Who wrote all this?
Not having posted here in over a year, I went back to read over some of my old posts. I'm a little amazed at some of them, really, not so much in their content (I am still who I've always been), but in their expression. I think my ability to express myself in writing has deteriorated considerably over the past year, as most of my writing now is purely 'professional' in nature, always preoccupied with the expression of thoughts not turned inward. Sure, many of those older posts were dramatic, overwrought, and in too many places striving for eloquence that may have turned out more artificial and stilted than articulate or artful - but it disturbs me that I may have had a better hold on my mind just a few years ago than I do now.
I have nearly no time to write for myself anymore... but as they say, use it or lose it.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
A failure of direction
(warning – extremely stream-of-consciousness and a total downer. Abandon all hope, ye who enter blah blah blah. To my friends, especially - don't read until well after the holidays. This is depressing stuff. I'm venting because I have to. Please don't ruin your holidays.)
I’m never what I should be.
My father’s one of those slightly taciturn types. Oh, he’s not the strong silent type – he makes small talk, loves talking about golf and particle physics – but when it comes to statements about topics that fall under the ambit of life’s direction – like my job, my personal life, my being 33 and single, he doesn’t say too much. We’ve had so few actual conversations on those core topics that every time the subject is broached, it’s him talking at me, with me having little to say in response for fear of it devolving into a shouting match (more likely my fault than his. I’m combative in an argument, but I love my father and part of me doesn’t want to be sending him away with a shouting match ringing in his ears).
Dad just left the house, leaving me sitting here in silence over a brief tongue-lashing about not making the effort to go out and date more. I could tell him I’ve tried harder these past years but there wouldn’t have been much point in it. He’d probably just tell me I haven’t been trying hard enough, which would be difficult to hear because even my efforts over the past year would look fairly meager by the standards of the average person. Of course, I’m not the average person. I’m me – a strange little duck apparently defined, even by my closest friends, by an impossible combination of extraordinary ability and stubbornness, crippling insecurities, and a pickiness that is at once warranted and inexcusable.
But singlehood is just the one topic of many. Where should I even start? How about a lack of direction?
Most people wouldn’t think I have had any lack of direction in my life. I’ve been to graduate school and law school – like so many American-born Chinese children of my generation, college was never a choice – it was compulsory. Just another stage in life, so obvious and so expected that it would never cross our minds that it was actually a privilege. It felt like more of an obligation, a foregone conclusion. If we’re accused of not having a proper appreciation for the kind of opportunity it represents, we’re probably guilty of that. But what credit or appreciation does one give to one’s destiny, if there is such a thing? I can’t see what pride there would be in, say, being destined for greatness. That would just mean you were obligated to fulfill a preordained fate. That the freedom and control that so many of our parents cherish so strongly, having fled the Cultural Revolution or the crowded, limiting press of the Hong Kong or Taiwan of their age, is denied us from birth even as we grow into the ugly entitlement complexes and underappreciated luxury that, to the rest of the world, is the American birthright.
The direction stops with graduation, though. Like so many people, I had little to no idea what I wanted to do afterwards. I had a major – actually I had two – and that should have pointed me in some kind of career direction, right? Not really. I studied a major because you have to pick something. If you’re silly like me, you never decide and wind up with two. It’s a little like how so many people make so few actual, conscious decisions in their lives, instead living life on personality-autopilot. When one comes to a fork in the road, how many of us really know when we’re there? Life is full of choices and you usually make the one that feels right to you with little if any real deliberation. You made the choice you made at the time you made it because “you’re that guy.” You do as you are. Same with me and my education, me and my career. I don’t know what I want to be. I don’t know what I’m good at. I do know what I’m not good at. I have surprisingly little sense of direction – I’m merely in the habit of running very hard. It’s the only real reason I’ve come far enough that most people express some respect – or even admiration - where I’ve ended up. I don’t want to be nobody, so I tried very hard to excel, to be somebody – and now that I’m where I am, I don’t know at what point, if ever, I looked down the direction I traveled and said, “Yes, this is where I want to be.”
