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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| Separate the planning from the worry. What may trouble you will need to be confronted or planned for but worrying about the problem is a wasteful distraction at the least and a self-destructive hobby at the worse. To not worry is not the same as to ignore the problem you are facing. Plan your strategy for tackling the problem, analyze the problem, understand the problem, all this will be a better use of your mind than to simply give in to the anxiety, fear, and anticipation of the problem. Understand the difference between worrying about a problem and strategic contemplation of a problem. Learn to separate the two and then focus only on the one that will truly set you free.
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| Same Old Lang Syne by Dan Fogelberg - this song has eluded me for so many years. I heard it a long time ago on the radio but I had fallen half asleep and I did not catch the name of the song nor the artist. The song's beautiful and touching visuals entered my ears and were all the more amplified by my dreaming mind. The only part of the song that I was still lucid enough to remember was the last line about the snow turning into rain. I had such a vivid image in my mind of the quiet sadness as he stood there alone, watching the present slip back into the past, the light, slowly falling snow becoming a steady stream of rain.
It's a song that can make you cry. The past can do that to you; those once long buried memories, rising out of the forgotten past into the now, can wake you up from your present. The dissonance of the past being in the present reverberates through our body, cracking the hard shell that has built up over the years.
Years later, I had tried searching for the song on Google. I searched for song lyrics about snow turning into rain but it did not find the song for me. It was a long shot I guess as snow and rain are such common imageries in art. Then today, almost exactly one year to the day Dan Fogelberg died, I heard the song again. I heard it in the deli across the street from work as I waited to buy two bananas for breakfast. I was able to catch more of the song's lyrics and search for it on Google. I finally found the name of the song and the artist when I searched on the first line of the song about meeting a lover in the grocery store. I found the song on Youtube and listened to it all day at work. And now, I am still listening to it.
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| "Tom, do you think I am gay? If you did not know me and just saw me, would you think I am gay?" I asked my gay coworker in marketing. He just laughed as he and the rest of the event/marketing department in the room are used to my weird and random questions of the day like "Do you think you have free will?" or "Do you ever think about all the different ways you could die at any given moment?"
Of course, I then went into the backstory behind this extra weird question to help give him some context. It all started with my subway ride to work this morning. On one of the stops, an older middle-age man got on the train, walked through the crowded train, smiled at me and took the pole that I was also holding onto. So as the train continued on, it was just me and this guy using the pole rising out of the seats on the train. Then I felt his hand touch mine, so very subtly, I inched my grasp of the pole a little higher. A few seconds later, I felt his hand touching mine ever so slightly again. I inched my hold a little higher again but he was touching my hand again soon enough. It happened not once, not twice, and not thrice but four times!
At the next stop, quite a few people got off the train and he took a seat behind me. Another stop later, I moved to stand in front of the door to get off soon and as I passed him, he looked up and smiled at me.
Tom laughed and exclaimed that he must be a rice queen, a gay guy with an asian fetish. But he also confirmed what I could only guess since nothing like this has ever happened to a solitary person like me - he was hitting on me. So I asked him if I gave out some kind of gay vibe or something. He looked at me and said I have some kind of androgynous quality. Androgynous? So I am male and female? Ali suggested it might be the nice shiny hair.
It is at least an amusing coincident that he mentioned the word androgynous because the night before, I was reading an article from the Kotaku site that I found on Digg about how to create video game characters the Square-Enix way. The joke is, you start off with an androgynous character and with some minor touch ups, she/he becomes your female hero or male hero or even male villain. Eh, if I am to be an androgynous guy, I want to be Cloud then or maybe Sephiroth.... no, not Sephiroth! He is evil! He killed Aeris! Sweet! Kind! Spirited! Aeris!!! Why does she have to die??? Gahhhhh! I never played Final Fantasy VII before so when I was playing it for the first time, I googled it after I started the game and found out about Aeris' impending death. Where I am at in the game, she is still alive but now I cannot play the game anymore. Knowing that her death awaits me, I get too saddened by the thought to want to play it anymore. If I never play the game to that point and I never experience that scene then for me, she never dies in the game. Oh Aeris...why...why...
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| What will you be when your flesh has lost its strength, your hair has lost its masses, your coughs are more than just coughs, and your hands grows cold in the autumn breeze? Will you still be loved. Will you still be taken care of?
What will I be? When time collides with the ego, time always wins. What will I be when time finally runs me over with its undeniable passage, when time is the constant aching of my bones, when time is the slowness of my walk, and time is the murky waters rising above my memories. Will I be loved? Will I have a love? Will you be there to hold my hand on a cool autumn walk? Will you comfort me regardless?
Will I have found you? That I may comfort you as well. With what dwindling strength, that I may protect you still. Will that be enough for you, for you to love me til the end, that the best you will have left of me are yesterday's memories. And perhaps one of those memories can be us having found something that we could call charming?
Or will there be nothing left in the collision of time and ego? A silent heap of a ragged old man, huddled with cold, dirty hands, that no one can identify is all that is left. In another time and another place, all the "Will I" were but in this time and place, I am alone and you were never found. Perhaps, I did not search hard enough. Perhaps, my ego blinded me to your passage in my lifetime. Or perhaps this is my fate, my penance.
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| Humans. So afraid of being alone that it becomes better to hold onto whatever you can get, even when you know it to be a mistake or wrong, than to be alone. What brings this on? It is a musing on the stories told by an old coworker who came back to work as a freelancer about another old coworker. So weak.
I have made much progress with my one to two hours of Qi Gong training a week. I have gotten much stronger and more physically defined. I am getting more and more flexible but strong flexible: seventy-five seconds with chin pass the knees and feet fully flexed toward the head, bending in half. And I am bringing more balance to my left and right halves. Being a right-handed person, I could feel my body being out of balance in the development of my left and right sides. My level of balance standing and twisting on just my left leg is closer to the level of balance of my right leg now. Not bad for an hour or two of just stretching and tensing but what is it all for...
"Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless."
--- Percy Shelley, To The Moon (and quoted in Portrait of An Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce)
Opposite equal. All so weak. None exists. Maybe I am the one who is weak. Could I be wrong? Is there something that I do not see that is in plain sight for everyone else? Maybe... Is this what it feels like for all those characters who are the last and only one of their kind... Frankenstein's monster, the last son of Krypton, any anachronistic character of a bygone era....
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Lifetime