MSWho?

I just had dinner with some old social work grad classmates and I could not help but feel left behind.  Every one at the table was working on an advance degree or beyond and all the social workers had moved on from their humble MSWs.  The listed included:
- PhD. candidate in Mechanical Engineering;
- Postdoc in Chemistry;
- MSW to Law;
- MSW to PsyD;
- MSW to PhD. in Education;
- and me.
And they interestingly most were second generation Mexican Americans who were the first generation in their families to attend college.  I suddenly felt a stagnation in myself for sticking with my practical degree in a very practical, government job.  I am not doing anything to advance knowledge or my field and my job does not inherently demand that I learn something new everyday.  Economically, I can see that what I do also stagnates as a working-class of the white-collar jobs too, with little advancement beyond my small agency as a line-worker.  I don't anticipate that I would be happier in academia, and actually know that I could not be happy there.  But to see people my age who still are in dynamic stages in their lives makes me envious and makes me wonder what life I am not pursuing where I can be changing and growing everyday.  What is missing for me?  And, no, that is not more school.  But there is something practical and challenging that I am starving for.

Cute: the new and the old

New Cute.  I brought hamster purse to my library reading for good luck.  Hamster purse, I love you!

New Cute.  My recent apartment improvement project has involved selling my tv and acquiring a reading chair.  It's not the most comfortable thing in the world, but it is quite cute.

Old cute.  This is a gift from a friend in high school.  

Ah, Monkichi, I want to squeeze your pink butt cheeks, and face cheeks.

Old cute.  KiguruMX is a gift from a beloved friend.  He dances when you hit the white button at his feet.  He's still dancing after all these years...  That is some serious cuteness.

The Word

My writing classes with the Oakland Word series have just finished up.  Yesterday I read my piece in front of a mini audience, including three of my friends.  Ah, I was a bit nervous that they were going to cut me off at three minutes, the prescribed time limit, but a few people didn't show up and it wasn't a big deal for me to read my whole piece.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear some laughs at funny parts and a compliment from an audience member who suggested I try writing for feature articles like in a newspaper.  I can see now how much practice and work it is to write, and write well.  I look forward to my next class on short fiction writing, and hopefully producing another little piece.

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Acupuncture Clinic, May I Help You?

My sisters and I spent Saturdays at our parents’ acupuncture clinic.  My parents enlisted us to do minor tasks like refilling dispensers for the cotton balls, which they used with a dab of rubbing alcohol to disinfect patients’ skin before the needles were inserted and after they were removed.  We often rearranged the glass moxibustion cups on the bedside tables after playing with them by stamping each other’s arms with big red circles.  My mother and father never seemed to mind that we were all inveterate snoopers who also peeked in every drawer and into every cabinet at home.  We liked to look under the patient beds that my parents had made themselves with two-by-fours, plywood, foam pads, and yards of synthetic leather.  Under the beds they stored old Chinese acupuncture journals and empty cookie tins, but we always checked to see if my parents had hidden any new or interesting things there.

The clinic was always an exciting place to visit – it was nothing like home or school.  It was a completely adult world, which made it precisely the most excellent place to play.  When the clinic was not too busy, we had a whole small patient room to ourselves.  We liked the room with the two beds because it gave us more space to spread out our toys and papers.  Each of the beds was a continent for our troll dolls and the space between was an enormous canyon.  The Chinese watercolor paintings and woodcut panels on the walls were backdrops for our plastic bear family saga.  We looked out the window of the office building at the freeway below and stuck our bare feet on the glass, daring drivers to look at our toes.

But when we had exhausted all play in the little room, or our parents needed the room for patients, we all piled into the small reception area and sat behind the big desk.  We three sisters tried our best to avoid talking to patients.  We politely answered questions about how old we were and where we went to school, but mostly we played under the desk and on the floor in hopes that they did not notice us.  Unfortunately, staying in the front meant that we had to answer the phones.  Callers were greeted with a little girls’ voice saying, “Acupuncture clinic, may I help you?”  When the caller needed more than to make an appointment, we placed the telephone receiver facedown on the desk and ran to find one of our parents.  We peeked into the rooms and saw patients in various degrees of undress with needles prickling from their waists, knees, or eyebrows.   No one ever appeared too surprised to see us stealing glances at their peachy bellies and waxy legs.

