Liquid Nonsense

My emotions are not my own right now. At least "not mine" in the sense that they're local to me. For years I have admitted that I'm a sponge of affects. It only takes about 20 minutes to soak up the energies of the people around me.

Phil is back in town from Philadelphia, and it's great to have him back, though admittedly I still feel a little lonely even knowing he's here. Totally not his fault though.

Last night went to go see "A Scanner Darkly" with Phil. It was definitely an interesting movie, but I'm not sure if I really liked it. I'll list as worthwhile nonetheless, if anything just to see what a movie made through the process of "interpolated rotoscoping" looks like. Doesn't hit nearly as hard as Requiem for a Dream, but still sends the "drugs are NOT good" message.

Today I decided to get my hair cut. Completely uneventful except for this cute little girl that happened to be there at the same time. She was with her mom and was probably somewhere between 2-3 years old. It was her first haircut and she threw a fit, but it was really cute too. Her mom bought her a little magic-wand-like toy before coming into the shop and sat consoling her with it. I sat smiling paralyzed by the forces of adorable at work around me.

The afternoon involved a day trip down to Desert Ridge since I hadn't been in a long time. Made the usual rounds talking to the people I know out there and stopping in the stores I like. It was an oddly comforting afternoon. Made a stop by Barnes & Noble and bought a new paper journal and spent some time writing.

Also, picked up a copy of "My Undoing: Love in the thick of sex, drugs, pornography, and prostitution," by gay porn super star Aiden Shaw. I started reading it lightly in the store, and it turned out to actually be fairly engrossing. Super light read, but some of the views and emotions expressed by the author hit really close to home. I find it remarkable and simultaneously crazy that my emotions are not all that different from a 40 something year old veteran porn star.

Between the depressing movie, afternoon of cathartic writing, reading a book that reminds me of my emotions, a boyfriend healing, and sitting here writing this when I thought I'd be picking said boyfriend up at the airport from his return..... I am left with a fairly all-encompassing sense of "blah." I'm going to go to work tomorrow and hopefully clear my mind.

Once again my left big toe is hurting. During sparring people are evidently magnetically attracted to harming this one damned specific toe. It's like they gather before class and discuss strategies on how they will lure "lefty" into the fray. Either way, I'm walking around like a gimp today because it hurts to fully step down.

Evidently Lance Bass of N'Sync has finally announced (admitted?) that he's gay. Honestly I never had a crush on the guy nor did I ever like N'Sync as a musical entity, but this reminded me of a discussion I had with a gay manager of mine several years back about how the entire group had to have been gay. Good for him and coming out.

Is there such a thing has venereal disease porn? I think there is, and I think more horrifically I accidentally found it during a less-than-innocent browsing of the Internet. What demographic out there wants to see oral sex involving a man's penis covered in pea sized nodules? Potential acute warts aside, would you even consider putting something like that in your body?? I sincerely hope the answer is No. Similarly, would you put your penis in a man's (or woman's for that matter) bright red and distended anus? Once again, I sincerely hope the answer is NO. Talk about wrecking the prospect of getting it up...

Wacom tablets are awesome. I have a ton of pictures from China that I'd like to clean, process, and possibly order prints for. Unfortunately that's a ton of computer work, and using Photoshop with a little touch pad of a mouse doesn't make the process easy. Circuit City was running a special on Wacom tablets, so I went and picked up one of their smaller ones to try it out. Now I totally understand why all graphic professionals use these things. Image editing is absurdly faster using the tablet, not to mention it's fun operating a computer via a pen.

Last night I had a dream that much like all of my other dreams; bat shit crazy. The reason this one stood out so much is because I don't usually dream in color per se. Generally when I remember back to my dreams they're rather amorphous and memories of conversations rather than real conversations. They have a distinctly surreal quality without narrative and without cohesion. What made last night's dream different was there was a section that had exceptionally real color and vibrancy.

The brilliant color and vibrancy was special because it was literally on me. I had the most amazing tattoo work I think I had ever seen. It started slightly below my jaw line on the left side of my body and a hair away from my midline and continued all the way around to the same point on the back of my neck. It covered a region drawn vertically from that start position to roughly an inch below my floating rib and included a full left sleeve that stopped at my wrist. The colors included a brilliant orange and blue pattern similiar to some of the artwork Jason Dinger did for Simon a few years ago. Other patterns were present and it looked part tribal, part artistic, part insanity. It was beautiful.

