11/26/2021

my most recent post was written because i felt compelled to write. i believe i woke up early, haunted by these feelings of immense sadness. right now, i'm writing out of a routine, so the words might feel stunted and forced.

yesterday was thanksgiving. it was nice. we (the four of us, now: my wife, my son, my dog, and myself) went to diamond head grill to buy an expensive thanksgiving lunch. we're missing my daughter, or course, who is spending thanksgiving with her two high school friends over at uc irvine. in any case, it was a tradition of sorts for us to pick up our thanksgiving meal from diamond head grill, and then eat it at some nearby park. although we had invitations to celebrate thanksgiving with the in-laws, frankly, we were never comfortable going there, sitting amongst the lazy, half-asleep, somewhat strangers who were all watching the football game (which i never cared much about). it was nicer just to be amongst ourselves, the four (or five) of us. oh well, let me amend that... sometimes it would be us. at other times, lynn would have to be working (or sleeping to prepare to go to work) for black friday over at godiva... this year, now that she's working for see's, they don't seem to do the crazy black friday thing, so things were laid back enough for us to eat together...

later on, we went over to uncle ferman's house (lynn's uncle) to eat thanksgiving dinner (of course, we never once mentioned the fantastic lunch we had had over at diamond head grill). the turkey at uncle ferman's was, predictably, dry. even dousing it in gravy didn't do it much justice. but it was nice sitting with aunty and uncle and talking. uncle ferman seems to enjoy my company, and talks politics and history. he lived in wahiawa for the better part of his life, and knows the area that i work very well. so he asks about whether this store has reopened or what has replaced that restaurant. stuff like that. meanwhile, some asshole plays fireworks in the neighborhood, setting musubi off running and crazy... so i have to hold him firmly, listening to his heaving panicked breathing as the background for the conversation.

*****

i'm getting old. that's always at the background of my thoughts. there's a time where you start to wonder whether there's a point in doing something... or anything. i mean, is it going to lead you anywhere? not really. is it going to change your life's trajectory? not really; things seem to be going downhill, impelled largely by actions taken long ago... and on the downhill path, you can't really change where you're heading, now, can you?

but even faced with this despair, we have to live, don't we? we have to entertain ourselves. we have to continue to harbor hopes and dreams. maybe as we get older, more of those hopes and dreams involve other people, my children, for example. but there are ridiculous dreams that i still keep to, and keep to myself. yes, they are absurd. they have no rhyme or reason. they have no point. but i guess i still have to honor them. it's better than pretending that they don't matter... because to a certain part of myself, maybe the stubborn childish part of myself, they still do matter. they matter a great deal.

maybe life is learning to affirm that part of yourself. at least a little bit.

11/17/2021

i couldn't sleep.

for some reason, memories of my time at williams surfaced. it all seemed closer somehow, like the tides had exposed the ghostly shapes of the sea floor to the moonlight, and i could see it all, its contours, its hideous emptiness. i realized how sad i was for most of my college life. i could see the infinite hope i had placed in those years, and how each day, particularly towards the end, seemed to be this growing despair that nothing was ever going to happen, that no one was ever going to save me. yes, that was (and maybe secretly is) my mentality with regards to relationships, that it was all about some kind of salvation or something. that by finding someone, really finding and connecting to someone, it was going to suddenly change the world... and, to be honest, it did, it does, but not in the way that i was thinking... it honestly felt like it just wasn't possible during the "high time" of my life, that there wasn't the right synchronization of myself, or anyone else out there, or even just the music playing at the time...

i recall how someone out there put out my name as being synonymous with- i don't know, everything clumsy and stupid. it was only when a friend of mine came across the term ("you pulled a randy otaka") that it came to light. and now, when i look back into myself, across all these years, i definitely can see it - dressed in stupid tie dye shirts and layers of clothing in the cold winters of the berkshires, always apparently hopeful, living on mountain dew and noriko sakai songs- impossibly hopeful, but only hopeful because of the incredible despair i carried within me. there was no one there. there wasn't anyone who could've taken me out of where i was. and so, i think i was just biding my time, waiting for the lights to change or something.

i'm so thankful i had some friends to "wait" with me... to make me feel somewhat normal.