My father loved to tell stories and we always found him deep in conversation with patients.  There was one room in the clinic that was lined with chairs and devoted to people trying to quit smoking.  My father liked to brag about the very particular technique of ear acupuncture he had discovered to take away patients’ tolerance for nicotine.  He told one story about demonstrating the technique in China to a group of acupunturists.  None could find the right spot in one Communist official’s ear, but when my father tapped it, the man had to throw up immediately because his body could not tolerate the cigarettes he had just smoked.  My father said that the room was designed to encourage patients to share their experiences kicking their addictions, but in effect he created a captive audience for his talks on how his patients needed to make changes for healthier living.  He had placed a poster in the room that charted different foods as positive or negative.  Sweet potatoes had huge positive points and my father liked to recount how he had survived as child on sweet potatoes grown by my grandmother during the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, when all food was scarce.  Much to my mother’s chagrin, he thought the few positive points for pizza also justified his love of barbeque pizza.

When we were tired or hungry we sought out our mother.  She still had her mother smell even in her white doctor’s coat.  She maintained order where my father left chaos.  He never kept track of when patients were ready to have their needles removed or who needed to pay for their treatments.  My mother took care of her own patients in addition to his and I don’t know how he managed on the Saturdays he went to the clinic alone.  My mother found us paper to draw on and snacks to eat.  She showed us the little balls and pins that they taped to the earlobes of their quit smoking patients.  Patients were to rub the taped spots on their ears over the course of the following week to reinforce the effectiveness of their treatments.  She taped the little balls into our ears to treat our sinus problems and headaches.  I used to get stomach aches, for which my mother gave me heat treatments with burning moxa sticks that she waved over the skin of my stomach. The sticks looked like smoldering cigars and had a sweet incense smell.  My mother’s heat treatments were some of the few regular times that I had her all to myself; I recall constantly having stomach aches.

When we needed to go to the bathroom, the three of us went together.  We hoped to avoid running across other adults.  Most of the time we never saw the attorneys, dentists, and insurance agents that occupied the neighboring suites to the acupuncture clinic.  We saw them as strangers, who were unknowingly dangerous.  We made our rounds together from the bathroom, to the water fountain, and to the vending machine where we picked out what chips we would buy if we had money.  The building was six-stories high, with the suites arranged around the periphery of open space on every floor, thus allowing a clear view of every door from the floor to the ceiling.  After the security guard called our parents, we couldn’t ride the glass elevators from floor to floor anymore, but we still trampled the cold metal stairs with the dim fire escape lighting.  We found the hallways not visible from the bottom floor and used our hidden passage ways to make our way back the clinic.

At closing time, my mother tried to drop my father subtle hints to wrap up his conversations so we could go to lunch, but he never seemed to notice.  Usually my sisters and I became so squirmy that the patients themselves knew it was time to say their final words and leave.  At last, my father held up the day’s stack of checks and twenty-dollar bills, boasted about how much he’d made, and took us out for dim sum. 

Me first!

These last few weeks the universe has been sending me messages.

I started taking free career development and creative writing classes from the Oakland Library.  The creative writing class has got my writing brain chugging again.and remembering what I missed about putting words together and the career development class has inspired me to really think about what I value about work and what I value about my life.  I deserve to be happy.  What?!  This has been an original thought for me that I have been encountering recently in many areas of life.

I was looking for new apartments recently and a friend commented that when I'm frustrated in my life I tend to start looking for new placed to live, though my living situation is not the thing spleening me.  Woah, that's true.

I also went to a yoga/meditation workshop around Valentines' Day that explored opening yourself to love.  I'm not a fan of hokey eastern things normally but I thought what the hell.  I actually ended up having really meaningful meditation and learning.  Plus an exercise we did at the end connected our relationships with our primary caregivers with what we seek in intimate relationships.  It opened my eyes to what I always look for (stability) and what I really need (affection).  I also had to consider the fact that I deserve good things and good people in my life.

Reading an article in the Atlantic Monthly about the recession and what it is going to do to our generation gave me a whole new appreciation for my job and having a job.  I hope that I'm not at my job forever, but I can use my time now to be thoughtful about what my career will look like.

