One for the New Year: Memento Mori

It is not my usual thing, to write about death on New Year's Day, but a series of unfortunate events has made it almost necessary.

Yesterday afternoon a coworker called me with a worried note in her voice. I was driving my grandfather and cousin home from lunch and tensed at the sound of my work phone's ring - it is not unlike the theme song to "Jaws" and while I wonder why I have not changed it, I think subconsciously I prefer not to. If the work phone rings on the weekend, it is 99% of the time my boss or my boss's wife, neither of whom would call unless something were wrong. I risked both a ticket and my grandfather's peace of mind regarding my driving and reached for it. On the screen shone the pretty Greek name of a pretty coworker.

"Have you heard anything about D?" she asked.

D was our company's IT guy -at least that is how I knew him in the beginning. We had an IT team, but D was the the go-to guy if your computer, phone or anything electronic broke down or malfunctioned. We called him first and if he sent someone else in his place, you couldn't help but be slightly disappointed. I knew vaguely that he handled more serious issues like our connectivity and server security, but in my first few days I work I learned D was, to me at least, indispensable.

"No," I said, "Why?"

"I heard he was in a bad accident and that he didn't make it."

I was driving. I had stayed up late the night before, and had just consumed an enormous lunch. It was information I could not readily process.

I stopped at a red light and my grandfather looked at me, not understanding but sensing that something was wrong. Was it my boss? Had I messed up again? Grandpa was always chiding me to take my job more seriously. At that moment, I had a very serious expression on my face.

"Is it true?"

"I don't know," my coworker said, "That's why I'm calling you. I got some cryptic text messages from the receptionist and was wondering if you heard anything."

"I haven't," I said. I wanted to add that I liked D a lot, but we weren't close. He had asked, indirectly, to hang out after work a few times, but I always declined. I said instead, "I don't know anything about anything."

We exchanged a few more pointless affirmations then hung up, though I was certain of two things: that if D was dead, I wouldn't be surprised and that I was feeling quite tired.

--------------

I met D on my first day of work and while normally not attracted to men of his ethnic origin, found him quite handsome. He was lean then and had a strong, regal profile with thick brows, bright, wide eyes and jet black hair which he styled into a subtle rising tide atop his forehead, giving him the appearance of always leaning forward. I was standing in front of the receptionist's desk, waiting for the head of HR to come and receive me when he walked in the door, holding a motorcycle helmet and wearing a fitted rider's jacket. He didn't smile at me and instead nodded hello to the receptionist and started toward his desk.

"D!" the receptionist said, "Meet Betty! She's new." Almost reluctantly, he paused to acknowledge me. We shook hands and I smiled his solemn face, thinking (assuming) that he was just a shy Pakistani man with a wife and kids. I painted. He comes to do his job, socializes little, if at all, then quietly goes home. I didn't put the clues together, that normally men with young families did not ride motorbikes.

The Spirit of Adventure, 1962. Renee Magritte Oil on Canvas

 It was strange in the beginning, our relationship, which mirrored the way I interacted with the rest of the company. As a newcomer, my policy was to be open and friendly to all. Friends and enemies alike would show themselves in time. But D was, for the first month, an enigma. I sensed that he was avoiding me for mysterious reasons, among them my work mobile, for which D was responsible and which I made do without for the first two weeks because he would not give it to me. Each morning I called his desk and asked, as sweetly as I could, "D, is my phone ready?" And he would say, "Oh soon, soon. There is just one more issue," then promptly hang up.

I grew impatient (so keen was I to become the best assistant ever), but wasn't ready to joke with him in my usual manner. If he saw me walking towards him, he would go the other way. If he had no other way to go, he would turn and talk to someone else. I wondered if he had been close with the previous assistant and if he resented that I replaced her. Or perhaps he thought I was fake? I worried about this at first: I had unwittingly taken on a "ray-of-sunshine" role at the office and perhaps the solemn Pakistani with a dark past could see right through it. Let him think what he wants, I thought. I just want my damn work phone.

Thus I sat patiently at my desk and hoped that one day, my phone would be ready. And finally it was. He came by my desk one day and dropped it off, explaining to me how it worked and why it had taken him so long (it was some IT issue I don't remember). I was overjoyed to finally have a work phone (now the bane of my existence) and told him so.


"You're very welcome," he said, his slight Pakistani accent coming out, "Let me know if you have any trouble."


That was perhaps the kindest thing he had said to me in the beginning.


A few weeks later Jane from marketing called to invite me to an informal interview. I thanked her for the invitation, but was it okay that I wasn't on their team?

"D is coming," she said, "He's one of the cool kids,  and we like you, so just come."

My niceness had paid off, it seemed, but I warned Jane, "I don't think D likes me. He's always avoiding me."

Jane was surprised, "What! D is The. Nicest. Guy. You just have to get to know him."

I said okay and that evening went out to dinner. Marketing was interviewing a young woman from up north - the formal interviews with the managers and VPs would take place the next morning. The evening out with the younger folks was a way of loosening her up.

The point of the evening then, was for them to get to know the candidate, but I went in with the selfish mindset. I would finally get a chance to know some of my new coworkers and they, me. We drowned her out, certainly, and who knows, might even have scared her away. We exchanged stories about certain VPs and executives, and they corrected or affirmed my many assumptions. We warned the girl, who grew increasingly silent and nervous, not sure if such a rowdy "interview" was a joke, that if she came to work, there were certain people she'd need to avoid. I was learning too, slowly absorbing information about my new colleagues, especially D.

I learned that he had lost both his parents some years ago in an accident, and a week after they passed, his brother died too. This had come up during dinner in a joking manner and I had brushed it off as a joke, until D kindly corrected me, "Yes, it's true," with a soft smile on his face as though he too, couldn't believe his misfortune. What understatement. I marveled at him then, that he was able to come out and socialize and live a relatively productive life. I thought of my parents and brother and the support they provided me, whenever I needed it. I complained often about living at home, at my father's annoying habit of having the television on too early in the morning and my brother's definition of "clean," but they were alive and well. I could reach out and talk to them whenever I pleased.

