Take my ashes now

Beauty for ashes - this phrase is so hard to decipher because it sounds like "we're trading in beauty for ashes" rather than what it's supposed to mean: "He's giving me beauty [in place of] ashes" or something like that. Why does the bible have to be so silly/smart.

But let's not get caught up in thinking idiom.

Erikson has a theory that infants must negotiate between the two characteristics of trust and mistrust. If the mother is consistent in her moods and in meeting her infant's needs, the infant develops the personality trait of "trust" but if the mother is inconsistent, for example forcing the baby to suckle when he/she doesn't want to or only sometimes appearing when the baby cries out but not always, it develops the characteristic of "mistrust." The ideal result is that the child will be mostly trusting and slightly mistrusting. There is an interesting result. Children who come out of that stage of life with the ideal resolution have a natural mechanism of hope. When the baby is able to trust that when it cries out its mother will come to fulfill its hunger, thirst, or need to be held, it also develops the ability to believe there is a secure future for them. The grown adult who is trusting also has as a part of his or her personality the ability to hope. The mis-trusting adult has a more difficult time. Possibly then Erikson's theory of trust and mistrust can predict who has a disposition that is vulnerable to depression and anxiety.

It bothers me sometimes to read about all these smart people's ideas about why people are the way they are. So much of it is linked to our early developmental years which we cannot un-do. I just want to pray God takes my ashes immediately and replaces it with beauty.

I think Maslow said that we all have an innate drive to discover beauty... and the more broken a person is the more she is aware of that drive.

I want to visit somewhere that has a lot of ash. Or maybe make a lot of ash, just to remember how annoying ash is. You know, like when you barbecue and the wind blows it all into your face.

This time much more

Looking for you amid the clutter of my mind
I'm gonna let you drop some peace into my life
I'm calmly observing that my faith is still lacking
Yet you covenant to meet me at this time
You say then still I will love you
Even then still I will love you
I say "I want to love you
But this time much more."

Penelope's Theme

All we did was watch basketball (no, I don't know who was playing or who won - I might remember the color of the shirts they were wearing). They were tired and unencumbered by the need to converse; here we are all familiar, and I very tenderly familiar with the way men's consciousness deteriorate after sated by food and drink and a day of active recreation. To me, it's a phenomenon which astounds me every time but - .

It comforts me also. I never mind the lack of conversation; I just feel grateful to be included. I occurs to me sometimes that they may feel I interpret that void of speech as neglect but it's not that way. I don't know why it is but that duration of time when they have nothing to say, understand, or argue may be the only time when my mind can escape from the constant barrage of anxious thinking which terrorizes me each normal day. 

I'll share a secret. I do like sports television. Not for the love of the game or to see The Greats accomplish what training and genetics have hardwired into their destinies. I like sports television because I like to gaze at the visages of the friends beside me, and see an odd look of glassy focus in their eyes. It's perhaps a little pathological but I feel quite unusually happy and content to be amongst such foreign creatures who can vacate bothersome thoughts with supreme authority. 

I noted as we said goodbye that these are family - for this town felt safer today than yesterday only because they are here. We parted ways the way we would in LA, an offhand wave and "Laters," and it felt right, though we may not see each other for another months or years. But then driving home, I missed the U-turn and kept at a road leading away from where I wanted to go and for a second I entertained the thought of just following and allowing myself to be taken somewhere to be lost. Then furthermore, I began to imagine that in every car I passed and which passed me were my friends, and their passing didn't sting me because there they would be again and again. I still can't tell why I imagined so but I did.

I felt slightly that I was hallucinating because when I neared the residential area around Safeway on Miller and Di Napoli Street where I used to wait for my mother to pick me up after middle school, all things seemed not so dark (I had always felt we needed brighter street lights but today I thought they were sufficient).... and in being less frightening and mysterious, it felt much more truly empty of people. 

That was when I thought to myself perhaps there may be utility in falling asleep in someone's arms. Some employability in being known. Some use in picking a person to listen to The Weepies with, for a lifetime. The house, I knew, would be unlit, silent, chilly - hardwood and floor-to-ceiling windows all along one side - and I was convinced. 

I know I love very simple things and none that can exactly be had. Glassy focused eyes, the knowledge that someone's dozing in the corner, calling the same person five times in a day. Perceiving someone to be reliable, allowing him to crunch the numbers, and maybe place a judgement on the waitress who forgot about us for half an hour. These are things that awaken my feelings, which tells me in truth I belong with friends. 

When the last of the frost melts off maybe I'll be flying back. 

Red eyes and fire and signs
I'm taken by a nursery rhyme
I want to make a ray of sunshine and never leave home

I want to be forgiven for causing pain and I want to be free from the pain I live with. 

She says: Gapjagi seulpo. Mr Sanders wants to kill himself. I can't sleep. Gapjagi seulpo. 

She cries, the gasping sobs of someone whose body developed much faster than her adaptability. Lord, a prayer for the brokenhearted.

Heartthoughts

1. Give me faith, give me faith, build me up from the core, give me faith, give me faith, Jesus.

2. I will wait until my prayers come about.

Sophie Full of Faith 2

We offered her the bottom bunk quite happily but she turned it down.

"I don't want to have it if it's going to be, like, you two practicing the missionary lifestyle," she said. She meant she didn't want to burden us. If she knew what kinds of gamey fantasies we occupied ourselves with, maybe she would have taken the bed.

"So it was like that for years and years and years."

