Yesterday night was pretty interesting. It wasn’t as boring as I had expected, and I met some new people (even though they all made me feel so old, LOL). And to my surprise, I got eleven dollars in tips, a heck of a lot more than some other people. There were a lot of volunteers, sometimes it seemed like more than was actually needed, and it made everything feel so disorganized.
I was carrying this lady’s bags, and she was at the concert with a friend. As I walked behind them, the lady started saying how these concerts were really nice and always gave her a sense of escape. Apparently, she seemed to be be a cancer survivor, she talked about coming to the concerts while she was in chemotherapy, etc. I didn’t know what to say, I was so in shock. I realize meeting these people shows how strong one must be to step forward in life.
A man, who is a pastor in a church, introduces himself then proceeds to ask which church I go to. I had absolutely no idea how to respond, and I just told him I was Buddhist. He was nice about it, and changes the subject to “I can tell your parents raised you well.” Most awkward thing all night.
Hmm, I’m definitely looking forward to the next few concerts!
I’ve come to realize how selfish I am. These past few years have been difficult at times if not devastating, and most of the time I just kept telling myself that I did not want to lose my father and I want him to be able to be in my life for a very long time. A short time before he decided on operating, however, I had a conversation with my mother which made me come to see what he must be thinking and what he must be feeling.
The daddy I remember before Aorta Dissection is vastly different from the one now. I remember that he actually would laugh more often, and that he would enjoy having people over to our home and interacting with them. Ever since he went to the emergency room in the early hours of the sunrise a few years ago, he’s become more serious, more strict, more impassable for me or the rest of my family. And only now, after most of this is over, do I know that he is hiding his own fear from us, he is covering his own insecurities, his own doubts, and his own worries about a future for us without him.
Looking back, I remember a steady increase in the number of stories of his childhood, more preaches of how you have to be a good person and work hard and not follow his “bad” example, and a decrease in the fun, witty personality I vaguely remember. He would tell me about his high school life, how he was a terrible student and was hugely popular, or even tell me about the vast number of girlfriends he’s had before my mom. Of course at the time I thought he was just finding something to say or just lighten up the mood, so I would just laugh along and joke about it.
But even if he did not mean it, or he did not intend it this way, the more he told me these things the more I felt that he was trying to tell us more about him and about our family before he leaves us, and it bothers me a lot. I’ve been told that I should sit down and talk to him about it, but I’m so afraid. He raised me to never really show my fear, and I grow up hearing my parents say every day that they did not give me courage when I was born. But it’s true. The last thing I would do is go up to him and burst into tears, which I have only done, to my understanding, once.
Although many people many friends think that this surgery may have not been that big of a deal or things to that extent, the number of calls and care I’ve watched in my home after the surgery from my dad’s or mom’s friends made me feel so comfortable and happy for my dad that there are people who care for him. The last “deep” conversation I remember having with him, he ended with a note that he does not have many of his own friends, and not many people to talk to. I really hope that this proves him wrong.
It’s true, his life has not been a breeze, or even now, he loves telling his life from his military life in Taiwan to his arrival in America to be an adventure of some sorts, traveling from state to state following family and “friends” who think they have great business ventures. If I was able to send a message to make his life better, I would have told him to eff those guys off, and maybe he’d be just a little different from today.
Those experiences made him unable to trust many people, and he would always, no matter to who or to what, find a small problem, and proclaim it to everyone as if it was a big deal. He left no one out, not family, not government (tw, lol), not society. It’s uncomfortable to grow up around such a negative view of the world, and I know for a fact that it has rubbed off on me, as many people have pointed out my negative perspectives. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot prevent myself from thinking such thoughts or ignoring them, it’s because the idea of scrutinizing everything is simple what my father has “taught” me.
But I’m thankful for him, and although I know I have many obvious and annoying faults, I can only say that my father’s life is what made me this way, but I must more proudly say that his life is what inspires me to try and change and be a better person. I realize I have gotten way off track from the beginning of this “Tumblr essay,” as I call it, but I hope it does give the very few of you and idea of just how I feel.
And although the ordeal is near its end, why does my heart still feel so weighed down, and why do I still worry so much?
爸爸, 我永遠愛你. 謝謝你的批評指教還有你的關心. 我們不行束手無策, 只能全力以赴的往前衝.
Thanks to everyone who’s asked me about his condition, thank you to everyone who has even bothered to care a bit. It means more than you can possibly imagine, it shows me who my true friends really are.
