The first time

The first time I cut my hair short was at a provincial campsite in Oakville. It was the closest park to the city that offered camping, and as we pulled in I saw that a luxury real estate project was being built right next to the park. If you look on google maps you can probably see it finished now. My family and two others parked our minivans in a little cubbyhole of a campsite. My dad was put in charge of dinner, and I’m fairly certain that we ate nothing but pit-barbecued short ribs that night. I hung out in a tent with my sister and our good friend. I think they were rolling around posing for silly photos. If you look at the photos you can see how static from the polyester of the tent and the sleeping bags had built up in their hair.

I had been thinking about cutting it for a long time. What it meant, and how it would feel. How I would be. As the sky faded, I asked them to do it. My sister asked me how I wanted it cut. I said, anything short. We went out behind the car and I stood very still. Faithfully, they proceeded with kitchen scissors by the light of a small flashlight. They said the hairstyle they were giving me was called the “A-line”. If you look it up, I believe it’s a real style. They found it hard to cut evenly without proper lighting or tools. Apart from protecting my ears, I didn’t really care. I just wanted to hear those long, dark locks hit the grass behind my feet. When they were done, I turned around and the severed locks formed a satisfying pile. I had done it, and I started to think about what I’d done.

I had expected it to feel like a substantial physical weight released. But it wasn’t that, just a neater and cleaner feeling. A load off my mind. When I turned my head, my hair did not lag. It did not fan out like when you spin around while wearing a dress. I expected to never have it itch my back or neck again, but I experienced phantom itches for some time afterwards. On the bright side, my peripheral vision had never been better.

When we got home, I spent hours in the bathroom with my new short hair. Just more observing. It was something of a hack job, but a hack in the right direction. My eyes looked different. My whole face was something else, foreign crossed with familiar. Like déjà vu, I was thinking “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” at my own image. I was who I had been straining in the mirror to see for so long.

It was a learning experience. When I wore a cap for extended periods, my hair became oddly compressed. Okay, so short hair is more easily persuaded. When I raised my eyebrows, my bangs shifted back and forth. Never noticed that before. When I woke up in the morning, I no longer found myself gagging on loose strands. When school started again, people said I looked like a… exactly what I was going for. And on my paper route, neighbors started to call me “son”, “sport” and the like.

Current thoughts

When a store or restaurant has a large statue of what they sell sitting outside. It’s always something ridiculous like a giant donut. Never something sensible, like a giant loaf of bread outside the grocery store. Or a giant 3-hole-punch out in front of Staples. There must be a law that it has to be a donut.

I get emails from an undergraduate life science student mailing list. They are about research opportunities and student council elections, pub nights and stuff.  Somebody on the list has the email address orthopedic.md@gmail.com. Dream big!

“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”, the least descriptive product name ever. If all you can say about a product is that it’s not butter, I’m kind of concerned for what it really is. Most product names are constructive, like “Tomato Soup”, not deductive! Interpreting what it is shouldn’t be a process of elimination. What if you went to the doctor and he said you have a disease, you ask what it is and he says “It’s not herpes!” Or, “Honey, guess who I ran into at the mall today? It’s not a talking stick of celery!”

 

Many years ago, before we ever met
We crossed paths hurtling through space
Before we ever held each other
We held our own blueprints
A tangle of helices, so-called prophecies
That was all we were

But as the cards were being dealt
For reasons yet unknown
Maybe a simple genetic snafu
You took my Y and I took your X

Now I wish you’d take the rest of me
The flesh of me
Love it like I never could
From this point of view

I’d do the same for you, my love
Were that a privilege of ours
But if that day won’t come, still
We have the comfort of one another

We have nothing to hide
Lights on or lights off
“Before” or “After”, and throughout
We have everything to share

And when we get close enough
Undressed enough
We become a body collective
No parts are cursedly mine
Or tragically yours
We feel beautiful, impossibly beautiful

Because that affirmation
That which everyone deserves
Was out of the question
Until we lay down together
Flesh collides, juices flow
Sexy… Se(xx)(xy).

