Remember the Sweet Valley High saga from the early ’90s?
“All’s fair in love and high school….” HOLLA BACK.
When I was about eight, I was introduced to this series when experiencing a crushing blow to my self-esteem after my language arts archnemesis accused me of still being a first grader because I was still reading “Babysitter’s Club.”
Ho, I could spell “babysitter”!
Anyway.
This marked the beginning of a new era for me. Based on the lives of two All-American twins living in southern California, the series revolved around their social and love lives, including all the banal details of everyone else in their existential vicinity. Shockingly, high school was so dramatic and life-affirming at the same time. Scandals depicted were things like pimples, formulating a strategy during lunch to ask out Tom to the prom, getting your reputation destroyed after your ex-best-friend who never returned your pink pumps called you a slut for flirting with her boyfriend, fighting with your mom about wearing a crop top in public, and dieting.
It was just so raw, you know?
No, Jessica, just say no!
But I stopped reading when they started coming out with the inevitably crappy-ass spinoff.
You would think that the Wakefield twins entering the collegiate stage of their youth would be a more appropriate setting, given that they could actually do the precocious things they always bemoaned they couldn’t in their high school years (where sitting on the quarterback’s lap was as raunchy as it was going to get). Not to mention the fact that the quality of any book is automatically improved once all characters who wear letter jackets are removed.
Classy ass bookshelf right there.
But SVU books were a lot more… supernatural than their high school counterparts. Just tried way too hard to outdo the teenage shenanigans. (And not in a cool Animorphs kind of way.) I just got really confused when I finally turned to page 4398509 and just started getting really invested in Elizabeth’s new relationship, especially because she was such a straight-edge in high school, but then all of a sudden, she got bitten by a werewolf?
I DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR ANY OF THIS MYSTICAL BULLSHIT, YOU GUYS.
I can waste a lot of time trying to figure out exactly why SVU totally backfired and nearly ruined one of the defining cultural icons of my adolescence. In the end, it came down to either incompetent publishing editors or Francine getting writer’s block and trying to get rid of it with weed.
But the deal is this.
All the random insertions of vampires, haunted dorm rooms, and the occasional ski-mask creeper?
I mean… you do realize I can just go on the internet, visit a forum frequented by middle-aged housewives who go by usernames like cali_gurl69, and read fan fiction, right?
Just too much for me to handle, Frannie.
Too.
Much.
OMGZ u guyz!
I gradually segued from reading about bored, self-absorbed teenagers living in the SoCal suburbs to watching bored, self-absorbed teenagers living in the SoCal suburbs. (Why yes, there is only genre of entertainment these days.) But no show on Fox could never replace this huge part of my adolescent literary experience. Thanks to Fran’s weirdly satisfying form of Harlequin romances for grade schoolers, I know what’s really important in life.
Friends who don’t return borrowed shoes are skanks, not friends.
Meryl, listen. You’ve got to stop doing things like this. It’s enough that you basically doom any other nominee come Hollywood awards season in any year you make a movie, but I draw the line at being nominated twice in one category and then beating yourself for the trophy, shoving it down the real Julia’s mouth. Come on. Now you’re just being crass.
Neener neener neener!
On a serious note, Meryl Streep is probably severely hated in Tinseltown, but not for the obvious Oscar-hogging reasons she’s been known for. Although the camera always manages to pan to the losers’ faces at the exact moment when they purse their lips in sour jealousy while golf clapping, everyone usually has too much champagne at the afterparty to stay disappointed for long. It’s another kind of envy altogether, something less artificial and perhaps more threatening at the same time and stirred by a rare quality. In L.A., it’s known as plastic surgery, but most people refer to it as perpetuity.
People who tell me about their new year’s resolutions usually don’t know me that well. Most people who are familiar with yours truly know that the glazed look in my eyes isn’t a symptom of sympathy and understanding but rather one of complete disinterest bordering on condescending pity. I won’t be the one to break it to you because regardless of whether I tell you or not, you’re really not going to be 10 pounds thinner this time next year. Girl, they don’t make Nicorette for CHEESEBURGERS.
