The Old Curiosity Shop

7:45pm: On Long Distance Relationships and Temporary Insanity
So my parents are like, you've got to stop talking about this boy. Think about your future. Try to keep busy. And I'm trying. Because I was never this person, I was never supposed to be the person who repeated a single name until it sounded like the tooting of a scooter.

But I'm doing it. And when I try not to, it becomes worse. One day I'm going to write about Malaysia, about the personalities of my students, the ones who propose marriage, the ones who bounce up and down, and the ones who scuttle off without saying hello.

In the meanwhile, everything that comes out is about a boy. And all I can do is accept that this is what the muses have given me to work with today.

---

If Venus had a telephone, I would leave cranky messages. If Aphrodite had e-mail I would flame her. And if Cupid, god damn him, had a mailbox, I would stuff postcards with letter bombs attached in it. All of them would say the same thing: What is this? What have you done to me?

I did not ask for this. I never wanted this. God knows there are a thousand people who do, people who lift their faces to the sky, rip open their shirts and say, Go ahead. Shoot me.

I kept my head down. I said, stay the fuck away from me, I considered taking vows as a non-religious nun, because I spent two years teaching myself to exist in solitude and at the end I reached a peace. If I was not happy, I was not unhappy either, and there is a lot to be said for that mindless stability.

But one day he sat next to me in a crowded room. And it was like talking to a part of myself I never knew I had. And though time carried us to different places, we kept coming back to each other, through text messages and e-mails, and like that, the gods and their cohort shot me straight through the heart.

When I see him its like someone added another sun to the sky, everything is brighter, the world is filled with a heady warmth and the drowsy peace of long summer days. When we have gone out, strangers have given us free sweets and milkshakes, asked us to talk about ourselves. Little kids have run up to us and said hello, waiters at restaurants tell us to come back together. We’re cute. It’s disgusting. This has never happened to either of us before.

But distance has not been our friend. We are five hours away by bus. I see him on weekends. We talk on the phone every night, we text almost every hour. If all goes well. But there are the weekends that don’t work, the nights where we are busy, and the moments when the phone is out of money. This is now, and this is the foreseeable future for as far as I can see, for years and years.

When we talk and when we are together I am at ease. But then the weekend is over, the night grows late and it is time to hang up the phone and sleep, and I am haunted by a pale misery. The world is somehow less without him.

And if I think too hard about the future, or about the miles of highway that stretch between us, the pale misery deepens into panic, and there is a constant wash rinse cycle spinning through my head. Is he worth this? Will we last? Will I be full of regrets? If this ends? I am so frightened, so sick of being frightened.

I can see no world where we are not long distance, and I can see no world without him.

( I have questions. I have questions for the ones who did this to me. )

1:37pm: Down the Highway
The pole is about knee high, flimsy, about two inches off of the highway’s shoulder. I fixate on it because I’m falling asleep on Paul’s shoulder. We’re on our way to Pontian to help out at a friend’s English camp, Paul is driving, and I’m sitting behind him, everything we need for the weekend strapped to my back: our computers, clothes, books. I cough and straighten up, but the weight of the backpack pulls me back down and I slump into Paul’s shoulder coughing into my helmet. I feel like an astronaut. Astronauts are not happy people. No one who leaves the earth to seek out the remote stars, is fundamentally happy.

While technically I know you shouldn’t fall asleep on motorbikes, it’s hard. We’re half an hour in, and I don’t know if I’m going to last for the full two hours. Sleep has made me soft and blurry around the edges.

You alright? Paul says at each traffic light and I purr into his shoulder.

I have things to say to Paul like, I’ve been sick with asthma for the past four weeks and you never said, see a doctor, or skip out on long motorbike trips. Or, sometimes you talk too much and it makes no sense. Or, you have the discretion and tact of a sponge. Something nudges you and everything leaks out of you.

There are other things to say too, like, when I see you, I smile and I can’t stop smiling and you’re smiling the same way, a demonic grin three inches wide, two inches across, that makes you look like a demented joker, all teeth and smile, and then we just walk around together smiling and people look at us and laugh. Perhaps out of pity, perhaps out of joy.

The only thing I really want to say is, after this year of teaching in Malaysia you are going back to graduate school in Boston, and me? I don’t have any career dreams that involve Boston. It’s been a month and I can’t imagine my life without you. After a year? Let’s end it now, while we can still walk away with skin wounds, skin wounds and no major damage.

When are you going to eat dinner? I say instead. You haven’t eaten since breakfast.

The light turns green before he can answer.

The thing about traveling by motorbike is you can’t talk about anything, not really. All you can do is hold on and watch the world go by.

It is dusk, rush hour and passing trucks and cars zoom by forcing us onto the shoulder. Soon it will be dark and we still have a long ways to go. The fumes from the passing cars rise in the air and I cough harder.

The pole comes closer, Paul misses swiping it by an inch, then it is right in front of my knee.

There’s a pause in the universe.

Then something bounces hard against the road.

( I realize it’s my head. )

7:48pm: How to Spend a Week in Laos
--Arrive in the capital with three people in tow:
• your best friend from childhood
• a girl with a quiet voice who waltzes like a debutante and builds her own furniture
• a boy who texts you every day with tales of the universes he found in an inch of water or the velvet back of a leaf

It is burning season. In the mountains farmers are setting fire to their crops to usher in the new growing season, and the smoke fills the air. It is raining in slow sick trickle. The boy is passive, the girl has a cold, and your friend is too cheerful. Wonder why you decided to come here for spring break with these people when it could just be you and your best friend, the known, the familiar.
( But it is the week of doing everything strange and new )

5:14pm: On Rejecting Submissions: You Do Not Write in Vain
Either I am writing or reading slush, at least that’s what I like to tell myself. In reality, I spend more time thinking about writing, more time thinking over the dozens of rejections I have received. Days, sometimes weeks are lost to a frozen paralysis where I wonder what the point is. It is difficult to write, and once you have written still more difficult to get published.

If I am lucky the rejections are like this:

We like your writing but…

If I am not, they are just rejections. Either way I am left to wonder what I am doing and why I do it.

In this mood I read slush...

(Link redirects to the Shimmer Blog)

2:02pm: The Shores of Malaysia
For the New Year Owl washed up on the shores of Malaysia. More specifically, she arrived in a five star hotel in downtown Kuala Lumpur to begin Orientation for her Fulbright grant to teach English. At first she did not know what to do with herself. She had sailed through the month of December in a delicious haze of sleep and books, and she was not prepared for the dazzle of Kuala Lumpur, the chatter of her fellow grantees.

Actually it is a wonderful thing to have the run of a five star hotel in the middle of downtown Kuala Lumpur with forty nine other like minded people. Kuala Lumpur is a city of glass buildings and towers squashed between extravagant shopping malls built of marble and light. Here, the days stretch into the nights, and the nights into day. Everyone is bright with laughter and fellowship. The party is all the more hectic because everyone knows the time is short. Orientation is three weeks long, then the party is over, everyone disperses to a remote town.

People are easing into Malaysia, some sinking comfortably into its softness, others landing awkwardly and bruising. It is not easy. Malaysia is different, roughly 70% Malay, 20% Chinese, 10% Indian; three cultures folded into one, and so mixed that their edges blur and it is difficult to distinguish one from the other.

The breakfast buffet has Chinese porridge, Malaysian nasi lemak, Indian dosas and while most of Owl’s cohort marvels (or despairs) over the food, Owl is jaded. Owl has seen it before. This is exactly what Owl grew up eating, it is a combination Owl never expected to see outside of her house.

And this is where Owl struggles.

Malaysia is more home like than home.

(Link directs to Owl Reads).

1:00am: Murmurings of the Troubled & Outspoken Gut


The gut is a troubling organ. When fed too much, it rolls and roils. When fed too little it groans and grumbles. In between it talks. Mine never shuts up. It’s alarmingly fond of the mundane: Oh hello, you twisty little cupcake with a cherry on top. You’re going to get us into lots of trouble aren’t you? So we’re just going to skeedadle away. Occasionally, very occasionally, it goes silent, for a long meditative moment.

And then it starts screaming.

