may thirty-first

the end has a way of quietly slipping out the door without making a stir. and i'm not talking about the end of something big even, although those don't slip out quite so effortlessly, but something simple like the end of a month. if i hadn't written today, in a month's time, a week even, no one would notice- may thirtieth would've run into june first seamlessly.

but today happened- i lived it, maybe not well, but i lived it. i was here for it- i was here. i watched three movies- carolina, over her dead body, and in the land of women. i asked a lot of questions and learned how to play settlers. i unpacked two boxes of trinkets and memories with my mom. i ate a bowl of watermelon with absolutely no seeds and felt so completely blessed by how much my mom loves me. i planned lunch tomorrow with a beloved friend and sunny pool goodness after. i dotted my i's and crossed my t's. i said goodbye and went to sleep.

how did it get so late so soon?

it's night before it's afternoon
december is here before it's june
my goodness how the time has flewn
how did it get so late so soon?
- dr. seuss

just because

you've let go of something doesn't mean that it's gone-
it just means you're not gonna be the one holding it for now.

and that's o.k.

there i sat awash with neon

gazing up at love's fancy footwork



listening to heartbeats
and trying desperately to understand my own.

the morning after

the end.

i know this is a good thing.
i know it's for the best.
and i know that it's a wonderful world
but I can't feel it right now.

i wanted this..

i was so tired-
tired of being confused.
tired of holding on to something that
i may or may not even have had in the first place.
tired of waiting, so tired of waiting
for nothing- it's hard enough waiting for something,
but waiting for absolutely nothing. i couldn't.
not anymore.

i couldn't do it anymore.
i didn't want to do it anymore.

but now.
the emptiness kicks in
and when i close my eyes-
i can picture the exact shades of darkness we burrowed in as we whispered away the nights.
i can feel all the songs we spoke, we sang, we shared, we knew by heart.
i can hear all of the silliness that passed between us and the memory tugs at the corners of my lips.
and most of all, i can see the exact shape of you in my heart-
two and a half years is a big hole to fill.

give ear to my words, o Lord, consider my sighing.
listen to my cry for help, my King and my God,
for to you I pray.

in the morning, o Lord, you hear my voice;
in the morning i lay my requests before you
and wait in expectation.

let all who take refuge in you be glad;
let them ever sing for joy.
spread your protection over them,
that those who love your name may rejoice in you.
psalm 5:1-3, 11

i can't do this anymore

you're either in my life or you're not-
and if you don't want to really truly be in my life,
then get the heck out.

i can't freaking do this anymore-
my heart hurts.


we're not alone,
just lonely all of the time

oh brother

could this be out of line?

it totally is, isn't it?
oh boy.

i'm sensing a trend here-
c. j. m. h. d.

cheese

so, between my brother's baseball game and late night belagios last night and being at the osaki's today for rachel's birthday and then szrya and chun shui tang, i was looking through photo albums and i noticed for the first time, to my great amusement, that as a kid i have basically the same disposition as i do now! i mean it makes sense seeing as they're both me, but i never realized before. for some reason this time i noticed that in picture after picture i'm either baring my teeth or glaring sideways or sticking my tongue out or wearing a big cheesy toothy grin and i was like ha- i do that now :)

my world is changing

i'm rearranging

a wiggle, a scoot,
maybe i can fit-
but the reality is,
it's not my seat anymore.

i hate this. i hate that the thought even crossed my mind-
what am i doing back here?

this is shanghai, my beloved shanghai world-
the city i love, that i so pined over, longed for, yearned for.
i wanted more than anything to be back here.
i wanted more than anything to be home.

but none of this feels like home anymore.
none of this belongs to me anymore-
my furniture, these walls,
my youth group, my school,
even my relationships.

this is supposed to be home.
so where does that leave me?

i know, i know-
heaven is our home.

it's just
it'd be nice to have somewhere to belong down here.

the world is my coloring book

and i want to be all the crayons in the box!
you can be a box of crayons too :)

or maybe we're the boxes, and jesus is all the crayons in us!
because the colors aren't our own, we're just vessels-
more of You and less of me.