I learned that D was ten years older, and that we had gone to the same high school. We had taken P.E. a decade apart under the tutelage of the same teacher, one Mrs. Smith whom ten years after D graduated, would still astound my class with effortless pushups. 

I learned from Jane, when he left for the restroom, that he had an ill-defined romance with the girl in legal whom I found annoying. She was a drama queen disguised as a legal counsel who had also gone to Berkeley and had, perhaps for this reason alone, pegged me as someone worthy of being her new bosom buddy. I begged to differ in various ways, begging out of offers to carpool (we live, unfortunately, in the same town) and invitations to dinner. This did not stop her from dropping hints about her love life. She wanted to lure me with "girl talk" as she called it and, when she had a moment's free time at the office, would stand by my desk and update me on her romantic liaisons. Apparently she was torn between two men, one who was local and treated her like a queen, and the other, an asshole in another state who had treated her like shit until local man started to pay her more attention.

It didn't take a detective to figure out that local man was a colleague, considering legal girl worked long hours, leaving little time for outside-the-company romances. When I asked her, she grew huffy and said, "I'm not going to answer that question." This essentially, answered my question, though I still didn't know exactly who. Thanks to Jane, I now knew. I questioned D's taste in women, but thought, whatever floats your boat. 

And then I caught a glimpse of what Jane meant when she said that D was The. Nicest. Guy. Somethings actions/words you will never forget because they come so out of the blue, yet when they do, you realize you had misread someone, or really, it is a culmination of all the subtleties you had sensed but were too busy worrying about things like work phones to evaluate correctly.

At one point over the din, D noticed I had not yet ordered a drink (I was not planning to drink), and with a concerned look, waved for the server.

"Please sir, could we get the lady a drink?"

It was a line from another era and it melted the ice I had frozen around him.

We drank, ate, laughed. The evening ended and we stood in the parking lot saying goodbye.

"This was fun," I said to D, and he nodded, a cigarette in his hands.

"We used to do this all the time," he told me, "back then when some other people were here... but the company went through some changes and those people aren't here anymore. But yeah, we should do this more often."

I never saw the interviewee again, but was confident then that I would see D et al. the very next morning.

And I did. The next day my boss had an issue with his cellphone, and I brought it down to D. His desk was as a busy IT person's should be: stacked with old laptops and cellphones and bundles of wires. His many monitors blinked with interfaces I would never understand  - I did not bother to look too closely. On the walls of his cubicle were pinned a small company banner and a photo of a motorcyclist on a race track, leaning dangerously close to the road.

"And how can I help you?"

I turned and there he was, the kind sir who had made sure I got my drink the night before. I handed him my boss's phone.

"I'll take care of it," he said.

Later that afternoon it was ready and to save him a trip upstairs, I said, "I'll come down and get it."

"Okay," he said, "You could use the exercise."

Ah. The solemn Pakistani jokes. I wrote back, "Great. I'll start by punching you in the face."  

He really enjoyed that. We became friends in the tentative way you become friends with someone at work. He was not whom I thought he was and I was certainly not the "sweet and lady-like" whatever he thought I was. His comment opened the doors for me to joke in return and for a few weeks after he would, whenever I appeared, pretend to duck or say, "Oh no, do I need to grab my helmet?"


Around this time legal girl began to pester me more and more about her love life. She was torn. The asshole was coming back and wasn't so much of an asshole anymore. He wanted her back. Wanted to move in. Did this imply marriage? He told her he loved her, and even though he had treated her like shit, she wanted to be with him. This left local man out of the equation.

"I feel terrible," legal girl said, "I'm going to tell local man soon that I'm going back to the asshole. He's going to be so pissed. He's going to say I led him on."

I'll never know what series of events or what train of thought led D from storming around legal girl's desk, embittered by her rejection of him to his sudden attention to me, but it would not be far-fetched to say the two were related. Legal Girl had said that D was looking to settle down and get married - that he had not proposed to her, but had proposed, in one conversation or other, a future together. He could envision it...could she?

She had shaken her head vehemently. She was Christian! Her parents were missionaries, for Christ's sake, literally. He was a Pakistani man with a foggy yet intact Muslim background. She had laughed at the thought of them being together and needless to say, he was enraged, then despondent. All this from legal girl's lips and never from D's. I'll never know the whole story - but regardless of whom pursued who, D was pissed at Legal Girl because according to him, she had pursued him. I surmise he had grown to like her, and then she had turned around and chosen an asshole when from the very beginning, even when D wasn't interested, he had been The. Nicest. Guy. Ever.

Shortly after legal girl chose, D and I bitched about her on a long drive from our office to LA, where there was a company event. We rode with the receptionist and an IT contractor from Australia who had instantly become one of D's best friends, and they laughed at our vindictive comments. That evening in LA however, I learned that D could drink far too much and still, frighteningly, feel confident enough to drive us all home.

"You aren't driving," I said, "Give me the keys." And holding a drink, his millionth one that night, he put his hands up and smiled in what he thought must have been a charming manner, but to me, looked purely foolish.

"I can drive, Betty," he said, "No problem. You seem so fun but now you're just uptight! Just dance!"

It was nearing two in the morning and I had to work the next day. We all did, but I need more sleep than the average employee and wanted to get home. Alive.

"You're not driving, D."

"I can drive."

"You can't. You won't."

"I can drive."

It went on like this for several more minutes until it became clear to him that for me and the receptionist, who had already taken off her painfully high heels, the evening was over. I drove them back to the office, a shadow having crossed my overall impression of D. I am judgmental. Undeniable and unapologetic. It irritated me to see a thirty-four year man drink so recklessly. Offer to drive four people home so recklessly.

