Yabot the Robot

The Personal Statement

September 18, 2011

It can be about anything.  A goal, a struggle, an important experience, a triumphant story about rising out of poverty and gang violence and going to college to study Psychology and becoming a family therapist.

But: it can only be 500 words.

And if you’re me, and you’re writing about perfectionism and anxiety and how you try to deal with these things and overcome them and how you think you are overcoming them, the great irony is that I stare at the same text document for hours and hours and cannot type a single sentence, and that is because I am a perfectionist, and I get extremely anxious and sometimes I am incredibly incapable of dealing with these things.

I am not sure how to make my life sound authentic, meaningful, compassionate, mature, creative, curious, thoughtful, candid, tactful, independent — not least of all because I don’t want to use any of those vapid words.

I apologize Fulbright Commission, but I don’t know exactly what I want to do with my future.

I have always aimed toward being a writer, but recently writing has been such a source of frustration in my life, and I don’t want the only thing that makes me happy to be the end product.  If the process doesn’t satisfy me, I’m going to spend a lot of my life miserable as a writer.  I can’t guarantee that I’ll be a successful teacher in Germany and I don’t know how I’ll use the experience when I get back home.  I don’t know that I’ve risen out of any particularly detrimental circumstances, and I’m not even sure if I’ve adequately used the myriad opportunities I’ve been given — I know I’ve squandered thousands of hours, and at least half a dozen just today.

But — and I’ve been warned against using hackneyed endings in the personal statement, but this is my blog and its an expression of the pithy contradictions that I use daily to describe myself — I’m trying.  I’m really trying.

Haven’t Been Sleeping Lately

September 16, 2011

It’s the second night in a row that I have been up past two ante meridiem for no reason other than I’m simply not sleeping.

I lie down, the lights are off, Ira Glass tells me about some camp counselors — Notes From Camp is my podcast comfort food — and as I feel the chemicals rushing into my brain that I absolutely recognize to be sleep-promoting, I bite down really hard on my teeth and wake up coughing, struggling to breathe, certain that someone is in my house right outside my bedroom door.

Why wouldn’t there be?

If you’ve never been afraid of sleep, you aren’t an insomniac.

People throw insomnia around casually nowadays — or maybe they always have, I’m not an expert or anything — but if you’re sitting in bed and you get tired and that doesn’t make you worry (perhaps for an unapparent reason), doesn’t make your heart race and your throat close and your mind lament another sleepless night — which only makes things worse, people will tell you, but you already know — then, then, then: you aren’t an insomniac, no matter how cool it is to be more tired than your really tired colleague.

I’m not sure that I’m an insomniac either though, and so I’m going to sleep.

Two Unrelated, Short Anecdotes

September 14, 2011

It’s hard to imagine that something so beautiful, so useful, so satisfying exists.

I found elegance wrapped up in sheer practicality here in my house in Dresden: moist, antibacterial, watermelon-scented toilet paper.  Sure, it’s probably for kids, but who says responsible, hard-working adults don’t also get bum rash from time to time?

I used it, and not only because I love the smell of watermelons emanating from my oft-forgotten side, but also because the advertisement on the front of the package would have even the least adventurous bathroom-goer yearning for its magic.  A small sister knocks on the door of the bathroom, but it’s not going to open.

Why?  Because inside sits the most content little boy, reading some comics and smiling gleefully — not on account of Garfield, but rather because, as we can see from his wandering eyes, he’s already excitedly anticipating the moment he gets to wipe without fear and with the perfect amount of moisture.  What a country, what a city, what a concept!

Kids in the school stare at me.

I think the word stare needs to be emphasized here, because this isn’t surreptitious staring, like how junior high boys quickly gaze at the “budding” parts of the “flowers” that later bloom in a noctural-emitters dreamscape and then turn their heads away to look instead at the fire alarm, which is, like, what they always were planning to look at.

The kids at the elementary school will turn around in their seats and look at me for multiple minutes — and in the case of one little third-grade girl, for pretty much an entire Stunde (45-minute class period).  As adults, we have to (try) remember how absolutely magical novelty can be, since we’re all entrenched in routine and, most of us anyway, take extraordinary measures to ensure that everything remains ordinary: plan the commute according to traffic patterns, buy the groceries for an entire week of meals, prepare an emergency kit, make lists, usw.

For the kids, it’s absolute bizzarre and rad and madcap that I’m going to be there for a year, that I sit in a desk by them, that I speak English without a German accent, that I like to dance when we play songs about counting from 1-20, that I high five them for doing good work.  I like that, and while I know the staring will (and must) stop, I definitely want to keep the curiosity about my presence there, because I think my classes are going to speak some wonderful English at the end of the year thanks to the spirited attention they give me.

