late july

This morning I went to help the Campuswide Honors Program register new freshmen into SPOP (Student Parent Orientation Program). When I told my dad last night that I was going to go to campus early enough to get there by 7 AM he asked me, Why do you always sign up for those things? I told him I didn’t know....I don’t actually know. I always feel compelled to. And then I told him, this is my last time helping out at one. I don’t think it convinced him that I am any more justified in the escapade. 

I think, out of all the forces that guide me throughout my day, one that I am quite sensitive to is that of possibility--I think I have found myself, over the past three years, returning to campus on early mornings to help with these events because of moments like what I experienced yesterday, cleaning the mirror in my bathroom--I found it necessary to ask myself, sternly, wiping over my reflection in circles, what I expected out of the next morning, and all I could answer to myself was that I never knew who I might meet, who might meet me, who might be changed. I am not, by a very long shot, the brightest or the friendliest student that the CHP has to offer. I am probably not even properly qualified to serve as a “face” of CHP, because I have never felt very at home within its community. But I’m drawn back to it, again and again, drawn back to volunteer opportunities that involve greeting and meeting new students, because I think there is a possibility that somewhere amongst all of them there is someone like me. Awkward, strange, discontent and all. 

Mostly--I envy them. I look at them all, new-faced, excited, innocent, willing, eager, and I think to myself, Lily, didn’t you have good hopes for yourself when you were in their shoes, didn’t you wish to be somebody really great, didn’t you have this reluscent vision of all that UCI had to offer you....didn’t you wish to become a good person, to meet other good people, to fall in love, to find a niche....? I did. I know I did. And I’m looking back at my last three years and thinking, did it really happen? Am I anyone at all? If, somehow, I could have known who it was I would have become when I was new-faced and willing, would I have still chosen to move forward, in this direction? I really don’t know. I think there are a lot of things that I could have done better. I could have been more graceful. I regret a lot of things--friends often, encouragingly, but somewhat misguidedly, tell me that it’s the things that I won’t do that I’m going to regret someday, and that might be true, but I regret a lot of of the things I’ve done, too--the people I’ve lost or pushed away, some of the clumsier things I’ve done, some of the choices I’ve made....I don’t regret being shy, and having a hard time making friends. Because the people I’ve met are beautiful, and I need them. I couldn’t have met better people. So if I had to have been me, this is one of the best things that could have happened--that I didn’t know who I’d be, so I’d make the same choices, and so that I’d meet the people who would help me become better....I’m a very shy person, and I’m a late bloomer--socially, I’m immature, shy, clumsy, and when I do reach out I am upon entirely fresh, petrifying ground, and though I have been unsuccessful in a few attempts somehow I am stubborn enough to pursue the people who interest me anyway....

In the same way I suppose, I keep going back to volunteer at the CHP events. I remember two years ago at the “Experience Honors Day,” a day in which prospective CHP students and their parents come to tour the schools, a very small-statured Chinese girl and her parents kept pointing at my nametag, which said “English Major with an Emphasis in Creative Writing”--and I remember that the girl was nearly crying with excitement, because she wanted to be a writer, she had written and illustrated some manga before....I told her about the opportunities I had already had to work with the faculty and to take classes doing something that a lot of people told you, no, wasn’t going to get you a job and wasn’t going to put you into a very liquid job market, either, and I told her about the ways that I found it worth my time, maybe even more so because of that, because, what they don’t tell you is that having to live with question, with darkness, with the strangeness of one’s own compulsions as they oppose reason or security--that’s all preparation for life after college, too. Perhaps it’s even more valuable preparation than all the “job-prep” major tracks. Having to be at peace with yourself when you know you are not doing something that makes sense according to the majority of your peer’s concerns is a skill that you have to learn like any other. I told her this in softer terms. I told her that as uncertain as my future was, I was sure that right now, I was going the right way, that I was doing the right thing for that day. I remember that she was still too moved to speak, but her parents both thanked me extensively. I ran into them later that day while I was walking through the park and they waved to me and thanked me again. I think, really, the moment didn’t have much to do with me. I still wonder how that girl is doing--if she decided that UCI was worth it, and if she did, where she was, and if I’ll run into her in fiction classes, ever.

