chasing myself

Blue Jays on the radio. It’s night now. It took me almost two hours to mark students’ papers. Then I made soup for lunch. Then I went online to see check the requirements for teachers college. They state very clearly that they would not even look at your application if you had a ‘C’ average in your university grades. That does it. I wasn’t furious or anything. It was expected. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I was going through a phase in my uni years. I had to. It had to happen. I was lucky I even graduated. I didn’t know I wanted to be a teacher. I didn’t even know I can teach the way I’m teaching now! I didn’t even know I could walk out in society, have a job, face people, kids, let alone making a difference. I had no fucking idea. So how was I supposed to plan that I’d go to teachers college upon graduation and in my undergrad years plan it so that I’d get high grades so they’d accept me for teachers college? No way. There was no way. I was not prepared.

It felt like the world is made for the ‘prepared’ and I’ve always been the ‘unprepared’. But to ask me to prepare is too much to ask. I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have known.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

I was never prepared. In my nineteenth summer they asked us to register for courses in university and to decide on major. I wasn’t prepared. I was not set up for it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know I would run into a cloud. I didn’t know I’d turn out the way I’m now. I didn’t know I would turn out to love reading, reading books, novels I never read while I was in high school! I didn’t know I would want to be a writer, a teacher.

And I wonder if other kids ‘knew’ it. Maybe I’m the only one who’s out of the loop. Maybe everybody ‘knew’ what they were to do. I know friends who knew what they’ve always wanted to do and they haven’t changed. But for some reason, I get suspicious when I hear a highschooler tell me how they’re fixed upon becoming an engineer or doctor or whatever occupation, or when I hear an elementary kid say they know for sure what kind of program they will enter in university. Nothing is fixed, I want to tell them. We change.

Still, maybe I’m alone on this one. I wish I am.

The truth is I miss the university. I never imagined I’d say this, but it’s how I feel tonight. I never really experienced it, what it’s like to study what you enjoy, what it’s like to be chasing the dream you’ve always had. I spent my uni year chasing after myself.

But had I not done that, I would not be where I am now. I love the way I am now. Yes I have my regrets, but at least I like the way I stand now, out of the box, and free, at least in thoughts, freer than before, freer than most people I think.

Take Catcher in the Rye for example. I was never ready for that stuff when they gave it to me in Grade Ten. I was only fifteen or sixteen. I had no idea. Why da hell do they do that? Make me read it and expect me to write essays on it and enjoy it. I had no idea what it was talking about. No idea. I was never prepared to understand that stuff by age fifteen. No way.

Tonight I revisited Catcher, for the first time since those hazy highschool years. This time it resonates. Maybe that was the plan, they’d plant it in me so that I might revisit it years later and learn to appreciate it then. I doubt they planned that, but I’ll think it, just to be fair to my teachers. But I wonder if any of my friends have revisited.

I’ll go make dinner now.

dreaming on paper

Honesty. Throwing myself into the open world. I'm back. Where have I been? I don't know? I was flickering. In fact I've been flickering ever since my sixteenth summer, when my existence really came into being (does that phrase make sense), it was a time I came to realize I existed, and that the world has colours and the abstract world revealed itself much more exciting, offered to me an infinite rainbow of hope, more so than my high school math classes ever did... what was I saying...

I forgot... but on the topic of flickering… it’s not sad. To be drawn in solid lines is sad.

I’m back. On this bright and windy afternoon in the end of September. Experimental writing has no place in literature, but it has a place in my blog, and my blog is not literature. Make sense?

That’s fair. I’m not accountable for what I say here. Not accountable at all.

I have three dreams.

I want to publish a book of fiction
I want to host a Cantonese radio show
I want to be a high school English teacher and guidance counselor

In the process of pondering these dreams I scribble lists and diagrams and various doodles of what I ought to do to achieve these and how to overcome the things that stand in my way. I have made a habit of dreaming on paper. I shall not only dream on paper. Dear me.

I’m not being honest now.

Wait.

Let’s switch into third person.

Hi Adam. How are you today? You’re not being honest. You’re also being judgmental. The fact that I’m telling you you’re judgmental shows just how judgmental you are! But you can come out of it. Yes I know how much you like to loiter in coffee shops and scribble blue and black lines on white paper with multiple to-do lists. I know. I know. Why don’t you… go make yourself some lunch, and if the weather is so gorgeous today, why not head downtown and go watch that play you’ve been wanting to watch. You have this thing about you, you know that. That thing you said yesterday about the cars… about that truck that transported eight Chevy whatever-model cars, one of each colour. I saw the expression on your face. You found it so interesting because you’ve never seen a transporter carry eight shimmering new cars of the same model and each of a different colour! Nobody else saw it. Only you did. They did not react to your comment because they saw nothing worthwhile about it. But you saw everything. Everything. This is why I like you.