*****

relationships are strange. miraculous. serendipitous. merciless. i don't get them. i don't understand why they can't happen when you need them. i don't understand how they start, or why they sometimes trail off.

*****

i think in some senses that i made a decision to become like stone. there is the vibration of a child within me, a frustrated child, who was not meant to follow his feelings... it just never was the right time for him, it wasn't appropriate for him to be let out into the sunlight... and to survive, and to live, and to have a structure- a backbone- it was necessary for me to turn into stone. to be the support for the situations in my life...

i think children like me, because they implicitly see that i am harmless. i am a memory of a person. i collect the warmth of the sun, mainly because i can no longer burn with my own feelings any more. i can pantomime their joy, because i understand its incompleteness within me, as a distant, sad memory. and i am generous in that respect, because what i want is gone, and i can simply be what they want....

but in the world of my peers- which, increasingly, don't exist- i am a non-entity. i am duty. i am work. i am responsibility. i have no real feelings, fresh and hot, of my own. i can communicate memories of feelings- but not the feelings themselves... because there has always been a disconnect- an inability to relate- and that part of me that can truly feel is sealed off- again, a distant almost absent vibration trapped in the heart of stone upon stone upon stone. the inertia of the material that makes me.

for me to be saved, i must be irreparably broken.

*****

i think we return to a time, a moment, as we grow older, when it seemed possible (even though it probably never was). there is a window into a self when hope and the world seemed to speak to each other, at the very least... maybe there was a small window, for a brief period of time... and maybe back then i was happy, in the sense of me feeling - i don't know - i could be free.

there is a different, truer sort of happiness i have felt- of the joy of my children- of the happiness i feel when i help someone... i say truer, because the happiness of others always feels unquestionable, because it doesn't deal with my own waning heart -

okay. i suppose that's enough rumination.

10/23/2021

 posting here:

...it at times pains me to admit this, but it is entirely true.

over the summer, i took on the task of teaching a therapeutic ethics/clinic safety course at the acupuncture school. it was the first time i had taught the course (and indeed, i hadn't even taken the course at my school, because it hadn't been offered). i had decided early on that i wanted to make the ethics portion of the class open-ended; although i would share the ethical codes of different governing bodies and entities, i tried to maintain that the ethical realm was fundamentally personal, and therefore, subject to interpretation...

bad idea. or, rather, good idea, but wrong context.

it quickly became apparent to me that there were (and are) many in the acupuncture community that hold an anti-vaccine stance. there are many reasons for this, some possibly legitimate (...possibly...); but in many cases, it boils down to a distrust of "the medical industry" or "big pharma." i completely understand this, even if i don't entirely agree with it (or rather, i don't generalize it to the point of distrusting it in all instances). it is the motivation that drove many to alternative medicine in the first place (practitioners AND patients)...

i guess things came to a head (somewhat) when i got to the clinic safety portion of the course. i had to share information about different infectious diseases, and the precautions we had to take in order to prevent transmission to patients. and, of course, i had to talk about THE communicable elephant in the room, so to speak: covid. as soon as i started talking about masking precautions and about vaccination, i began to hear strong objections: questioning of fauci, questioning the cdc guidances, questioning whether it was even really as bad as the "fake" media claimed it was... i was somewhat at a loss as to how to respond. it's one thing to hear these sorts of conspiratorial slants when talking to people in normal, everyday contexts (it's why you never give away anything about yourself nowadays)... but to hear these sorts of objections in what is ostensibly a medical context?

it was extremely difficult for me to proceed.

i found (find) myself the only consistently masked individual at the school... i am probably one of only a few who are vaccinated...

i love and respect my colleagues and students, and i know them to largely be caring, compassionate individuals. but in regards to these matters, i must say that an opportunity to demonstrate an ethical and professional stance with regards to covid has been missed... it's ironic, but my insistence that ethics be fundamentally personal was precisely the weapon i intended to be used against the present wave of conspiratorial, anti-institutional nonsense... instead, that weapon was taken to further entrench people in an "i decide what's right" mentality...

ok, that's my rant to some aspects of my profession...