Today my job was to stamp the hands of all the students waiting in line with a little anteater. It’d be their lunch pass. The day could have easily been a success without me, and for a couple minutes toward the start I was self-conscious of this fact, but I started asking kids where they were from and a few of them opened up to me and I was touched by how gracious they were, and  I became excited for them, for their futures. When most of the students had gone through the registration line and had entered the seminar, a third year nursing major approached me and introduced herself as Beatrice. She saw that I was a fourth-year by my name tag and said something like “how exciting!” and I must have not looked excited because she said quickly, “and scary....” I said I was sure I’d be excited closer to when school started.

And I’ve struggled with it, and I realize that it’s selfish and pointless to worry, and I know in my heart that I am doing the right thing and I have the rest of my life to decide what to do with myself, but I don’t feel very useful on this earth, and I am scared, I am so scared, for what I don’t know. I am probably more scared for my future than I have ever been scared for anything in my life. I try to take the advice of my elders, people who care about me the most--do not worry, it is useless to worry, do what you can with today. And for a large extent, I am able to live day-to-day. But this--this is a beautiful world. This is a world of consistent beginnings, of peering into darkness, entering that darkness, and emerging from it, which is a victory itself, whether or not we plunge straight into another darkness....this is a world of forever-possible renewal, but with that comes the strangeness of unfamiliarity. Every day I am made stranger to myself, every day I’m getting to know myself more. And I am happy, at times. Sometimes I am overwhelmingly content. And sometimes I feel this need for the future like the need that arises out of a presentiment of loss; the preciousness of things being magnified, prismatic. We say, precious, and what we mean are jewels, which absorb and throw the light in short witty glints. But what I mean are the small things held in the hand, recognized as vital, with heartbeats of their own, and held close to the heart. The things felt against the palm and the heart at once. Bird in the hand. Bird in my hand! 

I left today with my hands covered in the ink from the re-filler bottle for the ink pad. Sometimes moments in my life feel entirely mimetic, as if they speak not for themselves but for a larger idea, and for that idea only. But today I’m just going to be a girl who has ink all over her hands. 

I try to be content with what I have...but this is a beautiful world. With all the good there is out in the world, available, willing to be had--with all the futures out there, ready to be had, existing to be had--with all the air in the world to breathe, knowing this, seeing these things, how can I not want it all? 

mid-july

I recently discovered a small Taiwanese restaurant/café called Class 302 close to the university’s campus. I’ve been working late (until the library closes at 8 PM) and visiting the campus gym after this, but usually we’re hungry or too awake after working out to go home and sleep. I introduced one of my friends from the library to another friend from a different circle of my life, and they took me to Class 302 a couple weeks ago. I accidentally ordered dim sum with shredded dried pork as a garnish, and wondered why it tasted so strange to me until Megan pointed out what it was. I’m not sure if it was this small amount of animal protein after years of abstinence or all the sugar in the shaved ice we ordered that gave me a stomach ache later. But it probably wasn’t the pound of sugar.

            Last night we went again and, when considering what to order, my friend turned to me and said “why don’t you get pig like you did last time?” I turned to her and said “are you happy that I ate pig? Does that make you happy?” We were joking; and I don’t even remember what the stuff tasted like, but there’s been a weird concatenation of events in my life recently that have been asking me to consider the choices that I’ve made and the things that are important to me. Sometimes, looking over a menu, I’ll whine, I’ll say something like “I wish I could eat fish!” and then someone with me will say, “why don’t you? We could go to a lot more places,” or, “you should, then we can go get sushi.” Someone at work the other day was really surprised to learn that I don’t even eat/drink animal broth, not even with the “bouillon cubes, you know, for flavor?” I said something to the effect of “if I couldn’t live without that flavor in my life I’d have a different set priorities.” And it’s true. It’s sort of a tautological statement, so it doesn’t even matter that I said it, but at the time it seemed appropriate. I’m wondering now how much of what I say is white noise.