I’ve been a software engineer and now I am an attorney. Both are difficult jobs entailing very long hours – although I must say, being an attorney pays better and, believe it or not, saddles one with slightly less social stigma, lawyer jokes or no. (All of you out there who unconsciously hold strong stereotypes about engineers – yes, I’m looking at you). Being an associate is rather a consuming, voraciously demanding state of employment. My father doesn’t appreciate or doesn’t believe that being an associate at a law firm – even a law firm that isn’t one of the country’s premier sweatshops (and that whatever power you believe in, for that) - leaves as little time for one’s life that it really does. But even if he understood that, it would be beside the point – you can’t wait around for life to be nice to you and drop something in your lap. Life is hard. Life is unfair. You go out and fight, because when it comes down to the wire, it could be only you in your own corner. You work to survive and only a very lucky few work because they enjoy what they do. I would be among the first to say it, so I didn’t argue. Arguing would have made me a hypocrite.
“Why don’t you go and do something you love?” My first impulse is to laugh (appreciatively, mind you). My second is to offer excuses. But is there really something there? Is there something I don’t see, that everyone else does? I like tea. I like flowers. I like cheese. I like wushu. None of these are things I can really make a living at. I’ve learned to make a pretty good cup of tea (and now have even developed an intuition for making really delicious sweetened tea that would make a good dessert, in memoria de Lucy’s), so much so that friends from widely separate circles have all offered that I should do something with it. “You could bottle this. It’s better than anything out there.” “Go for it! If you opened a teahouse, I’d be your first customer!” (spoken by at least three people). I’ve seen the restaurant business, though – it’s a difficult endeavor, to say the least. A restaurant can’t solely be a labor of love – you need to advertise, you need to understand business and have an entrepreneurial spirit. But I’m lousy with money. The less I touch it, the better. I’m not good at making investments or monitoring my cashflow. My answer is simply to enough of it so that the average crisis won’t send any real shockwaves through my finances. For all my supposed intellect, it’s a blunt and brute-force approach to dealing with it, also rendered feasible only by my inexpensive tastes and a life largely devoid of big-ticket trappings (which is particularly important given the one HUGE big-ticket item, the mortgage for this house that I barely get to sleep in 7 hours a night). As for wushu, I don’t have the innate talent or the knowledge it would take to teach at a school (let alone open one of my own). I’ve substitute-taught from time to time, but nobody would want to learn from me, long-term. I’m anything but athletic – the attorney’s lifestyle makes it hard enough even to be healthy. I enjoy wushu immensely, but I couldn’t do it for a living. It’s a hobby. I’m not a professional. And if you’d seen how many kids out there style themselves as ‘professional’ – not truly having a sense of what it means outside of talent – you might enjoy a quiet chuckle at the throng of athletic kids who don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into. Ask any b-list actor or unrecognized stuntman as to whether they think their lives are comfortable or exciting. It’s what most of these kids are aiming at, whether they know it or not.
In a nutshell (to collect, contain, and curtail all that hand-wringing rambling), the career – it’s a mess. I must have had some degree of success to find myself where I am, with the accomplished people that I work with… but as to the simple things that I really enjoy, I probably couldn’t sustain myself doing them.
But Dad’s principal gripe with my career is not that I’ve made any bad choices – it’s that I let work consume my time and don’t pay enough attention to the business of living, whether that means keeping a tidy house, going out and finding dates, or even checking my mailbox more than once a week. There’s my problem – I work like crazy but it’s not to fulfill any obvious material need of my own! It’s true – one should work to live, not live to work. So what the hell, mes ami, is up with this abominable billable hour shit? We as a profession find ourselves in a ridiculous bind, with a poor set of motivators. The minimum billable’s a big stick, and it gets bigger every year. As to the carrot – the bonuses – they’re nice but worth relatively little when you consider that a working attorney’s most precious resource is time. It’s like the Mongolian quandary – you only have so much yak butter. So will you eat it for energy, or burn it for fuel? More money is worth nothing if you have no time to do anything with it. Oh, sure, I could save it… to put my kids through school. Oh, right! No kids! No wife! No girlfriend! No time to date, either! Which died first? The chicken, or the egg? But is it really work’s fault? When I take enough time to be honest with myself, I think I get angry at working so much because it’s convenient to be able to point at it and declare, “the billable hour has deprived me of all of these simple things that any human being would be able to enjoy” when perhaps I never had any of them to begin with.
