Belt

My oversized jean is baggy like some guys swagging on the street showing off their superb taste in underwear, which I don’t have because my underwear was just as baggy and worn as my jeans. On top of the shame of having to wear my aunt's jeans, I never had a belt to hold the oversized jean up, which hung precariously on my waist and was ready to fall off. 

I thought about and mused upon and cogitated over it days on end like a true philosopher until the compromise had to be made quickly--I didn't have anything else to wear for that day (the state of which lasted my entire teenage years rippling into my stingy adulthood)--two shoe laces were tied together and became my belt. It was too thin and soft, holding up only parts of the belt loops and cutting into my flesh, but it did the job. My butt was secure and nicely stashed inside of the jeans, content like every other butt normally does. 

Now the trick was to swerve my way around humiliation for the rest of the day--long shirts were worn to cover up the waist, movements that involving lifting up my hands were avoided. I sailed as hard as I could to rise up from the agony of being laughably pitiful to the comfort of being ignorably poor. Unlike gay teens in the last few decades trying to pray away their homosexuality, I did not have the ambition to pray away the poverty; I simply aspire to be ignored. 

Well, I failed epically; as my own critical eyes were wide open and I hated myself to core and rind. For every inch of the shoelace belt was soaked in the venom of vicious prejudice and judgment, the harder I tried to hold my jeans up, the deeper it carved into my flesh. 

Three poems and one prose--for "crafts of writing"

What's the most crucial part of becoming a writer? It's to actually write.

To write down all the trash I have from page -1000 to page 0, so that I will be only left with the good stuff for page 1 to 10, or so said the author Anne Lamott in her book "Bird by bird", the text book for the class I am taking every Tuesday night called "crafts of writing".

It takes 1.5 hours to drive to the class across densely congested traffic in San Francisco at 5pm, and it takes 25 minutes to drive back to my hilly little home in South SF at 10pm. Crossing the new Bay Bridge is always a splendid experience, so is the class itself.

Playing with words and imagination, being appreciated for mess-upness and sensitivity, I like writing because it's exactly the definition of my soul mate: someone who thrives through all my foibles and idiosyncrasies and craziness, enjoying all my dramas, giving me surprises through my own hard work, teaching me a lot about myself, and calming me down from my dizzying existential anxiety in the end.

Here are three poems and one prose I write during my writing practices that I feel remotely happy with for week 1 and week 2:

(1)

Commuter

Avoid eye contact on public transportation,

shoes and pants are extraordinarily interesting

as well as the corner of the automatic door and worn edges of

handbags, and purses and poles and chairs and window seals

Sip diluted life in a cup of coffee

with too much sugar and cream

Time goes by fast if not dense--nothing to linger upon

Sail through without friction,

smoothly 8-hour days turn into nights,

nights into hateful morning alarm clocks,

packed with bitterness and suppressed passion

and the lack thereof

Cold ass professionalism

Stacking boredom into money

or the lack thereof

(2)

Coverage

Which her clothing is apparently lacking

Which her stories are wistfully lacking

Which her childhood is painfully lacking

Which his roof is apparently lacking

Which his stomach is wistfully lacking

Which his pride is painfully lacking

(3)

Accomodate

I am clearly superior

I do whatever I do

You do whatever I do

Everyone does whatever I do

And you all thank me

For my kind accommodation

(4)

My Mom had a very large front tooth, it’s one of the two big front teeth behind the upper lip--for her that tooth is not exactly behind the upper lip--it’s so large, protruding and deformed that her upper lip can not cover it up, unless she tries really hard to wrap her lip around it, but then she will look like she is holding a candy where that tooth actually is.

In all her pictures she smiles with her lips closed (looking like she is hiding a candy), apparently she is very aware of the existence of that unseeingly tooth. She grew up in a very very poor farmer’s family in 1960s China, exactly when the cultural revolution took place--not a good time for finding orthodontists, if they existed at all.

When she was a child, in the morning she got up and carried a big basket on her back and went to the country road through which every family’s cattle will walk to the farm and plow the earth. The cattle’s poop was what she was going for--she would collect piles of dried poops in the basket and burn them to cook breakfast, which is usually made of Chinese sorghum. The regular burning wood is precious and she would not venture to use it except for absolute necessity.

I grew up being secretly ashamed of having an ugly toothy Mom. I worry everyday that I will inherit the front tooth. I check the mirror everyday staring at it waiting for it to disastrously protrude out of my month. It never happened. I ended up having nice straight teeth but I always felt like a teeth imposer.

I wondered how my Dad can stand that, for example, how did they kiss? I never saw them kissing anyway, nor did I even ever imagine that they two, who hate each other with all their determination and creativity, would ever kiss.

