sunrise in dallas 10/24/2010

(a frank description of observations and feelings)

it had just rained not too long ago and the atmosphere is filled with humidity. i am equally moist, wet-haired and damp-bottomed, having just gotten out of the shower and sitting on the wet steps in front of apartments 203 and 204. the foliage all around the highlands is still green and birds are still whistling clamoring chirping away on this late october morning. sounds like the rain forest in puerto vallarta. the sun is sitting on the horizon.

my parents are back in china, taking care of their folks. i miss my grandparents to tears and somehow feel like i've failed their expectations. the difficulty in aligning their expectations with the ones of my parents and the ones of my own has never been so salient.

the birds in the nearby tree are really going at it. i think one bird is getting ravaged by other, either in a fit of passion or violence. i'm mostly deaf from the wedding last night, but they are certainly being loud. crazy how the most manmade subdivision in the most manufactured suburb can have such striking sounds of wilderness.

these days have been filled with uncertainty. the unbearable lightness of being. i've been making some dangerous life decisions but if i don't start now, then when? how easy would it be to just go down the path of comfort and conservatism and end up like my parents. though, to be honest, their lives are pretty sweet. another conundrum that is difficult to reconcile.

the upcoming winter season will be my first in years where i am utterly and completely single. the thought is dreadful. my mind/body does not cope well in the wintertime. almost texted an ex this morning out of dread of a loveless winter season, but thankfully, my good senses arrived just in time to save me.

time for some breakfast, homecleaning, and productivity. tata~

i had a pretty creative dream last night. a little surprised-- my mind usually works in mundane ways. dreams for me are usually a slow succession of horribly uninteresting nonevents.

but last night i dreamt of you.

i was standing against a wall, eating yogurt, minding my own business-- like any other nonevent in any other dream i have. and then i got a text message. from you.

in this dream people had the power to make other people invisible, like i can make your existence "never show" in my gchat world. i had made you invisible to me. so while i was standing against the wall, enjoying my natural yogurt, you were walking by me, trying to catch my attention. when you realized what had happened, you just stayed by me a little. and sent me that text.

hi, you can't see me right now but i'm standing near you, if that's okay. i hope you don't mind.

it always seems like the alarm goes off at the climax of each dream.. but maybe it was my mind that froze. maybe at that moment, my mind just reached this impasse.. that it couldn't or didn't want to get past. maybe i wanted to stay frozen in that moment when i realized that we were close. drama-free. and together.

the half rule usually works for me. but from time to time, i relapse.

the mind is so funny-- it makes time move forwards and backwards and in circles in spirals in upward spirals and downward spirals and. it makes time move in all directions. directions that lead back to you.

those short months we were together are beginning to fade from memory. our unpleasant exchanges of words and accusations only compound all the bad memories and our complicated adult problems-- and they're starting to envelope all my thoughts of you. sorting out my photos, i come across this picture. one random day after coming home from work-- wanting to save a piece of your sweetness and my happiness, i took this snapshot. did i tell you those were my favorite flowers? did you know that you did everything i've ever wished a boy would do for me?

i haven't written much lately because writing without inspiration is, to say the very least, extremely difficult. but i was inspired today. and for the first time in a long time, i feel really good about where i am and what i'm doing. i'm starting to feel the hunger again, the hunger of pursuit. i'm really happy i'm single. that i'm not content with who i am, that i'm itching to grow. i'm happy to be in dallas. i look forward to tomorrow, the day after that and the day after that. and then the weekend and the weekends to come after that. i was stagnant for a while--taking care of menial tasks upon menial tasks and chasing visceral pleasures, relieving visceral pains. life was reduced to the visceral. now i'm gaining momentum to *live* again. i love summer. and god of wine. interesting new people and old friends.

good day today :)

what song was it? the death cab for cutie track that played outside the bar as we walked to the parking lot.. we were both a little tipsy and all of a sudden we were dancing. dancing under the open sky in the light of an endless texas day. i never wanted to leave.

there were a lot of moments with you i never wanted to end.

from the very first, very awkward "you said you wanted me to be more sincere around you right? do you know why i take route to take you home?... so i could spend more time talking to you in the car..." to the last fantasy about following me wherever i went to nursing school so you could go to dental school right beside me--

it was a sweet one.

i miss you.

and breakfast at tiffany's.

i miss hearing you sing semi charmed kind of life

and "there goes my baabyy."

i miss the 1000 kisses on my forehead. and your conscious efforts to smile at me in the morning.

i miss your e-mails.

i miss your jokes.

i miss my graffiti-ed blue car, and your close-eyed smiles with their hidden meaning.

i miss doing our secret handshake even though i complained about how lame it was.

i miss the future we never had-- tee shirt - cupcake - and - hobobonobo night.

thirteen candles and honky tonkying. the austin and montana trips we never took.

i miss my first bouquet of wild flowers that you picked alongside preston road.

our first date of everything we craved, wine, candles and connect four.

i miss our anniversaries. every frivolous anniversary, even the ones that went wrong.

i miss your tattoos. your goatee. the chain i never saw you wear and the nitrogen tank that exploded.

i miss that feeling of anxiety as i walked up to your car the first night you came to pick me up.

your perfect lips.

marinara mondays, taco tuesdays, wild/wanton/wonton wednesdays, thin thursdays, and stirfridays.

your delicious tiramisu and the muffer pot which shall house mint one day.

i miss that day in fort worth where we spent such great lengths being utterly enraptured in the yodeling performance of those kids.

i miss dancing with you, whenever wherever. and running up to your place in legacy in anticipation of your hug.

i miss hearing you tell me stories-- including the ones i rudely interrupted.

i miss your voice. your sweet voice, your harsh voice, your r&b voice, and especially your lying-down-phone-voice.