It could be the universe sending me signs, or that I'm finally ready to see them, but the message is startling new to me.  I need to put me first and take care of myself.  I need to love, nurture, and care for myself the way I've been pouring that unconditional regard out on other people, with diminishing returns.  I deserve to be treated well by others, and that means myself.  I know I've said things like "self care" but I don't think I ever really understood what that meant.  I also never really saw that modeled in my parents, that you have to seek your own happiness before you can really care for others because you teach others to settle for less when you do that to yourself.  I'm still very much in the throes of practicing some self-love and even listening to what I want, but I'm grateful to have found the space to do it.  I am not moving!

The fungus in me greets the fungus in you.

I decided today that I am tired of solitary paralysis.  Just because I'm single and can't always recruit people to do things with me doesn't mean I have to stay at home.  No!  So I decided to give myself the gift of freedom.  First in the form of a GPS.  Besides the fact that I get horribly lost going to places that I've been to several times before, I think having a GPS will also make me bolder about exploring places I have not been to  without fear of not making it home if I haven't mapped the location beforehand.  Well, the GPS comes in the mail on Tuesday so those adventures are yet to come.  But I decided to venture out for my first solitary hike today at Huckleberry Botanical Preserve.  All by myself!  I worried a bit about needing to tell people where I was in case I slipped off a cliff or something, but I needn't have stressed out so much.

The preserve is a quick drive away and very close to the urban bits of Oakland.  The nice thing about the Bay Area is that everything is so concentrated, meaning nature is right next to the big city.  (Or I guess in the case of Oakland, the mid-sized city.)  I picked a short and easy loop that took only an hour in total, but how refreshing it was to be walking on dirt.  Every time I go hiking now I always think about foster kids and wonder if they've ever walked in the woods, every walked on pure forest dirt rather than concrete.  I always start to wonder if maybe my body knows that I'm someplace different and if it responds differently to the unevenness of the ground and the moistness of the air.

The paths were green and shady--my favorite kind.  Today was a rare sunny day in what has been a series of rainy days, so along with a little mud there were colorful mushrooms along the paths.  Reds and yellows.  And I couldn't help feeling like maybe the fungus on my neck felt some kind of affinity with the cute fungus all around us.  My neck.  Moist woods.  We are all of us ecosystems!

I also spotted two huge hawk-like birds in the sky circling higher and higher and kind of swooping near each other, which reminded me of Avatar pterodactyls.  That's funky that for me nature is imitating art.  Hm...

So yes, I feel like I am reclaiming my independence, or rather exercising it.  I'm also taking some free writing classes through the Oakland Library.  If I write anything worthwhile, I'll be sure to post it.  And did I mention, my ringworm is clearing up?  What a splendid Sunday.  I think I'll go take a nap.

Like a burning ring

A while back I got this itchy spot on my neck like a mosquito bite.  I put some insect creams on it but it kept growing.  Finally it got to be about a centimeter in diameter and I got to poking around at pictures of rashes on the internet.  So I self-diagnosed myself as having psoriasis, nummular eczema, or ringworm.  I called an advice nurse who said she couldn't tell what it was over the phone and suggested I try an antifungal cream for a week and see if that worked out.  She asked how that sounded to me.  I was not impressed and asked to see my doctor.  So my doctor takes a peek and says it doesn't really look like ringworm and I should try a topical steroid cream and see if it gets better.  Or worse.  I was like, this is the best plan out there?  So I tried the steroid cream for a few days and yep, my little rash turned into a clear red ring.  Ringworm!  Guh.  So I sent my doctor a picture and she got me an appointment with a dermatologist likety split.  The dermatologist took a skin scrapping, peeked at it under a microscope and confirmed what I had originally thought.  Fungus ring!  The dermatologist was really helpful, though, and reassuring.  Of all the rashes to get, this one is not so bad because it is so easily treatable.  Likely source of contagion: children and animals.  Oh you look so cute, but you are incubators of ringworm spores!  So eww.  I'll be slathering myself with jock itch cream for the next three weeks.  FUN FACT: ringworm (misnomered as it is not a worm at all) is the same fungus that causes jock itch and athlete's foot.  Fancy.

Urgent Need! Must kill computer hackers!

