solitude vs. loneliness

I don’t consider myself a particularly social person. I’m not a fan of large parties or gatherings, am generally bad about keeping in touch with folks, and the idea of meeting and chatting up with complete strangers continues to both mystify and terrify me. And more often than not, I find myself greatly looking forward to or even craving periods of solitude - be it having the house to myself while my sister travels somewhere on vacation (or just goes up to SF for the weekend) - or preferring to stay at a hotel while visiting other cities even though I may have friends who can accommodate me. The ability to be in full control of my own schedule, what I’m going to eat, and what I’m going to do without having to worry about the needs of anybody else is liberating.*

Part of the problem here, I think, is that I generally exert way too much attention and effort to make sure whoever I’m with - if I care about them at all - is happy. Which usually means trying to figure out what it is they want and doing that, even if it’s not necessarily what I want for myself. I also fully recognize this as not simply being nice or selfless by any means - my motive for pleasing others is generally entirely selfish, be it because I simply derive greater pleasure from making said person happy, or because some inexplicable sense of insecurity, or most likely, some combination of both. But I digress...

The fact of the matter is that I occasionally have the want or need for self-indulgence (be a bum at the computer all day! go eat at favorite restaurant #103! watch this horrible chick flick!), but only allow myself to do so when it doesn’t affect anybody else. And while I certainly have plenty of such opportunities and generally take advantage of and relish every single one, the loneliness invariably creeps in the midst of all this, and I find myself craving for another human presence and for company. This eventually leads to a downward spiral of depression, especially when I realize that there’s nothing I can do about it.**

Which leads me to the conclusion that the fundamental difference between solitude and loneliness is that you can do something about one but not the other. It’s fairly possible (and perhaps even easy) to find solitude amidst a crowded room, but it’s certainly not so possible to find human company, comfort, and presence in an empty one. The tricky thing about all this is that solitude - be it physical or merely mental/emotional - eventually leads one down the path of loneliness. Or at least it does to me.

I’ve definitely had plenty of experience with both, but then I also realize that there are a subset of people I know with whom I’ve never found myself looking for solitude. They are the people who make me feel loneliness rather than solitude in their absence, and perhaps it is their presence that I truly seek in moments of trying to find solitude among others. Naturally, these are generally the people I find myself caring most about and seek most to please.***

I really don’t have anywhere to go with all this. It’s just something that’s been bouncing back and forth in my mind for the past several weeks, perhaps because the moments of solitude and the consequent moments of loneliness have become more frequent of late. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I'm just stating something that's extremely obvious to everybody, and thus am once again writing about something that really isn't worth writing about anyway. Boy, I am good at that. Maybe I should rename this blog to if-i-were-stating-the-obvious.blogspot.com.


* Milan Kundera characterizes this feeling as “lightness” - a freedom from anything that binds us - which is contrasted with, unsurprisingly, “heaviness” - the weight of our relationships, our worries, and pretty much everything else that comes with being a social human being. He similarly writes that we all yearn for lightness, but once we have it, it becomes quite unbearable - thus, “the unbearable lightness of being.”
** And somewhere even further down that spiral, I start having suicidal thoughts of finding a random bar to see if I can get myself to meet random strangers. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), San Jose has no such places for such self-destructive activity.
*** It remains unclear to me whether I care about them because of this, or if it’s because of this that I care about them so much. I suspect it’s a bit of both, and that this cycle is the source of Calvin-hypersensitivity-of-exponential-proportions.

coincidences

Already breaking my own rules with the whole creativity/writing-as-exploration thing, since instead of actually writing something, I'm going to paste something from my Buzz awhile ago. It's a subject that now floats in and out of my mind every now and then, but nothing concrete has really formed around it just yet...


Excerpts from The Unbearable Lightness of Being on the subject of coincidences.

-------------

Twisting and turning beside the slumbering Tereza, he recalled something she had told him a long time before in the course of an insignificant conversation. They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him." [...] We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.

Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not "Es muss sein!" (It must be so), but rather, "Es könnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise).

--------

After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities. But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

--------

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. "Co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.

Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna [Karenina] meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed precisely in such a fashion.

They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

dreams, and stuff.

I am reading the Sapolsky article on dreams now and suddenly remembering one of the many dreams I had last night (sleep dep usually means a ton of dreams very early on): I was aware that I was dreaming and decided to explore how much I could see, smell, hear, taste, and feel inside the dream itself.

Some things I tried: cranking up the volume on music that was mysteriously playing in the background, noting the complexity of the music and the fact that I could distinguish it very clearly - down to every lyric of the song; noticing the vast array of colors and the distinct sharpness of all the objects and of my surroundings (and thinking to myself - "hey, this almost looks like I'm not dreaming, except I am because it's daytime here but it would be the middle of the night if I were awake").

I also distinctly recall a couple other things: thinking that I should write down the various dreams I was having at the time (something I do quite often - the thinking, that is, not the writing), and also at various points of different dreams, checking to see if I was still dreaming.

Then I tried to make a lot of cool stuff happen and to create things inside my dream (apparate a cute girl! (who likes me!)), though without much success. Apparently, being inside a dream and becoming aware of it doesn't automatically grant you special powers. ;( Then at that point, I decided, "Well, maybe I should try to discover something in this dream that I wouldn't be able to discover in real life. Time to go exploring!"

But clearly, we know where my priorities are. =D

roots, zoomed out

The reality is that the struggle of assimilating modern American life vs. keeping one's cultural roots is just one aspect of the more general clash of "the old vs. the new."

Whether it's learning a new technology and forgetting the thing it's replacing, or making new friends and spending less time old ones, or just simply growing up into your next phase of life and leaving behind the habits and lifestyle of the last phase.

To step even further back, I suppose all this can be summarized by one word: change.

In that light, I think I just wrote two pages of crap on how change changes you.

manifesto

This blog is a collection of posts and/or random writing I've done in the past that I consider either worth preserving or sharing with the world. As you can tell, I either don't write much, or don't write much that I deem to have value... and the true value of the latter is entirely questionable to begin with.

That said, in order to keep this blog from devolving into a stagnant pool of self-pity*, I've established the following ground rules:
1. The amount of emo must, at worst, be kept to a minimum. At best, there should be none at all. Therefore, posts about my love life (or its lack thereof) are generally prohibited.
2. In fact, posts about my life should generally be discouraged, unless it is used to tell a story, illustrate a point, or discover something new (see 4).
3. Posts must show creativity of some kind - short stories, descriptive recounts of dreams, and other involuntary spasms of inspiration. That said, creativity for the sake of being creative tends to not be very creative at all. Or at the least, it sucks. A lot. Which is really why I don't have that much to show even after ~14 years of writing on and off.
4. Posts that don't fall under 2 or 3 should be explorative. Wait, I suppose if it doesn't fall under 2, then it's not explorative by definition.
5. No emo posts allowed. See 1.
6. Ironically, this post fails to fulfill 2, 3, or 4. Oh well, at least it's not emo!

And to explain why this post is more recent than, say, all the other posts to this blog at the time of posting... well, that's because I'm writing this now while I'm totally stealing my own previous work to pre-populate this blog. It's sort of cheating, but at the same time, collecting them all together was half the reason for creating this in the first place.

Which might not bode too well for the frequency of any future posting.



* Like all the other blogs or journals I've kept so far, excluding the one I made about WoW.**

** Yes, I have a blog about WoW. But since I quit WoW a long time ago, it's pretty much defunct. And no, you probably don't want to see it.***

*** Yes, this footnote thing is an unashamedly stolen device from kidchamp, who is awesome, takes damn good pictures and keeps a damn fine blog.****

**** After you use it a couple times in a row, "damn" sounds like a really odd way to describe something positively.*****

***** I am now completely abusing this footnote thing and should really, really stop.

roots

Having the first quiet and eventless Sunday in a long time today, I grabbed the book* I’ve been reading and headed over to Fantasia in Milipitas Square this afternoon. After spending a good 30 minutes reading and sipping bubble tea in front of the shop, I dropped by quickly to the Ranch 99 (Chinese supermarket) next door to buy some assorted fruit before heading home. As I walked out of the store towards my car in the parking lot, I was struck by a feeling I’d often felt while leaving that place.

