"Out of Sync goes my Style"
I stole that from somewhere, if you're its rightful owner, you're welcome to come take it back. My thoughts have been out of step with my life lately. There's been a lot floating around up there, thoughts like fish (I stole that too), but there was always the more pressing matter of work or life and these thoughts grow stale and get thrown out with yesterday's sushi. And it all reminds me of the line in that awfully rhythmically repetitive song, "Breathe (2am)":
2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a songA few days ago I was going to write something about hysteria. Must have been the moon or the memory of the moon. But it's gone now, lost to the fog of an uncertain scribe. There's a crowd of thoughts each day that lurk in the shadows of evening, eluding me as I try to snatch at them. They fly when I am asleep, shy as a two year old who is just realizing that everyone is staring.
All of this is just to say that there's been a lot on my mind and I've nothing to show for it. It's the end of a quarter and maybe I can write off all these idle days and start again with a fresh balance sheet. And I think, as we move in to the heart of summer, maybe, just maybe I can find enough time to do a little better than this.
The storm that was giving me so many problems last Friday broke today. Strangely enough where it counts, sixty miles out to sea, it's relatively calm. The grey outside is Washington wet and reminds me of Seattle and large, plain buildings, of roadways that dipped beneath airplane wings and the scale of things. I was younger then and thirty was not lurking around the corner waiting to leap out at me. In truth, thirty was always lurking around this corner and I was just farther down the street. I suppose I should be glad and celebrate the years lived instead of the years left. But it's hard to get perspective when you're looking to the future forty or more hours a day and even two and half years seems too short a time to get anything done.
Things are moving too fast or I'm moving too slow. Some days I feel if I am adrift, sixty miles out to sea, the rough, rolling waves churning about me while I lay wind striped and sun burnt with my face to the sky and thinking how it is easier accept disappointment than to deal with hopes. My mind clouds with thoughts of other choices and other roads and driving underneath the aluminum wings of dreams. For a moment only, until I remind myself that life is too short and that I need to move. And on I press when all I want is to stand still and believe that the future is just as long as it needs to be.
I feel as I've forgotten how to write. Words get swallowed up by the inconsequential happenings of the day. Last week I had a meeting every day that I had to miss because of a more important meeting. I took the day off on Friday to fly down to LA for a wedding. I was called three times for an emergency; there's a storm brewing out in the Pacific. Somehow this is all related.
Mom picked me up at the airport and we went to get some Chinese food. One of her high school classmates happened to be eating at the same restaurant. Sam BBQ is a small restaurant, popular for some reason that's beyond me because I didn't consider it to be particularly good. Still, it was crowded enough that Friday afternoon that small groups of strangers shared tables together. The other gentleman at our table happened to be a civil engineer too, but Mandarin was the vernacular of the day and that similitude went no where. I kept my head down and ate ravenously as I tried to piece together their conversation. My mom and her friend made a connection with the stranger. He's wife was two years older than they were. They had gone to the same school in Taiwan. Iris Chang? Yes, of course. He was her uncle. Her name saddens me still.
They continued to ask questions where I would have quieted. He seemed comfortable enough to give them. It's not something people of my age talk of. But then I am reminded that they are not my age. When she picked me up from the airport, my mom told me that my grandmother has cancer and the she has to go to Taiwan. When you get to a certain stage in your life, this is what you talk about.
Driving into work this morning I heard a story about a horse named Alex and a girl named Alex. The horse won the Belmont Stakes, the girl died of cancer at the age of eight. She setup a lemonade stand at the age of 4. She raised $2000 that summer to help pay for her chemotherapy. Recently her foundation, set up in her name to fund pediatric cancer research, and in no small part because of Afleet Alex's Belmont win, surpassed two million in donations. This cancer it seems, has done more than take away a life, it's brought people together.
It was a warm day in November. So many people came. If you could measure friendship in years, then there were several hundred in the church that day. Later, when we laid him to rest, there were fewer. And then this Sunday, only two. There's rain and rough water ahead, that much I know. But it brings us together as it tears us apart.
Somehow this is all related.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about language. This maybe be a well known fact, but I don't remember ever reading this: I've been thinking that the older a language is, the more metaphorical it becomes. Take Chinese for example. If you understand a little Chinese and you're listening to a conversation, you will inevitably end up hearing a strange combination of words that when directly translated is unintelligible. A familiar example is "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman." Someone might understand these four words when spoken in Chinese and still not understand what the speaker is trying to say. I actually only have a vague notion of what this is supposed to mean. I take it as a metaphor for basic things that can't be changed. Another example is the phrase, "Dog barks (at) train," which is used to describe something that is futile.
I like the idea that a language become infused with the history of a culture. Any TNG fans out there will remember the wonderful episode, Darmok. In brief, the crew encounters an alien race with whom they can not communicate, they end up in locked in a deadly battle and it's up to the captain to figure out how to communicate. The key is that their entire language is based on metaphor. In the episode, the phrase, "Shaka, when the walls fell," is used to mean either, "I have failed," or "You have failed," or perhaps could be used to mean, "I hope you fail," depending on context. In this case the presumed mythology is that there once was a person named Shaka, who was trying to defend something and failed at his task when the walls collapsed. Failure, then, is like Shaka, when the walls fell.
Of course, for my theory to hold up, I'd have to look at other languages which have been used for many centuries and see how they've evolved. I figure though, with people constantly trying to say the same things in different ways, eventually, you end up with a language that can only be understood when you understand the history and etymology of it.