Posts that are Uncategorized-ish
Let me paint a picture here in words, because I haven’t done that in a while.
I’m in my apartment in Raleigh. It’s not the best apartment in the world (indeed, it has been described as a “student ghetto” – but the bathroom works now, really!) but it’s cheap and it’s a place to live and it’s got internet and I’m not usually here in any case. I’m in my bedroom with the door open and the AC off, with a half-eaten bag of shrimp chips in front of my keyboard and a pile of dishes to be washed beside me on the desk. A guitar book is open on the floor beside me; on the other side, also on the floor, my keys and wallet and a t-shirt lie in a pile. Housekeeping: not one of my priorities.
I’ve got a whiteboard (1/3rd of a giant sheet of melamine paneling from Home Depot – less than $11 for 3 big whiteboards!) leaning against the drawers with an October/November schedule and a partial to-do list on it. I’ve been cranking through that list all day. Then this afternoon I stopped, put on some 70’s music, and rummaged around the kitchen throwing things into and out of the fridge while I cranked out some gumbo (on the stove now, waiting for the rice to cook) and started defrosting tofu for a curry I’ll make probably this weekend when I finish eating the wok o’ gumbo. Until recently, I was sprawled out on the couch with a pot of spaghetti in one arm and a fork in the other hand, and I’m still going back to that pot and shoveling another forkful of spaghetti and tomato sauce into my mouth whenever I realize I’m hungry.
I also munch shrimp chips. Once in a while I leap up and walk to the kitchen and stir the gumbo so the bottom doesn’t scorch. In the meantime, I’m booking tons of travel for the fall – Cape Town, Rochester, Arlington, and more.
Ah, gumbo is done. I now have a giant wok o’ gumbo sitting on the stove. It’s not particularly elegant; frozen gumbo mix, canned tomatoes, rice, broth, seasonings all boiled in a formerly-nonstick wok that now requires oil and constant stirring not to burn things. The gumbo is spicy (of course it is; I cooked it, so I quadrupled the amount of cayenne pepper called for).
Wait, I’m not hungry any more. Put pasta pot in fridge, close chips, drink water (I am dehydrated). Tired, but not sleepy yet; even though I do have a sleep debt I’ve been catching up with, it’s barely 7:30pm and I know I won’t be able to sleep if I try to do so now. A giant to-do list stares me in the face, but I don’t have the ability to tell what’s important on it at the moment. What I need right now is motion. What I need to do right now is unpack the car.
Longer-term: I need to meet people here I can hang out and talk with – more than the few I already know from work. Or… dancing. Yes, dancing. Looks like there’s blues on Friday and swing on Saturday and Sunday here; good to know
Aha. I think I have enough of a backtrace on my brain now to know what to do next. Also, I found my cell phone charger! Braindumps… they’re sometimes good ideas.
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wow. Working in an office is… awesome. (In some ways, at least!) You run into people! They talk with you! You can print and scan things at decent machines, and there’s water and snacks and meeting rooms and really big whiteboards! The AC always works and there’s fun stuff going on and you can turn around and talk to people.
I ran into Mike Esser on the way to my car this afternoon and he told me about his trip to Utah to film the Open High School. Max turned around several times during the day and just commented on things and I heard them. There were bananas in the snack room! My desk has a keyboard tray! People walk by and wave!
Oh. And editors? They’re awesome. Bascha Harris took my opensource.com article on POSSE and did things to it, and the tiny tweaks make all the writing so much better (and grammatically correct). I’ve never had a real editor before. My writing will probably dramatically improve since I’m now writing an article for opensource.com at least every two weeks.
I sound more excited and less exhausted than I feel right now, to be honest – trying to write the stuff I’d like to think about in order to stay somewhat focused. Tomorrow I’m going to start by working from my apartment, without being on IRC and such, in order to stay focused and crank out some big things (POSSE-related) that need to get done before I catch up on all the little stuff (which is what I did most of today; I feel like I’ve gotten a sense of things again now).
I write in order to regain my equilibrium.
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Back from vacation. Just staggered (literally) back into my apartment in Raleigh a few minutes ago. My brain is approximately like this:
But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within… He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said. –Last lines of The Lord of the Rings, Chapter ‘The Grey Havens’.
It’s hard to imagine unless you’ve read the books (or seen the films), but that’s the best thought-picture I can paint at the moment. I’m feeling surprisingly well-rested and… good. Very good. The tiredness is a temporary local thing that comes from having driven down from Boston in 36 hours, and I’m actually paying heed to it right now and going to sleep extremely early. More coherence when I wake up.
