Thwarted

Last night, after half-listening to a tv local news report on the dangers of saturated fat, I developed a hankering for a fast food burger. The McDonald's located three blocks from my house has a late-nite drive through, but whether it would be open at a quarter to midnight on a Sunday was iffy. Before the thought even occurred to me, my young uncle agreed to accompany me. This, I think, was in part because he is visiting for two weeks from Taiwan with a few of my great aunts and great uncle and probably wanted to get out of the house for a bit. But mostly, he's generous and shows his love by anticipating my comfort, doing all those little things without my having to ask.

As we approached McDonald's we saw that the lights were on—oh! oh! and there were people moving about in there. We cheered as we found the doors still unlocked (Yay for us!) and walked inside. But victory was short lived, as the cashier informed us that they had run out of beef. I thought he was just joking because it was so improbable. What kind of burger place runs out of beef? But he wasn't smiling (and soon neither was I) when he repeated: indeed, they've run out of beef but would be happy to serve us any of their chicken or potato products.

My virtual world

It's been months since my last post and the ones preceding that one can only be described as sporadic at best. If you must know, dear reader, I've been busy.

Yes, busy--tending to my virtual town called 'Smee Bay.' Thanks to me, Smee Bay has four varieties of non-indigenous fruits as well as a complete collection of dinosaur fossils on display in the local museum. I am popular among all my neighbors because I gossip with them, write letters and bring them medicine when they are sick. Smee Bay is a perfect town owing to my landscaping efforts; I tend to flowers and trees once a day, removing any weeds and trash. I've won trophies in fishing, bug catching, and flower arranging. The residents of the neighboring town Boondox have given me a rare gift, a feather, in appreciation of my donations which allow them to eat something better than grilled dirt. I wrote the town tune, which is really just the opening of the fourth movement of Mozart's Symphony 41. And I've amassed a fortune by growing turnips and selling them on the Stalk Market.

"You spend more time in your virtual world than in the real one," DH would say, half as a joke. But he was mystified and somewhat annoyed by my recent preoccupation.

This charge--avoidance of the real world--is often levvied at geeks, dreamers, and those who overstay in what should only be a temporary escape in an imagined space. The value of this space mystifies the practical-minded, but serves as a refuge for the alienated. It serves no purpose but to provide some semblance of control for those who in real life are acted upon external forces they cannot control.

That is, it is much easier to care for a virtual bunny rabbit than a real one that may decide to stop eating, bite or scratch you when you try to administer meds, and flick their feet at you (the rabbit equivalent of giving you the finger) for your trouble. It's much easier to pay off the sizeable mortgage on your gigantic six-bedroom virtual house by selling fruits and turnips than it is to drag yourself out of bed each morning to a job in service to graduate school loans. Note, the graduate degree would pertain to a field which outlook most people describe as "bleak"or "moribund" and ensures that the prospect of supporting yourself will be a great challenge even in a good economy, without taking into account the 15-year shadow of debt you just incurred. It's just easier in a virtual setting to get those little everyday victories that people need. You don't need to possess any real skills--knowledge of cooking, dancing, music, or surgery--but simply the willingness to apply yourself. Also, real life does not have a reset button.

No matter how complex a programmer can design a simulation of life, variables must be limited in any model (assuming it's a logical simulation). Once the mini-world becomes predictable, you start to cheat or test the boundaries with illogical scenarios. Once that ceases to amuse, you start thinking of yourself as a solitary hamster in a fancy wheel. And you start to feel self pity.


to the whole not labeling to Flickr
I've been feeling lazy
And sometimes tired. Like this whole effort with Smee and Mit and Flickr and my writing.
and Steve too
Sometimes I think it is bullshit.
sujiestar: are you writing more?
me: I'm putting forth this effort
for nothing.
I'm only half nourished by the effort.
But if my efforts all meet with the backs of people's heads or people who just go: "Uhhuh-uhhuh"
Well, why do it?
And in the end, it isn't anyone else's issue. Maybe what I have to say really isn't all that important. It certainly doesn't feel like it.

