Field Notes

Thoughts from my daily life to inspire me on bankrupt mornings.

Purpose of this blog:

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…”

— Joan Didion

“It’s better to be wrong then to be vague.” — A wise man

I stubbed my toe on a wooden box.
I yelped and kicked it in frustration.
Why must we blame things to feel better?

People are like peaches. Sweet on the inside but fragile and easily bruised on the outside. I want to be a watermelon.

Mo’ money, mo’ problems. No money, even more problems.

New York Times headline reads, “We sleep to forget”.
I could have told you that.

From a Roger Ebert review of L’Avventura: “It is about the sense in which all of the characters are on the brink of disappearance; their lives are so unreal and their relationships so tenuous they can barely be said to exist. They are like bookmarks life: holding places, but not involved in the story…Why don’t we have movies like “L’Avventura” anymore? Because we don’t ask the same kinds of questions anymore. We have replaced the “purpose of life” with the “choice of lifestyle.”

My heart is as full as my fridge.

Connection leads to learning and learning leads to change and change is frightening.

From an obit about Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Alex Tizon:

“Alex’s wife, Melissa Tizon, told me recently that her husband was always impatient with small talk, because he believed that all people had within them an epic story, and he wanted to hear those epic stories — and then help tell them to the world. “Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story,” he liked to say.”

Honesty without tact is cruelty.

We define ourselves.
But our relationships refine us.
— Van Gogh

“My parents often say that when they were children, they didn’t have cell phones or digital cameras and they didn’t think that society would change so much in just a few decades. There’s a future we can’t imagine as adults. That’s why I think there aren’t any dreams that can’t come true. Dreams end when we throw away hope.”

Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.

“I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out,” she says, “but I can’t disagree with your experience.”

“[T]he positioning of Asian Americans as the least oppressed in dominant discourses on race…puts Asian Americans in a position where the only choices we have are to be in collusion with white supremacy against other people of color, or an ally to another community. Whether villains or allies, what both positions have in common is that they are tangential — we are marginalized, we marginalize our own experience and our own communities. It is tremendously important to work in solidarity with other communities. But we are more than allies. More than villains. We need nuanced, even empathetic, critical examination of our people and our experience.” — Bao Phi, A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” — Haruki Murakami

In a sing-songy voice you sang,
‘You make even the mundane fun.’
And without you knowing,
I fell in love with you all over again.

“What makes music beautiful is the distance between one note and another. What makes speech eloquent is the appropriate pause between words. From time to time we should take a breath and notice the silence between sounds.” ― Haemin Sunim