Down Blades the Quit

I can see the red circle beside his name. He is online right now. Chatting? Or doing something else, logged in but tuned out? Which, incidentally, is what I'm doing, because I am at work and it is 11.22 PM and the streaming radio that plays songs according to my preferences makes me feel abandoned instead of accompanied --is there nothing more paradigmatic of modern loneliness than private radio in midtown? So, out of a vague listlessness for company, I signed into chat with my red light on --declaring that I am around but not exactly here. It makes me feel like I am holding hands electronically with friends who are also signed in, like we are 12 and doing homework together in the rec room; it makes me feel e-ccompanied.

I can see him online right now, my best friend, my teammate, my baby. Pick a sense, and I can evoke him within it by hundredfold. Smell, touch, sound, the slight damp of his light blue smooth buttoned Old Navy shirt that we bought on sale for $12.99 that weekend in 2006, the warmth of his roughness, and the roughness of his warmth, his palm against mine, like a buddy like a friend. Oh my friend.

The memories make me wistful and sad and I want to sense him in the now, just for a bit, paw at him a little --say Hey, how are you? And if he'd say, if he'd only say, I'll always be here should you ever want to revisit, should you want to feel the char of my scars, the condition of my jeans at the knees, my progress with the electric guitar. If he'd only offer me that, I'd stroll away without sentiment, leave no footprints, no look backs.

But beyond this wish for the past to be touchable --to be a winter coat hung in the back of a closet in the summer months, to be a friend with a red circle beside his name-- beyond this backwards yearning, I really cannot fathom (yet again!) the sudden sluice gates of relationshipping: how they begin with a start, and the slow, stupid, ending, and then, then, when you think you are numb and feelingless and can handle anything even loss and renewal and the anxiety before the renewal, when you posit that you are armored with a studied objectivity on your own life and can rationalize every dance step and recipe any taste, when you are eager and ready to change your circle to a shining irridescent green --down blades the quit.

Midnight, Downtown BK

So I just got home and I'm still a little bit jumpy! I took the F train from work and got out at that stop right after Jay St., in downtown BK. It's my third time getting off at this stop after semi-accidentally taking the F instead of the other oranges.

Anyway, it's drizzling and I'm holding a book and listening to my ipod like a typical boring stereotype of something or other. A good song comes on and I'm sort of bopping to the music as I walk down the street. I love love love getting off at this stop because it's got these ambitious under development parts that sort of remind me of San Francisco and then it's got these totally old school BK places like a barber shop that's still open at midnight, you know, or a place called: No Lawyers Save Money. Yeah, there's a tab in the title!

Um, the street's pretty populated with construction workers in flourescent vests and security guys and a few stragglers caught without umbrellas and quietly ducking under eaves. I didn't have an umbrella but this summer has been my no-umbrella summer. I just get soaked if it rains. I like it. It's kind of freeing. Ah, so as I'm bopping and smiling down the street like a little christmas time urchin (what's an urchin?? In my head I see a lovechild of a gargoyle and a sea horse.) and my eyes meet with a guy walking behind me. It looks like he's with some friends and he's smiling at me. I let my smile fade away, just because he has this rascally look about him that I would covet in the day time, but at midnight, I get a little bit anxious. I turn off my ipod so that I can hear better if I'm going to be gang-banged, you know?

So I walk and walk, semi-lost as I always am in this place, and suddenly I see that he's like 5 feet behind me on my right, and he tries to say something to me. So I pretend like I can't hear him because I have my ipod still on and I even bop a little bit and smile into the empty store windows. I quicken my steps and I think I've lost him.

Ok. Two minutes or so later I JUMP like bejeezus when I feel a tap on my left shoulder! I swear it came out of nowhere. I turn around and it's the guy. He's 6 feet tall and at least 190 pounds, but smiling kind of goofy and sweet.

"Hey, where are you going?"

"Me?" I ask dumbly.

"Yeah, you," he smiles.

"I'm just goin' home."

"Can I walk with ya?"

What?? Either this guy is the most innocent guy in the face of the earth or he was going to stick my limbs in a freezer by 1 AM.

"Nah," I smile and look away. The thing is, I don't want to make him mad, you know? What if he's like, one of those villains on tv, who are all nice one minute, and then, BOOM BAM! KAPOW! He turns into Batman. No, no, I mean, the Joker. Or the Riddler. Or any of the other colourful villains whose name contains a verb.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah..."

I skip across the street and start walking doublespeed. I am not fleeing because I don't want to offend him and make him turn into an evil villain. Also, he hasn't done anything scary --just more like clueless as to what a weak girl with no muscle tone would fear at night.

Ok, so I'm walking walking down DeKalb I think, I dunno. Towards Applebees. Then sudden-fucking-ly, he's beside me again!

"Can I know your name?"

"My name?" I am full of dumb questions. If I keep it up I'm gonna punch myself in the piehole.

"Yeah, can I know your name. I saw you and you're so beautiful..."

I contemplate giving away my name. People sometimes give me grief for giving strangers my "artifacts" like name, email address, so forth. But I don't feel like it dilutes me or something. So why not?

"Ying."

"Ying?"

"Yeah."

He tells me his name and reaches his hand out for a handshake. I offer a weak grin as we shake right in front of Juniors, the cheesecake experts.

"So what are doing here so late at night?"

"I'm going home."

"Oh yeah? Where's home?"