It busts out banners and drums, bangs on gongs with wooden spoons and howls: Listen to me. Listen to me you wretched wretched fool.

I would prefer not to be a fool. So usually, I don’t listen. Because, who, absolutely, who makes life changing decisions based on some bulging green sac in their belly? Every so often I wonder how much you have to pay to get a gut surgically removed. Or at least muzzled and muted. I have spent most of my life studying the art of being sensible. In other words, living life the way I ought to. ‘Ought to’ defined as some compilation of watching what other people do and trying to be like the people most admired by other people. All the while, my gut wails like a siren.

It is not easy to be sensible. Sensible involves a lot of observing other people and imitating them even when you think they’re ridiculous, a lot of practicing something called discipline, which means sitting down and doing things you don’t want to do, when you don’t want to do them, and not complaining. Alright. Complaining. But doing anyway.

Sensible people study mathematics and science so they can make a living. So I did, even though my gut squatted in a corner and shat in a pot, to show me what it thought of all this unfortunate logic business. Sensible people take internships abroad so they have international experience on their resume. And so I did, even though my gut threw itself on the floor, and cried until it was marinated in salt water. And sensible people get jobs in offices with plump salaries. So I went, even though my gut handcuffed itself to my bed waving protest signs.

Sensible people are sometimes very very unhappy.

And so, on a July morning when I was riding a bus to work at 6:00 a.m. and my gut said, to hell with all of this, let’s go abroad and write, I was just depressed enough to listen. I made plans. I wrote applications for a Fulbright. I day dreamed about a future that wasn’t supposed to come true, because when the time came, I would be sensible and—well, who the hell quits a good job to go abroad?

Then the future arrived, and the worrying was all pointless anyway. I didn’t get the Fulbright.

This is not over, my gut said. And that was funny, sad and sweet, the delusion of my gut, and very sensibly, I laughed and told myself I’d get over it, because it’s better to be in an office anyway.

Then I did get it.

And I sat in my cube, and I thought six more months of this until my grant starts and I can leave for Malaysia. I was that depressed, it wasn't even about deciding to stay or go anymore, just about when, and my gut said, China’s lovely this time of year.

Sensible pointed out that I cried during both of my internships abroad. Sensible pointed out that I’d probably die friendless and alone in some gutter since I'm hopelessly monolingual. Sensible sounded a lot like fear.

I want to go to China, my gut said, louder. Right now.

But, my father said, sensibly when I told him I wanted to study in China before my Fulbright started in January. How will you make the arrangements? It’s June. Term starts in September. It’s too late. And it’s too short. You’ll have three months. It’ll be impossible to learn Chinese. Wait. Do it after Malaysia.

I’m going, my gut said. I’m going even if you don’t go. And that made no sense, because what would it do? Eviscerate me and hop the plane by itself? Yeah. I will, my gut said. Don't make me do it.

We went.

And we did not learn to speak Chinese, not even my gut who was somehow convinced it could understand people no matter what language they spoke--it’s all in the eyes--and we spent most of our time reading or writing when we should have been doing our Chinese homework, and occasionally we had panic attacks about the good money, the good time we were wasting.

We were incredibly, incandescently, indescribably happy.

It is the dawn of 2012. I have one more day at home, curled up in the haven of my house, surrounded by beloved books, surrounded by beloved people. Then, I fly off to Malaysia for a year to teach English. This is what comes of listening to your gut on July mornings when you are half asleep.

At the moment I’m sprawled across the floor this close to throwing up everything I’ve eaten in the past month, because dear God, foreign countries, teaching, strangers, the pay check that I left for a future, the unknown future that begins once the grant is over.

You’re making a mistake, my coworker told me the day before I quit. You’re doing well. You’ve got a future here. Who quits a good job in this economy?

Ignore him, my gut said while I tried not to spew all over my coworker’s shoes and ask him what I was doing, why I was even thinking of leaving. I’ll see you through this. I’ll make you happy. Just trust me.

This year's resolution: Trust my gut.

3:48pm: ravings from a slug-burrito
Been home from China for about two weeks now, and have spent most of it curled up on the sofa like a great horned slug. A thick fog of exhaustion has settled over my shoulders. I don't know where it came from or why it persists, but I've basically given up on words. Thoughts are mostly coming in pictures. Two pictures: a slug and a burrito. If I'm feeling really energetic, there is a third: a slug in a burrito.

No seriously, I have a dream. I dream that one day I will wrap myself in a comforter, hide under the coffee table and never move again. Ever.

Except, in early January I'm supposed to fly to Malaysia and begin teaching for my Fulbright. Slug-burritos are charming capable teachers, yes? Yes? Anybody?

---

On facebook some of the Fulbrighters have formed a Malaysia group. Most of the people who apply to teach abroad are extroverts. They're bright and bubbly and thinking cultural exchange thoughts, brainstorming class activities, like teaching is this fun exchange of knowledge not a wretched hell where you stare at your students and they stare at you.

People are putting time and thought into their preparations. They're behaving like they're going to live in a different culture for a year.

Meanwhile I'm sitting on my ass reading Beowulf and Rimbaud thinking: Goddamn extroverts. Goddamn overachievers. Watching other people behave sensibly always enrages me.

---

I've spent the past two weeks going through my books and my papers. I researched Chinese philosophers so I could arrange Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Mencius, Mo-Tzu, and Chuang-Tzu chronologically. I made tough calls about shelving like Bhagvad-Gita next to The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari or the Bible?

Then I went through my correspondence. I am shit at replying, but I've kept all my letters since I first started writing letters. More specifically, I keep them in a filing cabinet organized alphabetically by sender. Anyone who has ever sent me a letter/drawn me a picture/etc. has their own folder and inside letters are arranged by date. In my more anal days I used to decorate the folder with stickers that matched the sender's personality.

In the middle of this, my dad walked in and said, okay, this is great, but what about your retirement account, your tax papers, and your medical records?

And I was like, oh fuck.

---

For the past two years my college correspondence has lain in a thick binder. I was not at my best during college. Leaving home wounded me in some fundamental way, and I wanted to pack that wound full of friends and bloodpacts and sisterhood and etc, I wanted people to love me like a sun that obliterates everything else in sight. And because there were so many people who were all loved in so many different ways, I saw how everyone else was loved, and I saw myself and I thought, I am lacking.

I took opened the binder and a lifetime of letters, funny drawings and inside jokes spilled out. Notes from when my friends papered my room. Notes slipped under the door when I was stressed. The remains of a hugeass package mailed to me when I was interning. Horrifying drawings of couples who must never be named. Funny drawings of hated TAs.

I was loved. I was always loved, and I never saw it.

---

There are ten issues of the Economist I haven't read on the living room table. I gave up on the news in China and I didn't miss it. Picking it up now seems futile. September's news is already stale, only important as the introductory paragraph for October and November which can be packaged together as setup for settling down with this week's Economist.

I've never really trust people who are eager to deliver up firm opinions on the news. At best you can hope for a surface acquaintanceship with current events, hardly enough information to enable you to form an opinion. At worst, news is delivered entertainment-style packaging in all the biases of the journalists and publishers who produce it. The Jakarta Post does not tell the same story as the New York Times, and the real story is somewhere half way in between. By the time you figure out the real story, it's old news, something else has happened somewhere else in the world.

I believe in fiction. The newspaper from 1801 is not of interest today except as an antique or a novelty. But the book from 1801 still is because fiction that endures, touches on human themes, life, loss, love, death, all the small-big words that matter from century to century.

---

I am most unhappy when I tell myself what I feel is a wrong, that I am a bad person for feeling the way I do, and that I ought to feel XYZ. At some level I really do believe I am a bad person, I worry that my thinking is faulty. I fixate on people's flaws. I always idolize kind people, people who overlook flaws, who notice only the good things and look puzzled when I stamp my foot and say--but didn't you see?

Because of this I don't make friends easily.

Secretly, this is what I believe. Society doesn't equip us to deal with our emotions as they are. It tells us to change them into something positive. The positive people are the good ones, the ones who cure cancer through willpower, who always have a kind word, and forgive the fools, especially the fools who do not deserve forgiveness.

