They painted the door blue.
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was for Mom and me.
Last weekend I went home to find it taken over by boxes. The house that I had lived in through my high school years will not be mine in just a few weeks.
In my short lifetime, I have lived in five homes, and I am about to live in my sixth. You'd think after five rituals of taking everything I own and putting it in cardboard, purging the things I don't need, and then shoving my life into another residence, it would be easy. But it's not.
It's not because it's Change. And I don't care what anyone says, Change is not easy, whether for better or worse.
It's not just my house that's changing. My grandparents are getting older, which is something I should have forseen, but haven't. How short sighted have I been! They are becoming different, and slowly our relationship is as well. This weekend my mother poured out the difficulty she's had with them since living with them for the past months. Granny is becoming forgetful and harsher, and Pa more short-tempered. Sometimes there's things I don't want to know. I don't want to see the grandparents I have been so close to morph. But I have to. That's now how my bond with my mom works, perhaps strengthened but a different hue of love from when I was in middle school and high school. Now I'm a confidant. Not only to her, but my dad as well as he tries to boil down his business misadventures (not of his doing) and explain how the his bank account could be shrinking under the economic "temps" (see last post).
...There's some things I don't want to know.
But that's what Change is all about, showing you things can't be the same forever, tearing down bridges and walls, and revealing the hidden truth behind them. And when you learn something, something inside of you is changed as well.
They painted the door to the Chinese place my mom and I frequent. My mom had tried to paint the doors to our house, the house we are currently moving out of, a particular shade of jade/blue-green, but failed to capture it in the final project. So when we visited the then new to us Mark Pi's China Gate, my mom gasped at the color of the doors and exclaimed "That's the color I wanted my doors to be!" And as is customary with mom and I, that seemed to stick. Every time we went to Mark Pi's, either I or she would say "Did you know that's the color I/you want the doors?"
It was with the same sort of gasp we discovered that the jade doors are now blue. It seems that Mark Pi's is not immune to Change, but nothing is.
It's a shame that we will never be able to see those jade doors again. But I am sure Mom and I will find another thing to latch onto. We, like our home and our relatives, our relationships and our doors, can change as well.
08 March 2009
26 February 2009
23 February 2009
The short of it
Not five minutes ago, I heard the forecaster on the Channel 13 news say "temps" instead of "temperatures".
Now, I'm not usually a stickler for language, seeing as I make a mistake in 1 in every 6 sentence I say. But really? Is this what we're coming to?
Perhaps I'm naive in my knowledge of television news. There must be numerous in's and out's that I am not well versed in. I hear it's a high paced profession, spitting out bad and good news left and right with just a slight tweek of countenance. That sort of thing must require stamina and talent. This shining star of a meterologist could have merely been trying to conserve time and airspace. Or, he was trying to make the weather that much more uplifting and trendy, like a causual article found whilst on the web.
Oh! Wait, I see where I've gone wrong. I assumed professionalism was something the televised news strove for, and maybe that's what's got me confused.
Because, as a child of these new times, that's what I want when I watch the news. Forget lousy terms like "murder" and "man slaughter" to describe three people being killed in their homes on the south side. I want the newscaster to label them as "slaughts" or "murds" with an ironic little frown.
Now, I'm not usually a stickler for language, seeing as I make a mistake in 1 in every 6 sentence I say. But really? Is this what we're coming to?
Perhaps I'm naive in my knowledge of television news. There must be numerous in's and out's that I am not well versed in. I hear it's a high paced profession, spitting out bad and good news left and right with just a slight tweek of countenance. That sort of thing must require stamina and talent. This shining star of a meterologist could have merely been trying to conserve time and airspace. Or, he was trying to make the weather that much more uplifting and trendy, like a causual article found whilst on the web.
Oh! Wait, I see where I've gone wrong. I assumed professionalism was something the televised news strove for, and maybe that's what's got me confused.
Because, as a child of these new times, that's what I want when I watch the news. Forget lousy terms like "murder" and "man slaughter" to describe three people being killed in their homes on the south side. I want the newscaster to label them as "slaughts" or "murds" with an ironic little frown.
18 February 2009
O, Thoreau
I have a few quotes, maybe because I feel like a better person for having read them.