I think the motivation to change in people is driven by guilt instead. Until their dignity meter looks like it’s going to drop on empty, people won’t recognize the benefits of changing for the better. Unlike revenge, remorse is a dish served with leftovers mixed together until it’s a disgusting casserole that tastes like Lance Armstrong’s jock strap after the Tour de France. You just want to throw the fuck up. You know?
I also definitely forgot where I was going with this.
Anyway. In the past year (and maybe in the past decade), I think I’ve managed to function as a somewhat passable human being, partly out of conscious mini-epiphanies like, “Oh, maybe it is a bad idea to put this spoon in the microwave,” but mostly out of sheer luck. But in retrospect, some semblance of normalcy could be reintroduced in my sometimes shambles of a life. The following are some self-promises I’ve broken this past year, things that would definitely improve my quality of life but that I’ve simultaneously failed to adapt into my lifestyle. But even though I’m giving myself 350-some days to rectify them, don’t call them resolutions. I don’t want to be tacky.
Not going to lie—a little bit jealous of her happy new year right here.
Combing my hair on a daily basis
Giving bros a chance
Waking up before elevennoon one
Doing laundry without making my whites Pepto Bismol-ified
Buying a Phillips drill from Dickson’s with Lakshmi to unhinge our doors to show the fucking automatic lock who’s boss
Not eating meals that solely consist of tater tots and black coffee
Not saying “peeps”
Learning how to wink
Watering my desk fern
(Finding my desk fern)
Peeling apples without amputating my digits
Watching more Seinfeld
Watching more Brian Williams, golden tan sex god of broadcast journalism
Using tildas and asterisks more frequently cUz iT’s So kEwL~*~
Becoming an Avatar
This didn’t make it onto the list. Because, like. Exercise is hard.
And by rectify, I mean somewhat toy with the idea of contemplation, get bored, and go watch a “Parks and Recreation” marathon because it’s more fun than being self-help-y. Amy Poehler, heeey.
Remember that one day in July when we were both walking through Shinjuku together? I said, let’s stop at the crowded McDonald’s to get a McSlurpy, and you said, a Mc-what? I repeated, a McSlurpy, but I guess I just got confused with all of the different names these people give milkshapes. NO—I mean, milkshakes. Milkshapes are a different matter altogether. Though that’s neither here nor there.
So anyway, we were walking, and you told me that you fell in love with a girl exactly two days and a dozen minutes ago. I asked, how do you know it’s love. You said, it’s just the simple negation of the opposite. The absence of anger. It’s not something that exists, but rather something that doesn’t not exist. Like when you crack an egg open and let the yolk and the whites seep out slowly until the shell is all empty inside. The sudden fragmentation of your exterior that lets in all the crisp air in the world rush right through your open spaces and sends shivers through your cavernous interior. That’s what it is.
You had met her not far from where we strolled. She was in a hurry, and when she ran into you, she didn’t fall down, but her glasses slipped off her nose and crumpled on her face, the black frames all askew and surrounding her almond eyes with a shadowed outline. And it made you hungry just looking at those black pools of soul because it reminded you how much you enjoy eating delicately-shaped nuts with red wine. You said, gomen nasai, but she was too much in a hurry to take your apology as sincere. Even after she started yelling at you and demanding who the hell you thought you were to get in her way, you couldn’t stop staring at her heart-shaped face and her glasses, askance.
We stopped walking suddenly. We reached a crosswalk where the light was red. The middle-aged man standing next to us on the curb was carrying a 7-Eleven grocery bag with a smaller bag of soba and a carton of a dozen white eggs inside. One egg must have cracked because, through the plastic, there was a slimy liquid settling on the bottom. As we stood there, waiting for the light to turn green and the crowd to push me against you, I grabbed your hand and squeezed hard.