I’ll start replying to emails tomorrow.
Monday, August 30th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I am extraordinarily bad at sleeping. You’d think that returning from China (12-hour time difference) after sleeping, on average, less than 3 hours a day the entire time I was there, and making that return trip while sleeping approximately 1 out of the 36 hours in transit, would mean that I was tired – and you’d be right. I am. Not nearly as much as I think I should be, though. And I can’t seem to sleep, either – nor do I seem to need it. The longest continuous stretch of unconsciousness I’ve had since Saturday was 4 hours; the average has been somewhere between 1-2. I keep waking up at midnight, 1am, 2am, 2:30am, and being wide awake, unable to do much other than read tech education journals (IEEE Transactions on Education, I wish you would write papers more like SIGCSE does).
It’s not like this is the first time that’s happened; I sometimes don’t even need the time shift to get my sleep patterns into this state. It’s terribly annoying every time it does, though, because I keep on waiting for the other shoe to drop: sure, I feel great now, but at some point, I’m going to hit a wall. I was actually looking forward to crashing, because while I was in China I did feel increasingly tired, but no – as soon as I started for the airport, adrenaline rush!!! and I just haven’t really calmed down since, except for tiny occasional moments that I’ve mostly shaken off right away.
I think the trouble is that adrenaline is also a defense mechanism, and that I’m equally terrible at relaxing. Ah well. It’s 1:30am… let’s try this again.
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Ran across this quote and went oh yes.
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations. –George Bernard Shaw
That’s all. I fly back from Shanghai to Raleigh in a few hours, and then my work travel for the summer will be done. Phew.
Friday, August 6th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I spent the past 2.5 hours walking around Shanghai speaking Mandarin. It’s incredibly obvious that I’m not a native speaker, but I managed to get lunch, a haircut, and bubble tea without embarassing myself too much.
Me: I would like a haircut! Very short. *points to a male customer who’s getting a short haircut* A haircut like his, very short.
Confused barber: Like hers? *points to a female customer next to the man I’d pointed at*
Me: *points to the man again* Like his, very short, like a man’s haircut.
Barber, still confused: Where are you from?
Me (after several attempts to understand the question): America!
Barber, with dawning look of understanding at my rather non-Chinese behavior: Ahhhhhhh. Maybe a little longer?
Me: Okay.
I’m learning how to get around rapidly, and my (incredibly primitive and rusty) language skills are coming back; too bad I’m only here for one more day. I don’t need to push the “English” button on the subway ticket screens like I did last Saturday; I can sometimes understand what might be on a menu item (“something something duck something noodle soup”), I can take a taxi – asking if it’s available, giving an address (that I’ve written down in Chinese beforehand – I’m not that good), paying, getting a receipt – without speaking English at all. In restaurants, I’ve progressed from point-at-picture-on-menu-and-smile to at least using the proper counting word (“Please get me one bowl… of that stuff! – and a glass of cold water”) and I can stroll into hotels and say “Hello! I already have a room reservation, my name is…” and carry on that conversation in Chinese (how many nights I’m staying, what room number I am, how to get to that room) for the most part.
I’ve been here for five days. I haven’t studied, haven’t cracked open my “Beginner’s Chinese” textbook, haven’t had a teacher… just me and a phrasebook and a dictionary and head-first shamelessness. I love immersion. Best way to learn something is doing it, right? Mmm.
At the airport in Beijing, waiting for my flight to Shanghai, I saw a few non-Chinese (white American, I think, judging from their accent) passengers and had a momentary jolt of wow, foreigners! while simultaneously realizing that I was one also, and that in my normal life I deal almost entirely with people who look like that and not like me. It’s been a while since I was surrounded by people who look like me. Eat like me. (Did I mention that lunch – a bowl of wonton soup – was about 80 cents?) Well… sort of. I didn’t grow up here; these folks aren’t like me, and this isn’t home – except they are, and it is, a little bit, in weird ways.
I am Chinese, even if I’m a lot of other things at the same time. We heap food on each others’ plates with chopsticks and eat pig’s ear without thinking that it’s weird and they cook rice properly and also fish – served whole with the head and skin on, never flipping the fish over while serving it (you lift the bones off to get to the second side of the fish, or the fish is served butterflied open in such a way that you don’t have to flip it in the first place). Slurp noodles. Have decent tea. The last two foods on my list are soup dumplings (hopefully at Din Tai Fun with my aunt and cousin tonight) and rice porridge/congee/zhou/lugaw (I’ll find it somewhere). And… I would like to learn how to live here more, someday. Speak the language more, understand the place more, be able to get around more. I dunno… do any other children of immigrant parents feel the same way? Like you’re missing out on something you should know, like you come from multiple places and no particular place at the same time?