Society actually isn't fond of emotions. Emotions foolish, weak things. Logic and intellect should rule the day. But that is a sort of lie. Any emotion that's shoved away and not properly dealt with will explode into something messy. Any emotion forced to transmute into something else will implode into something disgusting. And the exploded and imploded are always expressed in some sort of action, and action, no matter what is effects other people.

The best is to owe up to the emotions, whatever they are and then let them go.

I think the best writing, is the writing like empty pastures with magnetic poles. Poles that pull emotions, especially the twisted ones--the things that make good people say they are bad people--up and out of people's mouths, until there is nothing left except a peace: I am not alone in my twistedness. It's alright. This too is part of life.

I would like to write like that.

5:04pm: for love of common words
The trouble is sometimes I think of myself as a fictional character in third person, so half of my entries come out from the point of view of a stuffed bird...therefore also cross posted to Owl Reads.

---

For the past month Owl has been haunted by this line about an artist from John Galsworthy's To Let:

"The quiet tenacity with which he had converted a mediocre talent into something really quite individual…"

Owl read this and flung Galsworthy across the room. Lines about mediocre talent have a way of searing themselves into Owl's mind where they throb for weeks before fading into a dull ache that never quite disappears, in the way of things you don't want to believe but know to be irrefutably true.

Owl went back through all of her work and read it exhaustively. Every so often she ran into a decent paragraph buried in the detritus of her stories, and the shock of it made her come away satisfied. There's something here worth fighting for, she told herself, and for a week she was happy.

Then one of her friends sent Owl a story to critique.

It was good.

Not good in the way of school assignments that get an A, or stories that are shown off by proud parents, but good in the way that Owl read it and felt the gaping hole in her that is always searching for beauty and wisdom wrapped up in a few elegant words, the part that is always hungry and rarely fed, that part read, and said this. This is good.

Owl read and her heart broke open in her chest.

It's one thing to be held in the thrall of some dead genius. The space created by death still allows for self-delusion--another ten years and I'll be able to do that--but it's another thing to realize belatedly that you have rubbed shoulders with genius, cleaned kitchens together and stayed up until 2:00 in the morning discussing spoons.

All illusions are stripped away. There is yourself and there is genius, and there is the distance between you, and you know with an awful certainty what you are and what you are not. And then you look into genius's face, and it's an ordinary human face, two eyes, nose, cupid mouth, spattering of freckles, and you peer at the rooms and roads genius inhabits and wonders what it is she sees that you don't, you ask yourself a thousand questions about innate talent versus hard work and in the end the all boil down the same wretchedness: Why not me too? Why was I passed over?

Because it's hard this love, this obsession with words. It demands a life, hours spent pouring over books, days spent spacing out in company, years at the table scrawling over sheets of paper, ripping them up, starting over, again and again, and yes, again. You quit your job, you give it your life, and in return there are no promises, no comfortable salary, no accolades, nothing but the casual amazement and pity of strangers. You write? Oh. It's a hard life you know. Doesn't pay.

Yeah. Owl knows.

But there are the things you can choose in life and the things you can't, and then in the realm of things that just are, there's love. Sometimes that isn't enough, not compared to a salary or to that firm nod from strangers, You're a clever one. You made the right choices, but in the end, you pick up and you carry on because it was never about choices. Not really. Just about living.

You love and you live with it. But it is hard to know, in the end, that your love, this love, exceeds your ability.

( How do you deal? )

4:43pm: peter & the wolf
Back from China where my internet was oh-so-broken. Dazzled by the abundance of blonde hair, facebook, and ice water in restaurants. Overwhelmed by the sheer amount I've missed. Wallstreet exploded. Facebook's layout changed yet again. One of my friends sent out a wedding invitation. Oddly mute, both physically and in terms of writing. China has been the best three month stretch of my life, a slice of paradise, that taught me not to settle for anything less in real life. I had a job I loved. I made real friends, good friends, the kind of friendship I haven't had since college. I lived in an apartment with a tubby little dog. It's all over now, it's gone, and somehow that's alright because you have to move on.

But maybe part of moving on is being silent? I'm spending most of my time these days on the couch behind a wall of books. In the meanwhile, I'm back posting China entries at: Owl Reads and here.

---

Friday night, the tree branches are tapping against the window and a skittering wind blows down the empty street. Inside the lamps cast a pale glow and I am sitting at my desk, lost in some shadow dream that comes pouring out of my fingers onto the page. This is how I've spent the past night, the night before that, the last week, most of my few months in China.

My phone buzzes. A text from my friend Dolma.

Having dinner. Come out.

I should. I really should. It's the social thing to do.

My phone buzzes again.

What else are you planning to do?

Write. Daydream. Waste time.

It's your last week, she texts. Don't abandon me.

I shut my computer and come. When I arrive at the restaurant I am yawning and cranky. The chair next to Dolma has an abandoned red sweatshirt and a messenger bag. Peter.

Peter is twenty three, Dutch by nationality. A year ago an exporting company hired him to work as the managing supervisor in their China plant. A year later they fired him, and now Peter is taking Chinese classes with us while searching for a job.

Well, ostensibly, Peter is taking Chinese classes. Mostly he doesn't come. When he does come to class, his eyes are bloodshot and his hands shake. Most weekends Dolma accompanies him to the hospital for IVs, or shots, or something. Peter always has something.

You're going to dance yourself into an early grave, I told him once, half-laughing because it was a Wednesday morning and he'd cut first period because he was in the hospital, and he looked back at me and said, I know, and his eyes were too large in his thin face, and the moment lasted too long, so he smiled and stuck his tongue out and dying young was just a joke, a bad joke that didn't matter.

It's China, he said later. Damn Chinese have no work ethic. They party all night and then off to work in the morning. Ridiculous. I'm not like this. Not really.

Are you tired? Dolma asks me because I've been silent for ten minutes now.

No.

Is it because of Peter? Give him a chance. He's doing a lot better. Even went to church last week.

No. And then because Dolma is a friend, I tell the truth.

( I was writing. )

10:54pm: to my ancestors
Internet been brokkers for a few weeks, but it just got fixed, glorious, glorious day.

---

There are temples in China, red pillared temples with blue and green roofs where great golden Buddhas sit inside. I must drop by and pray. I am very happy these days, and for a long time I thought such happiness was a thing of the past. I must thank my ancestors. A monk once told me to stop in every temple I pass and thank my ancestors.

They are looking out for you, he said.

I should have laughed, because between you and me, let us be honest—imagine the good men and women of India in their saris and kurtas, and the good men and women of China sitting in their robes, and think of them ignoring centuries of tradition to look after a lousy half breed versed in American ways.

Actually, I did not laugh because I imagined that once people reach the smoke curl clouds of heaven, these things cease to matter, that actually all of our ancestors are sitting together at the same table looking at a stream of souls floating by, gold and silver ships that must be guided past muddy whirlpools to clear streams where orange and red carp swim.

They are looking out for me, they are looking out for you. I trust this now because I wake up, and I am awake, there is the morning yogurt and fruit buns, dodging cars and buses without wishing one would hit me, waving at the wrinkled grandmothers because they like hearing the mother tongue from a foreigner. Everything is new, everything is an adventure.

The days are crisp, fresh, mine to unfold and shake out like freshly laundered white shirts—sweet smelling, unwrinkled.

Before this I was leading a moral life. There was a purpose. I got up, I went to work every day, I sat in an office and I did whatever it is that work is. If you are an American citizen, at some point my work touched you. In a small way it made your life better.

These days I have no purpose. Ostensibly I am here to learn to speak, in reality I am cartwheeling through time. I do not go home and study. Someone is paying for me to be here and maybe I should repay them by studying hard, but I am not. I write articles because it pleases me. I strike up conversation with strangers because that pleases me. I spend more money than I have at bakeries, because that too pleases me. I answer to no one, and that pleases me most of all.

The first life, the moral life, I did not know this, was utterly corrupt. I lived like an animal waiting to die. I waited for the days to pass, sometimes I even counted to a thousand and then did it over and over again just to see how much time it would kill. Like that I murdered the minutes of my own life. I did this for money. Not even a lot of money, just some money. I did this so people I did not care about would admire me.

