Each time I meet someone I’ve known through the web, I wonder how our first interaction will be. I try to imagine sitting in the restaurant and wonder what sort of conversation we will have. Will it be awkward or will it be as if we’d been buddies all along?
Will I even recognize the face?
I wrote about meeting web people before. Rony and Daphna definitely were like longtime friends. Within minutes, we were conversing as if we hang out regularly. Since they were the first official people we met from the online world (well, not entirely true, but at least the first official people we met from the weblogging world), I wasn’t sure if they were the norm or the exception.
A few months and at least ten more meetings with different people showed me that as special as the Tako couple are, and they are special, there is some sort of ease when meeting people that seem to share an online world with you. I don’t know if it comes from the comfort that’s raised from frank email or AIM conversations, or it’s that people who choose to express themselves on the net are a certain kind of people who blend easily when face to face.
Yesterday, I met four more such people. Two who live a few blocks from my house, one who can be considered a neighbor and another who came from miles and miles away. Four different people with four different personalities, four different backgrounds, four different styles, four different priorities. Five, if you include me.
Walking down the street to the diner, I recognized them without a problem. How many other people carry identical cameras? A two-hour lunch went from topic to topic without an awkward pause. The weird thing about meeting these people is that they may physically be strangers, as we’d never previously met face to face, but we knew much about each other.
So the awkwardness of talking to a stranger doesn’t enter the picture. And yet, you haven’t really met this person ever before, so it’s still full of the excitement of meeting a new person. Talking about different interests, listening and agreeing and laughing.
It’s not like hanging out with an old friend, nor is it like being introduced to a brand new person. It’s an amalgamation that’s unique to the world it emerges from. It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s unusual, it’s memorable.
And it’s always worthwhile.
Previously? A Moment.
Life can change in a moment’s notice.
My interview went well, thank you to all of those who sent me wonderful messages and crossed limbs. I don’t know the results yet and will not find out for a few weeks. All I could think of last night was how it’s all over and now I just get to wait.
I’m not good at waiting.
Normally, that is. Ordinarily, I am just as stressed as if I actually had a say in what happens. But last night, I was so tired, so worn out that I just wanted to sleep. Just enjoy the momentary lack of obligations. And then my whole world changed.
A four-word question.
A magical moment.
A christmas tree shimmering with red white and blue, lit up angels, complete shock and public applause.
A single moment.
It didn’t even stop there. It kept compounding. One set of good news after the other. One more unbelievable than the previous. So much so that waiting is not a problem anymore. It will probably take me a few weeks just to process all this news. Just to wipe off the smile from my face.
A single moment.
That’s all it took.
Previously? Vortex.
Anticipation.
Worrying.
Stress.
Anxiety.
Excitement.
I’ve spent the last week playing a game of Wheel of Fortune where the options are one of the above. I give it a push: stress. A harder push: worrying. Am I going to get excitement? Nope. It’s the equivalent of the tiny sliver of triangle with the $10,000 on it. For now, I’m stuck with the others.
Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s a day to pray. Don’t believe in God? I don’t care, pray for me anyway. Have you ever wanted anything so much you can taste it?
I have. I do.
I tend to believe that things happen for a reason. If you truly, really work hard to get something and you can’t get it, maybe it wasn’t meant to happen. That might sound like I believe in destiny, but it’s not exactly that. I guess it’s just that knowing it might be something more than my not getting it makes me feel better. Self-deception, baby, I’m all about that!
Is it better to have tried and failed than to not have tried at all? Do you really want to put yourself out there over and over again? Is it about aiming or is it about enjoying the achievements?
These are the thoughts that are dancing in my mind. I don’t have the answers. I’m not even fully thinking about the questions. I’m not thinking about much right now. Can you tell?
Cross your fingers. Toes.
I want this!
Previously? Don’t Pass Go.
Life offers us different opportunities at different times.
