I've started to recognize faces on the 7-train in the morning. There's the short, awkward man with little red stubbles on his face that match the red hair on his head, much of which is covered by the ugly baseball hat he's been wearing. I don't know why people wear baseball hats; I wonder if it's more comfortable for them than for me, I wonder if they they it's cool, I wonder if they want to cover up the unpleasant smell of their unwashed hair.
There's the Hispanic woman that often talks on the phone during the trip, much of which is above ground for me, though more so for her since she's there when I board the train. She is plain looking, and her clothing is functional but hardly fashionable. From the tone of her conversation, only her half being accessible to us, and the content that I can decipher, she probably is talking to her mother. She doesn't have a ring on, but unlike people who go to work in Stamford, most women in New York don't have a ring on. Oh, I notice these things, whether I am interested in the woman or not.
I went out Tuesday night, but not to tango. Not to dance, at least. I went with my tango crush. Well, more like crush from tango. "Tango crush" simply means someone you almost fall in love with but only during the dance. As a person, he doesn't elicit much romance in you. But this is my crush from tango, the teacher with whom I exchange poetry. She wrote me a poem the other day, after sending me one from Pablo Neruda. No, she isn't interested in me. She is done with people from tango; her boyfriend is not from tango and not even from the City. Still, I cherish the moments I get to spend with her. And that's why despite my fatigue, I stayed late with her in the Village on Tuesday, listening to music. First we went to see a tango band at Zinc. It was all right. It's modernized tango music, and almost never is it danceable, and in some cases like this, it wasn't particularly exciting. No one does it like the masters and no one appears to try.
She didn't really want to go there, but one of her friends was in the band, or "orquesta". Afterwards we walked over to the famous Bar 55. It was like in the movies. It was what I have wanted to do for so long: going to jazz in the Village. This was a legendary place. In the basement, a former speakeasy. It's cozy because it was a little grungy. It was Tuesday night so everyone was a bit more relaxed and not so crowded. The music was great. At first I was a bit stiff, but my friend was just dancing like there's no tomorrow to the mix of blues, jazz, and Brazilian forrò. Soon I got off my barstool and started shaking, too. We stayed there for one and a half sets, arriving in the middle of the next to the last. We didn't talk much, but I realize more and more that forging a friendship, or any relationship, doesn't require only talking, and talking alone isn't enough. It's all about experiencing something together. I got to experience my first real jazz experience in a real jazz bar with my favorite person in New York. We hung out a bit together before the tango concert. Walked around the village in search of food, and grabbed a plate of savory crêpe for each of us. We chatted a bit. I was feeling awkward. I didn't want to. The awkwardness is inevitable when you like someone, especially you know you will never have her.
On Wednesdays I usually go to the milonga where I would see her, and maybe have the courage to ask her to dance (she's a famous teacher in New York and I am still very nervous about dancing with a teacher. I have to add "famous" because there are plenty of so-called teachers whose skills don't come close to match their title). But I decided to stay home. I couldn't afford more sleep deprivation. Sunday night I went dancing. Monday night I can't remember what happened but I ended up going to bed late. Tuesday night, despite being lucky with the train, I still went to bed about four hours before getting up. Of course, last night, despite not going to the milonga, I still went to bed just over five hours before going to bed. There was too much to do. I had to cook, take care of some business with the house, and actually spend some time for myself. Both last night and Monday, now that I remember, I go to kung fu, which means I don't get back until 9:30, at the earliest. 10:40 is when I need to go to sleep if I want all my 8 hours.
I still have to work on my budget. I need to save enough money for the next round of IRA deposit. This roof thing has eaten up quite a bit of money from my savings. And the move this year was costly. Furthermore, buying this laptop had a significant effect on the cash reserve. I also have to think about my furniture and belongings in the New Haven apartment now that I have started advertising it for the next lease, and likely it will need to be empty.
A lot to think about. The problem isn't that there is too much to think about, but rather, that I haven't made enough space in my mind to think about them. I have too much. I think this week I will skip tango, at least until the Sunday one. I will meet up with a tango person tonight, first time meeting. She's a crazy pianist who wants me to make her chocolate mousse. It's our first time hanging out. Tomorrow I will hang out with my little sister and Dad before she returns to her woods Saturday. Weekend? Maybe I will actually have some time for myself. Quite a few of the people I know are away this weekend. Maybe I will make space in my mind.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Father's Influence
A tango song keeps following me around like a shadow, or like a little child that seems forever latched onto you wherever you go. There's no great significance to the lyrics; it's another sad love song and I don't really understand all of it (despite the cheesiness of the love songs, they are very poetic and the language quite profound). It's the melody, the rhythm, what the sound speaks to me. The voice, the violin. It's soothing but at the same time reminds me of the difficulty of trying to live a simple life in the torrents of life, and the name of the song, and its central theme, is "Torrente".
On my way to Grand Central, I thought about my Dad. Not because there is still some tension between us, just because my thought veered into his world as these thoughts are busy with the house. Yesterday evening I was a little tortured with the idea of having paid $8000 for coating the roof. I realized I had no idea if I overpaid. I was rushing so I didn't make enough effort to get other estimates. I did call other roofers but they never called me back. I told myself that since this guy is recommended by my sister's boyfriend, whom I trust, the recommendation was good enough. But then I started wondering how putting two coats of protection would cost nearly as much as painting the exterior of my house.
Of course, when I was having my house painted, I went through the same thing, wondering if I overpaid, if the guys were doing a good job, if I would ever know. I don't even live in the house so I can't see what the coating looks like. I can only confirm through my tenants that there were people on the roof, that it was now silver.
My distrust of people, my uncertainty of my landlordship of the big house with three groups of people, the unknown of the house, the housing market, are just a few factors that have started to cause a lot of anxiety in me.
But most of all, it has to do with my family. I've always known I felt resentful of my Mother who pushed me to owning a house. And I always knew that that resentment couldn't go far because overall it had been a good investment idea since, practically, I hadn't been paying rent for the past five years. It wasn't completely free since I had to pay for insurance and maintenance, and I put in an additional amount equivalent to rent in the monthly payment to lower the overall interest payment. Looking back, I think that additional payment was a good idea compared to the alternative of investing in the stock market because the latter had been performing rather poorly in the past five years.
So I could resent her for locking me now into this iron ball to which I am attached along I-95. Right now I also have to look for tenants to fill the first floor before the end of August. That adds to my anxiety greatly. But the resentment is balanced by a combination of gratefulness and guilt.
Guilt that I do appreciate the extra money, which I have used in traveling and in investing in the stock market. Guilt that I should complain about my lack of complete freedom while enjoying the extra money from the past five years.
All this is complicated, these feelings, many of which remains rather murky to me. But one interesting new idea I've started to explore is the role my Dad plays in all this. He never played a direct role. He never pushed me to buy a house. In fact, indirectly he had discouraged me by complaining for as long as he had been a property owner that he was a slave to the house they live in. He always considered himself a victim, a victim who was paying for the mortgage of the house but it was really under my Mother's name. He didn't care about all the reasons that pointed to his being a co-owner of the house. He just liked complaining about his fate. His complaints grew larger when repairs were required. He always said his biggest fear was plumbing problems. The unknown pipes of a house he never really understood. The small problem of a clogged toilet would be a cause for losing sleep.
