Monthly Archives: December 2008

Once Upon a Time There Wasn’t a Chinese Donut

I dart around the corner, sure I’d get there first this time. Dropped my bag in the place where we drop our bags. Run down steps, almost losing my balance. Turn left again, slipping on the slick surface. Making sure I don’t crash, not because I don’t want to get hurt. Because I’m in the library. And if I crash, It’ll make a lot of noise, and I’ll get in a lot of trouble. I’m a kid, and the last thing I want to do is get in trouble. I see the seats. Still open. Surely I’ll get there before Tommy.  Tommy alwasy beats me. He’s the teacher’s pet. Well, not the teacher, the lady that reads us stories. He always manages to sit right in front of her. He can see the pictures the best when she turns the book around to show us. Stupid Tommy. I’m almost there. Four rows back. Two rows. Almost there. NO! Not again! That rat!

Like when I was at the donut shop the other day. I always buy the same donut from the cute Cambodian girl that works behind counter. Chocolate with chocolate frosting with pink and white sprinkles.  Cute AND delicious.  Not today, as soon as I walk in, I see another customer. He’s taking MY donut! Does he have any idea? There aren’t any left. What to do? I can’t just stand here. Maybe I’ll go talk to her. Strike up a conversation. Ask her something. Maybe about Cambodia. Then she’d wonder why I’m here. I need to buy someting. I hate this. When you don’t know what to do. Confused. Bewildered. Perplexed.

The same thing happened at the chinese restaurant last week. I drive to the shop, the whole way eating Kung Pau Chicken in my imagination. You know how you can really imagine something, right? Someting you really want. Like you can just see it in your mind?  I get there. I walk in. No Kung Pau Chicken. Only a few left over pieces of moo shoo pork that looks like it was cooked last week. In a microwave.

Why does this alwasy happen to me? Why do I alwasy get the leftovers? It seems like the more I focus on something, the more it moves out of my reach. Maybe I’m focusing too hard. Like when you really want something bad, and you can’t see all the good stuff around it. Like when you try too hard to do one thing, you neglect to do the important things.

As I contemplate this, I see the cook walk in from the back. He has a freshly made pot of Kung Pau Chicken! Lord Have Mercy!

“I’ll take the three dish combo please…uh, Kung Pau Chiken, and , uh, Kung Pau Chicken, and uh, um, yea, Kung Pau Chicken.”  All it took was a little patience.

And not only that, while I was thinking of something to say to that cute Cambodian girl, she recommended their apple fritter. “Are these new?” I ask. “No,” she said giggling. “There always here.” I try it. I like it. In fact, I’ve gotten it ever since. Who would have thought? And while Tommy was gloating because he got to be story readers pet and look at all the pictures up close, I got to sit next to the new girl. Debbie.

Funny how things work out.

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Guitar Playing Scottish Sharks

We had just arrived at the dive site. Or the snorkeling site in my case. I wasn’t licensed or trained or certified or qualified or whatever-ified enough to strap on one of those big metal cans of air AND a weight belt to make sure you sink enough so you can go down and look at the fish. Nope, I was strictly an ameteur fish looker atter. Except we really weren’t going to look at fish. Well, if we did see any fish, which were likely as we were at the second largest reef in the world, they would be secondary.  Yep, we were big game hunters, er, lookers. We were going to swim with sharks. When we heard about this while on dry land it sounded safe enough. “Sure, everybody does it!” He said. “Yes, of course, they’re completely safe!” He said.  Funny how that seemed to be less relavent as we were suiting up to dive in. You could see the sharks just below the surface, swimming around, big dark shapes of death moving constantly. Slowly. Waiting. “Are you sure it’s safe?” I asked, suddenly wishing I had decided to attend the Aztec Ruins excursion. “Yea, just jump in!” He said. I wasn’t too sure. Sharks were bad right? They ate people, right? Jaws was a shark, right? And why was our boat captain wearing such a funny hat? It sure didn’t look like a boat captain hat, although I’m not really sure what boat captain hats are supposed to look like. It just didn’t fit the image I’d had in mind.

Kind of like when I first arrived in Scotland. It was a friday night, I had no clue where to go, what to do. And everybody was wearing these funny hats. Well not everybody, some people had on hats that looked kind of normal.  But at the time I wasn’t interested in hats. I apparantly hadn’t remembered to plan well, becaue I wasn’t supposed to meet my friends from Texas for another two days. I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me that I should probably plan ahead and book a hotel or something. I suppose I could find a hotel, but I didn’t really know where anything was. So I wandered around, past some park that was famous for some guy doing something that helped Scotland out in their past. And on the side of the park were a bunch of people singing and drinking and playing a guitar. I guess everybody all over the world knows how to have fun. They seemed to give off a really good vibe when they asked me to join them, but I passed. I was tired, and needed a place to sleep. I’d been traveling for about twenty hours. Then I saw him. And older guy. Much older. The kind of person that you imagine hates young people for some reason.  He kept eyeing me. Maybe he wanted something? Maybe I looked like the guy that got his daughter pregnant and then left her at the alter?  Who knows. He started walking towards me. Staring. Not shifting his eyes. Not even wearing a funny hat. He kept coming closer and closer, but I was tired, I was wearing a heavy backpack, and I just didn’t have the energy to put up a fight.

