Notes of a Desolate Libra

I have always been obsessed with voices. That’s why I say that I love all music, as long as it’s good music. I especially like live music, although those usually come pretty expensive. However, as with food and travel, I think experiences are priceless and if you are able to spend some money to gain them, then you should definitely go for it.

Last year I went to quite a few concerts -
1) Eason – 2/26
2) Hins – 8/27
3) MUCC – 12/15
4) Jay – 12/21

Food for the Soul!

I’m sure my friends are no stranger to my Jay Chou obsession. I ended up crying at Jay’s concert, but all of the above concerts were 100% worth watching. There’s just no word for that warm fuzzy exploding feeling in my chest that I get whenever I’m listening to live music. It’s as if a different me comes alive within me. It’s a sort of exciting, thankfulness, and just contentment that come with knowing that I am standing in front of people who love their arts as much as I love mine, and they are able to share it with other people, which is what I’m trying to do. I appreciate anyone with the passion to drive themselves forward on a “road less traveled,” but are especially thankful that they exist to show us that it is possible to attain your dreams.

To me, music is the source, capsule, and storyteller of life. Appreciating music is like appreciating life itself, because we identify with the lives that music tells with its unique language. This isn’t an ode to music, but I think just something that all music lovers know but don’t always express. I always remind myself that it is for this reason that I became a radio host, it is for this reason that I translate lyrics, and it’s for this reason that I still shell out those dollars to go see concerts. I hope you will do the same.

Aside from singers and music, voices themselves trigger something in my heart. It’s as if a voice can physically touch me and make me tremble, joyous, sad, angry… in love. That explains the obsession I have had with Seiyuus (voice actors) since young. If I close my eyes, I can visualize an entire world just by a person’s voice. Perhaps that’s why I love(d) being a radio host. My voice is nothing special, but I know that through my voice, or my words, I can bring comfort to many many people.  Such is the amazing thing that is the human voice.

Musings 2008, Concerts, Eason Chan, Hins Cheung, Jay Chou 周杰倫, MUCC, Music, Seiyuu, Voice Actors

“Wheel of morality, turn turn turn. Tell us the lesson that we should learn…” -Animaniacs

Wheel of Fortune

Well, that’s the Wheel of Morality, but more generally the wheel that we are familiar with is the Wheel of Life 生命之輪.  Life often sets twists and turns in your way to test your faith (no, not religious, just faith in yourself, in life, etc.).

There’s a phrase/idiom in Chinese: 塞翁失馬，焉知非福。 塞翁得馬，焉知非禍. The moral is that when you are blessed with a “gift,” you don’t know if it will bring happiness or trouble; and when you are hit with a calamity, you don’t really know if that is truly a stroke of really bad luck or a harbinger of good fortune. When you look from behind, you may realize that things have a strange way of falling into place.

In 2008, I had the most (physically) traumatic experience in my life: I developed a severe inflammation that was really quite painful, to the point where I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive the early mornings (that’s when inflammations are the worst). I was carted off to the ER for the first time, where they performed a procedure on me, just to later find out (two days before I was supposed to leave for Taiwan and Japan) that I would need another surgery. Needless to say, I was having major emotional issues. However, now, looking back, I realize that this was for the best. I apparently (now that I can really look at things more clearly) have been brewing this condition for quite a few years (since iaTV time) but I just didn’t realize it at the time.

Now, a year after the event, I look back and realize that if the issue had not exploded at the time that it did, I would never have gone through the mental changes that made me who I am today, and if I had gotten sick much later, who knows if I would be near people who could help me (in this case I had my parents). So, albeit this sickness brought me pain and suffering that I would never want to experience again, it also freed me from many of my previous (mostly hidden) constraints and I can travel freely.

In another example, when I became a lit major, I didn’t have faith in myself. I didn’t really believe that I would be able to make a living for myself using things related to my major. So I tried many other fields: Law, Web design, Marketing… etc. What seems like lifetimes (of careers) later, I realize that I’m doing for a living something my major would have applied exactly to: translating. Critics, take that! From this I realized, sometimes we just know better what’s the best for ourselves, even if at the moment we didn’t know. That’s why, if you really want to do something, go do it. If you fail at your dream, at least your hard work was for something you love. If you fail at something you hate… you just have a lot of lost love and time. Lose to your dreams, don’t lose to your reality. 寧願輸給夢想，不要輸給現實。

Just go for it!

