River Days

...

IT happened.

She did not yet know to beware those thickets, not to ride alongside these place where THESE things happened. She was not aware of those awful black clouds of punctuation marks, hovering in the unsuspecting shade.
The wind combed through her hair, estuaries and rivulets of air along hte flood plain of her main.
She cruised along the path, in a one-speed, two-pedal, rotary machine and then...
SPLAT.
IT happened.
And a twitching black spot, came to rest in peace in the hollow along the arch of her nose. There it was:
an unintended insectoid murder, committed at the tender age of ten.
At the courthouse, they would scoff at crime carried out with so little skill:
a one degree turn of the head would have let the creature glance off, leaving the victim, the evidence in the road.
a two degree turn of the head and it would have been just left stunned, your typical hit-and-run.

Hear what my grandfather told me,
this, his statement bold:

"All great works of intellect,
from Socrates to Poe,
I do recollect,
were conceived upon the toilet.

Yes, it was the secret
of these portrait men,
that gifts bestowed,
were discovered whilst seated
upon a humble commode!

Yes, all deep philosophy
was born of men,
out back,
pondering
in the latrine.

Yes, all insight into the
insanity
depravity
of man,
was dissected upon the can.
(Archimedes, one rare exception)"

--> Running -->

I was sitting with a friend, and I asked him,
"What brought you to Deerfield?"
He said to me,
"We're all running from something."

True story.
But I wish, sometimes, I knew what it is we're running to.
Are we even running towards something? Or are we just moving our legs forward the way our praents taught us? Did we have a purpose then? Back when every step taken was rewarded with adoration and awe? Did we have even the faintest idea where our doughy little legs would take us?

Does it matter if we know where we're running to?
If we did, would we try and veer off course? Would we stop to wander by the wayside? Would we still look off to the horizon, or would we simply behold each grain of dirt beneath our feet? Is it the journey or the destination?
Or would we simply stop?
If we walked backwards, refusing to look onwards, would it be the same thing? Would we try and walk our hands? Would we take to our wings? Would we try Something, Anything, to believe we're making our own way, instead of traversing the same trodden path our ancestors laid?
Would it change anything?

Under the confidential umbrella-embrace of a maple tree, someone whispered to me, "No."
But, was it a "No, it won't change anything, and you will swim lakes and walk mountains beyond mountains and still arrive at the same location"?

Or was it a...
No, it doesn't matter at all and
you just keep running all the while?

May 22, 2008

The wind sends the pods of helicopter trees
to pirouette through the air,
whirling madly in a one-man death drop
They dance unbidden,
for as for as they'll be taken.
Until they touch down upon the earth and
collapse
into the roles of where-you-will wayfarers,
they dance no more...

GOODbye, GOODbye

There are goodNIGHTS, fareWELLS, and soLONGs, but there's nothing quite like a GOODbye.

"I miss you" or "I thought of you today" 's are delightful.
But they're also kind of...puzzling.
I always feel a small bit of disbelief. When it comes to the time for GOODbyes, I'm always surprised by the people who come to see me off. "I actually made an impression on you?"

The people of my past were like polaroids, tucked away in my mind after the GOODbye. There's the shutter...shake them a bit, and wait for the picture to settle in. Every now and then I take them out and comb over my memories, hold them out at arm's length and say, "Now those were some good times..." But they always stayed frozen like that. And you couldn't keep up a conversation with a polaroid, and a fading one at that.

I thought I was a wormhole traveler when it came to these affairs.
I'd arrive one day, from nowhere and make myself comfortable. Then, another wormhole would be opened up for me, and I'd be herded along to jump through that hoop.
I'd climb out, and I was supposed to close up the wormhole all neat and tidy behind me. The universe would be as it was before me, complete without me. As long as I didn't leave that tiny zipper-bit open, then neither they nor I would have to admit that nature of things: there was one world for the one US before the GOODbye, and there were two separate universes after the GOODbye: the one for a certain ME, and the one for THEM.

So when people poke a slim bamboo pole through that open zipper-bit to prod me and say, "You exist. You always did, and you still do,"
I take out my polaroids and shake them a few times.
Maybe they haven't settled after all...

And Time Just Keeps On Ticking...