As the weeks went on, I gathered that that reckless might as well have been D's middle name. From other coworkers I learned that he liked to drink. A lot. What happened in LA had happened many times in the past: at the company Christmas party, on dozens of happy hours with "the old crowd," and most likely every night in his apartment. He lived alone with his dog, an aging chihuahua with a bevy of joint and organ problems. He loved the dog dearly and would often go home to walk and feed it in the afternoons. Often he would respond to my emails with a house phone. "What are you doing at home," I'd ask. "I'm feeding my dog," he said. "I don't like to leave him alone for too long."

From D himself I learned his passion for fast cars, motorbikes and racing.

"Isn't that dangerous," I said.

"Nah." he said, then thought for a moment, "Well, yeah, but I'm not scared or anything." Later he forwarded me photographs of a car he had totaled - I had driven the same car in high school and knew it was something of a tank, more likely to crush other cars than be crushed. But the photographs showed a vehicle so mangled it seemed impossible that the driver was alive and sending me the photos.

"That's awful," I said without humor.

"But I'm fine. It happened. It's done," he said lightly. He shrugged as though it were no big deal and I thought about his dead parents and brother. Would I shrug too, if I had lost so many loved ones in a week?

It had not been my intention to create some sort of alliance with D regarding legal girl, nor did I intend to send him an invitation to woo me. Though slowly, uncomfortably, I sensed a redirection of his attention from legal girl to me. I was neither flattered nor mortified, just bemused - what a quick turn of interest! 

Little treats began to appear on my desk. The Australian, an eager wing man, began to make more and more trips upstairs to ask me about my weekend plans on D's behalf.

"D and I are going to do this or that," he would say, offering me a chocolate covered cherry or some other sweet treat, "It's going to be wicked."

"Sounds fun," I'd say, chewing.

"Are you interested? D's gonna drive and he says he can pick you up."

Thanks but no thanks, I said, and, "The chocolates are great! Thanks for bringing them up."

"Don't thank me," the Australian would say, "Thank D. He told me to bring them up here."

I was not being coy, but straightforward. Or at least I hoped. And I always did thank D for whatever he did for me, but I invited nothing further. What was the point? I had painted him once, been wrong, and he had repainted himself - the nicest guy, true true, but not my guy. Not in a million years.

--------

In the middle of this, D discovered my blog. In truth, I don't remember if I shared the link with him or if he found out via his mysterious IT ways. But he began to read. 

I warned him to keep his mouth shut, because I was writing about people we both knew - legal girl included - and he said in that light, no-big-deal way of his, "Of course. Your secret is safe with me." 

Except it wasn't. He had seen a post about my boss playing golf in Australia and mentioned it to his boss, an avid golf player, who then wrote me and said, "Your blog is beautiful." I was angry and warned D again. Don't tell ANYONE, I said. And he said again, "Of course, of course." 

A few days later my boss called me into his office. 

"Don't tell anyone what's on my calendar. I told you this before," he said. 

"I don't tell anyone anything." 

He stared at me, "You told D that I went golfing in Australia and he told Greg, and Greg, he gets jealous whenever I golf with a celebrity and I have to hear about it." 

I apologized and made a mental note to really punch D in the face. 

Though I never got the chance. 

Last week. 

His last week. 

On Tuesday after Christmas, I walked in the office and found on my desk a small shopping bag. Atop it lay a small red square of cardstock, cut, it seemed, from a poster. I knew it was from D - I recognized the handwriting. But it was going to be a busy week - my boss had been away on vacation and due back the next day. I had to clean house. I read it swiftly: 

"To a talented writer..." 

I don't remember the rest because someone called me away and it was many hours later that I finally found the time to open the gift. There were two: the first an angry birds beanie that he perhaps bought on a whim because he thought it was cute, though it almost embarrassed me to hold it up. I quickly stuffed it back to the bottom of the bag, along with the red card. I thought, "Does he know me at all?" The other was carefully selected, which showed me that on some level, he did.

It was a Cross pen, masculine and sleek, not unlike the motorbike D was riding when he lost control at a bend in the road and was hurled into a tree stump.

-----------

He "lived" for less than twelve more hours before the game of telephone began, which is how my pretty coworker came to call me on New Year's Eve with a worried note in her voice. A few hours later my boss called to see if I had heard. 

"I'm not sure of anything," I said, which was half true, "What have you heard?"

"I heard that D is dead." 

It was strange to hear the word, "dead" for which "He didn't make it" is a euphemism. My boss is not one for euphemisms. 

"Let me call HR," I said. Both our voices were without emotion. I called HR, who sounded as though she'd been crying. 

"I heard that D died," I said, "Is that true?" 

"Yeah," she said, "He was in an accident." 

We exchanged a few more pointless affirmations and I called my boss back. 

"Oh," he said, his voice then sounded younger, almost childish, and I pictured a seven year old boy watching as his tower of legos came crumbling down, "Ask if there's anything we can do." 

"Okay," I said, though I knew of course there was nothing.

---------

On Tuesday, as per my rule of not leading him on, I said nothing until he messaged me.

"Did an angry bird drop by your desk or something?"

I feigned ignorance until then, "So it was you!" I wrote, "Thanks D! That's so thoughtful of you!"

The rest of the week passed in a blur. The Cross pen sat unopened and unused on my desk at home. I cried in front of my boss on Wednesday. Wondered how long I could stay at my job on Thursday and spoke briefly to D on the phone Friday afternoon because he wanted to know if one of the VPs was upstairs. I answered him absentmindedly, annoyed that he was calling me about this when I was already so busy, and when ten minutes later he appeared he seemed irritated as well.

"Betty, the whole point of my calling you to ask was so you could save me a trip upstairs."

I wanted to murder him. I was dying, couldn't he see that? But I remembered the pen and the card - where did I put that small red card? - and apologized. "I'm sorry D. I'm just...not paying attention today."

"You okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine. I'm just tired. I'm sorry."

"It's okay, no big deal." He shrugged in that easy way of his and walked towards the door that led to the back stairs.