Atom 1

Back in my day camp summers, the counselors killed time by teaching us many bizarre games. For some reason, I always had more fun observing other kids’ behavior and pondering strategy than actually playing. There was Broken Telephone, where a sentence would go in tame and come out the other end as a nonsensical declarative about cheese dishwashers. You could usually tell who was really screwing up the message, because the person receiving the message would laugh. Then there was Murder Wink, where we all sat in a circle and one “murderer” would kill silently by winking at people. Since the dead couldn’t talk, bystanders would race against time to figure out who the murderer was before getting the dreaded wink. I noticed that murderers often made the mistake of killing too many people too quickly. I also noticed that death was easily averted by pretending not to see the wink. Just don’t go fingering the murderer too soon after that, because he or she will finger you back for cheating.

My favorite game was Atom, which must have been a local phenomenon because I haven’t been able to find any mention of it online. It was a math-related game that involved forming groups of a specific number. For instance, on the call of “Atom 4”, kids had to form groups of four. After a few seconds, anybody left without a group of exactly four was called out and eliminated by the leader of the game. And then another atom number would be called, like “Atom 2” or “Atom 7”. It was mildly amusing when a kid would dash into a group only to be told to scram, because they already had the magic number of people, and the odd kid’s presence would mean elimination for all of them. Kind of harsh, but far less so than the more pervasive game of dodgeball. I quickly learned to avoid the most common mistake—not counting yourself in the group. And that was all there was to it.

It all felt very one-dimensional on my first time playing. And then they called, “Atom 1”. This meant that we had to stand alone. Anybody who so much as tried to find a group was eliminated. So, many kids were eliminated. This effect left me baffled. It was the one time in my childhood when it was okay, even normal, to be alone. And I wanted so badly to tell my parents and their stupid self-help parenting books that I was normal and okay. I found comfort in those few seconds, and in their memory, in which I was free from peer pressure and judgment. I never forgot about “Atom 1”, and into my adolescence it became a sort of philosophy of mine.

Kids ask a lot of questions. “What’s wrong with you?” “Why do you do that?” “Why are you so quiet?” After that summer, I always had an answer. It was more of an answer for myself than for anybody asking.  Atom 1.

Cold Wonders, #2

The first devastating internet outage of life happened in 1998. It lasted for three or four hours. While our dad called our service provider, we got bored enough to go for a walk in park. We brought a frisbee to keep us busy, but it was just another ball that I couldn’t throw right. I decided to play park detective. I picked a stick up off the ground, below one of those prototypical suburban trees. The bushy ones that that looked like the heads of the aliens in Mars Attacks! There was nothing special about the stick, but I was so sure that it had been planted by aliens or something. Like a secret message.

My brother yelled over at me to put it down. I thought the “don’t touch anything” rule only applied to dirty needles and not to nature. What was his problem? He told me to look at how smooth the stick was. That means a dog’s been chewing off the bark. There’s dog spit all over it. Do you really want to get rabies?

Without thinking, I tossed the stick. Then I spent the rest of the day obsessing over this theoretical dog. Was it true, was that old stick a sign of life? Had someone’s, or maybe no one’s, scruffy dog been past that tree? And was he so into that stick that he chewed off all the bark and left it coated in his dried up, rabid saliva? I believed it. What a great gift, that we are never truly alone in this world.

Imagine being lost in the desert and finding a smooth stick lying in the sand. Forget the Morse code–you could just live it up with the dogs for the rest of your life. I understood it as an indicator, just like beaten paths and smooth tree boughs. Countrymen would sit on a branch, rubbing it smooth over time just like a stick in a mutt’s mouth. The same as the restless teenagers who carved their initials into picnic tables. I wondered what my mark would be, if I would ever make one. Would it say that I was here?

I wondered if what my brother said was true. Are sticks to dogs what dehydrated marshmallows are to cereal box mascots? Are we surrounded not by a concrete void, but by a secret stomping grounds? A secret magic.

I ran back to that bushy tree to look for the dog that might have chewed up that stick. I stood still and panned around. I needed proof. I thought, where is everybody? It was all quiet, like peace and secrets. Not like in Snow White where the rabbits and the squirrels all get together and help you do the dishes.

My Dissociative Year

In my freshman year I was friends with this guy, Chuck, who I met on the subway. But I never really knew who he was.

I had this one night class that ended at 9 pm, so I usually skipped it. But this one week I had to go because there was a quiz—for marks. The douchebag lecturer decided to give the quiz in the last 10 minutes, too. Extra miserable. I handed my quiz in and rushed out without getting back any of my marked work, so I could catch the train home.