I never thought it could happen to me.  I mean, I didn't even think of myself as a particularly good target for identity theft.  I don't make huge amounts of money.  I don't visit porn sights or do a bunch of illegal downloading.  But i had a gmail account.  And a facebook account.  With the same username and password.  I know!  Stupid.  So here's what a bunch of my contacts in gmail received:

I'm sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it's just the situation of things right now, we are presently stuck in Wales,United Kingdom. we came down here on vacation. we were robbed, worse of it is that bags, cash and credit cards was stolen at GUN POINT, it's such a crazy experience for us and we need help with flying back home, the authorities are not being 100% supportive but the good thing is we still have our passports but don't have enough money to get on a plane back home, please we need you to loan us some money till we are back home to refund it back.



And here's what a friend alerted me to at 4am (I've placed where I got online and began typing in brackets):

4:03 AM j: hm
 ?
4:04 AM me: how have you been?
4:05 AM j: i've been good ... what are you dreaming?
4:06 AM me: did you got my msg?
 j: mmm... no.. what message?
4:07 AM me: am not good at the moment  am stuck in Wales
4:09 AM I came here to visit a resort and got robbed at a gun point,my money and stuffs was stolen,am lucky i still have my passport here with me
4:11 AM j: :S ... what a mess
 but are you ok?
 me: yeah
4:12 AM i have been to the embassy and consulate they are just delaying  all i need now is a financial help with getting on plane back home 
 can i ask for a favor?
4:13 AM j: sure, what do you need?
 me: can you pls loan me some cash to complete my ticket fee till am back home to return it to you
 ?
4:14 AM $600 is all i need more
4:16 AM j: no problem, or i can pay the ticket for you
4:17 AM me: you can get it to me here using western union,all you need is just my name as written on my passport and the location here
 Name:Jennifer
 Location:Wales,United Kingdom
4:18 AM am glad you can help
  [eh?]
  [was that you?]
4:19 AM It's me Jennifer
  [did you just send me a text message about my gmail account?]
4:20 AM [?]
4:21 AM How long will you get it done?
4:23 AM you there?
 j: yes i'm here ...
 me: [is someone using my acount]
4:24 AM j: eh?
 me: [something strange is going on]
4:25 AM j: you are confusing me, are you ok?
 me: the network sucks here
4:26 AM [i didn't just type that]
  [i think someone hacked my gmail account]
 j: ?


So, yes, I was online typing while the hacker was typing too!  I can understand someone spamming with my email, as evil as that is, but impresonating me to chat up my friends?!  That is like a whole different level of insidiousness.  I later found my facebook account was closed, probably because someone alerted them about someone using it.  I heard from a friend that the hacker was also impersonating me on facebook, chatting with friends and trying to convince them I was in Wales.  Oi.  I mean, not super sophisticated, but opportunistic I suppose.  My close friends caught on very quickly that this was a scam, but some people I haven't talked to in a while where confused and freaked out for me.  It's nice to know people still care about me after so much time, but not ok that they had to go through with that kind of emotional trauma.  Grr!  I was so mad that someone would do that to my friend.  Thankfully none of my finance had been tampered with, but I did an overhaul of all my passwords to be safe.  I'm done with my old buggy laptop.  Considering getting a Mac.  Taking a break from facebook until I don't feel like a walking victim.  Or so violated.  Ugh.

cork girl #1

She looks a little grotesque so upclose, but she actually doesn't look half bad. I'll just leave her to dry while I'm in Houston and hopefully her face will be dry enought that I can hold it while I finish an outfit for her. Cork Girl!

prime the pump!

Of course this had to be a bigger project than I realized. Of course cork will be too porous to support oil paint and I'll need to prime the corks first. But aren't they cute? By the way, shout out to my friends to start collecting champagne corks for me! In exchange I'll do a mini cork version of you. I'll post samples as I make them. I hope they won't be too grotesque.

all my cork peoples say hey!

So this is my newest art project in the works. I'm planning to paint cork people. The egg concept is photographed in there for scale.

Oh my god! Racist! Racist!

That is what I should have said, like Margaret Cho. She's so cool. In one of her comedy acts she talks about when she saw a bumper sticker on a woman's car that made fun of Asians. She was so offended she didn't have any witty comeback but just yelled at the woman that her sticker was racist. I wish I were so brave and able to let that anger explode. So recently...

I was pumping gas at a gas station. And the homeless dude that works that station came up trying to get me to pay him to wipe my windshield. The first thing he says to me is, "I talk to a lot of women of your race." So my response is to ignore him and say no thanks, when in my head I'm thinking, "Motherfucker, what race is that? If you want some change you best not piss off the person you're bumming off of. You want something? Let me spray you with some gasoline."