I turned away from my computer and watched him go, thinking about the note he had written on the small red card.Where was it? Had I thrown it away? He opened the door, and before it closed, turned to smile. I waved then turned back to my monitor. Emails. So many emails. All urgent.

Or were they? I started to type again, then heard one of the accountants say to another, "See you next year!"

I winced. To D, I had forgotten to say, "Happy New Year."

Monday Night Lament

I realized just now, five minutes ago, that this was my first winter sans winter break. In all fairness, I did have a winter break: a measly two days tacked onto this whirlwind holiday weekend, but four days(!) pales in comparison to the two week or month long breaks I was accustomed to in the past.

It's strange to think that this time last year, I was moving out of Berkeley. I was eating at my favorite restaurants one last time, packing all my stuff into my dad's SUV, waving goodbye to roommates and friends, wondering if I'd ever walk the tree-lined streets of Berkeley again. I was so eager to go home and start "real" life, but of course I was still a solid three months away from real life. My parents generously awarded me a two-month trip to Asia for finishing my degree, for which they'd held their breath two years. Underneath it all I was waiting to hear back from the Fulbright commission - if I got it, I'd be off again, living a (government-funded) student's life abroad under the guise of writing about family history. As long as there was no envelope in the mailbox I was free to travel here and there and delay job hunting.

That was my last hurrah for a while. I spent January catching up with old friends, going to Vegas, baking, reading, lounging around. February and March were spent in Taipei, with short bouts to Hong Kong, Japan and Shanghai. I was happy to be traveling, but at the same time felt something deservedly ominous growing in my heart - that I was somehow having too much fun, and that it was only a matter of time before God said, "I think you've had enough."

I reasoned with myself that I deserved it. But then Karma's voice came back: "Yeah, but three months? And if you get the Fulbright, you're never going to find a job. You're going to tell yourself, 'What's the point, if I have to quit in July anyway?'" Karma was right - I was thinking exactly that. But I had gotten past round one - didn't that entitle me to enjoy some much deserved time off?

Apparently not. The envelope finally came, a slender, pure white "no, thank you," and had I not been so happy with my situation at home (most of my closest friends had somehow ended up close by), the color and hope I had held onto for the coming year might have drained from my face.

Karma rewards those who actually want the Fulbright (and a slew of other things) for the right reasons. I was, in all honestly, looking to delay "real life" for as long as possible. For all my talk about hating school and the academic life, I was a prime example of what everyone loves about school: I hated writing the essays, yet reviled in the sense of accomplishment they gave when I turned one in. I hated exams, yet loved exam days because they were short and straightforward. Come in, take out pen, write for two hours, turn in. Done. Nothing passes a long school day like a few lengthy exams - you always want the clock to slow down rather than speed up.

But time flies and I am now a 9-5er, or an 8:30 to whenever, as our company goes. I am often too exhausted to think, and it frightens me because I know my job is nowhere near as exhausting as some other jobs. In college people who were only a few years older but who had been working full time for a while whispered to me, "If you're smart, you'll stay in school for as long as possible." I didn't understand this because I didn't recognize that school was a haven of sorts - it didn't matter if you hated what you were studying - your presence there indicated, for most people (unless you were an Asian kid forced into med school or electrical engineering), that you had made the choice. You had somehow found the funds and were there to learn and discover. I didn't see it that way and instead spent hours in certain classes scowling at over eager students and pompous professors and the false importance both groups assigned to essays and dissertations and exams - who the hell cares who or what influenced Nabokov? Well, I did, sort of, but not nearly enough to think of pursuing a master's degree never mind a PhD.

Looking back however, it was for me, the ideal lifestyle. I fancied myself a productive person, but school gave me the perfect balance between making progress in my life overall (I was, after all, working towards a degree, however useless it would prove in the job hunt) and doing nothing at all - sometimes, I wonder where the true progress lay: in the hours I spent in class or the quiet mornings and evenings I spent walking through the tree-lined streets? It provided both structure and absolute freedom - I had a community, and yet I was alone. My parents were an eight-hour drive south, my roommates knew not to disturb me if my door was closed, and friends, if I wished to see them, were a text message and then a short stroll away. I could miss class too, and my professors would not care - (the budget cuts cut more than just money).

Call me stupid. No one likes papers and essay tests (With the sole exception of my friend Elena who annotates her books for fun) - but it's a small price to pay for that balance I so wish I could have now. And looking back, I could have been mistaken for one of the students who cared too much about grades and had doctorate dreams because I was always lingering outside my professor's office and starting papers early (so I could turn them in early and go home early for Thanksgiving/Winter Break). But I realized that the happiness I felt when I was out of class, browsing through the massive university library at my leisure, laying around on campus near a running stream, underneath a willow, with the campanile in the background was a happiness almost exclusive to my time as a student. And now, at 10:55 PM on the last day of my meager "winter break," it makes me wistful. Did I squeeze out every last drop?

Monday Musing

In high school, our lesbian (? no one ever really knew for sure) English teacher had us write short, freestyle essays over the weekend to turn in on Monday. She called them "Monday Musings," though a good handful of us thought "The Late Sunday Night Pain in the Ass" would have been a more fitting name. I liked the idea of them (even though I waffled in and out of the Pain in the Ass group), because it was a guaranteed page and a half that I had to write. I did it for the grade, the same reason for which I did most things in high school, but sometimes I'd stand by the printer and realize that what was coming out was something I was quite anxious to turn in.

The questionable lesbian wasn't the best teacher, but she liked me (the first in a longer-than-it-should-be line of questionable lesbians) and wrote encouraging remarks on my papers with her blue felt-tipped pens. She had the loopy, elegant script of female English teachers and if one were to judge her by her penmanship alone, would never question her femininity. She enjoyed reading our work and wrote at a slant in the margins her thoughts on a particular line or paragraph and at our papers' end, would suggest how we might further develop our ideas thought. Most student's musings were half or quarter-assed, but for those who showed promise and who were unwittingly carried away by the writing itself, Ms. M's slanted lines were some of the earliest encouragement us budding writers would receive. Sometimes she could be harsh if it was too obvious the student had written the Monday Musing during Monday lunch (which was at least an hour) or worse, during Morning Nutrition, which was just ten minutes.

