What have I done?

I Want To Talk About Music...

...because it is the only thing that makes sense.

A Decade Under the Influence By Taking Back Sunday

Play your angry music for me in a rhythm I can bob my head to as if cocking my head back was like cocking back a gun, and shoot your notes of pain into my heart. Let me get high off of those high notes you scream into my ear till I can't hear anymore. "I've got a bad feeling about this." Rinse and Repeat. When will my repetitive anger finally go unchallenged? Let me end my song with a question and let me have my own catharsis before you ruin it with your answers. Just cry with me and scream so loud with me that you lose your breath.

Innocent Again By Switchfoot

Your lyrics are too good to be true, you Christian rock band, but your melodies and rhythm are so good I cannot deny it. I cannot do anything but sing along to it, remembering the grace of my own life. Your truth is too hard to hear, too freeing to hear. I'm not used to running around naked on the courtyard, devoid of the world holding me down. I have been accustomed to the walls that hold me in, been accustomed to feeling guilt. Can I be innocent again? Why doesn't anyone else hear these lyrics? Why does everyone else get so lost in the music, they forget about the music? Let me run wild again as the innocent child I am made to be! or else I just might get lost in the music, get lost in a world where I have forgotten innocence, when I'd rather forget myself.

The Freshmen By Vervepipe

Calm me down with your memories of freshmen year, so that I can pretend I know what you're talking about, but the title alone allows me to remember nothing but my freshman year of something, some period of life when I was young, when I was lost, when I was immature, when I was innocent, when I had hope. I still don't know what you're saying, but you screaming "we were merely freshmen" rings clearly in my mind. Feelings of "Allow me to go back" and "I can't believe I was so dumb to be there" clash like some interracial marriage. I still don't know what you're talking about. I still don't know what I'm talking about. But let us just scream the chorus over and over again, so that memories can prolong in my head, so that notes can flesh out the subconscious pain in my heart, so that you can end on a note that makes sense, and so that my life and this blog can continue to make smaller sense.

Stars By David Crowder Band

My life does not make any sense. My feelings do not make any sense. If you were to ask me how I was really doing, I would tell you, "I'm feeling angry, delighted, disappointed, elated, excited, tired, pumped, upset, lost, found." instead of "Fine." I am a complicated individual and my mind gets so wrapped in trying to decipher itself that I begin to lose it. And then songs like this come on, and I realize I don't have to do this. Allow me to lay back on the grass that is really my bed (I write grass for poetic purposes), and look at the stars outside my window, so that I can think of nothing, but stars. I can be struck by such beauty that I am lost in it. And once again, I have become lost in you, while at the same time, I'm found in you. And now, music is not the only thing that makes sense.

Luggage

Familiar faces, which look as if they were smothered by the tooth fairy, attempt to force out limp smiles and stale hugs at 9 am to other familiar faces aka strangers for the past three months. Boxes, luggage, and backpacks plummage through the rooms, and the only loot hoped for is the bed that awaits us: the bed that is not our own, but will inevitably cling to us and us to it for the next several months. Each year, a new bed awaits my caress, as she and me become we, creating humanity through saliva and snores. It is one of the few I take comfort in; she is surprisingly and inevitably the only thing that I trust. I trust her to accept me and take me in. I trust her to wrap her comforts around me, sinking me into the heart of her dreams as I dream of her. I trust that she will not look to my past and expect the same. I trust that she will not look to the future and forget my history. I trust that she will not even look at the present, for even the present moves, but time stands still when we are together, that makes the endless minutes between midnight and 8am seem like a blink.

Our gift of memory has quickly become our vice, clouding our minds to change, as it acts to be the 10-minute bathroom break during the scene when Edward Norton realizes Brad Pitt is himself in Fight Club, when Bruce Willis figures out he is dead in The Sixth Sense, and when Tom Hanks gets stranded in a deserted island in Castaway. You come back, screaming out WHAT HAPPENED? But everything has changed, and you can't ever get it back. The only difference is that summer vacations are the infinite alternate routes instead of just one that are taken before it becomes a collision course once again. Everyone is left out of the loop, changed themselves, and no one can ever figure out what happened in each other's lives, no matter how many heart-to-heart conversations are held. Someone press the rewind button, or at least buy me Tivo.