It’s still comforting to get back to my hotel room and work through the night during the US day and talk in colloquial English with my friends and colleagues and have a familiar world I understand available through my computer. And I will be glad to return to America and be able to read street signs and get text messages and navigate stores without a second thought; my friend Becky (who’s off to grad school in Monterey to study French language education this fall) described returning to the US after a year in Russia and France as being marvelously easy – a sudden lifting of the cognitive friction that makes you blink and realize that you weren’t all that used to what you thought you had gotten used to after all. (I know, I’m just here for a week this time, but every time I go to Asia – whether it’s days or weeks or months – the same thing happens. I’m going to get off the plane in Chicago and go “whoa, white people!” for the next few hours.)
I want to come back, and I want to stay longer. And… I need to catch up on a backlog of China trip updates in the next 12 hours; I owe everyone a Beijing report, and then I’ll need to do a Shanghai update probably Saturday morning before I leave, so I don’t carry a China backlog to the States with me (I already have a crazy FOSS+edu backlog). And my parents want me to call everyone we’re related to in China while I’m here (sigh).
It’s weird; I’m here, I’m happy, running around, excited, not-home but surrounded by vague familiarity, wanting to stay here and go back at the same time, overwhelmed but proud of what I’ve been accomplishing, backlogged and on top of things at the same time, scattered in many pieces across multiple timezones (James (in Raleigh) asked me last night – his afternoon – what timezone my body was in, and I replied I didn’t know any more – “…the internet?”) and it’s just… I’ve been jetting from place to place for a long time and barely touching a toe down here and there, I haven’t landed for a long time, been grounded, rested my weight somewhere. Only for the briefest of crash-landings when forced to by exhaustion, and then only long enough to duct-tape myself back together in a sufficient manner to take off again. But… it feels… really good. To run this hard and do this much.
Vacation. I am taking it this month. I may even lock my laptop in the trunk of my car or something like that.
Thursday, August 5th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Left Chicago Tuesday evening, arrived in Boston close to midnight. Hauled my luggage 2 miles from the train station, slept in a bit the next morning, packed my car full of my stuff throughout the majority of Wednesday and napped for a few hours before hitting the road early Thursday morning just as the sun was coming up. Drove straight down through NYC and DC (pausing during rush hour for dinner at Waffle Houes), hitting Raleigh close to midnight and getting a quick tour of both the apartment and the Django-based POSSE webapp (under construction) from Ian before folding out the sofabed and napping for an hour and a half before heading off to the RDU airport carrying my backpack and a guitar.
Flew RDU to ORD, attempting to stay conscious during my layover; flew from Chicago to Shanghai and slept fitfully for a few hours on the plane (I usually have a terrible time sleeping on planes) because I was so exhausted. Didn’t sleep particularly well – it was a long, long flight, made longer by the fact that the least sappy movie on the entertainment rotation on United was called “Date Night” (actually an action-comedy with almost no sappiness at all and a bunch of guns and car chases and a helicopter, so I was not entirely displeased). Learned that specifying “Asian Vegetarian” for meals gets you way better food (curry!) and think I’ll keep experimenting with various dietary options on flights out of pure curiosity.
My Mandarin isn’t so much rusty as it is patchy. My main challenges with the language center around (1) lipreading, because there are clusters of syllables that appear identical and that plus the language’s tonality mean that any given visual clue could correspond to a large number of auditory signals – and unlike in English, I lack the exposure to word-frequency I need to wing my way through it Markov-style, and (2) the writing and phonetics of the language being incredibly decoupled – that is, reading a character and knowing its meaning doesn’t mean you know how to say it, and vice versa (unlike languages that, you know, use a phonetic alphabet[0]). So I could follow signs, but not pronounce them; knowing the English for the train station I was looking for did not help me find it on a map until I (laboriously) figured out the characters for it, translated them to pinyin (because my visual scanning for Chinese characters is weaker than my scanning for Roman letters), and then read the map, and so on.
