I dreamt of all sorts of nonsense last night. There was a scene where we were driving through singapore with the car top down, except that it was an illuminated flyover that stretched on for miles but doubled as a waterfall. Then I was in an apartment, being shown the triple locking mechanism with double-doors, and I was incredibly intrigued because I was hiding from something of course, like my own personal ghostface. There was another scene where I was looking at my patio and it was summer and I was thinking of cleaning the area up, taking the chairs and tables out of storage, buying a nice table cloth from ikea maybe, so I could have guests over and entertain them. But it was the tropics, so it was summer every day. Why weren't these tables and chairs out sooner?
They were all random scenes at first, short stories with no apparent relation to each other, but my mind eventually weaved around them and brought me to him, the one person that had been occupying my mind these past few weeks.
In the past, I've dreamt of best friends whom I really miss but are not on speaking terms with. I dream that they call, or I call, and we speak, and everything feels right once more. Or we're together in the same room, talking, with laughter, with smiles. And everything feels right once more. Why don't we make the effort to reconnect? Because it takes two to do so. And sometimes no one makes the effort. Now, it is his turn to guest starr in my dreams.
The air was warm, and we were in what felt like his house. There were people there, walking about, extras on the set, setting the environment for the main actors. Then, we were in embrace, we were kissing, and I felt his brown hair in between my fingers, his beard grazing my face, his nose touching my cheek, his warmth on my skin. There was no exploring of the hands, no leading to the next step; we were simply in each other's arms, enjoying the moment we had, what we've always had. As we held each other, he rested his head on my collarbone, and everything felt right once more.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Sunday, June 6, 2010
I've always wanted to participate in a marathon/triathlon - part 2
It's 10pm on a sunday night as I write this, where I nest in the comfort of a laptop and dry clothes and a warm lamp, on a sunday that began with enough rain to sink noah's ark, where I began my day at the starting line of the Tour de L'île amongst thousands of other colorful bikes, beachballs bouncing through the crowd, happy people singing along to Olé Olé but chanting soleil, soleil soleil soleil instead.
It was shitty weather. Not once did the rain stop, but we were always greeted by volunteers who either cheered, shouted, yelled, blew horns, rang bells, or just stood there. It sort of amazed me. You could have taken a look at the sky in the morning, said fuck it and stayed home. But you didn't. You showed up to watch tens of thousands of strangers cycle by. And most of us appreciated that so we waved back.
By the time we were circling Lafarge quarry I was pretty much high on endorphins. I was riding full speed down a slope with a huge smile on my face, just really smiling for no reason. I thought the quarry was the breathtaking because I was so exultingly joyful. Trees cleared to my left and all of a sudden I was looking at layers and layers of dirt and stone of a big hole in the earth. We took a few more turns and descended on another path through the quarry. You know that perfect moment where you don't have to worry about braking for the person in front of you because everyone around you is also riding full speed ahead so the distance between everyone just remains about the same? That moment lasted like, five whole minutes. It was glorious.
The spoils of my victory! Milk and two free passes for the metro at the finish line. I waited in hypothermia-inducing conditions for a chance to spin the wheel and win something from STM. My shoes were sloshing and my fingers were carrot sticks. And my knees! Oh how they ache. But I finished! 50km! 3 hours! I can do anything now!
Montreal spoils me, three splendid hours of a day, stolen away from all the cars, all the trucks, all the buses, all the minivans all just for the leisure of a bike ride.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
I've always wanted to participate in a marathon/triathlon
I've always wanted to take part in a marathon, or a triathlon. Technically, I've always wanted to be at a point where I was physically fit enough to do it and not pass out halfway.
Being incredibly unfit, I thought I'd approach this one step at a time. Since summer is just around the corner, there would be a gazillion benefit runs, walks, and rides I could start myself off with.
Et, voilà! La carte de ma première course:
The tour de l'Ile (Tour of the island) begins at 9.15am on June 6th, 2010, and the total distance is 50km. I have about less than 5 weeks to start training myself. We are gonna get "bibs" for it! Bibs! It's official! Bibs do sound infantile though. Hm.I took my bike out and wiped it down, and discovered that one of my tyres was bent. :( Obstacle 1!
Monday, April 19, 2010
22, not 20.
I've always expected that change would come on special occasions. I have no idea why I've never questioned it. Like, my 20th birthday, 20, what a nice round number, maybe I'll lose those pounds. Or by Jan 1st, I'll have quit that vice. Something like that. Basically I just expected something awesome to happen to me. Waiting. Waiting for something to wake my life out of its dormant state. Man, this feels ridiculous to type.
