Category: Living

The Road

Betty2 Comments

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On Facebook, a high school classmate recently changed his profile picture to one of him and his son. If there’s a surefire way to alienate certain Facebook stalkers (or just, you know, members of your high school class who are still in college) it’s putting up a photograph of you, your kid and your wife/husband (whose presence is implied as the photographer). It’s even more startling than the status updates that say So and so is “engaged” or “married,” not least because of that old adage: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Continue reading “The Road” →

Procrastination Kills

Betty4 Comments

Recently, loved ones have taken to congratulating me prematurely.

“You’re almost done! You must be so excited!”

“Just three weeks away!”

“I’m so proud of you! Do you want anything for graduation?”

“A graduate! You’ll be just like Dustin Hoffman in that one movie with the ambiguous ending!”

No one’s actually said the last one to me, but it’s the statement to which I can provide the most accurate response.

Lately I’ve been stalling. I haven’t been writing except for lame one pagers in my diary (pining about ‘Ben,’ mostly) and I certainly have not been reading for or participating in class discussions. True, “graduation” is only three weeks away (two, if I subtract the week of Thanksgiving, as I will be home for its entirety) and true, time, in its inevitable way, will fly, but right now, this Tuesday evening, the unwritten pages of final papers are piling up and I haven’t a clue as how to tackle them. It’s no longer a question of motivation – I haven’t been motivated to do well in school since senior year of high school – but rather, an issue with…”What now?”

I didn’t expect this stupid, common question to hit me too like the proverbial ton of bricks, but it has and my face hurts and so I’m asking: What now? I can see into the immediate future. I will graduate. With above average grades, below average affection for my alma mater. (At the department store the other day, I overheard a teenage boy discussing Berkeley and Brown – “I like both,” he said. I looked up from black boots that didn’t exactly fit, my face red, “Choose Brown,” I said.)

I know myself – writing papers assigned by youthful and elderly professors alike is, regardless of my attraction to them, like pulling teeth – and I will write them. I will turn them in and if they are graded by professors, will garner generous grades. If not the professors, then bitter, stingy GSI’s (graduate student instructors), who, if the holiday spirit vacates their hearts at the wrong moment, will damn my papers and final grades to scholarly hell (any grade below an A minus). I don’t want to be cast into that hell, especially not in my last semester, but while it’d be great to leave Cal with an academic bang (3.9 decibels loud!), I am wearied by all this relentless reading and writing and listening. I have waited six years to tune out higher education and on the 17th of this December, 2010, I will finally plug my ears and walk away.

My dear aunt called from Taipei two evenings ago. It’s been my spoken plan now, to leave the States for one or two years and fashion a little expat life for myself on the seventh floor (the most modest penthouse there ever was) in our family’s building on Dong Fend St.

“There’s a fine English cram school near my work,” my cousin told me happily. Both she and my aunt anticipate my return, as though my presence would somehow breathe fresh life into their self-perceived dull ones.

“There’s no one here to make waves,” my aunt sighed into the phone, “And Karen wants to live with you on the seventh floor. Perhaps things will be more exciting this way.”

And I’ve no doubt things will be exciting – I’ll teach English, make a killing (especially now, with my degree!) and shop, dine, watch movies whenever I please – it will be a more mature, more fabulous version of my life in Taipei nearly five years ago, when I tutored privately and taught at the National Taipei College of Nursing. Karen and I grew up together and the plan is to continue growing (or perhaps halt the aging process) while living out our single girl life in Taipei. Is this viable? Is it possible? Am I merely planning some elaborate escape? Taipei, despite its cloying humidity and bustling streets, is my mental cryogenic freeze. I go there to pause. To put “real” life, whatever that is, on hold. Ought I do that for more than six months not to mention a year? Or two?

I have my concerns, not least of which is Taipei’s dating scene- a veritable pond sans fish for a big-boned, deep-voiced, giant shark like me. (I believe I did, yes.) The year and twenty-three summers I’ve spent in Taipei have revealed that my “type” of man does not exist in Taipei. And if he does, he is there only briefly, on a stopover perhaps to bigger and more important cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong or Tokyo. No, Taipei gets the stringy foreigners from Europe and middle America – the guys who are misinformed about but endlessly by idiot Taiwanese girls. They come with pale, blotchy skin, holey t-shirts, and those disgusting sandals with the velcro straps and in the heat, break out in the worst cases of yellow fever known to man. Speak perfect English and their eyes glaze over – they don’t want communication, they want dumplings spooned into their mouths with submissive coos.