And oh my god people here speak really fast. However! There is hope! I’ve started to be able to pick up on sentence structure again – not content, just structure, so sentences sound like fill-in-the-blank reminders that I have a limited vocabulary – “<place> <date> I <verb>-past-tense <direct object> or <verb> because <item> better-than <adjective> <other-item>” and so forth. I hope to someday have the luxury of being able to immerse myself in learning this, just throwing myself into a weird place and a new (well, not entirely new now) language until I actually become able to function at a higher level than the “I can get around town, buy food, have basic conversations, and painfully pick my way through news articles” abilities I had (and have now forgotten) last time I tried. I have therefore decided that I’m going to be Really Stupid while I’m here – unless work-functionality demands that I speak in English – and throw myself headfirst into reclaiming my Mandarin, which means making a fool out of myself in broken sentences and bad pronunciations but if that’s what it takes then I don’t care.[1]
Also, an 18-hour drive followed by 23 hours of transit to, between, and from airports (including a 15-hour flight) that lands you 12 timezones from where you started is supposed to make you tired – and it did! – for about 4 hours. Which is… how long I crashed for. And I’m awake again and not feeling tired in the slightest, though I know I’m probably exhausted but not feeling it because of the timeshift. (I usually don’t even try to rest when this happens – I just go “ooo, I can work!” and work – but I tried to be unconscious for another few hours this time, got in about another hour of sleep, and now I give up.) So I’m reading in an attempt to stay calm enough to go down for a third nap before I go off to catch my flight to Beijing.
Sumana’s post on Kannada made me smile – as many of her blog posts do (see: copious amounts of food) – because I feel similarly about Fookien (my family’s Chinese dialect). There are words I automatically translate into thought-images that are not their literal meaning – in some cases I didn’t learn their literal meaning until years later – because of the contexts I heard them in. For instance, “Gong-bin” means (roughly) “stupid/stupid-looking,” but I heard it only as a term of endearment (as in “Gong-bin chabowah,” which means “my dumb-looking daughter” – and I’m totally mangling the phonetic transcription here) so I thought it meant “beloved” or “cute” or something complimentary until… I think I was in high school when I found out otherwise. And phrases that mean things other than what they say (“have you eaten rice yet?” –> “how are you?”) And little softening-words, and doubling-for-emphasis. And the weirdness – and richness – of growing up surrounded by a language you don’t really speak, growing up actively not understanding a swath of the conversations around you, a linguistic wall that can’t be breached[2], knowing idioms but not basic vocabulary.
On a semi-related note, I’m trying to discern a pattern in my fearlessness, because so often I throw myself headlong into things that other folks are usually afraid of – I’ll do that for some parts of my life but not for others. Actually, it’s usually not actually fearlessness, it just looks that way… often I’m terrified but hurl myself in nevertheless. (Sometimes I do seem to have an absence of fear where there probably should be at least some caution – for instance, traveling alone and walking strange city streets at night – but that’s another discussion for another day.) New place? New job responsibilities? No problem – maybe an initial momentary hesitation, but then it’s all plunging through. New language? Gulp, but okay, I can deal; hurtle forward. Stop occasionally to recover/gasp for breath, and then off we go into the storm again.
The adverb “slowly” is largely in my vocabulary as an abstract concept that applies to other people; I tend to have two settings: (1) ZOMG and (2) the much more rarely-seen and shorter-in-duration “crashing in recovery from ZOMG.” That’s why I so often write down (in this blog for my future self) the small moments of actual peace I have – they’re so fleeting and rare that I want to catch them while I can because I don’t know when they’ll come again.
Probably not this week while I’m in China, and that suits me just fine. :D One last nap attempt now and then it’s off to the airport – working with Gerard (and possibly some other local Ambassadors) today to try and get a sense for what they need. Wheeeeeeee!
[0] English doesn’t really. We just like to pretend we do, but in reality, American English is a mutt of a language with way too many in-jokes.
[1] Hah. I have cut off my escape route to being shy about this. Which I really, really, really am. Unless a teacher or someone gives me explicit permission to mess up, I’m absolutely hesitant to speak a language I don’t know because I am afraid of making mistakes. So this is intended to be a public statement of accountability to make sure I don’t cave in to that fear. Yarr! LINGUISTIC MASOCHISM!!!