It’s difficult to describe, but my best approximation of it was a sense of leaving home, despite the fact that I was actually about to go home. As I drove out of the parking lot, my mind started chewing on something that I had unconsciously been aware of for a very long time in my life now - specifically, about my Chinese background, and particularly, my background rooted in Hong Kong and Cantonese people.

As many of my friends are already aware, I’m a second-generation Asian-American whose parents immigrated here during the 70s. Thanks to their hard work - the kind of “hard work” that surpasses anything most people of my generation are capable of understanding or perhaps even imagining - I lived what could be called a charmed life of relative luxury. Though from a young age I already knew just how fortunate I was and understood the value of living a life of thrift, my parents made sure that my sister and I were never left wanting of any basic necessities, and more.

The shelter my parents had thus provided meant that I never needed to worry about anything outside of what was happening in my own life. I could, and for the most part did, focus exclusively on living what could be described as an American childhood - doing well at school, participating in various clubs and activities, fitting in with my classmates, and assimilating as much of the American culture as I was capable of doing. And I did pretty well. As a friend once put it, I was sort of the classic “American dream” child that all Asian parents hoped their kids would become - being the first in the family to go to a college like MIT despite having parents who had no real education, and now having the wonderful and well-paying job that I’ve got.

But all this meant also that as I became more and more American, I also became less and less Chinese. I don’t recall exactly when I made the switch, but it was well before first or second grade that I had already begun to think in English. And even from a young age, I identified much less with peers who had recently arrived from China or those who weren’t born here, and more with the “American” or ABC crowd. My circle of high school friends reflected this: my closest friends were white and second-generation Filipino-Americans, and the few Chinese friends I had were mostly ABCs who had relatively American/white lifestyles and could only speak broken Cantonese or Mandarin to their grandparents (at least, in comparison to the crowd of kids who spoke mostly Cantonese to each other and went to Chinatown all the time). In fact, I was the only person within my high school’s circle of friends who actually spoke their native [non-English] language fluently.

Which brings me to the point that despite my very American tendencies, I grew up heavily influenced by Chinese culture, and the fact that I speak Cantonese extremely well attests to this. I remain particularly proud that when I was at MIT, a lot of my international student friends from Hong Kong would frequently ask me if I was planning to return to Hong Kong for the summer or after graduation and then give me surprised looks when I told them that I was born and raised in California. It was close to unfathomable to them that someone who spoke as well as I did had only visited Hong Kong once or twice in my life for very short periods of time.

I explained to them that I grew up in a household that spoke only Cantonese. It wasn’t until around 4th or 5th grade that my sister and I switched to conversing with each other primarily in English, and even then we would occasionally find ourselves using Cantonese without a second thought. Throughout the greater part of my childhood, my best friends were my cousins, who were all born in Hong Kong and came here at a relatively young age. We grew up together playing Chinese games, watching Chinese movies and TV series, albeit with an increasing dose of American cartoons, TV shows, and most importantly, books. I also had another pair of cousins who, despite moving here at ages 13 and 7, respectively, have to this day remained very close to their Chinese roots, and from them I learned a lot about the Hong Kong culture from which I had increasingly gotten disconnected.

And yet, despite these heavy influences, I live a mostly American life these days. In my culturally diverse company, I find myself more at ease in the presence of white and international coworkers, and unlike a good number of people there, I never converse in my native language with anyone else at the workplace. My musical tastes lean towards songs whose lyrical complexity typically confound Chinese people (my parents, bless them, have found a way to love some of my favorite artists despite not understanding a single word or phrase being sung). My literary background is exclusively American. In general, I can go on for weeks or even months without being in a Chinese environment outside of my family and not even think twice about it.