Wakaranai. What if she never forgives you, I asked. Who will repair the crack in the egg? And you laughed at me, like I was a naive little thing. You’re so silly, you told me. You can’t fix the crack. Why do you think caulk will do anything? No, you have to let it stay there for the rest of eternity. You hope that someone notices and will catch the egg that falls out. But even then, it’s a precarious situation. Because you can’t stop the yolk from seeping right through your fingers.
The light turned green and we walked across the pavement striped with white concrete paint. Some lady wearing too much makeup shoved you aside with her umbrella when she was pushing through. A skinny boy with a backpack twice his size weaved right by me. And as we were both being pushed this way and that as we crossed that street in Kabukichō, my fingers seeped through yours, like yolk flowing down a drain, leaving an empty shell behind as proof.
Are some lyrics lost in translation when reaching relatively foreign ears? Definitely, but in the full-length album Exit performed, written, and produced by Shugo Tokumaru, a damn unique act from the young Japanese scene, perhaps that’s a good thing. But calling it experimental is misrepresentative, as this album of jazz, folk, and electronic fusions culminate in a confusing yet hypnotizing pot of strange sounds not suitable for the shy.
Recorded mostly with the help of a MacBook, Exit could be referred to as the jambalaya of Japanese contemporary music. With accordions, synthesizers, and maybe even a xylophone tinkering around in the background of Tokumaru’s newest songs, the fact that the usual American listener can’t understand his Japanese lyrics serves as a non-issue, especially with the distraction of deciphering the eclectic blend of instruments Tokumaru uses to break out of a genre—or, at least, to make it his own. In the opening song “Parachute,” he propels into a fast-paced riff of guitar and synth without warning, sassing us (well, at least me) into submission. A few tracks later, Tokumaru uses a sordid cacophony of sounds in “Clocca” that somehow accompanies his gently celestial vocals with grace and leave the listener wondering just how he managed to succeed in making him believe that noise is music. But to say that his songs are illuminating doesn’t directly associate them as bright. Toward the end of the collection of whimsical audio delights, “La La Radio” and “Wedding” somberly wind down—with a banjo, no less—in a mournful pace what is undoubtedly an emotionally captivating project.
“A parachute opened too soon at a plant-covered intersection, a demon made his crossing just in time and fluttered in a gust of wind.” For the curious, a dose of the translated Japanese humming doesn’t disappoint. In fact, a small taste of Exit’s lyrical nature probably exacerbates the frustration for those who don’t innately understand Tokumaru’s native language feel when coming across strange poetry that complements an equally strange soundtrack. “If you give up on climbing the ladder, you’ll get blown away by a big wind.” A chilling forecast, and one that makes a non-Japanese feel almost okay about not being on par with the metaphor, whatever it may be.
Tokumaru brings to mind the kid in the kitchen banging on pots and pans but with the affinity and talent of the nearly 30-year-old artist he is today. With additional experience in the J-rock band Gellers, Tokumaru proves with Exit that genres don’t matter and anything and everything is fair game. And props goes out even to his choice of a western audience, making his job a little bit easier. Because we don’t even have to understand, and that just might have been the entire point.
“You forgot your glasses at my house that one day and I had to run outside with it before you disappeared from my life forever but you were walking away really fast and couldn’t hear me screaming your name across the street because you were too busy thinking things and I almost got hit by a dumb guy on a moped, backfiring down the street with his helmet half falling off.
Do people still drive Hondas these days, because I don’t think they should.”
The Lolita Syndrome isn’t and will never be a mainstream concept. It doesn’t matter how Liberal (and yes, Liberal with a Capital “L”) modern society gets; pedophilia, or any kind of age-inappropriate love, will never get less weird, not even if it turns into a fetish Paris Hilton tries to popularize. And, after almost a decade, native French speakers probably still cringe when listening to this song, what with Alizée basically crooning, “It’s not my mistake, and if I want to quit, I see the others all ready to throw themselves upon me,” simultaneously flaunting her training bra in a Moulin Rouge-y night club.