His own experience as a homeowner contributed to my fear of being one and continuing to be one. But his influence is bigger than this. My Mother wants me to be like her, in the sense of the stereotypical merchant Chinese. Chinese people have a lot of stereotypes, but one that many people around the world know about is their entrepreneurial fervor. There is a Chinese restaurant in just about every village and city in the world. Laundromat? My mother's younger brother is like that. He is very business-minded, with a very Chinese style. He is always looking for an opportunity to make money, whether in cutting costs, buying properties both here and in China, or evading taxes. His elder sister wished her husband were like that. She couldn't accomplish the same goals because, I suppose, she's a woman, and there aren't enough opportunities here or back in China for her, or simply it had been planted in her head by tradition that she could not succeed. And she married to someone who had none of the desires she and her brother had.
My Dad doesn't care much for the stress of business, and so nothing of the business. Owning a house for himself (forget being a landlord) is already stressful enough. He wants things to be simple. He eats very cheaply, not because, as is the motive of my Mother, it cuts cost, but because he can't imagine any need for something more complicated. He is not a good cook in the sense that he doesn't want to explore options. He just wants some good, simple food in his body. I remember in China he never showed any interest in anything, but I was a kid. He never went to do something even slightly out of the ordinary. He went to teach, prepared his classes, slept, cooked for us, went to the market, and spent some time with us like by the river. He had grown up in a busy and crowded city, but before I was born he had moved to the laid-back world of a village that had just rice fields and all the little critters that inhabited them.
My Mother didn't like that. She had often complained in front of him, in front of us, that he was a coward, lacking initiatives, lacking ambition. He didn't come to this country for a better life because he didn't imagine one. He came because that was what fate had required him to do. He gave up his idyllic life for a foreign one, his teaching job for a labor-intensive one in various grocery stores. I remember he had a stint in this grocery shop where he felt happy, and though I don't know all the reasons, I suspect one was related to the fact that the owner was like him, not very competitive, nice guy, unlike the cut-throats you find in most Chinese immigrant stores. Of course, that didn't last long; the cut-throats in the grocery store across the street soon shut down Dad's store.
I think I have much more his desire to be free, desire to be left alone, desire for simplicity, more of this trait than my Mother's trait of wanting to make money. In my every day life, I find myself often trying to be efficient, and I am thinking about making money much more often than most of my friends. Besides the India girl, I am the only one I know who actively invests in stocks. Most people who do investment really just dump their money in some money manager's lap and forget about it until their retire. I have full control over which stocks I invest, how much, and I read stock investment news nearly every week. I am not as diligent as many people who spend hours a week reading about the trends, philosophies, and economic news, and sharing ideas with other investors. But compared to my friends, I must look like some investment expert.
And I keep a tight budget, which also no one else I know, besides that India girl, has. So definitely I think about money a lot, and would like to think I am not obsessed but wise about money management. That part I am not sure if I learned from my Mother teaching us being cheap and money-pinching (she just had me walk with her to CVS just to understand where that dollar she thought she would get went). Or I learned it from surviving in New York. Or both.
But the important thing is it is becoming clear to me that my Dad exists in a bigger part. Looking back, I know I would have been equally happy, perhaps in a different way, if I didn't have that extra money. My Mother somehow believes, and somehow had convinced me, that life had been better off with that extra money. I, however, know that whatever I wanted from life, even if it cost a lot of money, I would have found a way to get it. But the reality is that what I wanted from life rarely required a lot of money. I could have still traveled as much as I did, just less money in the stock market. She didn't mention about the future, which is also important in this evaluation. When I do sell the house, and if I sell it for the price I want, or close, I will have a lot of money, more than I have ever saved in my life. Not extravagant, of course, but that is the point.
Just like my Dad, I don't need anything extravagant. I don't need to own anything when I know what I want can't be touched or seen or smelled. I appreciate more the lack of material objects.
But balancing an unknown future, an unknown future sales date, is the present annoyance and frustration with owning a house and taking care of its inhabitants. It would drive my Dad nuts. I am not good at managing people, and neither is he. When he was the manager of the bookstore where he still works he was being a bad manager, in the sense he did everything, didn't delegate any work because he didn't want to inconvenience his insubordinates. He let them go home early even if that meant he had to go home later. I sometimes think I care too much about my tenants. I am worried the slightest inconvenience caused them. I know most of my friends don't have very responsive landlords. One friend had that same leak in the kitchen for as long as she had lived there before leaving. Me, I scramble to find someone fix the roof, twice, totaling more than $9000. My personality doesn't fit a business person. I take risks, but in the stock market where there is nothing material, just numbers. I am not responsible for any human being, any structure.
To end this, I want to say that there is something good to say about an entrepreneurial spirit. It requires patience, faith in what you're doing, faith in reaching your goal, being open-minded, being active. My Dad was never ambitious, and I think even if you're not ambitious about making money, life needs to be full of ambition. One should not confuse desire for simplicity with a simple mind. Life should always be a journey and the traveler always taking risks for the simple goal of happiness. Unfortunately, I believe, sitting around doing nothing extraordinary at most makes you unaware of what deeper joy life offers. I don't know if owning a house gives me deeper joy than not owning one. But it certainly is a challenge for me to go through this dark valley full of worries and concerns and frustrations.
On my way to Grand Central, I thought about my Dad. Not because there is still some tension between us, just because my thought veered into his world as these thoughts are busy with the house. Yesterday evening I was a little tortured with the idea of having paid $8000 for coating the roof. I realized I had no idea if I overpaid. I was rushing so I didn't make enough effort to get other estimates. I did call other roofers but they never called me back. I told myself that since this guy is recommended by my sister's boyfriend, whom I trust, the recommendation was good enough. But then I started wondering how putting two coats of protection would cost nearly as much as painting the exterior of my house.
Of course, when I was having my house painted, I went through the same thing, wondering if I overpaid, if the guys were doing a good job, if I would ever know. I don't even live in the house so I can't see what the coating looks like. I can only confirm through my tenants that there were people on the roof, that it was now silver.
My distrust of people, my uncertainty of my landlordship of the big house with three groups of people, the unknown of the house, the housing market, are just a few factors that have started to cause a lot of anxiety in me.
But most of all, it has to do with my family. I've always known I felt resentful of my Mother who pushed me to owning a house. And I always knew that that resentment couldn't go far because overall it had been a good investment idea since, practically, I hadn't been paying rent for the past five years. It wasn't completely free since I had to pay for insurance and maintenance, and I put in an additional amount equivalent to rent in the monthly payment to lower the overall interest payment. Looking back, I think that additional payment was a good idea compared to the alternative of investing in the stock market because the latter had been performing rather poorly in the past five years.
So I could resent her for locking me now into this iron ball to which I am attached along I-95. Right now I also have to look for tenants to fill the first floor before the end of August. That adds to my anxiety greatly. But the resentment is balanced by a combination of gratefulness and guilt.
Guilt that I do appreciate the extra money, which I have used in traveling and in investing in the stock market. Guilt that I should complain about my lack of complete freedom while enjoying the extra money from the past five years.
All this is complicated, these feelings, many of which remains rather murky to me. But one interesting new idea I've started to explore is the role my Dad plays in all this. He never played a direct role. He never pushed me to buy a house. In fact, indirectly he had discouraged me by complaining for as long as he had been a property owner that he was a slave to the house they live in. He always considered himself a victim, a victim who was paying for the mortgage of the house but it was really under my Mother's name. He didn't care about all the reasons that pointed to his being a co-owner of the house. He just liked complaining about his fate. His complaints grew larger when repairs were required. He always said his biggest fear was plumbing problems. The unknown pipes of a house he never really understood. The small problem of a clogged toilet would be a cause for losing sleep.