Equally repulsive are the wealthy ABC’s (American Born Chinese) and TEABRGHTWFD (Taiwanese Educated Abroad But Returning Home To Work For Daddy). When we were younger, my cousin and I studied my aunt’s wealthy friends, dreaming that marrying into one of these families was certainly the fast track to wealth, power and consequently, happiness. Thank god we developed brains along the way. Despite our meager (future) jobs and pitiful paychecks, we still have, in our fathers and other men we admire, standards to adhere to. And I confess there’s a bit of self-loathing going on here – I’m terrified of being my parents’ charity case (hence the plan to teach English in Taipei) but I would hate to date or marry another charity case, regardless of how lucrative the source of the charity may be.

Thus one setback Taipei might pose is the potential throwing away of two perfectly good years of my twenties. I’m not getting any younger. The crows feet that have stepped into the corners of my eyes are only getting deeper (and funny, I’m not laughing all that much). I’m not thinking too much. I’m thinking critically about my situation as a woman in the world.

Another crux: professional progress. Of course I can pledge to write everyday about the sights and sounds of Taipei and of my family – and most likely, I will, but how diligently will I revise? And how ardently will I complete the applications for the MFA programs I’ve also been crowing about? That was the whole plan, after all – graduate, move, teach, write, apply, enroll (Brown, UCI, Iowa – in that order), learn, write, publish, teach at Harvard. The master plan.

And now that’s it’s written and will soon be posted, I feel better. Now that it’s written, I can see how far this plan is, how strange my fears sound and how very achievable it all is. My imagination is quite vivid. My age still young.

My essays all due in less than three weeks, still unwritten. As long as they remain unwritten, the master plan will seem hazy and far. I can’t have that now, can I?

To Nabokov, Milton, Hitchcock and Wagner (the last not a famous writer but an adorable professor with an unfortunately dull class) – may you all see me to the end.

Focus

Betty3 Comments

This past weekend I caught a glimpse into the focused mind – a brain capable of tuning out and zooming in on whatever task or idea sits before the body. Ben, old Ben, changed but unchanged, with a sprinkling of gray hairs on his young head, stood a little straighter, dressed a little neater, walked a little faster than I remembered. He welcomed me with open arms to his new Alma Mater, Stanford University, granter of his future Doctorate in Computer Science. We walked through the campus; I saw everything and nothing.

But he unlocked the door to his office, which he shares with another PhD student and I began to pay attention. It was a narrow room with a large window at the end wall providing a refreshing vista of Stanford’s campus. “I like the view,” he said, and I nodded, knowing the need to look up from one’s screen sometime and wish to see something far and natural, like a tree, mountain or glistening lake. But whatever respite the eyes require, the focused brain at work can stop only for a minute, if at all.

The focus I speak of manifests itself in surprising ways: a dirty dry-erase board with a mysterious “Daruma” written on the top left corner; a messy desk nearly smothered by half-empty coffee cups and Gatorade bottles; conference papers spilling out of paper grocery bags and onto the floor. It was intoxicating. I imagined myself standing in a still life: “Genius at work”. I was lucky that the genius stood there with me, but had he been somewhere else, I would, by the contents of the room itself, have been bathing in the aura of genius.

His is not the only office I have seen that paints a passionate, concentrated mind at work – my lovely professor, the Nabokov expert, has a similar workspace. Every shelf crammed with books (all with creased spines indicating they have been read and reread) and every inch of flat surface covered with papers both his and his students; mine, the product of hours and hours of sporadic, half-hearted research, floating lightly on top, weighted down only by the ink and paper rather than solid ideas. In both offices, dust coats certain areas, but it does not matter – the true activity takes place in their skulls.