So here we are back from several climaxes of several stories, and Howie Day was right. We did somehow find that you and I collide. Please tell me he has a sequel to that song because he failed to answer what we should do from here. Let me take my luggage, put on a Dylan record, and ride into the sunset with nothing more than who I have become...

...and my bed.

A Song For My Father

Somewhere lost in the translation between two men of the same, yellow hue is a relationship; it is quickly becoming gloriously undefinable while crossing the thin line to nonexistent. Somewhere lost in the endless hours of him at work so that I can speak this language is a lost of language between us. Somewhere lost in our male egos are two extroverts who become mute with each other. Yet, there is love. Yet, there is an atmosphere of sacrifice for one another not out of duty, but because we are one another. Call it the product of the immigrant 1st and 2nd generation experience. Call it a normal father-son relationship. Call it the result of Confucian ideals of filial piety. Call it two males without a clue in what they are doing. Call it his fault. Call it mine. Call it all of them, but this is the confusing relationship that I cannot explain, but nonethless, exists in our household. This is my father. This is me.

The song I write for my father is not a verse taken from a Simple Plan song. My father loves me. My father loves me in the, "I will spoil you with things you don't need because I love you" way by buying soy bean milk in bulk when on sale just because I said it was okay one time. My father loves me in the "I will smack you on the ass and curse at you even though that's not very Christian because I love you" way by providing lectures in three different dialects of Chinese just to make sure I got the point. My father loves me in the "I'm going to help start a conversation even though there is nothing we have to say to one another" way by saying how he loves derek jeter and his team, the new york rangers. My father loves me in the "I'm just going to stay silent because you seem to like the silence when you're around me" way by being the one person in my entire life where we can be completely comfortable not saying each other in a car ride for over two hours. My father prays for overtime everyday, so that I don't have to cover the loans that I have to cover, while paradoxically praying for more days off, so he can spend more time with me. My father loves me. And it is in these attempts that I realize that I love him.

It just hasn't worked. Swing and a miss, shoot and brick, putt and wide, interception, these attempts wants me to give him more attempts, but it just hasn't gone in. It just hasn't worked. His English is limited and my Chinese is limited. He likes the news and the weather channel, when I like sports and ESPN. His world revolves around food and money. My world revolves around everything but, but relying on his food and his money. I am dependent upon his love through action. He is dependent upon my love through response. I have failed. And I want to love my father better. I want him to be my Cliff Huckstable, Carl Winslow, and Danny Tanner, but he is not, yet more. He is undefinable. He is a mystery. He is me.

Maybe that is the real issue. We look at each other like mirrors without the glare, amazed at God's creations that we can be the same and different at the same time. Maybe that's why we don't want to speak, because we are in shock. Maybe that's why we don't have to speak, because we feel each other's heartbeats. Maybe that's why we just can't speak, because we can only sing this song for each other, only sing it in our own unique ways. The question we both wind up asking is, "Will he understand my language of love, or will it be another crucial element lost in the translation?"

Another wasted day, another wasted night

There is nothing much more satisfying than waking up at 2 in the afternoon. It's kind of like my way of kicking the world's ass for a day. I remember four years of high school when I had to wake up at 5:45 every morning just so I can make it to my 8:00 class. The days seemed endless and every person became 5% more of a jerk. Now that I am in college, I wake up fully rested and the sun is already beaming on my face. I leave a few Nelson from the Simpsons-like "Haha!", point and laugh at the sun, and lay in my bed reading the paper before I go on with my life. People have asked me, "Don't you feel like you've completely wasted a day and doesn't it irk you that people have been working for nearly 6 hours by then?" In response, I say, "Hmmmm...NO!" I'm pretty sure that they won't be asking themselves that question at 7:30 in the morning, packed like a can of sardines in the 7 train, on your way to a job that requires at least 4 cups of coffee before you can truly wake up and realize, waking up at 2pm doesn't sound that bad.

I remember going to the drive-in theater with Adam, his two younger sisters in high school, and one of their friends. As we were in the car, having conversations about college and once in a while jamming to Rod Stewart, I often took myself away from that to hear what the three teenage girls were talking about. I don't quite remember, but that was only because it wasn't that interesting. From boys to petty and dumb jokes like "you're stupid, your face is stupid," the gap between high schoolers and college students is rapidly widening. There is an incredible shift from superficial talk through and through in high school to superficially talking about reality in college. With this in mind, I look into the interactions between the group of men I have grown up with through grade school, middle school, and high school, but we are now college men, only opening the lines of communication during slow summers and cold winters.