Which brings me to my point—why, then, is EVERY SINGLE COPY OF LOLITA CHECKED OUT AT THE TWELVE LIBRARIES ON CAMPUS? There are legitimate uses of this book to be made, improbably self-important and asinine papers to be written, yet there is a significant minority of people jerking off right now to Vladimir.
Nololita: the apocalypse we’ve all been waiting for.
You know how everyone complains that in the modern age, no one knows how to cook anymore because our idea of dinner involves sitting in front of the TV during primetime eating microwaved plastic that masquerades as beef while watching a scary, un-makeupped Janice Dickinson try not to scream while molesting tarantulas scurrying around in a tree trunk? Let’s all take a moment of silence to say a prayer for those spid—I mean, Janice. Anyway, sometimes I wish that actually were the case, because it would make living up to a family of culinary geniuses a lot less shameful (see previous culinary adventure). Birth fate’s a bitch, but since there’s nothing I can do about it now, I decided to make the best of it.
First, a disclaimer: I consider myself not completely useless with a spatula and cutting board. Sure, I can make an orgasmic strawberry banana smoothie or a baller tuna salad sandwich, but honestly, people shouldn’t even be allowed to brag about that. “Dang, someone fetch me a glass of water ‘cause I’m completely wiped out from putting meat on top of bread and then putting ANOTHER piece of bread ON TOP OF THAT. Then—get this—I had to press that shit TOGETHER.” Sorry to bust out the Debbie Downer, but Janice will miraculously make peace with everyone on the island and win the show before you ever get that Nobel Prize.
Conquering Asian cuisine is where the line is drawn between the grasshoppers and the masters. Heating up the wok takes a lot more skill than assumed. First, greasing it with vegetable oil (or canola, if you’re into the whole idea of, you know, living longer) calls for attention to the heat level. Leave the stove on too low and the meat will end up attaching itself to the steel, curling up into pathetic pieces of evidence of your culinary failure. Turn it up too high, and you’ve got some severe third degree burns on your forearms from fending off pieces of pork rising from the dead. DANG. And this is all before you actually start Emeril Lagassing it up.
Flash back to the other day. I was feeling all domestic and Childish—Julia, that is—so I asked the wok-master of my family’s kitchen to help me with the ingredients du jour. After a quick tour around the narrow Chinese grocery store and scouring the shelf for products like pig’s feet and red bean paste (which, as a quick heads up, should be pre-served with Beano beforehand so there be no gas™), the Mom suggested that I make spicy curry tofu with pork and a kind of lentil/barley soup to go along with it. Sounds kind of daunting, right? WELL, YOU’RE DAMN RIGHT IT WAS.
The ingredients exotique: 1) canola oil, 2) dried and sliced dougan tofu, 3) green onions, 4) diced pork, 5) soy sauce, 6) curry sauce, 7) chili paste, and 8) a prayer to the finger gods for corporal preservation. Huh, 8 items… so maybe it’s a good sign.
But I pressed on, my craving for dougan tofu surpassing my fear of cleavers. Once I recovered from the shock that people related to me by blood owned cutlery by Chef Tony of Chef Tony Knives irritating and loud infomercial fame, I got to cuttin’, which became sort of addicting, in a neurotic, psychotic, Hannibal Lecter kind of way. Remarkably, none of my digits ended up in the pile of chopped greens. SUCCESS WAS IMMINENT.
“Simmah down, nah.”
Bon appétit? Maybe more like bon courage…
After tasting it, I have to admit that the tofu was a little dry. Turns out I didn’t add as much water as I should’ve when simmering. But my sauce mixture ended up perfectly spicy and curry…y. As for the soup? Eh, another attempt for another time (never sounds good). Tomorrow, I try seasoning soba noodles. No knives involved, hail Mary!
(NOTE: I honestly have no idea why I used so many French references in a post about Chinese cooking.)
