Lotus

Put yourself in my shoes tonight.
First, let go of childhood inhibitions. The ones you acquired from other kids, the kind who like to make fun of everyone. Then let go of the inhibitions you picked up from almost those same people in college or high school or whatever. And from the inhibitions of simply being human, of the obligation to think constantly and to wonder what you seem like from the outside.
Have some vodka and cranberry juice, and force yourself to stand in a crowd of complete strangers.
See if you don't dance in the free way of a person with no thoughts, no questions, no insecurities.
It's so rare that I can accomplish this, this complete lack of anxiety, that I have to jump on my own train and dance until I almost fall asleep standing up, moving around in whatever way strikes me.
This was my Saturday night.

That's the sound of my faith in the American sense of humor wavering

What exactly does Fox mean to accomplish by canceling a show like Arrested Development? Does this mean that the world has room for shows like Yes, Dear and Eight Rules for Dating My Daughter, or King of Queens - not to mention Dancing with the Stars and other such scraping-for-attention acts of "entertainment" desperation - but can't manage to keep Arrested Development running? They say it's because the show hasn't managed to establish a big enough fan base to sustain it. Are that many people really watching those other shows?
At moments like this I'm glad I don't own a television. It would be a series of chronic disappointments.

For Sale

The sadness of a convertible we only converted twice. The sale of this vehicle (which is actually Nate's, but which I drove for a while too) is based on the purchase of this one:



A '73 Dodge Dart. I guess Nate has always wanted this exact car, and I have to say it is pretty hot. Especially in green.

That's all.

I can't take my eyes offa yaouw!!

Some people have asked where my blog address came from, referring to the tocolderwaters portion of it. Well, I thought to myself, I'll tell you. Firstly, I wanted to use part of the theme song from the movie 'Closer' (the Damien Rice song) because the song was not only the new soundtrack in my head but had also assumed great symbolic meaning and emotional value. We actually used to play the DVD menu in Mt. Hermon just to listen to the looped snipet of the song. (How statistically likely is the phrase "looped snipet"? I'd like to know. That's one more reason to really like Amazon.com) Anyway, said song contains the line "the colder water" and I wanted that, but it had already been taken. Blasted blogger name-takers. And so I changed it a little bit so as to add extra symbolism for myself.
I made it 'to colder waters' because I knew that that was what I was doing again. Jumping around from place to place and from life to life a few times, especially in the past five years, has exposed a pattern to me that every new life feels cold and scary when I first look at it. Graduating college looked like that, leaving Virginia for India, leaving Woodstock for Kansas, with smaller jumps in between, each new thing seems like wandering into cold water. It's shocking in a way that's completely reorienting even if you thought you knew it was coming, and it makes me want to turn around and go back to wiggle my toes in the warm sand forever. So I guess when I made this blog I knew I was heading back to colder waters again.
Things tend to be less cheesy if you don't say them out loud. This is a good reason not to have a blog.

p.s. and the blog title is the only thing I know how to say in Korean, learned from my good buddy Jung Min.

A Million Little Theories

I think I know why the whole motorcycle thing has been bothering me so much. When I first left India, or I guess when I first got here, all I wanted to do was go on this huge binge of domesticity - I haven't had my own place that I could really take care of and set up the way I wanted to before. I shared a house in college and I didn't have a whole lot of say over my apartments in India, plus I was never anywhere long enough to bother with really doing things right. Anyway, I really enjoyed getting to do all of those little things right at first and was totally happy with the calm, domestic Americanism of my life here. The problem is that it wore off. Every day is the same in a place like this. I don't mean Lawrence, I mean it seems like we've civilized ourselves to death in this country. (Here's where I spout off half-baked theories.) I mean, the most adventurous thing I'm doing in life right now is trying to pay my rent. And although this is no small feat on $150 a week (yeah that's right. When am I going to get a real job?) it's not even remotely satisfying. Now, of course I'm not saying that no one lives well in America. I've known plenty of people who had found their own way to live honestly and with courage and have done it with grace, perhaps the most difficult part. My point is that we make it so easy to live complacently behind closed doors, controlling the details of our own lives without venturing beyond them.
People need adventures. People need to break new ground for themselves on a regular basis. To defeat a some fear and live down some sense of danger and live up to a personal challenge. I guess I just haven't really figured out how to do that here. And I really think this is more of a cultural problem than a personal one. What other culture has such an obsessive fascination with video games or extreme sports? Or is so fat and wealthy but at the same time so sated with methods of escapism and so full of self-pity? Not even to mention our levels of fear in general. I firmly believe that the less you confront and face down your fears the more they start to seep into your life until they eventually just take over and you spend your life avoiding pain or danger instead of actually living. I guess this is what I'm afraid of now. Finding a way to live here without falling into the monotonous habits of continual distractions that mean nothing. And that's really scary.