What I hate most of all has been the ending of every day for the last fifteen years. I go to bed alone, with naught in my arms but a pillow and a head full of rambling and oftimes melancholy thoughts. I slip into the sheets and they are cold from having lain unattended and empty all day. I rest my head on my empty hands, and breathe in air filled with silence, tainted only by scents of bath soap and dust to keep me company. The absence of humanity is never more literal for me than it is at the end of every day. By too many accounts I’m as eligible a bachelor as any in these parts, so why am I single? Well, actually, that’s my fault, too. Have there been opportunities? Sure there have. And I let them all go because I wasn’t ready, or wasn’t in love, or didn’t want to settle, or wasn’t interested. For someone who goes out as staggeringly seldom as I do, I really ought to be amazed at the number of times a woman has expressed interest in me. For those of you keeping score, yes, it’s a small number – I can still count them on the fingers of my two hands. It’s still more ‘game’ than someone who’s constantly bent over books and laptops, who doesn’t comb his hair or have any sense of style, who works around 70 hours a week and doesn't party and who is all but socially invisible, should have. I once derided the adage, “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” as failing to cover the all-too-common instance of unrequited love, where you have loved and lost all in the same instant leaving you with at best dashed hopes, and at worst a lifetime of longing. What a rotten trade. I have been the bearer and recipient of unrequited love alike – so even the cold comfort of victimization by fate, really, is denied me. A close friend fed me the unpleasant truth years ago – “You’re single because you choose to be single.” In other words, you might not be enamored of the options in front of you, but you have chosen to be single rather than to be with someone you don’t think you’d be head-over-heels crazy about. You can call it not wanting to settle if it makes you feel better, but viewed the other way, you haven’t given it a fair chance, either.
That’s it. I’ve purged for an hour, and all I’ve done is made myself slightly more aware of my own role in my problems. There are no answers here. No pleasant ones, anyway. None that I’m yet ready to face in waking life.
I’m sad. My Christmas ended in kind of a bah-humbug, and all told, maybe I deserved it.
(warning – extremely stream-of-consciousness and a total downer. Abandon all hope, ye who enter blah blah blah. To my friends, especially - don't read until well after the holidays. This is depressing stuff. I'm venting because I have to. Please don't ruin your holidays.)
I’m never what I should be.
My father’s one of those slightly taciturn types. Oh, he’s not the strong silent type – he makes small talk, loves talking about golf and particle physics – but when it comes to statements about topics that fall under the ambit of life’s direction – like my job, my personal life, my being 33 and single, he doesn’t say too much. We’ve had so few actual conversations on those core topics that every time the subject is broached, it’s him talking at me, with me having little to say in response for fear of it devolving into a shouting match (more likely my fault than his. I’m combative in an argument, but I love my father and part of me doesn’t want to be sending him away with a shouting match ringing in his ears).
Dad just left the house, leaving me sitting here in silence over a brief tongue-lashing about not making the effort to go out and date more. I could tell him I’ve tried harder these past years but there wouldn’t have been much point in it. He’d probably just tell me I haven’t been trying hard enough, which would be difficult to hear because even my efforts over the past year would look fairly meager by the standards of the average person. Of course, I’m not the average person. I’m me – a strange little duck apparently defined, even by my closest friends, by an impossible combination of extraordinary ability and stubbornness, crippling insecurities, and a pickiness that is at once warranted and inexcusable.
But singlehood is just the one topic of many. Where should I even start? How about a lack of direction?