I did this because I was afraid to take responsibility for my own life.

And my ancestors, my ancestors who fought their way out of the womb, who during times of disease and famine, fought to live, who struggled to raise their own children, raise because maybe that's how it really is, babies arrive on their back squalling, and you pull them by their hair and scream—stand up, stand up and walk, damnit, walk—all of them did not get up and walk just to see me wish my life away for a pile of pennies and platitudes.

That life is an abomination to them.

This other life, it is not helping anyone. I am not doing anything besides looking out for my own pleasure. Sometimes I worry about how the monks in the temples, how God in heaven, would account for this. I do not give money to charity. I do not volunteer my time. I did, in that past life, but automatically, because I felt that I ought to, that I was beholden to some higher cause. Call it the appearance of compassion.

Can you live a moral life without helping anyone?

In this new life, I am eager to spring out of bed, eager to greet the new day, because this life is my life. There is no paycheck, but the time, it is very sweet, it is very good to think, yes, I will go for a run because I want to. Yes, I will write, because I want to. No, I will not study Chinese, I do not want to—and no one, no one can tell me that it is wrong, or I should do otherwise or I owe something to someone.

I imagine it is quite difficult to live like this for a long period of time. People make noises about earning your daily bread, your stomach makes noises about eating your daily bread. People make noises about owning something to society, or about your conscience and there are a thousand ways to avoid doing the things you really want to do, to sell yourself into a sort of indentured servitude for a paycheck and to call it a good and moral life. Certainly, the monks might agree if you donate to them.

But I would wonder if all those ancestors sitting in heaven, who have lived their lives, who have worked through their regrets and are now shining beacons of light down on the thousands of ships they are guiding, are urging us to withstand the cries of the people, the grumblings our stomachs, to ignore everything except following whatever it is that will keep you excited about life whispering, yes, exactly, do it, do this even if you're frightened, go after your freedom, do what you want to do, because:

This is how you should live. Regardless of what it costs, regardless of how much courage it takes, or whatever price you must pay for your freedom, pay it and then live. Otherwise you are just an empty body waiting for death. Live, eager to spring out of bed, eager to stand up and greet the new day.

This is moral. This is good.

3:41pm: Notes from China
Definition:

China: slender, shy novelist with a shock of hair falling over one eye, plays pan pipes, eats cucumbers raw in the morning because they taste like sky, holds his grandmother's hand when she crosses the street and isn't ashamed, takes solitary walks around a mirror clear lake while feeding white geese bits of bread, doesn't say much but looks at you like he's forgotten more words than you ever know

Chinese: 500 lb spiked hammer crashing down on your forehead at 50mph every 5 minutes occasionally stops and just when you think you've gotten through the worst of it, it shoots a 500 megavolt electric current right through the tender lymph nodes on your groin.

*(All Chinese is in italics).

1. Chinese classes are held in a room where green desks are joined to green chairs and seat two. The walls are bare except for a blackboard in the front. Outside it is cool and fresh, there is always a breeze blowing because I have come to the city of eternal spring, a city where air conditioners and heaters don't exist.

In the classroom we are from all over the world, eight Swedish boys who don’t talk to anyone except themselves, three men from Laos who are on a government scholarship, two Thai girls, a Swiss-Tibetan who laughs before she talks, and a Vietnamese girl who is only seventeen. I thought she was a bit nasty because she wouldn't talk to anyone, then I learned that she speaks next to no English and her father moved here for work. She is very unhappy. I would like to do something for her. I can't think what.

There are three teachers, the comprehensive one always wears a flower in her hair and dresses in colors like bubble gum pink and goldenrod. She laughs a lot and when she does, the corners of her lips curl up like an amused kitten. Her name means surrounding sky. She is our favorite.

The speaking teacher balances on high heels in front of the classroom. She is rather beautiful, her legs are long and slender in the high heels, her cheeks are pink, and her hair falls over her face. Her English is not confident, maybe this is her first time teaching because she is very serious, but sometimes we catch her smiling at us.

Teacher I love you, one of the Sweedes declared--the young gawky one who does a little hip swirl dance whenever he has to write on the blackboard—when she told us our class would be split up. No want to leave you.

The third teacher is the writing teacher. Maybe she is beautiful, a delicate silhouette tottering about on stilettos, with a tiny waist and a small smile, but she scolds us when we don't remember the Chinese characters, or when something must be repeated. Even though she is smiling when she scolds us, I hate her for being so miserly with her kindness. We call her the dragon lady.


2. They call me Apple here. We had to pick Chinese names. The spoken teacher wrote them on the board for girls, and they all sounded vaguely hookerish. Expensive South. Thinking Jade. I liked the boys names better. Flying Dragon. White Tiger.

I thought of the apples in the market place, apples that look like color pencil drawings. On the surface they look pink, but if you look closer there are faint red, orange and yellow lines. Where I come from, apples grow on the trees in the fall and you can pick them. In China, God draws each and every apple on a sketch pad.

Teacher, I want to be called Apple.

Apple?!

Yes.

3. I live with a host family in a three bedroom apartment. The first time I visited, I saw eight studio photographs of my host mother in the foyer and wanted out. Can you really trust someone with eight studio photographs pinned on the wall? She likes her short skirts and high heels. She laughs a lot, her English is good and she is always telling me something about the city, or teaching me a new word or showing me how to use the washing machine. She moves quickly, in and out of rooms, in and out of the doors. She is not home often, she has a job as an administrator of a school, she owns three restaurants with her husband, she likes people.

The photographs are from when she met her husband. He was the photographer.

Her husband is tall, the kind of thin where his jeans dangle on his hips. He is very silent, at first I thought I offended him by sitting in his chair. He is the kind of Muslim who doesn't eat pork but doesn't know how to say Salam Alaikum. When he does smile, it's an unexpected gift. When he laughs, he does it silently, with his whole body.

There is an American border here. He is sixty nine, a former alcoholic and drug addict. After his first visit to China he sold his business and moved all his belongings here. He likes to flirt with all the shop keepers and old ladies. He's taken me under his wing and acts as a translator, navigator and study guide. He tells me stories about his former life in America. Once he drove drunk out of LA and ended up in Manhattan a week later. He still can't remember any of those seven days.

Sometimes he looks at me too long during conversation and this makes me nervous.

4. Last night I went to the lake park with the Swiss-Tibetan girl. I should say woman, she's in her thirties. Lakes are part of the reason why I'm in love with China. This lake is surrounded by stone benches carved in the shape of penguins and pigs, and weeping willows that dip their leaves in the water. There are half moon bridges built over it, pagodas tucked in every spare corner, and squares for dancing, singing and tai-chi.

It was dark when we arrived and paddle boats lit with red lanterns for the autumn festival bobbed in the water. We stumbled across a ring of people, their faces golden from a single lamp. In the center were two dancers, one middle aged lady who waved a fan who stepped about like she was nothing but feathers and wings, one youth who bent and rippled like flowing water. Men and women took turns singing at the microphone for them, and like that, the audience became part of the dance.

Afterwards we went for ice cream. The Swiss girl smoked a cigarette and told me about her ex who'd been with her for ten years, gone missing for three days and then came home and said, I don't love you anymore.

I never expected that, she said. I knew him. I knew he wasn't that sort of person. If anything I thought he loved me more than I loved him. But towards the end, we weren't in love anymore. Not really.

What is love? I asked her.

I don't know, she said. I thought I did.

We ate our ice cream silently, then she said—

I still think he's a good person. Is that crazy?

No. It's mature. Forgiving.

Oh yes. Me, I'm such an angel.

And angels get ice cream. Eat.


5. I have an internship with the expat website for the city. It's run by these two guys in their mid-thirties. They fell in love with China in their twenties, refused to make a living the conventional way (teaching) and instead spent seven years or so in a dilapidated little room behind a shop building up their website.

They're obscenely bony, sharp and quick, full of clever barbs and slightly mad from being locked up in their room. Supervisor, the more talkative is American and coats his madness with a thin veneer of tact. He looks like a ferret, his eyes are big, golden, very bright. Programmer is blonde, British, and doesn't bother with any veneer. His features are long and thin, pointed, like he's an arrow about to be shot through the air. He conducted the interview face down on his keyboard.

