Posts tagged with "reflection"

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.

Continue read­ing “My oth­er Chinese par­ents”…

  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.

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.