Disjointed Thoughts

I was tempted to give feedback to SFGate to create a section on environment topics since they have had so many articles on the topic recently. They must have read my mind, because the Green section just appeared. We're going to be hearing green this green that coming out of our ears before long, whether or not things actually get done.

It's probably a lot easier to be a "locavore" if you live in the Bay Area and California....

***

I was just remembering a brief conversation I had some time ago about a seemingly perennial question women have about who is better to marry. The one with romance but lacking in some other qualities, or the one without romance but who has the other qualities. Well, since just about everyone says that romance goes away after being married for a while, let's see what that leaves us. With the first option, you end up with no more romance as well as nothing else. With the second option, you end up with the same characteristics that you started with. Putting it that way makes the choice sound so obvious.

***

I noticed on Craigslist that there are some new forums including one on "dying". Reading some of those is painful.

Chicken

It's kind of late for me to be grilling chicken and eating it, but I didn't eat enough dinner before going to tai chi class. I eat too many chicken drumsticks, because they're the easiest thing to cook.

Last time I went to the Marina, I was looking for Sichuan pepper. However, nothing was named "Sichuan pepper." Something looked like it, but had a weird name called "prickly ash." Between my deciphering a Chinese word here and there, a vague idea that I was looking for something with little twigs and pepper-like things, and by logic of elimination, I concluded that this must be it. Anyway, I'm trying it on my chicken...

More on chicken... I discovered that marinating the drumsticks in various Indian spice powder, in other words curry, gives the chicken skin a perfect crisp and evens out the crisping.

***

This post was not supposed to be about chicken.

Remembering, one year ago (and a couple of days) was a first date. Then on the 4th of July, me hanging out with another couple, skipping the fireworks. Maybe we were all wondering what we should be celebrating.

***

A man drafts a letter to a woman, many years after their relationship ended, professing he is in love with her and could not get over her, but never sends it. In real life, he can never be with her. He is in love with what he cannot have. In real life, he is with another woman, chooses to be with her by not choosing to not be with her, and doesn't fall in love with her. The worst theft, of time and life, a guy can do to a woman. He says he will leave someday. But when she asks him to leave, he cannot leave. Can't stay, can't leave.

What is up with having one foot in reality and the other foot in the opposite of reality? Those splits must be painful.

The admirable ones...

The flip side...

The few I admire...

Drivers who don't make me carsick, or nervous.

Men who leave your bathroom spick-and-span, with the toilet seat down, and the lid down. Wow. One in a million. I've witnessed two in my entire life.

At work, those who are really smart, fast, and helpful in a modest, unselfish way.

The husband who calls his wife and kids from work, and speaks with a good voice and words. I've only witnessed one person who behaves like this. (The others snap at their wives and kids.)

Nice Big Road Blocks

People's personalities are evident in all faces of life. So they say you can judge a person by how they drive. I guess you can judge a person by many such things.

The road blocks...

A grown man who can't tie his hai dai properly, because of stubbornness or inability to learn, or both, also doesn't change any other behavior once started.

A person who has furniture and wall hangings falling on your head and crashing to the ground, also has no other foundations nor preparations for the future.

A person who simplifies and underestimates, due to lack of comprehension, (somewhat Bush-like and Republican-like), yet charges forth while not learning, can only go that far.

Perhaps for some, they have made the best of their abilities and background. The same point could be one person's best and another person's worst. One end and one beginning.

My pet peeve. Or, actually more of a fundamental peeve.

The Gift of the Sea

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity -- in freedom in the sense that dancers are free barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation but in living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands; one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits ... islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
from The Gift of the Sea

Sex and the City

Why does a person still sleep with someone she knows she can't marry? Is it an addiction too hard to shake? Is it a hope that the person will magically become marriageable material? Is it an inability to be alone for a day? Maybe addiction causes denial of character flaws and blindness to bad treatment.

Of all the choices. Seeing this, rather than be with someone non-marriageable, I'd rather, in descending order:

Be with someone marriageable who loves me.
Not be with someone marriageable who loves me.
Not be with someone non-marriageable who does not love me.

Or, just be. Single. No ranking in the descending order of being.

It's better to not be able to be with someone you love, than to be with someone who sucks. Maybe it's just the sight of middle-aged little boys that annoys me.

Note that to be "non-marriageable", a person must have major character flaws, causing anyone who cares about the person involved to be unable to allow the person to marry him or her.

Blues

I just watched the first six episodes of Sex in the City.