            I wonder—I suppose if you don’t know, if you haven’t made this kind of sacrifice—you couldn’t know what it’s like. My body still wants animal products. I smell meat and it is food to my nose and I want to eat it, I feel drawn to it, I know it would be good to me, for me. I know that it’d be a lot easier for friends to take me out or take care of me, it’d be easier for my family, it’d be easier for me, too, to shop, not to have to read the ingredients on every single pre-packaged thing I buy to make sure I know what I’m putting into my body, that it doesn’t violate what I hold to be right for my life. Sometimes I want to ask, when people say things like “we could go more places”—I want to say—do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know what I’m giving up? Do you think that every day, I’m unaware of the sacrifices I’m making and asking you to make if you want to go somewhere with me? I resist the impulse to withdraw; I’m loathe to be a burden. But I also feel, I don’t have a choice in this matter. I fully believe that the right thing for me to do is to abstain from eating animal products. And, believing this to be the right thing to do, do I have the option not to do it? To live the way I feel is right, this is what I have to do. And I am used to explaining this to people, but I’m sure it’s one of those things that you don’t understand until you give up something like it; until you are, multiple times each day, fighting against your natural impulses to do what you think is right.

            I used to sort of think that people were born innocent and good and this dissipated as they grew older and violated their own purity, or goodness. But what I’m learning more and more is that you have to earn goodness. I’m not talking about spiritual righteousness or goodness—that’s a whole other discussion. I mean, you have to earn the type of self that puts good into the world. You don’t have that from birth and then lose it. When I got home from England I realized the simple validation, person-to-person, of receiving a smile from someone on the street or in passing. You don’t find a lot of that in the UK—they’re famously reserved—so when I returned to California after three months of solitude, after three months of fighting to preserve my sense of self and worth amidst a world that did not know or care I was walking its streets, and I found that people, strangers, smiled at me in passing, I felt incredibly…human. I felt acknowledged as a person, as a human being with a heart and a brain and something beyond the body. And that doesn’t just happen—people aren’t born smiling! I was touched, I think, by the fact that someone would take time out of their own minds or own concerns to reach out to me, even if it was in a small way. And I began to understand that my reservations are not protecting me from a world that doesn’t understand me and does not wish me well, but are stifling these opportunities in my life and other people’s lives. I think now about all the people who have changed my life, who have made an impact on the way I look at God or the world and everything is illuminated in a certain fatedness, and I realize that every small thing they did for me has gotten me to where I am, has gotten me through some intense difficulties, has, at times, saved me from myself….This is a small example. But I believe that doing what you feel to be right, even if it’s hard, is something you must preserve. Despite what is easy, or what appears to you, or what would please the people around you most. People often wish to be better. I think there are endless opportunities to be better. People sometimes say that you get back what you put into the world, but I think that’s missing the point—your job is to put goodness into the world. What you get out of it is that you’re better able to put good into the world.

I look up to people in a magnetic sort of way who are natural lights, who can make anyone feel better, who can brighten anyone’s day without trying, with ease and grace and something akin to beauty, a tangible spirituality and peace. I am not that person. But there are still things I can do.