His own experience as a homeowner contributed to my fear of being one and continuing to be one. But his influence is bigger than this. My Mother wants me to be like her, in the sense of the stereotypical merchant Chinese. Chinese people have a lot of stereotypes, but one that many people around the world know about is their entrepreneurial fervor. There is a Chinese restaurant in just about every village and city in the world. Laundromat? My mother's younger brother is like that. He is very business-minded, with a very Chinese style. He is always looking for an opportunity to make money, whether in cutting costs, buying properties both here and in China, or evading taxes. His elder sister wished her husband were like that. She couldn't accomplish the same goals because, I suppose, she's a woman, and there aren't enough opportunities here or back in China for her, or simply it had been planted in her head by tradition that she could not succeed. And she married to someone who had none of the desires she and her brother had.
My Dad doesn't care much for the stress of business, and so nothing of the business. Owning a house for himself (forget being a landlord) is already stressful enough. He wants things to be simple. He eats very cheaply, not because, as is the motive of my Mother, it cuts cost, but because he can't imagine any need for something more complicated. He is not a good cook in the sense that he doesn't want to explore options. He just wants some good, simple food in his body. I remember in China he never showed any interest in anything, but I was a kid. He never went to do something even slightly out of the ordinary. He went to teach, prepared his classes, slept, cooked for us, went to the market, and spent some time with us like by the river. He had grown up in a busy and crowded city, but before I was born he had moved to the laid-back world of a village that had just rice fields and all the little critters that inhabited them.
My Mother didn't like that. She had often complained in front of him, in front of us, that he was a coward, lacking initiatives, lacking ambition. He didn't come to this country for a better life because he didn't imagine one. He came because that was what fate had required him to do. He gave up his idyllic life for a foreign one, his teaching job for a labor-intensive one in various grocery stores. I remember he had a stint in this grocery shop where he felt happy, and though I don't know all the reasons, I suspect one was related to the fact that the owner was like him, not very competitive, nice guy, unlike the cut-throats you find in most Chinese immigrant stores. Of course, that didn't last long; the cut-throats in the grocery store across the street soon shut down Dad's store.
I think I have much more his desire to be free, desire to be left alone, desire for simplicity, more of this trait than my Mother's trait of wanting to make money. In my every day life, I find myself often trying to be efficient, and I am thinking about making money much more often than most of my friends. Besides the India girl, I am the only one I know who actively invests in stocks. Most people who do investment really just dump their money in some money manager's lap and forget about it until their retire. I have full control over which stocks I invest, how much, and I read stock investment news nearly every week. I am not as diligent as many people who spend hours a week reading about the trends, philosophies, and economic news, and sharing ideas with other investors. But compared to my friends, I must look like some investment expert.
And I keep a tight budget, which also no one else I know, besides that India girl, has. So definitely I think about money a lot, and would like to think I am not obsessed but wise about money management. That part I am not sure if I learned from my Mother teaching us being cheap and money-pinching (she just had me walk with her to CVS just to understand where that dollar she thought she would get went). Or I learned it from surviving in New York. Or both.
But the important thing is it is becoming clear to me that my Dad exists in a bigger part. Looking back, I know I would have been equally happy, perhaps in a different way, if I didn't have that extra money. My Mother somehow believes, and somehow had convinced me, that life had been better off with that extra money. I, however, know that whatever I wanted from life, even if it cost a lot of money, I would have found a way to get it. But the reality is that what I wanted from life rarely required a lot of money. I could have still traveled as much as I did, just less money in the stock market. She didn't mention about the future, which is also important in this evaluation. When I do sell the house, and if I sell it for the price I want, or close, I will have a lot of money, more than I have ever saved in my life. Not extravagant, of course, but that is the point.
Just like my Dad, I don't need anything extravagant. I don't need to own anything when I know what I want can't be touched or seen or smelled. I appreciate more the lack of material objects.
But balancing an unknown future, an unknown future sales date, is the present annoyance and frustration with owning a house and taking care of its inhabitants. It would drive my Dad nuts. I am not good at managing people, and neither is he. When he was the manager of the bookstore where he still works he was being a bad manager, in the sense he did everything, didn't delegate any work because he didn't want to inconvenience his insubordinates. He let them go home early even if that meant he had to go home later. I sometimes think I care too much about my tenants. I am worried the slightest inconvenience caused them. I know most of my friends don't have very responsive landlords. One friend had that same leak in the kitchen for as long as she had lived there before leaving. Me, I scramble to find someone fix the roof, twice, totaling more than $9000. My personality doesn't fit a business person. I take risks, but in the stock market where there is nothing material, just numbers. I am not responsible for any human being, any structure.
To end this, I want to say that there is something good to say about an entrepreneurial spirit. It requires patience, faith in what you're doing, faith in reaching your goal, being open-minded, being active. My Dad was never ambitious, and I think even if you're not ambitious about making money, life needs to be full of ambition. One should not confuse desire for simplicity with a simple mind. Life should always be a journey and the traveler always taking risks for the simple goal of happiness. Unfortunately, I believe, sitting around doing nothing extraordinary at most makes you unaware of what deeper joy life offers. I don't know if owning a house gives me deeper joy than not owning one. But it certainly is a challenge for me to go through this dark valley full of worries and concerns and frustrations.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Sanity Revisited
I realized something that has been happening to me, and I realized I am not insane.
But since I didn't realize it, perhaps I can't blame them for not realizing it either. Then again, that doesn't help me forgive them.
I asked one of my closest friends if I am crazy to think like this. She said no.
Here's a man who has been made to feel unwanted for a year by a woman with whom he was on and off intimate. Then she finally said no, 99% no, until one day she started seeing some guy and it became finally 100% no.
This isn't an unusual story even if it's not a nice story.
But what's unusual is that I have to see these two people every weekend I go dancing. Has this ever happened to you? Has this ever happened to anyone you know? You have to see the person who rejected you, and then the person who took what you thought you would have for a year, and see them together, dancing. Dancing at the beginning and dancing at the end. And talking, right in front of you like you don't exist.
And you have to bear with this every week in a place in which you used to feel safe and relaxed, and they knew it. They knew this and they still made a decision to put me in that situation, or else I leave my friends I see on Sunday nights.
And sometimes Fridays, when I thought I was safe.
The last time this happened on a Friday was the previous time I told her I didn't want to see her again. She thought the reason for my behavior was the girl from Missouri. How naïve can you be to think that I can put up with seeing those two in front of me. That Friday I was so angry I even spilled my anger on one of my best friends.
Until today, I thought I was being irrational. I thought I was childish and hypersensitive.
But no. Not many people, no one I know, has the fortune of going to do his favorite activity where he has to see the two people who claim they care about him but instead remind him of his humiliation and pain. Unlike life outside tango, in tango you don't have many choices on where to go. If I have to go somewhere else I mind as well stop tango.
In other people's lives, when things don't work out romantically, they don't see each other because someone moves, out of the zip code, out of the city, out of the time zone. In my case, she is actually moving into my city, so I get to see the two of them even more in September.
Am I crazy to think I am in a unique situation?