Summer ‘09 culinary adventures // Part deux: Hungry for Homecooked.
Yeah, I bitch and moan about being Asian a lot of times, especially after a semi-traumatic childhood of people asking me if any passing woman with black hair and Lucy Liu eyes was my mother, as if we could be related just as easily as Jack Black could have fathered Meryl Streep.
Most of the time, the self-pity is in jest (except for when I can’t tell among the yellow crowd exactly who’s sleep deprived and who’s contracted jaundice). Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with my outcome in the genetic lottery, especially when it comes to metabolism. If I belonged to any other ethnicity and sustained my current eating habits, I would probably be one of those fat people you see on the subway that innocently and unknowingly take up one and a fourth of a seat, making it impossible for you to decide whether to stand and then deal with sore feet after the 30-minute ride to the airport or to sit down and sidle up uncomfortably against his or her extraordinary muffin top.
Yes, I’m a morally reprehensible person. Moving on.
I became especially grateful about this fortunate fact of life during the feast my uncle conjured up during an impromptu family reunion a few weeks ago. On the menu were things that should not be stuffed down anyone’s throat during one sitting—chili-seasoned beef chips, broiled chicken with red vinegar sauce, sweet and sour barbecued pork mini-ribs, snow greens with a dash of red peppers, stir-fried squid seafood platter with curry, a lotus root salad marinated in sweet vinegar with red peppers, and (as if we weren’t carnivorous enough already) peppered meat balls. In three, compact letters: F-A-T. But it didn’t feel gluttonous to come back for seconds or thirds; unlike much of butter-heavy food found in American cookbooks, eating a lot of these lightly seasoned recipes made with a mixture of vegetables and meat doesn’t leave the gourmand feeling like a giant piece of lard. Not only that, but when cooked with all of the bones intact, it counts as exercise when you’re patiently chewing bit by bit and not simply inhaling chunks of meat. Perhaps less for the stomach, more for the soul?
Right about the time after my eighth barbecue rib and when I started lapsing into a mild food coma, the rest of the family, including my 75-year-old grandma, each got up for a bowl of rice. Wait—so we aren’t even HALFWAY THROUGH THE MEAL YET? And here I was, already on the verge of defeat after round one of what they considered piddling appetizers.
INTRODUCING my ultra athletic tour guide when I went to 金坑 (Jinkeng) to visit 龙脊 (Longji) a few weeks ago. Before eating lunch at her family’s restaurant, she took us from the bottom of the terraces all the way to the top in less than 45 minutes. On the way, she explained to us the customs of her minority clan, Yaozu, including sartorial traditions, such different skirt colors for single or married women. The women like to grow their hair out almost to their ankles and then tie it all up in a bun on top of their forehead each day, decorating it with an embroidered handkerchief. Putting American emo scenesters to shame, my guide wore heavy silver earrings that stretched her earlobes all out of proportion, like dumpling dough. How appetizing.
Besides trying to avoid looking at her ears, we were led on an exhausting yet knowledgeable trip as we trekked with her all the way up 1000 meters above sea level to the first and second “summits” of the Jinkeng (literally, Golden Pit) and listened to her mini-history lesson on the Yaozu people and their customs. I learned that she makes this steep hike daily during the summer time, when temperatures reach around 40 degrees Celsius in the valley. As we maneuvered our way on the precarious path constructed from rocks that jutted out in all sorts of inconvenient directions, occasionally, a farmer leading his ox or horse along would joust us for the right of way. “Rang kai yi xia!” he’d warn us with a slap of the bamboo rod he carried with him on one hand while he steered his four-legged companion with the other. “Step aside a little!” Each time, we sidled up against the mountain wall, letting the animal pass first, which made me doubt my worth as a commodity just a little. Hmm… maybe I’m not as priceless as I thought.