pleased to be lonesome, quiet, and clear

I ate my last meal in England at a small Italian restaurant in Heathrow, where I sat alone at a table. I ordered a mushroom pizza and a glass of coke. I remember there was a wedge of lime in the coke, about three ice cubes. I remember the pizza being very good. I remember looking at this loneliness as one loneliness in a long queue of others that I just had to get through. It was just a moment like that, that you take as it comes, you deal with it, you eat your pizza at the small silver table on your own with a glass of coke that has a lime wedge in it. You pay a little bit of attention to the couple next to you as they help each other finish their meals, but not too much. You don’t cry. You don’t take off your hat, either. Your backpack is underneath your legs, topped with the box that has your mother’s Christmas present in it, a Wedgewood teacup from Harrod’s. When you can’t finish your pizza you leave what's left at the table with a tip, feeling a bit apologetic. You want to say, I loved that pizza. I loved that coke with a wedge of lime in it. But this is your last meal in England, you have a backpack full of Christmas presents and a Wedgewood teacup. You’re alone in an airport. You’re about to go home after three months of loneliness that you’re not sure you’ll ever be able to explain to anyone. This is a drop in a river. 

cento

Were you ever a ripple 

at the edge of yourself?

I turn to hear the sea

in the wind.

Gods eat the moon periodically--

somebody clawed a womb

apart and found we came hard

breathing from sea.

I can tell you. Once I was

moon and sun

and I went about myself.

Maps of our bodies and 

oceans coincide.

compiled from James Kimble's 

The Light the World Appears In

late may

Today, talking with a friend, I said, “I don’t know who I am right now.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I spent abroad--it’s been six months that I’ve been home, and realizing it aches. It hurts. I’m glad to be with people who matter to me. I’m glad to be at school. I’m glad to be where I am, in intense bursts. I’m glad I’ve met who I’ve met. I’ve been reintroduced to beauty, to goodness, to just enough reality to paralyze me out of choosing. Where will you go? I don’t know. What will you do? I don’t know. What will you write? ... I don’t know.

When I was in Paris, it was near Christmas, and walking down the Champs-Elysees in cold, wet shoes, after having gotten rained on heavily, mercilessly, after having gotten lost for two hours in the city looking for the Eiffel Tower, I felt like the light reflecting off water caught in gutters after the downpour. I loved the smell of wine in the air, warm, earthy, spiced for the season. I felt like things could grow out of the air, drop from the sky. Appear out of stars. Things could rearrange around me, air could be a cocoon for me. I felt comfortable; myself. I felt as though, walking the old streets, naive and moon-faced, I could slouch my way to heaven. There is a contentedness that beats deep in the heart, and for one night in Paris, it was mine. 

Sometimes I am suffocated by the force of my own want, what will not stop. That every small thing I do on purpose might be done to be known more. I returned home from school after having a poem workshopped the other day, and exited the car, stood in the middle of the street. I couldn’t tell if I was disappointed in myself or my writing. If I was confused in myself or my writing. Have I lost hope in myself, or in my writing? Do I not see myself going anywhere, or do I not see my writing going anywhere? I don’t know. But I know I’m willing to stare into darkness. Something is always emerging in it, of it, folding it into something, someone is always good to show me what’s in it.  The secret to islands, I wrote while in England, is that there’s an ocean floor.

I think I am the one who feels too much, who admires aimlessly, selfishly, who revisits and revisits life after it has happened out of some need to rearrange, to steep, to arrive at an undeserved peace. 

I’m sorry I haven’t written in so long. I’m revisiting London in stories. I graduate in a year. A year to cure my skin, so I can do something new, so I can take real steps to a real place and maybe become somebody, if only to myself. It’s been six months since I was abroad but I am abroad every day. I think I’m going to be abroad forever, at least a little bit. 

early march

I’d love to be the first to admit that it’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything here, but I can’t claim to be the first to admit to that, as it’s really my dad who brings it up with admirable regularity. There are a lot of things I should write about. I should write about Paris, or London. I should write another list about words that the British pronounce alarmingly differently from us, or about the flight home, about my making it all the way to Heathrow before breaking my Stanford-upon-Avon coffee pot bought for three quid at an antique store in Norwich. 