Contrast those still lifes with another of my room: consistently spotless; my desk, my closet, even the bottommost drawers of either, everything neat as a pin. Never an item out of place; the only thing on the floor are the legs of my furniture and a rug, which, if wrinkled or flipped, immediately straightened and righted. This is not only the sign of a budding (or full grown) obsessive compulsive, but also a dead giveaway for an unfocused, wandering mind. The brain that can’t focus must generate the illusion of being able to do so by making the physical environment seem orderly.

A decade ago, I was the same way, my symptoms in some ways more acute. My aunt asked me, after marveling at my various systems of organization, why I felt compelled to keep everything so neat. I thought for a long while, mulling over a suitable response before settling on a fact: I was, at least to my young self, quite “messy” inside. I understood my need to clean and wipe and stack and fold as an outlet to some inner rumblings – the confusion that comes with being as optimistic as I was, yet also painfully self-aware of potential limitations.

I wanted too many things, pursued too many interests, swam in a million shallow pools so that I would never have to get my hair wet. By keeping my room neat and my belongings pristine (for some reason, I was never one of those kids who wore out the soles of her shoes or came home with muddied, torn clothing – even after long afternoons spent in trees) was a precaution – I was creating a safe haven for my body to return to in case the clutter of my mind somehow reared its head and emerged. It’s the root of my many evils, this desire for superficial perfection, and rather than promote productivity or creativity, it constrains, corrupts, and desiccates whatever streams I might have flowing within so that I cannot write or read or do anything worthwhile without fretting that my clothes are not in order or that my desk drawers are not perfectly partitioned off. Staples here, paper clips there, empty stationery for letters I will never write, here.

I am getting better. Better at letting little things go here and there (people are now allowed to sit on my bed) and no longer worrying about letting papers pile up or books topple… but even these little allowances seemed forced, as though I am testing myself to see how long I can go before I reach out to straighten, no, completely reorganize everything in one long, dusty afternoon. But I am learning. I am learning to apply these methods of organization to my mental state. And I am writing. It is hard for me, but I do it.

As we strolled through campus, I asked Ben if every morning he walked to his office.

“I do,” he said, “I drive sometimes too, because I do get lazy, but I like to walk. It takes me roughly thirty minutes to get to my office and in a way, the walk saves me time.”

I nodded, about to say something about not having to go to the gym, but he continued.

“I like to use that time to process my thoughts. It’s a good time to think and organize. I can’t really do that effectively when I’m driving.”

So this was his reason – a far cry from mine, which had everything to do with the body and nothing to do with the mind. This was before he showed me his office, and already I was in awe. Later, we stepped out of his office and into Hoover Tower, a Stanford landmark which, I was pleased to see, was less aesthetically pleasing than Berkeley’s Campanile – but the view was pleasant, despite the greyness of the sky and the chill of the wind.

I remarked how lovely it was to see matching Spanish tile roofs. “So orderly here,” I said, “Unlike Berkeley, where the buildings don’t match.”

He looked at me for a minute, “Really? I like that the buildings in Berkeley don’t match.”

In the two years I’ve spent at Berkeley, I learned to find my pockets of neatness and order. There are certain houses I like to look at because the paint is not chipped, the windows are whole and clean and the lawns are not overgrown to the point of resembling a small jungle. I smile at these houses and wonder how they can stand to neighbor the more unsightly edifices. Walking to campus, I prefer the right side of my street to the left because the sidewalk is more even and the row of houses more favorable to me than the over grown students’ garden. Certain restaurants top my list not only because of the food, but because the tables, floors and bathrooms are clean and well-lit. I hate the smell of garbage, piss and shit (all of which occur in abundance in Berkeley) for the same reasons as everyone else does, and also because these odors transcend the membrane of my nostrils and threaten to sully my insides. The homeless, even though I feel for them, truly I do – I too, would talk to myself and yell obscenities – invade my vision. They remind me day after day of what I am not capable of cleaning.

I’ll end here, at the top of Hoover Tower, where it was strangely quiet despite the wind and a group of laughing Chinese families. I gazed out across the red tiled roofs, feeling happy and sad, composed yet on the brink of disintegration. Dear Ben with his gray hairs and kind smile that masked a gleaming mind and I with my shiny hair, my bright orange scarf – the first carefully brushed the second carefully selected – with my muddle of thoughts. A jumble of millions. The buildings with the matching roofs calmed me a bit. I stole a glance at Ben, who smiled at me. Tumble tumble crash crash. I wanted nothing more right then than to clean something.