10/15/2021

it has again been quite some time since i wrote an entry for this blog... life has been all-consuming. my work, in particular, has dominated my attentions. let us say that the entire covid issue serves only as the background for a majority of my concerns. i have several difficult cases this year, which- truth be told- should not be my responsibility, but are... my room, which is already full, is constantly changing to accommodate new "guests," students who require semi-isolated environments. i'm now debating whether to create a third such environment for a third "guest," all the while addressing about a dozen different students... very different students... at the same time, my robotics materials have migrated from my portable to be stored in a classroom near the library (requiring me to weekly set everything up in the library, no small task, and put it all back away again), to now being given a room of my own to store and do robotics in (which i have yet to see)... it has all been a kind of dream, a floating feeling... and as we are not yet to a normalized season, with true tournaments, i often have the feeling that i'm just going through the motions... it is difficult to teach students mechanisms, especially intricate mechanisms like this thing called a "choo-choo mechanism", which turns the rotational motion of a motor into the pull and release of a catapult... i think (like myself, if i'm honest) a majority of the students are "playing" at ideas, as they have hit a wall in terms of their creativity and capabilities... and while i'm trying to provide them with ideas and options, i think that, largely, this crop of students doesn't "get it." eventually, i'll have to set a deadline for the vex iq stuff, just get it done with, no matter how infeasible and inoperable a majority of the student robots are... that will allow me to move on to other sorts of challenges...

anyway. there's that. and there's concerns about finances and such. again, we're struggling to pay for, save for, willow's college. and there are also concerns about how willow is doing, not just academically, but simply how she's getting on with her chaotic roommate, and things like that. it's hard to feel powerless to solve your child's problems... i mean, there are things i can do, but ultimately, my daughter has to wrestle with and figure things out on her own.

*****

i'm getting old... we conceive of a lot of things, i conceive a lot of things, including, well, sexuality, in terms of standards that probably no longer apply... or perhaps will no longer apply. the dreams i have with regards to these matters are, frankly, ridiculous, not at all related to my reality. but then again, is that what fantasies are supposed to be? in any case, there's an overwhelming sense of "what's the point," after all this time, that repeatedly intrudes and ridicules what i'd "hope" for... ultimately... i feel at times as though i need to shift my vision of who i am or what role i am to play... a lot of my desires, etc., are frankly a nuisance. they distract me. they fill me with longing. but they are not relevant. and, so long as i am haunted by them, neither am i.

i can't conceive of how things would happen, anyway. my mind's eye is so skeptical of anything, that all such fantasies are fragmented, insipid things, dream figures... nothing convincing. i can't remember that feeling that, perhaps, i used to have, of people being doorways to entire other universes... maybe they are, but those doorways are for other people to "walk" through... for me, people might as well be walls...

i recall how vulnerable i used to be. how silence was so dangerous. words were things you threw at each other to keep yourself from falling into other people. i remember that it was impossible to look into people's eyes (maybe, in a sense, this is still true) because if i did, i would fall into them. or i would disclose something that i didn't intend to... i always needed (i always need) to look upon a surface as i speak my thoughts, to trace the patterns of the tiles on the floor for example, in order to find a - in order to believe in- something solid. it's like the formation of a crystal- how you need to have a seed crystal to formalize a pattern and create a crystalline wave...

at times, i wish i could experience other people. but i only experience people in all-consuming ways. (or maybe i long to be all-consumed, even if i would never ever risk it). in truth, i'm such a routinized, self-contained individual that it would be impossible. i'm a stodgy old man now, and anything truly self-destructive and passionate would be seen as an inconvenience, no longer proper and appropriate for someone like me, someone with stiff knees, and failing eyesight...

*****

i feel somewhat content with the writing i have produced via the writing workshop classes... maybe it's because of the (undeserved) positive praise that my fellow writers have heaped upon me... we always remain positive to each other... but in any case, i have a sense that what i've written has a solidity, a believability... and a point. it is "something." and now, i feel confident of reworking, editing, coming up with new ideas. like today, i came up with an additional scene, set in an imaginary world, called "styx and stones." more thoughts, ideas, to resonate and reinforce some of the themes of the play...

