The Essential Weirdness of Stories

An essential weirdness permeates all good stories: the weirdness of purpose. Things in stories happen for reasons; they must, for stories to make sense. Authorial intent and meaning require a basic assumption of cause and effect to be intelligible. Strong narrative structure entails strong beginnings and strong endings; good characters need good motivations; resonant themes shine brightly by definition. Even those stories whose point is ambiguity and dissatisfaction nonetheless have a point.

In these ways, stories are not like life. Life is filled with the random, the meaningless, the unintelligible. Life's complexity resists the sort of throughlines present in even the simplest narratives; life's level of detail eludes any attempt to capture it all. In a fraction of a second, we can have a thought that would take us hundreds of pages to try to describe, and even after all those reams, we'd still feel like we didn't quite explain it right. And (in another way in which life and stories are different) even after all that, we still have no idea what will happen next. So much of life is happenstance, and therefore naturally opposed to formulation. As my friend Kathleen told me, "You can't accidentally write anything. You can't accidentally create."

I often tell people I stopped being Christian because I went to a Chinese Christian camp with a charismatic pastor who delivered all these powerful sermons about life, but I got so much more value out of the non-theologic parts of his sermon that I stopped believing in God. I saw how all the important parts -- loving my family, listening to my parents, taking pride in my heritage, having meaningful conversations, resisting temptation, being still -- were attached to a totally vestigial, evidence-free religious dogma I could easily jettison, and jettison I did. Or so the story goes.

The problem with this story is that it doesn't make any sense. The pastor (whom everyone loved, and who was a truly gifted speaker) structured his entire message around God, the importance of God, and how wonderful God was. Indeed, his whole point was that all that other stuff about loving your family or whatever was totally vestigial, and could be easily jettisoned if love of God wasn't also present. Why didn't I feel the weight of the essential core of his message as much as I felt the other parts? I have no explanation. Furthermore, I know plenty of people -- people in my age group, with similar backgrounds, whom I still know today -- who were heavily impacted by that core message of God, who cite that guy's sermons as a key inspiration for their personal devotion to Jesus and to church, and who will tell my same story with the opposite outcome. Why did our paths diverge so radically?

I want to ascribe the divergence to something intelligible, but I can't. The truth is, there are probably thousands of minute factors -- genetic, environmental, stupid -- I'm not aware of. Maybe my personality meant I never had a chance of committing my life to Christianity from birth, or maybe I'm still a mere breath away from becoming a pastor myself. Maybe the peculiarities of the connections between my neurons caused me to interpret the pastor's mannerisms in a totally different way, or maybe I was too busy chewing an especially tough piece of fingernail to hear a crucial sentence that would've changed everything. There are whole reams of reasons why this massively impactful moment in my life could have broken the other way, and I regularly choose to ignore them. I exclude those details in service of telling a more logical narrative.

The same is true for other stories I tell: how I started liking rap music after listening to it on full blast in my teammate's car (many people, including friends of mine, got turned off of rap music precisely because its listeners blasted it on the street), how I never built a great relationship with my siblings because my dad was yelling at us all the time (there are tons of siblings for whom that sort of abuse is galvanizing rather than isolating), how I love writing because I love reading (some of my best friends are avid readers and readily admit to hating their own writing and avoiding the practice at all costs).

It's a lot easier to explain why something happened if you already know it happened. The stories we tell ourselves about our lives are not our lives; they are carefully manicured things, curated for purpose and plot through the darkly tinted lens of hindsight.

Stories are weird. They reside just beyond the uncanny valley of un-reality, contain just enough truth to deceive us into thinking they are all truth, when even the very best stories are but shadows of our indescribably rich and complex lives. But at the same time, stories are an essential component of the human experience. They are the only tool we can use to extract meaning from a sea of gibbering chaos. They are the best way to share all the roiling complexity bubbling up within us, and in so doing, lighten our individual burdens. And so, even though they churn with all this subtle strangeness and false promise, stories are all we really have.

