Tina's ProcrastiNation Palace

You know what? I think I have to give the notion that I can speak Spanish. Did I take it from 7th grade through senior in college for an easy A? Yes. Have I practiced? No.

These past few months, I have broken out the Spanish 2-3 times with strangers and the response was zero, (or nada. Hardy har har). This is what I say “Hace muchas anos que tengo opportunidad para hablar. El estado de mi espanol esta tan pathetico.”/”It’s been many years since I have had the opportunity for speaking. The state of Spanish is very pathetic.” (You will have to imagine the accents and the missing “en-ya” squiggle over the “n” in “anos.”) Or some such sentiment. If I’m feeling particularly free, I might add “Cuando bebi cerveza, hablar es mas facil porque no tengo verguenza.”/”When I drink beer, speaking is much easier because I’m not embarrassed.”)

It used to be I got a huge reaction, since people are not generally used to Asians speaking Spanish. But the last two times? Total crickets. I must be dropping words here and there, I’m definitely remembering fewer and fewer words with each foray and there is not response because it is clear that I would not be able to hold a conversation. Sigh.

So I let this go. I let go of the idea that I am someone who can speak Spanish. I let it go because it’s embarrassing and it puts the other person in an awkward situation.

(On the same topic, I bought First Son and me a proper 88-key keyboard. He’s been learning on a 60-key keyboard and since I just recently bought “Creep” by Radiohead piano music, I’ve been trying to play and it’s weird to have keys missing! But again, I played from 5th grade to senior year in college. I could sit down one in a while and play Bach, Rachmaninov, the same level I stopped at. No more, man. Today, I was trying out a piece and I could remember a lot of the base notes and wasn’t even sure my hands were in the right spot. EEEEEEK!)

This is mean. I’m sorry in advance. But it is difficult to listen to actors talk about their clown work. I have heard over the years about how “clown work really blew my emotional work wide open” or some such similar sentiment. And then listening to the specific clown name they came up and then retelling a workshop story from the point of view and in the voice of their clown. I hear the name “Chris Bayes” a lot, who apparently teaches clown work at Yale and other workshops in the city. (Husband and good friends have taken classes with him. He’s also taught like Lupita L’uongo and other famous people.)

The thing is I believe them, and I am fully committed to not being cynical. I want to embrace being positive and promote possibilities and not focus on what can go wrong.

But this is too much. Too personal. Keep this to yourselves. Or better yet, let the work speak for itself. And I’m sure, should I ever find myself in a clown class, I will fully disregard this advice and share, share, share.

xoxo

I’m off this week and vacation can sometimes mean a beach getaway, a setting so breathtaking that it makes your Instagram followers weep, and sometimes (in my case), it just means dealing with fewer challenges at a time.

Today, Wonder Girl Twin and I tackled her essay due on Monday. By far, she is my most emotionally mysterious child. I keep mentioning what I’ve observed about her behavior, hoping someone will respond “oh my god, that is totally like my Samuel, and here’s what you do!” etc. But so far, I have not had any bites.

She’s unusual, at least in this family. While the boys and Husband are “Party of Five”-level verbal in terms of their feeling (so much emoting, people. So much verbal expressions of feeling. It’s exhausting, but also helpful.) Wonderful Wonder Girl Twin is different. She prefer no one look at her when she cries. She’d rather not discuss what she feels. If she’s furious or depressed, she goes to her bed and falls asleep — the ultimate in shutting down. You cannot yell her into submission, as tempting as that path is. You can not greet her stubbornness with your own stubbornness. That only results in a stand-off of ill will and everyone feels terrible.

Today, she threw everything she could to avoid the work. We got through it, but it took multiple stages, and I want to note one thing I learned so that I remember — when she’s flails and says how much she sucks, she hates life; how we don’t love her, how much she’s stupid — it is extremely tempting to argue with her and refute these horrible claims. (I mean, ugh, seriously.) But that’s just a storm. It’s like she’s throwing grenades to derail you from the task at hand — which is to finish this homework assignment that she’s so in her head about and that’s causing her relentless anxiety/worry/stress. Like believe it or not, the best thing to do is to finish the homework assignment. (I think. I may change my mind).

