1.
Sometimes I feel like I am an imposter—like the things in this world were not meant for me to touch. Yet, despite my want to comprehend them, I can't. It's not my place as an inexperienced, 18-year-old youth to have significant things to say. In the end, all my writings come from a single, bleak fountain within me—none of them have external sources, none of them have bridges to the world.
The work of another can never be mine. If I try to dissect something, it would only singes, confounds, and baffles me. I wonder about critics: How are they so confident about their own interpretation of another author's text? How can they assume so many things, then prove them with a single thread of a text? Do they ever question themselves, the validity of their words? Do they find expertise exhausting?
If I create my own world, where I construct every reality and every detail, maybe I would feel like I have the authority to control it, to declare things about it, to ponder it.
2.
The chill outside is finally flowering into autumn. Your mouth tastes like iron and lead, your eyes are a pale shade of scarlet, and the outfit you wear today is head-to-toe gray. You feel about as attractive as a lumpy pigeon in a street bazaar. All you wish for is your bed, the pure creamy sheets enfolding you like floral snow. Another Statistics lab, another hour to devour, another night to spend on endless procrastination and a sorry stumble of words, worlds, and numbers.
Yet, there is beauty in the void. The chill nowhere near compares to the few, rain-whipped weeks at the end of October. Because Thanksgiving is swiftly approaching, the thought of your first snow—after ten years spent in California—materializes, and you look forward to the dizzy prisms of white and shadows, to the thought of wearing wool gloves and winter boots again, to the remedial holiday joy that will replace your ritual of shunning Christmas every winter season, because each year is a bigger disappointment than the last. Thanksgiving is coming up soon, too, and you will be going back to California for that. Will it feel alien to see your parents after three months? Will their faces beam through the drowsy airport, with grins wide and cheery in spite of days of working, working, working to support you in your college escapade? You are still unsure and uncertain about your decisions, about the amount of fulfillment you're getting. But it is only early, they'll assure you. It is too early in the game to have doubts. It's too early in the game to get lazy, and too early in the game to feel confident.
You have a checklist of things you want to do once you get home: pick up that coat, walk down University Avenue again with a large cup of jasmine pearl milk tea, see your friends' faces, finally get that driver's handbook and read it when you have nothing better to do.
And you keep dreaming, and dreaming...
3.
I have found there are multiple kinds of happiness. There is surface happiness—little pops of elation that fizz on your skin in a fashion like the cool moisture after leaving a hot shower, with the fresh steam curling around your pores. Often during these moments of happiness you smile, you laugh, you pose for the camera like nothing matters at all. I’ve had plenty of these; they appear, they’re beautiful, but they crumble under the first, transitory moment of loneliness or boredom. They smudge like eye makeup. They melt when wet, and end up as dark circles. It is the transitory happiness you feel after you see a movie that is entertaining, or a musical, with your friends.
Then there is joy. Enduring joy. The joy that survives any transitory moments of sorrow, that only strengthens with time, pain, and experience. The joy that blows coals on your internal furnace. The joy that is quiet sometimes, but always there.
4.
Not since fourth grade, when I colored my language arts assignments, laminated them, and put them together into a book, have I made a list of what I’m thankful for. But with the occasion, I suppose it couldn’t hurt.
Thankful—
5.
So, real winter has arrived. It is a painted beauty, a geisha. It has no umbrella. It breathes all over any exposed flesh. It is greedy for warmth. It is lustful. It is ashen. It makes brittle your lips, and kicks your boots. It sneaks up behind you. It’s wanton. It adores girls from California.
What I like about real winter is the snow. The repetition of Christmas music in Target and Borders has always been maddening. But now that it’s tangible on my hands and beneath my shoes every time I go outside, I can understand why one would dream of a white Christmas. When it’s falling, the stuff is the purest a substance can be.
Here is a poem about first snow:
Poem on an Empty Stomach
Pittsburgh's first snow sprinkles us like we're walking desserts.