One day, ironically like any other, I realized, why wait. Why not take charge of my own life. Why hesitate. Why not just do it. I'm in my immortal twenties but I feel like I'm living my golden years. Where is the spontaneity? joie de vivre? Then I decided I would rather live with anything else other than regret.
So this year has been spent fulfilling things from the "I've always wanted to..." list. Or the "Why don't I just..." list. Or the "Just do it, stop giving excuses" list. Just me writing a Yes Man monologue or something. Ha ha.
Henceforth begins the chronicling of my life, doing what I've always wanted to do.
One day, ironically like any other, I realized, why wait. Why not take charge of my own life. Why hesitate. Why not just do it. I'm in my immortal twenties but I feel like I'm living my golden years. Where is the spontaneity? joie de vivre? Then I decided I would rather live with anything else other than regret.
So this year has been spent fulfilling things from the "I've always wanted to..." list. Or the "Why don't I just..." list. Or the "Just do it, stop giving excuses" list. Just me writing a Yes Man monologue or something. Ha ha.
Henceforth begins the chronicling of my life, doing what I've always wanted to do.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
It's 5 in the afternoon.
It's days like this, after a cup of unsettling tea, a sore middle finger from abusing the f5 button (occupational hazard), slightly less than six hours of sleep, after clocking in too many hours of housekeeping on my own incredibly boring courier-font-in-size-10 code, that I would like nothing better than to be at home reading a sorely neglected book about a female bounty hunter from New Jersey, while enjoying the sweltering heat in the most tattered shirt I own.
I'm incredibly tempted to walk away from my responsibilities. Just for the rest of today, to walk away from an office of prematurely balding sedentary workers, to not spend five hours of my evening slogging away on the treadmill in a gym that artificially inseminates itself with energy by way of blaring trance music and glaringly-colored walls. To walk away from a clerk that tells me I'm earning less than a lab rat that finds the cheese in a maze. No, To walk away from a clerk that tells me I'm earning less than all the different kinds of lab rats that find cheese in mazes (it's a temp job, dammit. Learn some tact also.) To walk away from being broke not by my own undoing, but by the bank that decides that it's excellent customer service to process cheques ISSUED BY ITSELF one full month after its customer deposits it in. (Have you heard of anything like that? I'm still in shock. And making as big a fuss as possible).
Jesus.
To be able to wake up in the afternoon, to stop tasting blood because I bite my lip in frustration, to basically be my own boss, and not serve my boss who serves her boss who serves his boss who serves his boss who serves her boss who serves his boss.
I'll see you at the gym.
I'm incredibly tempted to walk away from my responsibilities. Just for the rest of today, to walk away from an office of prematurely balding sedentary workers, to not spend five hours of my evening slogging away on the treadmill in a gym that artificially inseminates itself with energy by way of blaring trance music and glaringly-colored walls. To walk away from a clerk that tells me I'm earning less than a lab rat that finds the cheese in a maze. No, To walk away from a clerk that tells me I'm earning less than all the different kinds of lab rats that find cheese in mazes (it's a temp job, dammit. Learn some tact also.) To walk away from being broke not by my own undoing, but by the bank that decides that it's excellent customer service to process cheques ISSUED BY ITSELF one full month after its customer deposits it in. (Have you heard of anything like that? I'm still in shock. And making as big a fuss as possible).
Jesus.
To be able to wake up in the afternoon, to stop tasting blood because I bite my lip in frustration, to basically be my own boss, and not serve my boss who serves her boss who serves his boss who serves his boss who serves her boss who serves his boss.
I'll see you at the gym.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Happy Father's Day
This is one of the best articles I have ever read.
WHEN YOU WEREN'T LOOKING, THEY WERE WORKING
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/business/08every.html
By BEN STEIN
Published: June 8, 2008
MOST business journalism is about investments and the people who make them, usually on a large scale. Or else it is about the big dogs who run the mighty earldoms of American business and the agencies that regulate them. This is fair enough. As Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.”
We all want to read about money and how it’s made and lost. But for young people who might have no idea of what business involves, or even what work beyond flipping burgers or selling DVDs might mean, here is a little primer on what it is and why it means something as Father’s Day approaches.
A few days ago, I came across a draft of a memoir my father was working on before he entered immortality in 1999. After reading it carefully, I realized that I knew almost everything in it except for one huge thing: how hard his work — his “business,” as one might say, for it surely kept him “busy” — had been for a number of years in middle age.
