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I always complain that there’s nothing special about Sacramento as a city.
The nightlife is too polite. The tasty restaurants are sparse. The public art stale and often outdated. Our sports teams embarrassing. The main employer in the city is the state, and it isn’t hiring. The terrain is flat and largely featureless. Our winters too cold and our summers too hot.
But hey, Hollywood once again reminds us that no matter the climate, LOVE can happen.
Here’s Katherine Heigl (Grey’s Anatomy, Knocked Up) and Gerard Butler (300) in a new RomCom, “The Ugly Truth,” which is SET IN SACRAMENTO!
If you caught the first three frames in the trailer, you can see the Tower Bridge, the Delta King, and a bit of Sacramento’s humble skyline.
I DO hope that is a Sacramento River Cats game.
I wonder if she’ll go on a date in Old Sac.
Go Sacramento.
My parents always worry about me staying up so late. I guess the toughest part about living at home for me (fortunately) is that it’s more apparent that I don’t sleep until maybe 3 or 4am. It’s a lot easier to hide that fact when I’m at school, and my roommates only wonder about me, rather than worry.
There’s something special about times like this.
The silence, the stillness, the thought that everyone that I care for is asleep, safe, dreaming.
The solitude seems to preserve time, and allow room for thoughts.
Usually, the solitude is nice. It preserves my individuality. It allows me to think entirely of my own.
But tonight, I realize…perhaps I have been spending too much time in this solitude.
Not that I want the company of other people either…
I need something else.
–
I’ve recently been reading my sister’s college friends’ blog: http://www.graceandrew.blogspot.com/
It hits close to home and heart.
Cancer is cruel, but God, somehow, is oddly good.
I’m still trying to get my head around that number.
Necrotic?
I guess you could say I’m part zombie. Parts of me are dead.
And now, I have to come to terms with my entire mortality. At 21 years, yes. Death is ever upon us.
We are so rarely confronted with this reality, especially here in America. Life seems to go on, with no exact point. There is always something to look forward to in the vague unknown, and fairly distant future. No plans need to be real plans, except for the simple daily routines that we build for ourselves to feel safe enough.
But when that illusion of safety was disrupted for me…I did not expect it.
No one expects this.
Joan Didion opens her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, with the lines:
Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
Mid-November, I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled because of a recurring cough and illness that wasn’t going away. I was prescribed amoxicillin and a decongestant. I pointed out a large mass on my left abdomen that I had noticed swelling since summer. The nurse practitioner ordered an ultrasound for the area; it looked and felt suspicious. I complained of separate back pains. She prescribed amazing anti-inflammatories.
The cough should be gone within a few days, she said. Back pains can subside, but you might want to see a physical therapist, here’s the number. We’ll check on the spleen again. It’s probably related to your sickness. Spleens manage white blood cells. We’ll get your blood tested to make sure everything’s in order.
I took a blood test; white blood cells were normal.
I had my medicines, I had a plan.
Life, it would seem, would return to normal soon.
A few days later, I had to return to urgent care. The cough was worsening. I felt like I was drowning, and the cough would not go away. The family practice doctor said that I had asthmatic symptoms, and proceeded to prescribe me medications to treat them.
I tried to tell her that I was having more than routine breathing/coughing problems, but I was having recurring evening fevers. She brushed me off and said that since I did not have a fever at the time (it was the AM), I was probably fine.
Probably, was incorrect.
I had a CT Scan later in the week of my lungs.
Obstruction in upper right lung. Referred to Pulmonary Specialist.
Faith restored in Doctors/healthcare. Finally a doctor who cared.
He saw the second CT scan I had later that day, and was genuinely concerned.
This one was of abdomen, chest, pelvic region. Bad news bears.
Tumor. Spots in liver, lungs, hip, spine.
Does not look good.
And thus the rest of my story begins.
Go to sleep and set your alarm clock for 3am. Wake up at 3am and write whatever comes to you. It is the magical hour of slept over epiphanies, sandman soliloquies, the lucid writing in between dreaming and waking.
