Conversational Growth

I had the pleasure of making conversation with a stranger a few nights ago. There is an art to making conversation, and when two people come together, sometimes this collaboration yields beautiful results. This time, it did. I left the conversation feeling exhausted as usual, invigorated, and incredibly vulnerable. 

I'm used to spiritual revitalization from mutually supporting my Buddhist community members. I rely on my parents and friends (more heavily than parentals) for emotional revitalization. But it was a strange sensation to feel anything other than drained from interacting with a potential partner. That probably says more about my tendency toward the role of emotional caretaker in romantic relationships than I'd prefer, but I digress.

Initially, I was surprised that I felt vulnerable afterwards, intellectually and emotionally. It's been a very long time since I've felt like that. In the moment, I decided to trust him, even if on a very small scale like telling deeply personal stories of my past. As I digested the reasons why I felt so exposed, I saw that time has taught me to be logical and force partners to access my heart at a slower pace than my heart wants to be accessed. Is that a symptom of being too trusting in my youth and subsequently burned by my partners? Or is it a part of my red-hot heart slowly cooling as I amass wisdom and spend more time in this world?

Because I recognized this trust-aversion at all and because of my residual feelings of emotional defenselessness, I see that I do still have the capacity to trust partners. That's wonderful! In the last six months--when I determined to take a furlough from dating--I wondered if that ["trusting"] muscle was shriveled up and slowly dying… If I can in fact exert that muscle, would it be an act of naivety or faith? I guess that depends on perspective…

Middle Way

Definition of eight winds:

Eight conditions that prevent people from advancing along the right path to enlightenment. According to The Treatise on the Stage of Buddhahood Sutra--Bandhuprabha's work that was translated into Chinese by Hsüan-tsang--the eight winds are prosperity, decline, disgrace, honor, praise, censure, suffering, and pleasure. People are often swayed either by their attachment to prosperity, honor, praise, and pleasure (collectively known as "four favorites" or "four favorable winds"), or by their aversion to decline, disgrace, censure, and suffering ("four dislikes" or "four adverse winds"). (The Soka Gakkai Dictionary of Buddhism 八風 definition)

For most of my young adult life, I have been using this as a guide to keeping calm almost. To me, being calm doesn't mean keeping myself from expressing excitement, joy, or agitation at all. It is more be able to keep my negative emotions under wraps and only expressing the uplifting, endorphin promoting emotions. But that isn't to say I'm necessarily a positive person, because many things I say, think, and feel are in fact pessimistic in nature. 

This concept has also been instrumental in reminding myself not to sweat the small things, something that can be difficult because I'm a perfectionist by nature, and slightly obsessive compulsive. If someone doesn't like my work, that's ok, I can fix it. If I don't get a call back for that interesting job opening, that's quite alright too, everything happens for a reason. If anything, this idea lets me be more relaxed about my life while still focused on my goals and not beat myself up every chance I get. This idea is so important to me, that I inked it on myself.

Osaka, Predeparture.

Friday. Friday, January 22, 2010. At 11:30am I depart from SFO and begin my adventure in Osaka. My adventure, like any other, has already begun with the anticipation. Freshman year I was super excited to go on study abroad in general. Sophomore year I was still excited but felt some apprehension because my beloved classmates would be separated for an academic year as every 3^rd year student must go on study abroad for a semester.

As a departing junior, the excitement is still there but the person who will leave SFO will not be the same person upon homecoming, this makes me nervous. I anticipate the adventure itself with excitement but anticipate my reintegration into American culture with nervousness. This is because the people I am leaving behind may not appreciate the altered version of myself, or perhaps we will lose contact completely.

On a lighter note, I’ve been craving greasy, fatty American foods for the past two weeks. Yesterday, the Japanese food cravings started kicking in with a yearning for Tonkatsu, today it’s Yakisoba, tomorrow, maybe Katsuage, who knows? To my stomach’s dissatisfaction, I will be staying in a dorm for the first week, probably without access to a cafeteria meal plan, so maybe those cravings will be satisfied, not by a wonderful host mother who can cook like no other, but by a 7-Eleven microwave dinner. Speaking of 7-Eleven, I’ll need money for the first month of existence… I’m broke, damn.

Water Towers

I remember laying awake the first night that I was crashing at my uncle’s penthouse in lower Manhattan. I couldn’t sleep, I was too excited. My cousin Wigberto (Wiggs for short) and I were in my other cousin Gaspar’s old room. (Bare with me, I have a lot of cousins, a fraction of whom will be mentioned in this piece) The walls were white washed with posters of Mos Def, Beastie Boys and, what I didn’t know at the time, a marijuana leaf. Wiggs was snoring, something I’ve never been able to sleep through—nasal noise pollution, the fan in the living room was still on, Gaspar must have been hot or forgot to turn it off, and despite the late hour, the streets outside were alive with more noise pollution. The cool air from the open window filled the flat with a sweet scent, somehow Tia Paula’s doing.

My bed was located next to the window from which I could clearly see the rooftops of the buildings across the street and out onto the dark street below. Gaspar’s bedroom window has a view of Robert De Niro’s apartment, which has a beautiful lush garden on his rooftop patio where vines spill over the edge. I couldn’t help but imagine there was a jungle inside what I thought to be a green house that was trying to escape like too much water being poured into a box.

De Niro’s jungle was on the left hand side of the view the window painted. The middle and centerpiece was occupied by a dirty, grungy water tower that was supported by lanky steel pillars. It wasn’t very large, I remember the size it came through the window was no larger than my head, which may speak more of the distance to which we were separated than the actual size, but I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been close enough to a water tower to know how big they are.

New York has a lot of light pollution, even at 3am. None of the apartments that I could see had lights turned on but from behind the water tower, it looked like the sun was rising. Never have I seen anything like it since, not even real sun rises. The longer I stared at the spectacle in front of me—the jungle rooftop, the dark brick buildings, the grungy water tower being illuminated from behind like a delirious dream of a savior descending from heaven—the more I could feel the city sucking me into itself. Embracing me with its hot, sticky heat, its sweet aroma of Tia’s Glade Plug-in, its lingering taste of car exhaust, its clean floors and dirty room corners, its old modern, its millions of children, all begging me to relax and accept the environment I suddenly found myself in.

It’s worth mentioning that I have germ issues, Krystal says I’m a germaphobe, but, “you have very specific stipulations to your condition.” In New York, I have no germ issues. I don’t care if I touch the subway station walls, I don’t care if I eat a hot dog from a street vendor; just short of licking a telephone pole, I’m fine. I believe this to be because I spent my first night away from my parents in the city with that water tower, I felt so comfortable sitting, observing, and pondering it that nothing fazes me in the big apple.

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Excerpt from my writing portfolio. Enjoy

When I think of writing, I think about...

When I think of writing, I think about letters, and words, and sentences, and paragraphs, and papers, and stories, and books, and grammar. As soon as I enter the thought bubble of grammar, I jump into linguistics, and psycholinguistics, and the cultural implications of language.

Writing is a form of language, and language gets me excited.

Language is fascinating. Have you ever been reading a page and stopped, just stopped and thought about the words on the page in front of you? Why does this word blue make me conjure this image? Why does this cluster of words form what I call a sentence? I don’t know about you, but so many why and how questions pop into my head.

I love language, I somewhat enjoy writing because it is a form of language, but it’s only a piece of the overall pie, we can’t forget that.