Magic flour. I’ve lost this feeling
since the Year of the Tiger when I threw tantrums
in the scarlet-orange October leaves,
mouth twisted, screaming at the pebble-ash blue of the Bay, wanting to plant more snowdrop seeds in winter, wanting a Christmas filled with ashen frost
in my fists that melted with a slip of a mitten, a lick of the hand.
Everything can hide in snow: key chains, strings of fat pearls,
pendants, cool dried tears, even heat.
I used to hold a bowl up to the sky and wait for it to fill up, a bowl of snow;
it tasted like jasmine rice,
pure and cherubic, with just a chimera's breath
of sweetness, like eating a mirage.
6.
I desperately want to get into the Survey of Forms: Fiction class. Waiting lists are like bread lines. Some of these courses I will need in order to keep my sanity intact next semester, when I’ll be taking calculus. Math and I have never been on friendly, picnic terms with each other. I want to get into a drawing class-—one that requires early morning flights because it starts at 8:30—but this semester has proven to me that even having every day 10:30 classes does not mean adequate sleep. So I can justify getting into shape next semester and stop being so lazy in the early morning hours. Drawing class will help me catch up.
This semester is drawing to a close. So soon already. So fast. A bee that buzzed past my nose.
7.
If ever a test were to have Antisocial Personality Disorder; if ever a test were to have the purpose of searching, manipulating, raping, and destroying; if ever a test were to tyrannize and cackle loudly in the face of those suffering from adversity; if ever a test were to provoke suicidal tendencies and sleepless nights spent writing poetry that spoke of its grave and unfathomable injustices, then surely... surely it would be the final I just took this morning—which shall remain unnamed for the sake of its repute.
8.
I’ve been browsing the McSweeneys website too much. A few of my favorite links are Lists, Reviews of New Food, and McSweeneys Recommends. I have become so inspired that it’s necessary to bring my own recommendations to the table:
Coconut Ice Cream with Sticky Rice
Like many of the best things in life, it is simple. Not too adorned or laced with ingredients, it is comprised of only a delectable scoop of ice cream over warm, sweet, sticky rice. The ice cream drips slowly in between the delicate morsels for a most heavenly flavor that will make your toes curl with glee. For perfection, this dessert is awfully unpretentious.
It can be found in Siam Royal, a Thai restaurant located on University Avenue in Palo Alto.
Urinetown
What sheer delight this musical brings to the senses. The music was roaring, the dancing enthralling, the hilarity unending. It is set in the future, in a town that is inundated by drought, and water is scarce. Urinetown is the mythical place of punishment—when one is summoned there, one never returns. A giant corporation reaps profit by oppressing the poor: to use the toilets, the people must pay. The police enforce the law. And, the poor are left to suffer, until a leader gathers them together for a plight for urethral freedom.
It will make you pee in your seat as you buckle over with laughter. But you would pee in triumph, for only this musical will make you understand the sacred privilege of public bathrooms.
Brokeback Mountain
What began initially in a wide chasm of boredom-—my friend going, “Hey, let’s go see a gay cowboy movie, yo”; and me going, “k”—became 2 hours and 14 minutes of transcendent illumination, awe, breathlessness, heart-rending sorrow, and, at the end, a total loss for words. Let’s just say that this movie put me in a wide-open, grassy field and struck me with lightening. I love it to death. Not once did I wonder when it was going to end, like I do in all movies, even the ones that I like. I didn’t want it to end. I wanted it to keep going, in all its pristine splendor, with all its rough and tumble love, with all its amazing characterization, with all its passions suppressed and flooded, with all its words left unsaid, in all its sad, lonesome beauty.
Izze fruit juice sodas in Blackberry or Clementine
I found this one at Starbucks. Yummy things, these sodas. They fizz on your tongue. Quite amusing.
Reading good novels for pleasure
Even in college I don’t see much of this. Even among English majors, I don’t see much of this. Hell, I don’t do enough of this. But this should be remedied. Because it brings so much pleasure, at least for me, to let the words on the page simmer in your brain for a while until it melts into a heap of literary satisfaction.