But instead I’m going to write about home. I’ve been home since just before Christmas. I’ve learned the word mansuetude lately. It describes Irvine well--a sort of planned gentleness, some unsatisfying prettiness--but not my feelings for the city. I’ve been commuting for over a year now almost forty miles a day. Irvine feels close to San Juan, now, almost like I’ve never travelled. But the hours spent in the car are as much a part of me as the hours spent in class, or at work. I remember nights after eighth period my last year of high school turning onto San Juan Creek Road in the dark, staring up at a heavy yellow moon, writing poetry. I wrote poems line by line and spoke the lines aloud until I had them memorized. When I got home I’d write them down. During the last two years of high school I wrote over five hundred poems. I look back at them sometimes, mostly to remind myself that I’ve changed incredibly since then and so (thankfully) has my writing. I couldn’t ever look back and pinpoint a moment of change, perhaps. Or change doesn’t happen in moments, but stretched out over time and slowly. I think I’ve had to work for some growth. Other of it has been God-given. Some of it’s by luck, or my own determination. 

My parents had some old friends over the other night. They asked me about England and I found it exhausting to talk about. Maybe because I find it difficult to tell a story whilst being consistently and boisterously interrupted, or having portions of the story told for me. But mostly I think it’s because something happened to me while I was there that I can’t say out loud, and not just because I’m selfishly choosy with whom I choose to share the most precious details: but because I don’t know how to say it. But that’s not the point of this post.

Irvine is a luminous place in the first months of Summer. The sun is still white, sifting through low clouds. The grey hills and light grasses are soft. The air smells like grass, sweet, nutty. People start to smell like suntan lotion or tropical scent. The old spice wearers bear their armpits to the breeze. I invest in a gas mask. I love Irvine like home. Not because the city’s straight lines and clean pavements suggest to me the capacity of mankind, or the hills off the highway remind me of a childhood spent hiking neighborhood hills and playing with the cat in the woodsy backyard.  I love Irvine because I’ve felt so trapped amongst its yuppie streets and shopping centers that I couldn’t do anything but turn to literature, to poetry, to writing stories. I’ve felt so strange, so out of place, like I’m restricted from the knowledge that would allow me to fit in, to be friendlier, more graceful, more beautiful, better accomplished. Resistance to Irvine’s corporate, business-casual charm, has caused me to emerge from some sort of social cemetery victorious, pages and pages of prose and verse clutched in my closed fists. The writing’s getting better. I’m learning to love it more. I’m learning to listen. To tell a story. To write something that matters. Something that lasts. The act of writing puts something down on paper irrevocably, or maybe onto a computer screen. I can’t untype anything. I can’t unsay anything. But what makes literature immortal is that other people read it and become it. I’ve written to friends about this idea I’ve had, that there’s a way to read something so deeply and intensely that you become what you read. That you write what you read. I can’t make it make sense yet; I don’t have the language. But I think it’s true, and I think that’s why the authors everyone knows have written stories that matter timelessly. What’s true, remains. 

I’ve always turned to poetry. My parents had friends over the other night: I mentioned this already. I told them about England. I felt uncomfortable about it. I felt a pressure to tell the story in a way that I thought could matter to someone else. I spend a lot of time alone; I have some difficulty understanding where the boundaries lie between what I find meaningful and what other people do. With some difficulty I told my story. We came to talking about my writing: I was deeply embarrassed when Mom pulled out a poem I’d illustrated and given to her for Christmas one year to show her friends as an example of what I write, because it’s two years old, and I’m so wildly different now--my writing is so wildly different now--that I don’t feel what they read is a good representative of my writing or who I am. But I think they understood that it was old, and I couldn’t tell them they couldn’t read it. I didn’t know if my embarrassment was appropriate, or allowed. I tried to swallow it down. It dissipated. They were gracious. I think they actually did appreciate the poem. I think when you reach a certain maturity you’re probably able to genuinely appreciate things much less than masterpieces.