As I reflect back on 2020, I can’t help but conceive of the year as a collection of stories. And I already know I'm going to assign a lot of meaning and purpose to those stories, and there are going to be logical cause-and-effect relationships and character motivations and (hopefully) bright throughlines in my reflections. I want to frame all those things appropriately. I don’t want to lose sight of the frailty and myopia of my own constrained perspective. And I'm hoping that after reading this, you’ll be able to frame all the stories you tell yourself with all the subtlety and caution they deserve.

 

 

“I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.” -Ecclesiastes 9:11

 Part of the inspiration for this came from this video.

Lyrics: Shaped Like an Ellipse

Video | Audio only

I'm a savant with a soft heart who thinks outta the box, avant-garde, ex-lovers like the Devil cuz they fell hard, so far spinnin’ fast like a pulsar, early on the play that’s a false start, colder than the water found on Mars, re-cover rap like it’s a lost art, my bars catchin’ like a strain of SARS, brain’s changin’ the game with in-flamed pul-monary range, I’m luminary, tearin' it up, so say a prayer or I’ll make ya perish, I win games, got more rings than your eighth marriage, parry garish affairs with savoir-faire on a pair-o’ jet-skis and embarrassed a barracks of American paratroopers when they coul-dn't get me; regal air on the Se-renge-ti like Mufasa, droppin’ heat like the luftwaffe, poppin’ off like the top of a bottle o’ Smir-noff vodka, can not stop this abomination like-Hutus in R-wanda, I'm tearin’ the roof-offa this whole damn-nation, my congregation’s the size of the human race, no exaggeration, I’m losin’ patience, you're losin' face unless you prove your faith, cuz you’re there but for the grace of Wei, I’m makin a declaration: I'm a reckless Asian whose consecrated exhalations em-brace the face of a generation, no confabulation, so fire call me a conflagration

I blot you out son, call me an eclipse
Double focused, shaped like an ellipse
Better hang tight or you just might lose your grip
Yeah you coulda had sex but you’re listenin’ to this

You’re vacuous as clickbait, I won’t acquit, I’m immaculate as shit -- wait. I meant to say they’re infatuated, my numbers cause a spit take, like “what? that must be a mistake!” nope, I got the unborn too, embryos on my flow, still in the womb, ‘m killin’ a dude and catchin’ ‘im jammin to my tunes when I visit his tomb, bringin’ invidious doom to perfidious noobs, I’m ad-vanced and in-sidious, a combination o’ Sith Lord and Nvidia so giddy up before I get rid rid o’ ya like Walter White did with Lydia, Mr. T (mixed her tea) with fake stevia, I pity da fool who doesn’t know my Camp Rocks like Nick Jonas, a bamf talks, calls me a see-change like glaucoma, so glam my glances induce orgasm, my pants got ample room for expansion, what I call a shack to you is a mansion, Shaquille’ll kneel in front of his king, no need to ask ‘im, I’m the essence of fashion and straight cash, impassioned and makin’ a splash-near areas from Cali to Kashmir

Helix in double-time, Francis Crick mode, I got sick flows cuz my lymph nodes went AWOL, don't need no sticks and stones cuz I kick most o'my glib foes from zip codes with a quick dose of my slick prose, bitch hoes’ll emit woes like "this blows", better tiptoe when my grip's closed cuz I slit throats when I spit roasts-real as Pinocchio with a slim nose, whip votes from coast to coast like hypno-sis, know souls to the bone, call me gnosis, bulldoze'm like Nick Bosa in a Ford Focus, in my pro-phase like mitosis, con-tagious like tuberculosis, in-sane, out-rageous like Jim Davis en-caged with Cassius Clay, and I’m so famous my picked name is en-graved in thick frames from South Station to Las Vegas

Do not let me shake your soul

Audio

 