if i were a crayon box, i would definitely say that to my crayons.

oh, if only i were a pair of techni-colored lenses-
that way i could show the whole big beautiful world to everyone around me in more colors than they ever knew to dream in.

color, colors, colors ♥
potentially the one thing i love more than
words, words, words.

this is why pop art is such a joy-
andy warhol knew where it was at, yo.


there's nothing quite like being devoured by colors!

jesus loves me

this is how i know-

i love the window seat on flights. and every flight i've been on in the past few years, without any maneuvering of my own when booking the seats, i've been assigned a window seat. and each time as i sit there by my window, looking out at the world, sleeping against it, reveling in the freedom it gives that side of my body whereas the other side has to be on its best behavior, i say to myself with a smile, "this is how much God loves me."

so, i got to the airport, got my tickets and i saw that for my baltimore to chicago flight i was in 27A and for chicago to shanghai i was in 58B. having flown more times than i would prefer, i knew upon looking at my tickets that my first flight, the puny, manageable one hour flight, i had a window seat, whereas the dreadfully long thirteen hour flight, i would be stuck, squeezed, sqmooshed in the middle- when it comes to flying, the letter B is not your friend.

UA507- baltimore to chicago: and so the journey began. i buckled myself into 27A, leaned my head against the window to make the most of it. by the time we took off, not only was there no one sitting in 27B, there was no one in 27C either- i had the whole entire row to myself! it was quite the sweet deal but i couldn't help being a little frustrated that this wasn't the seating arrangement for the thirteen hour-er. but i was a little too sleepy from my save-up-sleepiness-for-the-long-flight-all-nighter to really be too bothered.

UA835- chicago to shanghai: 58 is a big number. i walked past rows and rows of seats, each one confirming that seat B was stuck in the middle. i could only hope that maybe it wasn't a full flight and there would either be no one next to me or a row available for me to conquer. but then! i got to 58B and lo, and behold, it was a window seat! now you may be asking, how can this be? well, starting from row, yes, you better believe it, fifty-eight, the rows became indented into two-seat rows to accommodate the curve of the plane, doing away with seat A, and giving me a glorious window seat-
this is how much God loves me ♥

why, hello jetlag. i'm thinking it's bedtime.

oh the beauty of it all- home.

with my freeze ray

i will stop the world
& with my freeze ray
i will find the time to find the words
- dr. horrible's sing-along blog

3:27 am. flying soon. oh actually, maybe not that soon- though sooner than i've ever been. "so far, this is the soonest it's ever been." (okay, i may be the only one to catch the allusion to my threadless shirt- "so far, this is the oldest i've ever been")

7:30 am flight. leaving the house at 5 am. the hours aren't so hard to wait out when there aren't so many of them. usually it's a 9 or 10 am flight. those are the hardest. too little hours to sleep. too many hours to wait.

but i mention all this because as much as i hate traveling and all the lines and things to be carried and set down on conveyor belts and rearranged back into manageable carrying positions, i love the actual flight. i love the hours that stretch before and the oceans that stretch below, limitless. i love the flavor of nostalgia fostered in my dim pocket of light as i reflect on the faces i'm leaving and the ones i'm approaching- in that middle ground, i can be completely unbiased and miss both equally. i love observing the people next to me, noticing their nuances and writing about them to you. i love the perfectly assembled little trays of food and the cute little rectangular desserts. i love feeling closer to You as i quiet down my heart amidst the clouds. i love feeling the endless possibilities graze my unfurled fingertips as i let go of one world and reach out for the next- and in that moment, for once, my hands are unclenched and receptive to everything.

and above all, i love finding the time to find the words.