To eat, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream, not on paper, but to translate scribbles into action, and action into dreams, and whatever…

I want soup for lunch.

Wounded Little Souls

I almost lost me arm for me country honey I’m home and me country better hook me up with job.

How I love the frisky colours of propaganda posters.

Photocopying takes time -- the petty sense of accomplishment derived from the medicinal smell of heated toner.

A careless mother leaves her stroller with baby inside parked outside a dollar store, and although that’s usually okay, this time the storefront displays Halloween promotions that feature veiny and prickly-skinned plastic masks like freshly flayed facial cadavers with bulging eyeballs, terrorizing the poor baby’s untainted eyes. He panicks. How I want to approach the stroller and sweep close the eyes of a still-carefree child.

It's my project...

Start with five fingers.

Add five colours: purple, blue, pale blue, pale red, orange

-- dreams, struggles, times & places, inspiration, wishes now

Dip fingers into paint. Press fingers onto paper.

Garnish with original pictures.

Sprinkle poetry...

dear work dear me
papers on my bed
teacher sighs teacher dies
poison pencil lead

Sense no.
Rhyme yes.
=yippee…

Conceptualizing a project.

Many tasks ahead of me -- tomorrow we dig into Fahrenheit 451 and we’ll recap the Turgenev and Henry James readings before I take them through the first two scenes of King Lear not to mention SSAT prep and them essays – fun and games, normally, but my project, MY PROJECT, must get done, for myself!

Where have all my flowers gone?

Downloading msn messenger…

Downloaded.

Pop-up windows, dozens of them, activated: people who have added me whom I have not added. I have not touched messenger or ICQ in more than two years. It’s nice to be added. I feel I am back with the rest of the world again.

What has made me most happy in the recent weeks is the fact I’m reconnecting with people. In the past month I met with three friends, one of whom I hadn’t met in seven years.

“Talking to you now, it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long that I haven’t seen you,” I said to Irene on the way back from our dinner together as she dropped me off, “I’m so glad we met tonight,” I meant it very much.

Maybe there are just lots of things I need to tell my friends. Lots of things I want to know about friends, and to throw my random thoughts at them and see what kind of a reaction bounces back, “If you come to a fork on the road, take it,” what do you suppose that means?

---

I fell pensive this afternoon. It had been a sunny day all day. But while walking home from the coffee shop carrying my stack of books, I passed by a transparent window through which I saw a barren sitting-room with an old-fashioned fan on the ceiling spinning, and I thought of Yuki, of love, how cliché, of whether I have ever been in – Of course I have! What a silly thing to say! I know I have, I just have never given. Yes, it’s been the thinking and reflective kind of love. Not once did I sit by her hospital bed when she had heart check-ups. I reproached myself. I lay on my bed and heard sounds from the outside so clearly, a dog barking in the distance, a child begging to go to the convenient store. I fell asleep for a few frothy minutes.

I got out of bed and had a very early dinner and took to reading the first pages of Fahrenheit 451 and by doing so my pensiveness diluted. I read this book because I have to teach it this week.

It’s now almost 10pm. Tomorrow will be another good day.

---

Me and my girlfriend… it feels like a candle, flickering… this hurts me, and I tell my friends and sometimes they respond like…

“Why don’t you just tell her? What are you waiting for?”

“See yourself a free man!”

Then I feel like sitting on a hard chair in a dark and empty room, for it feels no different.

---

My recent entries have been so much like a diary. I have not scribbled in my diary in a long time. Who’s reading this? I have given my blog address to a few friends and acquaintances but I doubt they are reading, and yet more and more I feel as if this is my actual diary, that I’m writing…

My chain of thought hit a cloud.

I’m conceptualizing a story.

---

Dear me I need life… how about a Gatorade… how I want to sleep early… how I love my window wide open on this drifty frothy Thursday evening… how I have nothing to write about… how my fingers are tapping on the keyboard yelling, where have all the flowers gone…

It's hard to chat and write at the same time.

The Carnival Drive

I love the drive up the Don Valley Parkway at night, especially tonight, when the air is misty and the cars are sparse. The songs in Priscilla Chan’s newest album play like carnival music, waltzing and dipping as the road curves slightly left then slightly right. My car flutters along the left rail. On a merry-go-round, the distance between horses is fixed. On the Parkway tonight, my car passes car after car like picking flowers. The carnival music makes the trip more playful.