The group I am referring to is labelled 162. The name was originally from the elementary school the majority of us grew up in, and the parks that our hearts embraced through the years of conformity and braces and the metrocard. Without truly having a set lis of people who are considered to be a part of the clique, we have grown and shrunk through handball, basketball, crushes with the only two girls of the group, awkward birthday parties, repetitive stories, bowling, shooting pool, movie hopping, beer pong, video games, magic cards, and the newest obsession, poker. Activities plague our existence of a group and even the thought of having nothing planned out for the next several hours is unnatural to a group that is not accumstomed to just "hanging out" for no more than 15 minutes of "hanging out" someone will inevitably ask, "So what do we do now?" The strong glue that holds these relationships together are not the long, deep, intellectual conversations that lock college relationships together, but simply shared experiences, creating harmonies and choruses of laughter and ewwww and oh my god are you serious! and dude, that freaking sucks, so that we can leave each other for 6-12 months, come back and reminisce on the same stories, creating the same harmonies and choruses. We return to this comfort, half hoping we could just hang out for hours and hours on end, but half hoping we would be nothing more than we are: a bunch of elementary school kids in bodies of adults. The faces of each other remind of us a better time of hopscotch and seasaws and Mr. Softee trucks and kickball and Hannah Kim and Dana Elder and Bye Bye Birdie and shit was the curseword and life was limitless. Frankly, we don't mind to talk about the innerworkings of our soul once in a while, but at the end of the day, there is something strong and undeniable about the attachment we have towards one another, one past words and college locations and past arguments, one that is based on the undeniable truth we call time.

So let's kick back, give me some cokes, play some holdem, and say nothing but ha...ha...

A New Blog, A New World

I am finally back from Boston, no...Massachusetts after an amazing long weekend with a new knack to write and a readiness to head back into the flow of things. Five days with Rutana, Deke, and Ferrin has put me back into Emory-zone, so packing seems to be the only thing left for me to do.

The trip began with my first experience on the Fung Wah Bus from New York to Boston for only 15 dollars. Imagine the busist corner in one of the busiest places in the world (Chinatown) full with scents of scallops, lychees, and fish mixed with old Chinese women (Amas) yelling obscenities or walking faster than 30-year old businessmen in Grand Central. Within this hodgepodge of Asian livelihood, there is a line that stretches about a block that consists of white people. For a few minutes, life was inverted as an enclave of whites became the perpetual foreigners, out of their comfort zone, and frightened by their alien status. The only difference is that it isn't perpetual. Within half an hour later, the foreign Americans returned to the calming embrace of suburban lawns and tricycles on the sidewalks.

Within the bus, there were a few Asians and one fo them was a 50-60-year old woman who sat next to me. Before I go on with my story, I have to preface it by saying that I wound up sleeping at 6am a few hours before, woke up at 7, and headed out of the house by 8. By the time the bus left, it was 10:30 am and I only had 1 hour of sleep under my belt. That is when I began what I thought would be the greatest nap since Van Winkle. The bus even reached its one and only rest stop, and I was so tired, I said "Screw this. I'll just wait an extra two hours till I get to Boston and 'rest' there." So I continued sleeping, but I had made a fatal mistake. DISCLAIMER: Women, please skip to the next paragraph if you do not want to hear this till you meet your husband. But men, we all know of the concept of morning wood. For those who don't, it is a morning erection that is naturally caused as the brains enters the REM-deep sleep phase. At this stage, the body's skeletal muscle structure relaxes and causes hypervasodilation in the capillaries of the body, resulting in said erection. This can also be caused by a full bladder. By the time I wake up form my slumber, morning wood has made its attack on me at a most inopportune time. For the next half an hour on the bus, the old Asian women next to me tried to keep her eyes from my erection, but she wound up staring for several minuets at a time. Meanwhile, I go through every trick in the male handbook to coverup, adjust, shift, pretend to have a stomachache, cross the legs, etc. all to no avail. My desperation led me to only one option: the bathroom in the bus. And so the journey began. I had to make my way through the valley of the shadow of death known as the narrow and long aisle to the back of the bus. Two thoughts began to run through each person's head as I headed back there. The first included: "Why is this guy coming back there? Does he know its not a real bathroom? It is pretty disgusting and scary and with all the bumps on the highway, it would be pretty impossible. No one goes back there son!!!" These exlamations of warning and confusion were mixed with the second thought: "Holy Crap, That's an erection!!!" I'm hoping my coverup allowed for only the former. Long story short, I ignored teh 70 individuals on that bus, knowing full well I will never see them ever in my life.

