Echo

my greatest difficulty is my attention span.

how will i build anything if i keep disappearing?

it’s important that people don’t get to know me

magic. clocks. time. strangers. light. death.

a surprising number of people also think it’s fucked up that pluto got stripped of its planetship. and calling it a “dwarf” on top of everything else. bold move, scientists. especially towards pluto, which has long been associated with the revenge-is-a-dish-best-served-cold movement. science had better watch its back.

frogs. somewhere in memory or dream.

can’t remember my dreams lately. only brief glimpses during the day when i find myself in a feeling like i’m in a movie i saw long ago but only vaguely remember.

how does one accept that some day they will go mad?

it’s usually illogical people who will accuse logical people of being illogical.

Playing with my shoulder today felt like playing with a broken wing.

Had some tension in a 2 on 2 game. Played against someone I haven’t played before…his friend was on my team and seemed nice but shy, but this guy was a little intense. They were both late 20’s. His friend was tall with reddish-blond hair, gangly and reminded me of Colin so I instantly liked him. This guy was shorter, but pretty solidly built–we collided once and it felt like hitting a machine. He looked like he was either a soccer player or ex-military.

I’d told them I would play but I had a shoulder injury so I wouldn’t play too well or aggressively. Yet surprisingly, I had been shooting poorly and awkwardly while warming up, but my shots were falling in the game like they were being pulled through with a magnet (that’s the way it usually happens–if I make all my shots in warm-up and people are impressed, I tend to suck during the games. I have zero tolerance of high expectations). My teammate and I had good chemistry, so we set a lot of screens and were consistent about getting the ball to each other in good places… he did a great job of getting me the ball where I had the best chance of scoring. So I kept scoring on the guy, and his teammate, who’s played with me before, would keep tell him to watch out…that I’m on fire. I think his ego got bruised. So after one play where I’d faked him into the air and scored, I got the ball on the next play, went up for the shot and he bashed me on my (injured) shooting arm so hard I felt it in my bones.

I’ve been playing basketball long enough to know a frustration foul from an accidental foul, and this was a frustration foul. I don’t think he intended to hurt me, but I think he was pissed and just outletted it into this blow. This foul may not have been intentional, but his emotion was loud and clear.

The way I deal with pain is to move my mind away from it, disown it until it fades. So I walked it off for a few seconds, thinking. I wasn’t upset. It’s hard to get upset during pick-up games unless things are egregiously malicious, because they’re not worth getting upset over. But I think the biggest feeling was…disappointment. There are guys who see another person do well and they think, good for them, because from their life perspective, they see the world as a big enough place to hold success for everyone. Then there are people who live and breathe out of their egos, and take it personally when another person is doing well, particularly when they perceive that person doing well as a reflection of their own failure. People hurt other people when they’re scared or angry, but they don’t necessarily need to know they’re scared or angry to still try hurting someone. I made a mental note. This guy could potentially get dirty.

I walked back and my teammate asked if I was okay, saying he’d dislocated his shoulder once and knew how bad it could be. The other guy wouldn’t meet my eyes. So we played on, but I was really careful of any plays that would allow contact.

Last play of the game, I got the ball in the left wing. Teammate set a great screen and I dribbled towards the free-throw line with my defender caught trying to go over the screen. He’d lost me and knew it. He reached around my guy anyway and tried to grab me, which is highly illegal, but I saw his hand coming and got just out of reach to drive and take a pull-up floater over his teammate. The shot came off my hand so awkwardly that I could even see it in the eyes of the guy trying to block the shot that he didn’t think it would go in. Yet, it went in clean with a snap of the net.

I felt like I’d been getting a magical assist from omnipotent forces all game to play so well, despite, as I said, feeling like I was playing with a broken wing. The entire game had felt unreal. Maybe the universe was using me to create an experience for him, something that could give him a window of insight. Maybe for half an hour, I was playing a part in his movie, not mine. Maybe the universe was challenging his ego and his feelings about women. Maybe part of his personal journey will be how to deal with deep-seated rage. It seemed pretty clear to me the game illuminated a deeper history inside him. A physically abusive dad? Co-dependent mom? You hated your father for his violence and your mother for her weakness in standing up to him, but these feelings are too dangerous for you to consciously acknowledge? What makes you lock your doors when there is smoke inside?