Do not let me shake your soul

Do not let me plunder your convictions
Hide them
Bury them
Bury them someplace deep, beyond the reach of sunlight, so deep I will not find them
You will need more than a shovel
Bulldozer and backhoe at minimum
Drill rig to be safe;
Deafening and diesel-powered, and though you may choke on the fumes maybe they will serve to mask your scent when I come hunting
Don’t get distracted
Keep digging
Do not give yourself to me because I will know exactly what to do
How to touch you
How to change you
My plans are not “cooked up”
They are incubated
This poem is just the beginning

So dig
Dig with drill bit and dynamite
You will not dig deep enough until you breach the molten core
and even then you will find
Something has been there all this time, waiting
Finally done incubating,
Now ready to breach your molten core
You can’t let it
Resist!
Plug up that dam though your hands may shake
It is already cracked and
leaking
And listening to this poem isn’t helping.

Do what you need to do.
Stop listening if you must.
You don’t have to learn what courage means today --
just that it means the opposite of comfort.

So do not let me change you.
Lock the door and bolt it,
Drop the curtains, bar the windows
Good neighbors make good fences
And I am an enemy to both.

But I am inexorable.
Those precautions, that careful planning?
It will all amount to nothing in the end.
It was over when you started listening to this poem.
No matter what happens
No matter what you do
I will press my hand into the wet cement of your soul, so
You can either rush to dry it with a blowtorch
Or be thankful at how it hardened long ago.

My Multitudes

I don't like the introversion/extroversion dichotomy as a model of personality types. One reason is how easily it changed for me. In my first two years of high school, I didn't talk much with people. I mostly stayed home, played a lot of video games, and tried (and succeeded) to hide my dysfunctional family situation from my peers. I was also arrogant and thought I was smarter than most people, so I figured they'd be a waste of my time anyway. I felt drained just being around them.

In junior year of high school, I made some great friends. It was the same time I was getting into board games, so we'd hang out every week playing games and talking deep into Friday nights and shallow into Saturday mornings. They were my first exposure to mature friendships, laden with vulnerability and trust, friendships that humbled me and taught me things. These friends made me into a much better person. Being around them didn't make me feel drained; it filled me with energy and passion. (It also helped that my friends were incredibly smart, talented people whom I continue to admire.)

I had shifted from feeling drained when around people to feeling drained when not around people. It was a big change during a highly developmental stage of life -- but I am acutely aware of how easily it could happen to me again, in either direction. Ever since, I've considered the part of my identity that takes energy from being with or apart from people to be highly mutable, and hence not a reliable label of who I am.

I know people who identify as extremely introverted or extroverted who are confident they'll never change. For them, introversion/extroversion is a clear, established part of their identity. I don't know if they're right or not. All I know is, I was also extremely sure I'd never stop being introverted, and I was totally wrong about that. I'm sure all the extreme 'verts I know know themselves better than I do, so the duality makes more sense for them. I'm cool with that. But I also wonder if they can change like I did.

A bigger reason I don't like the dichotomy is because I don't like it when people quickly stratify themselves into binary categories. It's always felt too simplistic and reductive. Whitman put it best:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Sometimes, I feel so introverted I can't even muster the energy to send a one-word reply to a text message. I actively avoid close friends. I'd much rather read, or write, or dance in the peaceful solitude of my room (close the door on your way out, please).

Other times, I crave interaction. I call people who aren't expecting me just to hear their voice. I go for a walk so I can see some human faces. I start conversations with strangers on the street. I want people to pay attention to me and give me compliments so it's not weird when I give them compliments.

Feeling these different urges doesn't seem unhealthy to me; if anything, their breadth is an essential part of the beauty of being human. When I have to collapse all of this breadth into a single word -- "introvert" or "extrovert" -- it seems like I've failed to communicate something important. It also feels like the person who hears my self-categorization immediately forms an impression of me based on which side I picked, an impression that can only be deeply flawed.

