more pictures on 9/26/09

I went to the industrial area near the pearl, and down under Burnside bridge, riding my bike today

Photo Blog of downtown today

toxic lobster

Bike
my shadow

some stuff under a bridge

bound to happn

this guy said he was just waiting for the train cause he liked to watch them go by



down by the water front

homeless couple that said they'd been married for 20 years, the guy said his wife would flash me if I took her picture, I said I was happy to take the picure but declined the peep show

police horses

my favorite building in down town

old graffiti that someone decided to preserve and now people accept as art

Rich people's apartments on the waterfront

makeing sense of it all

A year after I stopped talking with Rye, almost to the day, she got in contact with me again. It seams that when you are on facebook then decide to cancel your account, your profile is saved. So if you come back years later and reinstate your profile it'll still be there waiting for you with all your old friends and all your old history.

When I finally broke ties with Rye I erased her from everything, her pictures, her messages, removed her from messenger. But I didn't delete her as a friend on facebook because at the time she had canceled her profile. So a year later suddenly I started getting her status updates.

I was in the midst of camp so I wasn't checking the computer all that often but when I saw her profile again I was shocked to say the least, it was like a ghost had suddenly appeared on the screen. Within moments I immediately deleted her and all was fine despite the fact that I spent a day feeling like shit.

But a few days later, I got a friend request and it was her, asking to be friends with me, I spent another day agonizing over what I should do, I didn't think it was a good idea to be friends with her and yet I felt like I really really wanted to click yes. And in the end my curiosity won out, and I added her again as a friend. Actually I felt really relieved after that, I didn't talk with her for quite some time, camp ended and all I had asked her was why she added me as a friend, her response was “because you deleted me”

That was fine for a while, but as time went on and things in my personal life got a little hectic old memories started being drummed up, and I started feeling very angry towards her again, I was getting so sick of these old scars jumping in and ruining my life, I was getting sick of feeling so hurt all the time, and so one night, I just wrote her an e-mail, not a pleasant e-mail, but an e-mail.

we sent unpleasantries back and forth a little until finally we started getting into why all this had come about. I asked her how she could do something like that to me, how she could hurt me like she did.

She said she was sorry, kinda, not really, but talked about being young and stupid and wishing she could have done things differently. But more than that she said this. (pardon her English, it's her second language and was texted via phone, so it's a mix of text speech, typos and funky grammar.

“Tianyi (that's me) i didn't leave u for anybody else but myself! it might sound crazy, but I would have been damaged if i didn't. Remember how we had a fight the nite Tina's (her friend) dad treated us 2 the hotpot (dinner). I feel like ur a virus spreading into every single bits of my life. I was scared and didn't know what i wanna do. Its not that i didn't want u 2 be part of my life. but ur jus so overwhelming!instinctively i wanna resist! it got worse after u went back US, its almost like im living my life for u! it wasnt what i can handle, u know that. “

now for one this is the most she's ever given me as far as a reason for why things happened they way they did, I responded that if she had told me this back then I could have tried to change, I would have listened to her, or at the very least she could have just broken it off with me if she was so unhappy, I mean anything would have been better then her cheating on me and dragging me along for 3 months.

But more importantly than that, it really throws something in my face, something I've become aware of to a point, that is I do do that, I try to control people, I do want to be all encompassing in the lives of the girls I date, I get overly attached too quickly I suppose and eventually I suffer a lot for it. To be fair it's gotten way worse after the whole thing with Rye, because I've gotten so paranoid, and so terrified thinking any girl could do that again, especially since in my head I was always thinking that somehow I'd done something to drive her away and I didn't know what it was so I was sure I would do it again, and to a large degree that does tend to happen, I do drive girlfriends away.

But this is important to me now because for the first time I feel like I have a clear view of what is wrong with me, and it gives me something to actually work on. I mean, I am a passionate person, I like to get excited and dive into things that interest me, and maybe that's great for things like traveling, where I can just jump into a new country with both feet and just love it to death, and maybe that's great for things like cooking, where I can spend days at a time perfecting some intensely difficult recipe or cooking technique that most people never try. I an eccentric and powerful and I boulder through things if they give me trouble, and that's how I really come to get totally enmeshed and excited in things. But I need to learn to resist that when I am with a girl.

This is highly important because I like strong girls, I like women who have strong opinions and strong minds. Women who are brave and powerful, and obviously those are not the type of girl to just stand being bowled over by my ambitions. Namely my ambitions to fall hopelessly in love. That is going to scare girls like that especially, I think the kind of girl who just stands there at takes it, the kind of girl who would just be knocked over then get towed behind me as I go on my path, that is not the kind of girl I want, it's not who I'm going to love.