better learn balance- balance is key

"whole life have a balance. everything be better."
- mr. miyagi

oh, wise words. if only i had remembered it this morning as i poured my cereal. i might've been able to save myself a lot of grief. so, here's what happened:

i was choosing between cookie crisps, peanut butter captain crunch, and this healthy flakey stuff that had honey oat clusters. naturally, i went with the healthy option. but i couldn't deal with just eating plain flakes so i started looking for raisins, because bananas turned my milk goopy last time and i didn't really want to repeat that. however, after locating bags and bags of dried pitted prunes and craisins grouped together, i came to the conclusion that if there were raisins, they would've been there, among its dried fruit counterparts. so i did what i had to and settled for craisins. in that state of mind, i made my first big mistake- i poured the milk first. now, any child can tell you this is a bad. idea. you never pour the milk first! it can never lead to anything good. ever. predictably, when i poured the amount of cereal i wanted to eat, i found that i had way. too. much. milk. knowing that i had brought it upon myself and unwilling to waste the milk, i decided to stop being such a child and accept this disastrous disproportion. i moved on and added in the craisins. however, seeing the craisins just bobbing there in too much milk was more than i could take so i grabbed another handful of cereal and doubled the cereal. at this point, the cereal could no longer be submerged by the milk, even with some coercion from my spoon, and i realized what i had done- i had gone too far to the other extreme! i knew what i had to do. i approached the fridge and once more removed the milk and began pouring into my bowl, cautiously, mind you. and the milk and cereal proportion was right at last and i saw that it was good. but then, i couldn't see the craisins anymore and i was like oh, maybe i need more craisins. so i light-heartedly poured in more craisins, unknowingly upsetting the balance once more. when i mixed the whole thing, i uncovered the terrible truth- i had way too many craisins! what could i do but add more milk and cereal? but i put my foot down and said, enough is enough. i decided i was going to brave through all the craisins. keep in mind, i don't really like craisins. i was just using them to substitute for the absentee raisins. so there i was eating, eating, eating and when i got 2/3 through my bowl, i couldn't do it anymore- i couldn't stand to eat all those craisins by themselves, for they were all that were left basically, and so, i added more milk and more cereal and finally achieved a perfect balance at a perfect breakfast amount. but sadly, at that point, i had already eaten 3829472034 times as much as the perfect amount and i not only did not enjoy it, i had to force it all down. life's hard. the end.

"regular jelly"

the age old question- strawberry or grape.
i enter into this conversation on average once a month-
uh, i may or may not initiate all of them.
come on, it's not entirely unlikely that i happen to look like a peanut butter and jelly connoisseur and people just feel a natural urge to approach me with their pb&j related inquiries.

anywho. i never know the answer, so clearly, their pb&j-dars are off. i mean, personally, i think it's strawberry, but that's just because i grew up on strawberry jelly in my pb&j. however, this may simply be due to my parents' general preferences; they do love their strawberry ice-cream. but then in opposition to my own authority, there are cartoons which always portray pb&j as purple. however, this is by no means conclusive and can be attributed to a number of reasons:

1. they (yes, them) ran out of strawberry-scented ink and wanting to do a quality job decided to settle for grape-scented ink rather than settle for scentless red ink.
2. they overused their red colored pencil down to a useless stub and although they tried to make it work, a hand cramp resulted that was so intense that they finally settled for the full-length purple colored pencil.
3. although recognizing strawberry to be the "regular jam," they feared that the red jam would convey communist undertones.
4. after an extensive child development psychology studies, researchers reached the conclusion that purple promoted playing nice with the other kids, or in their words "constructive peer interactions."
5. the artist didn't really care and grabbed the first color at hand which happened to be purple, if it had been green, the age old argument may have turned out to be apple or strawberry.
6. the vendor that sold the studio their colors didn't speak english and even though they meant to buy a lifetime supply of red inks for all their jam needs, the vendor gave them all purple inks and then stubbornly stood by a no returns, no exchanges policy.
7. a strict deadline was approaching and the last two things to be colored in were a fire engine and the jelly and everyone knows that fire engines gotta be red and of course, there was only one red so the person coloring in the jelly had to settle for the next best jelly color- purple.

with all this being said, i believe it goes without saying that strawberry is, in fact, regular jelly, and i am, in fact, a pb&j connoisseur after all- sweet deal.

oh boy, now i just smeared a huge streak of (delicious) peanut butter on my shirt and i can't even lick it off because it would defeat the purpose of removal since my tongue is still all peanut-buttery goodness.