At 3am, I did not have to wake up. I was trying to sleep. I could not. This was no magical hour for me. It is 7:08 am now, Bangkok time. I slept restlessly earlier yesterday evening, but I could not fall asleep. Jet lag. And stress. I have that same pounding sensation in my chest. I got a massage today. I couldn’t relax. The pounding happened then too, and I thought I was going to die because I could not breathe.
It is sadness.
And I need healing.
There are always those types of people (I’m usually one of them) who looks around in developing or underdeveloped countries and thinks, wow, I’m lucky. I’m lucky I don’t have to be one of these poor people, the world is suffering so much blah blah blah I should be thankful. Look how happy they are, these poor kids.
I’m in Bangkok right now, and I look around. In the hotel lobby, 3am. 3 French guys flock in. Giggling Thai girls in hand. It looks exactly like what it is. I look at them. They’re taking pictures in compromising positions. I wonder what is going through all of their minds.
Probably sex. And money.
It’s not that difficult here, to get all the bodily pleasures that you want, and for cheap.
But then the harsh realization: there is no love here. Everything is meaningless.
The richest people here are the poorest. And they live no happy lives. They sit across from the biggest mall in Southeast Asia, limp babies in their arms, holding up empty cups for a spare baht. And yet in their desolation, they are rich.
I wonder that if survival from day to day was the only thing I had to worry about, if I would be all the happier. Perhaps not. But I would be so much richer.
Jessica- that’s my name. It means wealthy in Hebrew.
Perhaps this is a sign.
When there’s too much to digest, and you can’t process any of it. It’s toxic, no doubt.
But you feel better afterwards.
Unlike other worldly–or wordy–endeavors.
On Solitude:
It is good to be alone. It’s hard to enjoy it. It’s hard to avoid crossing the fine line between quiet introspection and raving lunacy when you are left alone with your thoughts.
On Sadness:
This, I feel is different from sorrow or mourning. Sadness…it’s a light sensation, far more necessary to feel than sorrow or mourning. Sadness can exist healthily and constantly without really bothering me. I can be content but sad. Happy but feel the sadness. I’ve come to accept that it needs to be accepted as a part of my personality. Without the sadness, I lose much of my inspiration. Though my inspiration rarely results in much good. Nevertheless, without the sadness, I don’t think. I’d be to happy, and empty to do so. In my sadness, then, is my fullness. Not happiness, but fullness, and contentment. There is a certain clarity to sadness that happiness or any other emotion fails to deliver.
On Self-Awareness:
That sadness is necessary to my self-awareness. The sadness, however, is often a result of my frustration that I cannot ever fully possibly be self-aware. By self-awareness I refer to a certain fullness of understanding of oneself, of myself. I cannot know myself. This makes knowing others much more complicated, because others find the same difficulty of negotiating themselves. Therefore our otherness is hopelessly incommunicable because of our inability to know ourselves.
Temet nosce–I think this is essentially what we strive for.
And yet…
On God:
Simultaneous to our desire to understand ourselves and our subsequent inability, I feel that we strive for something beyond ourselves, the ultimate Other. This is the only key to understanding ourselves. We are innately selfish, so naturally, to create a design that causes us to look beyond ourselves for a selfish reason is ingenious. God. If we seek the one who has the answers, or rather The Answer, who created and modeled us after Himself, we will find, through Him, ourselves.
On Self-loathing:
And yet when we come to terms through Him about ourselves, we find ourselves still not fully self-aware, but aware enough to know that the self is something that must be detested. The old-self vs. new-self mentality. The old-self is that which we love, and hate. Something that we cling to. Rather, that I cling to. I love my old-self. I’m scared to let my old-self go. And yet it is something to despise, something that I feel guilty placing my affection upon. My old-self worships itself. I worship it. But it is wrong. But as long as I cling to it, I will have to hate myself, and hate the One who revealed this truth to me, the truth about myself. Not that self-loathing is suicidal. It desires to change the old-self but loves it too much to want to change. And the true-self, which is the negotiation between the old-self and new-self, must choose between the two, because there is no happy negotiation. There is always a give and more take than give. The change requires something the old-self is unwilling to give up. This is sin. This is habit, the habit of sin. It’s too hard to change. And yet because of this, the true-self will always loathe both selves.
