Emotional breakdown of the subconscious

I had one of those “prophetic” dreams this morning. You know, the kind that mark a turning point in your life. Here it is:

Global warming caused a drought in my neighbor’s tropical paradise water garden so severe that the entire ecological system was completely destroyed. Oh, by the way, the garden–housing several alligators, exotic fish species, turtles, coral reefs, and like–was all built by her inside her Hong Kong flat.

Wait, no, actually, that is not the prophesy of the dream that I was going to talk about. Once again:

Shortly and abruptly later, Goldie and I were temporarily living with roommates in mainland China. We were about to go to bed for the night and Goldie was cheerfully talking about her plans for the next day with her friends. I wasn’t so cheerful and I made several spiteful comments. She got hurt, and it culminated into an awful argument. Because of all the noise I guess, Dori, Dustin, and their friends appeared from nowhere to mediate the situation. They pulled me aside immediately and asked me what was bothering me. I denied emotional involvement and claimed several times I didn’t know what was really going on until finally…I broke down and admitted that “I don’t have anything to show for in my life!”

The remarkable thing is that I actually felt the emotional break down in my dream: my chest ached, my jaw clenched, my eyes burned, my heart got caught in the back of my throat and throbbed until I thought I would choke. It was pretty lucid.

Clearly after my last post, it’s no surprise that I am going through the twenty-something grad student existential life crisis. I, my conscious brain, has known this for quite a while now. But considering the reaction I had during that dream, I guess my subconscious mind didn’t know this.

So waking up today was hard…sometime mid-morning I heard Goldie sweetly talking to me and saying goodbye before she went to work. Still in the haze of sleep and my dream world, I felt a huge pang of guilt for arguing with her earlier. A little later, I heard my subconscious telling me that I gotta wake up and face the day despite the rough night I had.

Well, I am awake now but I still can’t shake off the feelings of the dream. Global warming is threatening the ecological balance of the world… and I am still trying to figure out how to balance a fulfilling career with a loving relationship.

Resolutions (Part 2a)

This is not the best time for me to be writing, I think. I am in one of those early evening slumps: I’m experiencing a post-caffeine/sugar rush and realizing that I have accomplished nothing today. I’m not sure what happened in the previous 6 hours. At some point I started looking up Canadian work visas and jobs. I’ve been trying to avoid that lately because it inevitably triggers an acute depression over my future. Is it really that bad? I don’t know, you tell me…

After considering research into all the options, I have figured out the following:

I cannot immigrate to Canada until I have one year of full-time, paid work experience. Goldie could apply but the average waiting time for her is 5-6 years because she must file from Hong Kong. When I am eligible, I could file from the U.S. and average wait time is about 2 years. If I was really lucky (meaning that I was working in Canada), I could apply from within Canada and have an average wait time around 1 year.

So my first priority is to find a job. I can’t work in the U.S. because that means another long-term separation from Goldie that I am just not willing to do again. I could work in Hong Kong but it just isn’t looking as appealing right now. Ideally, Goldie and I could both work and live together in Canada. But we cannot work in Canada without a work permit. And we cannot get work permit without get a labor market opinion (in most cases). A labor market opinion basically states that an equally qualified Canadian citizen is not easily found for the job. However, since I am a new graduate with no full-time work experience, it seems to me that this will be a very difficult position to argue. Goldie might have a better chance with her work experience but the field of graphic design is not in such high demand.

What about the “rare cases” of not needing a labor market opinion? Well, it can be done under some specific NAFTA-listed occupations. Software engineer is on the list but it is a very controversial position that has been difficult to get authorization for. Namely, you are expected to have a degree specific to engineering and I only have computer science (yes, they make the distinction). Computer systems analyst is on the list with the note that it is NOT (I repeat, NOT) a programming position. Well, that’s kinda funny because I was planning on getting a programming job. And besides that, I’m having a little trouble understanding how the rather old school job title of computer systems analyst translates into the new jargon of today.

Let me cut to the chase: finding a job is hard, but trying to understand how to find a job with the very specific and bureaucratic guidelines of immigration and trade agreements is making my head hurt, a lot. Do I even stand a chance of getting a work permit? And even if I can get authorization to work in Canada, what’s the long term opportunities? Can I apply for immigration while on a NAFTA based work permit? Can Goldie get a work permit, can she find a job in Canada?

