When I close my eyes I see a clean desk. A clean house with a manicured garden. My garage is neatly swept and my driveway is free of oil stains. I think of files neatly organized and thought equally categorized. It's gotta be this way, I think, because there's a lot more work to do. And you can't let yourself be distracted by these mundane chores. You gotta get yourself organized, because if you don't it's all going to fall apart. And then I open my eyes and it has.
I think of my time management class: Imagine a large empty jar. One in which you could fill with at least three or four large rocks. Put these rocks in, is it full? You find you have some smaller stones that fit into the gaps between the rocks. You poured the small stones up to the brim of the jar, ask yourself again, is it full? Now, you take your full jar and take sand and, you guessed it, fill that jar until you can't possibly fit anymore in. Is it full, now? Finally, you add water to the brim of the jar. And now it's full. It's a lovely analogy, but I open my eyes and I'm drowning. I can't find a rock to stand on.
Really though, it's not so bad. I know other people that have much more to do and much less free time. My life is good, if a little messier than I'd like. But I think to the future and I can see a time when it won't be so easy to get by. Even the most important task, so shiny when new, loses it's luster and interest. Left alone long enough, things lose their importance, and I know that I can't keep closing my eyes and wishing it all away.
Today, in the just starting to fall rain, a man came and fixed my window. All it took was thirty minutes to shut out the wind and the cold. And driving home at night, all I had to listen to was the barely perceptible whine of my engine. I haven't taken very good care of this car, that's for sure. But for all my complaints, it's taken pretty good care of me.
You don't think of these things, windows. Their purpose after all is to be transparent. Like impeccable service at a nice restaurant. Quick, competent and there when you want them and gone when you don't. All car windows are tinted and if, for whatever reason, one happens to break on you, it will come apart in large, mostly harmless, chunks. Honestly, in the three and a half years I had owned this car, I hadn't given a second thought to any of this.
I usually think of perspective as a frame, but today I'm thinking it might be a window. It's not just about what I see and what I don't. It's about what I look through and past. I see the word through a homeowner's eyes. I see it through engineer's eyes. I see it through slanted and american eyes. For a moment my view, through the periphery, was absolutely clear. But now that familiar tint is back again. The only thing difference now is that there's no radio. For now at least all there is inside, is the soft whine of my engine.
I ushered in the new year with my own brand of lackadaisical house cleaning. Traditionally this is all supposed to be done the day before so that the new year can begin anew, but I've been late all my life starting from the day I was born, so this comes as no shock. In order to celebrate my Chinese heritage, I put on one of my favorite (and one of my only) Chinese movies in my small DVD collection, Eat Drink Man Woman, and started cleaning up. By noontime I'd watched more movie than I had done cleaning. In fact, I was more or less on my second movie, The Road Home before I really got the kitchen done. After lunch I started in on my room and finished up with the last Chinese DVD in my collection Yi Yi.
I had forgotten how each of these movies has it's own special way of tearing me up. I suppose, in a way, that is it's own sort of cleansing. Luna commented that I could wait until today to really begin the year anew and this time around I really feel like I can. In so many ways I am not Chinese. Language, culture, tradition ... they all separate me from the people back in in Taiwan and China. And yet, in many ways I am undeniably Chinese.
I don't pretend to know what this year has in store for me. I don't pretend even to believe in such a thing as fate. But I'd like to think that better things are ahead and I'd like to start living a little like there's a better tomorrow.
Sunlight forces it's way past my closed blinds, but it's cold outside.
That's the nature of winter here in around the bay, it looks like it's a nice day, but don't forget your coat. Since my house is occupied by less than half a person these days, I'm reluctant to run the heater. $100/month to warm one body for a third of a day seems expensive. Maybe it's the chill that's got my tongue lately.
My window's scheduled for repair on Monday. I don't know if it's the annoyance of having a broken window or not knowing how to replace my stereo that's more frustrating. I don't suppose it really matters. Still, things of little matter seem continually on my mind.
Lately, words have been sticking in my throat ... my tongue really. They catch on the rough edges there and get twisted around. Like water from a petulant faucet, ideas sputter out in a mixed meter stutter -- I'm not sure if it's my mouth or mind that's at fault.