*****

oh well, nothing much more to report. i'm trying to get back into my routines, i'm hoping this fall break will allow me the opportunity to do that... but we'll see.

dream (9/26/2021)

i had a dream in which i was riding some sort of plane or transport somewhere, i think with phil (though i'm not sure right now). anyway, once we arrived, i was trying to get myself together, and took a while to find my shoes. once i did, i was getting our things- not from baggage claim, but from this hallway or something. we had a lot of things. anyway i was pushing this cart full of our stuff... then, there was this point where i approached this place where they were digging out some sort of ancient ship. i could see the shape of the ship (top view) embedded in the side of this orange-rocked hill. the path that i needed to take ran up the right side of this hill- into this little cave. i went in- and discovered what was perhaps the body of a child- i wasn't sure... i found little shoes, and little socks- but it was indeterminate whether those were on the body of a child, or were just placed there... in any case, as i discovered these, someone mentioned (or i realized) that there had been some child missing. below the shoes and socks that i had discovered was a bookshelf, filled with books from some sort of publishing series (with the same patterned covers), only the books ranged from children's titles to more advanced stuff... it seemed like what someone would have picked up at a garage sale, not knowing what to get to help a child learn... and that was pretty much it.

9/1/2021

hello... how are you?

*****

it has been a long month or so. school (elementary school) has started up again. the acupuncture school finished, and then (yesterday) started up again. and we went over to california for a week to drop off my daughter to berkeley. (oh yeah, and during that week, i got to meet and briefly hang out with a couple of old friends, one from college, and one from high school).

the thought i've had (and still have) is that life is short. i've said it before, and you've heard it so many times that it loses its meaning. but i'm here to tell you, from this side of life, that it's true...

*****

there's an episode within cowboy bebop (this now old anime show from the later 1990s, i think from 1996)... one character, faye valentine, had suffered amnesia after some sort of cryogenic sleep... her character post cryo developed into this wry, self-sufficient gambler type... but she could not remember her life from before... anyway, in this one episode, she and her friends discover an old vhs tape that her previous self had recorded, as a message to herself... i guess it's been done before, like in that arnold schwarzenegger movie (total recall)... but this was much better, and far more poignant... because in the video, faye is a teenager, with all the innocence and hopes and dreams of someone on "that side of life," who wants to give a message to "cheer herself on." she comes up with a cheer (and performs it with pom poms), and the message is "don't lose, me!!!" but when she says it, it keeps coming out as "DON'T LOSE ME!!!" ... which is sad, because that innocent hopeful self is gone and forgotten, a part of herself that she can no longer remember...

i sometimes feel that way. i mean, i can remember the past, but only in traces and shadows... sometimes i think the "meat" of the past, the thing that gives it the most content, is probably the most insubstantial part of it, the part that has proven itself to be unreal... the hopes you felt, for instance. the air of possibility... i can sometimes feel it, or sometimes relate... sometimes... but only from the outside. and maybe it's because i've seen a bit on the other side of life, how so many things never came to fruition, despite my cherished belief that they would... i've seen other kinds of happiness, other kinds of fulfillment... and developed other hopes... but sometimes it feels like, in the process of living, we are always leaving behind other pieces of ourselves, other "faye valentines"... and sometimes that is sad.

i also have been reflecting on who we live for. sometimes you don't even realize that you were living for someone else, trying to earn someone else's respect, until they disappear, or die. my grandmother, for instance... i guess, secretly, i had wanted to write stories to earn her respect... maybe a lot of people. my parents, etc. but as i get older, and as the stars slowly wink out from my constellation, i realize... maybe there's no one left that i care to impress... no one connected directly with me, i mean... and i start to think, what's the point? i mean, i portray it as a negative thing, but it's also liberating... i also have realized that this compulsion to write, or tell stories, even if it's futile... by a certain point in life, you have to try, because it's the river you're on, and you can't fight it. maybe all the vicissitudes of life are just realizing that you can't fight what you already are. you can only pretend, or distract, but it will always come back to you, pushing you, wounding you, killing you, even...