---

By the way...

What do you call that thin flaky layer that wraps a peanut?

I want to expand my vocabulary. I want more pencil crayons. I want different shades of red.

All I Ever

all I ever want from this world
is love –
I speak, the world has heard and hears nothing

a friendly face
a lover’s touch
stays one day
flutters another
how ready I am to cry this change!
yet in my deepest purest truest
I realize
man, what fragile beings
me and them are but searching still
the same same thing
uttering, all I want

I won’t if I don’t hear. but I do!
hence I shall my love be true
and speak of give

Flurry

Had McFlurry for the first time tonight. There’s a tube-like opening at the top end of the plastic spoon that fastens to the bottom of the Flurry machine so that the spoon spins at whirling speed and out comes Oreo cookies mixed with iced milk yummy.

I sat outside at the patio tables. It was around 9pm, warm enough. I reflected a day of sleeping at home, unable to breathe during the humid day, unable to work. I reflected about my dreams, or should I say project, ponder, about what I ought to do with my little life, now in my 25th year, I’m thinking about revisiting the dream of ESL teaching, something which I had abandoned due to a deep and morbid fear. “Yes, I will chase it! Now is the time!” was my conclusion as I bit into Oreo crumbs.

Back in the dark old days, I would not have thought of dreams, I would neither project nor ponder, but would only reminisce, review, evaluate, and drown in helpless nostalgia. Thank Dear Lord I’m out of it.

It was a snowy and depressing evening in March of my 22nd year as I was cruising around the streets aimlessly, and had made it a habit to do so while getting to know the streets of Toronto very well, but on this one evening I parked my car in the somewhat empty lot outside of the big AMC theatre and I decided to go to a movie by myself. I had not really wanted to do that because I knew once I entered the theatre and slipped into that cushy seat all by myself, my brain would produce a kind of message that tells me how I ought not go to movies alone for only depressed people do that, even though I cannot deny how much I enjoy going to shows alone. So I went. The movie was Amelie. Tonight, on this sultry September evening with my living room window wide open, I revisited Amelie.

My favourite part is when she sits on top of the building and pulls the plug on the TV of a man watching a football match. I also like the part when she sees the mean storekeeper mocking the shy boy and she stares through a basement window and thinks of a comeback to say to the mean storekeeper

I’m so tired. So tired. So tired. The more I say this the more I feel it. Tomorrow I have my writing class. The teacher tells us to bring a piece of writing that we think is good, a piece that is an example of ‘this is how I want to write’. I want to write like myself. I’m learning that I can write drama even with simple words. This is why I like reading Turgenev. And there are writers whose prose I simply admire, like that of Sylvia Plath. But I wouldn’t want to write like her. I want to write like myself.

Dreams are weighing on me. But no, don’t say that!

If you can dream and not make dreams your master
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim…

If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And meet the two imposters just the same…

Yes. I got it. Yes. I got it. Yes.

In class today, one of my students said he’s been suspended twelve times, one time for punching a classmate in the nose because the classmate was singing. “There are so many fairies in my school,” says my student. “We don’t have fairies in my school, we have gangsters,” says another one of my students.

“Is it possible not to let these people bother you?” I asked my students. They met my question with a mocking laughter. Then I thought about it some more. “What about those students who walk into school and do their own things and not let people bother them? There are plenty of students like that. How come they can manage school without getting into trouble? How do they do it?”

I was one of these students. Back in my highschool days I had developed a kind of selective vision that fades out all the things I didn’t want to see. I walked along the hallway while kids slammed lockers that reeked of squashed lunches and I did not let anything bother me. I just walked straight. Their sounds muffled. Sometimes it felt kind of like I was walking an inch above the ground. I was nice to those who were nice. I even found a deep appreciation for the handful of teachers who put heart into their work.

It must say, it took a lot of effort to attain that kind of invulnerability. Daydreaming and having a few supportive friends definitely helped. Writing also helped, but I only discovered this much much later.

Unhappy Adults

“I don’t have time to do my own thing,” I say to myself, without thinking realizing what a silly thing it is to say, so I follow up by saying to myself, “You make your own time.” Very true.

In class today V spoke of revenge. V is one my rowdiest students. Today was his last class. As usual, V spoke without raising hand and used words like stupid and gay and screwed toward other students, and so I invited him for a little chat after class, after all the students left, we talked. It was the only way to truly communicate.