The 1 Train

On the downtown 1-Train last night, a boy of about 7- or 8-years old stood with his father by the center car doors. As it pulled out of the 79th St station, he looked up at his father, disgusted: "This train is so local."

Breaking the bad news

I explained to Pyuck that because of his Intermittent Soft Stools, he wasn't allowed to eat fresh vegetables for three days. That means no carrots.

At first, he thought it was a joke, laughing it off: No carrots! Ha, what a gas!

That is exactly the problem, I said. Too much carbs will make him gassy and cause squishy poo. This is dangerous. Unless we figure out what's causing it there will be no carrots, no treats, and definitely no raisins. To this, Pyuck said: Whoa. That does NOT compute.



The bad news hasn't quite sunk in yet.

An apology to Bertha and Wolfgang

I found the book of Mozart piano sonatas in mama's basement. Mrs. Lang was already pretty old when I was taking lessons from her, so this and a few other books are the remaining artefacts of that time. It is full of Mrs. Lang's arduous annotations, fingering, pedal markings. It tells me that I started learning the second movement of the A-minor sonata on July 22, 1989. But I know this to be the revised date. Because I was auditioning with this piece, she erased and edited the date so it would seem as if I had learned the music in half the time it actually required. And if you look very carefully, you can see the erasures, traces of embellishments (232312 343423) spelled out and measures subdivided: "The judges don't need to know I'm spoon-feeding you like a baby."

When I quit piano, I had some grievances. At the time, Mrs. Lang stuck to a policy wherein I was disallowed from learning anything my sister played, because the temptation to imitate rather than to interpret would be too great. This would have been perfectly fine except for what I believed to be an inequitable division of works. It seemed to me (totally unfounded) that I ended up at-best with all of the minor efforts of demigods. And my sister got to play with the gods. I mean, how was it fair that my sister got Bach when I got Scarlatti? Or she had Beethoven but I had Kuhlau? Of course, it wasn't true that Mrs. Lang saved only the best for my older sister. In my narrow understanding, I saw value only in the music bounded by that time period between Beethoven and Debussy. And I resented the fact that when I asked for music from that era, it would end up being some weird work of Schumann or small-scale Moszkowski. I wanted virtuoso pieces that would impress people, that was fast, that thundered, and... well, satisfied my taste for sublime melodrama. (Funny how my sister would complain that all of the pieces she got were the schmaltzy emotive stuff, and that I got the stuff requiring real technical skill.)

Anyway, I don't deserve Mozart.

I could still see Mrs. Lang's permanent wince: "Stately & elegant. Do you know what stately means?" She would place her hands over her eyes as if to say: "If you can't even hear how bad that is, I don't even know how to help you." By most standards my Mozart sounded pretty "cheap." I used pedal the way a whore applies makeup. My fingers hadn't the dexterity for the speed at which I played the piece. Mrs. Lang pointed out that it's hard to be stately when you're running for dear life. And if I insist on going at that speed, at least my runs should be even, my trills unsticky and...Christ, can I make an effort not to play random intervals with my left hand?

There is plenty of power and thunder in Mozart, but in less obvious ways. And I've always regarded his music--even the most accessible stuff--as pretty but opaque. I just couldn't hear it. Even after all these years, his A-minor Sonata is in the muscle memory of my fingers, but I was never able to make it intelligible. I think it's rather like having a non-English speaker play Lady Macbeth. Without having first developed an ear for the musical cadences of the English language, the actor's delivery would sound unnatural even if all of Shakespeare's words were memorized perfectly.

What I ended up doing was an exaggerated pantomime of a virtuoso pianist, hoping that the excessive swaying and undulating would somehow liberate the musical animal inside of me. That is, I fully expected that if I could just suppress the rational mind I would be possessed of some wild Orphic spirit, creating music so moving that even rocks would weep. Or at the very least, impress Mrs. Lang who simply said: "Stop it. Flapping your arms like that isn't making the piano sound any better."