From a rational, logical perspective it seems that it should be a workable problem. But I just can’t visualize the solution. And at a time like this, where I physically feel down and I have been racking my head (and the Internet) all day for some answers but getting nowhere, I feel absolutely crippled. Everything comes crashing in around me, including my huge frustration at my current lot: a grad student. Previously, I have never feel regret for my decisions in my life, but more and more I have daydreamed about how I could have done things differently. Well it’s no use to go into the details of those daydreams, but suffice to say, I desperately want some change in my life. I am not thriving as a grad student, I’m am dying. I stupidly even wish I could just drop the program right here and now. Of course, then I remind myself that I’m currently getting paid a nice sum every month for doing absolutely nothing and the only thing between me and that damn degree is a several pages of useless drivel… ok, I better stop. This isn’t helping.

BTW, I did go hiking this last weekend. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as relaxing as I hoped. But I’ll have to share that story later.

A tawny kind of feeling

Well finally, I am beginning to appreciate the fine complexities of New Years from the insiders perspective. It is almost like my discovery of why people like wine. Let me tell the wine story first.

The very first time that I came to Hong Kong to visit Goldie was November 2001. Although I managed to stupidly lose my passport the very night that I arrived in Hong Kong, I was able to get a replacement in time for our weekend getaway to Macau. Macau, if you haven’t heard of it before, was a Portguese colony in China for around 500 years. It is (or perhaps was) a terribly romantic place to visit because of it’s old style Portguese architecture and laid-back pace of life. Now it’s the Las Vegas of Asia. But anyways, as I was saying, back in the good ‘ole days… Goldie and I had wonderful long strolls on the cobblestone streets and savored delicious Macanese dinners (a true fusion food: “African Chicken” which has been created by the Portuguese from African spices and then recreated by Chinese cooks in Macau). One of the biggest highlights was the street of handmade Macanese snacks. While we were there, we loaded up our bags with sesame treats, perserved meats, and even a bottle of imported port wine. The wine was a bit of an impulse buy at the time. I imagined we would savor it on some romantic evening back in Hong Kong, but we both kind of forgot about it. Goldie ended up storing it away in her house and we never did drink it before I left Hong Kong. A year went by until I remembered it and Goldie assured me it was around there somewhere. Another few years went by and Goldie wasn’t so clear on where she put it anymore. Then finally after about five years, when we were visiting her mom’s house, she found it covered in dust. We took it home and put it in our house. I marvelled at it several times; realizing that we bought that wine back when I was “vacationing” in Hong Kong and now here we were living together. But mostly it just sat in the back cupboard. I started to wonder if it was good to drink anymore. I had assumed that wine always is better the older it is, but I found out that is not necessarily true (see “vinegar” for more information). So around Goldie and I’s anniversary I decided it was time to try it out. Though honestly, neither Goldie or I care much for drinking. I figured I would end up drinking the wine for the symbolism but not really enjoying it. Yet, to my great surprise, the wine was not vinegar and actually it wasn’t even bad. In fact, on a second sip, it was really quite pleasant. On a third sip, I realized that it was almost like there was some…nutty flavor to it. On the fourth sip, I couldn’t believe how many flavors there were embedded in it. And after a few more sips, I was pouring a second cup. I managed to savor it over the new few days, but like all good things it came to an end.

Though I am absolutely ignorant of what makes a good wine, I couldn’t help but think that bottle of port was really a great wine. After that experience, I started to wonder if maybe I have been missing out on the great life experience of enjoying good wine. The memories of that port flavor stuck with me for several weeks until one day, when I felt that I had a little extra money, I bought another bottle of port. I naively assumed that all port wines were mostly the same and bought the one which seem to be a good price. But it just wasn’t the same (probably because it was a ruby port as I found out later). It was ok, but not what I was craving. Several months later I thought I should expand my horizons a little and try a different wine altogether. I bought a Shiraz (by basically resorting to a game of “ini, mini, minny, moe, catch a tiger by its tail…”). It tasted AWFUL to my tongue. I started to think that maybe my memories of the original port had been distorted by too many sips and wishful thinking. I lost interest in buying wine for while.