“I’m worried about you. Do you think you can change?” I asked.

“No, because I like it this way,” he replied.

“Why?”

“Because I want revenge,”

“And to whom are you carrying this revenge?”

“Mrs. C--- (who is our school principal),”

“And why do you want to revenge against her?”

“Because she’s old and ugly,”

“You know it’s not her fault that she’s old and ugly. In fact, nobody wants to be ugly and it’s not their fault,”

“I also want revenge against my mom’s friends because they are old and ugly and strange,”

“What about me? Don’t you want revenge against me for giving you homework all the time?”

“No,”

I asked V whether he likes his new school and if he has made new friends. He said yes. I also asked him if there was anything he wanted to say to me.

“Can I go now?” he asked.

So I let him go. I know my class will be a lot more peaceful from now on, but I am also worried about where life will take V. During class we study grammar and sentences and the students are all taking notes or chatting so I cannot share with him my thoughts. And when I do share with him my thoughts, he might be too young to understand. But even that’s okay. As long as we communicate, it’s okay. But I wonder about parents.

Grades don’t matter. Grammar don’t matter. Whether your son is smart or not, how are you to judge? Define smart. Define happiness.

There I have it. The next time parents come to me, I will hand them a questionnaire, like one of them tests I give to my highschoolers, and ask them to write in English prose, the answers to the following questions:

Define sucesss.
Define happiness.

Chances are, they’ll give me shitty answers. I’ve learned to expect very little of parents.

As a teacher I’m breaking a lot of rules. I also want to beat the tar out of parents who don’t know how to make their children happy. It takes very little. Parents don’t realize. Adults, what beings, how unreliable.

I can imagine myself a counselor in school. “Take interest” and “follow your interest” are two things I will tell kids.

It’s funny. I feel like revisiting Catcher in the Rye.

I need to build up my skills, and get myself into a position where I can make a difference, and really show these dull and unhappy adults.

Scotty Stevens & Skittly Skittles

What is wrong with me? I cannot seem to write today. Scott Stevens has retired. I hate that guy. I just can’t stand him. But I respect him. Hard work wins, he has proven that.

Handout from writing class: Oakley Hall’s Rules for Writers. (Who’s Oakley Hall?)

Rule #1. Write everyday.

I try. I do. Tonight I was doing everything there is to do and drag and drag and drag in order to stay away from writing. Do I fear? I have not posted here in many days. I have not written for many days, not since I last rushed that piece, that introduction piece I wrote for the anthology (which I’ve posted below). Dear me. Am I losing it? Losing what? Losing what? Look at my fingers, look how they dance across the keyboard. Look how easy it is once I calm and tap the letters and words and sentences as they come to me, step step step, the water isn’t too cold, no? Silliness. Petty silliness.

All day I roam around thinking, about Skittles. Skittles avec capital S, the ones that come in rainbow colours, them candies you eat, with colours that actually correspond to a certain fruit taste, unlike Smarties and M&Ms where red ones don’t correspond to strawberry nor does yellow ones to lemon, and blue ones are just hell confusing. That’s why I like Skittles. They don’t play with my mind. I relish the comfort of knowing that when I put a green one in my mouth I know it’ll be lime, or purple for grape etc etc. But one can also argue that the exquisiteness of Smarties and M&Ms is that they leave you to ‘fancy’ a taste that’s not really there. For example, when I put a green Smartie in my mouth, I have to imagine it to taste like lime (or melon or pear or kiwi or avocado). To do this I need to adjust my brain in such a way that it sends signals to the right spots on my tongue that triggers say…thirty parts of sweet and seventy parts of sour plus a sensation that resembles an off-lemon with a ‘ting’…in order that I can convincingly say to myself, ‘Yes, it’s lime,” and if once my brain becomes accustomed to this, I may fancy other green tastes like that of melon or pear or kiwi or avocado (though the latter would be a challenge for it is argued that it might be a vegetable and is best appreciated when wrapped inside Cali hand rolls). At the advanced stage, I could get myself to taste lime even if the colour is red or yellow or orange, and it’d be like, I get lime whenever I want it, and that’d be too weird. Having said that, blue ones remain most confusing. If you visit the Skittles website, you can play online Skittles game and learn more about their other products like them ones that blend two fruits into one and you end up with a hazy mellow fusion of pink and turquoise and they’d say it’s grapefruit-berry fusion confusion fusion and I’d be like, can you just give me my original rainbow colours please!!!

Back to Oakley Hall’s list.