It's really of little matter though, these days of faulty mind and mouth. There's work to be done and there's words to be written and that's all that there is to write. No, I'm not depressed. I just can't find the right words to express this winter light -- after all:
Sunlight steals it's way past my closed blinds and it's cold in here.
So six o'clock rolls around and I still haven't figured out where we're going to eat. I hop into the "Apple store and in ten minutes I have reservations at Rubicon. I've been there before and it's pricey, but I heard the chef changed and it's Dine About month so a meal is only $32 dollars plus tax and tip. I meet up with my friend L___ and the night begins.
The food is better than I remembered it and afterward we go meet up with the rest of the group. The four of us park the car on a busy sf street corner and take the freezing three block walk to the DNA lounge. While we're standing in line one of the girls turns to me and says, "Do you feel out of place? Do you need some boys?" Yeah, being the only guy in a group of girls really sucks. Pshaw. Dumb question. Predictably the line goes nowhere until the $20 cover kicks in at 11.
Inside the club it's an Asian lovefest. How exactly did hip hop become the preferred Asian music. Somehow it's like seeing black guys in riced out four bangers ... common enough, but still strange. Anyway, it starts to get to be a mosh pit on the dance floor so around one o'clock we take off and go do a small bar where one of the girls knows the bartender. They're playing all sorts of eighties music and suddenly I feel much more in place.
The bar closes at two and after only one drink, the night is over. We take the freezing walk back to my car and I press the key fob to unlock the car. The car gives this weird series of beeps that I've heard before, but only when I do something funny with the alarm. When I open the door I see glass all over the passenger-side seat. Shit. When it's you first time you have this funny reaction. You know what just happened but it looks so surreal. Anyway, I pop the trunk and wait for the really bad news. Luckily, it never comes. In the end, all they took was the face place to the stereo. I don't know what they're going to do with that, but now I have to listen to the wind for music.
Around three I climb into bed and count my blessings. I got away pretty easy tonight, but you can bet your ass I ain't parking anywhere dark in the city for awhile.
Michelle Bachelet, is Chile's new president-elect. I highly recommend reading an article or two about her.
I haven't been doing my civil duty lately. Truth be told, I don't feel like I've been doing much of anything lately. The upside of that is for the past week or so, I've been cool with my lack of progress in any meaningful direction. And of course, just like that it's the weekend again. If you haven't realized by now, weekend updates are very rare so it looks like, for the time being, this little tamagotchi is going to be neglected.
Sorry for the short update, while it might not be terribly late for a Friday night, it's already pretty late for this Friday night. Tomorrow C____ leaves for NY. It's been a good month. I feel like I haven't got much done this month, but then, as I said, lately, I've been okay with that.
We left this world for a few short days, spent a few nights looking at stars for a more southern sky. We fell asleep to the sounds of the Pacific licking at soft sandy shores and awoke the gray glimmerings of morning in the shadow of a god. We spent our days traversing the roads of that small magic isle and enjoying a winter sun kinder than the cold kiss of sunlight that we received this January morning.
It was fitting somehow that I started and finished Ishmael on the flight to and from, though we saw very little of what we'd consider native life. I received many little gifts from tiny sprites in bamboo forests and around tropical waterfalls. It's also fitting that they too have corrupted this once virgin experience. For all that my wallet is a little lighter, belly slightly larger, I'm a bit tanner and perhaps a bit better rested.
My desk is as disheveled as always and I'd like to give a swift kick. Or, being a more civilized parent, send it to it's room without dinner. However, this desk is no more my child than this page and I am responsible for this mess. Still, today I came back and the mess seemed more justified. I enjoyed my time there, living a life of little care. But I think the best souvenir was the excuse I have for being behind and a little slow today. The best gift is that I can feel okay of where I am in life, if only for Today. Tomorrow I have high hopes for a better me, but that gives me one heck of a loophole if you know what I mean.
I like my work best when the demands are relatively easy to meet or so exceedingly so that it's utterly ridiculous. Yesterday was one of the ridiculous days.
