Posts in category "Random"

Father-Son Bonding

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.

It’s strange to bond with him in this way, only after so many years of leaving home.

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.

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. [↩]

Protected: I Want To Believe

Turkey At Work

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.

Replacement Pillow

I sleep with three different pillows.

The one for my head is regular sized, with foam filling, and rather flat because I like to sleep with my arm under there. The one on my left is also foam, but a body pillow. The one on my right is king-sized and filled with down. I like to sleep on my side pressed between the two, and through the night, I’ll alternate between sides, hugging one.

When she comes over, she takes the king-sized one. My head pillow is too flat, and obviously my body pillow is too big.

So I lose my king-sized, and she becomes my replacement pillow.

To Write And To Remember

I admit that I not only save other people’s posts, but entire blogs.

Sometimes, there are entries I like to read over again. Other times, I just like to be reminded of how right I was. But more often than not, it’s the ephemeral nature of blogs in general, combined with the fickle nature of adolescent writers still trying to “define themselves” on a free medium, that gives me the itch to save. So many writers I used to follow have changed domain names, started protecting their entries, or deleted their blogs.

Some things are garbage and should be forgotten or thrown away — but some things deserve to be kept too. Word-for-word, exactly the way it was spoken, because that’s the way it was expressed.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point-of-view, our words do last. Just because they aren’t there anymore, doesn’t mean they were never spoken.

There are consequences to the things we write, whether we want them or not.