Up on the peaks, wooden hostels are situated next to homes of the Yao. Wayfaring travelers can rest their weary legs and stay the night for a mere 50 RMB, and the next morning, they can watch the sunrise from their windows as dawn breaks over the terraces, which are constructed by the village people in order to maximize land area for the agriculture on which they survive. After the trekker sweats more than a normal person ever should when he makes it to the top, he sees a sight that makes his breath short with fatigue, his legs crumble with vertigo, and his eyes wide with incredulousness.
If some of the tourists plan to stay the night on one of the peaks, she and other women in the village will carry their suitcases from the bottom up—on their backs. Even though this is a way for the Yaozu to conduct business and make a living of sorts, it pains me to see these dark, petite women shoulder things equal to their weight up a height equal to that of multiple skyscrapers. While hikers pay them to do this, I am curious as to what kind of people would be willing to dole out the money to witness this kind of manual labor.
Halfway down the trails as we were descending the mountain, it suddenly hit me that we didn’t even ask for the guide’s name. After all, she was a stranger in a strange place, and you don’t just ask for people’s names that you don’t know. But I should attribute all those stories to… who now? She’ll be a legend in my mind. Just a nameless one.
We returned to the city in a small rotund van (“bread car,” transliterally) popular in China for its versatility and good gas mileage (read: unsafe and cheap). More than one person made the trip on the verge of carsickness due to the driver’s less than steady driving prowess. The day after, the local news reported that the mountain road from Longsheng, the city most closely associated with the terrace landscape, and He Ping village had been blocked off by mud slides. Within the course of one rainy day, the narrow and winding roads up toward the village area became slippery and dangerous. Avalanches of dirt came crashing down within 24 hours after we left. Any vehicles traveling on the way to Longji would be swept off the path down into the steep ravines below. Was it a fortunate coincidence? Was it the bracelet I always wear for good fortune? Oh, to think about things that don’t have answers.
Then there are the people who say that whenever someone from the mountain village makes it to the city, he will never want to return to his roots nestled in nature’s layered cake after comparing his previous life to his current one. And true, after a close encounter with this different world, the peasant life in He Ping and the surrounding area is demanding, isolated, and predictable. Long days in the field turn the men’s skin permanently dark and rough, and people well into their 60s and 70s use canes to help them navigate the stoney slopes as they move back and forth between their homes and the fields. But whenever a villager leaves, never to return, he probably loses a part of the idyll that he won’t find again anywhere else. He will no longer breathe the cool and gentle mountain air. What’s worse, if he’s not strong enough, urban greed may rob him of what was his previously simple soul. So when he sleeps, I like to think that behind his closed eyes, he’s dreaming of a pink sunrise inching over the first peak.
Just finished watching «非诚勿扰», or If You Are the One, a romantic comedy (of sorts) starring Ge You, Shu Qi, and Vivian Hsu, and am PLEASANTLY SURPRISED.
Call this a first. Having been exposed to any sort of Asian television or cinematic drama means expections of a humiliatingly small amount in terms of talent from any Asian filmmakers, screenwriters, or actors. The yellow-skinned counterparts to Julia and Tom are extremely lacking in the subtlety department, either playing the cutesy ideal to a vomit-inducing level or dramatizing the most insignificant of situations. After finishing a Taiwanese miniseries, any sane person would probably take a chainsaw to his own pointer/middle fingers in attempts to prevent any sort of accidental fobby reenactments.
But recently, Chinese directors have taken hints from their European, American, and Hong Kong counterparts—aka their stuff is not the shit, but actually, just straight-up shit—and have gone all art-house nouveau. As if Focus Films and Fox Searchlight ran them through a condensed how-to program to end the horror that is Chinese dramatic arts, they now come out with some pretty interesting indie-style films, such as this, in which a Chinese man who returns from living abroad in the west sends out advertisements to find a wife, with the disclaimer on each ad, “Please do not reply if not sincere.” Some of the more solemn scenes call to mind the confrontational style of Closer. Some of the funnier moments remind me of Garden State and Zach Braff’s affable deadpan. In one scene, Qin Fen sits about five feet across from a potential wife dressed up in the traditional garb of her minority clan and interviews her about their hypothetical marriage.