The subway always made me nervous. There’s no other place where they’ll let hundreds of thousands of people stand within inches of a 400-tonne, speeding slab of steel. It was kind of like Secret Santa—any random person standing there next to you could be your surprise murderer. Or you could be theirs. Or, I figured more likely, they could be their own. The train pulled up and I wandered aboard.

Every time I’m on the subway I think about the morbidness and I start to feel sad for everybody. That day, I was thinking about what my friend Lee had told me on the bus one day. He said that a friend of his had been a subway driver, and the standard protocol for a jumper is to just keep on going. At those speeds, the people end up practically liquid, and there’s really nothing you can do to help. All you can do is announce that there’s gonna be a “delay due to an injury at track level”. And then call the cleaning crew.

Something grabbed me aside as I was walking around looking for a place to stand. Actually, someone. I turned around and it was Chuck, half-grinning the same way that he always did.

“Whoa, Chuck, I didn’t you see you there. How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been decent, buddy. Still carbon. How’s college?”

“Getting old. Getting old a lot sooner than I expected.”

“Hey, what doesn’t?” I nodded. You said it, man.

Chuck was this guy I’d run into a few times on the train since I’d started college. He seemed smart, I mean, he would make these clever observations about the world and then just mention them in passing like they were one-liner jokes he’d overheard. I figured that his life didn’t really present any better moments to mention those clever things. He told me to hold onto all my pay stubs, to never get involved with a girl who already had a boyfriend, and stuff like that. “Think about it, man, she’s the one cheating. If she can do it to him, she can do it to you.” Sometimes he’d tell me to stay in school, but I don’t know if he ever went himself. Yeah, I didn’t really know anything about him, but we could still take the train together.

We both got off at Yonge and went up the stairs to get on the other line. I was going northbound, and either he was too or he was following me. We talked about how the busker on that platform seemed to always be an electric guitarist of some sort. Seriously. I’d heard world music, soft rock, the Forrest Gump theme, you name it, but it was always on guitar. This particular night, it was a pale guy with dreads playing the standard classic rock program.

I said, “Do you ever think it might actually be the same guy every day, and he just changes his style really often?”

“You mean clothing style, or musical?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Maybe he has multiple personalities.” We both laughed. We went down to the other end of the platform until we couldn’t hear Under the Bridge anymore.

We talked about how much the city sort of sucked. I said, “I just started to notice this year that nobody in the city is very nice, and there’s a good reason for that. I kind of saw it coming, but I never expected it to make so much sense. It really is every man for himself.”

“You’re surprised. That’s ‘cause they tell you when you’re kids that everybody wins when you share and get along and all that. They tell you every chance they get—at school, on Sesame Street, even at the mall when the mall Santa’s there. Mall Santa always says you’ve gotta be good if you want presents. It’s all just to try and delay you from figuring out the truth, kid. That it’s a cruel world and there are no presents for good behavior. Everyone figures it out sooner or later, and then we turn into monsters. But that’s okay.” I didn’t know what to think about what he’d said. I kept waiting for him to say why it was okay that we all turn into monsters, but he just left it at that.

“I just can’t believe that they’d lie to us like that, Chuck. I’m taking a class that dabbles in game theory, and we learned about how every decision in your life has a cost and a benefit. After that class, I stopped studying with other people. I mean, why would I want to waste my time explaining something that I already understand to somebody who decided to skip class one day? It was their decision to skip, and they’ve gotta pay the cost. Anything that I can do to help would be just messing with the cost-benefit system. And I’d be paying my own cost for that, in lost time. So I just don’t talk to people about school anymore.”

“That’s right, kid. Next step after disillusionment is to stop trusting anyone.”

“Maybe I should have gone to Western or something. I think small town people are less likely to be assholes to you because they know they’re gonna have to see you again.”

“Nope. Not gonna make a difference, kid. A couple of guys I work with, I see them every day and they still act like jerks every day. It’s just human behavior.”

“But I think that the city’s a bit worse. The city’s where everybody in a 300-mile radius goes when they have nowhere left to go. Drifters, grifters, fight clubbers, anyone can be as much of a jerk as they want and still fly under the radar.” I suddenly thought of one of my douchebag wake-up calls from the previous week. “Last week I was taking the train during rush hour and a couple of stupid high schoolers tried to pickpocket the front pocket of my backpack. They were just digging around right behind my back while I tried to find enough room to turn around.”