I mean we have a series of opportunities that are in front of us everyday but, once in a while, something major comes up. An opportunity that someone else or some other situation made available for you. Something completely unexpected. Something that, if it worked for you, would make you leap and not just take another step towards your goal. Every now and then, such an opportunity emerges and if you don’t take notice, it slips right by you.
And here’s what I think: You should never let an opportunity like that slip by.
And I don’t mean you should seize it either. Sometimes, even if the opportunity comes your way, it might not be the best thing for you. Let’s say you’re offered a trip to the destination of your dreams. Since this is my site, we’ll say that place is Antarctica. Someone comes up to me tomorrow and tells me that I can go to Antarctica in January. All expenses paid, a month-long trip where I get to pet penguins. After jumping up and down for several hours, I think it would be a good idea for me to have a serious think about it.
Every opportunity comes at a cost. This Antarctica offer would mean that I need to quit my job or at least take an unpaid leave. It could mean I would have to leave Jake for a month. And there may be many other downsides to this otherwise amazing-seeming offer. So I’m not saying that jumping on it is the best move.
What I am saying is that it’s crucial to consider it. A major opportunity like that doesn’t come often and if you let one pass you by, there’s no guarantee it will come your way again. At least not soon. So instead of saying how what a bummer it is that I got the chance to go to Antarctica but couldn’t do it, if I sat down and had a serious think about it, I might not regret it.
If I considered all sides of the matter, then regardless of the decision I make, I know that I didn’t let the opportunity go unnoticed. I know that no matter how the outcome turns out, at the time, I thought I was making the right decision. In the end, even if I made the wrong decision, I still think that’s better than not making one.
I guess it’s all about control. When you let things pass you by, you’re giving up the chance to control your destiny.( isn’t that an oxymoron, ‘controlling your destiny.’) It’s true that if things don’t work out, you can say “I didn’t choose to do this, the decision was made for me.” but is that how you want to live your life? Isn’t there a point after which we need to get on the driver’s seat and say “This is my life and it’s short and I am here to make it the most it can be.”
We all get one life to live, at least one that we remember at any point in time, and don’t you want to be holding the reins to your life?
Previously? Tracking Happiness.
As promised, I think it’s time to talk about keeping track.
One of the subjects that came up in the happiness class has been figuring out what would make you happy and making a list of steps on how to get there.
To me, this is wrong on so many levels.
Let’s start with the first assumption: that you can figure out what would make you happy. I mean if it were that easy wouldn’t everyone do it? The weird fact about happiness, in my opinion, is that what you think will make you happy changes continuously. In the simplest sense, when we’re planning to buy something, especially something we’ve coveted for a long time, we think owning that thing will make us so happy. Like a computer or a camera. (Or maybe if you’re less geeky, a different set of items) And it does make us happy. For about five minutes. Okay, maybe longer. Two hours. Two days. Two weeks. Two years, maybe. But never permanently.
Believe it or not, I think the same rule applies to more significant goals. If you think a certain job will make you happy, or a college acceptance, once you achieve it, it often doesn’t make you as happy as you thought it would. Even a person who made you happy loses its magic after a while. I think, often, it’s more fun to covet. Once we reach the goal, we often start taking it for granted.
I think it’s excruciatingly difficult to know what would make you happy.
Even operating under the assumption that you could figure out what would make you happy, coming up with a list of items that would help you reach the goal isn’t always realistic. If your ‘happiness goal’ is something tangible like getting a job, you could possibly make a list of steps to help you get that job. What if what made you happy was ‘forgiving your father’ or ‘getting over an ex girlfriend’? These are not goals that can easily be broken down into steps. There are things one can do to reach these goals, but since the end result is not tangible, there’s no guarantee that you even reached it. How do you know you’re really over her? You could easily think you are and then run into her in the street and realize that you weren’t over her at all. Not all goals can conveniently be broken down to small steps that will lead you to them. Not all goals are even achievable.
Even moving beyond that unrealistic assumption, I still find the idea of tracking your steps to happiness too practical. To me, happiness is an emotion, not a logical thought. It’s a feeling. It doesn’t necessarily adhere to rules of reason. I can’t imagine reaching happiness by checking off a list of items. Contentment maybe. Sense of success, progress or achievement, maybe.