Nate and I were just reorganizing the furniture in his new apartment to make it look a little more like someone lives there. The finished product still looked sort of... manly, but it was much improved. So we sat in the recliners and ate corn chips. And I don't remember how it came up, but somehow we started talking about the bike. (Meaning the Enfield 350 that we co-owned in India.) I guess we've both thought of it here and there because we've been telling the story of the wreck to people here at home. (Of course! Kait: it feels like someone strapped a pancake to my shin and they're poking it with a fork) And I said something about how crazy it was that we used to drive it up and down those hills like we did, and then I remembered the hill by St. George's School, remembered driving up that hill, and that thought just made me stop. That was crazy! We, I, used to drive that 500lb piece of crap up and down crazy angles on poorly-paved mountains without even really thinking about it. And then I fell into a sort of reverie about how I felt about the bike. I guess I got used to it little by little and didn't realize just how much I loved it, and then one day we sold it and it was gone. It's going to sound ridiculous for me to try to spell it out, but I want to anyway.
It got to be something that I had an understanding with that I knew exactly what to expect from it and it knew what to expect from me. Sometimes it felt like an extension of my own body that I could just fly through the mountains on and look down into the valleys without being afraid of anything. It was such a freeing thing, an empowering feeling and I miss it so much. Of course there were also times that I hated it, when I would drop it and have to pick it back up, or it would burn me or spill over at a downward angle so that I couldn't get enough leverage to hoist it back up, while the gas leaked out of the top of the tank and I swore streaks of bright blue to nobody. Not even to MENTION trying to kick-start it, especially in front of people. Sometimes the curves on the way down to Dehradun would make me nervous, you have to LEAN so far on the curves that it feels like there's no way it won't fall down, but then when I actually did it it felt like magic. Like the sensation of flying in dreams. How each bit of progress I made with it made me feel more human and less human at the same time, like the first time I stopped on Mulingar Hill and was able to get started again or the first time I got through Dehradun by myself. Or just swerving through the bazaar, dodging people and animals and cars and holes like a video game.
I thought about buying a motorcycle here, an older Honda twin or something, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be at all the same. There's no skill involved in puttering around town, I think it would just butcher the idea for me. I should just let it go. I drove home from Nate's and parked my safe little airbag-saturated mom-car on the curb and pushed the lock button on the remote and sighed to think about it. I feel like a piece of real life is missing and I'll never be completely free again. And there's really no way to change it.

Three steps to picking a new church

1.) Avoid criticizing in your mind everything that the new church does and comparing it to what you would prefer. This is nearly impossible.
2.) Listen for cheesy catchphrases/ corny preacher jokes / anagrams or acronyms in the outline. These things will annoy you without end and eventually drive you away in sadness.
3.) Fill out the first-time-visitor card and see what they send you in the mail. Flier assuring you that you've found The Real God's People = don't go back, ever, and change your phone number. Personal card written by nice church lady = promising. Mug filled with candy/coupons/card = you've found your new home.

The End.

There are so many things I want to write about that I never really write about any of them. Ideas crowd around at bad times and go fleeing to places I can't reach as soon as my fingers touch keys and my eyes rest on a white screen.