“I hope you don’t keep your wallet in there, kid.”

“Wallet never loses contact with my body. The benefits outweigh the effort.” With pride, I patted the inner pocket of my jacket.

“Good on you, kid.” I nodded in appreciation. “But you’re wrong. You see, people in small towns are just as bad. ‘Cause the people from the city who leave the city, they’re even bigger losers. They grow up and realize they can’t make it in the big pond, so they move out to some podunk town where you can leave people gaping just by pretending to pull your thumb off.” With a sarcastic smile, he demonstrated the magic thumb trick.

“No kidding. I haven’t seen that trick since summer camp when I was 9. Blew my mind back then, for about two seconds until I figured it out.”

“Yep. Those small towns are full of lowlifes who couldn’t stand the competition in the city. It happens more than you’d think. And then you’ve also got the townies and the hicks who never had the guts or the brains to even get to the city. That’s the kind of people you’ll find in Hicksville. They’ve only got like, 2 cops patrolling an entire county out there. Imagine the sick things that people get away with.” This made a lot of sense. I thought about that kid from Colorado who was on the news a year or two ago. He shot his mom and stepdad for making him pause Counterstrike to take out the garbage. The cops arrested him like, a week later. He was twelve.

We sat in silence as I thought about the monsters that people become. Maybe Chuck was thinking too; I don’t know. It sounded like both of our ideas were generally true, about the city and the country both being full of jerks. But how could this be?

“Wait, Chuck. I think we’re both right about that, but I’m taking a class on predicate logic and it just can’t be. If everyone in the city is a jerk because it’s the city, and everyone in the small towns is a jerk because they can be, then from those assumptions we could conclude that everybody in the universe is a jerk. Even your favorite person in the world, doesn’t matter who it is, they’re a monster. It’s ludicrous!”

“That’s the point. Look into it, kid, and you’ll find out that’s the truth.” Chuck was actually so honest that he sounded crazy.

“Then are we both monsters, too?” I threw it out there. I made a gun with my hands and pretended to murder him in good humor.

“Yep. But maybe admitting it makes us a little better than everyone else.”

I went home and I thought about all of my childhood heroes. Throw out the ones that were fictional, and I had left was Harry Houdini and Kurt Cobain . A professional con man and a bipolar junkie. It was true, only unreal people like Spider-man could do no wrong. People always say that kids need real life heroes, so they can learn about the real world instead of believing that a radioactive spider could make you amazing. But do they ever think that maybe the world sucks so much that we need made-up heroes in order to grow up right? You could tell a kid for years that Spider-man was real; teach them that responsibility is cool. It would be like a band-aid lie to hold their innocence until they found out that absolutely everything was a lie. If we can lie to others for their own good, then maybe we can lie to ourselves for our own good. And, maybe admitting it makes it a little bit better.

I saw Chuck a few more times that semester, and then less and less as the years went by. I eventually settled on a career that I could bear doing for the rest of my life. I decided that I’d be happy as long as I could think. That decision actually came from something that Chuck said one day, something about how having choices actually makes people less happy. Anyway, it made a lot of sense to me that Chuck went away. It meant that I was leaving that part. I’d sort of figured out why it’s okay that we’re all monsters—something that Chuck could never say.

Inconsistencies in Mulan’s “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”

That musical number “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” in Mulan. Everyone loved it. Kids’ karate classes must have been packed wall-to-wall that year it came out. Okay, I’ll admit that the trick where they climb the pole with the weights completely blew my 7-year-old mind. The first time. But it’s just a simple application of static friction, right?

By now I think it’s important to bring up some glaring inconsistencies in the beloved song and video.

1) The training exercise where they deflect rocks with a stick while balancing a bucket on their head. (2:11) Okay, I can understand the archery and the hand-to-hand combat for an ancient Chinese army. The missiles also came in very handy in the whole avalanche situation. The whole “balance” element of martial arts even has a lot of merit. But under what circumstances would a soldier have to deflect rocks being thrown with a long pole? In what scenario would their enemy be reduced to throwing rocks? Or are they learning that in case they pass by a schoolhouse full of angry Hun children?

