this is where i use my words

this is by way of explanation

I’m going a little crazy. That’s everything on my mind, in my heart, and in my life reduced to its simplest form. I’m going crazy. I almost don’t even want to admit that I may or may not be PMSing because that seems to discredit my worries and heighten the irrationality of how I’ve been feeling lately. Is this how people who suffer from depression feel? Slighted? Discredited? Do people take comfort in knowing that they feel completely hopeless about life because of something as fundamental and uncontrollable as a chemical imbalance? Or does that make them feel worse? I suppose this philosophical debate is too much to get into here and certainly not something I intended to explore right now. So never mind.

Anyway. Yes. Life is ridiculous right now. So much so that my usual tiny-comfort habit of looking out over the bridge as the D takes me back into Brooklyn isn’t working. The train isn’t crowded, I’m sitting, I’m staring out at Chinatown and the FDR Drive and the little sigh/shrug of relief that usually escapes me isn’t there.

Until I turn my head (which, frankly is a more natural angle) and look north back towards Manhattan. And for the first time in my life, that I can remember anyway - but you know, my memory is a little shitty these days - I notice the Empire State Building. And right next to it, the Chrysler Building.

I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t expect to see them, or see them so clearly, or that they looked so much closer than I think they should seem or what. But it was nice.

It was more than nice. It was like, ok, someone’s throwing me a bone. I wanted something to look at and that’s what I got.

Now excuse me while I scarf down some fast food for dinner before I go on a conference call and then immediately tutor this girl.

this is displacement

When I left the office tonight and literally dragged my feet to the train station, I had every intention of getting off at 14th Street and finding ways to amuse myself until I felt ready to go home. On the train I read my book only because I needed to distract myself. The lights on the 6 were too bright, the woman sitting next to me took up just a little too much space. Every pair of eyes that locked on mine made me feel like they saw right through my schtick, like they knew. What it is that they know I’m not too sure of but the interaction left me feeling embarrassed. I kept my eyes glued to the floor for the rest of the ride. And when the train pulled into 14th St, I hesitated. The hesitation lasted too long and I ended up not getting off. There were multiple chances for me after this to go somewhere and do something: see a movie by myself, get some dinner by myself, hole up in a bookstore and read. By myself. There was a pattern here, obviously. And it’s not that I would have been doing all these things by myself that stopped me from going for it. It’s really that this was not at all what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do was go home and relax and let the wear and tear of this week fade away. What I wanted was peace.

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this is about expectations

1. If you head for an event, say James Franco speaking for the New Yorker Festival, and it’s the first social engagement you’ve had and stuck to since you’ve gotten sick, and you keep (irrationally, and quite crazily) thinking about how unfair it is that he enrolled at Columbia after you’ve graduated and that you never see him wander the streets of New York and that you’re actually paying to see him now, you’re going to expect the event to be awesome.

But it isn’t. But in terms of realizing your goals of a) getting out of the house and b) seeing James Franco, you’ve done a great job!

2. Walking around the winding, tiny streets of the West Village during the prime bar-hopping hours on a Saturday night, what you expect is that it’ll be annoying. That you’ll have to weave in and out of slow moving groups of rowdy party-goers. But instead, you only have to step into oncoming traffic to sidestep a group that one time. And for the rest of your way to the train station, all you really hear is the pat of the rain on your flimsy umbrella. There are traffic noises coming from some unseen location and you’re walking towards it, back to civilization but other than that, it’s just you and the West Village at night. The stoops are illuminated only by their own porch lights and everything around you is glistening in the dark. You know it’s only from the rain, but still. It feels a little unreal.

3. When a man who needs to shave sidles up to you in a rain-splattered sweatshirt and purple camo pants and though he’s holding a Venti Starbucks cup, you can smell the alcohol on his breath when he asks you if the trains are running normally and it is getting close to late night, you expect the worst. Okay, not the worst, because the worst would be.. This isn’t the worst, but you don’t expect this conversation to be a good one. But he turns out to be kind of endearing in a very distracted way and he kind of can’t stop talking and he’s revealing a lot of personal details about his life for someone you’ve just met and are still not done sizing up. But he keeps alluding to the fact that he’s gay and that automatically disarms you and you give in to the late night chatter.

And it’s cute. You talk about the MTA and the trains you used to take growing up and how you had to relearn the system after the bridge repairs, “B for Bensonhurst! What the fuck are we doing with the D?!” You talk about the Jews and the Chinese on the Lower East Side and how we as people should really be best friends for life. You talk about opportunities, and the projects, and Harlem and gentrification, and Jersey and B&T. To be accurate, he talks; you chime in when you can with a comment or two. He’s really all over the place.

Before he gets off the train, he fishes out a business card from the mess in his pockets and tells you to visit him at the store he’s working at, come in and say hi sometime. You take it, genuinely echo back that it was nice to have met but you doubt you’ll ever see him again.

You’ve already given him more credit than any other man who has ever tried to chat you up in public, and gay or not, you’ve learned your lesson from men you randomly meet on the streets and who happen to hold jobs of the same variety.