On Writing, Well…

September 13, 2011

I went to London recently to visit Lily.

I must mention that I am basically a master of island-based underground transportation systems.  I finally learned how to bend my knees so that I do not even have to hold on to the support poles.  People were impressed, trust me.  And imagine, all of my successes are floating around somewhere on a CCTV (closed-circuit television) hard drive that contain a million fleeting images of me that will never be seen again unless it turns out that one of Bin Laden’s Facebook friends was riding on the Piccadilly line with me.

As a side note, if I ever live for an extended amount of time in London, I expect someone to steal some CCTV footage of me and make a revealing documentary that chronicles the numerous ways in which I fake confidence in public situations.  An example:  I nearly walked into the dark tunnel made only for trains and people who work with trains, only to turn around and see a hundred and fifty people looking at me as I turned around, likely assuming I had a bomb in my overstuffed messenger bag. My response was simply to point at the corner, nodding and smiling at it, as if it were my intended destination all along, and then wait there for a few minutes until the station was empty.

Right before I left for Europe, I read a chunk of Mark Twain’s The Innocent’s Abroad, and, to be honest, I sort of hoped that my blog (romantically, I refer to it sometimes as a ‘travelogue’) would have the same sort of energy, insight, and humor.

Instead, I have two posts, twenty titles, three half-written attempts, and a couple hundred pages of daily scribbles in a red journal, mostly consisting of descriptions about mundane daily activities and the newest symptoms of my anxiety attacks: pg 12. chest pain; pg. 34 racing heart beat; pg. 70 tremors in face.  I have many pages of complaints about my handwriting, pages of German vocabulary words, pages of great insight, and a page with a large map of Bonn.  I have been thinking, recently, about a fixing a note to the front of it: DO NOT PUBLISH.

And really, I think that this sort of fear is exactly what paralyzes me from writing — I worry that everything that I write could be read, and thus must be perfect.  As a result, I write absolutely nothing, or when I do write, I feel like someone is looking over my shoulder, so I censor myself; flipping through the pages of my journal, I feel disingenuous, then boring, and, for an occasional few seconds, very brilliant.

I’m nearly finished reading Das bin doch ich, which will be the first German novel that I ever read in its entirety.

I picked it up in a train station a couple of months ago, mostly because of the text on the back:

Ein Mann schreibt einen Roman.  Der Mann heißt Thomas Glavinic, und dieser Mann will das, was alle wollen: Erfolg.  Er will einen Verlag, einen Preis, Geld.  Was er hat, ist ein Manuskript, Kopfschmerzen und leider zumeist unerträgliche Mitmenschen.

(A man writes a novel.  The man is named Thomas Glavinic, and he wants what everyone wants: Success.  He wants a publisher, a prize, money.  What he has is a manuscript, headaches, and most of all, unfortunately, intolerable fellow human beings.)

The word that struck me the most, at the time, was Kopfschmerzen, which means headaches, because for about four months, I had been experiencing daily headaches, induced by stress and anxiety.  As I have read the book, a lot more of the author’s life reflects my own: he is a hypochondriac, is jealous of Jonathan Franzen, plays Civilization, fears speaking a foreign language imperfectly, and has a best friend who is much more talented than himself.

He’s also unlike me in many ways: he drinks an excessive amount of wine, has a kid, and has written several novels.

Reading the book has been extremely encouraging for me, first because it is always nice to know that there are people suffering in similar ways (Glavinic’s forced irony and overwhelming fear on a broken ski lift is so immediately recognizable), but more importantly because it has given me a portrait of a writer who has so many idiosyncrasies, and not a single one of them seems to be a colossal interference to his ability to write prose.

I read lists and lists of articles on the processes of various writers, and it always leads me to think that using Joyce’s pen or Eggers’ paper or Ishiguro’s desk would make me begin to write, but the truth is, Vonnegut’s seminar on writing — I think it was Vonnegut, anyway — was probably the most useful.  He addresses the class: “So, you all want to write, huh?”  The class nods eagerly in affirmation.  “What the hell are you doing here?  Go home and write something.”

I have no idea whether writing can be taught, learned, or fortuitously found like a coin under a sofa cushion is the subject of a thousand interesting articles, but I guess what I admire about Glavinic is that he somehow writes, despite, or perhaps as a necessary counterbalance to, his constant fear and wandering mind.

All of this brings me to an observation about myself and a specific goal that I’m going to attempt this month.  The observation: I am a perfectionist.  I have known this for quite some time, and it has always been the biggest hindrance to my attempts at writing — for instance, every November I participate in National Novel Writing Month, a ‘contest’ in which one strives to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which amounts to a little over 1600 words a day.

