Things That I Know

Here is the first poem I wrote about my childhood in Indonesia. I wrote it in about 2004. Enjoy...


Things That I Know

The smell of a monsoon rain,
the pressing silence after.
The sound of wind in a bamboo thicket,
the thick cold of mud that settles
between toes in a rice paddy
in the long season of rain.

How to climb a coconut tree
with my bare hands and feet,
what noise a rhinoceros beetle makes,
rattling angry in the matted grass.
Sweat that radiates from the body
at 105 degrees, mid-October sun
in my window, glaring.

A place where the earth melts away
in the stillness of dawn, where shadows
stretch long in a sandy crater as the red sun
creeps over the volcano’s edge,
pouring into the barren mountain
like lava.

The voice of the Indian Ocean
calling out in the dark to all the distant shores
it may never touch, the heavy water
turning itself at the edges,
pulling over glistening beaches,
reaching again toward the deep.

Turning 30

I recently experienced a rather momentous age-related milestone. I like to think of it this way because "I just turned 30" still leaves a slightly bitter, metallic taste in my mouth, as if I have just bitten my cheek, or perhaps because I perceive that I began hemorrhaging my youth and vivacious personality the moment my twenty-somethings ended. The buildup to this death of vivacity was sort of a mixed lump of feelings that ranged from pride--"hey, I earned it," to the bleak but customary desolation--"oh my gosh I'm freaking old."

I finally realized that this sort of a milestone (thankfully) isn't really about the numbers at all. For me, most of the stomach churning wasn't from the sheer enormity of my age number, but more as a result of my perceived notions of where I ought to have been in life by this point. When I was twenty, if you had asked me where I would be in ten years, I would have told you for sure that I would be married and have two small children by the time I turned 30. In the months prior to this little milestone, however, I started to be conscious of just how different my life is now from what I had envisioned. This collective disparity between anticipation and reality hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks a couple days before my birthday. Did I do something wrong? Should I have changed my major? Should I have married that guy? Should I have stayed in that job a few more years?

Then I realized something else. If you had asked me at the age of 20 where I would be in ten years, I would have never told you that I would have a Master's degree. I would have never thought I would be considering a PhD. I wouldn't have guessed that I would be a certified interpreter, loving my work and participating fully in the rich life of the Deaf community. It would have never occurred to me to wonder if I might be respected by my peers and loved by my friends. I was too young then to know that success is not measured by whether or not you do exactly what you set out to do. It is much more about how you shine in whatever circumstances in which you may find yourself. It is the cumulative wonder with which you approach each change, each realization, each achievement, each failure, each new venture and unexpected turn. This is what defines "where you are in life."

So, that having been said, here is my 10-year plan. Here are the things I want to say I have accomplished by the time I am 40:

- I want to know that I have always been unafraid to laugh loudly and to fully enjoy all of the irony and silliness of life.

- I want to have either completed my PhD, or have decided that, in fact, a PhD is not the right thing for me.

- I want to dearly love the people in my life, and know that the people in my life dearly love me.

- I would like to be able to say that in all things, I have carried myself with a fair amount of grace. (Inherent clumsiness doesn't count.)

- I would like to have been to France.

So there you go. Here's to another decade of unexpected victories, exhilarating exploration, the search for knowing and for self, the adventure of new places and things, the momentous occasions and the occasional moments, falling down and getting up, and rejoicing in all the wonderful silliness of the world. Here's to life.

I suck at blogging.

So my little project that began with the idea of starting a blog has gone up in a metaphorical cloud of smoke. Either because of my irritating desire to please people or my obsessive need for perfection, every single blog post idea I have had in the last two months has been tossed aside for one or another reason. Moreover, simultaneous to the hibernation of my brain's creative side, my life suffered the addition of a new set of responsibilities, which promptly usurped nearly all of my computer time, leaving me with far too many excuses not to blog. At this point, it seems like it's been so long, I almost feel the need to beg forgiveness and delete my blog from the cyber-world altogether so it can no longer torture anyone with its nonexistence. However, as I am attempting to rid my life of its overarching pattern of starting projects and not finishing them, I have decided to push through the nothingness in search of something... anything... to fill this void. Wish me luck.