There are lots of ways of being miserable but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time. — The Last Asset, Edith Wharton

Light and winged for flight [2001.02.09]
There will be a slight chance of sadness. It won't be because of the songs I'm listening to, or the selected poems of Paul Durcan on my lap, but the Bernoulli Effect. I'll be thinking of the way we take flight; how we rush headlong, creating high pressure below and low pressure above (and I've already shown you how susceptible I am to pressure), barrelling back, towards union. ¤

Chaos theory [2001.02.07]
In Boston I went to sleep thinking of my itinerary and knowing that I would be handing myself over to physics and all its accompanying rules and axioms and conditions I cannot control. Not that it isn't always that way, it's just not usually so clearly stated. I pictured: comfort (in Toronto), warmth (in Houston, though the extended forecast predicts T-storms), and delays (in Chicago). I expect to have a fairly good time.

I woke at 5 am from an unsettling dream; it was a variation of a recurring drama in which I am some kind of secret agent in a spy caper (which usually ends with me being killed in a spectacular hail of bullets, brought about through a betrayal), except this time I spent some time in a cabaret hall talking to a man I once loved, and Andre Agassi had died. I don't even care about tennis. Yet the circumstances of his death were drawn to such detail that I could see the black-on-white text of articles I saw in the imaginary paper, and I distinctly recall thinking that Brooke Shields would be so sad. And in the moments before waking up, I remembered that their marriage didn't work, and then woven into the dream narrative was the story of how his game had suffered and how a comeback had been achieved through the support and understanding of his new love, Steffi Graf, a woman whom he'd known all along.

I don't know what to make of this dream, how it came about, whether it was something in the air again, or if these things just happen when you read Anne Carson before going to bed. I am left with only this certainty, that my first thought was sadness for the failed romance, for the end of what I imagined of his first marriage (conflict, passion, difference, etcetera), for what might have been except for alleged selfishness and incompatible goals I'd read about, for real, in papers — and sad for the randomness of love and desire, this chaos that brings people together and apart. ¤

On the "exotic" [2001.02.05]
Bharati Mukherjee has written of the need to "make the familiar exotic and the exotic familiar" and, as she adds later in an interview, "to bring out the luminosity in the most banal moment, and to elicit sympathy for the least familiar character." Having lived in many places, she understands the contingencies, the movement of things, how something can change shape depending on perspective and light.

How she must have thrown up her hands to see a review of Jasmine in the San Francisco Chronicle which gave this praise: "A beautiful novel, poetic, exotic, perfectly controlled." Or what would she make of this announcement of her appearance at SUNY last week that cites that review without a trace of irony, and which otherwise seems to contextualize the reading with such understanding and good-feeling.

This is a very small thing, an unintentional slip hardly worth acknowledging, but it reminds me of how our assumptions and beliefs are submerged so deep that we can hardly ever see them for what they are, or bring them out to be corrected in time. In some contexts, I scarcely notice the word "exotic" at all; in others, I don't think I'm capable of seeing it without imagining quotation marks, because I know it's meaningless, except to show where you stand on notions of difference and the matter of us and them. ¤

Perspective [2001.02.02]
A few more words about mountains and golden vistas, from outside the grand story. ¤

2 am, EST [2001.01.29]
Late-awake and restless, my arms ache, the air feels too heavy for sleep; after tossing about for hours, I turn to writing about body memory — those internal mappings that you slip back into when the mind forgets, things you move towards when you wake, all want and instinct in that fugitive, transitory gap between sleep and awareness. Upon waking the last few Sundays, I've imagined myself into the car and on my way to that place at Don Mills and Finch that my mother has been favouring lately for dim sum when I realize, hey. These days, I've had such cravings for dim sum and flavours I can't even name. At Christmas dinner, one of Agnes' daughters remarked, you don't realize that you're Chinese until you're travelling and find yourself in some backwater town in the midwest, wanting a plate of fried rice, even food court chinese is okay. Later, I watched her comfort her infant daughter in Cantonese phrases, the sounds so familiar, handed down from our mothers and grandmothers, codes taken out of every context except love.

Our hybridized, hacked-together ideas of being Chinese don't come from anything we could identify as cultural memory, exactly, just our completely unexotic childhoods — from the tastes and smells and sounds we remember from when we were just coming into our senses, captured in time like a blurred photograph. Last time I was in Toronto, my younger cousins from HK laughed at me when I identified a dish in the way it was explained to me when I was four years old; it would translate badly, but it was as if I had said that a watermelon tree would grow inside you if you swallowed a seed, and believed it utterly. Even the way I hold my chopsticks is a bad habit; I remember my grandmother's stern corrections at the table when I was very young, until we moved to Canada and it no longer seemed that important, or I faked it, or my parents gave up, or something. As recently as last year, I saw my grandmother looking, and without thinking about it, I shifted my fingers so they were right. I write out all these things, all rambles and vague longings and belongings, until I finally get to sleep around 4 am I think.

In the morning, my colleagues give reports of sleeplessness, and I receive a message from further up on the coast that complains of insomnia and the headache that comes with it. "My whole family didn't sleep," my friend writes from Cape Breton, "it was something in the air, the pressure wasn't right." ¤