Doodles

I’m running in the hotel gym that overlooks the pool. There are no pretty bodies in the pool, just kids and the occasional mom and the attendant who pointed my way to the gym. When I say pretty bodies I mean fit adult women with a pretty face. And that is sexist of me to write. As I’m running, slowly, without pop in my legs and I think it’s really unfair to be short and with a bald spot. I’m glad the pod of a treadmill with it’s TV on CNN blocks the view of myself in the mirror as it spares me from my husky self. The is nothing young and good skin about me at 51. But I do work. ...

The Serial podcast taught us that memories are fallible and yet it is with these memories that we live. I am in the fourth or fifth or sixth grade and home from school. I wanted to get some kind of musical instrument for school. I always wanted to play some kind of instrument but neither had the skill or vocation. To my surprise my dad gave me $4 to buy an instrument. I excitedly walked down to grand avenue and into a music shop. $4 wasn’t getting anything. I was disappointed, I really wanted a guitar or a sax or who knows what. I went into Ben Franklins. They had a flute. It cost maybe $2. It was plastic. Against my better judgement I bought it. I spend the rest of the money, again against my better guilt infused judgment on a plastic car and gum. I walked home, not so excitedly. The gum, like treats now, not delivering on it’s promise. When I got home my dad’s mood was different. A mood I forever learned to read. He asked what I got, I want to say he asked for his change too. I showed him the car and the flute. He was outraged and wanted to know where I spent the rest of the $4. I told him gum. That did not help. He stepped on the car and crushed it. He snapped the flute in half. I don’t remember what happened next, I guess I went downstairs without dinner. Later he would apologize for breaking the plastic flute. ...

I’m in a taxi having just left the Hangzhou airport and feeling relieved that with my limited to no Chinese language skills that I’m on my way. I am often reminded here that I’m working without a net and this is most evident when I’m travelling alone. As I was making my way in the taxi line I was beating myself up for everything that could and may still go wrong. And then I was reminded of a new song that I like. It essentially goes that if you want to fight in the ditch, then have it, I’m going to be up here, taking the high road. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I climb out of that ditch even sometimes it feels like I’m climbing against mud in a rainstorm. ...

Gratitude is the new Zen and I find my gratitude with a bit of spite. I am feeling grateful to be picking up Elisa after school which I only get to do maybe twice a semester. I have an afternoon of fun planned. Video game arcade, dairy queen ice cream, and Chinese “hamburgers” for dinner. A am grateful for the anticipation of joy and it did turn out to be a great father and daughter afternoon. But as I wait I am also spiteful. The reason I needed to pick up Elisa was because her mom did not give the Ayi (nanny) her scheduled day off over the weekend so I needed to take a half day off my work to pick up Elisa. The mom didn’t do it because she wanted to go snowboarding for the weekend leaving two of her three kids behind. Last I checked the mountains are opened all week and the mom doesn’t really work during the week. So, how’s that for spite? ...

My dad’s ready to go for coffee and stands up and puts on his sports coat. His shirt has a few stains. His undershirt is yellowing. His fly is open. Does one tell one’s dad his fly is open? Aidan came home from school on Wednesday night not feeling well. Dizzy, he said. He didn’t have a temperature. His grandmother texted me pictures of his mom at a party and told me to give Aidan medicine and maybe go to the hospital. She worries like that. Aidan went to bed early and the next morning still wasn’t feeling good, no fever, but largargic. The other kids went to school and I worked from home to take care of him. Aidan didn’t do well in last semester’s final exam. Really did not do well. It turns out Friday was the make up exams for students who didn’t do well. He wasn’t sick, he was stressed. I am at a 70 person all hands meeting where my boss is trying to explain a change of strategy. He is the boss apparently because he talks a lot. Someone asks a question about the strategy he doesn’t have the answer too so I stand up to explain. I talk in bullet points. By the time I start my third and last bullet my thoughts are racing in different illogical directions and I have to slow down and reconstruct the bullet points in my mind from the beginning. My body is shaking when I finally sit down. I am 16 years old and washing dishes in my childhood home. For some reason my dad is in the kitchen after dinner which he seldom was. He hands me a dish. I try to make a joke about something, I forget what. He thought I was saying he had bad breath. He explodes and I think he’s going to take my head off. The food arrives for pizza party movie night. I frustrated with something and haven’t had a chance to clear the dinner table yet. I call the kids in to help with setup like I normally do. Aidan just opens the pizza box to take a piece. Elisa knocks over her soda onto the floor spilling everywhere. I get angry. Tell them they need to help. I don’t like it when I get angry. I am at work washing my hands in the bathroom. As I dry them I look at myself in the mirror. Nice shirt. Too bad it’s wrinkled as all get out. When did I stop pressing? ...