So since I was off today, I could joke her out of bed. Took her outside for air when our attempt number one failed. When she threw up resistance again, I made cookies and got her out of bed, and for some reason, oh my god, she found her groove and finished the five paragraph essay. It is DONE!!!

I am wiped but I can’t help but think about how this would have been impossible if I were working today, so this is the vacation. A simpler to do list.

I told Husband, “you know, out of all the MCU superheroes, I am the Incredible Hulk.” It’s true. I’m always like rumbling inside and battling with an inner beast. He nodded, because he gets it. “Know who else you are? Wonder Woman.”

Said it without missing a beat. Pretty good, non?

(Although technically, Wonderwoman is a DC Comics character, not MCU, but I wisely decided to not correct him in the moment.”

Ha ha ha

When I go into the office (hybrid, remember?), I pass the cemetery we buried my father. One day, I saw a dead cat. It was about, I dunno, five feet from the fence? Laying prone in the grass, flattened in a way that suggested death, not a nap. (I do now have a pet cat, but do not fear that these thoughts/posts will be dominated by an animal lover. I peacefully co-exist with the newest roommate, but I wouldn’t characterize our relationship as getting along like a house on fire.) I told Husband about the dead cat, and he told me this anecdote/joke:

Husband: There were two hobos walking along a railroad track.
Me: Wait, is this a joke?
Husband: Maybe. You can decide. May I continue?
Me: Sure.
Husband: There were two hobos, and one hobo was thrilled to find the cat. “Lunch!” he said. Do you want some? He asked Hobo 2. Hobo 2 politely declined, so Hobo 1 feasted on the cat alone. An hour or so later, he threw up. Hobo #2 said “Hot lunch!”

I didn’t laugh. But we discussed at length how I usually am unsuccessful at repeating jokes because my brain typically starts with the punchline. (I think I think about the past, present, and future simultaneously, which makes me confusing as a public speaker or corporate meeting participant.) He tried to be helpful: “you have to make sure you say ‘Lunch!’ in order to make ‘Hot lunch!’ work. Even now, I’m not sure that I have accurately portrayed the joke, but I admire the fact his brain is able to organize the material into its particular order, almost like a photographic memory. When I tell jokes and stories, as I said due to the time lapse take I have on life, often the results are either stream of consciousness at best or confusing. I may have said this before in this blog, but I am not necessarily that organized.

Oh well. It’s okay.

CATS! FOREVER!

I had such a great time writing this recent novel that normal life kind of feels blergh. I have an idea of another novel, but there’s a lot of research that needs to happen before I fly. Husband has observed Wonder Twin Boy and I are similar in this regard — we are singularly focused when in the throes of a project and despondent when it ends.

I’m currently tinkering with a zombie screenplay that I cannot get excited about, so tonight I’m just looking over my series of unfinished efforts from my youth. I found the start of a novel I tried at age 24 — “Working in Publishing, or How I Learned to Use the Xerox Machine,” which makes me chuckle and wonder, have I never enjoyed working a conventional, corporate job? I think the answer is YES.

I’m watching this show with Husband in solidarity. Jk, because he likes shows featuring people in historical costume, especially of this time period of corsets and long skirts. (The outfits are beginning to look totally normal to me. Like for a job interview, can I wear something like a girdle with a ruffled skirt? OMG)

The show is about a contemporary woman (from the 1945to 1960s? Is she a vampire? B/c she’s a nurse at the end of World War II and then like a surgeon in the 1960s, but looks the same age?) who travels back to like the 1600s and 1700s — first by accident, and then again, because she wants to return to her historical husband and I guess, something about life before technology has great appeal for her.

That is not worth it to me. Like a scene where they’re doing laundry? Nope. A scene where she’s writing multiple copies of the same letter by hand with a quill? That’s when I would start remembering nostalgically xerox machines.

Anyway, it’s kind of interesting. it’s sort of a soap opera ridiculous mess but I am now committed having watched four stupid seasons to the very end. They are struggling, but they’re trying to come up with story out of nothing all day long.

