morning post

How about a morning posting? How about the window open and waking up early and stringing some words together and watching them spark! How about the hidamari-no-tami on my bedside table his yellow round head smiley and tilting side to side? I don't mind much working on this Sunday afternoon. Yes, the weather is nice and all and yes... I really don't mind. Lazy afternoons I've had too many, though I've been telling myself to check out this bookstore downtown and catch a baseball game with my friends, but I haven't been able to, and that bothers me. Anyhow. It's a nice day.

fragments

It is in this state of nothingness that I like to type. Nights like tonight when tasks take longer than I expected them to, leaving me tired, so tired. The black tea with bubbles I had was not very good but it was good to meet with my friends and playing cards and talking about random nothings that seem to lead back to what we really want in life. What do you really want? My friend asked me. I want to move out, I said. I want to have my own place. I want to live in Vancouver. Something like that.

I have never been late for a class before but this afternoon the highway was busy and I had the kids wait for me outside the classroom for ten minutes. It felt odd.

This morning I started thinking about my days in Fukuoka and the many tiny shops near Takamiya Station. It will all come back in my writing here and there, I said to myself. I believe so. If I record every bit of thought and the images that come with these thoughts and the meaning, layers of meaning, that come with these thoughts… if I record all of them… it becomes kaleidoscopic. This is why I believe in the short story. I believe in fragments and the power within these fragments and the little moments of discovery in these fragments.

tiny poem and things

a small thing.
but I’m here.

wish I be a misty spot in the corner of your heart-window
however many rainy nights
I spin and spin and flutter I decidedly wait.

your view of yourself in the presence of one you love
is always
tiny


---


It breaks my heart when I heard her say, “But it’s my responsibility!” How it makes me dizzy.

Last night I missed the bus so I discovered the Lake Shore bus and took it all the way east toward Queen Station all the while listening to an old tape on my Sony walkman.

It doesn’t happen a lot. But once in awhile I read somebody’s work and I say to myself “how I wish I can write like that,” and this happens a lot when I read the works of Evelyn Lau. There’s something captivating about the glass and the coldness of everything that surrounds us, us who are warm with blood and all. Something captivating.

I can’t really see myself. I’m hiding. It’s easier this way. It’s not hard to hide yourself in words but it shows when people don’t understand you. The torture is to want to be understood without letting yourself be understood. Then there are times when you feel you’ve done all to communicate how you feel and still be misunderstood. Times like that you can sit back and say ‘well I did my best’ and you can rest easily.

I want so badly to write a story in the first person as a girl. It doesn’t fit. It just doesn’t fit. My hidamari-no-tami is looking back at me smiling. Ok.

orange thoughts

The sounds of ice-cream truck and kids playing outside and birds… From my bedroom window I can look pass my backyard into a row of three-story townhouses. The sunlight reflects off those orangey brick walls so that it looks sort of Spanish. I love lying in bed with the windows opened in these summer afternoon. I feel so thankful whenever I have a chance to do that and lately with the weather being warmer I’ve given myself many chances to do it. I’m so blessed. Oh there’s a dog barking. Don’t poke it with that stick now.

In these late summer afternoons when the sun is setting I am seized by some sort of sentiment which usually starts off being romantic but ends up being a sort of depression and I’d have thoughts about moving to Vancouver. I used to think that I do this on purpose, meaning that I'd drive myself to this sort of depression by playing Anzen Chitai’s Koi No Yokan on my car stereo while driving westward up the slope on Sheppard Avenue and I’d be in that stupid-writerly sort of mood and I'd be telling myself 'oh here's a poetic moment and I gotta capture it in a poem when I get home' only to have such thoughts evaporate with the boiling water I use to make my macaroni dinner. Nowadays I figured if I stay away from the music and not think all romantic and shit then I’d be okay. But in the last few weeks, this feeling comes to me and I don’t even try. It’s crippling. But it does get better after the sun is completely set, when it’s night. It’s even better if the Jays have a night game on the radio and they’re winning. It’s even better if it happens to be a night when I don’t have to wake up early next morning. But that’d be asking too much.