Then today at work today one of my coworker, nice lady but maybe a bit sheltered, tells me about a murder/mafia party game she once had at her house. With scripts and stuff where everyone is a character trying to figure out who is the killer. So anyway, she tells me it is Chinese murder and everyone at the party dressed up in Chinese outfits. And the people from our office she was listing as having attended were not Chinese, to say the least. The idea makes me sick, of people parading around pretending to be Chinese. And I don't even want to think about what that script was like or how people decided to play their roles. I mean, do one of these murder mysteries happen on a slave plantation? Is there one where we dress up as Latino migrant workers? It was the white dude, with the gun, in the corn field! I mean how in-your-face should you get with coworkers you gotta see everyday?

But I know what Margaret Cho would have said. "Oh my god! Racist! Racist!"

mini me

a mini self portrait, 2 in. x 2 in.

You shall not be spared

I thought I was so lucky. My parents told me all through college to focus on my education and not worry about dating. It translated to me as they would not be meddling in my, granted non-existent, lovelife and not be placing any pressure to get married or whatever. I thought I somehow miraculously had the Asian parents not talking about the urgency to marry a Chinese engineer. Gah, I'm sad it's over. The illusion, anyway. I'm visiting home and this time the article my dad clipped for me from the Chinese newspaper is not on the health benefits of eggplant, but about Chinese online dating sites. "It's not good for you to be alone," he says. Gah! I know that! And he had to bring up one of his friend's single sons and ask me what I thought of the guy. No! It's happening! My mom also asked me if I still talk with any of the guys I knew in high school. No, thank god, I do not. Well, it's only the first conversation. If it gets any worse I may need to create a fictional boyfriend. You know, Chinese, Christian, and a software engineer at Google. I think I'm too old for freak-out games like Black, Muslim, and a pot dealer. But, let's see how intense this gets as I approach 30.

painting i did while sick at home...

hey you...

I made this mini illustration from my daily obsession, Farmville. This is one of the wiley pest creatures. But awefully cute, no?

It's been a while since I've updated, I know. Life has been the usual. Except that my grandmother passed away, but I didn't want to write about that. So I offer you these new mini adventure of mine.

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I was walking with a friend near Oakland's Chinatown when and older Chinese woman abruptly stopped us to point out the hat I was wearing, and here is the ensuing encounter.

Lady: That hat. Your yellow hat. Where did you get that hat?

Me: Oh, it's been so long. I don't remember anymore.

Lady: You have a good memory! Get your memory back!

De colores...

The most amazing sight on this trip was of this waterfall I saw on a boat ride in the Canyon of Sumidera.

Textiles!

A family that shared morning tortillas with us.

Colorful streets and houses

Where am I?

The Mayan ruins of Palenque

Ooo, ruins.

Ah, the beautiful falls of Agua Azul.

Amazing blueness.

A view of San Cristobol from high up at a church on a hillside.

All the whippets, sad to be ushered into the house and not be going on a car ride.

Chichanpec! He was the smallest of the pack of dogs and also the most afraid of people. No wonder since mother of the friend I stayed with found him in her yard one day when the neighbor threw him over the fence.

I'm finally back in Oakland and when officially back to work today. It was very hard to go back as I miss my vacation already and I got a cold that has had me hacking and coughing all day. In the evening I was so tired I just crashed for about an hour, but roused myself up enough to make some vegetable soup with rice. Here is a small collection of some of my photos from the trip. The last few days were spent in strolls through the city of San Cristobol de las Casas, enjoying the cobblestone streets lined in colorful houses, poking into papelerias, and buying handmade souvenirs like little Zapatista dolls and wool toys. I ended left with more pesos than I had planned and snapped up some more souvenirs and a book in the airports as I hopped home. It's nice to be back in my own warm bed, but like with any trip, it feels strangely like I had never left. Oh how wiley traveling is, those huge jumps in consciousness when you are suddenly somewhere new and miss home, but then the feeling of almost transmografication when you are home and it was like you never left.

I'll have one crabby patty!