This is good enough.

this is about crushes

I am sitting in my office, hiding again from my work and responsibilities because I have this amazing ability to shut down completely under too much stress, and I’m squishing my Dwight Shrute stress ball between my fingers, magically aging his yellow face with all the wrinkles that appear. So instead of working, I am trying to put my feelings and thoughts into words.

But it’s proving to be quite difficult as I’m trying to talk about my crush. Well, not my crush. Or crushes. (I crush easily.) Ha, let’s deconstruct that, shall we? Who’s doing the crushing?? So, really, just crushes in general. It’s something that’s been on my mind lately..

Specifically, how much it fucking sucks. For me. Maybe it’s not nearly as agonizing for you as it is for me. And if so, what’s your secret? Oh, you’re not insane? Oh yeah, that could explain the difference..

When I try to think about what words come to mind that best describe having a crush on somebody, the only words I can come up with are basically: eee!!, argh, ugh, ohhhh, aww, teehee, and the high-pitched kind of whining/whimpering noise that I know I make that’s accompanied by hands flying up to my flushed cheeks in reaction to some most likely innocent comment that I read too much into. If I had to assign words to all that? I don’t even know where to begin.

But I suppose “silly” is a good place to start. What is it about having a crush on someone that turns me back into a 12-year-old? I guess calling it a crush, for one thing. But what other way is there to describe it? It’s like a chicken-or-the-egg type of question: am I behaving like a lovesick teenager because I’m identifying this as a crush? or do I know it as a crush only because I’m behaving in this particular way? Will I ever not get all eee!! argh! ? I don’t know if I’m asking if I will ever evolve past this level of emotional maturity or if I’m wondering whether I’ll ever make it past this initial whirlwind phase of romance.

So I do all these silly things and react in silly ways and just generally feel like a giant silly tool. And the worst part of it is, when it’s not driving me crazy, it’s actually… fun.

It’s nice to have that small ball of anxiety mushroom in the pit of my stomach when we exchange a small glance, or when our knees touch, or are so close that they could be touching and I can feel your body heat across that space, when we’re sitting next to each other and I tell myself it’s because it’s crowded and it’s really warm so that’s probably why I feel so much friggin’ heat where our knees are touching.

I squeal and freak out when I see that I’ve gotten a new email or a reblog on tumblr. Every second that passes from the moment I see you typing in gchat up until when your message appears means trouble for my nails and cuticles.

The only thing that makes all this worth it and not 100% pathetic is the potential that one day all this could lead to something. If not the potential, then the fantasy that we’re living in this bubble where we can continue this back and forth and speculating and giggling forever undisturbed.

But when that potential dries up or the fantasy dies?
Well.
That really sucks.

this is about migraines

I start to feel it building up right after my conference call. We were going over our projections and trying to see what we would need to do to have the majority of the data collected before the Project Directors meeting in December. And what we would need to do is clone me because I can’t miraculously increase my consistent rate of 5 interviews per month to 5 per week. (Talk about a trigger, eh? Pretty sure stress is one of them.)

This is how it starts. A weight boring down on my brain. By the time I finish writing some impossible emails, pressure is pushing in on my temples. On ER, or Grey’s Anatomy, when they talk about needing to drill a hole in some poor guy’s brain to alleviate the pressure because there’s too much swelling, this is what I think of when I get to this point. I imagine drilling a hole in my head would probably feel really goooood. That should give you an idea of how not good the present situation is. I gulp down water. Take off my glasses. Put them back on. Gulp in mouthfuls of air. Close the door to my office and hide.

No use.

By the time I’m on the train, it’s here to stay. I don’t know for how long but it sure is making its presence known. I slump over in my seat on the end of a crowded, three-person orange bench. Part of my bag is on the knee of the person next to me. I have the heel of my palm nudged up against my right eyeball because without it, my eye would throb its way out of my head.

When I open my eyes again, I experience my first ever visual aura. It’s like I’ve become an animated character who has just gotten bonked on the head and now I’m seeing stars. There are birds singing.

It’s like fireworks going off in my retinas. Minus the blooming effect. So really a shower of sparkly confetti before my very eyes. Which sounds like it could be fun. And is actually quite a spectacular experience. If only it didn’t come with any pain.

I’m not sure if I actual hear fireworks or birds singing in that moment, which would make it a bonafide aura and truly a first-time experience, or if I just hear it in my head now in retelling this story.

When the confetti dissipates, I am staring at this:

and think that it might be pretty awesome to hallucinate that. Because that giant blue circle with the black one inside? That is one majorly dilated pupil.

And then I thought to myself, Hm Kandinsky must have had migraines. Or he could have been high. Whatever.

I have migraines. Which means that one day, I will become Vasily Kandinsky.

this is.. i don't know what this is

Sometimes everything in the world feels so heavy, I worry that my ribcage is going to crack and my chest will be crushed under the weight.

Sometimes I wish I could just make you understand what I’m saying and what I need to hear and most of all, I wish you could understand my life and what I’ve gone through with my family so that when I tell you how my mother made me cry the other day, you don’t chalk it up to a textbook case of mother-daughter guilt. Or when I say that I wish I wasn’t living with my family, you don’t tell me that at least I’m saving money by living at home and assume that I want my freedom for all the wrong reasons.