They cater to the kind of people who like to drink hard, play hard and work hard. I want them as my friends and mentors, and probably it will not happen, we are too close in age for mentorship, and too different in personality for friendship.

They are paying me to write stories about the city, to go out and explore or interview interesting people and write. My story ideas bore them, too soft, too surface, so they tell me what to write and I write it. And then they will pay me.

I read your Owl blog, Supervisor said during the interview. I braced myself. He didn't look like the type to enjoy sentimental pieces written from the POV of a stuffed owl.

You're a good writer, obviously, Supervisor said.

Obviously. Obviously, like he was telling me something I already knew and took for granted, something that was stupid to even talk about.

Then he spoke to me like I knew a lot about writing, like I practiced every day or something and had this skill that was hard to come by, spoke to me like it was embarrassing to mention the basics, like he imagined he wouldn't need to edit my work and when he paid me for the first story, he handed me $25 like I deserved it.

Jesus.

6. I thought maybe I would miss work, maybe away from the structure of 40 hours a week I'd melt into a pile of jelly and curse myself for leaving stability.

I walked past an office the other day and I thought no, fuck no, no, no, never again. And it wasn't that bad, I will swear the past two years were not at all bad, rather good in fact, but when I think of them now, it is like remember a bad dream, a bad dream about an animal that is slowly dying in a trap and doesn’t know that it's dying.

I have all these grand delusions about how I will study Chinese like a motherfucker, how I will memorize extra vocabulary on the weekends and evenings, and when I'm done I'll know more Chinese than anyone thought possible in three months and I go home and

I write.

I have three months in China, one month at home and ten months of Fulbright and then time ends and probably I will go back to a cubicle.

Fourteen months is enough to write something long. Fourteen months is enough time to save yourself. For years I have been waiting for a novel to spring fully formed into my head, and it has never come. Instead, when I am bored, I tell myself potboilers. I do mean potboilers, escapism, nothing earthshaking in terms of plot or character or philosophy, just the sort of thing you read to make the world go away, the sort of thing I like to read the best.

I am tired of waiting for a plot. I do not think I will get another fourteen months again. I am going to sit down and write a potboiler. It is not art. Probably I should be ashamed. It doesn't burst from the fingers, but instead takes easing into, and then the fingers get working. It seems to require more than wanting to explode at the screen, something like a little bit of discipline and a little bit of desperation.

Discipline and desperation. Is that enough to save your soul?

10:10pm: Notes from India
I am sitting in a hotel room in China. Periodically my muscles start to spasm. Fear.
Very few people here speak English. Everything is written in Chinese. I can not even read a menu. My mother has been steering me through everything from buying breakfast to registering for classes. She leaves in a week. I am, I am, not thinking. But even now, my hands are shaking a little.

---

For a week I washed up in India. I am always slow to go to India. The weather is harsh, the crowds so thick you are buffeted about, and by the end of the day you are covered in a layer of sweat mixed with dust. When I go, and it is hot, and I get cranky and sweaty in the crowds, and I hang out with my family and I can not believe, I absolutely cannot believe that people can love like this, like the earth is going to end tomorrow so you have to get it all in today.

I have not seen my aunt for four years, but she remembers the exact dates of my last visit, the biscuits I was addicted to. This time, when I came down with a fever she sat up half the night sponging me off, when we couldn't go out to eat vegetable stew and buttered bread because of my fever, she made them—because after you leave, I'll think of you every time I see them, and feel guilty, she said. When I left she said, come back, I'm already planning your next visit.

I'd like to think that's why I visit so infrequently, because it's best to space out your time with people so each visit is an overwhelming burst of affection. But, that's not true. I could have chosen to spend the next three months in India, and instead I chose to spend them in China where I am a stranger, because I love the way the lakes have crescent bridges, and old men and women eat peeled cucumbers while playing mah-jong. Can you believe such idiocy?

Shortly before I left DC, I visited my college friend roosacoffeejew. It was a lovely visit which is another story in and of itself, but what is pertinent at the moment is we spent the last morning curled up in our pajamas listening to her grandparents tell stories. Mafia connections. Ellis Island. Failed dates, love at first sight. They spoke and an entire history unfolded.

When they finished they turned to me.

What about you?

I shook my head. I don't have any stories. I don't share languages with my grandparents.

Can't you get anyone to translate?

Actually my grandparents are all dead.

Well, when you get a chance, interview any relatives you have. And write down whatever they say, her grandmother said. Write everything down or you'll forget it.

In India my father and my cousin and I spent one morning also curled up in our pajamas, digging through a massive stack of photographs that are kept in the plush tongue shaped sofa in my aunt's living room. The sofa is my aunt's inheritance from my dead grandparents. The photos are my father's inheritance. One day they will be mine. I can not recognize half the people in them.

Accordingly, here are the ( notes. )

10:10pm: Move On Up
The movers came today, two men dusted with tattoos. One was tall with a shaved head and a snaggle toothed smile, the other was short with sweet sleepy eyes. They spoke in slow thick accents I had to strain to understand. Until they came, I did not truly understand that I was moving, that I had deliberately chosen to break up the life I'd created over the past two years. Everything was dreamlike and distant, as if at any moment I could tell my boss I'd changed my mind after all, I'd be staying and he would take me back.

As the movers carried the artifacts of my life out the door—the meditation cushion I'd bought with the best of intentions and then never used, the long couch for out of town visitors, innumerable boxes of books—I saw that I would really be leaving, that for me this city would fade from reality to memory, and in a few months this apartment would be the setting for someone else's life story.

Where are you moving, the tall man asked me.

Away, I answered, because I could not say China. He would have asked me why China and I would have no answer. No good answer. Not at that moment.

I wanted them to fill the awful hollowness of watching your life break up with words, good words about beginnings and endings, or at least small talk so I could befriend them and rest easy in my belief that all people are well-intentioned, bone friendly.

But they were movers not pastors, and they were not in the business of comforting people, they were in the business of moving, so they sweated and cussed as they walked my things out the door.

Fucker needs me to wipe his ass, the taller man said to me of the smaller mover before they left. Been doing this for three years, but it's like every day is his first day.

After they had gone, I swept out the dust that had accumulated in the hidden corners, unrolled my sleeping bag and took out a small duffle bag of belongings, exactly what I had when I arrived two years ago, before I bought cutlery and furniture and all the other things that shape a life. If you did not know me, you would not if this was the first day or the last. I felt that helpless.

Then I sat on my sleeping bag and looked around. Most of my things had been packed for weeks and I'd been surprised by how little I needed them or missed them, surprised by how irritating it was to pack away a drawer full of things I cared very little about, only to find another drawer full of other things I cared very little about.

But now that my studio was empty, I cared very much. When I poured a glass of water, the clinking of the glass echoed in the apartment, the thunk of the jug on the counter echoed. I would have given a lot for my never used meditation cushion. Not to sit on even, but because it would be a soft island on the hardwood floor, a splash of crimson to focus on in an apartment full of nothing.
Maybe it is because we come into life with nothing, and go out with nothing, maybe because truly, despite whatever else we may believe, we own nothing and are owed nothing more than our bodies, maybe that's why we spend so much time collecting junk like treasure, building ourselves thrones out of dead trees and dead animals, because we don't have the courage to face up to how little we can conquer: precisely, nothing.

If there was a worthwhile epiphany in there, I did not embrace it. Instead, I fled to yoga class, the one where the instructor has a silvery voice and focuses on patterns of movement, the shift from downward dog to upward dog, rather than on the alignment of each pose, and fittingly, reads us bits of poetry at the end of class.

Here, in class perhaps because I was locked into a rhythm of movement, because I could not think about why I was doing warrior one or warrior two, but only execute each pose on the good faith that I was doing something necessary, it was easier to think about the last two years since college graduation.

Because I did not know that I had only two years, because I worried sometimes that this would be the rest of my life, I did not realize I had been given a gift, the gift of a long meditation. Yes, I worked, and yes I worried, but for the first time in eleven years I had time to myself, time away from a system that pushed mounds of homework into each corner of my life and filled me up with grade-neurosis, time away from my friends and family for better or for worse.