[2] Except it can be, but it would be very hard. Hypothetically, I could learn the peculiar Taglog-English-Fookien mashup my family uses, but only if people patiently sit down and teach me – it’s not like there’s a textbook for that sort of Creole, and I’ve been told all my life that it’s not useful/good to try and learn that because “nobody speaks it” (“but you do!” I point out) and that I ought to learn Mandarin instead. So I continue with my hobbled patchwork understanding of our odd little dialect, and try to shoot in as many “what does that word mean?” questions on the side as possible, and have slowly started to piece together bits of vocabulary and grammar over the years. Very little. But some.
Saturday, July 31st, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
As restless as I tend to be, it’s still harder than I’d like to admit to leave a place behind. Technically, I should be past New York by now; I was supposed to meet up with an old teacher and a friend in New Hampshire this morning, then start the drive to Raleigh. They had to cancel, so I decided to spend the early morning resting and packing instead, more leisurely – and found that once I sat down and looked around… there was a lot I didn’t want to just rip away and leave behind. Packing, usually a hurried 30-minute affair of shoving things haphazardly into bags, turned into a more methodical slow pick through all the things I’m leaving behind.
I’ll have one last shot to bring some of it back on my second trip to Raleigh, but I find myself mentally triaging again – do I want to keep my high school math notes? Yes and no. How much do I need? Not much. How much do I have? More than I need. How much do I want? I… have no idea. Part of me wants to settle down and have a place stable enough to get a real piano, even a beat-up old upright like Hector (which I got for free my freshman year of college), stock the fridge with more food than I can eat in a week and not have to wonder if it’ll spoil while I’m away. Part of me wants a carry-on luggage, a laptop backpack, and a travel guitar, and… that’s it. I am young and stupid, and so the second part is bigger, stronger, faster, and wins out every time.
I have generally made it a policy not to regret any decisions (nor to make decisions I’ll regret), so it’s not a problem. I’ll be hopping around for work and school and stuff anyway – all these things I’ve waited my entire life to do – and I do love seeing the world. I still get dizzy with the prospect of all that unexpected freedom (it’s still unexpected, even after a year or three or seven or ten depending on when you start counting), and I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon.
And my bass and guitar and Ian’s electric mandolin and my last two suitcases (one for clothes, one for everything else) aren’t yet in the car. What am I doing? I should put things in the bags, put bags in the car, and hit the road. I love night driving; it’s quiet, peaceful, and requires a working rear license plate light (yeah, going to fix that shortly).
Quiet night, open road, long stretches of highway and thinking. My mind will settle down again once I’m behind the wheel.
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
It’s 11:30pm and I’m trying to sit here thinking clearly about the work I should be doing. I feel like I’ve got a lot of good stuff wadded up inside my brain from the past few months of deep-diving (well, as deep as one can dive in largely one-week chunks) into a variety of education-related contexts, but it hasn’t found a satisfying way to spool out yet. Talking with Karsten in Santa Cruz got enough of it out to make for a good OSCON talk, and that felt great; I need to get more of it out. C’mon, thoughts. Form into words. You’re in there, wordlessly floating in my brain… now all you need to do is reify into something externally shareable and usable.
It probably doesn’t help that I’m simultaneously trying to get my brain to think in another language again. Mandarin re-acquisition isn’t going very well; I still don’t like staring dully at books that don’t type back at me. I memorize words quickly, then forget them just as quickly. Videos make my eyes glaze over. The #fedora-zh channel is largely empty and silent. I’ll pick a dictionary and a book to take with me to Shanghai – once I’m there, I’ll probably reabsorb the language like a maniac, but I won’t have long enough, nor enough time, to settle into being better at the language before I fly back to the US again.
Wish I could live there for a while. I don’t know how else I’d become fluent in the language, and… I would like that. I feel like such an ABC (okay, I am an ABC) and I’d like to be able to talk with the people I look like, and look like the people I talk to, at some point in my life. And it’s such an amazingly untapped part of the world for large swaths of the FOSS community, and… I would like to be able to help make that bridge. And I want to learn how to live in other places. Having more or less figured out how to live on my own, and then how to hop my long-term base every 3-12 months, and being reasonably happy with the progress I’ve made in learning how to travel constantly (still a long way to go, but I think I’ve identified most of the major bugs I have in that process by now), I want to go farther.
One of my problems is that I have to reach a certain point of exhaustion (it’s typically called “collapse”) before I can really rest. It’s a known flaw. It used to basically ensure that I’d be sick at the start of every single major school vacation because my immune system would cave in as soon as the adrenaline died down. I know, I know, I know. Sigh. Trying to work on this – the problem is that the sort of work and effort I’m used to involves more effort, not less (and putting in less effort involves more effort, which circumvents the point). I still can’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time – I just wake up. The way I know to sleep for longer than 6 hours or so involves not sleeping for multiple nights in a row and then then crashing hard. Or being sick. That works too.