Every personal history is a private mystery. But what is shown to the rest of us is camera obscura–just a reflection on the wall of a cave, but somewhere in the man, a shadowed town anchored by things unspoken at the base of a cliff.

Regardless, I declined playing again, shook hands with my teammate, collected Michael and headed home. Arcade Fire’s Wake Up came on the radio. Again.

I look through the windshield at the full moon in the deep purple sky, floating above mountains and road, the only sign of life i believe in who guides me home.

What does it mean?, I ask it.

The moon treads silently through cloud whispers.

Time.

full moon in gemini tonight.

i am…shadow side rising.

looks like i’m going to push the surgery off until jan. next weekend is the final round of the screenwriting contest and is weighted double…i imagine it will be too hard to do coming less than a week off surgery and with my dominant arm immobile. would have to type with my left hand while working through a foggy mind.

bohr woke me up at 6:15am this morning to go work out. i didn’t get to sleep until close to 3 and felt broken. i did it though, and was rewarded by the first sunrise i’ve seen in a really long time. but i was lethargic at the gym. and pretty retarded. i don’t think i become a functional human being until at least after 10 am.

had to give michael a ride to the gym for his training session in the afternoon and bring him home, so decided to just suck it up and work out again rather than leave just to come back in an hour. felt like i was moving in slow motion. i truly believe i have the ability to nap while on a cardio machine. my body can function on auto-pilot.

had to buy a temporary membership card from the sales rep i have issues with. i always avoid him and anytime we have to interact, i feel like i’m doing it through gritted teeth. i once filed a complaint about him for being an arrogant ass that garnered a sitdown with him and his supervisor. he did kind of deserve being called out, but i regret the whole ordeal. the truth is, i simultaneously hate him for being a douchebag and want to fuck him unconscious.

internal conflict.

freakin’ virgos.

i can’t resist their neat, understated appearance and courteous demeanor, and they know it.

they literally have my number. i hate it.

why am i so love/hate

sometimes i can’t tell the difference

So I can be scheduled for shoulder surgery as early as next Tuesday. Do it or wait? Otherwise, next dates are in Jan but I would definitely want to do it after the Retrograde that goes through the end of Dec until the end of Jan. It’s a 12 week recovery.

At the Warriors/Pacers game tonight, my cousin comes up to me and before even saying hi, asks… “Are your boobs real?”

i’m finally reading the time traveler’s wife. i’d started it years ago but didn’t get very far–just wasn’t into it. but now is probably the right time, and even though it makes me uncomfortable that the things she’s writing about are similar to the stuff i write about (i hate being accused of stealing, even though anything that is a truth comes from our collective unconscious), it’s definitely interesting. one of the biggest points of interest to me is that it’s a story about 2 gemini’s and it deals with very gemini themes. i strongly believe the writer has to be a gemini.

okay, i just looked it up. Audrey Niffenegger. Born June 13, 1963. that explains why her thoughts and style resonate with mine.

i was convinced she was either a gemini or lived closely with gemini’s when i read this line, spoken by the father of henry to his fiance:

“He isn’t calibrated to bring peace to anyone’s life. In fact, he is in many ways the opposite of his mother: unreliable, volatile, and not even especially concerned with anyone but himself. Tell me, Clare: why on earth would a lovely girl like you want to marry Henry?”

you have to know a gemini intimately or be a gemini to have such an acute observation. especially since her character’s response was that it’s because he’s really, really good in bed…

we inherently run a wider spectrum of personality than other people. the most disciplined and nice gemini’s can not change their inherent nature, but will do their best to control their volatility, outputting the need for change and variety in what they do while trying to maintain a more consistent personality. but the truth is, the core of our being is constantly changing. so sensitive to time, space, environment, and our own constantly changing reactions to a constantly changing world on a person who is not consistent enough to be the same person from moment to moment.