Mostly what I remember of the past two years is sitting in my apartment, the walk to yoga where I past two iron leopards, the long winter nights of yoga practice where we sat in the yellow light of the studio and watched the sun slowly set, the walk back home that smelled of cold, long runs on lazy autumn evenings when orange and gold leaves drifted in dark puddles of water, Sunday afternoons at the grocery, and during all of that, I inhabited a silent space in my head.

In the silence it seemed like nothing happened, but then I would wake up every now and then and find I was questioning things I had never questioned before, things I took for granted, the value of learning Calculus, the reasons why I admired workaholics, the every day actions committed without much thought…what belief system did they stem from? Were they valid? Did I want to live like this?

I had no answers. I have no answers. But the asking, the very act of asking, surely that is worth something? At any rate, it is what my two years have bought me. I'd like to imagine that the next year and a half of travel, of wandering around the earth like a nomad learning languages and teaching English will bring me answers, but even then I am not so sure—I do not know. I do not know if it is even sensible to break up my life like this, if come 2013 when I return I will be jobless and broke, only that I am going to do it, I will fly blind into the night, and I will not be stopped. Not now.

The instructor ended class by reading Rumi.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

Breathe in, she said. Now, breathe out.



(Cross posted at Owl Reads. I still haven't figured out how I want to divvy up posts. Also if I change the address to owloverseas, will that mess up the RSS feeds?)

5:43pm: Of Oracles
The day before the earth would be swept clean, Mika went to the oracle. It was traditional. Soldiers usually went to pray for an end to the wars or, if they were particularly weak of heart, for an early death. Mika had never gone before. He had no need for these things.

But this was different. This was the last war. They had nothing left for another battle, nor did the enemy. All around him men he’d known for his whole life were packing up their bags, talking about wives and children they had not seen for twenty years or so. No one spoke about winning or losing or the possibility that they might die tomorrow. There was no need. The wars had been going on for so long that winning, losing, life and death had become a toss of the coin. You lived today, the coin flipped, you died the next.

Instead everyone spoke about the great peace that would come. No one seemed to know what it would mean only that everything would be better. Somehow.

The idea made Mika’s stomach turn over.

While everyone was packing, Mika walked to the tall stone tower the army had built for the oracle so the enemy armies could not reach her. It was a long climb and the stairs were narrow, and the stone walls were cold underneath his fingers although it was a warm day.

When he arrived he stood panting slightly in the doorway. The oracle sat with her back towards the door, an open invitation for attack, Mika thought, but as soon as he stepped into the room she stood and pointed to a cushion at her side.

She was a slight creature draped in a white veil and looked far too small to carry the weight of the future on her shoulders. For a moment he wondered if he should have come at all. True, the men who visited her usually came back calmer, but she was so small. Force her to carry a sword and her knees would buckle.

“Kneel,” the oracle commanded.

Mika knelt on the cushion. Now the oracle’s face loomed above his and she seemed tall, full of authority.

“Soldier,” she said in a sing-song drone, “the fates do not allow me to tell you whether you will live or you will die, but let it be known that your life is in the service of a great peace.”

Mika waited to hear more about the great peace but she swept on.

“Nor can I tell you which side will win, only that our cause is just and righteous and history will remember you.” She went on like that for a great deal of time, describing the honor and glory of the army. Her voice was soothing and sonorous and Mika found himself nodding along despite himself.

Then oracle folded her hands around Mika’s and bowed her head. “Soldier, let us pray for your life and for our victory,” she said.

The touch of her papery thin hand shook Mika out of his stupor. “Oh no,” Mika said squatting back on his haunches, “that’s not what I’m here for.”

“Oh,” she said sounding more human. “Well, what do you want?”

“I have been a soldier all my life,” Mika said. “I was born in the army, I grew up in the army. I don’t know anything else.”

The oracle waited.

“I don’t know anything else,” Mika repeated. He had traveled to many places, grassy plains, narrow ravines, the edges of mountain cliffs, but the details were always the same. Lines of army tents pitched wherever the ground would hold them, his narrow bunk, the morning bell for breakfast at the canteen, the afternoon bell for exercises and drills, the dinner bell. Even the battles had their own pattern, the duck and weave of the soldiers, the blasting of horns, the clashing of swords, and then finally a silence, the heavy quietude of tending to the injured, burying the dead, packing up the tents and moving on.

Mika could not imagine life outside of this.

“Ah,” the oracle said.

“Can you tell me what the great peace will mean?” Or what will happen to me, or how I will survive outside of the army, he would have liked to add, but shame stopped him.

The oracle raised her arms and chanted. “The great peace is a time that comes after, a time of great joy when the earth will be wiped clean and—“

It sounded like one of the songs the bards sang around the campfire. Then he realized it really was one of the campfire songs.

“You don’t know,” Mika said.

She froze.

“Tell me you know something,” he said, but she did not answer. Infuriated, he grabbed the edge of her veil and ripped it away.

He’d been expecting an old woman, or a faceless entity, or well, someone who looked wise, but a young girl no older than him stood before him. She had a snub nose. That offended Mika.

“You’re not an oracle,” he snarled. “You don’t have any answers.”

She shook her head. “I have answers, but not for the questions people ask. That is the difficulty of being an oracle.”

She held out a bowl full of water. Mika peered into. Within the ripples he could see a faint sky instead of the stone ceiling. There were one or two clouds, they hovered over the camp and there he was holding his first sword, and now he was younger a baby held by a strange man, and now that man was a young boy and nervously handing an official some enrollment papers while an old woman wept. And now the old woman was young and running across a field, and the image fractured and the faces of a thousand people shifted across the surface of the water.

And Mika saw all of the world in flux, from the particles of air that are blown from the sea to the shore, to the waves beat against the sea shore, rolling in, then out, and back in.

When Mika lifted his head the sun was low in the sky. Soon it would be time to go back to his tent and buckle on his armor for the last time. After that, then, well, what would come would come.

The oracle smiled suddenly and a dimple popped out. “I too will be out of a job when the wars end. I will still be here tomorrow. If you want to talk.” She handed Mika the bowl.

He clasped her hand for a second. Then he took the bowl and tucked it in his belt. It wasn’t much, but the slight weight of it pressed into his hip, firm and reassuring, a memento of constant change.


I leave DC for good in two weeks.

11:18pm: second chances
I check my e-mail obsessively, every fifteen minutes or so. Secretly, I hope there will be something life changing in my inbox. The week after Fulbright rejected my application to teach in Indonesia, I checked my e-mail all the time. Surely there was a mistake. I had spent a year piecing together my application, picking up a volunteer teaching job, attending Indonesian classes. Of course no e-mail came. You don’t get second chances in real life, particularly not when admissions committees are involved. There are no miracles, just picking up and moving on. I tell people I’m over Fulbright, I didn’t want it anyway, sure it would have given me the experience and the time to write, but whatever. These days I’m over writing anyway. Instead I—

I wait for life changing e-mail. I don’t know what. A note from a friend. Sparkles. It is like this. I am growing resigned to my job. It pays well, there is enough time to write on the side if I am canny. True, I do not like my job, but I can not picture what a better job would look like, so I can not find the energy to search. This is a little embarrassing, once I was full of potential. Bright. Now, I am a little bit of a joke. My boss is after me to speak up in meetings. Take public speaking classes, he says. Once upon a time I was the captain of my school’s speech team and brought home medals. Now I blush whenever I speak. Alright. Regression. Adult life. It happens.

But the soul must have it’s little something, and so, when I feel the walls of my cube closing over my head, when the pages of my blank calendar begin to look like a merciless eternity, and I start to wonder why I haven’t made new friends since college, and how it is that when my friends and parents call the conversations are short because I have nothing to say because there is nothing going on in my head except this—thinking about spending the next ten years trotting back and forth to work and then coming home to an empty apartment, spending the weekdays waiting for the weekends and the weekends waiting for the weekdays—well, I check my e-mail.

Something to do right?

Stupid, but ah well.