merry-land: day two

time goes by slower here. i swear it does. okay fine, i just bum around more. and the bumming is inversely proportional to the speed of the passage of time. inversely proportional? is that right? it doesn't roll of my tongue the way it should. inversely proportional. bah. that's gonna bug me. oh well. so once again, i am going to attempt to write every single day this summer, so as my brain shan't becometh rusty. i don't even know what i'm saying. i'm not really in a writing mood. not to mention there's nothing much to write about today. all i did was download music. and i ate cereal. but that's it. i haven't had cereal all year basically. unless i ate cereal at home this winter which i may or may not have done. but i definitely didn't have cereal once at tufts. what kind of cereal did i have this morning, you ask? well, i had peanut butter captain crunch. is that the proper order? should it be captain crunch peanut butter? no, no. definitely the former. it was slightly antagonistic towards the roof of my mouth and the bananas i put in it made the little milk that was available all thick and almost took on the consistency of yogurt. interesting, huh. peanut butter banana. awh, makes me think of summit. i miss never being for a lack of people. i miss tufts a lot more than i expected- i was so homesick! but now, i really really miss tufts and that lifestyle.

i made a tumblr but i think i'm gonna go disband it and all of its one post. i must. i gotta. no matter how aesthetically pleasing and brand-spanking-new and shiny it is. goodness. i’m such a compulsive blogger- the self-proclaimed pokemaster (hyphenated word?) of the blogging world: gotta catch’em all. xanga. myspace notes. facebook notes. blogspot. twitter. words, words, words, i’ve dabbled in them all. dipping in each of them to paint a wildly disjunct reflection of my life. it’s like finger stamps. or skin stamps? you know, when you use a ball point pen and draw on yourself & then squmoosh your finger on some other part of your skin or paper and it inks on like a stamp? but the more you do it, the fainter the image gets. yea, something like that. i’m about out of ink here- no more. oh two more places i store my heart: flickr and my diaries. oh my. i’m like voldemort! and the horcruxes? hahaa. maybe not quite as damaging. but i’ve split my heart and mind and words into 283947029384 mediums and now i just feel all over the place. oh my. i think there was one more, pre-xanga. but i don’t even remember the name of the domain anymore. i can picture it in my head though. we posted stories. was it with kate? with bids? and quizzes. did the domain name have a z in it, an x.. some letter of the alphabet? was it simply old-school blogspot? gah. okay, okay. it doesn't matter. and i think that's enough out of me for a day.

history sucks

and i've finally figured out why.

it's because people only ever really feel like writing or journaling or recording events when things absolutely, positively BLOW. most people, myself included, don't feel like sitting ourselves down, quieting our hearts, and writing a few words when our hearts are BURSTING with joy, when we feel satisfied or content with the little things, when we're over-awed with beauty, when we're just happy to be alive and living that one moment. those moments speak for themselves and we don't want to undermine them with our words so we keep quiet and simply revel in them. while when we're overcome with sadness the darkness eats away at us and we try so desperately to find the words to bind the darkness, to contain it, stop it from seeping into everything we own. if anyone were to read my blogs, my diaries, it would seem like my life was very dreadful indeed. i fill pages with heartache and stuck in the cracks of all the brokenness, there is the occasional page with a huge smiley face scrawled in there- because in that moment of joy, that's all i could say without delimiting the bliss i was feeling.

and all those characters in our history books, all we ever read about are wars and tariffs and riots and other unpleasantries because no one bothers to write about the days when they sat under their favorite tree with the sun streaming down on them and they just felt peace and joy, or how blessed they felt sitting down at breakfast with people they loved eating their favorite foods in the whole world, or the presents they got for their birthdays or the surprise birthday banquets they were thrown by their best buddies. happy memories die with you, but sad memories brood in dusty pages waiting to be read.

i've been happy. i've been sad. last night i sat in the midst of all my boxes and dust and luggage and unpacked junk at five in the morning and just cried. but today is sunshine.

sunshine is also like jesus. it helps me love people better, love them more.

so ten boxes become sixteen and my crap is still all over my floor.
asdf, back to it.