I also revisited my Urban Nobody Theory this afternoon. Part of me want to write about it here, but no, it's too complex. I want to keep to myself for now. Plus, I don't think anybody cares. (laugh)

a volleyball

After washing my face I looked into the mirror and I said oh boy my skin looks dry and pasty yucky… I need to apply some cream or maybe go in for a facial… Then I said to myself oh boy I’m not healthy, I don’t look healthy, I need to eat better, sleep in more regular times, eat more fruit, do some exercise, and breathe more morning air… yes… I need to take better care of myself if I’m going to write all those stories I’m so determined to write! Dear me. I have attained a higher level of understanding of comfort and appearance. If I’m healthy I will look better. Nowadays, it don’t bother me much that my hair’s a mess and my jacket's a few sizes too large… me don’t bother how me look to nobody no more and it feels kinda neat. Three cheers for me.

The bubble tea was not very good… the bubbles were too melty and the black currant tea tasted more like grape juice, but at least it was only $2.99 and the waitress said thank you when she took my money and said goodbye when I left. They were showing the Leaf game on the big screen which was kinda neat. It was their last game and they won. Mats Sundin was interviewed after the game and skated along the rink clapping his hands in the air. Poor Mats, I think it’s time Mats moves on to a better team. I’d like to see him play on the Flames.

My friend was telling about her boyfriend about how he’s chubby and he ought to do more sports. I asked my friend what sport her boyfriend likes. She said he likes squash. So play more squash… it’s dangerous you know, I said, that ball moves very quickly and it stings when it hits you… but it’s nice to play sports together. It made me think of the time Yuki and I were playing volleyball… She only played volleyball and she was good at it. That day she carried a volleyball in her handbag, she carried it the whole day we were walking around the city… We went to the beach then walked to a park near the castle ruins… She had borrowed the volleyball from her friend, and we played in the park. It was nice. We played keep-ups. Then we played dodgeball by taking turns throwing the ball really hard at each other, not to hit each other, but to throw it toward the person, like for example, she would throw the ball to me really hard to see if I can catch a ball that is thrown really hard at me. She threw really hard but I remember I caught it every time and she was annoyed. The way she threw the volleyball reminds me of some exaggerated movement from some manga comic. When it was my turn I threw it really hard at her too and there were many times she couldn’t catch it and the ball rebounded off her little body and she reacted comically as if there would be a BOING effect or something, and she was annoyed. I was amused. I was amused because she was annoyed and it made me throw the ball even harder at her just to get a reaction and I was so amused. We were so amused. We were happy. We were young. We were together. I shouldn’t say ‘things were simple’ because they weren’t that simple, but looking back it feels simple and…

We were really really happy. We would be tired on the way back sitting together on that train. I still remember that volleyball bulging out of her handbag. How kiddy we were. Dear me.

small waters flow long

To see words on blog makes me happy… newly written words on blog even if it makes no sense, even if it comes from the sentimental minutes driving home alone… still, minutes and minutes pass and I go through a day seeing so much the whole day telling myself I have to record this.

I woke up at 9:30am and opened my window to the sunlight and felt so refreshed. I sat up on my bed with a blanket over my lap and I read a story from the Channel-A collection edited by Amy Cheung… petty romantic stories but I love that stuff and that’s how my morning started.

Smoking hurts your brain… one of my students said to me. Are you corrected? I said to my students. Are you corrected? I said, instead of saying, have you corrected? Are you corrected? Sounds like there’s something wrong with them.

Felt incredibly lonely driving home. I said I’d come out and say it, that I felt incredibly lonely. Writing a story, the whole process from gathering ideas in the head to moulding the sculpture and chipping away certain parts… the whole process feels like getting pregnant and giving birth to a child… How do I know how it feels to be pregnant?

Then there’s my next story. I will start on it. I will start on it. There’s something attractive about the short story collection. While driving home I was listening to an old Raidas album and thought about how the songs are ordered within the album and why they put the songs in that order.

My thoughts are very scattered this evening. I want to say this and that and end up saying something that sounds close to something I want to say but I wonder, I wonder, is it ever possible to say exactly what you want to say? I mean, the moment we try to use words to capture a feeling, part of that feeling is already gone, no? It’s funny. When I write I am extremely self-conscious. Sometimes my soul has left my body so that even though I’m typing here as I watch my fingers dance atop the keyboard I am watching myself from another angle. If the eyes are gentle I don’t mind being watched.