I woke up this morning not really thinking about it because I'm usually fairly groggy just after waking up. My usual routine involves me then going to the bathroom. Upon entering the bathroom I looked in the mirror and had a sudden profound sense of loss when I didn't see the tattoo pattern from my dream in the reflection. Without realizing it part of my mind had totally accepted the idea that I could have tattoos starting on my neck that covered most of my body with conspicuous colors, and had actually become upset because I didn't really have them.

I'm absolutely positive that the reason my dream included this tattoo work is because I was considering going with Clemens later tonight to get his next tattoo. My mind must have been processing that much more than I had originally thought. Coupled with the fact I had decided to start my journey into body art this summer it really isn't a surprise at all.

Certain ideas and ideologies that I've worked to change over the years have had their transitions and eras marked by my more profound dreams. They might be absolutely insane, but I know when my subconsciouss has adopted something, then my waking mind has reached a state of near total acceptance. It would seem it's time to start making those appointments I've been considering.

It's almost been two weeks since the return from China, and I ready to start integrating Asian foods back into my diet. At least little by little. Anyway, the Pei Wei up by work apparently started getting their fortune cookies from a new distributor since the messages are much different these days. For instance, mine today was:

Go ahead and be as sexy as you can.

I don't recall fortune cookies ever previously telling me to increase my fuckability. I do, however, approve of fortunes which are sexually affirming.

This last weekend Phil and I celebrated the six month mark, w00t! In celebration we sat around and worked on recovering since his kidney chi somehow got out of whack. Currently he's on vacation in Philly (haha, Phil in Philly) catching up with friends and shadowing doctors at a clinic. My boyfriend rocks, and hopefully he's having an awesome time, but I'm still looking forward to his return.

Digitally developing pictures from China is taking a good chunk of time in the evening, so don't expect them all in the immediate future. So far all I've really managed to accomplish is paring out the ones that I don't want. Several hundred pictures were taken, but the final catalog will probably only be about 35-40 pictures. Hopefully later tonight I'll start actually converting them out of RAW and into a usable and distributable format.

Other than that, life is pretty much just plugging along at it's usual pace.

I think I've found the solution to my work related problem. I feel the problem isn't with the actual company, but rather the underlying task. Software engineering is alright at best, but it isn't exactly a job that I derive a considerable amount of satisfaction from. After really considering whether or not I should interview with another company and consider a job change I came to the realization that I'm most likely trading a good position and good pay for more of the same shit at a different location.

What to do? I'm going to downgrade my position back to intern and resume classes this fall. I'm two or three classes away from a degree in math. I'd like to finish that up and complete the paperwork for my computer science degree. Also, I plan on taking a bunch of undergraduate courses in psychology.

Psychology has been a field I've kept in the back of my mind for the last year and a half after taking psych 101 and social psych. Various conversations recently with Heidi and exploration of my own personality tell me I'm potentially entering the wrong field with computer science. I rock at it, but I'm starting to think the reason I enjoy it so much is simply for the abstract problem solving it requires to become proficient at it. The actual application of the education is drearily boring and research in this field requires a Ph.D. I think research might be fun, but I'm not 100% sure it would be satisfying.

For years people have told me I have a sense of wisdom beyond my age and an emotional capacity that can be mystifying. Maybe I should be pursuing something that let's me engage in the humanizing aspects of society that I thrive on in my personal life. This is going to require some personal exploration and some coursework to see if this might be for me. All I know is that planning this out and making it work has been the happiest I've felt about the short-range future of my work oriented life in a while. Wish me luck.

I'm looking for a new job while I work through the process of interviewing with various other large engineering corporations. I seek mindless activity which yields money. Not even a lot of money. If you have an "in" anywhere in the Phoenix metro area that you feel would benefit from my wealth of abilities, then let me know. My goal is to have something new (and somewhat temporary) setup by the end of this week. Please help end the suffering today.

This is absolutely legitimate. The less customer-facing the better, and it doesn't even need to be technical.

My updates have been somewhat negligent since I haven't had a private Internet connection since I was in Deng Feng. Now, however, I'm sitting at home at the comfort of my own desktop computer.

To summarize the ending of the trip:

We left the Shaolin Temple at Deng Feng and went by bus to the city of Xi'an. The only real thing of note in Xi'an is that it's the home of the first Qin emperor's tomb and the home of the Terra-cotta warriors. The warriors were neat, but it's really a site that you can see in about 20 minutes and not feel like you've missed anything. Most of the pits have yet to be entirely excavated and you can't actually get anywhere near the relics.

After a day and a half in Xi'an we flew to Beijing. Beijing is a rather bustling city filled with people. The highlights from the capital included seeing the famous Peking Acrobats, the Forbidden City, the summer palace, Tienanmen Square, and the famous Hongqiao Pearl Market.