Today I woke up, looked at the calendar, thought, as usual about how I never imagined that I would end up living an automaton’s existence at 23, and then shook it off and checked my e-mail, because well, maybe today, there'd be a miracle in my inbox.

There was.

The Fulbright committee has offered me a teaching grant in Malaysia.

Second chances.

They exist.

9:42pm: Like This
The church is built of stone, and inside it still, an unexpected moment of hush in Manhattan. A small knot of people stand in front of the altar, a few aunts in pant suits, two or three uncles. The bride is pinning a flower to her hair and the groom is talking to the priest. In the center of the knot is Dominik, performing the most important of tasks during a wedding, particularly a small wedding, bridging the gap that lies between two families that are about to meld into one.

He is tall, broad shoulders, slender waist, a black silhouette in a suit. His hair is clipped close to his head, except for a wave which swoops over his forehead. There are new patches of white in the swoop. His face is thinner. The cheekbones threaten to rip his skin. The consulting job is taking its toll.

It is not that Dominik is handsome precisely, rather he is in harmony with himself. Most people’s faces are slightly discordant. Beautiful eyes over crooked teeth. Pug nose over a finely cut mouth. Dominik’s Eurasian blood has been good to him. His mother’s angular jawline and hawk nose are softened into sculpted cheekbones and a sloping nose. His eyes are brown, and almond shaped, large. Chinese eyes in a European face.

He smiles when he sees me, and the smile is the same.

It’s the smile of someone who believes God made the world for him.

It does not matter that I am kitted out in wedding best, dress, slippers, gauze scarf draped around the arms, and even my mother approves of my outfit today. The past fourteen years peel away, I am nine years old again, chubby in a grubby t-shirt, and mute with awe in front of my sixteen year old cousin Dominik who has come from Jakarta to live with us.

I creep to the side of the knot where my father is standing slightly apart. My father is silent in all social situations, and I am the same way. I take his hand and hide behind him. He squeezes it. We’d both rather be somewhere else.

Dominik is speaking fluently, brightly, making shapes with his hands even though he flew in from Jakarta six hours ago, and tomorrow he will fly back out. Consulting work does not stop for weddings half-way across the world.

Poor boy, the aunts say, and Dominik beams at them, looking anything but worn out.

How’s the job? Dominik asks me, and just like that all the aunts and uncles are looking at me.

Pays the bills, I say. A ripple of laughter. The aunts and uncles like that.

Still want to be a writer?

I step forward into the knot. It is like a spotlight has snapped on. That’s how it is when Dominik is around. My palms sweat.

But I must have my bread, I say. The aunts and uncles laugh again and close around me. I let go of my father’s hand.

Nah, don’t worry. I don’t even know what I want to do, Dominik says.

Impossible. Dominik always knows what he wants. How else did he become a consultant at one of the best companies in the world?

I’ve got such a love-hate relationship with consulting, he says. You know what? You’d be good at consulting. Creative people always are.

Is this just Dom-charm or does he mean it? I don’t know. I don’t care.

I should put you in touch with my friend’s wife. She’s a journalist for the International Herald Tribune.

I want to ask what the International Herald Tribune is, but I suspect I should know these things, and I am so rarely the focus of Dominik’s undivided attention that I would not interrupt him for the world.

Send me an e-mail if I forget. I’ll e-mail you anyway, but I’ll be faster if you remind me. Don’t forget.

( I never do. )

3:25pm: salty throat
These days I wake early only to keep dreaming. Yesterday in the dim chill of 6:00 a.m. I saw a friend writing in a stone room cloaked in her hair. I tapped her shoulder but she kept writing and I fell asleep mumbling at her. This morning I chased a story through a palace. I yanked its tail, it darted away when we heard the braying of hunting horns. I collapsed by the wall and let the foolish story run to its death. Then I slept again.

I went running a few days ago. After a few minutes I stopped and doubled over panting. In my throat my pulse pounded, a frog ready to leap away.

( That is when I realize the sickness has come again. )

8:50pm: If on a winter's night a snake
There is an Aesop’s fable about a farmer who found a snake nearly dead from cold in the winter. The farmer took the snake home, poured the snake a bowl of warm milk and nursed it back to health. Warm and well-fed, the snake sunk its fangs into the farmer’s leg.
“But I took you in,” the farmer cried as he lay dying.
“But I am a snake, what did you expect?” the snake replied.

The official moral written in italics is do not expect gratitude from the ungrateful.

I have always found the fable deeply unhelpful. Forget about gratitude, what was the right course of action? Should the farmer have left the snake to die and walked on? Or does every person accept that the cost of kindness is unexpected death? Whose life has more value? The farmer’s? The snake’s?

( I know a green garden snake... )

11:02pm: book chat
So sometimes my dad calls me and says how is your day. And I'm all like "Well, dude, I'm read to stab Michael O. because he talks real pretty so at first I'm like 'awww!' then I'm all 'wtf,' because it's confusing, and finally I'm so confused I go 'stfu,' which is totz. bad. Never want someone to go stfu. So I chucked him, and went out with my gal Chika. She's cool like duck sauce, man. We chilled for hours and after that I grabbed me some time with Coetzee, who is an asshole, but whatever, he's an interesting asshole."

And he's like, "What? You don't know that many people."

And then he's like, "Oh! You're talking about books again."

That's usually followed by a long silence where he tries to think of a polite excuse to hang up on me or suggest that I get help. "Help." Of the medicinal variety.



( The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje )

( Summertime, J.M. Coetzee )

( March Comes in Like a Lion, Chika Umino )

( Open, Andre Agassi and J.R. Moehringer )

I don't know why I read. I don't know what it means to read. I don't know why I can't stop reading. I think, probably though, even more than writing, reading is my reason for living.

12:26pm: Interviews are a chance to brag...
Attended a god-awful training class on applying to jobs and interview. I learned a lot about how not to interview. In an attempt to drown out the meandering tangents, bad advice, and amount of time I spent spacing out, I’m writing my own guide to interviewing for corporate jobs based on my 2008/2009 eight month job hunt. This is everything I wish someone had told me before I started my hunt. But this isn't meant as a standalone. Google, read books, ask a career counselor.

In a sadistic way, I like interviews. I see them as an opportunity to sit down with someone and get to know what they do. Also, you get to brag about yourself for an hour. Life doesn’t get much better than that. But it’s important to remember, that while you are talking about yourself, the interview is actually all about what you can do for the company, not what they can do for you. The best decision the company could ever make is to hire you. The interview is your chance to explain why.

A lot of times, interviewers aren’t as concerned about hiring the most experienced or qualified person for the job. It takes about a year to learn the internal workings of a company anyway. Equally important are intangibles like, do I want to work with this person everyday? Are they reliable, or are they going to leave me in the lurch during a project? Can they learn quickly?

So have fun. Be honest. Be yourself, because that’s the person you’ll be bringing to work each day. Don’t try to be someone you aren’t, your interviewer will figure it out in two seconds.

There’s no way to know what they’ll ask you. Instead, two rules. Know thyself, know thy job. This will give you a solid base for answering any question they throw at you. (Seriously. Once someone asked me what I’d title my autobiography. Never thought about it before. But because I'd thought about what I wanted the interviewer to know about me, I could come up with a title that summed up my personality.)

( Before: )

( Bring: )

( Getting there: )

( During: )

( After: )

Finally. Don’t give up and don’t burn bridges, no matter how bad the interview is.
I had an interview where the woman threw down her pen after five minutes and said, “Honey, I’ve been a recruiter for lots of major organizations and I just want to give you some tips on how to improve your interview.”

Multiple panic attacks on my part. Massive humiliation. When the interviewer stops the interview to give you a how-to lesson, you know you’ve really made a mess. There’s no way around it.

Smiled. Did all of her exercises and did not judge their value. Shook hands.

Long story short, got the job.


Any tips and tricks you guys favor?

10:26pm: How to Write a Short Story
Mum's in town so my writing schedule is zilch. Love having my mum over but feel like an uncomfortably full balloon--no time to write but have all sorts of thoughts I need to empty out. Have taken to looking up "How to Write Short Story in Ten Days" manuals during odd moments of the day and writing guiltily but steadily through my lunch break.