Qin: “Where are you from?” Woman: “A small village in Yunnan province.” Qin: “How would we get there?” Woman: “First, we take a two-hour plane to Kunming. Next, we have to take a train for two days. Then, we drive for five hours. After that, we take a tractor.” Qin: “What about if we ever get divorced?” Woman: “My brother will break both your legs.”
via Sohu
What may or may not surprise me is the eagerness with which directors continue to hire Shu Qi, who provides maybe the only reason for guys to tag along with their girlfriends to this romantic comedy-née-farce. It’s old news that she was first discovered in the Hong Kong porn industry and that, perhaps through even more trips to the casting couch, she somehow managed to cross over to the mainstream. The new news is that she did so with the same horny manager the entire time of the transition. According to the salaciously entertainment saavy Manfred Wong, “If you’re an unknown and from Taiwan, there is no such thing as doing art and high-class films. Shu Qi knows if she doesn’t strip, she can’t be a star.” Perhaps in a turn of events that proved circumstantial, Shu Qi later fired said manager when he pulled her out of filming Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because he couldn’t foresee the success of the project. The role then went to Zhang Ziyi, who became the Rachel of the Chinese film industry, while Shu Qi settled for second place as Monica and filmed a Japanese Coca-Cola commercial instead. (Best decision EVER.) But trying to understand it in terms of the culture WE know is like replacing Meg Ryan with Jenna Jameson in When Harry Met Sally. That scene with the fake orgasm? Call me old fashioned, but our favorite protagonist probably would’ve lost her charm had it been real.
In any case, at least Shu Qi does a decent acting job in If. Unlike her massive-mouthed compadre ScarJo, whose acting talent emanates solely from the fleshy orifice that practically threatens to swallow her entire visage, Shu only has to break out the lip action once or twice. Trust me, I counted.
4.5 stars out of 5. Umbrella’s stamp of meaningless approval.
I have a good friend who finds his greatest source of inspiration from stars. Literally. He studies planets and other things greater than humans, and as long as I’ve known him, he’s always been interested in all things astronomical and cosmological. When we were in high school, he unfailingly carried around a paperback copy of one of Carl Sagan’s books in his backpack on most days, and he’d point out different excerpts, read them to me, shake his head, and then say, “It’s just… just… just… ah.” He would often be rendered speechless by the meaning of it all.
At that time, I didn’t really know how to respond. The universe and my specific place in it was never really something I thought about that much, probably because subconsciously, I considered it pointless to wonder about my insignificant role in the immense scheme of space and time. After all, a speck of dust on the vast window gets washed away eventually.
But one of the quotes he read to me stayed in my mind for a long time, and it wasn’t until yesterday, July 22, 2009, that it rose to the surface of my consciousness. In Cosmos, Sagan writes,
“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever.”
Witnessing the solar eclipse on top of Reed Flute Mountain yesterday clarified what my friend already realized four years ago. Climbing up and simultaneously seeing the seemingly eternal Sun become occluded by the paltry moon, the realization hit that millions of people died and will die without ever seeing this circumstance that’s so much bigger than all of us. Maybe it’s too much to ask from the cosmos to give us a reminder of just how trivial human lives are from time to time, but I’m now convinced it would do the human race a grain of good. I just want to thank my friend for wordlessly telling me something that I didn’t understand then but do now.
1. Count how many times you flashed the green card only to realize that instead of acting as an instant consent of marriage from a Latvian bride, it’s now a bone-crossed skull tarot card.
2. Snicker at the fact that “swine flu” is an anagram of “Elf Win Us.”
3. Pray that it’s all an illusion and that the female Japanese tourists aren’t actually wearing nylon socks with their sandals.
4. Count the number of times the Chinese immigration officer disturbingly hocks into a paper cup. (Eleven.)
5. Cough. More fun when everyone else is wearing a hazmat suit!