There has been tumult and...confusion...and a small sense of betrayal.
It turns out that Sara, one of the victims, wrote the hate mail.
She disappeared in a wisp, and the Disciplinary Committee hasn't made its decision yet: to kick her to the road, or to let her walk there herself.
With the initial shock came a hurt, knowing that the incident that brought together a few members of the community was not sparked by someone's genuine hate.
But then I realize...it was.
Refelct: What kind of torture, what kind of underlying circumstances and attitudes would cause Sara to cry out, to dismember herself in order to flesh out the reality.

So the DTF called a meeting in Ephraim Williams with the headmaster.
I don't know what we were expecting. Some answers, maybe? Some compassion, some real emotion instead of the same old scripted propaganda?
She couldn't release anything, really, about the case. But she asked that we "stop communications with Sara concerning hte DC" so that she could "move on from the icident" and "separate herself" form the community.
Wrong answer in a room of people full of her friends and admirers.
So we tried to move onto remedies, and like always, the headmaster wanted to hear specific incidents. When will she get it? So rarely do we get directly, openly attacked. It's those little things: little snubs snickers, and unwillingness to acknowledge the presence of a problem, that paint the picture. They're the multitude of seemingly meaningless strokes that form this impressiont picture of opression. You don't have to even be the one being idrectly discriminated against to feel suffocated by this culture.


When the meeting was over and the faculty had dispersed, a few of us stood in the living room, seething, suffused with dissatisfaction.
But the living room of Ephraim Williams made something in us want to retch: somethig in the neatly polished wood and the upholstered chairs meant for cozying the bottoms of important people. It was saturated in a certain Deerfieldian essence, and it reeked of hypocrisy.
We rushed out of Ephraim Williams, feeling enraged, maybe even slightly militant. We escaped out, where maybe we could stand under the spoitlight of street lamps and finally be seen, where maybe the still night air could carry the echoes of our anger to the apathetic.
Jane declaimed to the night,
"I'm sick of this provisional bullshit, trying to change people without making them angry, without making them feel uncomfortable! I'm sick of this guerilla warfare, I want a battle! I want them to come out and fight me!"

We laid out our plans like hopeful young radicals, contemplating causing a riot.
Amanda tried to rationalize us, or at least rein in our shaking passion, insisting upon careful documentation of the problem.

And this, I remember with the clarity of a polished mirror:
Jane was riding ahead on her bicycle, and she called over her shoulder,

"Aren't we proof? Aren't our lives documentation? Isn't Sara documentation?"

So it goes.

Figures.

On the way to Hoe down, I was complaining to Nick about how much I miss L.A.
He asked me,
"What's so great about L.A.? There's Hollywood, and all that pollution."

I replied,
"Well, it's a pretty diverse place, I'd say. Everyone can live together pretty happily under that grey smoggy sky. Or at least they make a good effort to."
While I won't go so far as to say that race issues are non-existent, they weren't the main focus. We had other things to worry about: our vanity, our pollution, over population, illegal immigration, the drug trade, and our violent young men killing each other in the streets.

I miss it terribly. It was a common question when you met someone to ask, "What are you?" You couldn't make assumptions about ethnicity or culture based simply on appearance in a place THAT diverse.

Let's take my old high school for an example. Demographics:
53% White, 25% Latino, 10% Asian, 7% African American, 3% Filipino, 1% Multiracial, 1% Native American, 1% pacific Islander.
Languages spokenat home?
Spanish, Farsi , Tagalog, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, Armenian, Cantonese, Indonesian, Hindi, Urdu, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, and...Gujarati.

Go figure.
No, I realy mean it: go figure THAT out.

False Advertising

When will they realize that the "American" in "Asian-American" is not some insignificant appellative, some simple technicality? As simple as it would be to simply lump me into the group "Asian", there IS a difference. The "American" has made all the difference in my life, and in the lives of those before and after me. It would forever be a cause of turmoil and grief.

Life was always a balancing act, trying to stand on that little hyphen, not leaning too far to one side: Asian enough to avoid the label "twinkie" and "forgetting where you come from." American enough to fit in and try and break away from the old stereotypes.

I've been thinking:
maybe that's always been my problem.
All my life, I've been trying to make myself comfortable on that tiny hyphen, and the even smaller space within that as a Filipino American, and the EVEN smaller category as a mestizo Filipino American. Maybe's that always been the problem: I've always been worried about the reverberations of my ever-changing identity, that flowing stream of consciousness and experience, fit in perfect harmony with a label that was narrow, restrictive, and static?
Yes, those labels shaped my experience, but a single label is not equated to my experience as a whole!