To illustrate this tension, I will tell you two stories. Both of them took place in empty homes.

The first story takes place at the end of my time in college, the day after my roommates moved out. We were good friends, usually having dinner together 4 times a week. We were also very open and comfortable around each other. When our lease ended, they left a few days earlier than I did.

I will never forget what it felt like to leave my room and see absolutely nothing in the house. The day before, it had been full of boxes, furniture, assorted packing paraphernalia, and not just things, but sounds: jokes and laughter, table legs scraping on hardwood floors, all the bustle of moving and all the laziness of not wanting to.

Now, there was total emptiness. My roommate's door, right across from mine, creaked on its hinges. I could hear my breath echo into his empty room. I was acutely aware of the sounds my clothes made as they rusted around on my body. I was struck by a profound, piercing loneliness.

I loved college. I'd been in school my entire life. I had no idea what life would be like afterward, without the structure of classes and teachers and syllabi. I was also someone who genuinely loved school, who loved studying and learning and teaching, and I had no idea where I'd end up, and it seemed impossible for me to end up in a place I would love quite as much.

I'd also made my closest friends in college, friends I didn't know if I would see again. I'd already undergone the painful experience of losing close high school friends whom I thought I'd never lose contact with. We naturally drifted apart due to our increased distance and loss of commonalities. It seemed totally reasonable for that to happen again, even though I really didn't want it to.

All my sadness, anxiety, and fear came together in the silence of that barren house. I felt wholly and utterly alone, in every way someone could feel alone -- physically, intellectually, emotionally, temporally. I was more extroverted than I'd ever been in that moment, totally drained of energy, in need of human contact. And there was no one home with whom I could share my multitudes.

The second story is when I finally moved into my apartment here in Boston. The two people I know out here are both super busy, so I ended up doing it all alone (well, almost -- I did pay a Brazilian guy I met off the street $20 to help me carry the heavy furniture inside, but that was the extent of my human contact -- I drove 30 hours from CO, stayed in an AirBnB while taking the bus to various libraries every day so I could look for an apartment online, found one, got an email for a better apartment that turned out to be a scam, paid the deposit for the real apartment, found cheap furniture on Craigslist (which, in total, comprised three bookshelves, two sofas, curtains, assorted cookware, a desk, chair, bed frame, box spring, mattress, table, dresser, and nightstand), rented a truck, moved all the furniture into my new place (with the help of the aforementioned Brazilian guy, who didn't speak English, so I communicated with him entirely through Google translate (shoutout to the Google translate team -- y'all do amazing work))), and collapsed, exhausted, onto my new bed.

I was wholly and utterly alone, and happier than I'd been in months. I was incredibly proud of myself for doing it all on my own. I felt mature, independent, self-actualized, free. It was the sort of freedom that felt so good I wondered if the radical libertarians were actually on to something after all. Everything I wanted to happen was happening -- not through chance, but through my own hard-fought efforts; I'd been working diligently toward a dream my whole life, and when I got finally got to the end, I found out it had all been worth it. Great endings go on to become even greater beginnings, and my future would be greater still.

I had no one to share my triumph with -- it was well past 1:00 am, and I was too tired to talk to anyone anyway. But even if I'd had the energy, I don't think I would have. I was caught in the blinding light of joyous introversion, totally fulfilled. It was a special, private moment, a moment begging to not be shared, a moment crying out for stillness. It was a moment just for me. It was a moment I -- no one else -- had earned. And so I laid there and exulted in my multitudes.

The Second Half of "Bittersweetness"

 Audio

This poem is about bittersweetness -- mostly the second half.
It’s about the embarrassing moments you learned to laugh at.
It’s about all the failure leading to self-improvement.
Sure, it’s about all the things that matter, but it’s also about all the things that didn’t, looking back.
And it’s about all the things that, when you look back, you no longer see.

