Echo

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.