On the Heel of a New Year

There can only be a few moments of epiphany, unless you are Thomas Edison who powers his light bulb one invention after another. As I'm typing this blog I wonder to myself what troubles assail me as I write. I am coping with ADHD as I type, and combat my thoughts of doing other things than completing this blog entry. I have read one third of William Zinnser's On Writing Well and I have learned that good writing must be pruned repeatedly for any tautologies and unnecessary verbiage. I might have committed a tautology right there! Beautiful writing is achieved after many dedicated years of writing. It is an ongoing process that makes writing one's prolific art. Zinnser lauds E.B. White's writing for its succinctness. I revere Simon van Booy's economy, poetic harmonies, and mellifluousness. I may not have any interest in reading E.B. White or Alice McDermott, but their writing remains celebrated as prim and effective. I am invoking these writers because I aspire to conjure what seems to be their writing spells, or the certain conditions they write in. I have this hyper-romanticized notion of writers residing in their clandestine tenements typing away or slaving away on paper, and nursing an aged bottle of gin or vodka. These deficient indicators of Bohemian lifestyle may not testify the best writers alive or dead, but it does signify the terribly ailing writer's lifestyle that seems to be communicated in writing by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham, and Jeffrey Eugenides. I can only imagine a writer at his nadir of life, submitting his blood and sweat to a story that encapsulates his trembling emotions. This writer begs the hands of time and perseveres a fever and alcoholic high just to produce two more pages of snot-drenched words on yellowed paper. These travails seem characteristic of a writer, a person who writes in solace of words, someone who celebrates a solitary lifestyle by discovering all the attics in his mind, and then commits these esoteric, meta-unique ideas to paper. What a tragic case of loneliness won by writers who believe their real selves cannot be epitomized by their physical body, but by their words in a tome.

Epiphanies don't usually visit me. I usually have these pangs of truthfulness that graze me, but disappear leaving little to no remedy for a haunting past and an unstoppable pressure of failing at life. However, I did experience a sense of independence when I kissed my father on his cheek and left my apartment building. As I bounded down the stairs my legs carried me with a distinct sense of purpose and flight seldom felt when I left the building many other times before. My legs hit the stairs with attentiveness and liveliness, unlike the gait of a modern day zombie, head-deep in a small smart phone screen and slicing colorful fruits on the train. I felt like a real human being who was not sleeping through life, but actually living life. This impetus to live and seize the day ("Carpe diem") represents a quasi-epiphany that motivated me to sit down and write this blog in its entirety until I am done dripping my insides word by word. Instead of watching the coffee percolate, I traded in these bitter beans for innocent tea leaves sitting in a can. I respect myself for consciously making this change. After reading about the anti-oxidant effects of tea in my favorite indie paper, Epoch Times, I started drinking tea and contemplated bringing along my toilet bowl after each dozen sips. I am in love with tea, especially green tea, Po Nee tea, and Earl Grey. I can appreciate learning about my Earl Grey when asking someone in college about its effects and whether it will "wake me up." I have come to love green tea after my ex-girlfriend introduced it to me. I watched her consume her liquid staple at Stony Brook and fell in love with its ease of preparation (that goes for any tea because all you need is hot water and the leaves!). I am actually awaiting a fresh cup of green tea as I type this blog. If I can't be a wine connoisseur I will be contempt as a tea connoisseur, flouting all the benefits of drinking tea and touting its fancy names, not nearly as fancy as libations.

Reflecting on a year gone by so quick, I can only say that it is almost one and a half years after I have left school. This fear is exacerbated by the stereotypical concern that if you're out of school for too long, you'll want to go back; you can't go; or you will be hopelessly unemployed. Being unemployed is no laughing matter, especially if this economy continues to sit ducks. What's worse is the numbers are all botched to give Americans a staggering amount of hope in the face of despairing money woes. I have never been this strapped for cash in my life. When I was in college I could fall back on my nearly two grand financial aid check. I clearly took advantage of my poverty status as a free rider. This is a slap in the face for Republicans who continue to scapegoat poor and minorities for siphoning the system of well-earned tax dollars which go to financial assistance programs such as the well-feared EBT (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzspsovNvII) and/or SNAP program. I take prideful ignorance in not knowing the difference of similarity between the two terms because I want to escape my poverty, not embrace it or educate myself about it. To learn about it is to accept it, and I am in no shape ready to accept my low status in society, a status that my father associates as a semi-caste system, one that cannot be renounced by pulling myself up by my bootstraps, when the awful truth is that I have no boots or straps. Thank God I am no longer unemployed. I am grateful to have a part time position which can transition into a full time position replete with tea and snacks, and a big office space for headroom (Did you know that large amounts of headroom/ceiling space foster creativity? No wonder NYPL Schwarzman Building Rose Reading Room has a high ceiling!). I am grateful to have people answer my calls for assistance, even though I think I should send out more calls for help. I was never one to ask for help, but I remember when someone told me, "All you have to do is ask." Afterwards I wriggled out of stigma and performed in subways and made money. This was my second attempt at being independent, away from my parents, and buying lavish clothing with my own hard-earned money. If you don't think my money was "hard"-earned, that's all subjective because work cannot be measured. Emotional labor (This term is an actual term!) is incommensurate to physical, manual labor, so hush!