I decided to forgo the beach as the rain keeps flying in over the mountains in waves throughout the day. The forecast did not look good for a trip to the beach. Or a 4-hour bus ride. Ugh, please no more bus in the mountains... So instead I´m staying in San Cristobol. I think this may be the most relaxing vacation I´ve had, not because of what I´m doing or where I am, but because I don´t feel stressed out. This is a very new feeling for me, one that I´ve not really experienced in my life before. I kind of like it, but don´t know what to do with it really. Also, my friend´s friend is very much into stargazing and has a great location for it up in the hills of San Cristobol. He showed me a computer program he has that follows the position of the stars and he also calculated my zodiac sign, which is actually cancer and not leo, owning to the variations of positions of the stars over time which do not follow the Gregorian calendar. Cancer! It was like a whole revelation for me. I was always figured there was nothing to astrology as it got my personality as a leo completely wrong. I'm the opposite of an outgoing person who can command attention in a crowd. But, as a cancer, well, that is a whole revelation. I can totally count myself as an introvert with mood swings and a huge loyalty complex. Maybe there is something to this astrology stuff. Really it just made me think about myself and how I see myself. I can accept my weaknesses, knowing that the flip side of them are also my greatest strengths. Now which signs are cancers compatible with?

Despues...

Hola from Chiapas! I´m now in San Cristobol de las Casas, a colonial city in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico. I´m here visiting my friend and am using his computer, so I can write things like ¡Excellente! and ¿Is that water potable or is that paramecium I see? I don´t have time for a complete post I just want to give you some highlights, my few but intrepid regular readers.

- I initially kinda lost my suitcase because I didn´t get it checked through customs in the Mexico City airport like I was supposed to. I actually went through immigration twice looking for customs but couldn´t find it. So my bag didn´t arrive in Tuxtla Gutierrez with me and I had to go back to the airport later to get it. Mexicana said they would call me but didn´t and none of their numbers worked, of course not, why would they. So my friend and I just ended up going to the airport where, my goodness, it had luckily arrived on the last flight and had been stowed away in a storage closet. I think if we hadn´t just gone, I would be now wearing a whole new Mexican wardrobe right now.
- We took a boat tour of the Cañon de Sumidera on the river that runs through it to a huge dam that produces half of Mexico´s energy. The canyon was full of animals like monkey, birds, and crocodiles, but the highlight was a gorgeous waterfall of mist and huge water droplets falling over rock precipices that resemble a Christmas tree. It was one of the most beautiful things I´ve ever seen, and I´ll post my pics with the post once I can, but I´m not sure the photo does it justice.
- We had some trips to see the villages of Zinacatan and San Juan Chamula. Both towns are inhabited mostly with indigenous people with their elaborately embroidered clothing and hordes of begging children trying to secure sales of bracelets or belts. In San Juan Chamula we went into a church where the locals practice an eerie combination of traditional practices with Catholicism. They lite candles on the ceramic floor surrounded by pine needles and sprayed soda or alcohol from their mouths. The ceremony was then completed with the killing of a chicken. Very interesting, but felt wrong to be intruding as tourist and there was a definite energy about the outsiders buying tickets to view a spectacle...
- I´m staying at the house of my friend´s friend. He lives in a gorgeous house set up in the hill with a view of San Cristobol de las Casas and its surrounding mountains. He also has 11 very exuberant dogs, which makes eating and entering a huge exercise. Wow, whippets are some hyper-ass dogs.
- Took a 6-hour bus ride to Palenque to see Mayan ruins and see two famous waterfalls. The ruins were cool and the waterfalls amazing. We got to swim in one until the rain drove us out. Ah, but the big adventure proved to be the bus ride there where my friend and I both ended up getting major road sickness on the windy roads, last minute tamales, and an unwise choice of morning mexcal. I was feeling a bit piqued from the road but the smell of my friend´s vomit totally put me over the edge. Honestly, it is one the funniest things that could happen and as gross as it was I can´t help smiling or exploding with laughter when I think about my friend´s first hamster-cheeked vomit face.

My Spanish still sucks as ever and I may have to solo a trip to the Pacific coast. Ah! I hope I´m ready for a little adventure. Though, please, no more gastronomic ones.

home is where the seratonin is...

If you will notice, I've finally updated the title of this blog to indicate that I in fact live in Oakland, and not Berkeley anymore. I know, it's about 2 years behind my actual physical move, but the current status update has a lot to do with mulling over my living situation and possible changes to it.

