I started this morning with a defrag. That’s not some weird type of espresso or hangover cure and it’s not some horrible euphemism for whatever bodily processes that may take place in the morning. I literally sat down at a computer, clicked Disk Defragmenter and then shuffled off to work. You know how some people cannot stand a messy room or a sink full of dirty dishes? I cannot stand a slow computer. I sit down at friend’s computers and, without them asking, I tinker with things.

SR 520 Evergreen Point Floating Bridge

On Saturday, I was backing out of a parking spot. So was some lady opposite me. I didn’t notice her until I was part way out and, in hindsight, I just kind of stupidly sat there and wondered if she saw me. When it became obvious that she had not seem me, I should have honked. Instead I tried to make the car go forward but I was not fast enough. She scratched my bumper. She was apologetic and kind of sweet. I was not angry but I don’t know, I was all business. We exchanged phone numbers, I took a quick photo of the damage. Now that the repair estimate has come back for $640, I feel kind of bad for her. It would be easier on my conscience to take money from an asshole and not a sweet Japanese lady.

Last night was dining with Diana. A sushi restaurant in Madison Park where I stupidly thought I had the palate to appreciate expensive stuff like delicate little pieces of foie gras. She spent $20 on dinner, I spent closer to $50. The cheaper stuff was actually really good so next time, I know what to do. Namely, I need to stop being so goddamn pretentious. Besides the price, it was good to catch up with an old friend (Diana is hella old, she’s like FIVE MONTHS older than me but I love her all the same).

It wasn’t quite a double life. It was more like doing chores before my dessert. I studied dutifully and got my straight A’s and then I went back to being dark. The word ’suicide’ became a piece of gum in my head; a constant smacking, slurping and chewing but an idea so old that all meaning and flavour were gone. I was never serious about it but it remained a central theme to my thoughts. How would my family react? How would my school react? How would that girl react? Who would attend my funeral? Would I even get one?

I doubt I could have ever qualify as properly suicidal and it may be peanuts compared to you but it felt like something to me. The aftermath, the chaos, the poetry of disappearing attracted me like it continues to attract vast crowds of teenagers and misfits. Maybe I was angry at world, maybe I was crying for help or maybe all I wanted was fifteen minutes. But the act itself made me squeamish. I knew deep down that I’d never jump, never cut, never step out of line. My acts of rebellion were frustratingly tepid.

Still, the lesson stays with me. Should I ever think about departing this world, a new voice is there. A voice that makes the decision so obvious, it’s like asking if the pope shits in the woods.

Of course I want to live today. I’m not done.

I read somewhere that suicide is really a phase people go through. I think it’s dangerous to say it’s “just” a phase but I’d like to believe it exists in a well-bounded period of time. They say it lasts about ninety days; I didn’t count. It’s funny to think that one day a person wakes up after three months of resenting the life they were given and they decide to live for days, weeks and decades. How do you change your mind about something like that? Do they worry it will just happen again? Does the universe do them a kindness and let them forget the whole thing?

Does ninety days accurately reflect your experience?

Amongst the drafts are wonderful topics such as:

• My Top 5 TV Boyfriends (inspired by Tiff)
• I figured out why I’m still single
• I’m doomed to stay single forever
• Everyone hates drivers who break the rules but it’s ok to speed
• What exactly changed your mind about suicide?
• Long distance relationships scare the crap out of me

For all of them, I started writing a few paragraphs and then I lost interest. These are all very worth topics but, uh, I just lost the motivation to write about them. I’m reading more stuff than ever but I’m having trouble just finding the attention span to sit still and write something. I should write blog posts in the morning when I’m still and patient. At work, I am like a toddler being forced to sit still; I writhe and flail my arms and demand to go home and watch Nemo again. Work is boooooooring.

There’s actually a bunch going on in my personal life that I don’t want to blog about. It will probably come out as thinly veiled fictional posts. Because I’m really imaginative like that. Now that I think about it, I much prefer writing the fictional posts as opposed to an accurate account of a real-life event because what I really want to do is capture a feeling rather than tell you what happened. You don’t really care if I had a croissant this morning but maybe you’ll play along if I can conjure up visions of soft flaky pastry and melty butter and French people making snide remarks about my shoes in-between their passionate mid-morning make out sessions. And when they kiss, their cigarettes magically cling to the sides of their mouth so afterwards they stand up, straighten their clothes and continue to carelessly puff away at this tortured existence. Also, it’s very obvious that I have never been to France nor even met a French person. Well ok, my French teacher was actually French and we all laughed when the gym teacher locked him into a classroom.

I know a guy who is of the opinion that welfare is largely unnecessary. He said something along the lines of having his money taken from him at gunpoint. I may be misrepresenting him here because I did not do my due diligence and ask him to elaborate further. Honestly, I was just in shock after hearing that statement because my parents worked their asses off and relied on government handouts to make a decent lower-middle-class living. I can’t imagine where we’d be without the assistance.

So maybe this guy has some legitimate gripes. I don’t know his story. Maybe he’s seen the government waste and corporate greed firsthand. Maybe things are done different here in the United States.

Fast forward to a second of such conversations. Such honest wisdom: “I always thought poor people were poor because they didn’t want to work any harder,” and, “I don’t really believe in minimum wage because some jobs just aren’t worth minimum wage.” Again, I was in a state of shock. I don’t know what else to call it. Something rammed into my head at full force and the world went white and all I know now is that I’m on my back staring up at the night sky.

It was as if a grown man had walked over and asked how babies were made. There is far too much to fill you in on, buddy. I really don’t care enough to lecture you about the mechanics of procreation. Besides, I’ve never made a baby so I’m probably the wrong guy to ask. I can only recite what books and TV have taught me.

