Monthly Archives: October 2008

Patterns in the Chaos

I hap­pen to have a chance to write now. It’s rain­ing, so nat­u­ral­ly the win­dows are all open.

My life has been some­what chaot­ic late­ly. Weekends spent being social have been turned into intro­vert­ed exile, a way of charg­ing my bat­ter­ies once again. The added ben­e­fit is that I have more time to tie up loose ends on my projects. I’m even get­ting back into the still pho­to medi­um again.

Dry erase boards

I installed these dry-erase mark­er boards next to my front door. I use them to keep track of my tasks, projects, and errands, so I can come home and imme­di­ate­ly decide what I feel like doing. The two sil­ver clips are used for hang­ing notes and let­ters.

Nothing feels bet­ter than putting that thick black line through a task. Writing on frost­ed glass is pret­ty tasty too.

Dry erase board closeup

I use the oth­er board for quotes, a way to keep myself moti­vat­ed — or ground­ed — every time I pass by on the way in or out of the house. It’s also a nice way for me to prac­tice my hand-drawn typog­ra­phy, by try­ing to bal­ance char­ac­ters, words, and lines on the board in dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions in an esthet­ic man­ner.

There’s some­thing famil­iar about this. A feel­ing like I’ve been here before, not in this sit­u­a­tion exact­ly, but in the mid­dle of the chaos.

All I know for sure is that I feel like I can han­dle it much bet­ter than if this was hap­pen­ing a year ago.

Awkward Brunch

The time my words dig a hole out of which my best friend must climb.

If you pay spe­cial atten­tion at 1:21, you can see ____’s face when he sub­tly shakes his head as if to com­mu­ni­cate to me, “YOU ARE MAKING IT WORSE”.

Looking Forward to Tai Chi Classes

Knowing the con­sis­ten­cy with which I go, she asked me if I ever felt like not going to my Tai Chi class­es on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

I thought about it, and came to the real­iza­tion that I did­n’t. There have been win­ter nights where the com­bi­na­tion of snow­storm and ail­ing tran­sit sys­tem have sud­den­ly left me with a wel­come free night, but oth­er than that, I always enjoy going to class.

Before Tai Chi was table ten­nis1, and some days, I’d have to force myself to go. But when I was there, in the mid­dle of a good ral­ly, then pant­i­ng, sweat­ing, exhaust­ed after­ward, I’d always remind myself that I was glad I went.

Tai Chi offers me some­thing else though, a way for me to lose myself for an hour or two. Maybe because it takes so much focus, or so much focus to not focus on any­thing, that I’m able to for­get every­thing else. Even when I’m prac­tic­ing the form on my own it’s not the same. Being at the stu­dio with the oth­er stu­dents — learn­ing from and teach­ing each oth­er, apply­ing the prin­ci­ples we can’t prac­tice by our­selves — lets me get away. On top of that, I know that I’m improv­ing, even if I may not notice it in myself.

And that’s enough to make me look for­ward to my next class as soon as I step out of the stu­dio into the cool night air.

  1. Unfortunately, they’re both on the same nights dur­ing the week, which means I have to choose one over the oth­er [↩]

Deuteragonist

I’m the au pair with the jazz tapes, telling him to use Davis and Coltrane on the first date. The hero’s child­hood bud­dy, who dies in mor­tar fire dur­ing their ser­vice in the Second World War. The awk­ward friend who isn’t attrac­tive enough to play the lead. The sib­ling con­fi­dante, who con­tra­dicts the pro­tag­o­nist with cyn­i­cism, only to be proven wrong in a sat­is­fy­ing fit of glo­ry.

All my life, I dreamed of great­ness, of being the main char­ac­ter in some quixot­ic sto­ry.

But I’m slow­ly real­iz­ing that I’m only a deuter­ag­o­nist.

I wrote this entry about four or five months ago, but nev­er pub­lished it. I held off because I was­n’t sure if it would be true a week after I wrote it. Weeks turned into months, until the sud­den real­iza­tion that I don’t feel this way now.

I regret not pub­lish­ing it at the time. Even though it holds no rel­e­vance any­more, at the very least, it would have been a time stamp of how I felt in the moment. There are so many fleet­ing mem­o­ries and emo­tions that change here, part of my ephemer­al nature. But part of me thinks that it took this real­iza­tion to give me the strength to say it.

Maybe I’m start­ing to believe in myself.