Most people wouldn’t think I have had any lack of direction in my life. I’ve been to graduate school and law school – like so many American-born Chinese children of my generation, college was never a choice – it was compulsory. Just another stage in life, so obvious and so expected that it would never cross our minds that it was actually a privilege. It felt like more of an obligation, a foregone conclusion. If we’re accused of not having a proper appreciation for the kind of opportunity it represents, we’re probably guilty of that. But what credit or appreciation does one give to one’s destiny, if there is such a thing? I can’t see what pride there would be in, say, being destined for greatness. That would just mean you were obligated to fulfill a preordained fate. That the freedom and control that so many of our parents cherish so strongly, having fled the Cultural Revolution or the crowded, limiting press of the Hong Kong or Taiwan of their age, is denied us from birth even as we grow into the ugly entitlement complexes and underappreciated luxury that, to the rest of the world, is the American birthright.
The direction stops with graduation, though. Like so many people, I had little to no idea what I wanted to do afterwards. I had a major – actually I had two – and that should have pointed me in some kind of career direction, right? Not really. I studied a major because you have to pick something. If you’re silly like me, you never decide and wind up with two. It’s a little like how so many people make so few actual, conscious decisions in their lives, instead living life on personality-autopilot. When one comes to a fork in the road, how many of us really know when we’re there? Life is full of choices and you usually make the one that feels right to you with little if any real deliberation. You made the choice you made at the time you made it because “you’re that guy.” You do as you are. Same with me and my education, me and my career. I don’t know what I want to be. I don’t know what I’m good at. I do know what I’m not good at. I have surprisingly little sense of direction – I’m merely in the habit of running very hard. It’s the only real reason I’ve come far enough that most people express some respect – or even admiration - where I’ve ended up. I don’t want to be nobody, so I tried very hard to excel, to be somebody – and now that I’m where I am, I don’t know at what point, if ever, I looked down the direction I traveled and said, “Yes, this is where I want to be.”
I’ve been a software engineer and now I am an attorney. Both are difficult jobs entailing very long hours – although I must say, being an attorney pays better and, believe it or not, saddles one with slightly less social stigma, lawyer jokes or no. (All of you out there who unconsciously hold strong stereotypes about engineers – yes, I’m looking at you). Being an associate is rather a consuming, voraciously demanding state of employment. My father doesn’t appreciate or doesn’t believe that being an associate at a law firm – even a law firm that isn’t one of the country’s premier sweatshops (and that whatever power you believe in, for that) - leaves as little time for one’s life that it really does. But even if he understood that, it would be beside the point – you can’t wait around for life to be nice to you and drop something in your lap. Life is hard. Life is unfair. You go out and fight, because when it comes down to the wire, it could be only you in your own corner. You work to survive and only a very lucky few work because they enjoy what they do. I would be among the first to say it, so I didn’t argue. Arguing would have made me a hypocrite.
“Why don’t you go and do something you love?” My first impulse is to laugh (appreciatively, mind you). My second is to offer excuses. But is there really something there? Is there something I don’t see, that everyone else does? I like tea. I like flowers. I like cheese. I like wushu. None of these are things I can really make a living at. I’ve learned to make a pretty good cup of tea (and now have even developed an intuition for making really delicious sweetened tea that would make a good dessert, in memoria de Lucy’s), so much so that friends from widely separate circles have all offered that I should do something with it. “You could bottle this. It’s better than anything out there.” “Go for it! If you opened a teahouse, I’d be your first customer!” (spoken by at least three people). I’ve seen the restaurant business, though – it’s a difficult endeavor, to say the least. A restaurant can’t solely be a labor of love – you need to advertise, you need to understand business and have an entrepreneurial spirit. But I’m lousy with money. The less I touch it, the better. I’m not good at making investments or monitoring my cashflow. My answer is simply to enough of it so that the average crisis won’t send any real shockwaves through my finances. For all my supposed intellect, it’s a blunt and brute-force approach to dealing with it, also rendered feasible only by my inexpensive tastes and a life largely devoid of big-ticket trappings (which is particularly important given the one HUGE big-ticket item, the mortgage for this house that I barely get to sleep in 7 hours a night). As for wushu, I don’t have the innate talent or the knowledge it would take to teach at a school (let alone open one of my own). I’ve substitute-taught from time to time, but nobody would want to learn from me, long-term. I’m anything but athletic – the attorney’s lifestyle makes it hard enough even to be healthy. I enjoy wushu immensely, but I couldn’t do it for a living. It’s a hobby. I’m not a professional. And if you’d seen how many kids out there style themselves as ‘professional’ – not truly having a sense of what it means outside of talent – you might enjoy a quiet chuckle at the throng of athletic kids who don’t really know what they’re getting themselves into. Ask any b-list actor or unrecognized stuntman as to whether they think their lives are comfortable or exciting. It’s what most of these kids are aiming at, whether they know it or not.