No, my friend said. She said despite my reaction, I have been pretty mature. I guess most people would just leave the milonga at the sight of two people who remind them of the rejection and replacement. I love tango too much. But not enough that I can dance well. That Friday, and this Sunday, I couldn't concentrate. I was nauseous from anger and humiliation.
So I am not crazy. But it doesn't mean what they did was unnatural. It would be weird if they avoided the places I go to for me, especially since the guy organizes the Sunday milonga! All I say is that I have somehow found myself in a very unique situation.
But then there were the smiles. Smiles from my friend visiting from out of town that I get to see only once every few months. Smiles from my New York buddies who don't know anything about the drama with the three of us. Smiles that replace my sullen face the whole time. Smiles that made me believe I can overcome this, I can forget about them, and even forgive them for their insensitivity and tactlessness.
But to be realistic, it's hard to believe I can forgive them for doing this to me. But I need to do so for myself. My friend, who agrees I am not crazy, reminded me that whatever I do it had to be something good for me. That might mean refraining from tango so I don't have to subject myself to their presence. Whatever it takes to take care of myself.
And that included what I had decided to do with her. It's too easy to be angry with her and pretend she's invisible, and by doing so I just feel sad about us and jump back into trying to be close to her, only to be humiliated again. The simplest thing is to be nice to her so I don't let drama get in the way. Be cordial and polite, but nothing more. Treat her like a human being and not an invisible point of hatred. And leave it at that. No more sentimentality when our favorite songs come up. That sentimentality lives in the past and can only cause trouble in the future. She has the right to throw away everything we built, and the worst thing I can do for myself is to pick up those jettison and cradle them in the present.
She is spending undoubtedly her last few days with him before he goes off to some work and she back to France. How do I know that? The more important thing is I shouldn't have found out about that. I shouldn't do things that make me sad. To remind me of the humiliation. It's bad enough that they humiliate me; it's my fault if I allow myself to be humiliated.
Stand tall and walk forward. Be with people who love you for real. That's what my friend reminded me again in our brief conversation. I hope to see my other friend visiting from out of town tomorrow. Her smile has always made me feel good. She's my first tango friend from New York (though not the first who still lives in New York). She is one of the people who remind me that the world is bigger than my dramas lead me to believe, that I am bigger. The humiliation and pain, too, shall pass.
But since I didn't realize it, perhaps I can't blame them for not realizing it either. Then again, that doesn't help me forgive them.
I asked one of my closest friends if I am crazy to think like this. She said no.
Here's a man who has been made to feel unwanted for a year by a woman with whom he was on and off intimate. Then she finally said no, 99% no, until one day she started seeing some guy and it became finally 100% no.
This isn't an unusual story even if it's not a nice story.
But what's unusual is that I have to see these two people every weekend I go dancing. Has this ever happened to you? Has this ever happened to anyone you know? You have to see the person who rejected you, and then the person who took what you thought you would have for a year, and see them together, dancing. Dancing at the beginning and dancing at the end. And talking, right in front of you like you don't exist.
And you have to bear with this every week in a place in which you used to feel safe and relaxed, and they knew it. They knew this and they still made a decision to put me in that situation, or else I leave my friends I see on Sunday nights.
And sometimes Fridays, when I thought I was safe.
The last time this happened on a Friday was the previous time I told her I didn't want to see her again. She thought the reason for my behavior was the girl from Missouri. How naïve can you be to think that I can put up with seeing those two in front of me. That Friday I was so angry I even spilled my anger on one of my best friends.
Until today, I thought I was being irrational. I thought I was childish and hypersensitive.
But no. Not many people, no one I know, has the fortune of going to do his favorite activity where he has to see the two people who claim they care about him but instead remind him of his humiliation and pain. Unlike life outside tango, in tango you don't have many choices on where to go. If I have to go somewhere else I mind as well stop tango.
In other people's lives, when things don't work out romantically, they don't see each other because someone moves, out of the zip code, out of the city, out of the time zone. In my case, she is actually moving into my city, so I get to see the two of them even more in September.
Am I crazy to think I am in a unique situation?
No, my friend said. She said despite my reaction, I have been pretty mature. I guess most people would just leave the milonga at the sight of two people who remind them of the rejection and replacement. I love tango too much. But not enough that I can dance well. That Friday, and this Sunday, I couldn't concentrate. I was nauseous from anger and humiliation.
So I am not crazy. But it doesn't mean what they did was unnatural. It would be weird if they avoided the places I go to for me, especially since the guy organizes the Sunday milonga! All I say is that I have somehow found myself in a very unique situation.
But then there were the smiles. Smiles from my friend visiting from out of town that I get to see only once every few months. Smiles from my New York buddies who don't know anything about the drama with the three of us. Smiles that replace my sullen face the whole time. Smiles that made me believe I can overcome this, I can forget about them, and even forgive them for their insensitivity and tactlessness.
But to be realistic, it's hard to believe I can forgive them for doing this to me. But I need to do so for myself. My friend, who agrees I am not crazy, reminded me that whatever I do it had to be something good for me. That might mean refraining from tango so I don't have to subject myself to their presence. Whatever it takes to take care of myself.
And that included what I had decided to do with her. It's too easy to be angry with her and pretend she's invisible, and by doing so I just feel sad about us and jump back into trying to be close to her, only to be humiliated again. The simplest thing is to be nice to her so I don't let drama get in the way. Be cordial and polite, but nothing more. Treat her like a human being and not an invisible point of hatred. And leave it at that. No more sentimentality when our favorite songs come up. That sentimentality lives in the past and can only cause trouble in the future. She has the right to throw away everything we built, and the worst thing I can do for myself is to pick up those jettison and cradle them in the present.
She is spending undoubtedly her last few days with him before he goes off to some work and she back to France. How do I know that? The more important thing is I shouldn't have found out about that. I shouldn't do things that make me sad. To remind me of the humiliation. It's bad enough that they humiliate me; it's my fault if I allow myself to be humiliated.
Stand tall and walk forward. Be with people who love you for real. That's what my friend reminded me again in our brief conversation. I hope to see my other friend visiting from out of town tomorrow. Her smile has always made me feel good. She's my first tango friend from New York (though not the first who still lives in New York). She is one of the people who remind me that the world is bigger than my dramas lead me to believe, that I am bigger. The humiliation and pain, too, shall pass.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Bryant Park, Sunset
I've written about Bryant Park once, but I think before I moved here. I never really sat in the park and enjoyed being there. There was some rush to leave, probably to catch the train. I was waiting for the train, in fact.
Now I am in New York. I have the luxury to waste time in New York.
I sat there without a reason. I wanted to get a gelato with this girl or that girl, but in the end, everyone was busy. If you are reading this, you must think I am some young boy constantly hungering for some chick. You got the "young" part wrong, but the rest I suppose has some truth.
Just some.
With some pain and a long chain attached to my foot at one end and a ball at the other, I move, dragging, to be friends with all these people, including men, but mostly women. I now know three women who have boyfriends and whom I wish they didn't. But in the end, it's OK. I am not counting the French girl since I don't know what the real nature of her relationship is and to type this sentence is already hard enough. The point is, I try to be good to myself by enjoying the beautiful friendships I am building.
So this is my defense of calling up girls and inviting them to gelato.