A man's intelligence really is inversely proportional to the size of his hands. Granted there's some genetics involved, I don't think it's actually because of the amount of manual labor one does, but of how one does it. Ie. intelligently or in a brute way that makes one's hands humongous.

I went blues dancing last Friday. The afterthought was disappointing. The more I thought about it the less it seemed to be blues dancing. It was entirely different from the real blues lesson I had down in Sunnyvale. The clincher that "blues dancing is anything you want it to be" by the love-fest woman. Is that what she says of tango too? If anything were anything one wanted it to be, why would it even have a name, specifically... blues? Do you really experience freedom?

Not all people need to dance ultra close to complete strangers and dance blues "because they want to be close to someone." Do you really experience closeness? Frankly, that's sad. It's fake. And that's it, it felt like an evening of fake blues. Dance close to someone you know and love. Or dance to make a beautiful dance.

Dancing dancing

I just found out about a new dance couple. One of those on par with the several other just-right partnerships found among the dance community.

I remember those occasions when I see two people and know, they're going to get together soon, or, they're going to break up soon (sometimes the same couple...).

A friend finally starts dating a nice guy, instead of chasing after *ssholes. My very first intuitions of offness and voidness about another person's significant other turn out to have a basis, and this good-bye should be the beginning of her self-discovery.

As for myself, well, that I can't publicize. ;) I read an interesting discussion about adoration versus love. Adoration, when a guy gives of himself completely, is a tremendous gift and we should appreciate and be awed by it.

Change

People often say you can't change a person or a person can't change, fundamentally, or it takes a long long time. I don't know. It seems like it's hard to change when you try, and change happens when you don't notice it.

Hehe, thinking back, five to seven years ago, I was so spontaneous and my punctuality was so bad (and my eyebrows so bushy), that a significant other couldn't stand it. I wouldn't think of what I was doing until the moment or maybe the day of. Now what's my problem? I no longer understand spontaneity? I must have changed just recently, in the last year or two, when I realized my spontaneous decisions and actions weren't working so well all the time. Well, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The puzzling thing is how I went from one extreme to the other. Thesis, antithesis, and what's the third one? Well, now that I realize I've been to both ends, maybe I can learn to make good of both, at the same time.

As for lateness, I've gone from the former 30 minute average to more like 5-10 minutes and often on time too! This is something that's nearly impossible to change in people, it seems.

And I thought I'd never give in to social pressure and give up my feminist statements (mostly of the hairy sort, haha).

Well well, I hope this means I'm capable of always learning, understanding, improving, and changing.

Birthday Wish

My birthday wish was a selfish wish, I think the first time I made a selfish one. Ugh. Perhaps with good intentions. But still thinking about myself first. If a person has to feel good before doing good, is it all right then to act selfishly first? Going home today, my mom reminds me that people who truly care and give to others get the most in return.

It's like the people who spend their time and efforts trying to retire, most often spend their whole lives needing to work for a living. Whereas the people who work because it's their passion, have more money than they could ever need, yet keep on working.

It's always the opposite. I told my friend that one has to be happy single before being able to find a happy relationship. Wow, if that's the case, then one would have the best of both worlds. Happy and happy. Double happiness, hehe. On the other hand, fear of singlehood tends to lead to a needy relationship, which is lacking and thus, you have the opposite.

So, I forgot some of this over the last few months. Fear and worry, I guess, is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Finding myself again. Remember to concentrate on the good things....

But if that's the lowest of my low, in my whole lifetime, then I guess I'm doing quite well.

***

I tried to convince my girlfriend that there are enough good men out there. Fear of not finding one shouldn't dictate one's decisions. My coworker told me that when her husband first started to court her, after one day at work when he overheard her talking to a friend saying she wanted to eat cake, every day after that she found a piece of cake on her desk, and she didn't know who it was from.

Don't waste the pretty.

Merry Christmas.

A gift all women should give to themselves, and I can use a reminder.

And I'm remembering the conversation we girls had the other day... so absolute... if ever our future husbands were found to be cheating on us, some of us would just up and leave immediately, with the kids and all. No room for second chances.

Digital books from Amazon.com means not having to wait to read books that you want to read now, even when stores are closed, and not having to drive to the bookstore and search for it, and possibly not find it there.

The clock is ticking. Seven days until the new year. What will I take with me from 2005 and what will I leave behind?