"Please turn in something of better quality or nothing at all," she'd write.

In her AP English class, I was the student who was always tired in a sad, mysterious way. I was an exhausted senior who had realized a little too early on that perhaps college wasn't the answer to all of high school's trivialities. That trivialities (pointless assignments, projects, etc.) continued in college and often, depending on the sort of job you landed, well into one's career. Sometimes, trivialities followed people to their graves and were, just short of being engraved on one's tombstone, worked into one's eulogy. "So and so was a great colleague. Did great work, etc. Etc."

Alright, perhaps I hadn't thought so far...but I was dreading the murkiness I saw in front of me. This dread tired my young face and it showed. In the way unhappiness attracts nosy wonderment, I bathed in the Ms. M's pity and concern whereas other exhausted students (such as my cheerleader friend Grace) only incurred her wrath. When it came time to turn in our senior projects, I had nothing despite that we had the entire year to work on it. The night before our projects were due, I sat in front of my computer and a blank poster board with a glum look on my face, a muted worry churning in my chest. I cared about my grades. But I didn't really care. I had spent five dollars on that blank poster board, gone through the motions at Staples, stood in line and paid for it and drove it home, wondering how something so thin and light could feel so heavy. The intent, I suppose, was to fill it with lies. Back in September I had proposed to a small committee of over-enthusiastic teachers that I would learn the basics of Japanese. I would keep a weekly log, charting my progress and have knowledgeable adults (my father's friend Greg Takino) sign off on my reports.

I did none of it. I knew the first five letters of the Japanese "alphabet," and to whip up a log of all the rest that I hadn't learned at 10PM sounded downright exhausting.

The poster board was a blinding white, yet I had never seen anything so abysmal. At eleven PM I decided that staring at the poster board for an hour was a good indicator that staring an hour more was useless. I shut my computer off and, if memory serves me right, went to bed or watched a movie or, as I often do in the summers, went swimming. I could have done it, created the project out of thin air, but there were some other things I wanted to do instead. It wasn't nihilism per se, but in high school, on the edge of college enrollment, it was very very close. Maybe I swam. Maybe I didn't. But it went quiet in my head and something had been cleared. I heard the faint buzz of the rest of my classmates pounding and pasting and lying away (because really, no one does the senior project) on their own blinding white poster boards, but in my room, there was no such noise. Just the silence of truth about to be delivered.

The next day I seemed strangely alert compared to the rest of my classmates, all of them bleary eyed from having stayed up late to "finish" their projects. A wall of poorly constructed poster boards lined the back of the classroom and sitting in the front of the classroom, I felt almost glad that mine was not there to join their shoddy ranks.

Class ended. I waited until all the other students filed out and approached Ms. M, who sat leaning on her podium. She looked up.

"Betty, I can't wait to review all these senior projects," her steely blue eyes stared past me and swept across the back wall. "Remind me again, what was your project on?"

I cleared my throat, "I proposed to learn Japanese. Well, the basics."

"Oh wonderful! How did that go?"

"I wanted to talk to you about that."

"Uh-oh." She put her pen down, and put on her "I'm concerned about you" face, with widened eyes to match. "Are you doing okay? Do you need more time?"

"Ms. M, I don't have my project." 

"Okay, do you need more time? All you had to do was ask for an extension."

"No. I just don't have it. I didn't do it."

"Oh." She looked crestfallen, as though she would have been the sole beneficiary of my senior project. "Why?"

I twisted my hands. It would have been too easy to cry then. And truly, I did ponder her question. Why? Why didn't I do it? Why didn't I feel the urgency or the weight of these final grades? Hadn't I, at the beginning of the year, planned to finish strong? Hadn't I promised myself and my parents that senior year was an important gateway to college - and that whatever bad habits I had were to be trampled until dead so I could fly away for college a sleek and disciplined bird? I didn't know why I did not do the senior project. Or I did. I did not care.  

What I said was almost that. "I don't know Ms. M. I don't know. I just didn't and I didn't want to lie about it. I'm sorry."

She stared at me long and hard. I watched her irises contract and widen, doing a quick calculation - what was wrong with this Betty? Was she depressed? Most likely. I had her for ninth grade English and she was a good student then, and still is, despite this senior project snafu and her occasional falling alseep, a good student now. It must be trouble at home. She wrote that one Monday Musing at the beginning of the year about being tired because she was arguing with her parents about her SATs.

It wasn't that I had a particularly tough year. I went through the college admissions wringer along with the rest of my class, though "escaped" four months early by applying early decision to NYU and was accepted in December. Naturally, I mentally checked out of senior year as soon as I opened the mailbox and saw the big envelope.

"Now I can dick around," I think, was my exact thought as I opened said envelope.

But Ms. M didn't need to know that. What she saw wasn't a student who no longer wanted to invest herself in her studies, but a student who couldn't invest herself anymore because of unsaid troubles at home.

"Betty," she said finally, "I've been watching you struggle for this whole past semester. I don't know what is going on, but you can certainly, certainly talk to me any time about it."

I nodded gravely, though really, there wasn't much to say. I was staying up late most nights watching movies. My parents had stopped giving me shit about my grades and the SATs a few months back since I turned in my college applications and aside from the occasional warning about wasting their money at an expensive private school and studying something useless like Art or English, had pretty much checked out as well, tucking away their tiger tails.

"I appreciate your honesty." Ms. M said, "It takes guts to tell the truth like that. I won't penalize your final grade."