Scary!

"Uh, around here."

"You from Manhattan or Brooklyn?"

Is this a ...different question than Where's Home? I'm confused.

"Brooklyn," I venture.

"Oh yeah?" He pauses as if struck by a thought. "Hey, you don't live in an apartment, do you?"

My heart races --does he have a deep and dark anger against apartment dwellers? Is that the thing that makes him become the HULK THAT KILLS in an ANGRY RAGE IN FRONT OF STUNNED LATE NIGHT CHEESECAKE LOVERS?

"Pshhh, no way!" I counter strategically.

"Oh, cos I got a friend that lives in an apartment around here and you kinda look like her."

What??, I think to myself. This is so not-making-sense that I'm more discombobulated than scared.

"So where you comin' from?" he asks, "School? Class? Work?"

"Work," I answer truthfully.

"Aw yeah? Which school do you go to?"

So either he's terribly incoherent or I'm a terrible annunciator when scared.

"I don't go to school," I say as we continue to walk by the huge Juniors. There is a pause. For some reason I add with a defiant sort of pout, "I FINISHED school."

"You finished school?"

"Yes."

"And how come you didn't go to college?"

I shrug on the outside and giggle on the inside. Man, I don't care if he pours kerosene on my face then breathes hellfire on me like Koomba from Mario Brothers, he's totally won me over with this line. I can die happy tonight.

We reach a point that's getting kind of close to my house. I stop abruptedly at the intersection and nod once at him.

"Okay, I'm going to go this way now," I declare.

He understands and stops too.

And then I walk home. Half expecting him to show up again, tap me on the shoulder like before. For a big guy, he's very good at appearing out of nowhere unexpectedly.

Omigod, maybe he's a ghost!

(sorry if this story lost steam like 75% through... I started gchatting with my professor of comic theory --hi professor!)

V is for Victory

we were in a van on our way to the hospital to see my brother for the first time, my dad had just got back from some engineering conference and i hadn't seen any of my parents for days ever since he left and my mom went into labour one night and left too... they left me with grad students who did not realize that i needed to change clothes, you know? i remember being passed around like a toy from dorm to dorm, sleeping in different beds but always the same clothes, no pajamas even. one morning i turned my socks inside out to wear. i thought it was the most brilliant thing i'd ever discovered. maybe it was.

so we're in the van and my dad is flipping through a baby names book. he looks like he's cramming for a test. "how about victor?" he shouts over the din of the van --it's a commercial van by the way, for carrying tofu, not a mini van --those didn't exist yet i don't think.

"no," ms. tai said shaking her head. she was the mother hen to all the chinese grad students, the first generation of mainland chinese to come out of china since the wars. her husband was a professor and she owned a tofu factory, where my dad worked on the weekend, and where i worked too, putting sticker labels on the cartons and being acutely aware that i was a novelty for all the adults around me, watching me.

"why not?" my dad asks, the book still open at victor.

"victor is a nice name," mrs. tai allows, "but on the playground the kids will call him 'vee vee.'"

my dad and i look at each other and shrug. what's wrong with vee vee?

Sistine Chapel in the Digital Age

Fort Greene... or Fort White & Yellow?

So I just moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn and I like it tons.

BUT today after I got off the subway at Atlantic, I took a short walk around the neighbourhood at around, oh, 10 PM. So there weren't a lot of people around at all. And even if there were people, I couldn't see most of them since it was dark.

BUT even so I managed to see THREE white boy/yellow girl (WBYG) couples. Actually, EVERY couple that I saw was a WBYG. I think at first I didn't notice because WBYG are not a new cliche. It's fun to roll your eyes at them (even if you participate or have participated in them) because there are SO MANY.

BUT. Based on my 10 minute walk, I posit that possibly Ft. Greene has more WBYG than any other borough.

After I noticed it, my mind released a montage --non musical, unfortunately-- of all of the WBYG couples I've seen in Ft. Greene over the past couple of weeks that I've been here. And... they are legion.

(For the record, this is not my op-ed on WBYG. This is just a quick aside. My op-ed on WBYG, if I were ambitious enough to pen such a thing, would look like a Phd thesis... or some sort of romantic comedy starring Sandra Oh.)

" Sonething"

Reading emails from my mom is like playing Russian Roulette (What on EARTH did they use as an analogy for this type of thing before RR was invented??). But with your feelings.

All of her emails to me are cryptically titled. "I want to tell you," for example, or "Email." I click on it with dread and foreboding, remembering that the content of her past emails have ranged from deeply honest discussions on whether it is her fault that I am so lazy, to sad narratives of family history that leave me shaken and disturbed, to incredibly incendiary and unsolicited advice on what I should do with my life, to girlish gossip on family friends from the past. I never know if I am going to be extremely sad or angry or nonplussed by what she writes. And that's scary.

So today I got an ominously titled email from her, "Sonething." What caused the typo? Was she typing through tears because I had done something wrong? Was she seething with anger and jabbing violently in the n/m direction because of something that she was writing about, which was about to make me incredibly angry as well? WHAT??

I read my other emails first. Took a deep breath. Sighed. Took another deep breath. Spent some time on Myspace in another Firefox Tab. Sighed one last time, then finally, just a few minutes ago, I clicked on "Sonething." It was a short one:

Another one that I like is Mamma Mia.

Is relief sweet enough to outweigh the horror of morbid anticipation?