I'm racing in the Ironman this year to benefit ShelterBox, a disaster relief organization. Click here to find out more, and thanks for looking!
Good Dirt Blog by Yi Shun lai is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at gooddirt.posterous.com.
...from freecycle.
I received this free today with a purchase but I just bought milk
yesterday so I don't need this and my kids don't drink milk that fast,
so I don't want it to go to waste. Must pick up asap(before the
blizzard).
1. IM Switz 09. I just signed up for it. I am panicking panicking panicking....but mostly very very excited.
2. ShelterBox garbage. I have yet to read the 385-page weight that is called _The Sphere Project's Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response._
3. Money.
4. An MFA in creative writing: When? If this year, applications due February 1. If next year, will it be too late? And if so, for whom? For my father to reap the benefits of having a daughter with more than just a BA to her name? For my mother, to feel some level of satisfaction? For me, because I'll be 37 by the time it's complete?
5. Timing timing timing: Assuming I get into the MFA program for this year: my year looks like this:
January 09: Conditioning and training for ShelterBox ENDOH (Ed's Nine Days of Hell), begin training for IM 09 (July 12)
Jan 17: First Aid/CPR Training (ShelterBox and Leave No Trace)
Jan 24 and 25: Teach Leave No Trace to REI folks here in Chicago
February 17: Leave US for ShelterBox UK training
March 4: Return from UK
June 28-July 9: Residency requirement for MFA program in VT
July 10: Leave for Europe
July 12: Switzerland IM
And then I start as a student. Whew. I think it might be too tight. And then somewhere in there I have to go on my first deployment for the 'Box, too.
Yikes.
6. The bookstore. I get to go today for the first time in a month. Storytime, yay!!
Here are some photos to lighten the mood, from the past few days and dinner with Dan, Lisa, Ron, and Jim. Pot roast and good friends, yay!!!
1. Sprocket likes to eat snow.
2. Jim made me toasted cheese under the broiler while I was sick. It looks kind of nuclear in this picture, but whaddya want? It's processed cheese food.
3. Lane Tech students are really really into school spirit.
4. Dan setting up his dominoes for a routing of everyone on the table.
5. Lisa sets of Stonehenge, the domino version.
6. Ron sets up BrickBreaker: The domino version.
7. Jim looks like he's about to eat something. Is it his dominoes?
8. My chicken. It sits proudly above all chickens in this small, ragtag kingdom we call: Dominoes.
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...makes a tremendous difference.
last month i ran a marathon and a 10K within a week of each other.
today i strapped on 25 pounds and mucked through 5 inches of snow for an hour and a half and almost didn't live to tell about it.
i am pooped. dinner tonight will prove me to be Some Cheap Date.
on another note, the snow is incredible-amazing-gorgeous, my bank account feels flush for the first time in ages (and no, just because i found $40 in my pocket), so i ordered this. so sue me.
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at the mo', i am sitting on the couch at a temporary workstation. it's temporary because my desk is covered in materials that must be read, stuff that i have to root through from the long time i was gone.
i must admit that the fact that the workstation is temporary allows me to still feel like i am "on vacation," and that i can put things off for just a little bit longer.
the other reason that i feel i can do that is because there are yet a large number of things to be recapped, among them my very complicated feelings about my month away in California.
first things first, i guess: we are not going to indianapolis. of course, by the time we'd heard, we'd talked ourselves into believing that it was such a brilliant move--and it would have been--that it was much more of a crushing blow than it maybe ought to have been.
sigh.
being back here in nice, although it's a far cry from the life we were living before the holidays. jim is home all the time now, of course, and that's nice, but we've been sleeping a lot, mostly because i've been really sick and jim's been stressed and not sleeping well at all during the nights, only falling asleep in the wee hours of the morning, even if he's been staring at the ceiling in the dark all night. hopefully that will get better soon.
the month in california was really, really hard at times, and surprisingly easy at other times. a few weeks before we arrived, my brother reminded me that i'd need to stick pretty steadily to a schedule and make sure my mother stuck pretty steadily to it as well, so that there were no dead spots in the day.
for the most part, until jim arrived, that's what happened: i worked at my desk from 7:30 until about 2:30 every day, and then i was free to do whatever mom wanted me to do.
and one thing i didn't take into account was the fact that mom had her schedule, too: she walked, with her usual daily walking friend and sprocket, from 7:15 until about 8:30, and then she'd go about her day, which usually involves a lot of telephone calls and a fair amount of shopping and fretting about the household and office finances.