Sometimes I forget that I’m Chinese, that I’m a minority, that I’m different from you until my coworker asks me if I think in Chinese or in English or if I’m sitting somewhere with my girlfriends and some curious asshole walks up to us and asks where we’re from.

The answer is Brooklyn, by the way.

Sometimes everything about New York just feels perfect. And it catches me off guard with how beautiful it looks, how beautiful it feels. Sometimes when I, atypically, find myself out and about on a Sunday and walk around feeling the sunlight on my face and I’m with friends and we find ourselves in a park and we’re just sitting in silence, or we find ourselves walking through Brooklyn, lusting after houses we will never live in, or stop by the promenade and watch fireworks shoot up towards the sky and reminisce about the good old days before Mayor Giuliani outlawed private fireworks displays and how awesome the Fourth of July had been when my entire block would shut down so my burly, fearless Italian neighbors could shoot massive explosives from their driveways and then we just stop talking because this glee comes out of a special place in this conversation and takes over and I just stand there with my friend, clapping our hands like children do when they get excited, and the world doesn’t feel so heavy anymore.

Sometimes, most of the time, you play the cards that you’re dealt. Sometimes you have to remember that you can’t fix everything even if you were brought up feeling like you have to. Sometimes you have to be ok with that. You’ve come a long way since that time when everything in life was really out of your control. You’re not that helpless little girl anymore. You have to remember this. You make the most out of the short time you have here on this earth. You may walk the streets of New York by yourself but you have to remember that you’re not walking alone. It’s a small city; your friends are close by.

this is about blood & guts

So if we’re going to talk about the varying degrees of gore (not Gore as in Al) that we can/cannot handle, John’s scale seems to be a pretty good standard to go by.

Except..

For me, it gets a little complicated.

These are the things I can handle:

• Zombies provided that they’re not gnawing on flesh, dead or alive. More importantly, provided that I don’t hear them gnawing on flesh. That wet smacking gumming sound is so disgusting. I have a thing about the sound of people masticating. And I guess this includes zombies.
• Cliche or campy depiction of movie blood provided that it’s not gushing out of knife wounds.
• Realistic depiction of internal organs and/or the actual organs themselves provided that they’re relatively intact and if real, or depicted as real, I know that I am viewing these things not because their hosts met a gruesome, violent death. (i.e as long as there are not guts spilling out onto the floor, I think I’m good)

These are the things I can’t handle:

• Any sort of injury or death by sharp objects. No slicing, chopping, hacking, cutting, puncturing, impaling, stabbing.
  • Seriously, whenever someone holds a knife or a hook or has a really heated conversation while holding a freshly sharpened pencil, I get really really nervous.
  • It is equal parts a visual thing and an aural thing. As much as I cannot bear the sight of knife injuries, what I absolutely hate is the sound effect of flesh being sliced or pierced. It is really unbearable to me.
• Severed limbs. If it’s already detached and cold (no longer bleeding) and clean (no protruding bones or pieces of flesh hanging), I’m fine. Otherwise, I will be reacting pretty viscerally. Especially if I am watching a limb get severed - like an episode of Bones from two weeks ago with the CIA agents? Oh man that was gross.
• Things sticking out of people’s bodies. Like knives, pencils, poles, tree branches, their own bones, etc.
• Decaying flesh. Not in zombie form.
• Burn victims. Skinless body parts, namely limbs and skulls.
• Other unclassified flesh mutilations.

All right, I’m going to do myself a favor and stop here. But seriously, if I watch scary movies on mute, I’ll be 100% fine. This is how I managed to watch the original Japanese version of The Ring twice. Twice.

Nothin’s scary if ya can’t hear nothin’!

This is where I use my words.

The tumblr bandwagon is the coolest, shiniest, brightest wagon I have ever jumped on. I have no intention of ever using another blogging platform. But the thing is? The thing is.. tumblr’s not really personal, right? It’s mostly an immediate way of finding, posting, sharing the cool photos and videos and memes out there. Which is awesome. That’s one of the things I love most about it. I see a ridiculously cute photo of a puppy, or a robot doll that someone crocheted, I give no thought to posting it or reblogging it. Literally. It’s a reflex now.

But then there are times when I have a story I want to tell or things I have to get off my chest. These posts snake their way in between all these other brief, colorful blips. And I feel kind of weird about that. First of all, it makes me look a tad bipolar if I post yet another angry rant about how the MTA is ruining my life and follow that with a slew of baby reblogs. And secondly, it’s one thing for me to bombard your dashboard with photos and quotes and whatnot. It’s another to take up several inches of space of text.

Obviously, if you end up following this tumblr on top of adnauseam, I would still be all over your dash. So if you don’t want to see huge chunks of text from me anymore, I suggest that you don’t follow this one. I won’t get offended, I promise.

Seriously.

I can’t follow people on this one anyway since it’s just an offshoot of adnauseam.

I also promise not to be so angry and ranty. I am no longer that teenaged girl spilling her every guts and tears all over livejournal. This is tumblr, folks.