So do any of you remember those Mickey Mouse cartoons from the 1930s? The ones that were just put out on DVD a few years ago? Well, there is one that was unreleased to even the most avid classic disney fans. According to sources, it’s nothing special. It’s just a continuous loop (like flinstones) of mickey walking past 6 buildings that goes on for two or three minutes before fading out. Unlike the cutesy tunes put in though, the song on this cartoon was not a song at all, just a constant banging on a piano as if the keys for a minute and a half before going to white noise for the remainder of the film. It wasn’t the jolly old Mickey we’ve come to love either, Mickey wasn’t dancing, not even smiling, just kind of walking as if you or I were walking, with a normal facial expression, but for some reason his head tilted side to side as he kept this dismal look. Up until a year or two ago, everyone believed that after it cut to black and that was it. When Leonard Maltin was reviewing the cartoon to be put in the complete series, he decided it was too junk to be on the DVD, but wanted to have a digital copy due to the fact that it was a creation of Walt. When he had a digitized version up on his computer to look at the file, he noticed something.
The cartoon was 9 minutes and 4 seconds long.
After it cut to black, it stayed like that until the 6th minute, before going back into Mickey walking. The sound was different this time. It was a murmur. It wasn’t a language, but more like a gurgled cry. As the noise got more indistinguishable and loud over the next minute, the picture began to get weird. The sidewalk started to go in directions that seemed impossible based on the physics of Mickeys walking. And the dismal face of the mouse was slowly curling into a smirk. On the 7th minute, the murmur turned into a bloodcurdling scream (the kind of scream painful to hear) and the picture was getting more obscure. Colors were happening that shouldn’t have been possible at the time. Mickey’s face began to fall apart. his eyes rolled on the bottom of his chin like two marbles in a fishbowl, and his curled smile was pointing upward on the left side of his face. The buildings became rubble floating in midair and the sidewalk was still impossibly navigating in warped directions, a few seeming inconceivable with what we, as humans, know about direction. Mr. Maltin got disturbed and left the room, sending an employee to finish the video and take notes of everything happening up until the last second, and afterward immediately store the disc of the cartoon into the vault. This distorted screaming lasted until 8 minutes and a few seconds in, and then it abruptly cuts to the mickey mouse face at the credits of the end of every video with what sounded like a broken music box playing in the backround. This happened for about 30 seconds. From a security guard working under me who was making rounds outside of that room, I was told that after the last frame, the employee stumbled out of the room with pale skin saying “Real suffering is not known” 7 times before speedily taking the guards pistol and offing himself on the spot. The thing I could get out of Leonard Maltin was that the last frame was a piece of russian text that roughly said “the sights of hell bring its viewers back in”.
I can’t handle suspense, so I jump to around eight minutes to watch just a few seconds. My entire childhood has now been tarnished and I feel unsafe at home. What the heck, Disney. What the heck.
Xin shen bu ding means that one does not, or at times, cannot have peace of mind in the moment. Although this may not be the perfect idiom, it is the only one that comes to mind which is the closest to how I feel, a mixture of happiness, worry, and immense anxiety about what is to come.
The school year has yet again come to a close, and I feel like this has probably been the most disappointing and interesting years I’ve ever lived. From making great new friends to grades that are more annoying and difficult to raise than ever, I don’t know how I even made it through the year. This post is cut up into sections/paragraphs, all talking about different things.
Friends. We really won’t be able to fully live without them, can we? With some people, I don’t think I would have survived sophomore year without them. From surviving Cordero with Tiffany Diep to the late night conversations with Steven Liem, I think that some of the friends that I made this year or even grew closer to mean so much more than ever before. I hope that these friends will last for as long as I live, and that they can and will be people that I can rely on or go to when need be.
I’m kind of disappointed in myself on how I actually had to struggle in some of my classes to get my A. I don’t ever remember trying so hard in math and history, even though I will probably still end up with a B in that class. Other than my grades being not what I wanted, I have this problem with not having any extracurriculars or whatnot. I’m really angry at myself now that I didn’t have the motivation to try out for something, or join a club. After the fact, I really wish that I should have given it a chance and go tryout for OSB. Agh, no college would want me now when there are so many other candidates that do so much better than I do.
I don’t think that I’ve ever felt like I do not have a sense of direction and something to pursue in my life, and for the first time, I don’t know what I want to do. For some time now, I have been pursuing advertising and wanting to go to ACCD and become an art director in ad, but now I’m not so sure. I can never get myself the motivation to design anything anymore, or to even execute my ideas that already have been approved. This feels so weird, as if I’m forcing myself now to love advertising instead of having a true passion for it. I’m just afraid that I will end up pursuing a career which I don’t immensely love, and be unhappy about it.
I don’t know why I feel like I do not have a lot to say, while inside I feel like I am about to burst at the seams, filled with things to talk or write about. But as I’ve been typing this for the last few days, nothing comes out of my mind, and from what seems like my hands typing on their own from previous posts, I have to force things out of me this time. I’ve never felt so confused.
For the few of you that know about my dad’s heart condition, he’s going into surgery at USC tomorrow, and I hope this messy and long ordeal will be over soon, and that life can go back to what I remember being normal as a kid. 阿彌陀佛.
For those of you that actually read this, thanks for reading. :)