For the past few months I've been looking at condos and houses with a milquetoast intention to buy. And today I saw a lovely house that I could totally picture myself living in. Strolling to the local bakery and grocery shops. Visiting the local library. Taking walks in the residential streets and to the nearby park. Figuring out new routes to get to work. Signing up at the local gym. Planting a garden...(I have a lip tremble at that one.) But then also freaking out at how I could possibly cover the mortgage payments for an exorbitantly priced house, trying hard to stay in Oakland but not anywhere I might get shot. My anxiety level spiked at thoughts of possibly three-fourths of my paycheck being siphoned off each month and having no savings at all, being stuck in a large--albeit charming--space that is devoid of the furniture I can't afford.

But let me backtrack a bit. This whole house searching thing started in the spring when my mom pointed out that housing prices are plummeting and it's a great time to get into the housing market. Low interest rates. Foreclosures priced to sell. Great investment opportunities. At her avid urging I went to an open house and met a realtor and have since been on a bit of a runaway train seeing condos and houses from listings sent to me by my mom, my realtor, and some that I found on my own while combing trulia.com and redfin.com. I even made offers on 2 condos, but at prices that I was quickly relieved were too low to be accepted.

I've learned a great deal about Bay Area real estate, though to be honest not as much as if my heart were really into to buying a place. I've maintained a search out of a weird sense of obligation to my parents to be fiscally-minded and accepting of their offered generosity--because for real there ain't no way I could independently afford any kind of downpayment on anything. My parents really want to invest money in me by helping me to get a place and I had to struggle with being able to accept that gift and not resent or degrudge it as an prod or a chain. After finally grappling with that, today's seeing a house that I could actually potentially live in made me freak out again and feel rushed to act. Because I'm not ready to buy a house. Or a condo.

And talking it over with my mom, while she went what price we should offer and launched into giving me more listings to look at, I finally was able to articulate how stressful and painful this whole process was and how in a hurry I was to put in offers just so that I could stop looking for more houses. And this time my mom heard the desperation, or maybe just peevishness, in my voice and realized that I was not enjoying this housing search and was doing it out of some misplaced sense of filial duty. And she released me. Said, you're not ready--it's ok.

I was surprised. I was gearing up for a verbal melee with hurt feelings and blame and a culminating burst of sobs to get myself out of this particular spiral of parental expectation, but my mom was cool about it. Which reminds me of a recent revelation about how Asian parents feed off their kids' insecurity. If I can't project confidence and manage up, my parents will give explicit instructions and expectations and manage down believing that they need to guide me out of my uncertainty. I mean, I knew when this whole thing started that I didn't want to buy a condo or house. I was paralyzed just by the thought of moving out of my drafty, tiny studio apartment (for what? where? ahh!). If I could have conveyed that uncertainty with certainty to my mom, I realize that I could have saved myself months of grief. It's hard for me too to learn that my parents aren't going to push me to the edge of a cliff just because they want to. If they can understand what I want, they won't feel so compelled to guess that I need to want what they want. What a crazy thought. We don't have to torture ourselves or each other just for the hell of it.

Maybe I'll browse craigslist and see if there are any nice one bedroom apartments around. If I feel like it.

For goodness sake

I just finished reading Nick Hornby's How To Be Good. I didn't encounter verbal artistry to coo over, but the book got under my skin, which is maybe the genius of it. One theme it hits, alongside the narrative of a family struggling along and a ridiculous spiritual healer with turtle broaches pierced to his eyebrows, is how does one be good? What do you owe to society, to the poor, to injustice, to meanness? How much should we feel guilty and take responsibility for the shittiness of the world we live in and the ugly side of humanity. I think what shocked me a bit is how much I didn't care for any kind of sanctimony anymore. I don't know if it has to do with getting older or having turned "charity" into my career by doing social work, but the desperate need to change the world now to right so much socially constructed inequality has puttered out of me. The righteous indignation and inability to understand how there can be so much ill in the world has been replaced with an easy satisfaction with knowing that things are the way they are. It's enough to keep myself together and not get depressed or mean or unsatisfied with life. Maybe it's also the futility that I learned in doing social work as well, that you have limits to what you can do and the world will stumble merrily along in it's usual fucked up state with or without my intervention. It sure takes the pressure off. Also some of the sense of purpose though. So what's left? How do you be good?