At least she didn't call me Oriental

That man over there? That's the perfect physical expression of how I'm feeling on the inside. It is Election Day. The run up to this (all the anticipation, the outrage, doubt) has been debilitating, driving me to the point of emotional exhaustion. It also happens to be my two-year anniversary with DH. First, what I feel regarding Obama victory is not jubilation, but simple relief that I do not have to resent my fellow voters for another four years. Second, tweaking estimation models at Shawshank is not how I imagined spending this night. I did not tell DH how much it would have meant if he had remembered. But I wished he would have thought to set aside his plans when he realized that he (1) forgot and (2) doublebooked. At the very least, I would have thought that my happiness trumped the other thing for this measly instance. On top of that, I had a row with a crazy lady on the platform at Penn Station.
---------------

Chiik v. Crazy Lady:
11:30 p.m. I sit down on the platform, placing a bag of timothy hay and rabbit litter on the seat next to me. A sour-looking woman hobbles over, eyes my packages and starts screaming:

-Move it! Move your things!
-Okay, just calm down. I didn't know you had to sit there. You don't have to be rude.
-What you don't see me standing here? So you move extra slow? What you don't see black people?
-Who said anything about that? There are a bunch of empty seats available next to me on this bench...
-What I can't sit here???
-I moved my stuff didn't I? You're sitting there now. Who's hurting you? Why are you getting mad?
-I'm not mad. You don't want me to sit here. Pretend you don't see me. You just move real slow. -So what? I move slow. Can you please shut up? No one cares about your problems.
-Moving too slow...
-Will you just shut up? Shut up.
-[to a passer-by] Do you hear that? Asians. Asian people are rude. Got no manners.
-Yeah. Well old people are dumb.

The E-train roared into the station, drowning out her (no doubt) witty riposte. How much do you want to bet she said I was a slow mover? She didn't follow me on the train. And once we were safely two or three stops away, I stopped pretending that nothing was the matter and broke down in tears. Were it any normal day, I suppose I would have been able to handle it. But I was alone, forgotten in a stuffy office, left to fend for myself on what should have been an anniversary.

This night was supposed to be the triumph of reason over racial hatred. And here was some woman who believed herself the successor of Rosa Parks--without provocation picking a fight with an emotionally fragile Chinese American in an empty subway platform.

Conscientious stupidity indeed.

From the POV of a highly-inefficient person.

Often, I can expect the coffee to be waiting for me when I wake up. As I drink it, I learn that he's already had a 3-mile run, tidied up, read the papers, fed the cat, practiced guitar, picked up some groceries, did some work work and answered umpteen e-mails.

My phone buzzes. I see that I have a text message. And it takes me roughly 20 minutes to agonize over the wording before sending it. I'm exhausted by the effort.

Space = luxury

Hmmmm, it's really nice to have a roof like this so you can sit out and get some sun.

Wait. I have yard! Maybe I ought to sit out there one weekend. But it actually has all these real gnarly plants that need to be cleared first.

I wonder if I can find someone to do that for me on Craig's List. Someone with a machete.



It took four hours for James the gardener to clear this out. Think of all the potential. To borrow one S's flashes of characteristic unbridled optimism, I'm having one of those moments where I feel like my life is about to change for the better. That this is going to fix all my problems.

"Thanks for the Scotch, sucker!"

When I said "Let's do something fun this Sunday," getting wasted in FlpL's apartment while he was out playing golf wasn't exactly what I had in mind. We shared a bottle of Rioja and half a bottle of Macallan. Regained consciousness at 9 p.m. on the rug wondering where I was. I also felt the need for a good taco once the room stopped spinning.

Just like old times. Said Huli: "That was fun. But let's not do that ever again."



Huli & FlpL's engagement cookies remind me of those "French Cookies" (oddly enough, a Taiwanese brand) that my mom used to buy when I was wee.

Bestelle dein Haus

As he was doing some cleaning around the house this popped into his head:
Bestelle dein Haus
denn du wirst sterben
und nicht lebendig bleiben.

Put your house in order
for you will die
and not remain living.