If you follow movie trivia and red carpets, you’ve probably heard the interviews with actor Ke Huy Quan, who is garnering acting awards for his performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I remember him when I was a kid, when he starred as “Short Round” in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” He was adorable and it was great to see an Asian face in the movies! We are all starving to see ourselves reflected! He then did “The Goonies,” which I flipping loved as a child, and then NADA until this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

To hear him tell it, he has waited 25 years for this moment, to come alive in front of the camera. He has been away because there was simply no work for him, an Asian actor, and so he had to content himself with working behind the scenes in film. He has been winning awards and has been utterly charming, and dude — I’m not buying it. I’m not. He’s my age-ish and to me, it is unacceptable to say this thing called acting was something you were denied and denied yourself for 25 years. How can you let something like that dictate your happiness? Could you not have found an alternative path that was maybe not the same but satisfying in a different way? Of course, I am project my own journey ALL OVER THIS GUY’S SPEECHES.

I told my friend Nancy, he is handsome and he can act, but his voice is weird (one reviewer called it “Daffy Duck”) and there is no way he could have gotten this part, but for the marketing potential of his story, the wide appeal of this dramatic turn of fate.

But I recently listened to an interview with him (https://talkeasypod.com/ke-huy-quan/) where he discusses his story in greater detail. He was born to a family of seven in Vietnam and had his parents made two attempts to leave. The first one was thwarted and so for the second attempt, his parents decided to split their family. To the child version of Ke who was extremely happy and whose brother was his best friend, the move was confusing and hurtful, but his father said this was for the best. They made it out on the second attempt and lived at a refugee camp for a year. He and his family were reunited in the US, (I think California) and he went to school where Steven Spielberg scouted the local school for the part of “Short Round.” Ke made an impression, got a call back, showed up in a suit, Steven hugged him and said to come back in play clothes. And Ke booked the part and discovered a love of acting. That movie paid for KE’s parents house. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas paid attention and made sure Ke and his family was okay. (Nice!) The Goonies happened and then nothing else. Ke reached a reckoning, one that I think has sent other child actors to drugs and suicide and profound unhappiness — that they had stumbled upon this thing that made them so successful, that they were good at, that made them secure, and that was suddenly taken away. Ke was depressed but ended up going to UCLA and became a TV production person and fight choreographer. With the connections he made through his childhood movies, he forged a career.

But nearing his 50th birthday, he said there was this thing nagging at him, that he wanted to return to acting. His wife asked, are you ready to go all in? To go to audition sand be rejected? He had a friend who was an agent who said you have to commit, full stop. This movie role audition came around, and Ke said “this was a movie starring Michelle Yeoh. There was no way I was going to get the part,” but his wife insisted he would get the part — and he frigging did.

There was something about listening to this man’s interview that made me realize I was reacting way too cynically to his story, that this journey is real. He is incredibly humble, and that he freaking deserves to be up there. It makes me wonder in what ways do I censor and limit myself. I have also had my reckoning(s). I am also past the mid point of my life and what do I want to do in that time? It no longer serves me to be cynical — I understand why we adopt that attitude. IT’s to keep us safe, but the truth is there’s no protection from rejection and disappointment. But dude, the truth is I have been dreaming too small. It’s long overdue to dream big and I look forward to exploring what the heck that means.

Thanks to Ke Quan. What an inspiration.

When I was in the middle of labor with First Son, there was an announcement that came over the loudspeaker of my hospital room:

“Tina Lee’s boss is here to see here.”

My main nurse, who was herself about 9 months pregnant, rolled her body in the equivalent of a corporeal eye roll and yelled “Oh come on!”

Husband and I turned to a doula (yes I hired a doula. Mostly because I wanted to try every single experience available to me and it took so long to get pregnant, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get here again. Her name was Sarah Pancake. I couldn’t not hire her with that name.) She said, “[Husband] will go out there and tell Tina’s boss she’s unavailable at the moment because SHE’S IN THE MIDDLE OF GIVING BIRTH.”

It was helpful. I can recount details later but I was very angry. I told Husband “My boss is trying to take over my birth story.” Husband was very wise. He counseled “Only if you let her. She is a minor character in our story.” I listened to his advice, and I also just accepted this incredibly aggressive invasion of privacy and never complained about it or reported it to HR.