Surprisingly after the divorce my mom went to an orthodontist, who exists now in 21st century, and got her tooth fixed. She was 45 and we were walking on the street, and her friend came up and asked who I was. She said this was my daughter. Her friend opened her mouth and eyes wide and said, "damn, I would not imagine you have a daughter of this age, aren’t you like 35 or something?" something along this line. My mom laughed out loud, showing her nice porcelain front tooth aligning just fine with the rest.

She is pretty now, for her age. I imagine she would be much more kissable at this point, nice lip and teeth missed by time and youth and her ex-husband of 21 years.

The battle

I think the essence of life is to choose which battles to fight.

Long time ago, in one version or another I poignantly /heartrendingly said this to some guy: "There will always be problems, but if we fight for it, try to compromise and shit, this is going to work", he said: "That's probably true, but this is not a battle that I want to fight. "

In fact I didn't realize that there was no battle at all, because my opponent was missing. 

The worth of battles depends on the people you are fighting with or against: 

We already know to save the time in arguing with an unreasonable person,or "Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". 

However, it's much harder to choose not to fight than to throw yourself into battles with fits of impulse, passion or sheer stubbornness. 

One all-encompassing wisdom is to choose the worthwhile battle to fight, and to define worth even before that, as goes the serenity prayer "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference."

A lot of battles are not worth fighting for because the battle is already finished before you start:

The fight against your own gene (that you are not hot enough....not the right race...not tall enough...to which family you are born...etc), and the fight against the past (what already happened shouldn't have happened...people should have done this or that...).

Some battles are not worth fighting because you are destined to lose:

The fight to win everybody's approval, the fight to be "perfect", the fight to make things go exactly the way you planned, the fight to make people think or behave the way you wanted...

However, some losing battles have to be fought so that people can learn the lesson. Some losing battle are fought to keep a thread of hope. Some lost battle are fought so that other battles could win.  Without the attempt to make perpetual motion machine there won't be first and second law of thermodynamics. 

Like most young people, I used to fight every battle that I encounter. When I played the RPG game "Tomb Raider", I made sure that I went to each fork before I finally chose the correct path to pass the level, just so that I could explore each corner and not miss any hidden treasures. 

However, in game there are limited paths and places to explore, in life the choice is infinite, and there isn't always hidden treasure. A lot of futile battles were fought, blood and tears shed, time spent, to learn that not all battles need to be fought. 

To avoid fighting lost or losing battles is already hard enough, but there are even harder decisions: a battle that could win, yet takes A LOT of effort. A battle for a miracle.  How do one know if a battle is worth the effort? Especially when there is a lot of uncertainties and a lot of factors out of control?

The other day I was reading a news about a new cancer drug which extended survival for 1.8 month in advanced pancreatic cancer. It is regarded as a success, because “ You've got to be alive to get the next advance.” 

This kind of hard and cruel battle is fought everyday in this world, yet some other non-life-or-death related battles are not any easier to fight. How do one pick one path out of thousands? When is right time to jump in a leap of faith? When it is the time to cut the loss and give up? Even if you can pick the right battles, how do you fight the battle between rationale and impulse within yourself? 

I eventually come to the part of writing where I have very little idea on how to answer my own questions, and I have to leave it this way, like all pretentious deep blog posts ending with resonantly too complicated questions. 

Like Joe said, what deep questions in life don't end in another question?

A mind-bending theory about suicide

Let me start with an interesting scheme of a sci-fi novel by Chinese novelist Cixin Liu (刘慈欣）:

During a long lasting rivalry between two planets, say planet A being earth, and planet B being a technologically much more advanced alien planet. The alien planet wanted to invade and destroy the earth, which is super easy for them because of their highly advanced weapons. However, human learnt/stole one super deadly weapon from them: if human uses it, the weapon will completely destroy both the alien civilization and also the human civilization itself. Thus the alien planet does not want to attack earth because of that threat (however, human will not want to use the weapon either)


Then there is a subtle balance built upon this threat point. Human beings selected the smartest person on earth (called the sword holder) to sit in a room waiting for any signal from the alien planet. This person gets to decide if he/she wants to push that button which will destroy both worlds based on the moves of the alien planet (for example a secret attack), while the alien planet does a lot of statistical studies on each sword holder to determine the possibility of him/her to actually push the button if they do attack.