To say that I ‘participate’ is perhaps an overstatement, since I usually lose steam only a few days into the project, after the eight or ten thousands words that I achieve do not seem to be heading in the direction of world-changing.  This past November, I lost with only a title, since I deleted my first sentence over a hundred times.

As I told Aidan last night, “I only like things when they are finished, and then, really, who likes when things are finished?”  I have never been fond of the idea of ‘drafts’ — with essays and short stories and blog posts, I edit as I write, and when things aren’t turning out, I simply delete whatever I have written.  I do something similar with old journals that I find: when I am embarrassed by what I have written — either the content or the quality of the prose — I tear out pages and throw them away.

And thus follows the goal: tomorrow marks the first day of Script Frenzy, a 30 day challenge to write a 100 page script.

My goal for this project is twofold: first, of course, is to work on the screenplay idea that has been sloshing around in my head for sometime, but second is to try to learn how to — prepare for cliche — appreciate the journey.  The process.  The steps.  The path.  I do not know a better way to formulate my wish except that I want to find some sort of pleasure in being stuck, because, after all, when I have a finished screenplay in my hands, what am I going to want except to write another one?

I believe it was Heidegger (though, who knows, it could have been Sartre or any host of other existentialists) that wrote dramatically about the moment that we purchase something, and how at the moment it becomes ours, it loses its shine immediately because we realize that it is not the object that completes us.  I imagine that the same sort of disappointment accompanies the elation one feels after finally selling a work of fiction.

Thus, I am going to spend the next thirty days training myself to become content with producing an utterly disastrous screenplay, and try to apply the challenge to other parts of my life as well: learning German, for instance, in such a way that I don’t yearn every day to be fluent, but only to learn something new — and yet, I know that the romantic ideal of doing something for it’s own sake is quite unattainable, but for the purpose of calming my mind, which yearns hopelessly for the best and fears constantly the worst, I am going to strive to occupy myself a bit more with the present: a single box of a Sudoku puzzle, the walk from my school to the bus stop, a single line of dialogue in my screenplay.

Or maybe just a single bite of Mandelhörnchen, the absolute best pastry in Germany.

When Life Gives You Cucumbers, Make Piccadillys

September 10, 2011

There’s a spot on the ground in the British Airways terminal of London Heathrow airport where the words “keep waiting” are written in dark red ink.

It is not the advice of the airline, which is so keen to give instruction — no liquids, stand here, etc. (as a side note, the security line is one of those rare places where the ‘No Shoes, No Service’ rule is inverted as such at LAX: “Take off your shoes, or we will assume you have a bomb in them.”) — but rather, those two words, “keep waiting,” are the scrawl of another wise, rather Stoic airline customer, who realized that there is no other choice — when your flight has been canceled, when you are a stranger in a strange land, when you need a hotel and a flight and all you have  is an invalid boarding pass — but to play by the rules and keep waiting.

The spot is on a white tile, in Zone G, on the third story of Terminal 5, Heathrow Airport, London, England, the World, the Milky Way, the Universe… etc.  — is it permissible to use et cetera after the Universe?

I spent a great portion of a day last week in Terminal 5: the mammoth structure of reinforced steel and unnecessary glass represented the beginning of my travel’s abroad, the first European ground that my feet had ever touched, and the romantic hope that all traveler’s and human being’s vainly attach themselves to, that there is better than here. [Vainly, and perhaps wrongly, as John Darnielle beautifully illustrates in The Mountain Goats’ series of ‘Going to…’ songs.]

I was willing to indulge in this notion, despite the fact that I recently read Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, which has an insight that is mundane but elusive: wherever you are, wherever you run to, wherever you travel, you’re there.

* * *

I left San Jose, pale and gray, in the middle of the day, headed for Bonn, Germany.

My parents dropped me off at the airport, cried, and then returned back to our home, with its new porch and old dog, surrounded by our neighbors, who I had breakfasted [I’m already in the habit of the German past tense, which often takes the form of ge-stem-t, or gefrühstückt for ‘ate breakfast’] with the day before, and perhaps took a long, contemplative look at our cuckoo clock, a consumer relic from the black forest, and the only thing in our house, apart from our ancestors’ genetic material, that is remotely German.  Cuckoo!  Cuckoo!  Po-te-weet!

I’m not sure if it even makes sound anymore.

And then my mind shifted into a terrible mode brought about by modern air travel, and mode that exists in between California and Germany, in between vacation and school, or, as the old man in the most terrible Indiana Jones movie to date says, I was in the space between spaces [This is Crystal Skull, of course.  Does that old man have a name?  Probably.].