To me, as a child and as a teenager, in Silver Spring, Md., he simply got up in the morning, packed his briefcase and went to a fine office at Connecticut Avenue and K Street in Washington — or, if he had business in New York, he packed his suitcase and went to the train after work. When he came home, he had stories about the elegant restaurants he had tried near his office, maybe Duke Zeibert’s or Harvey’s, or, if he had gone to New York, about his room at the St. Regis at 55th Street and Fifth Avenue and how outrageous it was ($30 a night), and how his sleeper car on the train had not really allowed him much sleep.
He never, and I mean never, talked about making money, and he always seemed to have enough of it for a middle-class or maybe upper-middle-class lifestyle. So, frankly, I just assumed that he was having a good time down at his office and was secure and happy in his work.
His memoir told a different tale. There were arguments and power struggles at the Committee for Economic Development, where he was research director. (It was and is an organization of high-ranking business people who put out papers on social and economic issues. My father, for about 20 years starting in the mid-1940s, was the author of many of these papers.) Yes, my father was able to socialize with the heads of the major corporations in America and live on an expense account the way they did, but it was always clear who was the boss. Yes, he got to fly first class, but it was always a struggle to be shown some respect by certain of his colleagues and he often considered quitting.
He also wondered, if he quit, what he would do next and how he would pay the bills, and he did not want his children to have to worry about money, as he did when he was a child of the Great Depression.
I think of this as I shlep through the airport security line with my heavy bags (Willy Loman style), as crazy people sit in front of me on the plane, trying to break my nose by throwing their seatbacks onto me, and as I wake up early to travel to the next destination. Then, as I look at all the other middle-aged (and sometimes older) road warriors in the security line, on the plane or checking into the hotel, I think of our children in school.
I picture our kids bravely taking moral stands on global warming and the polar bears, refusing to “sell out,” get a job or learn anything useful. I think of what I could write to them about their parents’ work. I would start with a short phrase from Hart Crane, the genius poet.
“O, brilliant kids, I was a fool just like you. I was in my mid-40s before I properly thanked my father for his decades of hard work — paying for me to laze around in the cars he bought me, to get drunk in the frat house whose dues he paid, to spend the afternoons with my girlfriends looking at trees and rivers while Pop worked and got so anxious that he took up smoking three packs of Kents a day.
“O, brilliant kids, you get to put on the garments of the morally righteous and upstanding while your parents work — because mothers work now and always have worked — and your parents must say, ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ to those who hire them. O, golden children, you get to talk about how you’ll never ‘sell out,’ and meanwhile your parents stay up late in torment, thinking of how they can pay your tuition. Because, brilliant kids, work (business) involves exhaustion and eating humble pie and going on even when you think you can’t. And you are the beneficiaries of it in your gilded youth.
“Be smarter than Ben Stein ever was. Be a better person than I ever was. Right now, today, thank your parents for working to support you. Don’t act as if it’s the divine right of students. Get right up in their faces and say, ‘Thank you for what you do so I can live like this.’ Say something. Say it, so that when they’re at O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth and they’ve just learned that their flight is canceled and they’ll have to stay overnight at the airport, they will know you appreciate them.
“Get it in your heads that if you throw away your moral duties to your parents, you are thieves. You were born on third base and your parents put you there, and you think you hit a triple. It’s not true. It’s time to give back.
“ `Attention must be paid,’ as Arthur Miller said. So start now, and make it a habit to be grateful to your parents. Say you’re grateful and mean it. Do it now, however young or old you are. Do it on Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, every day.”
How I wish I had done more of it. Now it’s too late — but it’s never too early.
Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.
WHEN YOU WEREN'T LOOKING, THEY WERE WORKING
new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/business/08every.html
By BEN STEIN
Published: June 8, 2008
MOST business journalism is about investments and the people who make them, usually on a large scale. Or else it is about the big dogs who run the mighty earldoms of American business and the agencies that regulate them. This is fair enough. As Calvin Coolidge said, “The business of America is business.”
We all want to read about money and how it’s made and lost. But for young people who might have no idea of what business involves, or even what work beyond flipping burgers or selling DVDs might mean, here is a little primer on what it is and why it means something as Father’s Day approaches.
A few days ago, I came across a draft of a memoir my father was working on before he entered immortality in 1999. After reading it carefully, I realized that I knew almost everything in it except for one huge thing: how hard his work — his “business,” as one might say, for it surely kept him “busy” — had been for a number of years in middle age.