there were a few spots in there that were really really difficult: spots of the sort that make you want to pack up everything right then and there, call the rental car company, and just leave, never to return; spots that make you vow that this is the last time you'll be around for "this shit," and spots that make you subject your four blog readers to cryptic two-line rants.
but towards the end, i stopped playing on the defense, and started playing smart. by smart i mean "selective." i mean that i tried more to read between the lines, and less to hear everything that was said, particularly the stuff that was said when i was trapped in a car with a specific offender and couldn't escape. i argued very little and listened a lot, and i heard a lot i didn't want to hear, but i also said i a lot less that could be used as fuel for another argument.
it helped. a lot. i've come to some very specific conclusions about what was said and done over the holiday break, but i've mostly come to one big conclusion: my parents are terrified, and that drives everything they do.
they are scared that they've left me not well equipped to deal with life; that they've raised someone who's incapable of smart thought and reasoning. i can't change this about them. but i can change the way they perceive me. i can tell them "yes," when i'm really saying, "yes, but." really, that's all they want to hear.
case in point: they want me to spend all of my time writing writing writing a book. they hate that i pursue athletic competition. they do not want me to "waste" time on these things. the end result is the same. everyone wants me to publish, but i've been too bull-headed to admit that i'm doing mostly that, sheerly because i hate that they want me to spend all of my time doing just that.
hell, why not just let them believe it? they don't have to know about the hours of training or the travel for competition...they just have to know that i'm writing.
after a month with my parents, i can better hear what they're trying to say, even if they're incapable of saying it in the right way themselves. my parents are angry people who say the wrong thing on such a frequent basis that they've risked ostracizing the two people closest to them. they've wasted entire years of time being angry and worried when they could have been partaking in the company of two people they raised to be, at the very least, enjoyable company, but that doesn't change the basic fact that they're just scared.
i think, in this case, being more generous with my position, and giving in to them, even if it's just at face value, is one of those things that i just have to do.
i am so tired of returning from christmas break, and spending two weeks out of the year, feeling like a cornered animal. i think this past month has allowed me some valuable insight into what drives my parents, and, at least, if i can't agree with where they're coming from, i can try and understand it.
it's a good tactic, even if i'm exercising it sheerly for self-preservation.
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1. pueblo-houses. i like! me want!
2. sprocket and some really cool part of american history and landscape, name of which i forgot to take down because i was getting sick. yes, yes, two days before new year's!
3. me and jim. same landmark. gotta zoom in to check name of said thingy.
4. sprocket-marks at the sangre de cristo art center in pueblo, CO, where we looked at art, bought some things, and had lunch.
5. this beetle also had lunch after the fashion of the bean sauce on my tamale, which tasted like nothing because i was...yes, yes, getting sick. then sprocket had the betle for lunch, mistaking it for bean dip, and the world was right again
6. KT and her station wagon. wha? did i say that? sorry, i meant Subaru Forester, named Sherwood. not by any means a station wagon. we new yorkers don't do station wagons. they don't pair well with heels.
7. me and jim on new year's. doyce and i were both sick, sick, sick. we watched "Firefly" instead of any traditional type of new year's celebration, three hounds at our feet and basking in the company of good friends. wonderful, casual, and happy-making.
8. doyce and kate. we ate at a lovely italian restaurant not a mile from their lovely little house.
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A few photos. There is one that's missing. It's of my mother, running down the driveway to give Sprocket one last hug as we drove away. I didn't snap that one because I was already crying my eyes out.
1. Sprocket, looking bored.
2. Our first glimpse of the Colorado River.
3. The Needles mountains.
4. Some sort of weird tourist-trap-spaceship thing.
5. My landscape for several hours today.
We're in Santa Fe, or just outside of it. Today was our very long day. Tomorrow is a short day. But I am getting seriously sick, some kind of bronchial thing, and I am worried that I will not be able o ring in the new year properly with Kate. Blah! Fingers crossed!!
More on the month with my parents later. It's been quite a journey. I feel no less of an accomplishment, and much more of a payoff, than when I finshed the marathon. This is the way it should be when spending time with the parentals, despite the last entry. Sorry for the bellyaching.
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this stupid month-long sojourn to california just took its predicted turn for the worst.
it's pointless to even try, and yet, i do this every year. what made me think this time would be different?
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it hit home for us in October.
let no one say that i am above being petty or vindictive. however, it's always better when the pundits are on your side:
pepsico, read it and weep:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28353557/site/14081545?__source=yahoo%7Cheadline%7Cquote%7Ctext%7C&par=yahoo
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...for real this time.