Finally we come to this New Years’. On the second night (i.e. yesterday), I found myself, unexpectedly, with Goldie in City Super (a food enthuiasist’s heaven). Goldie was actually supposed to be in Macau with her family and I was supposed to be at home goofing around on the computer and taking care of the cat. But due to a long story, she ended up back in Hong Kong, and I ended up trying to get both of us out of the house to make the most of the holiday. Anyways, on a whim again, I staked out the wine section. I decided this time to definitely stick to the port wines. I also paid a little closer attention and realized that there is at least two different types of ports at the lower price range: ruby and tawny. From what I could remember, it was a ruby that had been “ok” but not the nutty sweet fruit sensation with woody overtones that I remembered from before. So I went for a tawny. And yes, that was it. The moment I tasted it, I knew that was exactly how that romantic anniversary port wine had tasted. I also realized that those wine lovers aren’t just making up nonsense when they talk about “woody overtones” and “nutty flavors.” Anyways, so on the topic of wine, I have discovered that the flavor of wine really can be complex and I basically only like one wine.

And New Years? Well, I have realized that the common thread that ties all world holidays together is that they all eventually become a pain in the ass. Yes, that’s a bit too blunt. But I think that this observation is so universal I don’t really need to explain it any further. Except I can’t help but mention an amusing cross-cultural observation. Traditionally you are not supposed to visit your relatives on the third day of New Years because it is the day of “red mouth” which otherwise means “easy to get in an argument.” Doesn’t that sound kind of familiar to the phrase “Guests, like fish, stink after three days”?

Well, enough with the holidays. Tomorrow most everyone is going back to work. That means for the next week or so I will be hearing firecrackers and lion drum dances as the businesses celebrate reopening in the new year. Actually I like that part. I can trace how far away the lion is based on the echos through the skyscrapers, and when it gets close enough I get a bird’s eye view of him dancing on the street below. That will be something nice to look forward to as I go back to the drudgery of my research work.

P.S. Oh, and for my research, I can also draw on the energy burst from the mountain hike that Goldie and I did today.  Getting back out in the forest again made me feel so stupid for using the excuse “too busy to hike” earlier this winter.  As Goldie said, that just isn’t a excuse for not hiking.

P.S.S. Oh, oh, yeah…it’s the hottest New Year’s on record for Hong Kong.  That means 90%+ humidity and 24C temperatures.  This isn’t supposed to be happening until well into March!  Our monsoon winds are nearly dead, yet we are still trying to wear our coats.  We even turned on the air-conditioner this year!  This comes on top of the news that the global temperatures in the month of January SMASHED the record books.  So, it goes without saying, that anytime that I am not working on research I am probably thinking about global warming.  Dori, got any more suggestions?  We’ve already been using CFL’s in our house since we moved in.

恭喜發財

The Year of the Pig is here! It’s the first day of New Year’s and Goldie and I rolled our pig-selves out of bed at a few minutes before noon. As usual, New Year’s Eve was a long night. I worked for several hours cleaning the house while Goldie went out to play with friends. Well, it’s ok, I get a lot of self-satisfaction from cleaning and organizing. Not only did I get all my things into order again, (I reorganized my folders of linguistic research papers into topics, alphabetized by author, and then in order by date….ooooo) I bit the bullet and reorganized all of Goldie’s things. I knew this was risky because of her close possessive relationship over all things that are hers. But I also knew that if I didn’t help her, the piles of “really important stuff” were going to drown her. She openly admits that she has no skills in organizing. So anyways, I figured I have observed her work patterns for long enough that I could figure out how to make sense of it. Anyways, it worked. The adjustments were subtle enough to prevent complete disorientation (e.g. “Oh my God! Where’s my stuff?! I can’t find anything!!”) but significant enough for her to really appreciate my efforts.

So…Dori tagged me in a game to tell the world six things they probably never knew about me, or maybe it’s to tell six funny tidbits about my life, or maybe there is no limit to the number. Well, I am not so sure, but I know I am “tagged” and I got Dori’s blog as a model answer. (Yes, I am deliberately making a jab about the Hong Kong education system with the reference to “model answer.”)