Naps
They’re too underrated. Nothing is as refreshing as an unexpected helping of sleep. In an insomniac world like mine, naps are tickets to revitalization.
Cheryl Strayed
Nobody knows about this writer. It’s hard to find her stuff. But her essays are anthologized in The Best American Essays series quite often. Her essay “The Love of My Life”, published in The Sun and anthologized in Best American Essays 2004, was really a gem. She uses a refreshing style—very candid, but beautiful. The obsessive way she eulogizes her mother is truly haunting.
9.
Winter break was mellow and filled with a writer’s frustrations. I want to paint. I want to read. I want to write. I want to bend spoons and make jello molds out of them. I want to write another play. Hayward is oppressive. I never thought I’d want the boring, suburban Cupertino existence until now. I want it back.
I finished reading Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min. What I gained from it: Madame Mao Jiang Ching, bride and partner of Mao Zedong, was an overly ambitious, obsessive, obsequious zealot. I have been inundated with Communist propaganda. If I hear one more line of it, I will join the circus. And it just made me hate Mao Zedong even more. I share the dude’s surname. The book itself was illuminating, even though the people in it were maddening.
On a different note, I found out I won first place for poetry in the Martin Luther King Writing Awards at Carnegie Mellon. Flabbergasted doesn’t begin to describe how I feel about this. I am to read my poem “Winter Fable” in front of an (hopefully not large) audience in the Rangos Ballroom on Monday, less than a day after I arrive back at school, exhausted by ten hours of travel. There is this thing I have with reading my own work, in class or otherwise, where I will suddenly burst into hysterical laughter and, you know, not stop. It’s happened before on multiple occasions. I think it happened once in Dave’s class. What I’ve written may not be funny at all, maybe even dead-serious, but this bubbling itch in my throat forces me to submit to the mortification of a whole table of people staring at me like I’m a moron. I will start laughing my brains rotten as soon as the words come out. I just hope this habit stays in the classroom, and won’t burst in front of a huge room of people expecting poetic greatness.
10.
I’m feeling mellower, now that I’m back in school. For some reason returning here was much, much less traumatizing than the beginning of last semester, as one might expect. No orientation (thankfully). My suitemates moved for unknown reasons. (I do hope it’s not because my roommate and I mooch off their hand soap, and if it is, then we get the picture, seeing as now this semester we will clearly have to buy our own.)
I have high hopes for this semester. I’ve discovered the joys and delights of reading Haruki Murakami, in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Textbook prices are a rampaging bull of terror again. The bed is a warm, happy sand pit of lovely unconsciousness. What a pointless paragraph, as all of this I’m sure you already know. Good night, and I wish you all at 826 and beyond a beautiful, stimulating, delicious new year.
11.
Okay, so the last paragraph should have been the end to this journal. I was just kidding. No—I have something else to say. It just so happens that 2006 is the Year of the Dog. No kidding, I realized this just now. It was by mere coincidence that the title of this journal included a St. Bernard. I made up the title before realizing and writing this entry. Really, St. Bernard came up just because of the alliteration.
Anyway, since the time I was a small child, all kinds of dogs have delighted me to an almost insane degree. I loved to pet them. I loved to hold them. I loved to nurture them. I loved to tease them. Now that I think of it, I was a cruel child to those poor creatures. When I was in middle school, Lady, my neighbor’s little dog, was under my constant care. Sometimes I would stick a piece of ham to the refrigerator with a magnet and see how high that nimble Lady would jump to attain gustatory nirvana. It delighted me endlessly, and shamelessly. At the same time, I devoted a profuse amount of adoration to my tiny little cream-puff-colored, short-legged, canine cutie. She taught me how to bark. She accelerated my run on the beach. Most importantly, she taught me the value of animal companionship.
One summer, my neighbors moved to Grass Valley and took Lady with them. I never saw her again. But I’ll always consider her my first pet, even though she wasn’t technically mine. Lady, wherever you are, whatever you’re hunting, I hope the year of 2006 will be a fruitful one.
Cheers.
Sally Mao