After a Long Absence, Back to New York

Betty3 Comments

Earlier this month I took a trip to New York.
“Unnecessary,” my father said, “What business do you have in New York?”
“Absolutely necessary,” I replied, “Grace will be there, and besides, I’ll have two free places to stay.”

The first place was with J, the son of a family friend who I had imagined to be some sort of shipping magnate. J’s mother is an artist, a generous woman with flowing hair and luscious lips. She travels all over the world in expensive linen outfits, renting beautiful houses for months at a time. Sometimes she takes art classes from local masters to improve her technique. One Christmas she presented my parents with a painting of an enormous sunflower.

“It’s in the impressionist style,” she said with an artist’s authoritative air.

Standing behind my parents, I heard some of my relatives snicker.
My father, not known for tact, laughed heartily and said, “Whatever the style, the frame will probably cost more than the painting will ever be worth.”

J’s mom, luckily, is extremely thick skinned and slapped my father playfully on the arm.

“Thank you anyway,” my father said, “We will hang it right here, above the fireplace.”

Her generosity however, extended far beyond her willingness to give away her art. She was also quite generous with her timeshare. She took me and my parents to Paris in the spring of 2006. Her husband, the shipping magnate, came along as well, and contributed to what was a most memorable trip because there were two middle-aged, moderately wealthy men with nothing better to do but fight to pay for every meal. I sat quietly to the side and ordered escargot and steak frites.

Last summer, J’s mom (I’ll call her L), took me, my brother and mother to Venice. J couldn’t go because he had just started working for his father, who also couldn’t make it.
L petitioned heavily for her husband to let J take a vacation, but the shipping magnate was adamant, “I can’t just let him go on vacations with you whenever you want. He’s my son, but he’s an employee now. I have to treat him like one.”

Tough love, I thought, when L told me the story. Sitting in St. Mark’s square with the sun on my back, I popped another Baci into my mouth.

A year later, I ran into J at my cousin’s wedding and asked why he went to work for his father.

“Well, it’s hard to go out there and start something on your own.”

No duh, J.

He smiled, “So might as well do some shipping.”

He chose the New York office because it was in New York. His parents still lived in Southern California along with his older brother W, who also worked for their father. I asked W why he didn’t also move to New York to live and work with J.

“J seems to be having a lot of fun,” I said.
“He is,” W said, “But honestly, I’m old enough to know now. I need supervision.”

W is 27.

As J and I spoke, his mother came up to us.
“Betty! J has a great apartment in New York. You can stay there if you ever go to New York.”

My eyes grew wide and calculating.

“How big is it?”

“Five bedrooms,” J said.

That was all I needed to hear. It sounded like a mansion by NYC standards, and I was sure, as J’s father was a shipping magnate and as his mother traveled in high style and as J, in his designer tie, watch and everything else, the apartment could be nothing but spacious, clean and luxurious.

Well.

Just because you think someone’s father is a shipping magnate doesn’t mean they actually are. In March I made plans to visit New York and foolishly invited myself and Grace too, to crash at J’s mansion. Five bedrooms, I thought, that ought to mean he’s got an empty one for guests.

Where do I get these sort of ideas? I blame television and girls named Blair and Serena.

J, as it turns out, was being sorely overworked by his father and had, since the last time we talked, rented out the last bedroom to a girl whose boyfriend had also come as part of the package. The apartment was in a nice building on 14th St, which on paper sounds like a nice address but on foot is actually a helluva walk from the nearest subway station. Five bedrooms too, sounds great, especially when you’re talking about New York, but if you can build walls, anyone can turn a large studio into five small bedrooms. Six people used the one bathroom that wasn’t part of the master bedroom, which was not occupied by J but by another female roommate. It is shocking, the smell of a bathroom that is used daily by six people. The gist of my story is that there were five bedrooms, two bathrooms, too many people and not enough furniture. From what I remember, J’s “mansion” was furnished with two enormous futons, a dining room table, an ironing board, and a giant flat screen tv that blasted first the Laker’s game, then the latest video game J’s roommate had been dying to play.