That didn't work out so I found myself sitting on the lawn of Bryant Park. I realized I loved it. Loved the moment. Behind me was a raucous crowd of restaurateurs at some seemingly expensive restaurant built on the steps between the lawn and the mighty New York Public Library. In front of me was the lawn and the trees that circumscribe it. And standing behind the trees, peeking into the human beings penned within the arboreal fences, are the Midtown financial firms. That Girl in Black and Red works at one of these big finance firms. I walked past her building, saw the great letters, thought about her. Thought about the reasons I liked her. Thought about my regrets from being superficial and never really noticed her inner beauty until now. Thought about her seeing her boyfriend.
In the park, I thought about the fortune of being her friend.
There were lots of people on the lawn, but not enough to be a nuisance, to distract me from enjoying the space. The sun was setting, the gap that 41st Street created among the glass giants was fiery orange.
On my left a man just sat down. He had a messenger bag on his lap, his face scarred by teenage-year acne, just like mine, his shoes indicate he works in one of these finance firms, and his constant chewing of that tiny white bubblegum probably means he's got a lot of stress to release. He sat that nearly motionless for the whole hour I was sitting there.
Another lone person sitting nearly motionless was this woman about ten feet from us, left of us. By motionless I mean also solitary. Undistracted. Most people were sitting with at least one other person. And all those people not sitting with anyone was either distracted by a book they were reading or using a laptop or some Smartphone. Only the three of us were totally motionless watching the sunset. (Well, I can't really count myself since I was occasionally distracted by looking at these two.) The woman I was, no surprise, looking at more. She was very beautiful, even for Manhattan standards. She dressed rather expensive looking, but I know you can get a lot of expensive-looking things at TJ-Max. She had very long and lean legs. She wasn't distracted. Once or twice she looked at her Smartphone, but most of the time, she stared into that fiery gap in front of us. I couldn't understand what she could be thinking about. What he was thinking about. Both were motionless. Both just staring into the gap that was slowly reddening, soon to become purple as soon as the sun set. It was as if they were both just meditating, searching for some peace at the end of a hard working week in the heart of this financial hub of an island. So isolated from the tourists and families and romantic couples around them.
Being in Bryant Park was one of the turning points for my re-establishment in New York. It was a point where I felt good about being in New York. I haven't felt regret of moving here. But to say I had no doubts would be lying. I am making friends. I am learning to be good to myself. I have discovered a new passion called kung fu, as an extension to the passion of "living". But then, there's this hole still in my heart. I feel lonely even if I am always busy doing something. Sometimes I am angry. Sometimes I still get angry with those who have abandoned me by choosing a path I couldn't follow. I don't have New York to blame. This emptiness will follow me until I find the connection to myself, until I have reconciled and love all that I am ashamed of.
I said in the last entry that I am ashamed of fearing pain. Kung fu is helping me with that. The master told us today that we had to empty ourselves and recreate ourselves. It is a very Buddhist belief, fundamental tenet, actually. Isn't that what I have been doing for a while, attempting to do. Recreate myself? Isn't that what my last Yale supervisor said to me? That I needed to recreate myself? I sort of did by choosing finance. But that's not a big deal. That's easy.
Sometimes to recreate yourself is to face your demons and shake their hands. Pain I am dealing with. I can deal with more pushups on my knuckles now. I can face pain for more than a fraction of a second and convince myself I can do another round.
I left Bryant Park more than an hour later. But those two still sat there like statues. The man didn't move at all, while the woman tried to shrink herself into her expensive-looking shirt like a turtle when the wind picked up and the sun had set. There are so many stories in this city. I want to know them. How do I connect to them?
How do I do it when I have a hard time connecting with those I already know? With those with boyfriends and I wish they didn't. With those whom I love dearly but I find so much pain just talking to them? I walked among the shadows of the glass giants, and they too were tired after a whole week of trading and finance auditing. The path ahead is difficult, but the most difficult thing for me is to maintain my course and not run away from the pain that was waiting for me. Through the gauntlets of the dark valley I can emerge a better man. A man closer to what I want myself to be.
I said I want to be the best amateur tango dancer in the city (which really means North America). There isn't some contest I want to enter to prove that. There isn't a list of things I can mark myself against. It isn't some black belt thing for kung fu. It is for myself. Mount Everest didn't become the tallest mountain by looking at how tall others are. I have my personal standards for what is a good tanguero, and I want to meet those standards better than anyone else on the social dance scene. This is an example of what I mean by being the man closer to what I want. Be more connected. Be me.
Now I am in New York. I have the luxury to waste time in New York.
I sat there without a reason. I wanted to get a gelato with this girl or that girl, but in the end, everyone was busy. If you are reading this, you must think I am some young boy constantly hungering for some chick. You got the "young" part wrong, but the rest I suppose has some truth.
Just some.
With some pain and a long chain attached to my foot at one end and a ball at the other, I move, dragging, to be friends with all these people, including men, but mostly women. I now know three women who have boyfriends and whom I wish they didn't. But in the end, it's OK. I am not counting the French girl since I don't know what the real nature of her relationship is and to type this sentence is already hard enough. The point is, I try to be good to myself by enjoying the beautiful friendships I am building.
So this is my defense of calling up girls and inviting them to gelato.
That didn't work out so I found myself sitting on the lawn of Bryant Park. I realized I loved it. Loved the moment. Behind me was a raucous crowd of restaurateurs at some seemingly expensive restaurant built on the steps between the lawn and the mighty New York Public Library. In front of me was the lawn and the trees that circumscribe it. And standing behind the trees, peeking into the human beings penned within the arboreal fences, are the Midtown financial firms. That Girl in Black and Red works at one of these big finance firms. I walked past her building, saw the great letters, thought about her. Thought about the reasons I liked her. Thought about my regrets from being superficial and never really noticed her inner beauty until now. Thought about her seeing her boyfriend.
In the park, I thought about the fortune of being her friend.
There were lots of people on the lawn, but not enough to be a nuisance, to distract me from enjoying the space. The sun was setting, the gap that 41st Street created among the glass giants was fiery orange.
On my left a man just sat down. He had a messenger bag on his lap, his face scarred by teenage-year acne, just like mine, his shoes indicate he works in one of these finance firms, and his constant chewing of that tiny white bubblegum probably means he's got a lot of stress to release. He sat that nearly motionless for the whole hour I was sitting there.
Another lone person sitting nearly motionless was this woman about ten feet from us, left of us. By motionless I mean also solitary. Undistracted. Most people were sitting with at least one other person. And all those people not sitting with anyone was either distracted by a book they were reading or using a laptop or some Smartphone. Only the three of us were totally motionless watching the sunset. (Well, I can't really count myself since I was occasionally distracted by looking at these two.) The woman I was, no surprise, looking at more. She was very beautiful, even for Manhattan standards. She dressed rather expensive looking, but I know you can get a lot of expensive-looking things at TJ-Max. She had very long and lean legs. She wasn't distracted. Once or twice she looked at her Smartphone, but most of the time, she stared into that fiery gap in front of us. I couldn't understand what she could be thinking about. What he was thinking about. Both were motionless. Both just staring into the gap that was slowly reddening, soon to become purple as soon as the sun set. It was as if they were both just meditating, searching for some peace at the end of a hard working week in the heart of this financial hub of an island. So isolated from the tourists and families and romantic couples around them.