Similar to times when you don’t know what’s going on, and you just give in, and trust yourself. Like once during an acting class the teacher had us stand up on a table and fall foward into the waiting arms of our clasmates. All we had to do was trust strangers to help and support us as we fell. It was a pretty cool exercise. Another similar one was wear I was at a really wierd seminar, and this guy kept saying stuff like “trust is the secret, trust is the secret,” or something like that. There we had blindfolds on, and people led us around and instructed us to fall backwards into a chair without checking to make sure there was one there before we fell.  That was a fantastic experiene. Kind of when you just let go and for some reason can allow yourself to have faith that everything will be allright.

“Son, you look lost!” the old guy said, in the best Sean Connery Impersonation I’ve EVER heard, suddenly busting out a suprisingly full toothed grin. “Uh, yea,” I responded, relieved that he didn’t follow up his Sean Connery accent with some licensed to kill techniques. “Come with me……” I didn’t catch anything of what he said after that, as it was thick with local dialect and idioms that had I understood, I never would have forgotten. Twenty minutes later he led me to a row of Bed and Breakfasts. Five minutes after that I found myself immediately slipping into a nice peaceful sleep after slipping into some wonderfully soft and inviting sheets.

Just like when I let go of the railing and slipped into the water.  Not really slipped, more like splashed. And funny thing. As I plunked into the water, it seemed to startle the sharks. It seems they were more afraid of me than I was of them. They were only Nurse Sharks, and mostly fed on crabs and other stuff off the bottom. Another cool thing was after was able to realize that my fears were false I was really able to open my mind, and really appreciate the beauty that I otherwise would have missed due to my fears.

How many ways can you imagine being able to notice beauty around you when you release some of your fears?

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The Puzzling Sudoku Babe

So I was hanging out at my friends house the other day, and it was raining, and their wasn’t much on TV, and my friend busts out this jigsaw puzzle. Like the one you used to do when you were kids. Maybe not. Maybe you still do them.  Like when you try to find an easy way to put the puzzle together, you start to line up the edges, so you can see what fits where, right? How easily can you imagine that, now?  The only problem was, my friend, who has a bunch of old jigsaw puzzles, something about her sister teaching some kids before or something, didn’t have any of the boxes. She just had bags and bags of puzzle pieces. And none of the bags even had any markings on them whatsoever, they were just old crumpled bags when pieces in them. We weren’t even sure if all the pieces were there. So as we continued to put things together, we started arguing over what was what. A castle! No, a gang of horses! No, no, an aquarium with tropical fish. And on an on. We were so pathetic, that we had about twenty different ideas of what it might be when we only had completed the outer edges.

It’s like when I was in third grade. We had to do some kind of math puzzle, and I had always thought I was good at math, even in the fourth grade. Maybe it had something to do with my pyramid project.  Anyways something I was even better at in 3rd grade was I was able to generate good feelings for my teacher, since I pretty much had decided that I was going to to marry her.  But we had this puzzle, and it was like one of those Sudoku puzzles, where you have to put everything in the right order. But unfortunately, the only order I was thinking about was our pizza order for our wedding night.  Boy did my mistake hit me when somebody else was able to get the puzzle right before I did. When the other kid jumped up with the answer, she beamed at him with a look that must’ve made him feel really proud. And I was still contemplating where the 9 should go.

Like when I was hiking with my friend one summer in the mountains. This huge tree had fallen in front of the trail, and when my buddy and I got there, there was this group of hikers that looked pretty inexperienced. They were looking at their map, apparantly trying to find their way around the tree. Now normally, you just climb over the tree, but this was a really really big tree. And they were looking up the hill and trying to find a way to go up and around it. And about every five minutes or so they would stop, and moan and complain about how much time they were losing. I guess they were on a tight schedule. Maybe they had an appointment with a bear who was supposed to steal their food at a certain time, I don’t know. Anyways, while they were looking up the hill, and back to their maps (which were in these really expensive looking waterproof map cases) my buddy and I decided to try something different. We made a decision, the kind of decision that you make when you are not sure how it is going to work out, but you make it anyways, just like the one’s I’m sure you’ve been able to make alot, right? So anyways, we backtracked about a hundred meters, and then traverse lower, going under the tree, and then easily come up on the other side of tree. It’s funny what happens when you focus on solutions instead of stressing over some appointment with some bear that I’m sure will be happy to steal your food even if you were a little bit late. It’s not like bears wear watches or anything.

So we finished the hike safe and sound, got a few pictures (but not of any bears), and later I decided that Sudoku just isn’t for me. I certainly don’t want to keep chasing something that I missed out on a long time ago, right?  It’s not like if I develop super skills on some obscure math problem my second grade teacher will pop back into my life and sweep me off my feet with a pizza. Besides, she’s probably like 80 years old by now.

And the funny thing is, by the time my buddy and I finished the jigsaw puzzle (which actually turned out to be a bunch of swans standing around in some park somewhere, posing for the picture no less), it had stopped raining and we were able to go out and really focus our energies on being able to enjoy the day.

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