In a nutshell (to collect, contain, and curtail all that hand-wringing rambling), the career – it’s a mess. I must have had some degree of success to find myself where I am, with the accomplished people that I work with… but as to the simple things that I really enjoy, I probably couldn’t sustain myself doing them.
But Dad’s principal gripe with my career is not that I’ve made any bad choices – it’s that I let work consume my time and don’t pay enough attention to the business of living, whether that means keeping a tidy house, going out and finding dates, or even checking my mailbox more than once a week. There’s my problem – I work like crazy but it’s not to fulfill any obvious material need of my own! It’s true – one should work to live, not live to work. So what the hell, mes ami, is up with this abominable billable hour shit? We as a profession find ourselves in a ridiculous bind, with a poor set of motivators. The minimum billable’s a big stick, and it gets bigger every year. As to the carrot – the bonuses – they’re nice but worth relatively little when you consider that a working attorney’s most precious resource is time. It’s like the Mongolian quandary – you only have so much yak butter. So will you eat it for energy, or burn it for fuel? More money is worth nothing if you have no time to do anything with it. Oh, sure, I could save it… to put my kids through school. Oh, right! No kids! No wife! No girlfriend! No time to date, either! Which died first? The chicken, or the egg? But is it really work’s fault? When I take enough time to be honest with myself, I think I get angry at working so much because it’s convenient to be able to point at it and declare, “the billable hour has deprived me of all of these simple things that any human being would be able to enjoy” when perhaps I never had any of them to begin with.
What I hate most of all has been the ending of every day for the last fifteen years. I go to bed alone, with naught in my arms but a pillow and a head full of rambling and oftimes melancholy thoughts. I slip into the sheets and they are cold from having lain unattended and empty all day. I rest my head on my empty hands, and breathe in air filled with silence, tainted only by scents of bath soap and dust to keep me company. The absence of humanity is never more literal for me than it is at the end of every day. By too many accounts I’m as eligible a bachelor as any in these parts, so why am I single? Well, actually, that’s my fault, too. Have there been opportunities? Sure there have. And I let them all go because I wasn’t ready, or wasn’t in love, or didn’t want to settle, or wasn’t interested. For someone who goes out as staggeringly seldom as I do, I really ought to be amazed at the number of times a woman has expressed interest in me. For those of you keeping score, yes, it’s a small number – I can still count them on the fingers of my two hands. It’s still more ‘game’ than someone who’s constantly bent over books and laptops, who doesn’t comb his hair or have any sense of style, who works around 70 hours a week and doesn't party and who is all but socially invisible, should have. I once derided the adage, “’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” as failing to cover the all-too-common instance of unrequited love, where you have loved and lost all in the same instant leaving you with at best dashed hopes, and at worst a lifetime of longing. What a rotten trade. I have been the bearer and recipient of unrequited love alike – so even the cold comfort of victimization by fate, really, is denied me. A close friend fed me the unpleasant truth years ago – “You’re single because you choose to be single.” In other words, you might not be enamored of the options in front of you, but you have chosen to be single rather than to be with someone you don’t think you’d be head-over-heels crazy about. You can call it not wanting to settle if it makes you feel better, but viewed the other way, you haven’t given it a fair chance, either.
That’s it. I’ve purged for an hour, and all I’ve done is made myself slightly more aware of my own role in my problems. There are no answers here. No pleasant ones, anyway. None that I’m yet ready to face in waking life.
I’m sad. My Christmas ended in kind of a bah-humbug, and all told, maybe I deserved it.
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