For over a year now I've been working on a redevelopment project for a Japanese tenant. The overall cost of this project is approximately $35 million dollars and we're about to begin construction on approximately $15 million dollars of it. And for the past month or so, I've been working on starting the second phase of this project. Over the last couple of days, I've been developing an estimate to rehabilitate an adjacent piece of land for another tenant, this one from Taiwan. The manager upstairs, JA, to whom I owed said estimate, had left for the day and after I gave my estimate to my boss, she and her boss decided to go talk to the Director of that department, JA's boss. While they were gone I was working out how long it would take to do this redevelopment and I came up with approximately 20 months.
When my boss came back she asked me, "Do you want the good news or the bad news first?" Of course I asked for the bad news. She replied, "They want it by April." For those of you who can't count, I'll make it easy, April is less than three months away from now and if you've ever tried to do 20 months of work in 3 months, I applaud you for your insane commitment to duty. For my part, I bust out laughing. My boss related the rest of the story: "We complained that we'd thought [the Japanese company] was the tenant with the first priority and we've been working on this $35 million dollar project for them. [The Director] said, 'who told you to do that?'"
All this time I've been worried that I've been behind schedule on my project. Turns out that one, rather important, person didn't even know or care that it was being done. I never did get the good news.
Officially my work day starts at 8:30. So, officially I'm not wasting time. But I am. I come in early to beat the traffic. But traffic isn't that bad at all, even when it is congested -- not like those of you in LA who drive 50 or more miles to work. That's bad.
I woke up this morning thinking that if I can just change some of my time wasting habits I could get back some of the squandered minutes of each day. Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred of them every year and how do I measure? In the wasted ones. Perhaps that's not so much me being a half empty guy as an engineer -- always looking for more efficiency.
I have only about a minute left and so far I haven't said much at all. In fact all year these entries have be devoid of meaning. Perhaps that's what a proper journal should be. Maybe everything I've written to this point is too contrived. It's officially one past my starting time and now I'm stealing.
Screw prose. I don't really want to. I don't. I want to write to you, yes you, beautiful things. All the butterfly words that I can catch with my literary net. And yet, and yet, it just takes too long. I miss too many words. Too many thoughts fall beneath the trample of keystrokes. I should be working right now, right now, but I needed a brief respite. Cause all I did all morning was get loaded up on mundane things and I already have enough mundane things to do. Here's my promise to you: I won't wait to make all the words perfect, all the sentences flow. Paragraphs will come undone. That's the best I can do.
Sometimes when I'm rushing around at work, I get so tired. I'm not sure how many of you out there are desk jockeys, but I really don't sit at my desk all day. Don't get me wrong, I don't do hard labor either. I don't weld steel or mine coal, I'm more likely to use a stapler as a hammer and a pair of scissors as a wrench then a proper tool for a proper job. But I'm a cross between a accountant/secretary/meeting coordinator and a messenger. I do some project management here and there too. And when I'm rushing around, I get tired. Mentally mostly, but sometimes these weak knees of mine get sore from crossing these seven levels of hell time and again. So I take these breaks, too many breaks and I think to myself, why am I sprinting during a marathon. I'm trying to catch that ideal person I could have been, if I had just started the day better than I was the day before. But really, you can't pay for your past mistakes by sacrificing the future.
Noon rolls around and none of this makes much sense. I'm going to walk out to grab some lunch and maybe things will start to fall into place. I'm going to try to untangle apart of this weave before the shears come out.
It's a new year and as usual, I'm late. Dear world, I'm trying to get better, I really am, but these itchy fingers are attached to idle hands and you know what that means. Every year I tell myself the same thing, it's a chance for a new start. The thing is, that's crap. It's actually not a very good time for a new start, or at least it's not any better than any other time. Which, I suppose, means it's any time is an excellent time for a new start ... it really just depends on how you look at it. It's three, now two, minutes to three and I really need to get back to work, because there is work to do, no matter how much of it I try to sweep under the rug. So I'm typing as fast as I can think and as a result the first entry of the year's going to be complete gibberish, but there you have it. It's here, for better or for worse, and it's going to be a great year.