Discovered that guilt facilitates the process. Also, discovered that most manuals seem to be written by robots. They feature lines like "Don't get discouraged!" and "Reward yourself after three hours of writing," and "Now you have a story that's ready for an O Henry."

Wanted to commit seppuku after I read the manual. Clearly I've been doing the writing thing all WRONG.

Came up with my own manual instead.


( How to Write a Short Story--In, Well, Kinda, Hopefully, Before You Die )

6:40pm: “I didn't fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”---Benjamin Franklin
I love New Year’s resolutions. They give me an excuse to shove the nasty business of self improvement under the bed for an entire year. Then on December 31st I’ll pull the whole mess out and draw up a road map for the New and Improved Me Version 6.2. I drafted thirty two resolutions when I was sixteen. Number eleven was to keep at least one resolution. Number twenty nine was to keep number eleven. I’ve forgotten the rest of them.

It’s a bad economy, the environment is going to pot, difficult times call for simplicity. One resolution this year.

I will not fear failure.

A fiction professor told me when he was a student someone told him he’d be alright because he didn’t fear failure. Panic attack on my part because I do.

In middle school I’d bawl my eyes out and attempt to slit my wrists with a butter knife (sharper ones hurt) because I got an 89% on a math test. There was a one percent margin between suicidal despair and the ability to live with myself. I shit thee not. Is it any wonder math was my least favorite subject?

Someone mentions the f-word to me and I’m out the door digging trenches doing or whatever it is you want me to do because there is no try, just do it, etc, etc.

But before I’m out the door, I’ll pause. Do I even want to try something if I can’t succeed? What if I don’t succeed? What if I just try and fail? Isn’t that worse than not trying?

So sometimes I don’t make it out the door. I just stay inside under the covers and sleep away the day. I’ll wake at dusk, head aching, dizzy because I have somehow missed the sun, and that’s when I know I’ve hit the rocky bottom of that beautiful pit called failure.

I’ve failed in so many ways, in teensy eating cupcakes I wasn’t supposed to touch ways, to large oohhh I wasn’t supposed to press that red button that says detonator ways but my most spectacular failures have been the moments of paralysis.

Last year I applied to over two hundred jobs. I got three. I failed 197 times. But the sun kept rising. And even though it should have stopped and exploded into fireworks when I got my offers, it simply rose again. That’s what it is supposed to do.

And I hear that’s what we’re supposed to do. Keep rising.

Here's to a wonderful New Year to you and to you and to you. Cheers.

11:29pm: Reality's Hairy Gut
So after I write my strategic plan for taking over the world, reality rears her ugly head, belches in my face and scratches her gut. I discover that face belching kinda sucks, the gut is prettier than mine, and reality is her same old self a little bit of the ugly, a little bit of the beautiful, lots of the mundane.

My week in clips:

( 1. Rejections should come with initiation rites. )

( 2. I google image deserts at work. )

( 3. Chinese women think I'm hot. )

( 4. Newspapers are for toolbags. )

( 5. My coworker is a higher life form. Possibly a robot. )

( 6. I was slacker in college and I'm paying for it. )

3:12pm: Miss Manners Gets on the Phone
I love my cellphone to the point where it might be a new born baby fresh from my womb oven smelling of cinnamon and apples. It beeps, I pick up. It weeps, I hush hush into the mouthpiece.

But here’s the rub: everyone else owns one too and they behave the exact. same. way. And you get a world where people answer while they piss in public restrooms, yammer away while hanging out, and probably text while they’re doing unmentionable and scandalous things that I can’t talk about because I’m rated G. Quasi G.

My cellphone addiction=cute, understandable, totally reasonable.

Your cellphone addiction= Me take it and pitch it over the balcony.

Final result, everyone should be required to pass a basic etiquette class before they’re allowed to own one, but Congress is involved in some teensy debate about health care and that shizzle and with the economy and well…

I think I’ll have to take things into my own hands.

I’ve come up with some basic cell phone etiquette rules. I have broken all of them except number six because I don’t know how to put people on hold. Actually, let me be more accurate. I’ve shattered all of these rules and made pretty pots out of the pieces. At the rate I’m going:
A) I will have no friends
B) I will have no one to call on my phone

Therefore this is my attempt to save myself from a life of doom. These are the rules. These are the rules I must not keep breaking, but I’m writing about them as a victim because it’s so much easier that way.

( 1. Do not pick up the phone if you can't take the call. )

( 2. Do not pick up the phone if you don't want to take the call. )

( 3. Be mindful of where you use your phone. )

( 4. When you're on the phone don't have side conversations with the outside world. )

( 5. When you're hanging out with the outside world, don't have side conversations with your phone. )

( 6. Don't put people on hold, call them back )

( 7. If someone tells you they have to go, let them go. )



Naturally these are subject to change depending on the scenario and it really boils down to some cute punch like: when in doubt don’t pick up.

Thoughts? Additions? Stories? Cookie? Cookies!

11:48pm: My Man Godfrey
I want out. There’s the kind of love they tell you never to have. It’s for, oh hell, let’s be original, let’s be fresh, let’s shake up the litany and say: a man named Godfrey.

Godfrey is sitting down at the computer and vomiting all over the page until there’s nothing left inside of you. Godfrey is this poem.

Read the poem all the time, read it between spreadsheets and homework assignments, send it to all your friends, read it until it echoes in your head, a great ringing bell and know—

You’re nothing without Godfrey.

But Godfrey appears once a month and it’s glorious and then he says, “Goodbye sweetheart,” and he’s out the door, to London, to Paris, to fucking Bali, who knows, who cares and it is goodbye.

Goodbye Godfrey.

Only it’s never goodbye, its Godfrey all morning, Godfrey all afternoon, Godfrey all night. Godfrey, as you walk to work. You chase Godfrey down white sidewalks lined with scarlet and mahogany trees that form a canopy overhead. Godfrey is in the golden mist of seven thirty a.m. when the city is just beginning to wake and the sun still believes anything can happen.

Godfrey peeks at you through spreadsheets you work on midmorning, whispers, “What are you doing darling? Come here, come home to me.”

You count the hours, count the minutes, arrive home, flip open your laptop and…there’s no Godfrey.

Godfrey doesn’t exist.

Godfrey is never coming back.

You tell yourself you’ve given up hope. Any reasonable person would get out. Any reasonable person would invest their time in something more lucrative, or at the very least, if it’s that bad, board a plane, sail off into the sky, and find Godfrey. Look for him in the cobbled streets of London, hunt for him in Paris’s bakeries, coax him away from the beaches of Bali.

Instead you wait. You bake jam muffins, take Hindi classes, talk to your coworkers and laugh at their jokes and ache a little inside. They think you’re mad: can’t talk about TV, can’t talk about sports, doesn’t understand pop culture references can only talk about Godfrey, Godfrey, Godfrey.

“Give up,” they say.

“Get a life,” they say.

And you find, indeed, you have lost the art of conversation. You don’t have anything to say except, Godfrey, Godfrey. Goddamn you, Godfrey.

You start going to the gym after work. You run on the treadmill because you hear that somehow, running on circles sets people free. You run like it’s going to turn you into a great white bird and you’ll circle around the poor pathetic gym and then bust out of the apartment soaring over the trees and you’re never coming back—

And your lungs give out, your head spins and you slow to a walk, slow to a stop. Get off the treadmill. Walk around the gym, dazed.

Crawl back to your apartment, cram a jam muffin in your mouth and curl up in bed with your computer, a half creature facebook stalking other people to live their lives and you open Word and write:

“I want out,”

and right there, there’s goddamn Godfrey, beaming at you.

Suddenly you can live with yourself. Suddenly you rather like yourself and the future unfurls her red carpet for you and Godfrey and that is all you need....

And Godfrey doesn't show up the next day and you scream, and you bang your head against the wall, stop because it hurts, and then keep banging it because you know even if you pack up your books, throw down the pen and scream at Godfrey to go away, and he goes and you become an investment banker who speaks in spreadsheets, you’ll still wake up every morning thinking Godfrey.