I would elaborate on these topics some more, but I figure I can do that in photo essay format when I get my digital pictures developed in photoshop and posted to the web.

At this point I'm honestly just glad to be back in the United States. The trip was a lot of fun, but China is definitely not a place that I would like to go to spend a lot of time. Two weeks is about the maximum I would like to put up with. Especially since I don't speak the language, the water isn't potable anywhere, and you are really just a fleshy bag of money to the locals.

I'm looking forward to a few days of light work and catching up so I can rebuild my energy stores. Peace out.

Yesterday I was so tired that I didn't even have the energy to really explain the day out. So let me do some recapping.

After the morning ceremony we went back to the hotel for a little while to get cleaned up for an afternoon with the monks. The entire group was split into much smaller sections so we could receive training in the various training halls of the temple.

All I have to say is "damn". No kung fu movie is ever going to do it for me again. Now that I've seen and trained with the real Shaolink monks I know, at least partially, what the real Shaolin art looks like, and more importantly what a lifetime of training looks like; they are un-fucking-believable. Yesterday they started teaching us one of their forms that we think is translated as something like "Great Flood".

The form took the black belts the better part of six hours to learn. It's long, and it's complicated. It is, however, frickin' sweet. One of the USSD instructor's that I was training with said that based on the movements and style of the form that it was roughly equivalent to one of our 4th degree black belt forms (ie, meant to be done by people with about 15+ years of experience). Being a lowly first degree black belt now, I didn't feel so bad that certain passages and sequences were challenging. After one of the training segments I decided to wring my shirt out since we were outside and ended up leaving the temple a little present in the form of my water. I couldn't help but think of the Dune references.

Today we finished the form and I'm going to have to work my ass off if I plan on remembering the whole thing. The instructors from Arizona had a hard time picking it up too. To help pick it up better we recorded everything on digital video and we'll play it back a few hundred times until we have it down pat.

Last night also involved an amazing fireworks display as well as a dinner show from the Shaolin Temple's designated demo team. Once again, all I can say is "damn." There was a demonstration by about 15 monks using the whip as a weapon. Their timing was so perfectly synchronized that when they all went to crack their whips together, there was only one perfect crack. I can only imagine how many hours of training that takes.

Tomorrow morning we leave for the city of Xi'an to see the Terracotta warriors and then we are continuing on to Beijing.

Quick pictures (training pictures are in the actual Shaolin Temple's training courtyard):

Me working Great Flood in a low stance section


Me working Great Flood in a high stance section


My "water" present for the Temple


Me and the monk that was teaching me

I can finally say that I've been to the Shaolin Temple.

We arrived early this morning and walked along the stone path to the main entrance. The skies were completely overcast and it was lightly raining. We stood in four lines facing the main arches while Prof. Mattera and Grand Master DeMasco went inside the Temple and greeted the head abbot. I can only describe the feeling of standing in line at attention as surreal. The masters and higher-ups really drove home the point that we were lined up, and standing on the wet stone of the monk's ancestral home. Standing there will be remembered as one of the most profound moments of my life. The abbot came out and as a group we all kneeled down, opened our palms, and touched our foreheads to the ground in reverence. Various speeches were made and the end result was that all the students present for the ceremony were named the official disciples of the Shaolin as well as ambassadors of the art to the world.

We left Shanghai earlier today for the city of Zheng Zhou. The only worthwhile statement about this morning was really our lunch. They took us to a real Mongolian BBQ place...it was EXACTLY the same as YC's in Tempe/Scottsdale. There's something somewhat unsettling about the fact that I went across the globe to a country that was once completely controlled by the Mongols and I got the exact same thing as I can get literally three blocks from my house.

The only reason our travels have taken us through Zheng Zhou are so we can get to the rural city of Deng Feng. Deng Feng, as well as Zheng Zhou, reside in Henan (pronounced "huh-nan", maybe you've heard of Hunan style Chinese food??) in the middle of China. This little rural town is the home of the last remaining Shaolin Temple. Tomorrow morning we set out fairly early for the temple.

I don't know if you, the reader, believe in Chi or not....but, this place is literally *alive* with energy. This town is home to a 2,000 year old Taoist temple as well as 74 kung-fu schools. The kung fu students, not counting the Shaolin, make up 40,000 of the region's 100,000 residents. The Chi-qong exercises of a few thousand years as well as the burial sites of the monks, abbots, and Taoists around here have formed a well. If I walk outside and practice my breathing just a for a few seconds I can feel my entire body tingle. It feels like a wave starting at the perinium and simultaneously traveling down the legs, up through the back, and welling up inside the chest and ultimately like a pins-and-needles sensation at the top of the skull. It's a feeling I can produce with some work in the US at home, but here it's like I can produce the feeling on command. It's goddamned amazing.