i often ask myself, why would anyone want to be with me. and the answer is, why would anyone not want to be with me. we are easy to love. we make you feel alive. we are everything and yet we are nothing that you can hold on to. paradoxical, contradicting, real. we’re sand through your fingers…you either appreciate the experience as a whole, or live a frustrating life of trying to catch and understand each grain when it’s inherently impossible. we’re like seasons. they come and go and to love one season means having to accept them all to get back to the one you love. and that is not easy or desirable for everyone.

sometimes i don’t think i would wish a relationship with me on anyone i truly cared about, because it’s not easy. i know that i’m a really great person and really interesting and the positives of being around me weigh pretty heavily. i’m a good person to know, a good person to be around. if you’ve ever been scared of the prospect of boredom from spending the rest of your life with one person, then you should spend the rest of your life with someone who is rarely the same person. but it is not easy, because you have to be willing to let things flow, and let the me you love disappear and return, sometimes in front of your very eyes. when i have positive to give, i’m pretty selfless. but then there’s that other side that can’t be controlled, like a werewolf’s other side that is changed by invisible forces. day to day and moment to moment, i can become a completely different person, not that the person is better or worse, but just a completely different person. that can be unsettling for some people who like things the way they like them.

we were not built for stability. we were not built for consistency. we were built for a multitude of life experiences within a single lifetime. we’re often deemed the most human sign, because we will embody and reflect the entire range of human emotion and experience.

the key is expectation. i guess if someone were comfortable with the paradox of the person next to them being a different person from day to day, sometimes moment to moment, yet see that despite the switches they are still the same person, if they can see that it is in fact the constant change and evolution, the movement from liquid to solid and back again that is in fact cyclical and consistent and makes the greater, consistent person, they would find it less unsettling. they would see that the gemini is often consistent in his or her inconsistency, and often possesses a singular aim within a given moment. the gemini is a consistent person built on frames in motion, the same way an organic, dimensional world appears consistent on a projected film strip when it is in fact a series of fluttering still images. we are inherently self-centered because we are always aware of our environment and trying to project a consistent being (it takes awareness + discipline, thus our attention to ourselves, the outer world, and the relationship between), but at our best, we are not selfish. we are unstable by nature, but take a few steps back and we are an entire spectrum radiating simultaneously. we are wise, infinite souls inside little children, we are angels inside demons. heaven and hell, we’ve touched both. in fact, we have a knack for being in both simultaneously. there is no one more aware of the present than a gemini, and no one worse at adhering to linear time. we are as much here as we are not, and we have an uncanny way of surrounding you, and talking to you as though you are caught in the middle of a conversation between ourselves.

our purpose is to learn, understand, make connections, communicate, store. accept our nature to understand the person. if we disappear, wait in the same place and sooner or later, we return, not realizing we were ever gone.

do you want an interesting life, or a stable one?

we will give you the former, but you will gamble for the latter.

i’m currently reviewing the posts from the middle of october. the way i operate sometimes is i notice things in the present and they become integral to how i store that present as a memory, and these signifiers later serve as triggers in the future to go back into that past in my mind to gather the overall meaning. it’s the juxtaposition of the past with the present that allows new thoughts, realizations or breakthroughs, a way to come back and understand something when you are at the exact position to have a certain perspective. music is often a trigger. arcade fire in particular, seems to trigger a line that originated from the alaska cruise through seattle, a specific line that i haven’t been able to grasp yet, but it’s slowly being painted.

the song, wake up, was on the radio twice this weekend. the first was on our way to the warriors game on saturday, a pretty energetic day where i was tangibly affecting people and had a particularly active magnetic field. the 2nd was last night, on my way to the store.