The senior project was worth ten percent of our grade. had it been counted, it would have given me a B-plus in English, which for a socially awkward, video-game addicted Asian boy would be almost acceptable, but not for me, even in my academically apathetic state. I breathed a quiet sigh of relief and put my hands together in prayer, holding them up to my lips to hide my maniacal grin.

"Thank you so much, Ms. M. I know I don't deserve this, but I'm really grateful you understand."

"Remember Betty. You can talk to me anytime. I know this is a strange time for all you seniors."

"It is," I said,  already turning towards the door. Perhaps my next Monday Musing would be an ode to honesty.

Groundwork: The First Stone

A month ago Courage sent me this essay. I clicked it open and seeing it's length, put it off to read some other time. Courage pestered me again and again, "Have you read it yet? I think you will really like it." And each time I said, "I'll get to it, I'll get to it." Finally one afternoon at work I printed it out and despite a barrage of phone calls and emails and errands, managed to read it there at my desk and once again when I got home in the quiet of my room.

To be sure I don't relate in the way another famous writer would relate, but this will be, like my beloved Hopper paintings, one of those pieces that I refer to again and again. It so clearly captures those paradoxically personal yet universal convictions.

"...let me make a general observation -- the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, implausible, often the "impossible," come true. (Maybe Fitzgerald is talking about assumptions...) Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man -- you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star, but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied -- but I for one, would not have chosen any other."

With the New Year just around the corner, I want to lay out some groundwork for the coming year. This may be a foolish thing to do - a setting-up for blogging failure, of which I always feel at the edge, despite the increasing number of "drafts" that are populating my post list. Of 116 posts, 99 are "published," which means 17 posts are languishing offstage. How many of those will ever see the light of cyberspace? It's hard to say. I have not deleted them because I earnestly envision their completion, but really, are any of these "stories" or "vignettes" or "thoughts" ever completed? I go back to reread some and always end up tweaking them: adding, subtracting, streamlining, fleshing-out. Though of my few readers, who goes back to reread those edits?

Or worse than foolish, it may be too late. I began this blog a little under two years ago (Very Highbrow will turn two on February 17, 2012) and averaged one post per week, a shoddy rate for someone who claims to write often. But I think that's my problem. I do write often, hence all the damn drafts, but I don't publish often because I wanted this blog to be different from my older, more blather-filled blogs (of teenaged me). I wanted people to read only "finished" works. And because of this self-applied pressure to "finish" the post before posting and being stuck on certain drafts and then leaving the blog alone for weeks at a time, whatever interest I could hold slowly trickled away.

Perhaps the groundwork I speak of is more about loosening the reins. Not that there will be more blather on this blog, but certainly more room for me to post more often, "finished" posts or just a fleeting thought.

Dirty Windows

"I assume, therefore I am wrong." 

When I am a famous writer, that will be a famous quote.

In elementary school Lisa Casey chastised me for assuming something, I have long forgotten what.

"Never assume, Betty." she said, her voice thick with undeserved authority. "Especially when you haven't the facts. That's a bad habit."

She was precocious for her age, having learned too young from her detective father to distrust and manipulate. Her mother was a judge, and when I met them both, they seemed not as sharp as the detectives and judges I saw on TV, but Lisa was another story. I wish I remembered what it was I had assumed to better flesh out this story, but the point is that I made an assumption, was wrong, and was called out on it by a girl my age who knew most importantly that one must have the facts to make a true, sound judgement. I felt deeply ashamed. What I do remember are my cheeks burning and my self-questioning: why did I assume that? What gave me the right to jump to such conclusions? What a terrible and embarrassing habit!

If my brain were a processor, it would be the latest Intel whatever, albeit a defective one. I'm the queen of snap judgements, (if titles were given for that sort of thing), and what's more (and worse), I tend to stick by my judgments until slowly proven otherwise. It is a terrible thing to be: judgmental and, for lack of a better word, narrow-minded. I am too lazy to do the research required to flesh out my skeletal judgments and instead, assign labels and story lines from afar. So and so much be such and such because of this and that. For some, "narrow-minded" and "judgmental" are synonymous. For me, they ought not to be. I have no qualms with being judgmental; rather, I'd like to be judgmental in a broad-minded and accurate way.

There is plenty of literature on judgment and more specifically, snap judgement. Most notably, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, the title itself which in the wrong hands, can be misinterpreted as encouragement and, more recently, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow which warns that we must recognize both the "power" allotted us by snap judgments as well as the limitations.


Whatever power I find in judgment is almost always without fail, taken away once I come to understand that which I judge. Usually, people. Over and over again I learn that my particular kind of judgment, based upon baseless assumptions, it is not power at all but a weak and brittle shield. It is a filthy glass window I erect between myself and the subject. Once this shield is up, I almost never choose to clean the glass first. They, unexpectedly more broad-minded than I, wipe a bit off their side, allowing me a glimpse into their world. Only then, with their light shining through, do I begrudgingly wipe some grime off my side.

August Renoir, Portrait of Madame Alphonse Daudet, 1876. Or, Me Judging You.

 Perhaps you have already learned. Perhaps you can meet someone and take them at face value - it is not a game to you because you are not judgmental in a bad way. You evaluate, sure, but you do not make a game of it by guessing their inner nature, interests, passions, relationships with their family, the way they treat their boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, children, employees, etc. etc. etc., but I play this game because that's what writers do. It's how fiction is born, how profiles are made - it's safer, from a reporting standpoint to lay out the facts and let the readers assume what they will about certain people, but where's the fun in that?

Fun yes. Dangerous, too.

Take the office, for example: ninety-nine percent of the assumptions I made during my first week have already been upended. The fact that my assumptions were proven wrong is not surprising - it is a large part of my life story, this never-ending sentimental education. What's frightening is the smug certainty, still, with which I made these assumptions, each one so damning and limiting for both myself and others. 

