Currently Reading Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) By Marcel Proust see related

Dear,

I cannot believe it’s already April; what happened to the first three months?  What was I so busy doing that I let a full 90 days slip by?  Maybe it’s a symptom of growing old, but it really seems like my days contain less life than I’d like.  Once in a while, a day will come along where I get to do so much, like a lovingly planned date, that it feels like a lifetime of joy.  Then I think I’ve made up for some of the days when I’ve slept in and reveled in my dreams.

Maybe that’s why I dream so much.  A long time ago, I learned what it was to not want to get up.  I’d wake up early in the morning and evaluate the day ahead.  Sometimes it was the monotony of school, sometimes it was a weekend of grocery shopping and church, but often it simply felt ordinary and predictable.  I’d then weigh the forthcoming day against my dreams and try to figure out in which I’d have more fun.  I hardly ever stay asleep because of inertia, you see, I sleep because in my dreams I am sometimes happier.

The problem with dreams is that they dissolve much faster than life.  In fact, that’s how I distinguish between the two.  My memories in life are shared and concrete.  They’re like gems that I polish with attention.  The more I cherish them, savor them, labor over their details, the more they shine and glow.  But my dreams are less dependable.  I alone hold them dear and that can become quite a dreadful burden.  I cannot turn to you and remark, “remember that time when our elephant refused to cross the brook and we had to make shoes for him from leaves?”  Of course you would not remember.  Even though I enjoyed your company in my dream, loved you and shared the joy of the moment with you, you were not really there.  “How did it happen again?” you’d ask, just to play along.  And I’d have to retell the whole story, but imperfectly because it would have no corroborator.  

I also sometimes sleep because my eyes are heavy, they burn with fatigue and beg me to make them see no more.  Since fixing them, I’ve needed to sleep less, and I’ve become happier seeing more in my life.  I know that I can make my dreams elaborate and exciting, but I’ve realized that even an ordinary day can create memory gems that will glow like tigers eyes for as long as I love them.  So I’d like to stay awake more, plan more, exert myself more during my waking hours.

I’ve been having less nightmares lately.  I’ve been less anxious.  They went away since I’ve decided that I am superbly blessed and happy.  I am no longer afraid.  Before that one night, when I was falling and then developed a bouncing ability (instead of the flying ability I was hoping for), I never let myself sleep through the end.  They say that if you hit the bottom in your sleep, you’d die for real.  Even though I can control my dreams, I didn’t want to risk it.  But that night, I knew I was going to be fine, I was far from dying.  I willed flight, but ended up bouncing in long bounds, which was great fun.  That’s one memory I still love, even though it’s a dream.  That’s because I wrote it to you in an email, so now you share a bit of it with me.  

This is “wordy,” as you’d say.  But it makes me happy to tell you this, because even if you know it about me, it makes me happy to share it with you.  I like to sleep close to you because I hope that we’d one night dream the same dream and not have to spend our sleeping hours apart.  Holding each other close sometimes gives both of us dead-asleep limbs (that prickle like a million needles when they wake up).  But if only we can share our dreams and create in them whatever we wish – were we to become expert lucid dreamers - we’d have twice the lifetime to love each other.  In the waking half, we’d struggle and build a great life, while in the sleeping half we’d enjoy each other in whatever freedom and luxury we’d want, solving problems and inventing limitless adventures.  

Just like I believe that sooner of later, two people in love will intertwine in each other’s language, I know love can lead them into shared dreams.  It only takes practice.  I sometimes will napkins to twitch, hair to grow, names and addresses to resurrect (i.e. 314-230-9026, the phone number of my St. Louis home 13 years ago).  There’s enough literature and records of thoughts moving reality that I believe if I only focus, think hard enough, the impossible is inevitable.  That’s how I feel about love and shared dreams.  If only I am happy enough, strong enough, kind, generous, patient enough…it is wonderful anticipation.  

Yours Truly,

Lili

This is the most painful day of my adult life. 

I'm on the phone with a good friend, gurggling self pity, so we're making a market on it because the "I promise you you'll..." is making it worse. 

27.5 / 30 - that's Noverber 23, 2008 / May 23, 2011

You're welcome to get in on it.  On Nov. 23, 08, I'll be happy to pay out $100 for being pessimistic and wrong.  Amount decreases $3.33 / month, converging at 5/23/2011 (that's 30 months). 

Notional's $100.  If there's enough interest, I'll put it in escrow for 5% APY and inflation adjust it at payout. 

Easy when hurt=fault.  Not so easy when it's just hurt and hurt and hurt...and so much love besides. 