It’s been years, of course, since that day, but I thought about it yesterday, because Wonder Twins are dealing with a multi-year challenge with a school bully. After he punched Wonder Twin Girl hard enough in the stomach that she cried (she never cries), we were invited in for an unproductive meeting with the school administration that dismissed our concerns. Things seemed to calm down when I filed an official complaint and passed bully’s mom, who gave me creepy vibes (she’s a bit scary, I will admit. She body-checked the Twins’ teacher last year so I wondered, how will I react to being body checked? Why can’t I be more like Husband? I am always scared in these situations, and he gets angry and absolutely confident in his right to be here. Phew. An inspiration.) But I recently find out that school bully is still physically intimidating both twins and I am reminded how we as a society cater to bullies.

Of course, there is Trump, but there are bullies everywhere. I was in a job for 18 years that supported abusive, toxic behavior from its leadership. In this place, it was men who were the screamers. There would be these well-suited men who would rail and scream nonsensical abusive diatribes at staff, and everyone else would talk normally as if this was normal, because we all kind of normalize this behavior. We’re all invested in keeping the surface calm, keep the social fabric going, even if there is obviously a psycho behaving like a toddler who needs a nap.

I have a lot of thinking to do as to what allowed me to stay in a position for so long where abuse was so pervasive and prevalent. (That office’s culture was to let things roll “like water off a duck’s back.” Old school culture is all about being “a good soldier.”) I was listening to a Neil Grasse (not Degrassi, which I’ve said for years, but that is Degrassi High is the series that brought Drake to stardom so can you blame me) Tyson (omg who is so brilliant and charismatic. Excellent speaker and explainer of obscure, inaccessible content in a mellifluous voice that implies some kind of professional training — and if that’s his natural voice, it’s not really fair) interview on Larry Wilmore’s podcast — he said that children are not taught to be thinkers but to be obedient, to be seen not heard, to be good soldiers — and man, I’m so sorry to realize that is true.

So among my parenting duties, I have to teach these kids that yes, we have bullies in our lifetime and how to face them. The answer is not to fall down and absorb their aggression, as I have done for so many years. The answer really is to disrupt the status quo and say, dude, this is not right and I will not accept this. I will not deserve this. You can even be polite while asserting yourself, but you have to do it. If not for yourself, for others who can’t do it this yet.

Anyway, this is ongoing.

I grew up with a writing teacher I adored but whose editing style made all my writing sound like her. I remember another high school teacher told me that teachers should never cross out and rewrite over students’ work, and my reaction was “say what now?” because that was how I had been edited forever. In high school, I wrote a memoir piece that won a national writing contest that was to make me a “shoo-in for the Ivies.” I wrote it, it was healing, I felt deeply connected to the piece, and it did bring me very close to that teacher – but she had a very heavy hand in editing the piece. When you read it, it does not sound like a 17-year-old girl. It sounds like an older, educated, hyper intellectual bossy ethnic senior citizen (a.k.a. my beloved teacher). (Also, the piece did win that national contest, and I was as predicted, a shoo-in for the Ivies. As an aside, there was a point where I stopped doing any classwork, ticking off every teacher and gave myself a heart attack that my acceptance would be rescinded, but it all worked. Ahh, fairy-tale endings.)

I spoke Korean exclusively from birth to about age 3 or 4, whenever we moved to England then the U.S. and I entered the local school system. Because of that, my beloved teacher said repeatedly during our time together, “you can never be a true poet because you lack an intimacy of language. Your syntax is all wrong.” (And as an aside, I wonder, maybe that’s what’s behind my exhaustion-fueled garbled sentences to my family. I am infamous in my apartment for reverse subject and verb words or other perplexing combinations. Things don’t always come out of my mouth in the right order.)

I really did get so much from my relationship with my teacher and I do love her for everything she’s given me and for what we shared, but it also took years to untangle myself from her influence in my writing and to find my own voice – my actual, figurative, literal, physical voice. (She was not the only one who inadvertently handicapped me but she is part of that team.) I am finally in a place where when I write, I am one with the writing. It’s not that I don’t accept edits or constructive criticism, it’s just this my voice. It is not baroque, rich with ten-dollar-words, multi-syllabic exclamations of whatever point I’m trying to make. It’s pretty straightforward, plain, and simple. (Dude, I have friends who write like Rachimoniv on the piano, while I’m here plunking out Hot Cross Buns.)
So all of which is to introduce my latest haiku (first line 5 syllables, second liken 7, third line 5).

Fuck you fuck you fuck
You fuck you fuck you fuck you
Fuck you fuck you. Fuck.