i’ve only consciously heard this song 3 times on the radio. the first was mid-october, another highly energetic time when i was meeting a lot of strangers, having connections and doing a lot of “work.” i remember hearing the song on the radio and feeling the song was magnetizing my current life experience, then looking up the lyrics and discovering it was arcade fire. not long after, all that energy channeled into that 2nd story about meeting death at 3am in a diner.

i find it interesting that this song preceded a very energetic night on saturday (that ended in me at a diner at 3am feeling a weird thinness of reality being in a place i had imagined in my head but that now surrounded me in real life), concluded an energetic weekend on sunday, and was originally planted during an energetic and particularly magnetic time in october. arcade fire songs are also linked to high energy times in september and august.

remember how i said that sometimes life circles back to the past in the future? these signifiers provide the portals.

i don’t believe this is coincidence. i take the appearance of this song as a point of reference and a sign post that i’m on the right path and to be particularly vigilant right now…something important is nearby, either in time or space.

random weekend thoughts:

-my theory: the middle of 3 children are usually difficult personalities. first born and youngest gravitate towards each other, but if you are oldest of 2 with the younger being of the opposite sex, your best match is the oldest of 2 with an opposite sex sibling. i’m first born big sister to a younger brother, so i find a lot of youngest born guys gravitate towards me because they know that i will naturally be protective of them and take care of them. but unless they’re strong themselves, it doesn’t really make me grow. the best partner for me is probably a big brother who has taken care of a little sister. then we would take care of each other while also challenging each other, because first borns tend to be very responsible but also very ambitious.

-i met bohr’s friend rick who has a theory that any family with 2 or more girls, at least one of the girls will be crazy, a bitch, or a crazy bitch. he also said that having a daughter is very different from having a son. you don’t worry as much with a son, but with a daughter, you feel like you have to protect her at all times, knowing how vulnerable she is to all the forces in the world which want to take things away from her. even things you never would have thought of or been aware of before, you become very paranoid once you have a daughter, but on the flipside, you are also aware you can only do so much to protect her. it’s very humbling, he said. he and his wife have a one year old daughter, and they’re talking about having another kid. they’re hoping for a son. i asked him if part of the desire is that they’re hoping that by having a son, he’ll protect her. definitely, he said. there’s definitely a comfort in knowing that even if anything happens to us, there will at least be another man who will look out for her.

-assholicism runs in my family. but we’re like werewolves. we’re really, really nice, charming, fun, happy people, and then full moon and bam! we’re complete assholes. and then we’re angels again. it’s a temporary state, but it happens.

-my mom says sometimes she wonders if she was a wolf in a past life, because she has these moments where she wants to bite a person’s throat. on my side, unless i know you and trust you, i’m very protective of my throat. i don’t like people touching it, or even waving their hands too close to it. i wonder if my mom and i have some predator/prey past life history.

-bohr was over for dinner last night and on his way out. he was waiting to say goodbye to my mom, but she and my brother were heading out as well to buy christmas lights, so we followed them into the bathroom and watched them squabble over something inconsequential. i said to bohr, “i guarantee you they were a married couple in a past life.” bohr bursts out laughing and says, “i wouldn’t doubt it. they have a very interesting dynamic.” we stand in the doorway and watch them and my mom suddenly becomes aware of us. “what are you two doing here?” “it’s like watching a play,” i said.

-i am most often mistaken for: 1. a swimmer; 2. a police officer; 3. a poet; 4. a mirror

i’d bought a prime rib that i didn’t have time to make on thanksgiving, so we invited family over to eat it last night. my aunt helped me out in the kitchen and we were talking. she’s married to my dad’s cousin and has two really cool daughters in college, but they have dropped hints that the women in the family (my aunt and my two cousins) don’t get along with my uncle. from the clues i’ve gotten over the years, they say he’s very pessimistic and controlling and my aunt has mentioned that when it comes to his daughters, “there’s a very negative male force in the house.” but it’s hard for me to have clear perspective on the bigger picture because when he’s around the rest of us, he’s very mild. he used to babysit me when i was really young, and he would bring over video games for us to play. i know he’s always been a big fan of mine, but i’ve always instinctually kept a distance from him as well, so i really don’t know him that well.