1. In foods cooked with gas, I can taste the additive used in the gas. Well, I think that is what I am tasting. For instance, I have had salmon sushi seared with a gas torch and the taste was so strong I couldn’t eat it. I also had a cake with the same taste. I assume it had been cooked in a gas oven because it was mainland where ovens are rare but electric ovens are even more rare. Sometimes stir-fried foods have this flavor and I know they are usually cooked on a gas burner (often turned up very high). I believe what happens is some of the gas isn’t burned off, and that leaves the taste in the food. Anyways, I can’t stand the taste and I refuse to eat any food with it. It seems most people can’t taste it and when they see me refuse to eat, they think that I am just being ridiculously difficult.
2. I read and enjoyed the entire series of The Clan of the Cave Bear when I was young. I also read the Anne of Green Gables… both times I was mostly fueled to read on because of the romantic plot lines. Other than this pleasure reading, I have little to no exposure to “real” literature. I am so ignorant of literature, it’s embarrassing. And I don’t remember the last time I read a fiction book…it must be more than 5 years now.
3. I have been secretly cleaning Goldie’s mom’s house for the last two years. Whenever she has to step out of the house and Goldie are around, I find something that is just begging for a good cleaning and get to work. Just before New Year’s, I cleaned the light switches and the fridge door. I don’t know if anyone has noticed yet. But it doesn’t matter to me, the gratification comes renewing an object to its original state however old and worn.
4. I love sour and bitter flavors. When I was young, I loved to eat saltine crackers with pickles and mustard. Now I get my kicks from Chinese medical teas and soups. I love getting a cold because it gives me an excuse to drink the herbal flu tea or 24 flavors tea. If I get a sore throat, I can order kumquat tea. The best part is offering Goldie a sip and watching her face pucker up in pain. I also take great pride in eating my turtle jelly without sugar. While everyone else is covering it up with syrup trying to get rid of the bitterness, I simply indulge in the wonderful saliva-stimulating sensation.
5. When I was in 10th grade my friends were talking about their dreams for the future. They talked about lawyers, doctors, and making money. I said I didn’t want to work. I just wanted to travel the world. They laughed at me and said “How are you going to travel the world if don’t have a job to make money first?” I replied that there are always ways to solve the money problem. They looked at me skeptically and I finally replied, “Anyways, I always got my body!” Now, I wasn’t seriously suggesting I would engage in prostitution, but I guess I was trying to shock them a little. Well, the funny part is that after 10 years I have travelled quite a bit despite never having a permanent, full-time job.
6. When I was 16 or so, I wrote an email to www.ivillage.com arguing that it was harming women by propagating the stereotypical women’s magazine content of health, beauty, and relationships. I suggested that they diversify their website to include information on technology, current issues, and other topics that would inspire women to think and grow. A woman from the office responded to me and expressed her condolences that I was disappointed with their website. She assured me that the company really does care about the well-being of women and encouraged me to keep visiting their website.

Can an ant really move a rubber tree?

This morning I had the children’s song “This Old Man” stuck in my head, but I couldn’t remember the lyrics. I had to look them up and found out there are some really awful rhymes in that song. But in the process, it got me thinking about the other songs from my childhood. I immediately got a flashback of my father crooning (a little off-tune) “high apple pie, in the sky hopes…” I remember him singing this song on more than one occasion. But I never did ask him where that song came from and now I am wondering. So I have looked it up and lo’ and behold, it’s a Frank Sinatra song.

High Hopes
by Frank Sinatra

Next time your found, with your chin on the ground
There a lot to be learned, so look around

Just what makes that little old ant
Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant
Anyone knows an ant, can’t
Move a rubber tree plant

But he’s got high hopes, he’s got high hopes
He’s got high apple pie, in the sky hopes

So any time your gettin’ low
’stead of lettin’ go
Just remember that ant
Oops there goes another rubber tree plant

When troubles call, and your back’s to the wall
There a lot to be learned, that wall could fall

Once there was a silly old ram
Thought he’d punch a hole in a dam
No one could make that ram, scram
He kept buttin’ that dam

’cause he had high hopes, he had high hopes
He had high apple pie, in the sky hopes

So any time your feelin’ bad
’stead of feelin sad
Just remember that ram
Oops there goes a billion kilowatt dam

All problems just a toy balloon
They’ll be bursted soon
They’re just bound to go pop
Oops there goes another problem kerplop

The other song that my father loved to sing when I was young was “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”–yes, that’s the song that was the #1 U.S. pop hit in 1988.