Perhaps it is precisely this that makes moments like today’s that much more special and important to me. My life lately has been lacking in Chinese culture more than usual - outside of the brief periods I spend with my family, most of my free time has been dedicated to my primarily white/European friends from the dojo - we typically dine Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Mediterranean... but rarely Chinese - or with my circle of MIT friends who are for the most part almost as assimilated as myself. I haven’t watched any Chinese TV or listened to any Chinese music at all for almost half a year, and I’ve been reading a whole lot of wonderful books and visiting worlds that are decidedly non-Chinese. In a way, because I’ve grown up without having to deal with much racism towards me or my culture, I’ve more or less come to take my Asian background for granted in my day-to-day life.

So this afternoon, walking out of Ranch 99 and breathing in the very Chinese atmosphere, it was as if I had been reminded by my Chinese side, “Hey, I’m still here, and I’m still very, very much important to your life. Do not forget that I am ultimately, unchangeably your roots, your foundation.”

I thought about all the times when, infused by the cultural blast of a Hong Kong TV-series I fell in love with, I would almost long to move to and live in Hong Kong for awhile. I realized right then that perhaps much of my enjoyment of these series was simply from connecting back to Hong Kong and its culture and people. I thought about how, during my first year at MIT, I found a home away from home among the club of Hong Kong students there. I thought about how, during my short time together with S and in the midst of our conversations about our supposed future together, I was deeply terrified at the prospect of losing my Chinese side. I thought about how I often felt simultaneously at home and alienated in a room full of Cantonese people, and on the same token, how my bouts of longing to live in Hong Kong were accompanied by the recognition that I would never enjoy actually doing so.

I thought about whether my sister has faced this same problem, and how she’s dealing with it, especially with having a Japanese boyfriend who looks and acts more white than Asian. She’s always maintained a circle of very Chinese friends with whom she speaks Cantonese a lot of the time, and she’s always been in more touch with Chinese music than I have - so perhaps that may be her way of hanging on.

I thought about whether my other American-born or American-assimilated Asian friends face a similar problem, and how they choose to deal with it, if they do so at all. I thought about my friends from the dojo and how our various cultural differences often reveal themselves in the subtlest of ways, though I have never been bothered by them or in some cases even noticed them except in retrospect.

There’s an oft-discussed (and dismissed) belief that we have limited space in our minds, that for every single thing we learn, we do so at the cost of forgetting something else. And while this may be disproven scientifically, I get the occasional reminder that as I continue to improve myself and learn more things relevant to modern-American life, I am giving up a part of who I am in order to become the person I want to be. I may not exactly be forgetting who I am, where I’m from, or even how I could live as a Chinese person, but my increasing sense of alienation in a Chinese environment, albeit balanced by an equal amount of comfort that I find there, seems to signal a continuing loss of something that is at the same time substantial but intangible.


* Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. kidchamp is right. That book is truly marvelous.

relationships, ukemi

Throughout my life I've had relationships with people who I want to become closer friends with, who do not necessarily feel the need to do the same. I've long since come to understand that it's simply a matter of my not having much to offer that's of value to them, but it remains challenging at times to keep such a perspective in mind.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about how being a good friend to these people is sort of like being a good uke; in fact, perhaps this is the way one should approach all relationships (IMHGO - in my humble gokyu opinion).

A good uke is present, attentive and stays connected no matter where nage goes.
A good uke respects the boundary set by nage; he does not try to push past that. It is nage's choice to respond to uke's presence - so until nage chooses to do so, the most uke can do is to remain present and connected.
A good uke is relaxed, energetic, and flexible.
A good uke offers his center and his balance to nage so that nage may be able to learn the technique. As a result, uke necessarily puts himself in a vulnerable position for the benefit of nage.
A good uke is prepared to have his balance taken by nage; he is prepared to fall. A good uke knows that while he sometimes has to take the fall, it's of utmost important to do so in a way that preserves himself, and more importantly, to get back up after the fall.
A good uke is honest. He does not fall unless he has to. He does not resist unreasonably or break his connection with nage just to avoid falling.
Most importantly, a good uke learns something about himself and about nage from each and every fall he takes, so that every future exchange is an improvement from the one before for both sides.