i am tired. i am sad. but somehow i take joy in the little things, day to day. i like to talk to people. i like to laugh with my students sometimes (even as they frustrate me)... i like to look at my wife when she doesn't think i am looking. and make my face look weird or stupid (it's not hard). i like to talk to my son, in that way where you are trying to be casual and not too judgmental... all of these things, all of these people, i love... because i know what time and memory will do to them... right now, i love them in a gentle sad way. i think that's the one gift i have right now, is a kind of appreciation of people and things in my life- because it all goes away. even (or especially) because i will have to, i am always, going away...

life is short.

life is short.

life is-

7/24/2021

i am in this writerʻs class... the way it usually runs (at least for now) is the instructor gives a prompt (usually a word, although it could be a scenario), and we write lines for a script for a few seconds to a few minutes. anyway, at one point, the instructor said "worry", and i wrote "worry has a time, and that time is 3 am." what was funny was that another student in the class wrote something along similar lines. she wrote: "3 am... i wake up each morning and i worry until sunrise." it was a funny/odd connection...

...but itʻs 3 am again (or maybe more precisely, itʻs 4:20).

i recall, when the kids were 10 years younger or so, that i would wake up and haunt the halls of the house. i would go into the kidsʻ rooms and whisper, "i love you," like some kind of ghost (i would do the same to my wife, sleeping in her dreams). i canʻt remember what would disturb me. there is always always always something in life to be anxious about... money matters. the trajectory of your children. health issues... always there is, and always there will be...

there is always also a perpetual sense of regret, and it is something that doesnʻt necessarily grow, but it just seems more prevalent, more ever present. iʻve come to the conclusion that itʻs largely ridiculous to feel too much regret, or rather, that it is an inevitable part of life to feel regret. life is all about choices- choices that are made or not, or rather, choices that weʻre aware of or not. i think to breathe is a choice. even to dream in the depths of sleep is a choice. and weʻre constantly making them. weʻre largely blind to them, we canʻt help but be, but we still make them. and each choice wends a path through this woods, through this rapids, and even if we lay ariadneʻs web behind us, we will never be able to remake the choice, to redo it, to go back. and thereʻs inevitable regret in that, this idea that things could have been different. and perhaps they could have, but thereʻs no use in bemoaning that, because itʻs gone... and anyway, we have so much right here, so many other choices to make, so busy-busy-busy making choices...

what i want to say is this: life is incredibly incredibly short. i know we always hear that, we always perhaps say it ourselves. but it is. you think youʻre one thing, and youʻre so busy taking care of becoming that one thing, and then before you know it, youʻre something else. the world has changed. people are gone. people have grown. and the towers you thought you were building for one moment- for example, that swing set and that backyard play area you were working so hard to cultivate- why, the children are too old, and they donʻt want to play there any more... all these investments you make turn out to be irrelevant to the ever changing present...

i think my writing is a stubborn dream. and i hold to it. it may be irrelevant... but i think itʻs not so much about producing anything that would be read or celebrated by anyone else. itʻs more about me attempting to bind back my life, and find a meaning in it that perhaps only i would appreciate...

*****

among my insights (lately)... i keep associating my brother with the first chinese brother, the one who swallowed the sea. and i have a story for that association, about how he swallowed so much water teaching himself how to swim- and perhaps tears- that he essentially swallowed a sea. and how he might say that it was all for the sake of others- like myself- that he did this. when actually, it was always for himself... i also have ideas about this idea of trajectories. one of deanʻs friends is a literal rocket scientist, and i wanted to have this notion that, because of his friendship, my brother gave this friend the confident to have faith in trajectories, and to become a rocket scientist... but in the process, i wanted to say that he stole away my sisterʻs trajectory (in the story, she is the dragon princess, which is actually a carp that wants to jump a waterfall to become a dragon... only, she canʻt). the message is, yes, my brother has contributed to the world- the larger world- but it has come at a cost in terms of what he has taken away from my family... something no one ever talks about...

i also wanted to make mention of urashima taroʻs treasure box, somehow. this thing that holds time. "time in a bottle" essentially... and why anyone would want to hold back time?

*****

wherever and whoever you are, try your best, live your life, fulfill all your nagging obligations... just do your best to do what is right... because truly truly truly: life is short. life is so incredibly short.