***

It would be much easier to hop on a plane and explore living and working in China if I didn't have a condo to pay for. It really is a nice condo, even compared to the other units in the same building. And I like the fact that I currently can actually do it without parental assistance. (Except that I do get other subsidies....) I suppose losing a salary for a year isn't so bad, but the taking the side-step with the career so early, who knows what I could do when I came back from that scenario. Especially since the things I could provide more value with over there may revolve more around English language than software engineering.

The governor may be on to something with his China-California relations in the environmental arena. Let's talk about a huge market for environmentally-related business.

The thought that grows and grows. Somehow, I can't picture myself staying in the place I've stayed my entire life, for the entirety of the next 10, 20, 30 years.

***

Again, revisiting the question, what will I take with me and what will be left behind from 2005?

Fear and Courage

From a recent discussion came the thought that fear and courage are actually the same thing, or that one can have fear and courage about the same thing at the same time.

If one were in a serious relationship with someone who has visa issues, one might marry the person out of fear of losing the relationship and being alone if he had to return to his home country. This is what I thought of, fear. But someone mentioned courage, to do this. Courage to take a chance.

Then, on the other hand, someone like me, might not marry a person in any case except the genuine case. This takes courage and strength to risk giving up a good relationship so as not to sacrifice the self by doing a fake or half marriage. But along the lines of the new perspective above, this could be interpreted as fear, of taking a chance.

In the end, it doesn't change my mind. I still don't think I would ever do such a thing. The proof is in lives unfolding. Those who did the former, are still in half marriages, not whole.

If the scenario presented itself (and just so happens the U.S. citizen is female and the visa-holder is male in all cases known to me), why should the woman be the one to take the chance, giving herself to a marriage when the man has not asked her to marry him the real way? If the relationship were judged to have that much of a chance for real marriage in the near future, why shouldn't the guy take the chance and commit himself at that time to ask her to really marry him?

It depends who is doing more of the giving. It seems to me, that if the guy has shown he's not willing to take the chance, there's not enough in it for the gal to take the chance. At that critical moment, the guy has actually decided that he is unable to ask her to marry him. So it seems to me.

Running

Still running... seems like I'm becoming more like women, more emotional.

The book I was reading talked about different energies, masculine and feminine. It surely is confusing for women working in male-dominated fields. To try to be competitive, assertive, and aggressive at work, for survival, and then switch to the feminine way of feeling, passive, and following. Switching on a daily basis is tough, sometimes mix up one with the other. My natural state for dancing is definitely following, and dancing is a metaphor for life.

So the theory goes, that in these modern times, men and women are are adopting more and more of the opposite-gendered energies, and thus more able to remain single (or more unable to maintain a relationship). Because they are more whole and balanced already, and in a relationship they would compete.

Anyway, so it seems that highly-educated and working women have been taught to live like men in a man's world, but this is not doing much good for them in terms of relationships. (So if we don't want to remain single, we need to go through retraining. ;) Guess I should go dancing more. Well, this book was more serious. :) )

In the end, which would we choose? Just like, my friend has talked about the fact that they can't afford to have kids here, and contemplated remaining childless, so that she can stay here. Going against her nature out of necessity of the environment. Although she really loves this place, and is one who is not easily able to live in less nice environments. The unfortunate state where choosing is difficult because of not being able to live without either. I hope they find a solution.

I on the other hand seem to be the opposite. To be able to live and be happy in any situation. I can afford to live here, yet I could be just as happy living in a grass hut on another continent (as long as there are no large wild animals and I have my Internet ;) hehe). More seriously, in the general sense as well. Maybe that makes me too independent... when really I don't want to have to be completely.

So I was supposed to try to take a nap, because I am exhausted, before going out to the Sketchies bar in a bit, but I couldn't fall asleep.

Single-Minded

Interesting article:
SINGLE-MINDED
Ahead of the game
Rock scribe Neil Strauss became an unlikely master of seduction, and he's helping other shy guys do the same

Single Women

Women in Asia are starting to say 'I don't'

It sounds like Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are ahead of the United States in the gender and (non)marriage (r)evolution. But maybe that's because the situation for married women is even more oppressing. At some point, the numbers such as birthrates low enough to endanger population size, and lack of women willing to marry, will force changes, whatever they may be.

It's time for some new traditions for never-marrieds

Women: Single and Loving It

Life

Yet another female writer commits suicide, and I don't know what to say to the person related to her, so I don't say anything, just dance, since we don't talk anyway.