2. Observe and listen (and you’ll start seeing little Skittles bulge through dry walls)

3. Employ all the senses (but just don’t blend Skittles)

4. Use strong verbs (but don’t use ‘jiggle’ for Skittles don’t do that, it’s Jello that does but I swear if you stare at a Skittle long enough, especially them melancholic purple ones…)

5. Detail!!!!

The list goes on and on…

Who’s Oakley Hall?

I have written. At last. About Skittles. But least I have written. I feel better. Let’s go march the 2am streets and wake up some neighbours. Crazy young man have you not better things to do like study for your LSAT?

Scott Stevens. I wanted to say something about Scott Stevens. Or have I already said? Here it is: If I can write like the way Scott Stevens plays hockey, greatness will be all mine.

And isn’t that great?

Scott Stevens is cool. How ‘bout them New Jersey Devils Skittles Devils Skittles Devily Devilish Skittly Skittles Skip Skip Skip Skippy Sleepy me.

Caption: Look at them sad little faces in Ottawa while Scotty and Marty jump for joy. The have-Skittles and the have-not-Skittles.

Greatness

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past"

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

---

I love this last line from The Great Gatsby, so resonant.

An introduction to an anthology of my students' work

Summer is for love, for fun, for iced cappuccinos and spiffy sunglasses and loitering in parking lots with friends and drifting off on a mountain bike romanticizing here and there. On top of this, there is a mystique about summer school: the coming together of boys and girls from different day schools in a fresh setting before a backdrop of sunshine and freedom and layers of colours in the summer night sky that await them in the afterschool hours as they walk along, carrying their books, thankful and cheerful, they say, “I’m making the most of my summer!” While the average highschooler is playing their summer around, a group of dedicated students have sacrificed potential playtime to participate in a course designed to improve their writing, and have, in the process, made their summer all the more fun and meaningful. This anthology is a mini-celebration of their achievement.

“Why don’t we write in class?” a student asked, a most logical question indeed, “I thought this was a writing course.” Writing is, altogether, a process of personal growth. The act of setting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a solitary and reflective process. The foundation of good prose lives in a fun-loving and compassionate mind that longs to explore and maximize the human experience. The workshop is designed to facilitate this experience, to imagine, to connect, to relate, to interact, to concretize, to laugh, and when the experience is rich, writing comes natural. In addition to this, the aim of the workshop is also to simplify and see through all that bunk surrounding writing, about grammar, about commas, about thesis, that have made writing and English as a subject pedantic and boring. Writing, like English, like learning, should be fun and relative to life, so that a student might, upon finishing a class, re-enter our urban streets and see all the colours afresh, colours that have always been there. This is why the workshop is characterized by selected readings, insightful discussions, and productively digressive interaction. All of the writing is done at home when the student is calm and reflective, albeit a little self-discipline is required.

The pieces featured in this anthology are written by students attending their final years of high school, knocking at the doors of universities, where vistas of possibilities await them. What better time to enroll in a workshop that encourages one to dream? The writings speak of ambitions, personal experiences, and various social issues, all of which reveal the early development of a thinking mind that is beginning to take intensive interest in this thing called life.

And that is how the summer passed, as the students might say to themselves as they fall pensive under a summer’s sunset to reflect upon a youthful and meaningful summer some years before. But for now, they are set to go back to school, back, at least temporarily, into the mechanical world of report cards and university acceptance letters. Only this time they are more equipped than before, shouldering a backpack of dreams and enhanced self-discovery, they might, upon re-entrance into their day school, appear self-possessed and rebellious, and for a split second feel invincible to the world. This is youth. This is consciousness in its early stages sprinkled with glimpses of a long-hidden dream. And it is hoped that the readers of this anthology can feel this youthful vibrancy. More importantly, it is hoped that the workshop participants themselves can at anytime of their adulthood fall back into this period of uncompromising idealism, for it is in here that one may find inspiration for a lifetime. May youth and summer be forever.

Chalkdust In My Hair

My class! My students! They have removed me from my Grade Four class in order that I take over the Grade Nine class. In my new class, nobody will find it funny when I draw midgets on the board or write sentences about babies that bounce. I will find myself walk down the hall, passing by my previous Grade Four class, and notice how the kids are kept silent and serious by the new teacher, the new teacher looking like an evil stepmother as the kids scream, Adam, please safe us from this wretched boredom!

This is unfair. The teacher will be very nice. Most teachers in the school are very nice. Who is to say that a highschooler cannot appreciate the capriciousness of chalk-scratch midgets that solidify and multiply across a dusty chalkboard?