"That's tremendous. I can't imagine what it would feel like to have my sister die in a motorcycle accident. It's like one of those things you would never expect to happen after you've fled communist dictatorship. It's like... I'm free! Then the curtains fall."

We often sat in silence mulling over the intensity of our own stories, delighting over the truth of the world, which we had correctly thought would be grim.

I began, "I wonder how many of our generation actually know of the stories. I didn't know at all; my dad had an older brother who died in the war. I had no idea."

"How did you find out?" she asked ever sensitively.

"My sister said... you know my dad tells her so much more than he ever told me. I hardly know that man, considering. My grandmother had just given birth to the brother; he was only two months old or something. She was separated from Harabuji, with the two oldest daughters and the newborn, and they were running for some reason... then they fell and the boy was dead."

I was aware of the holes in my story but that was all I knew. Better to tell the story incompletely than not to tell it at all. Who cares, why running, why fell, why dead. It just is what I know.

"And then... there was an instance, this time Halmuni was alone and the Japanese soldiers made a whole bunch of Koreans line up on a hill and they were shooting each down, one by one. Mysteriously, one of the Japanese guys paused next to Halmuni, only her, and whispered to her, 'When they start shooting the people closer to you, just roll backwards down the hill' and when they shot the ones on her left dead, she rolled backwards down the hill. Then she ran." I thought for a moment. "Maybe he thought she was pretty."

"You almost never were!" She announced at the end. I stare puzzled. "If that mysterious man didn't give her the secret advice, she would have been shot dead like the others, then your dad would have never been born, and you neither!"

"You're right!" Realization dawned on me and I beamed at her, impressed. "It's true!"

"See, you were looking for a reason to think that God likes you. I think he definitely likes you," she beamed back.

I knew I was smiling childishly, feeling an odd swell of satisfaction in my chest. So, that might be. That well might be, and though it's a child's path to presume one's plain existence connotes significance and favor from up high... I didn't care why running, why fell, why not dead. It was nice just to believe Halmuni's story has at least a little to do with me - why, even to do with God.

Why did we electrify ourselves silly with these war stories? I remember, it made me feel dizzy with adrenaline just visualizing them. Imagining the smell of the meadows, as only a peninsula can smell, with yellow dandelions populating hills that stretch as far as the eyes can see. I was that woman, yes. Wearing grimy mens' tanks and thin flannel pants that flap around the knees. Waiting to be shot dead but instead, upon the instructions of a mysteriously kind but stony officer, hurled myself down hoping chance won't bite me, chance will deem me lovely, and there I survived. I fell flat on my face at the bottom of the hill, scrambled to my feet, and started to run before pausing even to think, "Did I just live?"

Sophie Full of Faith Part 1

I hereby release into the wild some excerpts of an idiot's story.

I felt like every organ in my body had frozen, waiting with both eagerness and trepidation to hear what exactly he meant.

“Like, you know, that time when we went to watch Iron Man, and you came to sit with me instead of with the other guys. You know. That was cool.”

So it wasn’t just my imagination.

It was a surprise to me to hear that my father’s parents, who I for so long had assumed was the antithetical relationship to my maternal divorced grandparents in Pusan, did not fall madly in love in the natural way.

Harabuji was a boxer, my sister retold, A boxer with a reputation. He had lost his rightful fortune to an uncle who wasn’t content with just the cash and intended on enslaving Harabuji as a sharecropper on his property. So he fled and made a living off jabbing his indomitable fists into as many sternums as he could. He was somewhere near Seoul when the Japanese colonized Korea and intended to take every unmarried Korean girl as comfort woman for their solders. Harabuji was passing through a village and on chance met the Halmuni’s parents in a noodle shop who inspired sympathetic eyes for her. She was soft-spoken and frail-looking with a deep gaze. He married her to save her from a life of degrading prostitution to the oppressors.

They had five children, my dad was the youngest of them, and led contented lives. One day my mother, carrying me in her swollen belly, and father decided to go to the city hall to certificate their marriage and discovered that Halmuni is Harabuji’s second wife. They confronted him about it and a couple other unsavory revelations were in store. That forsaken first wife had had a daughter; she was only two years old when he abandoned them both.

“Harabuji is a bad man,” my mother spat as she drilled the notion into us as if it was a military oath, “A bad man, and look at what kind of man he spawned.”

My father ignored the scathing personal remark and added, “I’m not sure if he ever saw them again but apparently the young girl grew up and got married about ten years ago and is living in Pusan.”

I gasped with delight at all the drama. The world, so full of secrets, was holding out on me all the gritty details that finally explained it: we are so screwed up but no one knows if you don’t mention it.

Color Outside the Lines: The Joy of Staging: It's not always glamorous!

Color Outside the Lines: The Joy of Staging: It's not always glamorous!: "I know I said I would post pictures of the office today, but Scott needed my help ... and you know how that goes. You see, Scott's a new rea..."

Oh my gosh.

I've recently been cleaning up a bit myself; my mother's out of the country and I'm just grabbing the opportunity while it's there! And you couldn't begin to guess the trinkets I've found in corners of the house I never even knew existed.

Scott Akdogan is a realtor, not a professional stager, so his take is that "it's not always glamorous!" But from a MILDLY ocd neatfreak, that just looks like a juicy challenged waiting to be cracked. Am I nuts? And about the stench, well that's what gas masks are for.

Yao suggested the last time we hung out before her missionary trip to Pennsylvania that I should set up a business of being paid to live in others' homes for a few days. Believe me, you wouldn't recognize your own room once you get back!