On Solutions:
Si yo puedo. If I can. The big IF I will find it, IF I can do it. So hard to execute it. IF I will. IF I want.
Too hard to digest.
Perhaps my change requires something very ridiculous to happen that I have been wishing to happen.
Upon waking up in the same clothes I wore yesterday, sweating, sticky, and recalling that I forgot to brush my teeth last night. Also, I only meant to take a nap. It turned into a 10 hour ordeal. Oh, and I still have about 200 pages to read. YAY!
Just last week, I took a walk through the muggy Los Angeles air. It was the kind of air that hangs thickly about you, and doesn’t quite suffocate more than it makes you forget to breathe.
That’s how I realized, I forgot how it feels to be alive.
Not that I am dead (“Are we the dining dead?”), just that I’ve forgotten how to live.
There’s that mechanical cycle. Work. Sleep. Eat. Bathe. Play. Sleep. Work. Write. Read. Simon says.
That all gets to you too. You forget so easily how to breathe. It gets to you. Los Angeles, the city, it wears down on you. And before you realize, you’re old. Your lungs are black. You’re tired, and on the verge of discovering nothing new except more ugly truths about how cruel and shallow people are.
The City of Angels, though, is not entirely bleak. There’s inspiration in that ugliness. It is cliche to say, but there is always beauty in violence. Beauty in death, art in crime.
Director Harry Kim followed L.A. local artist David Choe around for 7 years with a camera, documenting the ups and downs, the ins and outs of his artistic and personal experiences. Why David Choe? Why not. Choe struggles-and so openly, and candidly- with much of what we are usually too ashamed to speak of.
Choe’s art is not limited to his canvas, it is his very life. From a search for a dinosaur in the Congo to three months in a Japanese prison, Choe creates and experiences art, pain, love, sexual addiction, loneliness, insanity, depression, redemption, and God. The ups and downs, the falling away, the coming back, and the realization that maybe all of this is just because we don’t want to grow up.
Because when we were kids, we knew how to feel alive.
Never growing up is dangerous (Michael Jackson?), but there is that constant thrill, the irrelevance of time, the liberation, the discovery, and the lack of inhibition. The laughter.
“Dirty Hands” isn’t about crime, or art really. It’s not about the spray paint, the urine, and soy sauce that Choe uses on his canvases. It’s not about having sticky kleptomaniac hands.
“Dirty Hands” is about being a kid, fully capable of feeling pain, often subject to faulty logic, prone to injury and disillusionment, believing in the incredible. It is a film about growing old, but somehow through all the growing pains, staying young, and simply living.
It’s tough, I realize.
Coming back to it after having been gone for so long. I haven’t grown calloused; I’ve gone soft.
And in fact, I now realize…I wasted some good cash money on that old (new) guitar. If I recall correctly, my Martin was around $600. Mom and I split it, so that was a good $300 on my part (who knows if I ever properly paid her back!) And I’m rarely found with more than 2 Bens at a time. 
I spent a good 30 mins or so playing a buddy’s dad’s old guitar, worth $40 or less currently. A small yamaha with nylon strings. Glossy, nothing special. None of this rosewood and spruce nonsense (though they smell glorious).
I think it’s the strings and my general deafness to tone and timbre. (I thought I could hear the difference at one time; that’s why I got a Martin rather than a Taylor, because I could FEEL the Martin’s timbre but only hear the clarity of Taylor’s notes).
Nylon feels like feathers, waterbeds, baby cheeks, and rabbit fur compared to steel strings.
….and now that I realize that for $560 less I could be just as fine with life…