In 2008, many other things happened.For quite a while, my heart was shattered and I thought it would remain forever broken. But at the time I didn’t realize this was the time when I would grow immensely emotionally and as a person, the furthest I have ever gone in such a short period of time. It set the wheels in motion, finally, after being on standstill for so long. And I saw so much that I was unable to before. I believe now in the strength of my heart – of its potential to grow and to love. And to realize this is one of the most amazing gifts anyone can hope to have.

There is a reason I brought the Wheel of Morality into the picture: do everything as you deem right. You can lie to the world, but you cannot lie to yourself. If you are true to yourself and do everything in the best interest of everyone and everything (including yourself), you will find that fate and fortune will smile upon you. If not, at least you will smile and be proud of yourself.

Everyone and everything will find their place. And Karma will be silent judge.

Musings, Tarot 塔羅 2008, Animaniacs, Tarot 塔羅, Wheel of Fortune

2008 was the first time I had to deal with a potential divorce between two people I knew (there were other cases, but I only knew one of the parties)… and from then on, this concept of “divorce” became ever so real to me. Now that it’s 2009, I am learning, slowly, painfully, but surely, that marriage and love may be very different things. There are so many different kinds of relationships around me that each time I think I’ve heard it all, something new and explosive surfaces. So I’ve basically given up trying to think that I know a lot (or anything!) about love and relationships.

Of course, some of my friends are still very passionate about finding their soulmate, whom they expect to marry and live happily ever after with. I applaud them. May this passion never die and their quest be successful. But I personally am coming to realize and accept the idea that the person you love the most may not be the one that you marry, the one you marry may not be the one you spend the rest of your life with, whom you consider your soulmate may be someone you absolutely cannot live with, some people may just be better with tons of girlfriends and one wife (but otherwise a perfect husband to his wife)… etc etc. I’ve had friends married and divorced in a year; I’ve had friends who basically see their husbands as “business partners” – able to stand and work with each other, but don’t emotionally depend on each other (Clintons?); I’ve had friends who allow their husbands to have girlfriends/flings as long as they’re honest to each other (a man’s dream, right? :p)… there’s just so much. The more I learn, the more I know I do not understand. But I stand, humbled, by the complex ever evolving organism that is human emotions.

Fundamentally though, I still believe that marriage, be it only a piece of paper, is a very real and conscious commitment that you make to someone you love very much. When you make this commitment, you know that you will be giving up many things, but if you work at it, you will also gain many things.

Every turn in life requires a (lot of) sacrifice(s), but if life were a straight line instead of a series of find(write)-your-own-adventures, we would never realize how fortunate we are to have the ability to reason and make decisions.

But of course, that’s my personal opinion. There are many people in this world who live by a different doctrine and have lived rather well. I don’t have the right to judge (and try hard not to). As long as people claim responsibility for their own actions, really, it’s none of my business.

Musings 2008, Love, Marriage

Thought this was worth a write-up.

I am not a super superstitious person. I admit, there are certain things that I am more uptight about and prefer to follow. There is a saying in Chinese: rather believe it to be true than not 寧願信其有,不可信其無. That’s the general thinking regarding things that may bring bad luck.

Well, my luck with flying has been hilarious. There’s ALWAYS a certain incident before I fly. It’s happened so often that I have come to expect it. For example, my most recent flights:

1) JP/TW trip (10/2008): right before I left for the airport, the strap to my bookbag broke (MAJOR bad juju). My mom stared blank-faced and then rushed to say: “well wasn’t it good that it happened before the trip?” Mind you, at the time I was going insane because of all the bad stuff that had happened so far in 2008 and I was already envisioning my plane engulfed by flames and plummeting into the Pacific… now this…

2) Puerto Rico trip (12/2008): my travel partner Lan, right before we were to board, got very sick and spent a lot of time in the bathroom. We didn’t run onto the plane until after their final call. Then while she was on the plane, she locked herself in the bathroom and we almost got “escorted” off the plane because we were causing the plane to be grounded and the crew was skeptical as to whether or not we were (physically) fit to fly. Needless to say, I was endlessly grateful when Lan was able to make it out of the bathroom somewhat recovered and the plane finally took off. The crew was so afraid we’d come down with something that they were super nice to us the entire trip.

