i was dead tired, but it seemed like it's been awhile since i was able to stay up late without having to worry about waking up and getting to work on time. i was late for the first time today, and my boss was waiting for me in the driveway. we had an appointment at 8am but i was 20 min. late. so bad, but i had such a shitty day on thursday i for some reason really didnt sweat it.
im still tired, but dont feel like going to sleep. i looked through 3 old photo albums. i havent gone through a family photo album since high school. funny tho, when i was a little kid i used to look thru them almost weekly. 2 of the albums i saw were from our days in the midwest. i was bout 4 years old, my brother 2. not to be full of myself, but i was a damn cute kid. my little bro was cuter but i was the fun one that did funny things. a young, 28 year old father, trying to make ends meet. a young 28 year old mother trying her best to raise two young kids in a totally foreign country. dang, my dad was freakin' skinny. looking at him now, its quite shocking. he look so young and naive. but he had attitude adn he carried himself well. he was always well-liked by everybody, and he always got peoples' respect.
role model, yes. down to the part about being a functional alcoholic. ive recently come to terms with my alcoholic tendencies, and am beginning to embrace it and use it for good. reminds me of former LA city councilmember mike hernandez who we interviewed for our war on drugs documentary. he was claiming that civilization wouldnt be where it is today without all the alcoholics and addicts. he was citing unspecified studies that found that a lot of the most important figures in history were alcoholic/addicts. these studies claim that on average alcoholics are more intelligent, bigger risk takers, and usually more successful. now thats a recipe for success, wouldnt you say? it also reminds me of a q&a with prof. presti, and someone asked about how extremely intelligent people and the great minds of our history had self-destructive tendencies, especially when it came to substances. a bit dumbing down, wouldnt you say? i agree but have yet to come up with a satisfactory answer. ignorance is bliss, but some of us are just too damn curious for our own good. we try to go back by dumbing ourselves down, but curiosity ends up killing the cat for some.
photos that i realize are still engraved in my head. gosh, i used to really look thru those albums so much as a kid. i used to study every detail of every frame and think up stories and little obsessive compulsive patterns and rules that only i could see. looking at them now is confusing me. that kid in those pictures had no idea wat he was in for. good and the bad, but he had no fucking idea. im a better man for it, but i still long for those truly blissful days. i always hate on my friends cuz they grew up in this bland suburban nightmare. i climbed trees, dug holes, romped through forests, caught frogs, caught fireflies, climbed fire escapes even though i had to jump up to grab the ladder and climb up to a place where i knew i would get in trouble if caught. fought black kids that punked my lil brother, white boys that tried to punk me. picked on indian kids cuz they showed a weakness that i could cruelly exploit. although im being judgmental i think of suburban life consisitng of going to your nearest liquor store and buying candy, playing video games, spending money, growing into a consumer, not a person. spend money to past the time.
i moved around a lot, on average once every 1.35 years. 11 cities but moved more times than that. within cities, neighboring cities, a lot of new schools. adjusted ok, but my lil brother sometimes had tougher times. he was the joker, the clown as a kid, and its so funny to see how he's so fukkin serious now. super christian, upstanding citizen. but through it all family was family. must have been tough on my parents. they had me when they were 24, which is next year for me. im sure id probably grow up real quick then, but im spoiled. one thing about me and my generation is that we have things very easy, my mom tells me. when i think of what my parents went through i can see the frustration, the heartbreak. second hand me down clothes, rented furniture. minorities, a literal speck on the demographical map. stares, whispers. but they braved it through it all. i feel so guilty cuz i did have it so easy. i was too young to know the hardships of carrying green cards marked 'ALIEN' trying to make ends meet with limited funds and spoiling the kids to shield them from what they went through. given the situation, i grew up kinda spoiled.
bittersweet. that's how look back at it. when i was in preschool, which meant probably iowa, there was this plastic lawnmowing type toy. push it along with a stick connected to a dome with 2 wheels. there were a bunch of little plastic balls that popped around in there as you pushed it along. it's all i would describe and talk about to my parents. one day the family was in k-mart or some store and i saw it. i wanted it. my friends had it. my dad said no. i threw a tantrum and my dad got pissed at me and yelled and/or hit me. some type of hardline discipline. i knew it was probably mostly out of frustration. it was obvious i was dying to have this toy. what father wouldnt buy it? not this father. he wanted to, but he couldnt. it fell in danger of spoiling the kid with unnecessary things. not with rented furniture, on a full-time grad student budget, affordable housing for grad students with families. mom didnt work, barely spoke english and had her hands full properly raising two young boys. GOD, tell me how they did it. my mom retold me this story a couple years ago. her voice started cracking, saying in korean how when she thinks of those stories and those days, ga seum apuh, her heart still aches. i probably turned to my mom at the time to see if she could somehow change my dad's mind but she could only keep quiet.
i think of these memories that i bury deep and i think how im such an ungrateful bitch. how dare i lust after getting a head unit for my sports car. this is my second car now and ive never had a nice cd player. always wanted one, but never got around to it. i think i just kinda feel kinda guilty. my parents would say that a cd player was a waste of money; i had the radio and most of my car trips would be short. they dont understand, i would think. i was a teenager discovering music. such a big, important thing it was, that i was. cd players were certainly affordable now, never really worried about money now. didnt live in that 4 bedroom house in san jose with the pool no more, but living in condominiums in orange county wasnt bad at all. but still any mention of me buying a cd player for my car was always scoffed at by my parents. focus my energies on bigger things my dad would say. this was a pure luxury item that i was brainwashed into wanting. they werent being stingy or cheap, just overly practical. old habits die hard. years of having to be overly practical just to survive does that. makes you wise. i had the radio after all. and the radio is what i've listened to since i got my license at 16. thats 7 years. i had a tape player after all. well, not in my civic but still. i have a tape player in my prelude and i only had one tape in that unit for probably like 2 years. gangstarr's 'moment of truth' was the only tape that played in that deck those years. the booklet cover in the tape case got faded from the sun.
i think that's why i never bought a head unit. surely i could afford it. deep down i was just listening to my parents. being overly practical also makes you wise. i had the radio after all.