“I’ll only play for thirty more minutes,” he said at 1 am.
“It’s fine,” I said, my eyes bleary from fatigue, “I’m not even sleepy.”

As he shot at cowboys and slutty cowgirls, I used the only perk J’s apartment (apart from being free) had to offer and signed onto Expedia.com and booked a hotel room for the next three nights.

It was expensive, so before clicking, “Confirm,” I called my dad to let him know.

“Absolutely unnecessary,” he said, shaking his head into the receiver.
“I know,” I said, but thought, “Waaaay necessary.”

Rejected by Google in Philadelphia

Betty5 Comments
Ben Franklin on a park bench in Philly.
“So, why should I hire you?”

It is noon. I’m sitting in the colonial style lobby of the Best Western Independence Park Hotel, surrounded by the trappings of early 19th century genteel living: there’s a marble and wood-paneled fireplace, next to which is a heavy wooden easel displaying a framed, yellowed map of North America circa 1800. A faded tapestry depicting an 18th century hunting scene hangs above the computer, which was until ten minutes ago, occupied by an elderly gentleman in faded denim shorts.  Continue reading “Rejected by Google in Philadelphia” →

Interviews, 2

Betty1 Comment

Interviews totally come in waves. In the beginning, after securing an unpaid writing internship and a part-time job at a bridal salon in San Francisco, I leaned back with my head in my hands and thought, “I’m settled for a while.” Ha – the job hunt, once you start, never stops because unpaid internships are often about as fulfilling as cold, meatless salads for dinner and part-time jobs (Saturdays only), paid or not, are about as mentally stimulating as Justin Beiber songs. About two weeks into both positions, my brain was like, “Geeez…I think you can handle more than this.” And I said, “Gosh Brain, I think you’re right!” After all, I am twenty-four, in relatively good health (aside from this hacking cough that may lead into pneumonia) and in constant conversation with my brain – so I decided to apply to a few more places. A tiny part of my self-esteem with a rather loud voice said, “Aim high! You’re a generalist (with that damned useless English degree!) You never know what you might get!” And the larger, more conservative, mechanical part of my being obliged, selecting famous companies with enormous, shiny headquarters in dreamy, smog-covered cities and harried peoples – click. click. click. sent. sent. sent.

Immediately, you get cold, computer-generated instant gratification – the fruit of a long day’s labor in front of the computer.

“Dear Betty” (the feigned connaissance…)

“Thank you so much for your application! We are presently reviewing your materials and will contact you should we find you suitable/fitting/semi-employable/not a complete waste of our time etc. etc. etc.”

(Please do not respond to this email. It is automatically generated).

But this email signifies a connection sent. I did my part, is what my application states. Now, they do theirs. The thing – the ball, that is – is in their courts.

Well, casting one’s net widely ought to yield a few fish, and as my writing internship spirals towards its timely end (“Would you like to continue to write unpaid, un-thanked, unread, forever?” Why…I thought you would never ask!) and the only “work” that remains is found on the fifth floor at 23 Grant Avenue , I’m now searching for a more fulfilling summer internship to fill my summer Monday through Fridays.

I have applied to several dozen more jobs and internships – mostly in PR and Marketing, perhaps falsely deluding myself that I have enough hamming skills to relate publicly, and get paid to do so. And as the bulk of these applications went out over a month ago, I had given up home when April rolled around and my inbox remained desolately empty save for coupons and groupons that I haven’t the money to employ.

Thankfully, as I said before, interviews come in waves. The wave hit last week. They’re phone interviews, the bulk of them – a preliminary testing of the waters. They’ll see if they like the sound of my voice and the way I arrange my sentences. They’ll test whether I know the distinction between a pregnant pause and a well-timed clearing of the throat to develop a thought.

It’s already Sunday, which means next week is tomorrow. I still have this horrible cough and an entire colony of phlegmy bodies living in my nasal passages. Two days ago my friend said, “My, you sound like a man!” And although it would be one of those stories I’ll tell over and over again, “They though I was a man named Betty! And then declined to offer me the job,” I would much rather prefer to have this boast ready: “I was sick as a dog! I could hardly hear the man! But I got the job!”

We’ll see. Wish me luck!