con­tent in my com­fort­able home with two cats and every­thing I need to sing or write or create.

I’m just won­der­ing if I’ll ever get tired of this.

Date  January 12, 2011
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29 11/12: The Work in Progress

1

He who is not sat­is­fied with him­self will grow; he who is not sure of his own cor­rect­ness will learn many things.

—Chinese proverb

As much as I think I’ve become set­tled in my char­ac­ter and my mind­set, I still sur­prise myself with how much these con­tinue to change.

self-portrait at 29 11/12

Me and my Plushstache (hand­made with love by Shannon Gerard).

I used to think I’d finally be happy if I was a cer­tain per­son — some ide­al­ized ver­sion of myself who was inde­struc­tible, infal­li­ble, and flaw­less — but I recently real­ized that I shouldn’t see this as the goal. Instead, I should be happy with the fact that I’m not there yet, because change means evo­lu­tion and growth.

It would be folly to believe that an arrival is also an end. One should con­tinue to strug­gle, and to doubt, and to hurt, and to be a work in progress.

I turn 30 in a month, and I still don’t know who I am.

The Turning 30 Series

Date  October 13, 2010
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Protected: rock bottom

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Date  October 4, 2010
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