Small waters flow long… I was thinking about this proverb as I was listening to my friend talk about her new boyfriend and she talked about it so calmly that it makes me think they are an old couple. But they say, small waters flow long…

Your eyes are ocean-deep. Do you know you’re drowning me?

two writers

Sometimes I catch myself sitting around trying to make sense of it all… an impossible task. Sometimes I catch myself doing this… Sometimes I find myself doing that… ‘Sometimes I find/catch myself…” -- how I have a habit of beginning sentences like this (only in my diary though) but still, it’s funny if you think about it. It’s like being out of my body and watching me doing stuff. So now I find myself typing on the computer and I find myself wanting a glass of water and I find myself in the kitchen pouring water into a glass and I find myself walking up the stairs back into my room. Careful not to take on that existentialist tone. I won’t. I won’t. I love my existence! Sit back and rejoice.

Train of thought disrupted. Please ignore.

“Adam, you leave more questions here than you’ve answered.”

I know. I don’t know why I write like that. It must be the way I talk, the way I teach. I tend to utter more interrogative sentences than declarative sentences. I wonder why that is. But I'm getting better. I really am. “But you can write. You can definitely write.” She said that! She said that!? Miss Camilla Gibb who has published three novels internationally. How validated that makes me feel! And it was her last day as writer-of-residence at the university and my work was the last piece she reads and now she’s on her way to New York doing promotion for her newest novel… Dear me… the life of writer how attractive!

I’m building an imaginary list of people to whom I will send my first book. In the meantime, I need to resolve this piano scene…

what you sinking about

I bring myself here late at night 1am and have nothing to write all stuck like honey in a bottle. When I’m thinking, it becomes so obvious that it shows on my face that I’m thinking so that my friends would ask, “What are you thinking about?” To which I say, “I just try to think of something interesting. I keep searching and sometimes I find it and I can share the thought with others. Sometimes I can’t find it and it feels like looking down an elevator shaft…”

“Did you find it?” they’d ask.

I’d have something to say if I found it.

Funny is when I put on this thinking face in front of the class and they all anticipate something profound to come out of me and I end up saying gibberish or something about timbits.

la la

Loving you is easy cos you're beautiful
Making love with you is all I wanna do...

Two lines that make me cringe.

Cold world.

mind games

Was walking through the underground tunnel in Finch Station when I thought of how in Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction she says the most important skill a writer can aquire is the ability to concretize the abstract. It made me think. How I always used to start with an object, say, a coconut candy, I'd look at it and all the meaning would swarm upon it, layers and layers of meaning like dust, and I'd end up with words like nostalgia and growth and paralysis and kindness and all the fuzzy abstractions my fragile mind could think of. Nowadays I start with the abstraction, say paralysis, for example, and find an object that captures the essence of paralysis. The process of concretizing the abstract used to take some time, but now it takes less and less time because I do it so much in my head, I'd feel something and an object pops up, a blue yarn sweater, something like that, and I start to make objects out of feelings and sometimes I feel as if I... They say you can talk to yourself as long as you don't talk out loud, well, even if you talk out loud, I supposs it's okay long as you don't respond to yourself. I thought that's kinda funny.

In Philosophy class, the teacher asked the kids, "Hasn't everyone here at some point thought about the origin of the universe?"

This tall girl in the back says yes, enthusiastically. Then she starts talking about the big bang theory about how we were very small and then BANG we became big and expand expand expand and then we will become small again and then BANG we'll expand and expand and then we'll be small again... (This is pretty much the way she said it).

Then the teacher asks, "What do you suppose is behind all of this?"

"God?" the girl replies.

It was the most colourful expression I've heard in a long time.

a transparent capsule

There's this fear I have this fear that something somebody is watching over me and it makes me think of the eye on Count Olaf's ankle.

I have to read 100 pages of Margaret Laurence by Tuesday and I hate Margaret Laurence... no hate is not what I mean... I was in a paper store today that sells colourful papers and cards and journal books I will check out their site right... now

My story. I like the part when Linden stands in the middle of the hotel lobby with one hand he signals to Peter, "Stop! Don't come any closer!" Then he looks back at Gabriel. Then he enters the capsule elevator and ascends, all alone in that transparent capsule, and he is not seen beyond the seventh level. The spying couple leaves. Gabriel walks home passing by the Grasshopper Lounge thinking of the days when his wife was his girlfiriend and thinking how beautiful it is to see that your girlfriend will be your wife and how your wife was once your girlfriend.

Orange light... yellowish now...