I became the sort of person that motivation speakers and postmodern faux-losophers diametrically despise, insofar as I was neither carpe-ing the diem nor enjoying the present moment. I was thinking only of the arrival and not of the journey. I fly to get somewhere, just as I often eat to fill up and run to slim down. In the terminal or in the sky, I feel like I am absolutely nowhere — the whole science of flying is an absolute mystery to me, so, just as I close my eyes when I start a car, to the keep the magic magical, I stumble and murmur through the experience of flying as if my eyes were shut, letting the security lines and 747’s and complimentary soft drinks act as an otherworldly vessel, and when I metaphorically open my eyes, I am here, at the place that was once there, and thus the former here that I had escaped becomes the there that I’m slowly, unconsciously pursuing.

* * *

I looked out the window of the plane, but couldn’t tell that it was 6:30 in the morning, or 10:30 in the evening.

It depended on if you were like me, and had already twisted your watch to agree with Big Ben, or if you were one to imagine oneself constantly in Los Angeles until the moment the wheels smack against the ground in “London” Heathrow Airport.

I hadn’t slept at all, but I had finished Prosper Mérimée’s novella, Carmen, and, whether by coincidence or because I am so apt to see my life reflected in great works of literature, I was seated next to a subtle, flirtatious French girl — a year or two younger than I — who, continuously throughout our flight, fell asleep on my shoulder, woke up to apologize, repositioned her strange, two-headed stuffed-animal pillow, and then fell asleep on me again.

It was at this time in the morning — equally evening and morning, or perhaps equally neither — that I noticed that she and I were wearing the same style of red Converse shoes, hers new and laced loosely, but with a double-knot, and mine, not actually old, but certainly pale and faded, tied extremely tightly and tapping nervously, anxiously.  It was, however, just a coincidence, and it turned out to be the only thing that we had in common, while we had many divergences: she liked to watch videos on her iPod, while I liked to play music; she was able to consume the ‘roast beef’ that we were served, while I was hardly able to look at it; she liked to own great works of literature, and I liked to read them.

And it was with her desperate, silly head rested upon my shoulder, with the chair of the person in front of me leaned back into my face, with the map on the wall displaying our plane inching ever-forward over Ontario, with our plane propelling itself at six hundred miles per hour, and somehow constantly at a steady altitude of thirty-six thousand feet, with a man playing Tetris a row in front of me and a woman complaining about her broken arm rest behind me, with three hundred people around me, asleep and dreaming or awake and dreaming, that I missed my home, my family, my friends, the ground, a pair of pants I’d left behind, and especially, my girlfriend, whose head, covered with flaxen hair [There’s no better way to describe hair you love than to declare it flaxen, after all — even if it’s technically not blonde.], I would have given anything to have resting upon my shoulder in place of the French traveler who, for that night, called it home.

* * *

Three hundred people cannot escape a plane as quickly as they’d like to.

None of them can stand the in between.  The flight attendants demand that we do not unbuckle our seat belts until the Captain has turned off the sign, but we all unbuckle them despite that, because the Captain and the flight attendants don’t understand us, because our notion of the ‘in between’ is their home, and our home, likewise, their ‘in between.’

And I did eventually disembark from the plane, and with barely enough time to change terminals and get on another plane from London to Düsseldorf, but it turns out that the thirty-six minutes that I spent in a hurry were — is this situational irony, or just frustrating coincidence? — an absolute waste, because all flights from Heathrow were grounded due to snow, which is the British word for “the inadequate distribution of runway cleaning resources.”

To bring this to a quick conclusion, which is the fortunate ability of a writer discussing a past that took altogether too long in the present, I waited and waited and waited at Heathrow, for a new flight, for a bottle of water, for my luggage, and for a hotel, a hotel that was not in London, but rather in Reading, which broke my heart, because I spent 24 hours in a city where my girlfriend was studying, but did not see her for a moment, could not hug her or kiss her or run my hand through that flaxen hair, [Very much akin, I think, to landing on the moon and watching the movie Apollo 13 in the rocket, and then returning home; or, more reasonably, like the time I was within a thousand feet of Times Square on New Year’s Eve but watched the festivities on a television].

And I thought about this as I slept under a desk in a hotel room, and as I was driven back to Heathrow airport by a very skilled man who could play games on his iPhone while driving, and as I boarded the plane and flew away, to Germany, and when I landed, I thought again of that tile, in Heathrow Airport, that asked me to ‘keep waiting,’ and it’s good and needed advice when you’re frustrated in an airport, but as I wait to see the person that I love again, I don’t need to be told to keep waiting, because I’d wait forever even with just the vain hope of a chance of a possibility — but fortunately, I also have a plane ticket to London in a few weeks.

‘Til then.