But not pure happiness.
Previously? Boundless.
Ready for another happiness entry? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Bertrand Russell says something to the effect of how we should keep our expectations low. If you want happiness and reach for an achievable goal, you’re likely to reach your goal and thus feel happy. Which sounds pretty reasonable at first look.
Then again, who wants to be reasonable?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this happiness thing. Having almost reached the end of the class, I must say that there are two major facts I’ve learned:
1. There are no quick formulas to happiness.
2. Most of the philosophers believed happiness was unreachable, could only be reached through religion or required a stringent regime of everyday self-brainwashing.
None of the above options are all that appealing to me.
The practical advice of “keep your expectations low” clashes with the ambition and optimism of “reach for the skies.” I agree that if you keep your expectations really high, you’re likely to never reach them and thus not feel fulfilled. But is that worse than never expecting much from yourself to begin with?
Russell does place a tremendous value on striving. He believes you should always be learning new things and working to achieve something. Considering how amazing he was, his idea of “aiming low” might be a lot higher than I am imagining. I hope it is because the idea of people having to aim low to stay happy is quite depressing to me.
If we all aimed low and didn’t reach for things that appeared beyond the horizon, how would anything get done? I am willing to admit that different people have different ranges and we’re not all equal in our abilities, but we all have ranges and I’ve always advocated working towards being on the high end of one’s range. I feel like a person can’t really know his range until he tries to push against its boundaries.
Aiming low feels like playing with the cards we’re dealt. Which, at one point, might have sounded like good advice to me, but now it doesn’t. I know that the cards we’re dealt don’t mean everything. Like in a game of poker, we can turn some of them in for new ones. There might be a few we’re stuck with but not as many as most people make it out to be. And what’s the fun in playing the same hand over and over again?
Keeping track is another subject matter that I somehow cannot correlate with happiness. Contentment, maybe but not happiness. But that’s for another day.
For me happiness is feeling more than content. Happiness is achieved when you reach something you didn’t think you would. When you tried really hard, when you put yourself out there on the ledge. When you reached higher than you thought you could. That’s when success is extraordinary. That’s when one gets overwhelmed with happiness.
Or maybe I’m wrong and stuck with eternal unhappiness.
Previously? I Have No Idea.
Before you can learn, you have to admit that you don’t know.
We live in a society where there are rules about what one is supposed to know by a certain age. Or in a certain environment. If you’re an educated individual, there are sets of information you’d better possess. What if you don’t know these crucial bits of data? Shame on you.
That’s what it’s all about: shame.
We, as a society, manage to shame people into hiding their lack of knowledge. If two people are in conversation and one is dropping names of political figures that the other hasn’t heard of, would the other person ask the speaker to clarify?
How often have we heard: “You know what that is, right?”
How often have we nodded along when we had no idea but felt too embarrassed to admit it.
The fact is it’s not the knowledgeable person’s fault, either. How’s she or he to know that you don’t know? If you act like you know and you act well, the other person will never feel the need to explain and they shouldn’t have to.
What we need to do is to remove the pressure of having to know. We need to teach that lack of knowledge is not a bad thing. Lack of willingness to learn, maybe. But not lack of knowledge.
I am often not afraid to admit what I don’t know. There are a million things I don’t know and I am really dying to learn. If I don’t tell people that I don’t know, they will never take the time to explain it to me and I will never learn. The fear of not getting the chance to learn is what motivates me to admit my lack of knowledge. Somehow I lack the necessary shame.
I don’t know why, but I certainly wish everyone did.
When we’re young, we’re not expected to know so it’s easy to ask. Sometimes people explain even before we ask. But somewhere along the line, we reach a point where expectations rise and we stop asking. Instead we learn to play along. To act like we know.
Which is why we will never actually know.
Previously? Color.
I’m taking a graphic design class this semester.