I went out for tea this weekend with H, and then dinner with H and C at an Indian restaurant in Burlingame. Does a writer need to be in a relationship with someone who shares that intellectual interest? Yet two such people could be very unstable. Someone who can stabilize the writer/artist allows him/her to devote time and energy to writing.

Apparently, it doesn't occur to me until weeks or months after a guy says something like "Hey, cutie!", among other things, that he might have been flirting with me. Most women I know are just innocently oblivious like that. ;)

Saturday, K, S, and I went hustle dancing. K and I had dinner at Himawari. Surprise, surprise, we ran into H and C there. The hustle lesson was okay, and I led during most of it, which was not too difficult. However, there was a gender imbalance and the age range was a little off, so we left after about half an hour.

Quote of the day: You'll find it when you're not looking.

Reunion

This blog hasn't been updated in a while.... I've been at work for six weeks, went to my 5th year reunion, and did a lot of dancing.

Last week was reunion weekend. It wasn't really worth the money paid for it. Seeing former college classmates was strangely reminiscent of seeing former high school classmates. The best parts were hanging out with people I actually do hang out with sometimes, who live here in the Bay Area, so it's not like we really needed an official reunion to do this.

Astrid organized a dinner at Cascal's on Castro St. Funny, I never noticed the existence of some of the non-Asian restaurants there. The tapas were very tasty, so tasty, I wondered how they got so much tastiness into the food. Lewis, ex-boyfriend, was there with his new girlfriend. We went to Verde to get pearl milk tea afterwards. There, I ran into Peter Peng (my freshman year HAA), and Mr. Wu.

A few weekends ago, we had the annual DL picnic at Uncle Barry's Ranch. I drove there, passing my workplace on the way to the middle of nowhere, which apparently seems to be booming with new housing developments encroaching on the ranch. The Bay Area is going to start to include half of California.

A couple weeks ago there were a bunch of dance auditions. We auditioned people for DL, and had late night meetings afterwards. The last meeting went until 2am, which isn't that nice when you try to wake up at 6:30am for work, and you're still half an hour away from home. People's crankiness was amusing. I also helped out with Opening auditions.

I took Heather and Chris out to dinner at Amber India Restaurant as my "I have a job" treat.

I have a few people I really need to call back, erg, and have been too busy to.

A certain company is hiring again, and I heard that one of the directors remembered and asked about me. Does already having a decent job mean that I wouldn't go for this other opportunity for something that seemed as perfect as reality can be? There are many risks involved, and who knows how the other opportunity would really turn out to be.

Insert/substitute the words "relationship" for "job" above. The decisions are very similar. People in okay relationships consider alternatives, but decide it's not worth it to break up, or what really ends up happening is that they stick with it for longer, years, before deciding it's worth it to make a change. If it's less than okay, the decision is easy. If it's wonderful, the decision is also easy. If it's sort of okay, the cost of quitting might seem to outweigh the benefit of something better, if it is really better....

Dinner at Astrid's

Astrid invited a bunch of people over for dinner on Sunday. Dinner included a tomato salad of tomatoes grown in their garden, and watermelon from the garden as well. At one point, the three women went outside to the garden and stayed and chatted for what seemed like an hour. The guys didn't seem to miss us.

Engineers are defecting... to law, marketing, and other things. I'm just starting....

I heard that Emily got married recently. I had lived with her for one quarter when I sublet her roommate's room in the dumpy apartment in Mountain View. She married the Indian guy she had been dating at the time. I remember asking her about her thoughts on marriage. This is the second Indian-Chinese marriage I know of among my friends and classmates, the below being the first.

Tea with Ashish

I met up with Ashish a few weeks ago when he was in town for a conference at Stanford. I hadn't seen him in about two years. It's so nice to have made friends at Asera whom I still keep in touch with, although infrequently. I kind of miss those days, working at a start-up and hanging out, and being an honorary Indian. ;)

We had tea at Ray's. He mentioned that he was planning to give Q an engagement ring that weekend. We talked for a while but I can't really remember much. I asked him how much software engineers make in India these days, and he thought about $20,000. That was higher than I had thought. Oh yeah, and a funny story about his grandfather asking his parents why he hasn't found a girl to marry yet, since his grandfather didn't know about Q.

Engagements

At the last FNW I went to in August, I heard about two more engagements. One DL couple, and another dance couple, one of whom is in DL. M said that all the women in DL get engaged within two years of joining. Well... then it looks like I have one more year to go.... Uh huh.

Well, that FNW was pretty hot and sweaty. I didn't even bother going to this month's. I will return in the cooler months.