1. My mom's been pressing me to try her facial cream. She says my skin's been looking dry since I've been home, and that it looks "older" than last year. Well, she's right, and I've been using her ridiculously expensive, over-packaged facial cream. It's been working wonders (I wonder what the EWG's database has to say about Shisedo stuff), but I woke up last night with a wave of sadness, thinking that I've earned every wrinkle and sun spot on my face--even the dryness is a mark of running that stupid marathon in the driest place on earth--and that I'd be sorry to see these marks of character go.
2. On the same line of unreasonable middle-of-the-night brain meanderings: Last night, my brother and I went to a holiday party hosted by the couple down the street. I realized at around 2AM that they were my first-ever 2nd-generation Asian-American--and hence, truly Asian-American--acquaintances of my parents' generation. I really enjoyed the party. I know it was because it was very much like a party that one of my own friends would throw: a healthy mix of people in terms of age, color, and occupation; grand conversation, friends new and old. But then I realized with a pang that, despite the fact that I was perfectly at home there, I would miss the curious Asian-ness of my parents' type of party, the zero-eth generation type, where there has to be a "theme" for every party and food is the central attraction, rather than people. I am going to miss it because Jim and I would never throw that kind of party. It will die when my parents decide they are too tired to throw parties. And the new generation of Asians coming across--they don't do that type of party anymore. I ought to be OK with this, since I never enjoyed that type of party. But somehow, I'm not. I will miss that curious bit of my heritage, and I see its passing as some kind of omen that the other parts of my heritage, too, will soon be just a memory among the next few generations.
3. Last night before I went to bed, I lay with my head on my hound's chest and listened to his heartbeat. Lately I've taken to calming him down as soon as I can when I walk into the door so his little heart stops pitter-pattering so fast. This has something to do with something I learned in DARE class in junior high. Some public health teacher told us that there's a school of thought out there that says that each human being has a finite number of heartbeats left in his or her system. He them slammed a book down on the desk, making us all jump, and said something like, "Now that I've shortened your life by a few heartbeats, how do you feel?" Well, like CRAP, of course, thanks, Teach! being the surefire answer, he then proceeded to tell us that every upper we ever took would only serve to shorten our life spans. You know, given the finite number of beats allotted to each heart. But last night, the hound's ticker was beating a slow, relaxed, steady, "plip-plop," and we were both content for a short while.
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Time passes so quickly--between the ranting to myself, ranting to all of you, and the weekends spent doing something, I've only a little over a week left here. Jim's flight got cancelled due to the raging snowstorm blanketing Chicago as we speak (I'm a little sorry I'm missing it; I love snowstorms), so he won't be in until the 21st, and by then we will have just under a week left before we drive off into the east again.
I've calmed down considerably since freaking out on all of you a few days ago. Sorry. I think I'd told myself, for some reason, that if we did move, it'd be to Boulder, where we have plenty of friends already, or to Berkeley, where we have plenty of friends and relatives already, on both sides.
I thought that maybe there would be a move to a place with its own style and vibe, I guess.
The reality is, I'm totally prejudiced against Indianapolis already, and that's just silly. I have friends there, too. And anyway, it's got better mountain biking than we have here. I'm just worried I'll be stuck in a car culture with no real tradeoff.
Already, our January is shaping up to be insane. We won't be back until that first weekend in January, although I guess we could take more or less time as warranted. Then January 17th I'm at a FA/CPR class for ShelterBox. Then the following weekend I'm teaching a Leave No Trace clinic both Saturday and Sunday mornings. Somewhere, somehow, we need to spend some time in Indianapolis figuring out where and how we want to live: should we buy? Take over mortgage payments from someone? Rent again? Do we want to live in the collegiate area of town, also labeled a "cultural center"? Argh.
Fortunately, our friends are already providing good guidance and offers to play. Phrew. I guess I'll be a better mountain biker for all of this, although that wasn't really at the top of my list. Snark.
I'm awake in the middle of the night because I suddenly realized that Sprocket still has no pet insurance. Those morons at VPI didn't get it right again. Fortunately, there is another pet insurance company out there, and I will have to tap them.
Mom and I went shopping together today. I got some pretty things and wrote out some of my Xmas cards, although I'm not even through the Ks yet in my address book.
Also, we got a Chrismas tree. Mom trimmed part of it; I trimmed the rest of it. I love trimming the tree. Mom says that she's been doing it alone for years now, which struck a lonely, horrible chord in me. For some reason I'd always assumed she'd had help, especially since the thing was always already trimmed by the time we got home.
Here's a photo of Mom at the mall (yes, she's making that face deliberately). And then the tree. And then again, with Sprocket and some more prezzies.
Sigh. Christmas remembered, Christmas regretted, Christmas past. Onward to Christmas present and future.
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