Push Or Knock; Or Roundabout Gone

Some things I wish I felt more comfortable talking about, out of principle, because I know part of my inability to talk about them stems from a societal prejudice: my mental state, sex, and my inner dialogues. One of my favorite bloggers of late, The Bloggess, does all of these perfectly, so if I were completely honest with myself it's not just societal prejudice but also me.

Then again, how many of us are brave enough to talk about sex in a public forum?

The other two are harder to write about, for me, but they are easier to hint at. To skirt around the edges, like in Fragonard's The Swing, which I drew once as a book cover for my French textbook. Both rococo and romanticism I learned from my European history class from sophomore year.

The other thing I remember from sophomore year was a hazy mix of staring out windows and anonymous crowds rushing past. I wrote about it a lot before, things I kept locked up in the depths of my laptop and hid for two years before I showed some of them to Yuma.

. . .

There is an old Chinese legend (one thing the Chinese have no lacking of) that a poet, late at night, could not decide whether to use "push" or "knock" in his poem to describe his character's internal battle when opening the door.

These days, the two words together mean deliberation.

When I was younger, around seven or eight, I always wondered how people remembered all of these proverbs and legends and folk lores and idioms. It wasn't merely enough to know a saying, you had to know the story behind it too. There were entire books dedicated to the formal four-word proverbs and their origins that schoolchildren my age were required to know.

That, added to the pictorial nature of Chinese words, and you have to wonder: why is it not fading away in favor of something much easier to learn?

I like to cite the poetic nature of it—because, to me, no language is better suited for poetry as Chinese is—down to each word imbued with meaning, but who am I to say? I am neither a poet nor am I a proficient writer of Chinese.

. . .

Khajiit says the younger generation of French people are slowly abandoning the rigid structures their language imposes upon them in favor of their own blend of French. What the equivalent would be for Chinese I do not know, but I hope it does not happen.

Because it is a language of thousands of years' worth of stories, legends, and lore, and there is a part of me that finds peace in allegories.

. . .

Writing for many people is ultimately a cathartic process. Haruki Murakami speaks of writing as a poison, and writing to overcome that poison. Natalie Goldberg believes you should write "what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about." Tim O'Brien uses his writing of a fictitious yet real world to make sense of the absurd yet very real world he had to live in. Andre Aciman repeatedly writes about place as a cover to what he really wants to write about.

For me, writing is about making sense of the past. It is about digging up what I have buried in the past—what I have been afraid to face—and putting them in front of me to finally digest after all this time.

I have been told many times, by many people, that I do not have the courage to face reality. That I am weak, that I do not have the determination. Writing is a cheap alternative, a way to pacify those claims without having to make any painful progress. I can say that writing has helped me to name my demons, but in the end, didn't Seymour Glass still shoot himself? How far can you go with writing when your demon is reality itself?

. . .

It is now six in the morning. This far north, the sun has already risen, although I wouldn't know sitting here in the basement of the tallest building on campus. I woke up yesterday morning at 8:25AM, with ten minutes to spare for my morning class, and with an apathy that has set in lately, told myself it didn't matter and fell back to sleep. The next time I woke up—fully, truly awake—it was already getting dark.

On the bus from New York, I thought about how I used to tie myself to the road. The music I listen to, the colors I love, they all have one trait in common: they're hollow. This emptiness inspired historical fictions, with Vermont and their Green Mountain Boys being my favorite, although any road could evoke endless stretches of fields and the nonchalant wind mussing up my hair.

This is my American dream. The loneliness is only a requisite.

For some people, a vacation is a relaxing break, and when they get back from their far-fetched locations they can settle down and work another half year in their fascinating fields. I am from a family fueled by wanderlust—my father, who cannot settle in any one place for long, no matter how tempting the place; or my mother, who takes to trips as other people take to hobbies.

I can stay in one place for a very, very long time if I had to, and if it were the only option in front of me. I would be okay with an entire year without vacations if it meant a regular schedule and the expectation that this is it. But once I am on the road, no amount of travelling will satisfy me. I have been on day-long trips, and week-long trips, and month-long trips, and it is all the same. If I start, I cannot stop.

. . .

Deep in the nights, we talk frankly. Khajiit about his cuts, me about my panicked nature. He tells me to take a deep breath. We talk frankly but nothing much meaningful ever comes out of it. We revert to the same conversations.

My parents say I never write about anything truly meaningful. It could be because I do not show them the extent of what I write, or because I have not, in their eyes, suffered. I have not lived an entire year on pickled radishes and plain rice because I could not afford anything else. I have not woken up before sunrise and come home way after midnight working in a lab to sustain a meagre way of life. Compared to that, I have lived a life of luxury.

I think it is more than that. When Khajiit and I give someone on the streets a dollar, I wonder where our moralities lie. When we talk so frankly of being nineteen-year-olds and of the world giving us more responsibilities than we can handle (Khajiit more so than me, obviously), of, as he calls it, "Everything conspiring against me," I wonder if we truly know ourselves.

Through this year of tumult, political and personal, can I claim that I know myself?

. . .

The first time I formally learned about allegories was also in sophomore year, when my English class read Lord of the Flies. There is something to be said about things coming full circle.

A Bag Of Bananas

I went to Chinatown with Marie yesterday, because groceries were cheaper there than our local supermarket, and also because we wanted to go to a bakery. I don't know why I did not get my egg tart fill in Flushing, where the bubble tea was $3 for two compared to the bakery's $3.50 for one, but I bought some anyway and Marie bought a large green tea cake and I came back to the office with three bags of groceries.

Now I have bananas for breakfast for the next few days, so I won't starve in the mornings because I never wake up in time to both chat with Khajiit before one of us leaves and go somewhere to buy breakfast. The smart alternative would be to cook, but since I don't know who is using my only pot (the last time I checked it was full of this weird mushroom-like thing that I am pretty sure was not mine) and the fridge is full, this alternative is not very practical.