2) Ling was a fool at school for cutting gym. (2:39) Impossible. In ancient China, you would be either heavily disciplined or expelled for cutting any class. Besides, there was no gym class– only “morning exercises”, where you march in unison, and if you skip that it’s considered an act of huge disrespect. I’m surprised these guys have such a hard time adjusting to army life, since it’s pretty much identical to what their school would have been like.

3) The annoying advisor, Chi-Fu, gets his tent blown up 2 inches from his face and he’s completely fine. (3:00) I guess people really were tougher back then, even the annoying, squirrley guys.

4) The arrow on top of the pole. Li Shang appears to shoot the arrow such that it hits perpendicular to the wooden pole. But at 0:58 we see that the pole is really quite high, in comparison to the distance from which he shot it. Therefore, he must have shot it at an angle close to vertical. To do this he would have had to aim very carefully so that the arrow would hit its maximum height at precisely the moment it hit the top of the pole. Moreover, with a pole of that height, and an arrow fired from such a short horizontal distance, the arrow would have had very little momentum in the horizontal axis at the time it hit the pole. I doubt that it would have enough momentum to actually embed itself into the pole

Nothing good on TV

I know that people say it all the time, but it never fails to surprise me when I turn on the TV and there’s just nothing good on. When I press the power button I turn back into a child for a few minutes. I expect everything to be amazing. Like when I saw Mars Attacks! on TBS and I was in awe because it looked like it might have really been happening, giant brains and all. And that time I tried to figure out what a “virginity” was, while watching an episode of Dawson’s Creek. I guess, when the mystery is gone you’re just left with nothing good at all.

The last time

I stopped by the dollar store
On my way to your place
My mouth was dry and I needed gum
The line was long, I waited
Way back near the pet supplies

I saw one of those squeaky toys
Molded to look like the morning paper
Clever, I thought
The headline on the toy said,
MAN BITES DOG
The details were in chicken scratch

We almost embraced in your doorway
I heard an unfamiliar squeal
And a cold nose found my pant leg scent
He was young and biting everything

You said your parents got him for granny
For Christmas
But he drove her crazy
So you were gonna keep him now
You never could decide on a name
But your mom and your dad chose Sammy
They’d heard it so much lately
It just happened, and it stuck

I said, that’s so funny
I don’t know if I’m flattered
Or if the joke’s on me
Because I’m here to get back my CDs
A week later and Sammy would have never caught on

You’d kept them in the same neat piles
And my clothes, too
They all smelled like yours
They washed well but they were never the same

Sorry I kept joking
It must have sucked
Breaking up with me
Then hearing your parents keep saying my name
With that cutesy voice every day

Cold Wonders, #1

This is one of a few things that I’ve written down, about my run-ins with nature. I remember back when things that moved on their own were so fascinating that we chased them, and asked questions later. But the candor of actual nature was rare, fleeting. My prototypical concept of what a bear looks like will forever be a combination of Yogi and Paddington. A creature that couldn’t lie, or sell a soft drink, was like a lost legend that could only be retraced by chance.

At 10, my schooling had become truly tedious and I was further than ever from any dream of mine. Days were filled with insufferable reams of decimal worksheets and papier-mâché. At home, my dad had installed Windows 2000, which kept crashing in the middle of my conquests in Age of Empires II. I found myself staring into the backed up sewer drain at the far end of the playground. It had rained a day or two back; a puddle of muddy green sludge remained and deterred the usual sock-hockey games. As my head bowed with the routine grade school woe, I thought I saw something small but surely moving beneath the surface of the puddle, something living. But what dares to live in a sewer puddle? I thought it could have been merely a branch of dead pine needles dancing in the wake of the breeze. I knelt down and I saw a roster of tiny oil droplets with tails. They wiggled around like tadpoles on a smaller scale. I rubbed my eyes and they were still there. There were more than I had thought— flailing, swimming, each one indistinguishable to the resolving power of my eye. They were too small to be tadpoles, and too large and brown to be sperm. After a brief search through the little that I knew about biology, I decided that it was a miracle—spontaneous generation from sewage matter. A noxious miracle that may have had nothing to offer to this world but its ability to flabbergast. But the world would never see this; it was a miracle known to no one else but me.

It’s funny how knowledge eventually ruins all the things that we grew up loving.