"No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to."
"We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, not represented. A semi-human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot way."
"It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived."
"When were the good and the brave ever in the majority?"
For more such quips, read A Plea for Captain John Brown by Thoreau.
"No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to."
"We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, not represented. A semi-human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot way."
"It seems as if no man had ever died in America before, for in order to die you must first have lived."
"When were the good and the brave ever in the majority?"
For more such quips, read A Plea for Captain John Brown by Thoreau.
14 February 2009
Stimulus and Steak n Shake
My dad drove up to Upland to deliver the wonderful book, The Elements of Style, and such occasions are usually met with him taking me out to dinner. We were talking of sociology.
We play at talking of lofty things, my dad and I, neither of us usually an expert on what we say. But our opinions reside somewhere between common sense and abstract thought, and so to each other we exchange and repeat phrases, exercising our rights as Americans to be completely right or wrong about what we say.
The stimulus package came up in conversation, mostly because I have/had no idea what it was all about. I just heard it flying around the past week, buzzing on the TV as every newscaster smiled when they got the chance to say "stimulus package" and knew that the audience was suddenly back with them. However, the name does nothing to describe what was in the package, only that it promised stimulus. And so I asked my dad.
I was left with the notion that if it doesn't work, my generation (whether that is x, y, or z, I'm not sure anymore) is going to be left with the bill. I'm someone who gets weak in the knees thinking about three weeks from now. How am I supposed to stand up to the thought of paying more taxes on a modest teacher's salary at a nondisclosed time in the future?
We were eating Fazoli's as we talked. I was staring down my baked spaghetti as he dumped dressing on his side salad. To get there, we had to drive past a Steak n Shake, which always gets my stomach in a slight knot. It is as if I can hear the highschool and college uproar at the slow decline of the hotspot losing its shine.
Four meals under four dollars, eh? And yet I have to pay for cheese and a buck and a half Coke. Thanks, Steak n Shake.
Steak n Shake was once a giant, and now it seems it's slowly shrinking under the girth of its own prices. Poor management and rising food prices haven't helped it. Could this become the US? Could the economy dwindle into nothing as people have less and less to spend?
I can live without Steak n Shake, reguardless of how I feel about their apple walnut salads. And I can continue living without thinking about the future economy. Why worry about things I can't control? I can do as much now about the US economy as I can trying to save Steak n Shake. Lord willing, they'll both survive.
We play at talking of lofty things, my dad and I, neither of us usually an expert on what we say. But our opinions reside somewhere between common sense and abstract thought, and so to each other we exchange and repeat phrases, exercising our rights as Americans to be completely right or wrong about what we say.
The stimulus package came up in conversation, mostly because I have/had no idea what it was all about. I just heard it flying around the past week, buzzing on the TV as every newscaster smiled when they got the chance to say "stimulus package" and knew that the audience was suddenly back with them. However, the name does nothing to describe what was in the package, only that it promised stimulus. And so I asked my dad.
I was left with the notion that if it doesn't work, my generation (whether that is x, y, or z, I'm not sure anymore) is going to be left with the bill. I'm someone who gets weak in the knees thinking about three weeks from now. How am I supposed to stand up to the thought of paying more taxes on a modest teacher's salary at a nondisclosed time in the future?
We were eating Fazoli's as we talked. I was staring down my baked spaghetti as he dumped dressing on his side salad. To get there, we had to drive past a Steak n Shake, which always gets my stomach in a slight knot. It is as if I can hear the highschool and college uproar at the slow decline of the hotspot losing its shine.
Four meals under four dollars, eh? And yet I have to pay for cheese and a buck and a half Coke. Thanks, Steak n Shake.
Steak n Shake was once a giant, and now it seems it's slowly shrinking under the girth of its own prices. Poor management and rising food prices haven't helped it. Could this become the US? Could the economy dwindle into nothing as people have less and less to spend?
I can live without Steak n Shake, reguardless of how I feel about their apple walnut salads. And I can continue living without thinking about the future economy. Why worry about things I can't control? I can do as much now about the US economy as I can trying to save Steak n Shake. Lord willing, they'll both survive.
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