i miss bonobo apologies.

i wish i could give you one right now.

just finished /a virtuous woman/ by kaye gibbons. some nice quotes:

what possessed you to do the wrong thing when i needed the right thing the most? i don't ask for much from you. can't you see that anything less than not exactly right hurts worse than i already hurt? you've got to cure me or either love me so strongly that i feel some of this pain pass from me. those are the only things you have any business doing right now.

looking back on it all, i think the mistake i made with john woodrow had more to do with the careful way they raised me than anything else. growing up, i had absolutely no idea anything bad could happen in a life because nothing bad had happened in mind, no catastrophes. ... but worse than my ignorance of any bad coming into a life was the fact that i didn't have the imagination, the pure imagination to see that hard things or ugly things might happen farther on down the road. i was just whistling along.

you hear tell of somebody saying how so-and-so made him feel like a real man, how so-and-so made somebody feel like a natural woman and so forth... you hear about all that and i can honestly say that before i married ruby i'd felt like a boy on the outside looking in, but ruby, when she loved me, i said, This is what it must feel like to be a man. before then if somebody'd walked up to me and asked me right out who i was i'd have said, 'a tenant, one of the boys the hoovers use,' but now i'd say, 'i'm the man that was married to ruby.'

the quiet kind of love is better than the other, lasted longer, been better to us. oh, it's no crime to want and need somebody to love and to be loved by and to go and do what you need to do to have that.

in pursuit of love.

interests:

travelling. coffee. tea. frolicking. squiggling to musics. smiling till my eyes disappear. being a bonobo. chillaxing to the max...ing ;). poetry anthologies and short stories. good lyrics. artsy stuff. interesting people. montana and nepal, though i've never been. leaving some experiences to the imagination. summer and spring. loving people. learning spanish.. slowly. cooking all day and then being too tired to eat. drinking all night and then being too tired to sleep.. haha just playin on the last one. mountains, lakes, and oceans. having some introvert time every once in a while. being overly warm and open to strangers. playing with kids. deep conversations. strangers on the train relationships. taking care of people. binging on stuff i really really like. getting really excited over stuff no one else is excited about. being fearless! that's a big one. dreamers and other people who inspire me. okay too much infos.

favorite music: ooh so many~

alternative rock: third eye blind. oasis. goo goo dolls. matchbox twenty. damien rice. death cab for cutie. (and hence) the postal service. alexi murdoch. joseph arthur. maroon 5. daniel powter. regina spektor. james morrison. - can't help living the last decade..

rap.soul.hiphop.r&b: alicia keys. india arie. boyz ii men. kero one. far east movement. common. mos def. talib kweli. the roots. kanye. nujabes.

chill musics: khalil fong. corinne bailey rae. jack johnson. jason mraz. vienna teng. joanna wang. yann tiersen.

chinese music: 齐秦. 五月天. 游鸿明. 戴佩妮. 黄立行. 孙燕姿. anything deep, soulful, meaningful really. and a little bit of jay and leehom for general poppiness.

favorite tv shows: def poetry. top chef. archer. modern family. the office. abdc.

favorite movies: conversations with other women. before sunrise. after sunset. garden state. closer. the hand (a short by wong kar wai). about love (trilogy of shorts). paris je t'aime. chocolat. 和你在一起.

favorite books: 9 stories by jd salinger. all the editions of def poetry. every book by herman hesse. song of solomon by toni morrison (cuz i love love love pilate). f scott fitzgerald, his letters and novelettes. kurt vonnegut's ridiculous stories. j p toussaint- faire l'amour- sexiest book ever. joseph conrad when i have the patience. children's books when i have children to read them to.

favorite quotations:

while i'm anxiously awaiting summer-- a poem

i like hot days, hot days

sweat is what you got days

bugs buzzin from cousin to cousin

juices dripping

running and ripping

catch the one you love days

birds peeping

old men sleeping

lazy days, daisies lay

beaming and dreaming

of hot days, hot days

sweat is what you got days

(walter dean myers)

would he succeed in saving a few scraps of this inner world and making it visible to others? or would things just go on the same way: new towns, new landscapes, new women, new experiences, new images, piled one on the other, experiences from which he gleaned nothing but a restless, torturous as well as beautiful overflowing of the heart?

it was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping. either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast--which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life--the one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the services of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life.

ah~ life made sense only if one achieved both. only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! to create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. to live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. was that possible?

the man of my dreams is a lover

a lover of souls and of dreams

of nature and beauty

of life and all of its experiences

he loves wholly

experiences deeply

lives freely

and gives and gives

and gives

to the world

as much as the world has given him

as much as the world has given anyone

i love him for loving. living. giving. and.. i don't think i can love someone who does not love the world with every inch of his body, whose heart does not pump love through each artery, vein, and capillary to his every organ and extremity.

okay took that metaphor a little too far.

reachable resolutions. see below.

stretch resolutions- just one. BECOME AN AVATAR.

grocery shopped after work. just got home. changed out of work clothes. about to start making thai red curry for my first time.

feeling like a lady :)

New years resolutions

· Follow up with my projects

oLearn Spanish

oFinish making Gloria’s bday present, Angie’s wedding gift, LJ’s wedding gift, David’s holiday present

oContinue going to dance class on Wednesday nights~

· Eliminate time-wasters

· Take time to organize. Make the effort to stay neat.

· Go out less

· Give away 75$/mo. to the needy

· Be more financially aware

· Be more tactful in the things I say—watch out for people’s feelings

· Work out 3x/week

· Put the next step in motion: goals not acted upon are nothing but fantasies.

· Go to sleep by 11pm every day. early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise.

· Call my parents at least once a week

· Focus on personal development: be more mindful of other people. do more for others.

· And lastly, always remember that. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.