Tomorrow we can conclude our test in the Pagoda Forest behind the Shaolin temple. It's the final resting place of the Shaolin Monks, as well as the burial site of all the abbots of the Shaolin order. From the stories I've heard, once you walk into the area your hair almost stands up from the energy.

Tomorrow will also be the rank promotion ceremony after all the testing. Hopefully when I write tomorrow it will be as an official Shodan. Wish me luck!

Day 2

This morning's activities included a rather brief tour of the old part of the city of Shanghai. This particular part of the city is made to look the way the city did 50 years ago before they started to modernize. It was a fairly interesting area, but it's primarily shopping at this point.



After the morning shenanigans in old Shanghai we went for a tour of one of China's (supposedly) more famous silk factories. I have to admit that it was really interesting seeing how they make silk. For instance, who would have thought there are giant mechanical apparatuses for boiling and de-threading cocoons in the heart of the city? The principle thing this little factory/store sold was actually bedding. As neat as it would be to have full hand-made silk bedding; it just wasn't for me. Granted, you could purchase an entire California king size comforter of some of the finest pure silk available for what amounts to roughly $200 American.



Following the factory there was a rather uneventful lunch and a tour of a different silk shop that made rugs instead. Rather than hang around for the second tour we ("we" being a group of Arizona students) broke out on our own to return to the Yu Garden area from yesterday so we could actually go looking through some of the shops. An afternoon of shopping and haggling totally beat out a second silk shop.

Now I'm just sort of relaxing from the long day. I'm also completely covered in sweat. This humidity thing is a real bitch when your outside pretty much all day long.

Tomorrow is breakfast at the hotel and then we leave for Zheng Zhou and continue on to Deng Feng. The likelihood of me having Internet there is really slim to none. Also, tomorrow night is the start of the rank testing....so that's gonna be a world of hurt. Wish me luck!

Day 1 Part 2:

Today's tour of the city started off with lunch at a dim-sum style restaurant somewhere in downtown Shanghai. The first notable thing about the restaurant was that most of the staff worked on roller skates, and apparently at around noon they perform some crazy stunts as performers on said roller skates. Like picking each other up and doing some crazy spinning. The second notable thing about lunch, and this has more to do with lunch in general in China, is that poultry and fish come with the head attached.

For the record: I ate my first chicken head today. Everyone sitting at the same table as me was just kind of eyeing it in that sort of "no, you eat it" way. So, seizing the opportunity, I ate our table's chicken head. It's surprisingly good.

Our first stop after lunch was a visit to the Jade Buddha Temple in the downtown region. This particular temple is actually only roughly 200 years old, but contains artifacts dating much further back. The most notable artifact in the temple is a statue devoted to Guan Yin Buddha carved from a solid piece of white jade, hence the name Jade Buddha Temple. Many locals were present in the afternoon burning incense and offering coins. It was a weird comparison to have several groups of tourists walking through and taking pictures at the same time that these people were offering up prayers to particular Buddhas.

The next destination on the list was the Yu Gardens. Our guide informed us that "Yu" in Chinese is the word for happiness. The gardens are apparently several hundred years old and were constructed as the private gardens of a very, very wealthy government official. The gardens were reclaimed by the state nearly 200 years ago, and now serve as a tourist attraction. The gardens themselves are absolutely beautiful arrangements of plants in many different areas, separated by walls and carved rivers.

After the Yu Gardens we had a fairly uneventful dinner and then went on our river boat tour. The river tour involved a view of the skyline from the Yang Si river. There was a pleasant breeze on the river, so the humidity was much more bearable. Once again, many of the sights were incredible.

One thing that I will take a minute to bring up that is rather unsettling is the shear volume of beggars here. I don't mean like the usual sit-on-the-corner-with-cup beggar. Today I was literally accosted by several people badly in need of medical attention and food. After the Yu gardens there was a girl walking right up into peoples' faces that clearly had 2nd to 3rd degree burns on several parts of her body and face as well as leprosy indicated by her nodules and missing limbs. Earlier in the day there was a man carting around a woman on some palette-like thing because several of her fingers had fallen off and she had no legs from slightly above the knee.

This country has many beautiful sites, but there are some extreme organizational problems from the volume of people begging on the streets. The buildings are dingy and the lack of resources is clearly obvious. Our guide even told us that the nice apartment buildings we're seeing in the downtown region are referred to as "mini united nations" because the only people who can afford to live there are foreigners.