11/22/2025

wow. i suppose it's been over a year and a half since i last posted... apologies.

i guess i should update the maybe one reader that occasionally checks this blog out (me?).

this past summer was incredibly trying. my mother had been exhibiting signs of dementia for a while, but i guess things really came to a head when she slipped and fell at a pool. she had to be hospitalized for a knee fracture. the environment of the hospital (and later, the rehab center), the relative isolation, the inability to use a phone or computer regularly, and other complicating health factors (like a recurrent and very serious uti) all exacerbated her dementia. there were actually periods where she was almost incoherent...

in any case, this led to me taking a far more active role in my parents' care. i gave their home a serious cleaning, and tried my best to safety proof everything; rails in the bathroom, a bidet, and an ingenious (if i do say so myself) method of using the laundry room sink in the garage to supply warm water to give my mother a shower (since she could no longer walk upstairs to take a shower there). i was staying at my parents' house overnight, to ensure that nothing bad happened... although my father lives with my mother, he was getting verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive to her, and i decided that i couldn't just leave her alone with him...

my siblings and i had a disastrous meeting. i guess i had a lot of suspicions about my brother's intentions. he had been having weekly meetings with my mother for some time to go over finances, in the event that she became incapacitated. that seemed to be his only and primary interest. i felt that it was odd that in all of that time, my parents didn't get an opportunity to see my brother's two kids. if family was a priority, then shouldn't he have allowed my parents to establish a relationship with their grandchildren? but no. he was able to make time to go over real estate properties, but not to share time with his own children...

in any case... at this meeting, my brother initiated by saying that his lawyer felt it was unfair that his own children were left out of the will. keep in mind that my mother was in hospital, and there were concerns about how we were to maintain her care- 

dreams - 3/26/2025

hi,

it's been a while... i'm currently on a work trip to philadelphia. never been here before... but aside from the location, what i've really been contemplating is how old i am, and how incompatible i am with the living world... i periodically (perenially?) have this feeling... i want to express it in a story, maybe something where i am either made of stone, or am some kind of ravenous beast... or maybe even both.

anyway, i've more often taken to documenting my dreams here... so here goes. last night, among other dreams, i had one where- and i'm backtracking as far as i can remember- i was visiting some old local waipahu restaurants on a hill... and recall something about certain specials... i remember some of the signs, which were so tall that parts of the bottom had to be cut out to accommodate chairs or pipes from the floor. anyway, i remember something about fish cake or something. i must have been pretty hungry... there was something about my brother... but i can't recall.

later on in the dream, i recall a kind of treacherous path from a park. it was a dirt path, made of hard-packed red dirt. and it cycled down, zig-zagged... and at certain points, it led to abysses, edges going down to nowhere. and somehow you had to drive these vehicles over the paths... anyway, i managed to get down the path until i found this strange oasis. there were some mazes and other things carved into the hard red clay. i realized that myself and maybe some other young student had made these a while ago, and they were still up. it was actually a pretty amazing thing, a recreation of some computer game or something. there were a lot of displays... then at one point, i saw a hard basketball court, with all of these tall glass vases (again, a part of the game)... a strong wind kicked up, and it started to blow some of the vases over. i was concerned, because all of the vases were made of glass. sure enough, one of them tumbled, and cracked...

there are other ghosts of dreams, like of a classroom... my old school that i taught at... things like that. but i can't reach them.

dreams - 8/11/2024

weird fragment of a dream... so apparently, there was this weird arrangement for getting across a very busy intersection. you would drive your car into the back of a large truck (the kind used to transport cars, only one large layer), and then it would let you drive across when the time was right. i guess i was new to the system, so i didn't go when i was supposed to. and instead of exitting the truck so the new batch could go in, i left my car in the truck. unfortunately, in between cycles, some sort of metal ceiling comes down (i'm not sure why). so it started to crush our car (we weren't inside). so the entire roof of our car, and all the glass windows, were compressed into the body. we had to file insurance on this. they closed the entire truck contraption because our little accident had shown how unsafe it was...

anyway, that's all...

dreams 7/2/2024

just a little fragment of a dream... i couldn't trace it back to where it came from.

i was in a church. that only became clear to me afterwards. somehow i stumbled into this place... i had had another purpose entirely, apparently, and came in as i come in to all spaces, as an atom, an indivisible mystery to myself and to everyone else, somehow unafraid, but always always alone. and i observed these people in the church, as from a distance, as this older man spoke to the congregants, not as strangers, but as friends- people who had a place in his heart, as he had a place in theirs... towards the end of the congregation, i turned around, and saw my friend phil.

phil: how do you like my church? i've been coming here for thirty years.

and then he proceeded to introduce everyone- EVERYONE- and he did so with a naturalness that comes from being one with others: community. and i noticed when he introduced them that i knew he had a place in their heart, just as they had a place in his.

this is ivy. she works over at the capitol, as an assistant to the governor. and this is her son, freddy. [freddy makes a strange bulls symbol and so does phil, and they both connect their fingers briefly. freddy then tries to do the same thing with me, and i awkwardly try but fail.] freddy just got accepted to this jesuit school he's been wanting to get into for- what- two years? two years...

and so on.

and i envied him this.

it was wonderful- this feeling of community. it was a feeling of immortality, in a way, because you knew that if you died, pieces of you, like little shards of light, would live on forever in the hearts of everyone else. you felt known. acknowledged. understood... not like this passing thing, faces recognized for a time, words exchanged briefly, and then the inevitable return to being nameless among nameless others. not a return to being always alone.