I was so sure that the stony-faced IT guy with a name not unlike Howard David and who always wears a short-sleeved plaid shirt over a t-shirt was awkward and antisocial and lacked a sense of humor, until he came up to fix my computer and made me laugh uncontrollably with his straight-faced sarcasm. And even after many of these encounters, I still assumed unfairly, that he was single and had trouble getting girls, until I asked about his weekend plans and he said simply that he was going hiking with his girlfriend of two years rather than staying in and playing WOW, as I had imagined.

Along the same vein, I was so sure that Cindy, the overweight accountant who had generously supplied me with company gossip in her cloying little girl's voice, was single. She had to be. She was fat, for one thing, and she dressed horribly in ill-fitting trouser shorts (a stupid sartorial oddity), fishnet stockings and knit-poncho tops in patterns and colors inspired, it seemed, by puddles of vomit in the streets of Downtown LA. She insisted on tying her hair up in a little top knot which from behind made her look like a retired, cross-dressing sumo-wrestler. Worse yet she had a FOB's penchant for all things pink and Hello Kitty. I failed to notice the engagement ring, so distracting was her ensemble. And really, I thought, who would date her?

"She's had a live-in boyfriend/fiance for the past two years," Jane said dryly, which killed me just a little bit. If for some reason her man is tall, handsome, kind and successful, I may shoot myself in the face.

I was so sure that the short and stocky VP of Marketing was a pompous asshole with the world's worst Napoleon complex until I began gathering evidence of the opposite: that he was just a yes man who struggles to please his boss along with the rest of us and has to, because of his position and his stature, put up a front of extreme confidence. How else would he be credible in his position? I learned that he is somewhat a broken man, his wife having left him some time ago, and that whatever is left of him is being torn across opposite sides of the country, his job tugging him to the west and his daughters to the east. Life is a balancing act, but he juggles too many people in too many states and the obligations they all come with, none of which can be neglected without painful emotional repercussions. I thought he had aged well, until I realized he was ten years younger than what I guessed.

I was so sure that Janet, a girl only a few years older and who had started out as the assistant to the President, would have much in common with me and would, when I suggested we have dinner one night, be as helpful and insightful as our dinner would be fun. I mistook the grime for beautiful stained glass and imagined a possible friendship with a woman who, at work, was pleasant with a sing song voice, all of which I now find to be fraud of the highest order. Instead, she was neither helpful nor insightful, but supremely condescending and as pretentious as our dinner was meatless (very, as we ate at a vegetarian restaurant). She had studied Chinese Art History at Yale and then was halfway through a PhD program at Cornell when she called it quits and via family connections, came to work at the company. When I asked why she quit, she shrugged and in the world's longest non sequitur, rattled off all the PhD programs she had been accepted to - all the Ivies, essentially, except for Harvard, whose program was just "decent" anyway, and that she ultimately chose Cornell because it seemed like a great fit and blah blah blah... I tuned her out then, concentrating on my vegesoy patty and silently congratulating Harvard for having exercised excellent judgment in the case of denying Janet admission. Whatever others may say, it is indeed a world-class institution.

I was so sure that my Boss, in the easy, relaxed way he interviewed me and his overall calm demeanor, would not be as detail-oriented as he claimed to be. This was among the most dangerous assumptions to make and one that I am still struggling to correct, though in my defense I am certain my boss made the opposite assumptions about me, as I arrived on the scene on time and well groomed with a bright and vivacious energy I reserve expressly for interviews. Though perhaps this is more my acting and projecting an idealized version of myself rather than his assuming anything. 

I was so sure that Peter, the pale guy in marketing with the rather ostentatious fuel-guzzling German sports car and a penchant for tony, waterfront dining establishments was a modern princeling of sorts. In addition to the labor associated with a computer keyboard, his white hands seemed to know only the touch of his steering wheel and the stem of a full wine glass. He lived alone and I, curious about princeling's dietary habits, once asked him if he cooked.

He thought for a moment, then replied, "I boil."

I was unsurprised. His response nestled nicely into the formula of my assumptions, and I was hell bent on my faulty math, too focused on single variables rather than the whole equation. Thus I was immensely surprised when I learned that Peter was quite the handyman and rather enjoyed tools and building things.

"I'm all home projects, all the time," he said, "Over Christmas break, I'm converting half my closet into a workshop. I need the space for my tools."

"That's so strange," I said, "I never thought you'd be the type to do anything like that yourself."

"Why?"

I mentioned our brief dialogue about his limited culinary repertoire.

"You thought I was a pussy who feared tools because I can't cook? How are the two even related?"

Not quite that, and they aren't, but it was futile to explain my though process because my final answer was wrong. I had flattened Peter out along with all the others, stepped on his dimensions and assigned him a role and a personality that fit as poorly as Cindy's trouser shorts. I had turned the truth into a pale fiction and writer or not, that is never a good thing.

Edouard Manet The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, 1868-69

Chinese Opera

My grandma likes coleslaw. She fries some dumplings for my dinner, twelve more than I ask for, saying she will eat some as well. But she eats only four and then reaches into the fridge for a leftover carton of coleslaw from KFC.

"I like this...salad," she says, "It's one thing Americans make right."

Before dinner I ask my grandpa if he likes dumplings, as this is my grandma's specialty. In her heyday she could make over 400.

"That wasn't news, honey," she says, holding up her hands as though there were a watermelon sized ball of dough between them. "I could make that many easy. And I did so for many years. But then I fell and had to enlist your grandpa to roll out the dumpling skins." She gives him a look, "That's when productivity really went downhill."

He isn't listening. His hands are folded in his lap and his head is turned toward the television, where Beijing opera singers are warbling on a sparse stage. A man with a long black beard and fierce eyebrows is crying about something. I can't understand, but my grandpa shakes his head, the old frown playing on his old face.

I try to make him smile and ask him a favorite question, one I know the answer to.

"Do you like dumplings?"

He shakes his head again, but the frown softens.

"Well you sure did marry the wrong person," I say.