The first three to four days in Boston were spent with Adam in rural Massachusetts or as I like to call it, Podunk, Massachusetts. After seeing his environments of cows, corn fields, and small, privately owned businesses, I understand many things. I understand why he doens't pee standing up. I understand why he grows hair in patches. I understand why he's Republican. The days were spent playing catch in random parking lots, incredibly long naps, incredibly long drives, getting lost all over new england, people watching, talking about people who'd call us, listening to boston sports radio, watching def poetry jam, IMing each other, when we were 2 feet away from each other, the boston duck tours, not going to other things out of laziness, seafood restaurants, fast food runs, performing great poetry at poor poetry venues, my first drive-in experience, IMAX watching, and more eating. Our friendship is similar to two complete idiots or morons, but in a cuter way, it would be two 2-year olds who don't have a care in the world and the only objective in our lives is to make the two of us laugh as much as possible. I was supposed to head back down to New York Tuesday afternoon, but my spontaneity often takes often and I hitched a ride to Wellesley to see John Dicamillo.

Before I go on, I must make a few observations on the state of Massachusetts. First, there are two uniforms. 1) Red Sox baseball cap. Women may have the option of wearing a cute pink one. 2) New England Patriots Tom Brady #12 Jersey. I seriously did not go through three minutes without seeing one of these two types of uniforms. Secondly, they have a ridiculous obsession with Dunkin Donuts. It just might beat out Starbucks up here. I am both fightened and jealous. Third, the Big Dig really does suck and it is possibly the worse highway system ever. The fact that the drivers are equally aggressive as New Yorkers but not as good does not help either. Finally, those Boston accents are awesome.

This next section is titled: "Men, and How Yih Does Not Fit." The first thing that John and I do when I arrive in Wellesley is go to REI, the world's premier outdoor store. John begins rattling off to me, himself, and the employees are REI about camping, tents, storage stuff, and other outdoorish stuff. Meanwhile, I'm thinking to myself "Bears? What about bears? I like bears! Winnie the Poooh. Yay!!!" Of course I don't show this and I must do what every other guy would do, act like you actually know what you're talking about. My responses include "Yeah! Exactly! That was exactly what I was thinking!" or "Nah. :::chuckle::: Who would think that? Yeah..that wouldn't be very wise." or my favorite, "Wow, man I don't know. That's a tough choice. It's your call." All of these mean, I have no idea what I'm talking about, now give me a free snowcone! Maybe I'm releasing too much information. The next part of my lost manhood exposed is the introduction to the Golden Retreiver, Baker. If anyone knows me at all, they know about my feelings towards dogs, and the interesting yelps I make when those furry things come near me. In this area, however, I have found redemption. Baker became one of my best friends in this trip, from scratching his belly and his ears to feeding him, I have fell in love with Baker and with dogs. It is dogs like him that make me a dog lover, not a dog eater. I hoped no one laughed at that! After great dinners and awesome talks in John's beautiful house, the next morning was all about packing and picking up a man who makes most look like toddlers: Michael Ferrin. Just finishing up the Appalachian Trail in 5 months, he is now in the road trip back to Atlanta with John. I was in the area, so I decided to go a leg of that road trip with them to Connecticut. Just feeling Mikey's beard, seeing his skinny and toned legs, and smelling the camp odor made me go WOW a couple of times in front of him. Forrest Gump, I mean, Mikey helped me have two urges with seieng him like this: start working out right now or just eat and forget about it. I chose the latter.

Meeting a few new friends, going from rural to suburban to incredibly rich Connecticut, having a nice dinner, taking Metro North, and X number of conversations later, I am back in New York City. The vacation was not extroadinary. There were no amazing touristy situations. There were no shocking stories or too many interesting moments. Nonetheless, it was a trip that was invaluably, incredible, and significant to where I am now. I am back, ready to take on Emory once more. I am once more reminded of the amazing friendships God has blessed me with on that campus.

The love and excitement of us is rushing straight at me and past me, and the only thing for us to do...is catch up.