*****

i don't understand why i can't melt. am i selfish? i've tried not to be. i've tried to always sacrifice of myself. but the truth is, sacrifice, and the giving away of yourself, is not a real way to form community. it, in a way, is self-aggrandizement, because it allows you to remain yourself... or maybe i just haven't done it enough, done it truly. there are moments- and they are only moments- when i am able to really feel like i have lost myself.

but, no... i think really it is something much humbler and ordinary. it's about sharing of yourself, and allowing others to share with you... and i guess that's something i can't do. there's a core of me that is alternatively made of ice, and made of emptiness. i just don't feel. or i feel hollow. i think i am ashamed of myself, and generally just want to hide myself in matters of importance or purpose. i have been taught to be this way? or maybe i just always was like this.

i care for people. i am pretty sure i would be willing to die for them (because i'd be a small sacrifice). but i can never ever feel community with them, as phil had. i can never be... incorporated. one.

*****

i struggle to write this story i've been tasked to finish in a week. it's maybe THE story of myself. and it is an attempt to resolve some of the turmoil in my heart. it's all about vengeance and shame and hate. the truths within me. these are the things perhaps propping me up all the time. propping me up and bringing me down. about the well meaning me who is secretly longing for the destruction of- what?

i won't belabor the details here. but i- i struggle with it. that's all i'll say.

i want it maybe to be a thing of beauty, because it is a thing of truth. but maybe it will only be what i am: ugly, clumsy, inauthentic.

dreams 3/9/2024

it's a little late for me to be posting about this dream, because it's already 5 in the afternoon... but somehow it stuck with me.

i think there are a few dreams that not only intellectually remain with me (that is, i remember vivid details about it) but that leave me with a feeling. oftentimes it is a feeling of unease or anxiety, especially if the dream was chaotic, because it seems like it reflects the disorder of my psyche. but other times- rarely- it leaves me feeling, if not happy, then... open. like there are other possibilities besides the rut and emptiness i often feel in life.

so in this morning's dream: i suppose that i was back at my old school, wahiawa el. only, things had changed. it was as though the administration really wanted the teachers to feel like the return to school was a celebration. there were a bunch of carnival rides on the campus (in actuality, it resembled mililani high school's campus more than wahiawa el's). there was a dj playing music. i recall riding on some sort of roller coaster, listening to the dj make some sort of challenge, like a trivia challenge about the music. and i knew the answer to almost everything. but there was no one really to share it with. i felt- as i truly feel most times at work- alone...

for some reason, this dream made me feel somewhat light, if not happy... it made me feel like there was an unsuspected possibility. as though a wall was actually transclucent, and beyond it was a whole other world.

when i woke, i almost had to convince myself that i was still teaching at wheeler middle school.

*****

then there was this other dream... it occurred maybe a few days ago.

in the dream, there was a pretty young girl, a version of someone who is no doubt as aged as i am now, but she was trying to gently seduce me, with all of these conditionals... like, "if i did this, what would you do?" and, being the stoic and "good person" that i was, even in my dreams, i would always respond that i would do nothing, that i would always be the protector, a wall, the dead and shiny material of a shield... and, for some reason, the girl loved me, she felt entirely safe around me, and she let me carry her, not on my back, but in the same way that a newlywed husband would carry his wife across a threshold.

and for some reason, it made me feel happy. like i was appreciated and valued and loved, despite not being the "dangerous" and alive sexual partner that i could have been...

[please understand that i am and always will be in love with my wife. but there are parts of me that still cycle and repeat an incomplete circuit, the ragged edges of infinite possibility within me that have never been touched... you can never completely silence the longing within your heart. and maybe if you did, you would cease to be alive, dreaming. life, living, after all, is an incompletion.]

dream 1/23/2024

 been a while.

in my dream: there were several segments, unrelated, or seemingly, as usual... in one, living within a glass apartment, with windows in all the walls... in another, taking a field trip to some green field campus with my son... and in a third, at one point, swimming near the corner of a hotel, and finding so many ear rings and other things dropped there in the sand. when i returned them to the hotel lobby counter, all of a sudden, i noticed i had a large bag, and within the bag was a large gun. the lobby man said i couldn't drop that off there; i had to notify the lapd. so i started to leave. i was back again on this campus, filled with people, with families, looking for my son...

dream 8/28/2023

i had a weird dream in which i ended up on some reality game show. i suppose i had won some sort of trip, based upon my teaching abilities. there were all these other teachers there, in this big relaxing room, all talking about their big accomplishments, trying to impress everyone else. i was with lynn, and we were just talking about our next steps, practical stuff... i heard this woman and man nearby in the bed. the woman was asking the man some questions. apparently, he had gone through whatever program we were in, this was maybe his third time... long story short... teresa huang was there, she gave me a hug... i ended up trying to help someone who needed to use the bathroom (but to use the bathroom, you needed to traverse this tiny ramp high above the ground, with the assistance of someone. i helped the person at the last part, where there was some sort of trapeze. i ended up risking myself for the person (i could hear the gasps and general responses of the audience0. while i was helping the person, someone stole my wallet. although we were successful, i realized i didn't want to stah in that world). i was thinking of ways to get out, and get home, to where people actually loved each other.