So what now? I'm not super happy at this point in my life, this loneliness thing is something I've got to deal with, not just that I have no girlfriend, but also simply the fact that I have no close friends to hang out with. I'm learning to be ok with that. I want a girlfriend, but I don't know if any relationship I try for is going to work if I don't get to know that over powering part of me more, and keep it in check when it starts to go crazy. So now, I'm in stasis. But for the first time I honestly feel like there's some kind of path for me, for the first time since the shit with Rye hit the fan I actually feel like I can finally see the purpose to it all. I can finally see the lesson that is available for me to learn for all this, and finally see how this can make me stronger if I let it and that's so much more than I've had up till now when all I saw was senseless useless pain.

Love

I went on a run tonight and as often happens when I’m out on the street in the dark I started thinking. This time I started thinking about what attracts me to a girl. I started thinking about the difference between the surface person, the one we show to each other and the inner person, the one we keep to ourselves because it is scary to let people see it, but also perhaps because we actually have not figured out the right way to express it. And to have someone misunderstand that, misinterpret that inner being, would be so much worse than if they had never been exposed to it at all.

Criticism is the most profound mask. It is a shield that lets us hold strongly to our outer selves while not letting anyone see that inner bit of us. It is probably the most superficial piece of ourselves, the things we don’t like, which makes it a great starting point. It is much easier to have a conversation with someone and find common ground around the things we dislike rather than the things we like. I can make a long list of the things I hate, and go on at length about them, but I can feel myself seize up at the prospect of explaining the things I love. The things I love are personal, and I’d hate for you to misunderstand them.

I don’t mean the things that we like though, the things we want. These are not us. I could tell you I like chocolate cake, that I’m craving ice cream. I can tell you how I would kill for a Ferrari or that I just have to move out of my parents house. Those things aren’t loves, they are needs that of course are not needed at all. If you asked a drug addict what he loved, and he said “I love heroine” you would probably just think he’d missed the point, he doesn’t love it, he needs it.

What I love? I love cooking, I love art, I love myth and stories, and religion. These things are things that drive me. They don’t pull me towards them, they push me forward, drive me towards higher and better being. This is what love is. You see when you love something it is something that makes you a better person.

But I don’t talk about love between people yet. Love between people seems complicated, so often we fall in love with the mask, with the superficial aspects of a person. And most of the time it becomes love of the former category, the love of needing, need to be with that person, do anything to be with that person, like addicts to a fix. Love of a mask is only a love of appearance. To love something like dance there is no choice, dance is not a thing, there is no body to hold on to, no cemented figure, dance is an expression, an experience, that is why it is easy to find the purest love in it. Same with art, same with anything of that caliber. Of course some people would spend a billion dollars on a painting by some famous artist effectively turning pure love of art into the need to have of pornography. What is art but that which afflicts us with awe, and what is porn but that which drives us to desire.

But when a person loves something tangible it can become very hard to see which is which, a person may love a car, may love it truly and thoroughly and spend hours a day washing it, working on the engine, driving it to feel it move under his hands, but a man who simple wants it will buy it, and spend hours making it pretty spend hours driving it around town. If the actions are the same but the motivation is different then it is not love, if he drives it around so that others may see it, if he cleans it because he wants it to be as perfect as the day he got it forever, if his motivation is to have, rather than to love the machine. Love will take the man who has the car to greater heights. And someday when he no longer has the car he will hurt, but his love of that car with have truly moved his life onward, it will have been about something. The man who simply wanted to have it will lose the car someday and be angry, angry at the money he lost, at the cost of a new car, but his life will not have changed, he will be the same person after the car that he was in the beginning.

When a person attacks something, says that’s too ugly, that’s too stupid, that’s too annoying, then you must see that these things are just nothing, they are not the real person, they are just a shield that they have constructed, but when some tells you about what they love, describes with every word they can muster the feeling they get when they are acting, dancing, painting, running, working or anything, and then their words trail off because they find there is no words, there never could be any words to express what it feels like to love something like they love, that is true love.

When a person is being drawn towards something and they devote their path towards getting there, getting money, getting the girl, getting a big house, getting what ever it is, and then that thing disappears, they are devastated, they are lost, their lives fall apart. But when a person has true love, love of a woman, love of art, love of life, love that dose not pull them put pushes them forward, towards the unknowns, towards faith and something they can’t know or explain yet. then even when that things disappears, they do not fall back, yes there is pain, with love there is always pain, but they will not collapse into nothing, they will not lose their life, they will see that they are strong for the love they were lucky enough to experience.

If a person tells you they don’t like something that you like a lot, and you get angry at them see it for what it really is, shields clashing against each other. Masks calling each other ugly. It is not really you, and it is not really them. This is why love exists beyond those things. This is why love seems so mysterious. When a person loves, wholly and truly, then you see them truly for the first time if you are able to look.

I once heard someone say “love is not a two person thing, it takes a lot of work to come to a place where you are capable of love, and if someone loves you back that is wonderful, but the other person is not what makes you love, it’s yourself, it’s your own soul that is loving. To accomplish that even for a moment, regardless of what anyone else responds with, is a miracle. If you love someone it says far more about you than it can say about them” Because when we love we are true, we can’t describe it, we can’t explain it, but when you love you are put in a place where you are utterly you, the deepest, strongest you there can be.