3) Hong Kong trip (5/2009): this time I got sick right before the flight and I thought I was developing a fever. Now, normally this wouldn’t be a huge issue, but remember this was at the height of the swine flu fever and if I exhibited any symptom at all (esp. a fever) I probably would had ended up quarantined. Fortunately, by the time I got on the plane I was feeling fine again (took some fever meds) and the rest of the flight proved uneventful.

4) San Francisco flight (6/2009): I, being the insanely distracted person I was, forgot that my ride to the airport (provided by my dear friend Jeremy) was supposed to show up at 4 and thought it was supposed to be 3… and of course, by 3:30 when he didn’t show up (and of course by my luck he had fatefully forgotten his cell phone on this day, my entire family started panicking. Somehow though, I thought it was extremely funny, because I knew this – SOMETHING – was going to happen. And it did.

Now… it’s not like I enjoy these little incidents. Actually every time there was potential that something bad could’ve happen… but I guess it didn’t… and looking back, they *are* kind of funny.

Another thing about traveling alone though, I started chatting with the elderly gentleman who sat  next to me on my flight to SF (he had a mask on the whole flight so we didn’t actually talk until the end of the flight). Mr. Liu had guessed I was Chinese from the Tarot book I was reading and I ended up giving him my business card and asked him to let me know if he ever needed help with any translations. Fun, eh? :)

Travel 2008, Hong Kong, Japan, Planes, Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Taiwan, Travelogue

或許我真的是一個自虐狂。我決意來SF的原因之一就是想要品嘗孤單。

對於一個如果我想的話，身邊從來不會缺少朋友的人來説，孤身在一個差不多是完全陌生的地方，霸道地暫時佔據著他人生活的一部分，因爲自己的任性而為不少人，特別是自己最重要的親人帶來了許多的不便。

看著四週清楚描述出一個年輕人20年的生命：衣物、拼圖、CD、獎盃、玩具、家常用品等等一切，述説著一份與我無關的幸福。而我，在房間裏劃分了自己的一個角落，繼續著我尋找自我的腳步。未來是迷茫的、幸福是狡猾的、而我，是否能夠保持隨遇而安的心態呢？

去年大概這個時候我也來到了SF。同一個地方，同一個我，所差的，只是時間而已，心情和際遇卻是天壤之別。但是，如果沒有去年，我又是否懂得放開自己，走到這一步呢？人生，太長了，多少悲傷絕望蔓延不斷。人生，太短了，多少夢想失之交臂無力追求。我們，太渺小了。我們，卻也是最重要的。

可愛的孤單，歡迎你的到來。因爲，你會讓我明白，當我與幸福遇上的時候，不要傻傻地錯過他。可恨的孤單，希望你早日離去。因爲，你會一直提醒我，生命的盡頭，剩下的還是自己一人而已。

Finally, I’m getting a good taste of what it is like to be on my own and not having much that belongs to me. Perhaps it’s a taste of the loneliness I have come to romanticize in my so many years of listening to other people’s adventure stories.

My uncle whom I’m staying with is great, bu there are limits to how many times I can listen to “your mom misses you” or “you should go back as soon as possible” or “my kids are different from you, they miss home a lot and don’t want to leave home” or “you can’t just go on wandering all over the place” or “you’re a girl, you should just find a stable life and live it”…

Ahem. As all of you who know me know… this serves well to fuel my fire. I know that they are expressing this as part of their empathic feelings for my parents. But just because I left home doesn’t mean I love them any less or that I don’t miss them. It just serves no purpose if I start crying on the phone to my mom and tell her how much I miss her. Either it’ll get so bad that I’ll leave SF and go home or she”ll get really worried and pack her bags and run to SF to get me back to NYC. Not ideal scenarios.

BUT this is what it’s all about isn’t it? Me always wondering how other people felt when they left home and ventured elsewhere in search of a different life, not because there’s anything wrong with their home life, but because there are so many other things out there.

Inward Spiral

Musings, 中文 2008, San Francisco