Being in Bryant Park was one of the turning points for my re-establishment in New York. It was a point where I felt good about being in New York. I haven't felt regret of moving here. But to say I had no doubts would be lying. I am making friends. I am learning to be good to myself. I have discovered a new passion called kung fu, as an extension to the passion of "living". But then, there's this hole still in my heart. I feel lonely even if I am always busy doing something. Sometimes I am angry. Sometimes I still get angry with those who have abandoned me by choosing a path I couldn't follow. I don't have New York to blame. This emptiness will follow me until I find the connection to myself, until I have reconciled and love all that I am ashamed of.
I said in the last entry that I am ashamed of fearing pain. Kung fu is helping me with that. The master told us today that we had to empty ourselves and recreate ourselves. It is a very Buddhist belief, fundamental tenet, actually. Isn't that what I have been doing for a while, attempting to do. Recreate myself? Isn't that what my last Yale supervisor said to me? That I needed to recreate myself? I sort of did by choosing finance. But that's not a big deal. That's easy.
Sometimes to recreate yourself is to face your demons and shake their hands. Pain I am dealing with. I can deal with more pushups on my knuckles now. I can face pain for more than a fraction of a second and convince myself I can do another round.
I left Bryant Park more than an hour later. But those two still sat there like statues. The man didn't move at all, while the woman tried to shrink herself into her expensive-looking shirt like a turtle when the wind picked up and the sun had set. There are so many stories in this city. I want to know them. How do I connect to them?
How do I do it when I have a hard time connecting with those I already know? With those with boyfriends and I wish they didn't. With those whom I love dearly but I find so much pain just talking to them? I walked among the shadows of the glass giants, and they too were tired after a whole week of trading and finance auditing. The path ahead is difficult, but the most difficult thing for me is to maintain my course and not run away from the pain that was waiting for me. Through the gauntlets of the dark valley I can emerge a better man. A man closer to what I want myself to be.
I said I want to be the best amateur tango dancer in the city (which really means North America). There isn't some contest I want to enter to prove that. There isn't a list of things I can mark myself against. It isn't some black belt thing for kung fu. It is for myself. Mount Everest didn't become the tallest mountain by looking at how tall others are. I have my personal standards for what is a good tanguero, and I want to meet those standards better than anyone else on the social dance scene. This is an example of what I mean by being the man closer to what I want. Be more connected. Be me.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Pain
Dealing with pain was a motivation for me to do kung fu. It wasn't in the beginning. But in the first class I was stunned to see others doing (and being asked to do) pushups on their knuckles. I tried, I couldn't. My bare knuckles on the hardwood floor, the pain came immediately. Not like fire, not even like a needle. It came the moment I added any weight against the merciless floor.
I remember feeling helpless when I was going through food poisoning in January. I felt also ashamed. I thought it was something not so abnormal, even though it was my first time. And I have experienced presumably worse ordeals. But something made it horrible, and I don't know really why.
Now I still can't do a single pushup on my knuckles against the hardwood floor, but I can do a few on the mat. That's sort of cheating. Part of the reason they make us (try to) do this is when you punch someone, you don't want the pain of the knuckle to get in the way. Your hand needs to not feel pain, or at least not mind it. But more importantly, like the other endurance-trainings, I think pushups on knuckles is about the mind. In the end, it's about the mind over the body. Another torture we go through, though the pain comes ten seconds later, is the horse stand. That's what I tried to do when I was a kid watching kung fu movies. My Dad would be disappointed that I, the little boy, couldn't hold the stand for more than a few seconds. The burning pain surges from the knee up the calf like acid (well, it really is lactic acid inside). Today I could do it for a minute.
I question pain. Pain itself is a feeling. It's really the mind that decides to give up. I find myself being afraid. What if I damage my tendons when I push myself too hard on the knuckles? Same with the food poisoning; the foreign feeling of the stomach contracting suddenly, and painfully, made me very afraid. I have never felt my stomach contract so tightly. Never felt it contract, period! I had stomach aches. I had kids hit me in the stomach and I would writhe in pain. But I have never felt it like some foreign object, contracting without my permission.
So today on the bathroom floor (it's not just for my naps now), I put myself in the pushup position, on my knuckles. The pain came as quickly as before. I held myself there a few seconds longer, feeling the pain and the fear of breaking my tendons. I couldn't wonder about the pain until after I gave up. The pain was too distracting, and the fear enveloped me while I was a plank over my knuckles. Then during work (and during a meeting, slightly distracting to others) I made a fist out of each hand and starting punching the edge of a table, enough to feel the pain. My knuckles were all red, but nothing more. It's that fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing where the limit was to the force I could apply.
It's always about the mind. When I was doing the horse stand in class, I wanted to give up. But the instructor told us that it was in the mind, that we could do it more. And I did it. Longer than if I were alone. That's another reason to go to class, to be motivated, to be told I can do better.
I look at my knuckles, now, when it's all normal and happy, or after I subjected it to either the marble floor of the bathroom or the surface of oak tables, and I am reminded that I don't know my body that well, like most people don't know theirs. There are lines. There are shapes. There are different colors. And that's just the surface. What's underneath? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Again, it's that ignorance that weakens my mind. I hope after another month in kung fu I will have more confidence about what my body can do.
But the little I do know about my knuckles. They aren't like my Dad's. His are all cracked and scarred from so much manual labor since coming to this country. One time a relative, with my Mother's encouragement, made fun of my hands, saying I had women's hands because even she, a peasant, had rougher hands. I don't know pain. At least not physical pain. I can't even do a single pushup on my knuckles. That needs to change.
This is all physical pain I am talking about. The pain that most preoccupies my life is that of the heart. It's a different feeling. Heart broken. Disappointment. Hopelessness. Jealousy. The pain is unbearable in a different way. The two kinds of pain aren't comparable in quantity, but physical pain I forget much sooner, and I haven't had one of those physical injuries where I have to be in the hospital for a while with continual pain. The emotional pain is more abstract, with greater unknowns. It comes when I don't really expected as well as when I expect it. But I hope that any progress I make in enduring physical pain would spill over to the endurance of emotional pain.
Speaking of continual physical pain, one of the people I was talking to last night told me she nearly had to amputate one of her legs after a driver drove his SUV to her (hitting the gas instead of the brake, supposedly). She said she was touching her protruding broken femur. She even showed me her scar (and, strangely, asked me to touch it and touch lower part of her leg to see the difference in temperature). She's a relative beginner, six months of dancing, new to the city. Though she isn't that good, all the guys want to dance with her because she's a very pretty actress. I talked to her because I was in a mood to talk. I almost never talk at a milonga, but last night I spontaneously decided to talk, and I talked at least as much as I danced. The conversation with this actress extended beyond her broken and healed femur, though that was part of a larger topic of religion, how her Christian belief didn't make her a right-winger, despite what what left-wing people think about all religious people. I was also too tired to move my legs much. I had an hour of kung fu an hour before walking into the milonga. I also talked to this high school teacher visiting from DC, whom I danced with in that Boston tango marathon a month ago. I couldn't believe I was capable of listening so much with just seven hours of sleep total in the past two days. Last night I had less than four hours of sleep. Tonight I am looking forward to not listening to anyone and sleeping more, as Thursday nights I don't go to tango. This weekend, however, will be all tango. And we will go see the parents again, with my Dad still not really warm about talking to me.
I remember feeling helpless when I was going through food poisoning in January. I felt also ashamed. I thought it was something not so abnormal, even though it was my first time. And I have experienced presumably worse ordeals. But something made it horrible, and I don't know really why.