I’ve always wished I could be good at the arts. When I was young, my mom sent my sister and me to a weekend drawing course. Every Saturday morning she would drive us over and we’d spend five hours or so staring at a bunch of apples in a bowl. Even though my creations during those five hours surpassed anything I did elsewhere, claiming they were anything besides ‘a decent effort’ would be an outright lie.
My mom is an amazing artist. At nineteen, she won a scholarship to an art school in Italy, which she turned down by choosing to marry my father instead. She’s done jewelry design, Koran art, interior decorating, and plain drawing. Some of those genes could have come my way.
But they didn’t.
I’ve taken classes in art, 2-d animation, 3-d graphics, graphic design, and pottery. Some of them, I took several times. Some of them, I even enjoyed.
But not graphic design.
My graphic design teacher is treating us like real graphic designers. She’s giving us real assignments. Critiquing our work as if she were a client. That’s why she’s a good teacher. So I know it’s not her fault. I’m not even taking the class for credit, and yet I stress before each assignment. I annoy everyone around me, asking for reaffirmation, begging for approval.
This week’s assignment is to create a self-identity. Since I’m not taking the class for credit and since I’ve been thinking it’s time for a redesign, I asked her if I could do my web page instead. She said okay.
I spent yesterday going through the 250 fonts on my machine, trying to pick one that represented me. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I figured I’d find it when I saw it. Not true. When I finally settled on one, it was mostly cause it looked like handwriting, giving me a diary-ish feeling. I started with my typical purple, and went through seventeen color changes before settling on these. I put black and white photos, changed them to color. I put them on the side, on the top, on the bottom. I moved everything around too many times. After hours, everything started blending into each other and I decided it was time to stop.
So here it is. A new page. Some color.
I’m not changing the archives, I’ll integrate it as I go along. I’m not done with this design, it might change. Got opinions? Tell me publicly, tell me privately. Tell me either way.
At least it’s got color.
Previously? Thankful.
An impending interview.
Love.
A healing back.
Rice and bean quesadillas.
Books.
New friends.
Boundless possibilities.
An amazing family.
Diet Coke. Diet Peach Snapple.
Not having to wear glasses.
New York Public Library.
Cupcik.
Hand-knit scarves.
My nephews.
Photographs and music.
Email.
Kindness.
Colorful leaves.
Babies’ giggles.
Puppies.
Old friends.
Making peace. Maybe.
Previously? Sure.
“Sure” is officially one of my least favorite words.
At least one of its uses, that is. I have absolutely no problems with it when it’s used in the following context:
“Are you positive John’s going to show up to work tomorrow?”
“I am 100% sure.”
Or
“Are you sure that was Jenny with James?”
“Absolutely”
Using the word sure to mean ‘confident’ doesn’t aggravate me. But then there are these cases:
“Do you want to go out to dinner after work?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Or
“Is it okay if I bring Ellen along?”
“Sure, sure.”
To normal people, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the above sets of dialogue. But, they drive me absolutely mad. I’ve noticed this unnerving sensation a while ago and couldn’t put my fingers on the exact source of the problem. Then, last night, it hit me: I don’t like the non-committal undertone of the word. I think it’s ironic that even though the actual meaning of ‘sure’ is ‘certain’ which is a strong, absolute emotion, it’s often used in cases where one’s trying to say “it’s fine” or “I don’t mind” neither of which are confident phrases.
You might think I’m insane, and it might even be true, but I seem to be surrounded by people who are using ‘sure’ in that very context, continuously. Since I’m an opinionated person, one would think I’d like to be surrounded by people who are easygoing. Amazingly, that’s not the case. I like people who stand for something. Even something as stupid as what sort of movie to see or where to eat dinner. To me “sure, sure” sounds like someone who’s going along with what I say. Someone with no preferences or opinions of his own.
It just sounds so wishy-washy.
Or maybe I’ve gone mad.
I could tell you stories on how “interesting” is climbing up the charts, too, but I think I’ve said enough for today.
Previously? Living.
It’s like this.