so when i mention to her that the warriors have a lot of scorpios on the team this year (i said it to her knowing her husband is a scorpio), she scoffed and said, “scorpios and all their little secrets…” i took this as an opening and asked her if her husband keeps a lot of secrets. she said, “it’s like if he holds some secret over you, he wins.” i asked her if she knows what secrets he holds over her, and she said, “nope. he just reminds you it’s there but who knows.” later, i asked my cousin, his daughter, why she and her sister had originally not wanted to come home for thanksgiving (one is in la and i had offered her a ride back to fremont but she said she had to work, and the other is in berkeley which is 40 minutes away from fremont. she had originally not planned to come home but relented when her mom asked her to and when her sister told her i was cooking). she shrugged and i asked her if it was because of her dad and she said, “Yes…”

so last night, i’m chatting with my aunt. out of the blue, she mentions, “marriage shouldn’t be for life. it should have a limited time frame like athlete contracts or work contracts. like after 10 years, you have the option of renewing the contract, or opting out. because for the rest of your life, it can be too long.”

“and if you’re young and you realize early on that you’re unhappy, it’s hard to think you’re stuck in an unhappy life for the next 50 years…” i said, and she replied, “yes!” very strongly.

“they should change the laws,” she said. “i’ve often thought about that. we’re always fighting about gay marriage laws, but the laws should change anyway. maybe start a website and get people behind it–limited contracts for marriages. so instead of having to go through the mess of divorce, all you do is opt out when your contract’s up for renewal.”

“the people in california are so liberal. they would probably be open to it,” i said. i don’t know if any of this would really fly, but what i was finding more interesting was the story behind this idea, what i was reading between the lines from my aunt.

“we could have a website,” she said. “get people excited about the idea.” she pauses, then says more quietly, “maybe have chat rooms for men and women who have been abused in their marriages so they can support each other.”

whoa. a red flag down. does my uncle abuse her? his daughters? what kind of abuse? my mind is working furiously, mapping out what i know about this household, and i choose my response carefully.

“i think there are places online now that provide support for people who have been abused or are currently in abusive relationships,” i said, not to shoot down her idea, but to let her know that there are places. i used to volunteer for a legal advocacy group to raise awareness to teens regarding the different types of abuse, particularly those that are harder to pin down but equally damaging–emotional and verbal. and i’ve done a lot of research on this topic when i was considering grad school in psychology. there are a lot of resources and support forums available for people in abusive situations, but the problem is, those in bad situations don’t often seek them. abuse can be quicksand, a hostage situation with invisible chains. hard to live, impossible to go.

“yeah,” my aunt said, and trailed off in thought. i didn’t know what to say to her, because i’ve known she’s been unhappy for years, but i don’t know the situation and don’t know if it’s really my place to ask. chinese culture has many formalities that you have to be careful with.

but it disturbed me. to know that a wife is unhappy is one thing, but if there’s abuse…

i want to spend some time with my cousins and find out what their home life is like.

this is my destiny so come with me…

when the head chases the tail, you are going in circles.
when the head chases the tail and the tail chases the head, you are manifesting infinity.

last night i was talking to bohr, dropping knowledge on him, and i drew a crowd of listeners. it was flowing really strongly and even though the things i said were for and about him, there were multiple levels working and the words had simultaneous deeper meaning for all the other people in that circle listening. the flow comes from within me but not of me…when it comes through, i am learning as well. this is something that comes through when others are wanting/needing a message and open to accepting it. what i’ve been learning, is how to channel that energy while keeping myself out of its way. it is a power surge. the more that comes through, the more i have to relax my identity around it, focus the stream, give it the clearest path to those connected, keep the door open, and allow myself to go with it without being afraid. disciplined commitment. like playing a musical instrument of things that are hidden in plain sight but very real. last night was powerful. successful. new level. the words really fell into place and something else was there with us. positive flow, powerful opportunity for awakenings. an almost tangible presence of truth and deep connection.