Currently Reading What Is the What By Dave Eggers see related

A new year this 2007.  This xanga box feels so foreign to me.  I guess I've gotten so used to pounding my thoughts into Boyfriend that I haven't bothered to untangle them for a while.  I don't know what to make of 2006.  I was bracing for a summary as the year dissipated.  I've become fragile and frenzied.  It's so unlike me.  I can't quite remember myself in 2005, nor have I mourn the loss. I seem to have spent my life looking, preparing for some moment, but never expected reckoning to be a test of patience and grace and love.  Whatever else has reckoning been, but white-knuckled discipline in what-is-right.  

This year is ominous.  I'm finally moving forward, not "into."  I'm living without knowing because I can no longer find a way to plot ahead into a foregone, neat thesis.  There is sensational freedom in living.  Life roils me.  Life humiliates me.  But I let it through and it's exhilarating.  It's okay to feel and not conclude.

Currently Reading Lullaby: A Novel By Chuck Palahniuk see related

The latest JPMorgan China report discusses the magnitude of the domestic consumer market in relation to…Little Emperors.  It remarks, “These nouveaux riches are typically unmarried and well-traveled; they own Rolex watches and BMW cars.  They see life as constantly improving.”  It is remarkable, that the moniker of spoiled, bickering, narcissistic only-children now refers to the most wooed objects of global trade’s affection.  It’s also somewhat disconcerting that my generation has officially transitioned from lap-bouncing children to a formidable economic force. 

It seems to me that China’s current privilege is the backlash of deprivation - the Little Emperors’ parents grew up less like royalty, and more like slaves.   They were practically birthed in litters, with the government’s goading, but when it came time to eat, the Great Famine set in, killing over 20 million nationwide.  They entered school like gangbusters, promising China its first post-war, modern generation of eager minds, but almost overnight, they were bused to the countryside to learn proletarian values through labor.  Then, instead of butterflies and the poignant angst of puberty, they developed calluses, wrestled diseases, and bedded cadres in hopes of returning home.  And when time came to go home, they were tossed into a desiccated society, with broken parents and traitorous relatives with no further instructions on how to weave together a living, a family, a purpose. 

Maybe it was the sun-up to sun-down rounds in the rice patties, the starvation, or the non-anesthetized abortions, but for all that was lost, the Sent-Down generation earned their survival.  And they, with so little left to lose, took Deng’s Cat mantra to heart.  They took a stab at medicine; figuring things couldn’t get worse than the scalpel-wielding teenage red-guards who stepped in after they’ve struggled against and accidentally tortured the country’s doctors to incapacity.  They cranked up construction, spitefully set to rebuild anything the pubescent red-guards had knocked down, and then some.  And they believed in business because having believed in so much else had fatigued every desire but the last blood-raw nerve to get and protect theirs.  

So having had their trust splintered, it’s no wonder these Sent-Downers are “savers not spender and have caution engrained in their behavior patterns” who “concerns a Chinese Government that is encouraging spending as a key part of the economic modernization.”  The government may be encouraging spending, but the economy wouldn’t have budged if it wasn’t for the gargantuan Sent-Downer deposits in the Big Four, that grinded the rust off industrialization.  And certainly, it was this “lost” generation that coddled and indulged my generation of Little Emperors, hoping that through us, they would receive atonement.  

Meanwhile Little Emperor and Empresses fly unfettered through the new paradigm.  JPMorgan defines us modern women as, “girls of the economic miracle…cultivated, independent and avid consumers.”  They further suggest that “[To us] family and friends place relatively low in importance, and the ability to shop, plan trips and take in beauty treatments, using spare time for self-indulgence are good steers to capture the custom of [our] group.”  All this, written in a segmented entitled “Temples of Consumerism,” have surpassed capturing a social phenomenon, into exploiting its follies for returns. 

We’ve transcended our parents’ born-etching hardships into bulge-bracket investor reports.  But without the JPMorgan juxtapose, how many new-society royalties would appreciate the hermeneutics?  It saddens me to imagine wizening parents wading through the literature of the new society – pensions, annuities, life insurance, convalescent homes – hoping to see the undisciplined handwriting on a letter from their child.  And though it seems we've shed all the anachronistic hindrances of our parents' China, I hope that pangs of filial piety haunt us Little Emperors into our illimitable future.

Now that the World Cup is in full effect, my colleagues and I don't even bother to pretend we're working anymore.  My right monitor blinks x-mas colors all day, I IM and email on the middle one, and Brazil is spanking Ghana on my right.  Dida, you Brazilian cerberus!  Goooood goalie, so sexy you are!

Yet another email conversation.  Such profundity in simple dialogue - we should all take a moment:

Him: How come you never told me that Hank Paulson looks like Lex Luthor?