This poem is about all the times you knew it wouldn’t last, and you were at peace with that.
It’s about all the great endings that blossomed into even greater beginnings.

This poem goes out to all the parents who gave everything for their children and did not call it “sacrifice”.
It goes out to all the battle-hardened friendships forged in the crucible of war, to the sweet tenderness of scar tissue and the memories that made them.
To all those who have loved, and lost, and are loving all the more.
Keep all those unblemished hearts; purity is for germaphobes and preachers, and I am neither one.

Give me all the hearts that ache, because how else will they learn to heal?
Give me the ache of my muscles on the mountaintop, because how else will I have earned the view?
Give me the breathlessness that comes after the marathon, because after I cross that finish line, I want to feel my lungs burning. Stoke that pulmonary fire, because I want to run faster, need to run faster, cuz --
There are all these things I left behind, and when I look back, I don't want to see them anymore.

Give me the darkness before the dawn.
Yes, by all means, give me the petrichor of earth after the storm, but please: do not deprive me of the storm, and
Give me a shovel while you’re at it, cuz I have some things I want to bury.

You see, they thought I wanted sunrays when I was craving moonbeams.
They thought I was cold and wet and miserable, but I was dancing in the rain.
And that shovel -- was not for digging graves.
It was for planting seeds.

You can’t grow a garden until you break the earth, and so --
I will keep breaking my heart until it is fertile ground, trade my platemail for plowshares, and if the well runs dry I will refresh it with my tears.
And don’t worry if I cry.

The harder we weep in winter, the sweeter we celebrate in spring.

The Sweetness of Things Forgotten

Video of performance
_____________________________________________

Sometimes, I want people to miss me. That sucks. That’s like saying, “I want people to like me so much they will suffer in my absence.”

I can do better.
Let me be better than that.
Let me thrive in untamed wilderness.
Let me flourish far from charted waters, apart from eyes and ears and memories.

So what if no one remembers?
I don’t remember the warmth of my mother’s touch when I was in the cradle, but she was no less loving.
I don't remember all the jokes I’ve laughed at, the music I've listened to, the rainstorms I’ve cavorted in, the sunsets I’ve appreciated, yet they are no less part of me -- just as I am no less part of them.
Yes, I am the sum of countless precious things, precious because they are unremembered.

Why should we tremble when we find overgrown temples to long-dead gods?
I quake more at all the temples we will never find.

I’ve heard it said:
“Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is their answer.”
I will stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts why I should care about their opinion.
Their answer?
Is the same.

So --
So what if they forget?
I dance not to sycophantic drumbeats but to syncopated heartbeats.
I am not some ' stillborn witness to myself, so let them forget -- I will have still ‘ borne witness to myself, and I will prosecute and perpetrate.
I am a constellation peering through the telescope, the marble and the sculptor, carving out parts of me for my own sake, like -- this is not for you. Though I will give some to you now, I’m not asking you to treasure it.
Do with it as you will.

‘Cuz --
so what if I leave no legacy?
I still left tiny 8-year-old footprints in the snow as I rushed home to sip my mom’s hot chocolate, left breadcrumbs by the pond to feed the ducklings, left the ones I love to chase a future I only dreamt of, and if that is not enough for you --
That's fine.
I will not beg you to remember this.

Just -- breathe. <inhale, exhale>
And be here with me now, in this gift we call "the present".

A Love Letter to Boston

Performance

I moved to Boston 2 months ago, and there’s a lot I want to say --  but haven’t yet, because it sounds too saccharine, too naive, too sentimental.

I wanna talk about how I’ve dreamed of living in a big city since I was 8, young mind taken by the endless potential of human proximity, imagination running wild through seedy alleyways, bustling train stations, public libraries; standing triumphant upon gleaming skyscrapers, gabled rooftops, crumbling bridges; gorging itself on greasy cookies, greasy pizzas, greasy stir-fries; dancing with Dionysian abandon at rain-slicked crossroads, sold-out concert venues, dim-lit nightclubs.