We talked about what I write. I told them, I write fiction for school and poetry privately. One of the two writes songs and asked me if I ever did. I said, yes, and he asked if I also wrote the melody, and I told him, not at the same time that I write the words. The words first and then the melody. That mattered to me, to make that distinction. I thought that made it clear that I’m not a songwriter. I think in music, the melody is inextricable from the words. The way the song sounds and works musically isn’t separate from the way that the words work. The words and melody both work in the same listening moment, they both tell a story, and work together. So I thought, songwriters must write them both, words and melody, with some thought as to the other. And I said, I’ve written songs, but I’m not a songwriter.

He said, if you’ve written songs, you’re a songwriter.

I didn’t agree. I don’t think I do now, either. That’s a gracious point of view.  I am not a songwriter. I am not a fiction writer. I do not even think I am a poet. I think I’m an intense journaler. I’m an aspiring poet, yes. But not one now. I suppose I abide by the Platonic ideal: you can do one thing really well, and many things sort of well. Plato says, many things badly, but I think most people are multi-talented. I also think that both normal people (of which I’m one) and gifted people are born, or can choose, but they are something. You’re a doctor or a mathemetician or a musician or a soccer player, and you can do other things, but at your core, you’re something. Maybe I misunderstood what he meant. Maybe he meant it literally. A songwriter is someone who writes songs. But I was talking spiritual, maybe out of place. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for the last few days, and it’s made me think about where I am now. It’s more specific than the US, than California, than Irvine. I’m at UCI and I’m in the creative writing program and it’s frustrating, it’s trying, it’s exhausting, but it’s thrilling and rewarding and it’s gotten me to, and through, the best and worst moments of the last two and a half years of my life. I’m a creative writer inhabiting a creative writing program. As stifling as Irvine is to me at times, it’s also the only place I’ve ever had the experience of feeling truly at home, in my own right.

You’re having...what...for breakfast?

In my last post I promised a list of food in British and American terminology. I’m sure more will emerge as I remember them, but here’s a list I sat compiling in the food court at Castle Mall the other day. In no particular order besides the one that I thought them up in.

British	American
porridge	oatmeal
jacket potato	baked potato
soured cream	sour cream
chips	french fries / fries
crisps	chips (particularly potato chips)
bangers & mash	sausages and mashed potatoes
courgette	zucchini
aubergine	eggplant
rocket	arugula
coriander	parsley
jelly	jell-o
tea	dinner / supper (depending on context and geography)
“american style”	greasy or giant
lemonade	sprite-like sparkling lemon soft drink
cloudy lemon	lemonade
soya	soy
dippy eggs	soft-boiled eggs in which the yolk is still runny. they often dip “soldiers” (strips of toast) into these. “dippy eggs and soldiers” is a common breakfast menu item
ice lolly	popsicle
bubble and squeak	potato-cabbage hash
bap	hamburger bun
rump steak (I admit I giggled at this for a while)	sirloin
squash	citrus soft drink
boiled sweets	hard candy
sultana	GIANT RAISIN
cornflower	cornstarch
desiccated coconut (you did what to my coconut??)	flaked coconut
fairy cake	cupcake
ginger nut biscuit	ginger snap cookie
mince	ground meat
plain chocolate	dark chocolate
sweetcorn	corn
toffee	taffy
treacle	molasses
biscuit	crispy / non-soft cookie
butty	sandwich made with whitebread, mayo, and ANYTHING between the bread
candy floss	cotton candy
gammon	ham steak
pudding	dessert / sweet after-main course at dinner
beetroot	beet
chocolate vermicelli	chocolate sprinkles (when I found out this one, it just...why? THEY’RE SPRINKLES. THEY’RE AN EASY CONCEPT. the word sprinkles is what you do to them why vermicelli)
Demerara sugar	brown cane sugar. you can find packets of it at all coffee shops
polony	bologna (I thought this one looked like a disease word)