For human beings, they don't want to do nothing and wait to be destroyed by the alien, yet they don't want to prematurely push the button to destroy themselves. The sword holder need to be very cautious about pushing the button, yet he or she has to be have the mental determination to actually push the button in order for the whole "threat" to work. Basically the sword holder needed to have a great balance of rationality and craziness. In fact they calculated the threat will work only if the sword holder has a 80-90% of chance to actually push the button when the alien does attack. And the whole situation has no return once the button is pushed.


Very precariously, the threat worked to deter the attack from the alien, human perched on the balance of life and death for about 1000 years, with dozens of sword holder spending their entire life time waiting for one signal of attack and honored as the greatest person on earth. Then some drama is introduced as a young girl got selected as the new sword holder against a lot of disagreement on her personality (that she is too "kind" and not determined enough for the ultimate destruction).


The book is called “三体” and is currently being translated to English...I believe the story is deeply influenced by the nuclear weapon situation in this current world we are living in. In fact we are ACTUALLY just like in the story, where we perch on the brink of life and death for decades because of the mutual threat between countries and any drop of a straw might cause total destruction...

Now I am getting to the point that I am trying to make...which is the title: a mind-bending theory about suicide. I was telling a friend this story when we were discussing suicide. I was arguing for a vague concept at that point, and that concept is: because we can choose to die any moment, thus the availability of death as a choice enables us to live on. A more detailed but equally vague explanation is: we can only exist in one of the two states: alive or dead. If we make suicide a "choice", thus every moment we are not choosing to die, we have to be choosing the other option--to live. Normally happy people won't consider the choice of death at all, but at times where suicidal people are contemplating on death, the option of death should provide a mental support for keep on living exactly because it's life-threatening. The logic is: everyone is going to die, and you can choose to die any moment, however there is no return once you die, so why don't stick to the end and die then instead of now?

However, now I have an even more complicated but maybe a little clearer theory of suicide based on the sci-fi story. Let's assume that a suicidal person can always be divided in two parts: the part that desperately wants to live (the survivor) and the parts that just wants to die (the killer). In this battle inside of this torn individual, if the survivor wins, the killer will die, and if the killer wins, both of the survivor and the killer will die. Just like in the story. If we view both the survivor and killer as two intelligent and independently reasoning parties, then we can see the survivor as the alien planet that wants to destroy the earth (which is the killer), and the killer holds suicide as the threat weapon against survivor. 

Thus the survivor can never completely beat the killer because when the self-preserving instinct of the killer kicks in, it will snap anytime and kill them both.  At this point, I face a terrible dilemma: if the killer's goal is to kill, then it should have just killed both the survivor, and the killer itself, thus killing the whole person. End of story. So there will be no threat, everyone should end up dead. In order to make the balance to work, I have to make an important assumption: It is that the killer doesn't want to kill unless threatened. The killer side of us is not a cold-blooded killer, it's more like a sleeping lion only to attack when provoked, or more precisely, a revengeful soul aiming to destroy after getting hurt.


This assumption actually makes a lot of sense, as we see most suicidal people don't die of pure torture, pain, or physical deprivation. People struggling at the bottom of poverty, in the midst of wars and hunger don't choose to die usually, they try very hard to survive instead. The people that mostly suicide are living a fine life, yet dying of mental deprivation, perfectionism and unfulfilled desires--people suicide for heartbreak, lack of success, not having hope, which are totally non-life-threatening things. In these cases, the killer is actually triggered by the overpowered "survivor" part, the killer snapped and killed both because the survivor part wants too much.


Now in a balanced situation, where survivor acknowledge the existence of imminent death, and survivor is not trying to eliminate killer all together, thus the killer is not trigger for kill. This way the person lives, and lives as a real person--a complex and contradicted human being, perched at the brink of life and death the same way as our dear planet.


End of my theory.


I guess what I am ultimately saying is that a living human being is an intricate balance of life and death, and the killer part of suicidal people are paradoxically survival-seeking. Death is the reality check, it's the ultimate sword hanging on top that makes us cherish living. 

斩

我偏要把那根

        柔韧不断，念念不忘的丝线

一截一截

　　斩成千万段的碎片

沿着加州到阿拉斯加的

　　北美大陆的西海岸线

我手拿一把巨大的菜刀

　　一刀一刀

　　用力剁断

断成一小截，一小截

各个枯萎卷曲，发黄变黑

变成灰尘

　　飘到旧金山湾里

　　太平洋里

　　北冰洋里

从因纽特人的鲸鱼的骨架上
　　映着变幻的极光
　　朝着漫天的繁星

　　飘到火星的扬尘里

等到下辈子我们坐着探索号

　　移民火星的时候

再捧一抔异星的土

　　其中有一粒灰尘

在橘红的天空和大地下飘扬

　　讲一个拿菜刀的女人

　　发狠忘却的故事