Resolutions (Part 1)

Ok, I admit it: I am guilty of living vicariously through other people’s blogs while letting my own wilter away. I have been religiously monitoring Dori’s blog and even  chiming in with comments, while she comes here to find absolutely nothing new… for a half year. Well, you know, the objectives of the blog have been shifting and that might be causing the problems. Long ago, on my first trip to Hong Kong I wrote what were known as “mass emails” to my family and friends. Back in those days, people were thrilled to be part of Internet history AND hear about my travel stories at the same time. But times change, and mass email became synonmous with spam, and even regular email became synonmous with “yet another thing to do”. So a few years later when I went off to China for a year-long exchange, I decided to start a blog for my family and friends. Well, that was nearly three years ago and I’m still in the China-region (ahem, note there is still a border between China and Hong Kong). Anyways, my point is that I am not travelling anymore. I’m living here. Basically, it’s getting harder for me to come up with “travel stories.” So, what is this blog for exactly?

I got an answer for that quesiton. But I gotta give some background information first. On a recent post of Dori’s blog, she opened the door to an evil portal: personal monsters. That kinda broke the floodgates for me, and I posted a short but desparate plea for help by outlining various monsters. I was hoping Dori would indulge me in self-pitying my monsters, but that didn’t happen. Actually about a week later when I read the post again, I noticed that Dori didn’t really intend for everyone to share the misery and hopelessness of their personal monsters. She actually wanted to ask people how they overcame their personal monsters. Well, funny enough I had done a very good job of describing a few of my many personal monsters (like self-deprecation), but never reflected on the positive side of how I managed the monsters. So I finally did get Dori’s attention, and her advice is a comment on my last post: “try venting more here.” Hmm…she’s right, isn’t the definition of blogs nowadays something like “a publicly-available personal space to vent”? Ok, in all seriousness, I do think I could exploit this area to talk more about my going-ons. And perhaps it will do me so good to suffer the process of writing it down–it inevitable causing “emotional processing” as well. Although the public-personal contradiction is still disconcerting to me, but the good news is that hardly anyone reads this blog (oh, hi Dori!). So let’s try it out!

This New Year’s I made a unwritten resolution to myself to work my ass off on the thesis and graduate on time. Well, it’s been a month and a half already and the upside is that I did spend some of that time on the thesis. The downside is that I found several new addictive distractions. For one, I have started developing an extension to an open-source software project to make a recipe management website. I started out secretly coding by night, but it’s spilled over to daytime coding and now appears to be my reason for waking up and breathing. The fact is that even though I want to scold myself for sidelining my thesis to second-place, I can’t bring myself to crush my renewed interest in programming. How could a sudden spurt of interest in object-oriented programming, web development, and context-specific natural language processing algorithms be a bad thing?  Especially at the same time that I have decided to start my job hunt and focus on software development jobs?  In fact, the timing has been great.  I just had a job interview the other day and was given PHP code to decipher.  My personal monster of self-doubt jumped out, but I slayed it with the confidence I built up in the last few weeks of coding (where I happen to be using PHP, no doubt).  That was a great feeling and totally made up for the fact that I couldn’t be considered for the job due to not being available until August.  Then again, that was also a reminder that I gotta graduate before I can work and make everyday a programming binge.

The cool thing is that New Year’s is coming again, so I get to start all over with my resolutions.  That’s right, the Chinese New Year’s starts on the 18th.  So how should I revise my resolutions?  First of all, on the thesis I have only one matra from now on: “the only good thesis is a done thesis.”  Secondly, on the big profound question of life after graduation, I am trying to rexamine the criteria I have in mind for my future job.  The two biggest worries? (1)  All my linguistics knowledge will end up wasting away. (2) Work visas and lack of job selection will force me and Goldie to separate living arrangments again.  Both of these need some elaboration, but I gotta save it for later and get some sleep first.

Once again…. hi Dori!!