I wake up to a jet lagged haze feeling frisky and fat. Both confirmed I exit the bedroom towel wrapped around my waist and walk to the shower. The light in living room is on. Sabrina’s dad is sitting on the couch watching TV at 6am with the sound low. Apparently his hearing is good. Sabrina’s parents stayed at our apartment while we were in the US since the apartment they’ve been staying at doesn’t have an elevator and getting up the five flights of stairs is tedious for Sabrina’s mom (backstory: Sabrina’s parents come to Beijing during the winter months to visit their daughters and because Beijing has central heating). As we touched down the night before I had asked Sabrina not to let her dad cook for me as I’m particular about what I eat and I don’t want to have to be polite and eat what he makes. I was feeling particularly in need to control my food after a couple weeks of eating whatever I wanted in US. So of course as soon as we unpacked, Sabrina’s dad served us a full home cook meal. After dinner I went for a walk with Sabrina and she asked if I understood what her dad was talking about during dinner. I said no, that I wasn’t really paying attention. Normally I just zone out when conversation goes on in Chinese. He was trying to speak to me, she said, and was frustrated that I didn’t respond. I had no idea. ...

I think about anniversaries and sometimes they loom in front of me with the anticipation of accomplishment or dread. When I first started at Microsoft in September 2005 I remember picking my first Corpnet password. I read the policy saying it would need to be changed within 90 days. I told my cynical self that I will never need to change it. They would find out I was a fraud long before then. When I hit four years I started to notice the speeches they five year people gave. The 10 of them got to go up during and all hands and speak for a minute or so. I worried and planned what I would say for the next year. When the anniversary came there was something like 40 of us so there was no public speech. I got recognized in a team meeting which suited me better. I was, however, planning on leaving MS at that time so my words I don’t even remember. Always grateful for the employment I was burned out at the time. Or as I put it then it took too long to build stuff and I wanted to build things. So I took my gap year or more precisely gap 14 months. That caused the MS anniversary reward tracking mechanism to get a bit messed up. Four months after my return to MS and during a 60 person all hands I was surprise presented with my five year award. I sheepishly said I already had it. They let me keep the trophy anyway so I had two five year crystals. Because of my 14 month gap my actual 10 year anniversary was a bit hard to calculate. Ok, not that hard for a neurotic. Even one that works at MS. On the subway on the way home I wrote the broad outline of my “speech” – truths and motivations are for you to fine, believe in the best of people because then at least you will feel better – and calculated the date. The date came and I received an email asking where sent the crystal too. It arrived a month later and now sits on a chest in my bedroom next to the five year crystal and other MS trinkets I care about. No speech, no words of advice. Do I have something to say? Yes, but I’ll save that for another post. Does it matter what I say? Not really, but it does make me feel better. ...

Elisa takes my hand and asks we will ever move back to Chaowaimen. Her voice is tender and masking a sadness. We’ve become attached over the past four years to the apartment and our every other week routines. She asks if we’ll ever go back to UTown which has some of her favorite food and indoor playgrounds. I say yes. I wake up the next morning, after signing the contract for our new apartment, feeling sad too. I tell Sabrina on the way to work that I am sad but that I’m not afraid to feel it. That it will pass. We are moving maybe 10 minutes away to a slightly larger apartment with a better community and view. The larger apartment means Aidan gets his own room, which at 13, is better than sleeping on the living room couch which he’s done since I moved here. I know why I feel sad, or why my conscious brain thinks so. I feel sad because four years ago when I moved into Chaowaimen the apartment and my life were in tatters. My first night was spend on the last tenant’s filthy futon with a smell of musky tea (the tenant was literally a tea vendor). I got up that next morning and started to clean the apartment getting on hands and knees until the stains in the cracks were gone. It took much longer with many starts, fits, and stops for me. I may not be all the way there yet. Or as I’m want to say - I may not be out of the woods yet but I’ve stopped walking into trees. The moment things shifted was when I had the epiphany three years ago that I could keep the kids with me every other week for the full week with a slight change in their school commute. Since then on the weeks I have them we do everything together - everything being mostly meals. We built some of our own silly traditions like Friday night pizza party. But somehow it is about the rhythms. Waking them up at 6:50am, putting their lunch together, dinner time, shower time, sleep time. I somehow got closer to the kids during this time than when we were an intact family. I’ve seen their struggles as they wanted a reconciliation between their parents and when they finally let go of that hope. I learned to survive on my own because. For me, there were many dark nights on the weeks I did not have them. I did not always behave in admirable ways. I started relationships before I was ready, stopped them, and then started again. I found comfort in simple things done to excess. Slowly, very slowly, I started to move forward and find a human context. I rebuilt up my life in this apartment. Both my single life and my single dad life. And now the single man and single dad parts are reconciling. I will miss this apartment as home. ...