Since September, I’ve been struggling to keep writing. Not because I don’t want to, but because most of the topics I used to find interesting don’t seem to be anymore, at least not to me. I’m sure things will eventually work themselves out and I will find the time and energy to ponder random things once again, but till then I apologize for the lack of consistent updates, especially in my side sections like tidbits, learned things, and aiptek pictures.
I spend many nights sitting at my laptop trying to will myself into writing, but I can’t. I don’t even want to sit at home anymore. I want to go out, be with people. Somehow remind myself that life is going on, in its charming, annoying, delightful, fun and sad ways. I want to talk until I’m blue in the face, I want to listen until I’m falling asleep. I want to laugh and hug.
At the times I don’t crave human attention, I long for the opposite. I take a good book and curl up or turn the TV up all the way, enough to block my thoughts. Part of me wants the days to pass and another part wishes she could stop time. There are moments I want to hang on to badly.
As if to reassure me, my laptop broke yesterday. I was trying to take out one of the books it’s stacked on and I dropped it, causing the A/C adapter to split in half, inside the machine. I spent all of yesterday running from uptown to downtown, trying to replace the part, only to find out that it’s not possible. I have to order it directly from Toshiba. At night, when I finally collapsed on the couch, I ordered the part and decided to relax. It’s amazing how stressed a tiny glitch can make me at times. Yet when the world falls apart around me, I manage not to freak out.
So I might not write very often lately. If you like my site, take this as an opportunity to explore the archives. I’ve got a lot of words on this site and I guarantee they’d keep you busy for quite some time. I will be writing again real soon, I’m sure. Knowing me, I’ll even update tomorrow, after having said all this. But it’s important to say it anyhow. This way, when I look back years later, I can remember why.
Just a little down time.
I want to temporarily stop thinking so much and start living more.
Previously? Tidbits of Conversation.
I pick up the receiver and put it back down. I want to call. I think I want to. I know I want to. But I can’t. A call I made thousands of times, a call that used to be a routine part of my day.
Not this time. Not anymore. Now it comes loaded with ‘issues.’ Bits of conversations we never had, words that will not be exchanged. And each time I dial the digits, I wonder how the conversation will go. Will it be lively and fake or cordial and short? Will I play along or will I blow up? Should I play along or should I push it?
It feels like it’s been so long. It’s well past the irrevocable stage. I try to recall the past. More than anything, I remember the laughter. And then the tears. The problems. The distance. I wonder whether I’d been imagining it all along. Maybe it was never more than what it is now. It’s so easy to fall into the pit of self-pity. So easy to stop fighting. So easy to back off. To stop dialing.
Yet it’s so hard to let go.
~~~
“Are you lonely?”
The words sound so odd coming from this practical stranger. I act defensively. “I’m not lonely,” I say, hoping he didn’t hear the tone of indignation in my voice. “I mean not really,” I add, smiling. I list my friends, all over the world. Ireland, Canada, Missouri, and Turkey. Some I haven’t talked to in over a month, most I haven’t seen in over a year. “I have two really close friends in New York,” I say. But I don’t add the recent downturns in either. “Not to mention my wonderful boyfriend, who’s my best friend.”
He nods kindly. We both know that’s not what he means.
“In some ways, ” I relent. “Maybe.”
Someone interrupts and we never come back to it. Almost twenty hours later, I’m still pondering the honest answer.
~~~
I promise myself that I won’t ask. I repeat it over and over again. Not this time. I’ll just sit there and wait until he feels ready to share. I’ve never been good with silence. Not with him.
As if to prove my point, I blurt it out several minutes into the evening “What’re you thinking?” I make a mental note to kick my ass when I get home and smile awkwardly.
He smiles back. I wonder if it brings back memories for him, too. I already know his reply before it leaves his lips. “Nothing.” It’s always is. I don’t know why I bother. Yet I do, time and time again. I squeeze his hand and give up. Only to repeat my question ten minutes later.
I simply can’t let it be.
~~~
Previously? UBC.
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projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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