So I'll start with a pile of pine needles sitting on the hard floor, under a grainy wooden chair, in a neat pile. This reminds me that I probably won't be living in this apartment next Christmas, and that makes me a little sad. Bartok helps this feeling along without mercy, making shabby details seem tragic instead. The tree is still up but is completely naked. It's leaning to one side a little bit, as if drawn back aghast, arms thrown in the air after realizing that its usefulness is complete and all its growing in the woods has led it to very little. It's a perfectly shaped little tree and it makes me want to only buy uprooted, re-plantable trees from now on instead of chopped down ones. Although I guess it would have been chopped down whether I bought it or not, but that's not really the point. The light in the room is hard to see with even though it's bright because it's one of those compact flourescent bulbs, the five-year, energy-saving kind. Its light is a little too yellow and it makes the room feel fake. There are half-burnt candles here and there mingling with several brand-new ones I got for Christmas. None of them are lit, so they seem to be sleeping or not there at all. The chair has two legs on a rug, two legs on the wood floor. Crossed wires and screwed-in pieces of boards combine their efforts to keep the legs in their square form instead of splaying outward as they are wont to do. The seat of the chair is shiny but pale toward the back, the effect of hundreds of butts making contact with its surface, eventually rubbing off the finish. The window behind it is covered with a ratty sheet of beigy linen that I got in India and which is standing in for a curtain. It could be a curtain if it was hemmed or even ironed but is not. Is not hemmed, ironed, is not a curtain.

Today I went to get a TB test, a requirement for CNA training. I didn't really remember what they did, but vaguely remembered four little dots resulting on my forearm when I got the test as a little kid. I had some idea of a weird four-pronged plastic thingy that didn't really hurt. Also, I normally avert my eyes when anything is done to me involving a needle, since the very concept makes me feel like my head is detaching from my body and floating away like that kid on the milk commercial a few years back. Having decided to pursue a career in nursing, however, I felt that it would be best to make myself look and see if it would bother me. If you ever find yourself in a similar position, my advice to you is to KEEP YOUR EYES CLOSED! Instead of my fantisized four-pronged harmless friend, she gave me a weird shot that resulted in a pocket of liquid forming under the surface of the skin on my arm and slowly, slowly growing larger as she pressed the end of the syringe. I couldn't tear my eyes away from this unexpected phenomenon despite the stinging and the feeling of physical hollowness that started to rise up from my toes to my shoulders and into my head. Deciding nonetheless to tough it out, I thanked evil needle lady and made my way to the front desk to pay for this bizarre experience. I shoved ten dollars at another woman who I couldn't really see because she seemed to be sitting behind a big cloud. I knelt down and pretended to tie my shoe to give myself a chance of recovery, stood up, and then did the same thing again. "Do you want to sit down?" Cloudy lady asked me, and I wanted to say "No! I have to do this as a career! I can't give in already! Where did you go?" But instead asked her where and barely made it to a chair in a nearby, luckily empty room and slapped my forehead to my knees before everything went completely black. The happy ending to this story is that a friendly, motherly nurse finally came in and told me that it doesn't mean anything, that it's always different to have something done to yourself than to do the same things to other people. She said she gets squeamish too. And maybe she was lying, but she kept me from jumping into defeat with both feet.
The moral of the story: lie to embarassed people to make them feel better, and avoid staring directly at gross things.

one more level of nonsense

I recently saw the movie "Adaptation" and found it to be a good candidate for the rank of "most bizarre movie I have ever seen."
But I'm not really going to talk about that... in the movie mention is made of a drug concocted from the extract from a rare flower. The effect of this drug is to "make it easier for people to be fascinated." People who took the drug found every slightest thing to be, indeed, fascinating and worth seeing and appreciating.
Lately I keep having moments when I feel like I have to be on something like that. The weirdest little things are fascinating to me at totally weird times. For example, if I let myself, I can be completely engrossed in the grain of the wood of the table I'm sitting at right now. The way light shines off of my coffee mug. When my dad was driving me to the airport in Virginia right before I came back here I thought about stopping at a thrift store and buying an old record to bring back with me, because I got Nate a record player for Christmas and wanted to have any old record on hand just to hear it play something when Nate opened it. But the concept of stopping to buy a record on my way to catch a flight proved to be too foreign, too unbelievable, somehow too novel and too typical at the same time. I was beguiled by the concept.
I know this doesn't make any sense, but it's true.

Anyway, I had a great time in Virginia. I didn't get to see ANYWHERE NEAR everyone I wanted to, but I guess how much can you really expect from seven tiny days during which a major holiday was accomplished. Things I DID do include:


Go with Jacci:



To see the most awesome game ever



Wherein the Norfolk Admirals lost to the Philedelphia Phantoms 3-1. It was still a great game though.
I also went to the very, very cold beach.



And it seems that those are the only things I took pictures of.
The end.