What do I want to do tonight? The only deliverable I have to push out are my OSCON talk slides – as far as I can go with both sets of slides, and then publish them out so my co-presenters can complete their portion of the text information and we can release. Tomorrow I need to write an OSDC/edu article. And I’d like to clean my inbox before I start driving to Raleigh.
All right. I’m going to finish a little reading, upload all the notes I have for both sets of talk slides and blog about them and let my co-presenters know, and sleep for a few hours. I’m trying to go light on my to-do list and rest as much as I can force myself to rest; I’m bad at sitting still, but even if I can’t sleep, I can still lie down.
Monday, July 26th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I spent the weekend in Chicago, and will be working from my parents’ house today and tomorrow before flying back to Boston (to drive to Raleigh to fly to China)[0]. Originally I was just here to see my parents, as they (as usual) requested my presence, and tend to bribe me with my favorite comfort foods upon arrival (I had my first decent bowl of lugaw (rice porridge) in 2 months last night, and it was great), but when I landed in Chicago I promptly found out that my Ama (paternal grandmother), Ako (father’s eldest sister), and my Ako’s daughter Rizza (my cousin – she’s my age) had also arrived that day.
In the past year, my mother has taken up both yoga and stonecarving, and is noticeably calmer (I think) now that she is taking time to do things for herself, and I am glad. (And have been telling her to do this for the better part of… hrm. I dunno. 12 or 13 years, at least.) My dad is as akaw (“overly affectionate”) as he ever was. Ako and Rizza have taken over the bathroom: I am not sure what the multiple bags and tubes and jars and bottles are, but they take up a lot more room than… my toothbrush and my travel tube of toothpaste. (See, I figure when I stay somewhere, there will be soap and shampoo present, and if not, I can walk to a drugstore and get a tiny travel-size bottle, and what more than soap and shampoo do you need anyway?)
This afternoon, my cousin Mark (also my age) and I took Rizza, Ako, and Ama downtown because my parents were busy using Mark and Randy’s Christmas present to them (a cooking class). We rented a quad bike, which looks like a golf cart with pedals, and rode up and down the shore of Lake Michigan. More accurately, Mark and I pedaled us up and down the shoreline while Ama sat in the back and Ako and Rizza tried to keep up with our pedaling. When we went up hills I would leap out and push from the side while Mark continued to pedal and steer (so they wouldn’t have to pedal my weight, but I could push harder).
It was a good time; warm day, blue skies, and I was more or less myself and more or less relaxed and their reaction was an amused ay nako, there goes that Mallory being weird again head-shaking and laughing. Really, if it’s a sunny day and you’ve stopped by a park and are waiting for people to come back from taking pictures, I think it’s perfectly normal to lie down in the grass and enjoy the sunshine, but for some reason this is amusing, as is running (in general) and spontaneously being excited about… well… life. They really have been getting more and more used to me over the past several years, which is… good, because my role in the family appears to be “let’s push the edge of everybody’s comfort zone now, shall we?” at times.
Dinner featured the Asian equivalent of the Pru Frappe: a giant coconut bubble tea freeze from Joy Yee’s that was approximately equivalent in volume to a Pru. Om nom nom. As much as I complain about my family sometimes, they can be pretty awesome, and I do love them (and vice versa). We don’t agree on some things, and I can’t speak the mix of languages they speak, and I am unashamedly the Weird American Child, but… I dunno if this makes sense, but hearing conversations in dialects I barely understand is part of coming home. An oddly comforting part of coming home. This setup, strange and stressful as it is sometimes, is home. And these people are my family. And… I do not appreciate this enough.
I’m not coherent enough to write this well tonight, but wanted to pin as much of my brain down as possible before I spiral into unconsciousness for the night. Trying to fight perfectionism in my output, since I need to spew a lot of it and have been failing “release early release often” due to overly high standards, so you’ll likely see me spew a lot of utter nonsense in the next 2 weeks. I’ll brainspew, then at some point (hopefully) cull the good stuff and send that to various Planets / my team / etc / etc / etc.
Whee!
[0] and after I get back from China I am hoping that my next destination will be unconsciousness. Good grief but it’s been quite a summer. AN AWESOME SUMMER!!!! but yes. Rest. I’ve heard it’s sometimes a good thing.
Sunday, July 25th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