At the height of my young adulthood, as my parents love to remind me, I continue to feel lethargic, slightly empty, and unfulfilled. I am greeted with comfortable phrases that only cushion my fall, such as "You're a baby" and "You're still young." These phrases only coddle me and rock my crib even more; I am invited back into a warm space by strangers who don't think I need to succeed just yet. This is antithetical to my dormant spirit, an entrepreneurial spirit charmed by many startup companies. I admire Yinhua Kim who started a monetization app called Locket (Locket.com; thanks to my fellow promoter and blogger Terresa Ling [terresaling.blogspot.com] for informing me of this app!). She epitomizes the idea of influencing at a large-scale with little resources. Startup culture is also Bohemian in its own interpretation---a culture of close friends who rely on ping pong tables and apps in beta mode to complement their daily lunches, if they have time to break for lunch. My only gripe about startups is that they're dominated by white people. This complaint does not warrant the greatest lightbulb moment, but the truth stands that only those with money and WEALTH get to take creative, ample risks with their businesses. If a poor man like myself starts a company on a few loans and fail, I will spend more time recovering that money than rebuilding my business with an heirloom account of wealth. What else is new? White persons control the means of production and resources to power these means of production. If you can't get that green, it don't mean a thing.

Let me discuss some tangible things in my life instead of issuing grievances about abstract ideas that are far too elevated for my immediate concern: my plans for 2014. On the heel of a new year I contemplate doing things differently and seeing things differently. To view life through a different set of lens is to be open-minded and discerning. I value my friends, but it is time to designate close friends from mere acquaintances. It's time to stop gallivanting in tourist spots such as Times Square and Union Square and "get a life." It is time to stop going where the noise is, as my mom always says "Nee hai nigh hiang nigh oh," which means where there's a sound you'll go. I want to deaden my love of limelight and be humble as well a sincere. My four months of being a prankster has impugned my character and blemished my resume. It's take to be serious again and earn my dignity as a young adult, a man, a human being who doesn't trivialize everything into a compact joke and troll people for fun, but a person who is career-oriented and money-oriented, because the harsh truth is: without money I cannot survive. Without a roof I will not survive. Without a goal I will succumb to the ever-spinning world eschewing competition as a factor of success. This is real. This is now. Change is imperative.

These past two weeks have been a somnolent retreat for me. I have given in my 5 A.M. sleep time and wasted my days by sleeping until 2 P.M. At this time I cannot apply for any jobs because it's past the time for people to check their emails. I also cannot maintain my attention span to search job sites for a match. Logging onto my school job database has grown increasingly frustrating and I've become more and more lazy to scroll through positions without deadlines. I grow increasingly cynical about copying and pasting my cover letter an infinite amount of times. I pine for a close friend to refer me to someone, so that I can land a job without having to send my resume and cover letter into a dark vortex of unread emails. Any hopes of being directly placed is too optimistic for my generation. Misery loves company, so I forget about logging onto LinkedIn and finding out that my friends have landed new opportunities. I would rather simmer in my own puke as a sore loser who is waiting for someone to offer me my fifteen minutes of fame. Despite my putrid gloom, I am trying my best to catch up on reading. After slowly detaching friendships with Helen I have stopped practicing tango altogether. Although I show women residues of tango moves I have moved on from the dance altogether. I would like to say that a piece of me yearns for lessons, but most of me craves another scene altogether, which is just another symptom of seeking a change of scenery. Oh what will come of the New Year, if it is at all new? But remember that life is what you make it, so if you want to make it new, it will be just that. But if you sink into the past, the future will only be immaterial.