My grandma sits down slowly, using her arms to hold herself against the table. She has weak legs but strong arms, and she winces slightly from the bruises on her hips and shoulders. Weak legs caused her to fall against the windowsill the day before Thanksgiving. She split her forehead open, doused the carpet in blood and now she sports a Frankenstein cut over her forehead and the world's most vibrant bruise down the right side of her face. Her right eye is swollen, but I can see it clearly when she rolls it. She is a hardy woman. She fell. Blacked out. Woke up a little dizzy half an hour later, her face covered in blood, and then proceeded to the bathroom to wash the blood off.

My grandfather woke to the sound of water running at 1AM and went to find his wife covered in blood.

My grandfather has a strong heart. He panicked, but dialed my uncle, who drove them both to the hospital. In the car, my grandfather wrung his hands in his lap. He wonders if he is lucky to have heard the water running, or lucky that my grandmother awoke at all, and did not bleed to death on the carpet. The whole way to the hospital, he is thinking this.

My grandmother has weak legs, but strong arms. Arms that were once capable of making over 400 dumpling in one morning, but now can probably only do a hundred and fifty or so.

"Seventy years is a long time to be married to the wrong person," she says, rolling her eyes and nodding at my grandpa. "He's a strange creature, that one. Strange." If she spoke English, she would have said, "and a huge pain in my ass."

Without a word, my grandpa rises slowly too - he has moderately weak legs and, when he was younger, a scholar's hands. He walks slowly to the hot water dispenser and presses down on the top, filling his insulated tea mug with the hideous painted swans.

"Seventy years," my grandpa says, in between pumps. I see him eying the mottled skin on his hands and thinking back, perhaps, to when he did not move so slowly and when the sound of running water at 1AM wouldn't have meant anything. Seventy years. Seventy years. In Chinese he says, "how cruel life is," but I know he is thinking, as I am thinking, how strange and wonderful.

"Marriage was different then." My grandma leans back in her chair and puts one leg up, a sign that she's about to tell me something. "I got married at eighteen and right away I moved in with your grandpa's family. I had to take care of four generations. Four! I had to please them all and make sure the house ran smoothly. Women back then were different. We made everything by hand. We weren't afraid of hard work. We had to make our own clothes, trousers, even shoes!

Camille Pissarro, Madame Pissarro Sewing, 1885

My grandpa's mug is filled and he has seated himself back at the table. He nods along to my grandma's words.

"Your grandpa was lucky - he married a smart one."

I burst out laughing, and I can see a shadow of a smile on grandpa's lips. But he nods.

"What! It's true!" my grandma purses her lips. "I learned quickly. My mother raised me to be useful because my father died when I was thirteen. Women had work, but not all women did it. There were plenty of girls that just ran wild in the street, girls that didn't even know how to hold a needle, but my mother wouldn't let me become one of those girls."

My grandma shakes her head sadly, as though I have just come in from running wild in the streets.

"If you weren't married by 23, you were an old maid. No one wanted you then!"

Now it is my turn to give her a look.

"Well of course times are different now," she says, "Back then you were defined by your marriage. If you look at me, you wouldn't say I need a man." She leans in close to me and lowers her voice, "Just between you and me, your strange egg grandpa would not last a week without me." I turn to look at him, with his hands folded in his lap, his lips pursed. They would be pursed forever if it wasn't for my grandma goading him to talk now and then. She leans back, content that I know who's who in this relationship, then shrugs. "But that's just how it was."

"Women back then were different," my grandpa says suddenly. He gives me a look and this time, smiles for real. I know he is thinking about me at family dinners, how my voice is the loudest. How I talk too fast. Say too much. Laugh too loud, and then says exactly what I expect him to say, "They didn't talk so much, for one thing."

My grandpa takes his blood pressure with his glasses on, recording the numbers in a little notebook. They seem wildly different from day to day, and I ask him how accurate the readings are. Not very he says, but continues to write down the numbers.

They are examining their medication cases, those long plastic bars that have a compartment for each day of the week.

My grandpa gives me a serious, thoughtful look.

What day is it?

Sunday.

Ah. I forgot to take these this morning.

My grandma roles her eyes. What else is new.

Ah well, he says, then motions for my grandmother's arm. Let's take your blood pressure. She lays it out on the table, one strong arm. Seventy years, I think. At least she must have made 400 hundred dumplings at least once a month. 4800 dumplings a year.

336,000 dumplings, just in the course of her marriage, not including when she wasn't yet married and made dumplings for her own family.  

I write on my phone as the machine groans and squeezes my grandma's arms.

146 over 56 my grandpa reads, and diligently writes it down next to his numbers. Blood pressure. Heart beats. Life in numbers listed on a clean white, lined square of paper.

Are you still writing your email? My grandpa asks me.

No no, I'm done with that. I'm writing about something else.

He nods. Someone in the family told him I like to write. He turns to my grandmother. Did you take your medicine?

I'm waiting for the water to cool.

On the screen, the actors wail. My grandpa turns back to watching Beijing opera just in time to see the actor with the long black beard disappear behind a curtain and emerge with a gray beard. My grandma asks him whats going on.

The man's family was executed by the evil Emperor, and he too, is next on the list. He wants to escape, but cannot leave the palace. All the guards have their eyes on him and he has no way out. But he stays up the whole night fretting and his beard turns white from stress. The actor disappears again, and reemerges with a white beard. He laments his beard turning white, but knows it doesn't matter, because he will die soon anyway. But the next morning, the executioner does not recognize him and he is able to escape with his life. The audience applauds wildly.

I don't understand the opera, but with my grandpa's translation, I can understand the relief the man with the white beard must feel. Or perhaps my grandma can better understand. Her face is bruised and battered, but she still has her strong arms, even her weak legs. She can still tell me stories and roll her eyes and call my grandfather a strange creature. 

It's a nice story, sighs the strange creature with the strong heart. He sounds a little tired, but happy.

Edward Hopper Two Comedians, 1966 Oil on Canvas