Some other things that happened in the past few days include:

• Marie, Violet, Henderson and I played Team Fortress 2, which means I have played one more game on the list of games our computer club's recent LAN game tournament hosted (now there is only SCII and DotA to go).
• In order to friend Marie on Steam, I got Khajiit to buy me a cheap $1 game, and of course he chose to buy this game called Puzzler World that had over 500 brainteaser puzzles resembling those of gbrainy which Khajiit and I played a lot on bus rides to several states (apparently there is a Windows version of gbrainy, so I no longer have to only play it on Linux, although why I would want to I have no idea).
• Violet and I picked up several green bean, squash, and pea plants from some guy who was giving them away. One of the green beans is dying though, so Violet took it home to give it some sunlight, and hopefully it will live happily ever after.
• The guy who lives next to me, #26 (as Khajiit calls him), decided his room was too hot and moved all his furniture aside from his loft bed to the kitchen and dragged his mattress onto the ground. Now whenever I walk by his room I can see his feet poking out from behind the door, and whenever I go into the kitchen there is a bookshelf.

I should sleep now, before it gets too late and I won't be able to wake up tomorrow again, and my bananas all rot like the frozen black bananas I found once in the freezer (partially why I don't ever cook anymore).

On The Other Side Of Oblivion

"I have this aunt," Violet said, in her I-have-this-crazy-story voice. "She had chickens as pets. She bought these pedigree chicken eggs—yes, pedigree chicken—and she wanted to hatch them into chicken and have those chicken lay eggs to sell. Except they're pedigree chicken, so they get sick really easily, so she had to buy expensive medicine to keep them alive. She would stab the chickens with needles one by one and force-feed them pills."

We were in the computer lab, eating our large boxes of poutine with extravagant toppings. Violet's boyfriend, Henderson, stole a particularly large piece of smoked meat, and Rosemary turned her attentions towards him again.

Just yesterday, Violet and I were talking about our futures, what little we knew of it. She and Henderson both wanted to be in academia, like her father. Their dream was to get tenure together in the same university. I told her my future was to see if Khajiit would graduate in the next ten years. We both laughed.

. . .

When I first went to Fish Wings, I won't deny this: I thought it was beneath me. I had gotten in without trying, and a scholarship to boot that had seemed to have fallen into my lap. There were smart people here, of course, but I was just as smart as them, if not more.

This past year has been a lot, and I have met so many people who have changed my mind about that. There is Flynn, who could rival Bryant on anything math and physics related (and who infuriatingly calls everything from triple integrals to advanced algebra "easy shit"). Aishan, who programs with three monitors and will be going off to Microsoft this summer (hopefully with no chair-throwing incidents). Sandra, who works multiple jobs and learned French from a retail job so she can support her way through university. Jessica, who is involved in everything from residence council to engineering teams to student society representative.

What had I to be so scornful about?

. . .

In his spare time, Khajiit works on his beloved programs and websites. He works on them when there is work due soon and he does not want to do it. When there is an assignment due in two days he would fix the scrollbars on the a small portion of the computer club's website, or make a Java program more Windows native, or something, anything, that is not his assignment. He says that his procrastination is never time wasted. He is always productive, especially when he procrastinates.

It used to frustrate me a lot. It still frustrates me sometimes. The new meds will probably help, but we both know he has to work hard too. Some days I want to tell him I believe in him, and I know he will pull through, one way or another. Other days I wish he could do it right now, because with every setback I can feel him slipping away.

Khajiit is not someone my parents would approve of. They asked where he was from, what he was studying, all the usual questions. For once they did not ask if he was a good student. Afterwards, when Khajiit told me to take deep breaths so I wouldn't fall into a state of panic, I wondered if it was merely an oversight.

. . .

Khajiit's dad recently asked me, "Do you like it here? No regrets?"

Maybe it is because his own daughter has chosen a college, and he is curious to make a comparison. Or maybe he knows. He has always known things about me before I do myself.

. . .

They smile when I fix the paper jams. They thank me when help them with their computer issues. The other day, I heard a girl explain to her friend the way the printing system worked, and I grinned. I could not have done it better.

There is something refreshing about swinging the keys attached to the network cards, going off to fix a ghost paper jam and hearing people talk about why they need to print so urgently. Sometimes it's an assignment due in ten minutes. Sometimes it's a document they need to file their taxes. Once it was a girl who needed her transcript to apply to grad school.

Maybe that's why when someone knocks on the door I tend to get up to open it. I hold the record for most printing money sold last semester, and although there is no prize or recognition for it, it's surprisingly satisfying. All those hours I've put in this computer lab make me happy.

I had first joined because I saw Flynn at the front desk, and I knew him because he was friends with Sam and Denise. I had stayed because it was fun, dizzying fun, all the late night laughing and crazy antics and large group outings. We are all good friends, I want to say, or maybe we are family. We are a family complete with wise, mature ones and scream-in-your-face immature ones, and the one or two people no one likes and the one or two people everyone likes. Lots of outside drama. Lots of inside tension.

My residence advisor said that living in residence was supposed to give us a feel of home, to make long-lasting friends and to feel like you belong in a group. I never got that from my residence (going home at 2am all the time probably did not help), but it's nice that I found it elsewhere.

. . .

Today is Mother's Day. I should call my parents. I have been putting it off, and the more I do so the more I want to, the harder it is to pick up the phone.

. . .

The title was sentimental me thinking I had sentimental things to write about. It is too late for me to think much, although I have had a four-hour nap today, and should not need to sleep too much, even if sleeping patterns for me are too elusive.