Now I still can't do a single pushup on my knuckles against the hardwood floor, but I can do a few on the mat. That's sort of cheating. Part of the reason they make us (try to) do this is when you punch someone, you don't want the pain of the knuckle to get in the way. Your hand needs to not feel pain, or at least not mind it. But more importantly, like the other endurance-trainings, I think pushups on knuckles is about the mind. In the end, it's about the mind over the body. Another torture we go through, though the pain comes ten seconds later, is the horse stand. That's what I tried to do when I was a kid watching kung fu movies. My Dad would be disappointed that I, the little boy, couldn't hold the stand for more than a few seconds. The burning pain surges from the knee up the calf like acid (well, it really is lactic acid inside). Today I could do it for a minute.
I question pain. Pain itself is a feeling. It's really the mind that decides to give up. I find myself being afraid. What if I damage my tendons when I push myself too hard on the knuckles? Same with the food poisoning; the foreign feeling of the stomach contracting suddenly, and painfully, made me very afraid. I have never felt my stomach contract so tightly. Never felt it contract, period! I had stomach aches. I had kids hit me in the stomach and I would writhe in pain. But I have never felt it like some foreign object, contracting without my permission.
So today on the bathroom floor (it's not just for my naps now), I put myself in the pushup position, on my knuckles. The pain came as quickly as before. I held myself there a few seconds longer, feeling the pain and the fear of breaking my tendons. I couldn't wonder about the pain until after I gave up. The pain was too distracting, and the fear enveloped me while I was a plank over my knuckles. Then during work (and during a meeting, slightly distracting to others) I made a fist out of each hand and starting punching the edge of a table, enough to feel the pain. My knuckles were all red, but nothing more. It's that fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing where the limit was to the force I could apply.
It's always about the mind. When I was doing the horse stand in class, I wanted to give up. But the instructor told us that it was in the mind, that we could do it more. And I did it. Longer than if I were alone. That's another reason to go to class, to be motivated, to be told I can do better.
I look at my knuckles, now, when it's all normal and happy, or after I subjected it to either the marble floor of the bathroom or the surface of oak tables, and I am reminded that I don't know my body that well, like most people don't know theirs. There are lines. There are shapes. There are different colors. And that's just the surface. What's underneath? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Again, it's that ignorance that weakens my mind. I hope after another month in kung fu I will have more confidence about what my body can do.
But the little I do know about my knuckles. They aren't like my Dad's. His are all cracked and scarred from so much manual labor since coming to this country. One time a relative, with my Mother's encouragement, made fun of my hands, saying I had women's hands because even she, a peasant, had rougher hands. I don't know pain. At least not physical pain. I can't even do a single pushup on my knuckles. That needs to change.
This is all physical pain I am talking about. The pain that most preoccupies my life is that of the heart. It's a different feeling. Heart broken. Disappointment. Hopelessness. Jealousy. The pain is unbearable in a different way. The two kinds of pain aren't comparable in quantity, but physical pain I forget much sooner, and I haven't had one of those physical injuries where I have to be in the hospital for a while with continual pain. The emotional pain is more abstract, with greater unknowns. It comes when I don't really expected as well as when I expect it. But I hope that any progress I make in enduring physical pain would spill over to the endurance of emotional pain.
Speaking of continual physical pain, one of the people I was talking to last night told me she nearly had to amputate one of her legs after a driver drove his SUV to her (hitting the gas instead of the brake, supposedly). She said she was touching her protruding broken femur. She even showed me her scar (and, strangely, asked me to touch it and touch lower part of her leg to see the difference in temperature). She's a relative beginner, six months of dancing, new to the city. Though she isn't that good, all the guys want to dance with her because she's a very pretty actress. I talked to her because I was in a mood to talk. I almost never talk at a milonga, but last night I spontaneously decided to talk, and I talked at least as much as I danced. The conversation with this actress extended beyond her broken and healed femur, though that was part of a larger topic of religion, how her Christian belief didn't make her a right-winger, despite what what left-wing people think about all religious people. I was also too tired to move my legs much. I had an hour of kung fu an hour before walking into the milonga. I also talked to this high school teacher visiting from DC, whom I danced with in that Boston tango marathon a month ago. I couldn't believe I was capable of listening so much with just seven hours of sleep total in the past two days. Last night I had less than four hours of sleep. Tonight I am looking forward to not listening to anyone and sleeping more, as Thursday nights I don't go to tango. This weekend, however, will be all tango. And we will go see the parents again, with my Dad still not really warm about talking to me.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Dancing and Talking
A quick note before I go to another short sleep.
A friend told me he was a little heartbroken that he suspects his ex-girlfriend is dating someone. He wants her to be dating, but the suspicion was hurtful. He wants to ask her if it's true, knowing that it's true. For what, I asked. So he could feel the pain and be over with it.
One Wednesday night ago I finally got an email from the French girl saying she was seeing this guy. I had suspected it before, suspected something would happen even months before, seeing how he was in his own idiosyncratic ways trying to court her, suspecting that such idiosyncrasy would be her fancy. But like my friend, the suspicion was more tormenting than the truth itself. When I got that email I was about to let go, let the emotions come out, finally accepting that I wouldn't want to talk to her again. Like my friend, I would have asked her if she hadn't told me first, to feel the pain just before the catharsis.
I took a taxi home, alone, and I passed by 51st street, on Third Avenue as we raced toward the 59th Street Bridge. I remember the shops there. Why? I never lived there, and it wasn't some place interesting. But I saw that corner twice and I remember, because it was where the hotel was, where I booked a room for a weekend of tango, when she came with me for one night before going to brunch on the other side of the island. I remember things so clearly it's starting to feel like a disadvantage.
I came from that direction because I wanted to walk this girl home, the girl in red and black (not tonight, of course). She was going away for a month, most of the time with her boyfriend. But live for the moment. I wanted to enjoy the last bit of time with her in the present. We shared more. If she didn't have to pack and I didn't have to go to work in five hours, we would have kept talking all night. We danced half the time I was at the practica (the other half I was practicing, you know, to be the best dancer, etc, etc). And we walked all the way to her building. I was happy. Despite that corner on 51st and Third, despite remembering that I was not chosen while someone else was, despite still going home alone (well, to a guy), I was happy that someone thought I was cool enough to walk home with at 1AM at night. Now I need to sleep.
A friend told me he was a little heartbroken that he suspects his ex-girlfriend is dating someone. He wants her to be dating, but the suspicion was hurtful. He wants to ask her if it's true, knowing that it's true. For what, I asked. So he could feel the pain and be over with it.
One Wednesday night ago I finally got an email from the French girl saying she was seeing this guy. I had suspected it before, suspected something would happen even months before, seeing how he was in his own idiosyncratic ways trying to court her, suspecting that such idiosyncrasy would be her fancy. But like my friend, the suspicion was more tormenting than the truth itself. When I got that email I was about to let go, let the emotions come out, finally accepting that I wouldn't want to talk to her again. Like my friend, I would have asked her if she hadn't told me first, to feel the pain just before the catharsis.
I took a taxi home, alone, and I passed by 51st street, on Third Avenue as we raced toward the 59th Street Bridge. I remember the shops there. Why? I never lived there, and it wasn't some place interesting. But I saw that corner twice and I remember, because it was where the hotel was, where I booked a room for a weekend of tango, when she came with me for one night before going to brunch on the other side of the island. I remember things so clearly it's starting to feel like a disadvantage.