Honestly? You don’t have to look very hard to see the widening gap between the rich and the poor. There’s plenty of room for debate on how to deal with it but these views this guy expresses is just completely off my radar. Maybe they extend from some sort of hyper-idealism where everyone is born into the same wealth and the world is a gracious meritocracy or perhaps it’s some cynical “every man for himself” deal where if you don’t have enough then you can suck it because I got mine. I don’t know, I don’t really care to know, it’s too much for me to think about.

I know, I know. You would say, “Well Jack, you are a pot-bellied, twenty-something computer programmer who buys all his t-shirts off the internet. It is absolutely no surprise that you are not on great terms with the shower; a modern marvel of personal hygiene.”

That was uncalled for.

My actual problem with showers is that every time I stay over at someone else’s place, I try to use to the shower and I always have a problem. The pipes might groan and rattle when I push it towards the temperature I want. Maybe the hot/cold labels are reversed. Maybe it’s one of those artsy fartsy shower controls that do not conform to common sense; they are free spirits that require you to push up and outwards for temperature and invert the lever to increase water flow.

The shower I have in my current apartment is kind of weird. It conforms to this new American standard of only having one knob for temperature, water pressure is kept constant and, by default, water will begin spouting out of the faucet to fill the tub rather than the shower head. I imagine we arrived at this strange configuration because of some series of class action lawsuits and corporate lobbyists. American readers will nod their head at this description but I’m sure my Australian friends are thoroughly confused.

Here is the basic process:

1. Turn the knob to a position where you guess the water would be the right temperature
2. Pull the weird thingo on the tub faucet to switch it from Bath Mode to Shower Mode
3. Do your thang
4. Turn the knob to the off position

It’s actually a simpler process than the traditional system with separate hot/cold controls but I’m getting old now and I like to complain when things are no longer the way they used to be.

The singer’s voice rasps through the speakers of my old Mazda hatchback; it’s a slow, distorted melody of self-torturing. I drive quietly and automatically, letting the orange streetlights strobe across the windscreen. She sits in the passenger seat, perhaps wondering why this other girl had such a grip on me.

“I got so jealous when she met someone else,” I volunteer.

She nods.

“Have I played you this song before? It’s my favorite song of the moment and I guess it’s appropriate. He’s toasting the girl that he likes and her new boyfriend. He’s devastated but he has no plans to get over her.”

More nodding.

What follows is a long silence. I don’t waste any more time trying to articulate my feelings; I let the song wash over me. The song grows in distortion, the rasping is replaced with an undignified wailing, violins enter and it becomes a cacophony.

“But… is she happy?”

There’s optimism in her voice; she expects me to wish the best for people. That’s not the point, is it? The point is I’m dying and this other girl is the opposite of dying. She’s oblivious to me. I’m torturing myself over her and I’m torturing my friend in the passenger seat and she’s too busy to even notice. Such imbalance should not exist in this world, things should be fair and maybe I don’t deserve to be happy but I wish she could feel just a slice of this. She should know, right?

Anyway, here’s what my email horoscope said for today:

Try to make some time to relax and have fun today, Jack. Sometimes you get so caught up in chores and obligations that you forget what it’s like to simply breathe. Focus on the loved ones in your life, and have some important conversations with them. Play with your kids in the park. Go out for a romantic dinner with your partner. Celebrate the fact that you are simply alive!

This is why I am still signed up for a horoscope every day. I’m too cynical to ever trust those people who are happy all day everyday but my attitude changes when it comes to anonymous hippies that talk about celestial bodies the same way I talk about characters on TV shows. Plus this horoscope is good, no stupid predictions just something to remind me not to take things for granted.

My daily horoscope is woefully inaccurate at the best of times. Sometimes it is a fun game to read it at the end of the day and try to re-interpret the text to actually apply to my life. Kind of like what people do with Nostradamus’ writing.

An excerpt from If— by Rudyard Kipling

One day in high school, our English teacher started quoting some of this poem and we all stared at her blankly. The next day, she had printed off copies for the class and we sat there as she read it aloud melodramatically. This poem was not part of the curriculum, it was just something she liked and saw fit to share.

These symptoms in and of themselves aren’t that creepy. I’m not going to hold it against you if you have a foot fetish either. Whatever. I hope you find the feet of your dreams and an endless supply of lotions. It’s completely harmless as long as you’re not, say, actively contributing to the sex slave industry.

So, I think I might be a creepy white guy. Now, before you go on clicking over to my About page to double-check, I am obviously of Chinese descent but I’m not very Chinese. I’ve wrestled with my identity in this area and when I came back from Japan feeling really great because I really liked all the culture there until I remembered that white people love the shit out of Japan. If you are stuck for conversation with a white person, ask them if they’d ever want to visit Japan.

Another thing is that it takes one to know one. It doesn’t take me long to pick up on traces of creepy white guy and it stirs up the kind of irrational dislike that I only reserve for people that remind me of my own faults. Maybe it’s just the pretension that I’m allergic to.

In my defence, I did grow up as kind of an Asian stereotype. I got really good grades in Math, was really quiet, brought fried rice to school and suck at driving. So maybe that makes it ok for me to like Asian girls. I paid some of the dues. And actually, I only get along with Asians in similar situations to me. We have the blood but we’re kinda distant from our homeland. I don’t really get along with the Asian expatriates because they’re forever trying to re-create a little slice of home and it’s not like I can be nostalgic for a childhood that never happened to me.

So I think I’ve convinced myself that I’m not a creepy white guy, mainly because I’m not white enough and I’m too self-conscious to be seriously creepy. Creepy white guys still make me cringe, though. The way they look at my friends and devour their feminine Asian-ness with their beady, little eyes. They lick their lips and, in their minds, the women turn into succulent pieces of tuna draped over delicately-cooked balls of rice.