Yes, it ran fast, that imagination, but I chased it for years and years -- and in the end? I caught it, caught it someplace between Chestnut Hill and North Station, sometime between seeing my first perfect sunrise from Boston harbor and rushing to catch the last train home, somewhere between the word choice at a late-night poetry slam and the glimmer of truth tucked away in the American dream, somehow hidden in the ecstatic soreness of my muscles after they moved all the furniture into my new apartment or the beads of sweat I shed to be able to afford it -- to be able to call this place “Home."

And sure, home is what it is, but home is not all it is, because home feels too banal for that, because home is not a place where you are compelled to rhapsodize about the feeling you get when you’re not sure how to get there but you get there, the feeling you get when you work hard to achieve something and achieve it, the feeling you get when every passing moment exceeds your expectations, the feeling you get when you lay your head down at night and are proud of what you’ve accomplished, and so you cling to that half-lucid state between waking and dreaming because you don’t want to fall asleep just yet, because your dreams got nothing on your reality.

Because who could’ve dreamed of the pleasure of bearing witness to the vastness of the great Atlantic, or doing card tricks outside a club until the bouncer gives you VIP status, or basking in the same lamplight that inspired the Declaration of Independence, or marvelling at the richness only time can bring from atop Prudential tower, or making funny faces at toddlers on the T? Cuz see, they don’t have trains where I’m from, so it took me until now to understand Petro when he said, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation” --

-- and yes, my car’s been towed twice since I got here, and I’ve gotten triple as many parking tickets, but I would do it all again just to feel the elation I felt after I went to the RMV and got my vehicle registered properly, like “Yes, I live here -- and now I got the paperwork to prove it,” official government documentation attesting to the rhythm of my heartbeat, incontrovertible legislative evidence verifying the culmination of my efforts, formerly manifest as words and wishes, now wrought in ink and metal.

So just as I bear witness to this city, so I ask you to bear witness to me as I say all the things I’ve wanted to say, but haven’t yet, these things that beat against the riverbanks of my ribcage like so many insistent raindrops, each one rippling in my bloodstream until those riverbanks could no longer hold them, and so they burst forth at last, flooding my body from stubbed toes to split ends with glorious affirmation, because sure, wounds take time to heal, but aspirations take time to ripen, and the deeper they extend their roots, the longer they grow their branches, the sweeter their nectar tastes, and it is no accident that to “aspire" means both to hope and to breathe, because we need both for our survival.

Yes, I am surviving the way the Torah survived Abraham, they way the pyramids survived the pharaohs, the way Armstrong's footprint survived the lunar landing, surviving in Boston as Boston survives in me, in the form of countless quiet moments and countless loud ones, some gentle, some breathless, some splintering under the weight of centuries, some raw as an uncut umbilical cord, some begging to be said, others begging to remain unsaid, but I have said them nonetheless, and now that I have said them, perhaps you think I am looking at a broken world through rose-colored glasses with doe-eyed idealism, and perhaps I am, but at least I will have said them.

Cuz see, I’ve wanted to say these things for a while, but I restrained myself because I was afraid
words would diminish them, and so I kept them private, but now I realize: The flame of joy does not diminish when shared -- it only fans hotter, bigger, brighter, and so I stand before you to describe the way my breath caught in my throat like <gasp> when I first saw the moonlit horizon eclipsed by sparkling towers of terrestrial starlight, or the goosebumps that appeared on my arm when my car came ‘round Memorial Drive and the full splendor of the Boston skyline was suddenly captured within the confines of my windshield, or when I crossed the threshold at Chinatown’s gate and happily paid in cash to abet tax evasion, or when I was sitting above the Charles and my happiness bubbled up and spilled through my lips as laughter, because smiling was insufficient, because it had to make itself known to the world as something more than “something more”, because I felt so whole I wanted to break something -- and there was nothing to break but silence.