To me, as a child and as a teenager, in Silver Spring, Md., he simply got up in the morning, packed his briefcase and went to a fine office at Connecticut Avenue and K Street in Washington — or, if he had business in New York, he packed his suitcase and went to the train after work. When he came home, he had stories about the elegant restaurants he had tried near his office, maybe Duke Zeibert’s or Harvey’s, or, if he had gone to New York, about his room at the St. Regis at 55th Street and Fifth Avenue and how outrageous it was ($30 a night), and how his sleeper car on the train had not really allowed him much sleep.
He never, and I mean never, talked about making money, and he always seemed to have enough of it for a middle-class or maybe upper-middle-class lifestyle. So, frankly, I just assumed that he was having a good time down at his office and was secure and happy in his work.
His memoir told a different tale. There were arguments and power struggles at the Committee for Economic Development, where he was research director. (It was and is an organization of high-ranking business people who put out papers on social and economic issues. My father, for about 20 years starting in the mid-1940s, was the author of many of these papers.) Yes, my father was able to socialize with the heads of the major corporations in America and live on an expense account the way they did, but it was always clear who was the boss. Yes, he got to fly first class, but it was always a struggle to be shown some respect by certain of his colleagues and he often considered quitting.
He also wondered, if he quit, what he would do next and how he would pay the bills, and he did not want his children to have to worry about money, as he did when he was a child of the Great Depression.
I think of this as I shlep through the airport security line with my heavy bags (Willy Loman style), as crazy people sit in front of me on the plane, trying to break my nose by throwing their seatbacks onto me, and as I wake up early to travel to the next destination. Then, as I look at all the other middle-aged (and sometimes older) road warriors in the security line, on the plane or checking into the hotel, I think of our children in school.
I picture our kids bravely taking moral stands on global warming and the polar bears, refusing to “sell out,” get a job or learn anything useful. I think of what I could write to them about their parents’ work. I would start with a short phrase from Hart Crane, the genius poet.
“O, brilliant kids, I was a fool just like you. I was in my mid-40s before I properly thanked my father for his decades of hard work — paying for me to laze around in the cars he bought me, to get drunk in the frat house whose dues he paid, to spend the afternoons with my girlfriends looking at trees and rivers while Pop worked and got so anxious that he took up smoking three packs of Kents a day.
“O, brilliant kids, you get to put on the garments of the morally righteous and upstanding while your parents work — because mothers work now and always have worked — and your parents must say, ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ to those who hire them. O, golden children, you get to talk about how you’ll never ‘sell out,’ and meanwhile your parents stay up late in torment, thinking of how they can pay your tuition. Because, brilliant kids, work (business) involves exhaustion and eating humble pie and going on even when you think you can’t. And you are the beneficiaries of it in your gilded youth.
“Be smarter than Ben Stein ever was. Be a better person than I ever was. Right now, today, thank your parents for working to support you. Don’t act as if it’s the divine right of students. Get right up in their faces and say, ‘Thank you for what you do so I can live like this.’ Say something. Say it, so that when they’re at O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth and they’ve just learned that their flight is canceled and they’ll have to stay overnight at the airport, they will know you appreciate them.
“Get it in your heads that if you throw away your moral duties to your parents, you are thieves. You were born on third base and your parents put you there, and you think you hit a triple. It’s not true. It’s time to give back.
“ `Attention must be paid,’ as Arthur Miller said. So start now, and make it a habit to be grateful to your parents. Say you’re grateful and mean it. Do it now, however young or old you are. Do it on Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, every day.”
How I wish I had done more of it. Now it’s too late — but it’s never too early.
Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Zumba.
Now this is going to be rather emotional, because im so happy!
You know when you meet a friend whom you haven't seen in a while and she comes back but with half of her weight gone and you look at her in shock and jealously while unconciously measuring that fat ring around your stomach and she tells you her secret, some workout or some sport she picked up, or some new slimming product she chugged religiously and you think to yourself, I've tried just about everything you've tried, why hasnt it worked on ME?
I feel like it's finally my turn in line to go to the counter and recieve my fat-be-gone prize. In the form of ZUMBA! Yes, go look it up if you don't already know what it is.
You know when you meet a friend whom you haven't seen in a while and she comes back but with half of her weight gone and you look at her in shock and jealously while unconciously measuring that fat ring around your stomach and she tells you her secret, some workout or some sport she picked up, or some new slimming product she chugged religiously and you think to yourself, I've tried just about everything you've tried, why hasnt it worked on ME?
I feel like it's finally my turn in line to go to the counter and recieve my fat-be-gone prize. In the form of ZUMBA! Yes, go look it up if you don't already know what it is.
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