I came from that direction because I wanted to walk this girl home, the girl in red and black (not tonight, of course). She was going away for a month, most of the time with her boyfriend. But live for the moment. I wanted to enjoy the last bit of time with her in the present. We shared more. If she didn't have to pack and I didn't have to go to work in five hours, we would have kept talking all night. We danced half the time I was at the practica (the other half I was practicing, you know, to be the best dancer, etc, etc). And we walked all the way to her building. I was happy. Despite that corner on 51st and Third, despite remembering that I was not chosen while someone else was, despite still going home alone (well, to a guy), I was happy that someone thought I was cool enough to walk home with at 1AM at night. Now I need to sleep.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Sweatshop
I'll keep this short, unlike the novel I wrote yesterday. I am tired. The heat kept me awake, but also my guest, who was talking on the computer 3 in the morning. I need to talk to him about that. It's very hot in my apartment. The irony is that there's an 80-lb air conditioner still sitting in its box by the door. I simply have no time to open it.
I didn't have time last night to take care of the AC. I hardly had time to cook for the week and eat some dinner. I went to kungfu after work. It was an oven in there. Some men were sweating so much that their kungfu suit (or whatever you call it) was soaked entirely and sticking to their skin. Gross.
The elevator wasn't working, so I had to walk up the stairs, for the first time. When I passed the second floor I saw through the door that it was a sewing factory. A Chinese woman was putting things in order, standing among mountains of cloth. I didn't think any clothing factories still existed in New York. Even sweatshops couldn't compete with the sweatshops of Mexico and Indonesia, or, for that matter, China.
Then I spent the next two seconds remembering my childhood in the sweatshop. I wasn't really working, though my confused memory suggests that I at least helped. It was illegal to have minors in a factory, but then again, the factory was illegal in more ways than you can count. I remember the spindles, the sewing machines, and of course, the mountains of cloth waiting to be transformed into clothes. I remember the smell, which was the same here, on the second floor. I remember the sounds of the spinning machines, the presses, and people all talking as loosely and angrily as my Mother, the person who dragged us there because she couldn't watch us at home without working. I remember my little baby sister was there too, toward the end of my high school when I no longer wanted to have anything to do with the so-called family. The factory wasn't a fun place. It wasn't a horrible place, but it wasn't fun. Nothing to do, pretty boring.I remember my mother complaining often about how she was cheated of her wages. She wasn't an illegal resident, but there was no way for her to pursue an employer who skipped town with the workers' wages. I remember one time she even tried to write a defamation note to whatever authority exposing the illegal nature of such and such factory.
I realize I have forgotten about the sewing factory as a part of my growing up in this city, as much as I have forgotten that there were roaches here, there was suffering in many corners of this city of thousands of bars and restaurants and trendy clothes and fancy cars, and tango.
Slowly, living in New York, I am remembering the things that I thought were gone, disappeared with the new face of a city I really didn't know, only pretended to know so I could tell people I was a New Yorker. There was an article on the Times about how the weekend ridership on subways was actually increasing to nearly that of the weekdays. It attributed this phenomenon partly to safety of a city that wasn't there before. True, I would not have ridden the subway past 11PM. The train back home went through the bad bad neighborhoods that are now more expensive to live in than New Haven, have more trendy shops and galleries and restaurants. Now I go home at 4 in the morning and the 7 train is packed, the same 7 train that brought me out of Jackson Heights where the Colombian drug cartels operated while I was busy visiting my best friend and waiting for her attention.
Every now and then I saw those old subway trains with the corrugated exterior. I think the E-train is the only I have seen like that, though most of them were now the modern kind that has robot announcing the next stop. When I see those trains, I wonder where the graffitis are. There were so many graffitis on the trains I took to school, including the inside. I wonder where the heroine addict was that I saw one morning in my sleepy mode to school. Dead? A writer? Politician, of course. Or perhaps found God.
I have been here for about two months. I haven't thought much about my past here, as you can tell from the kinds of blog entries I write, most of which are about some girl or another. I guess that's good, in a way. Why let painful memories drag you down. But perhaps part of growing new roots back in the old pot is about searching the places of the roots left behind.
Besides, I thought plenty about how girls were torturing me already when I was going to high school in New York. That's never news….
I didn't have time last night to take care of the AC. I hardly had time to cook for the week and eat some dinner. I went to kungfu after work. It was an oven in there. Some men were sweating so much that their kungfu suit (or whatever you call it) was soaked entirely and sticking to their skin. Gross.
The elevator wasn't working, so I had to walk up the stairs, for the first time. When I passed the second floor I saw through the door that it was a sewing factory. A Chinese woman was putting things in order, standing among mountains of cloth. I didn't think any clothing factories still existed in New York. Even sweatshops couldn't compete with the sweatshops of Mexico and Indonesia, or, for that matter, China.
Then I spent the next two seconds remembering my childhood in the sweatshop. I wasn't really working, though my confused memory suggests that I at least helped. It was illegal to have minors in a factory, but then again, the factory was illegal in more ways than you can count. I remember the spindles, the sewing machines, and of course, the mountains of cloth waiting to be transformed into clothes. I remember the smell, which was the same here, on the second floor. I remember the sounds of the spinning machines, the presses, and people all talking as loosely and angrily as my Mother, the person who dragged us there because she couldn't watch us at home without working. I remember my little baby sister was there too, toward the end of my high school when I no longer wanted to have anything to do with the so-called family. The factory wasn't a fun place. It wasn't a horrible place, but it wasn't fun. Nothing to do, pretty boring.I remember my mother complaining often about how she was cheated of her wages. She wasn't an illegal resident, but there was no way for her to pursue an employer who skipped town with the workers' wages. I remember one time she even tried to write a defamation note to whatever authority exposing the illegal nature of such and such factory.
I realize I have forgotten about the sewing factory as a part of my growing up in this city, as much as I have forgotten that there were roaches here, there was suffering in many corners of this city of thousands of bars and restaurants and trendy clothes and fancy cars, and tango.
Slowly, living in New York, I am remembering the things that I thought were gone, disappeared with the new face of a city I really didn't know, only pretended to know so I could tell people I was a New Yorker. There was an article on the Times about how the weekend ridership on subways was actually increasing to nearly that of the weekdays. It attributed this phenomenon partly to safety of a city that wasn't there before. True, I would not have ridden the subway past 11PM. The train back home went through the bad bad neighborhoods that are now more expensive to live in than New Haven, have more trendy shops and galleries and restaurants. Now I go home at 4 in the morning and the 7 train is packed, the same 7 train that brought me out of Jackson Heights where the Colombian drug cartels operated while I was busy visiting my best friend and waiting for her attention.
Every now and then I saw those old subway trains with the corrugated exterior. I think the E-train is the only I have seen like that, though most of them were now the modern kind that has robot announcing the next stop. When I see those trains, I wonder where the graffitis are. There were so many graffitis on the trains I took to school, including the inside. I wonder where the heroine addict was that I saw one morning in my sleepy mode to school. Dead? A writer? Politician, of course. Or perhaps found God.
I have been here for about two months. I haven't thought much about my past here, as you can tell from the kinds of blog entries I write, most of which are about some girl or another. I guess that's good, in a way. Why let painful memories drag you down. But perhaps part of growing new roots back in the old pot is about searching the places of the roots left behind.
Besides, I thought plenty about how girls were torturing me already when I was going to high school in New York. That's never news….
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