I am in front of the stove making pancakes. I’m not sure why I am making pancakes. I should say I’m not sure why I asked the kids if they would like pancakes. I should not have asked because I am stressed out about a work meeting early this morning that made me get the kids up early. I didn’t sleep well for many reasons and it’s effect is apparent. I am blessed and cursed with self awareness so I use the stress to focus on getting the kids ready and out of the house. But I also know that stress and lack of sleep and dehydration tends to make me less smart. Ok, stupid. ...

The immigration officer smiles as Elisa exits the gate. She says my kids stack up one by one, like stairs, and that I have my hands full. I tell her that they are good travelers, at a good age. She smiles again as she stamps my passport, says something I can’t quite make out about another family. I smile back, pleased in the moment. The young woman at M-Mart convenience store in Bali greets me as I enter the store behind my kids. I had been in the store alone earlier and exchanged a smile with her when she asked me if I wanted “cigs” which took me a while to understand before saying no. She asks me if these are my kids, and I say yes, and we exchange another smile and I feel at ease. I spent a week in Singapore and Bali with my kids for a summer vacation. I travel alone with them as a single parent. Most of the time I want to make sure they are having a good time and that I don’t mess up any of the logistics. My emotions subjected to their emotions in some loosely coupled way. It dawns on me that while the vacation is fun and the kids are great, that my needs are not being met (as if I know what those needs are beyond the primal). This is why I highlighted to two interchanges with the immigration woman and the convenience store clerk. In those two interactions, I was fully present and with a warm heart. I felt like me. I also had some other interactions where I also felt like me, but these were of the unpleasant, frustrated, anxious, variety. The long check in when we arrive late and hungry to Singapore. The long checkout from our hotel to Bali when we needed to get to lunch before heading to the airport. Angling to cut off a woman trying to nudge her way past us in the airport security line. Getting angry at the Bali Airport porters who acted like they were part of the taxi service and then asked for a tip. It is that last one that I will highlight. We exited the baggage area in Bali and walked past the hawkers to the Taxi stand. I had read that it was a fixed price depending on what part of the island you were heading too. When I asked they said it was 200,000 Indonesian Rupee (about $15 USD) which was more than I had read so I went immediately into “they are ripping me off” mode to which I am gene adverse. The porters asking for a tip when we got into the taxi got me more tweaked. I didn’t yell or anything but I stood up to them and said sharply “I didn’t ask for your help. I already paid a lot” as we climbed into the cab. The kids were quiet in the backseat, feeding off my anger, waiting for it to smooth over. Or was it me – projecting myself back in time. My dad driving the station wagon with us kids in back, our excitement slammed shut to silence in response to his anger at our anticipation. Was that me; I am not having that same effect on my kids, am I? Or is it a good thing that my kids see me in different moods. In any case, I felt bad for the tension in the car, then and now, real or imagined. As we made our way to the hotel in Bali I made some small talk with the kids. Compared to Singapore they were not impressed with the small, crowded, chaotic streets. Suddenly we pulled into our hotel which felt out of place. Into our rooms and the kids spirits started to lift when they saw the size and in particular the stand alone bath. But what really changed things was when the restaurant. Thanks to tripadvisor I found a decently rated one 100 meters from the hotel. The staff was friendly, the pizza and steak had the kids happy and enjoying Bali. The next day would be our big tour day of Bali but it was that moment over pizza that I will remember most. Not for the peace or frustration of the real me slipping through but for me the parent doing my job. The fact that I could separate the two gives me hope. Hope that one day, with time, with work, and with luck the two sides can coexist like surf on a wave. ...