34 tagged with #family

( page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 )

Home Sick


"It's not like it's anyone's fault that you're sick," is what he told me, and in that instant I realized everything about my associations with illness that make me so unwilling to stay in bed all day. I dragged myself through a 10F bike ride to work yesterday, despite my boss's gentle suggestion that perhaps I didn't need to pretend that I wasn't sick.

"You're not having fun now, are you?" my mother used to ask me, when I'd try to burrow into the bean bag in a corner of the kitchen, a mop bucket slowly filling up with my inability to keep down food. "I told you not to get sick."

It's why I'm happy to have the house to myself when I can wallow, when I don't have to either look more pathetic than I feel or sit up straight without sniffling to prove that I am well enough for more soup. The hammock is filled with blankets, a carefully arranged cocooning with interlocking layers that keep the cold air out. The downside is that once I've exited, peeling back the edges so I can ooze out and slowly drop to the ground, I can never return, because it will never be the warm and cozy burrito it was before I disturbed the shell.

I still easily forget that being sick isn't necessarily a poor reflection on one's moral character. I still steadfastly claim that I am not sick through a hoarse throat and a layer of phlegm. My boss still sends me home early.

Permalink
04 March 2014 16:05


Spring Head


The cardio room stocks a pair of indoor rowers, placed next to each other in one corner. It's rare that I use one and am alone through my entire workout; it's hard to keep my own pace when someone else is rowing inches to my side. Usually, I outrow my partner, and usually, I go through several of them before I'm ready to quit. Yesterday, I was trounced, and it felt good. The chances of finding a spare rower are much higher than a spare treadmill, and the activity is much more interesting to me on a purely intellectual level. I have very little desire to row an actual boat, but the ergometer provides an interesting set of statistics to stare at.

I stretch on a mat that overlooks the lap pool, and remember the days when I swam thrice a week. I have never been a fast or strong swimmer, but one summer of stubborn grinding at least gave me the ability to spend hours paddling. A few weeks ago, I swam over a spring head feeding northern Florida's waterways, a crack in the bedrock thirty feet below the surface that pushed sixty-five million gallons of water out of the aquifer per day. I could sustain swimming into it, if not for the pressure that crushed against my ears.

I have never been a diver. The draw of swimming hard against the invisible current kept me hovering in place, twenty feet below the surface, the point at which I could not sustain the pain enough to keep pressing downwards.

My mother never realized I had learned to swim; my childhood swimming was characterized by floundering in place and never moving in any direction I intended. She was raised in the water herself, but I still swam circles around her when we were looking at the spring head. My father spent years as a lifeguard, yet was terrified to put his head completely under.

There are days when I realize I've exceeded my parents in some things, and those are strange thoughts.

Permalink
28 January 2014 11:26


Dish Duty


In my paternal grandmother's house, I was told that the rule for all meals was that the last person to finish eating had to do the dishes. This happened as I was the last person to finish eating, when I first visited as a child. It was the first time all of her five grandchildren were in the same place at the same time, so it was a massive family dinner with as many of her descendants as possible. I was eleven, and didn't understand the nature of complicated Chinese family structures, and still stumbled over addressing my relatives with the correct title that acknowledged their position in our hierarchy.

My uncle, the baby brother of his generation (fourth born out of seven), covered me on dish duty; at age eleven, my own parents still had not required me to wash dishes, so the task seemed impossible to me. As the sole representative of my branch, the embarrassment stayed with me for years. Later in that trip, my youngest aunts, my father's two baby sisters, cornered me and told me I wasn't doing my duty of taking good care of my father because of how much he had aged since he left them. They hadn't seen him in almost a decade and a half, during which he immigrated to a different country, had a child, and finished his doctorate. His greying hair and tired face in the photographs I brought, the only appearance of him I had known, became my shame.

I returned to my grandmother's house with my father thirteen years later, and offered to clear the table after lunch. My father put out his hand to stop me and repeated the rule of his childhood: the youngest present cleans up after meals. My cousin, less than a year behind me, dutifully carried all the bowls to the kitchen and washed them. Later, we fought for the right to clean my grandmother's kitchen for her; him, because it was his job indefinitely so long as the baby cousins weren't visiting, and me, because I wanted to erase a burden I carried from my first visit.

These are the things I remember whenever I am doing dishes. In my kitchen, the rule is much simpler: dirty dishes are forbidden. Anything in the sink becomes the problem of whoever sees it. It is permissible to ask to be excused from dish duty for a variety of circumstances, such as hand injuries, occasional time and energy constraints, or in exchange for having done a significant amount of food preparation. But, in general, dishes do not remain in the sink for any longer than it takes to clean them.

---

With a quiet smile, the electrician stared calmly at the cockroach that scrambled around his boots as he walked, carefully stepping to avoid smearing it all over the floor.

"Whoa. You know there are some big Madagascar cockroaches down in the steam tunnels." Maybe he was talking to me, since I was the only one within earshot on my way to the stairs, watching him in the same way he watched the roach, but the words seemed more for himself than anyone else.

I laughed while he let the roach escape under the machine room door. "Yeah, this guy's not so big as the ones I've seen."

Permalink
23 January 2014 18:47


Go ramblings


During my teenage years, my father and I played somewhere between 1-3 games of go every day in the summers. This meant that we both got to play a lot of games, but also that we were playing the games against the same person, thus neither of us improved. Slowly, over time, we became the same player, and the summer we realised we were just playing essentially the same game over and over again was, coincidentally, the summer we had the most strained relationship.

I moved away for college, during which I didn't play much go, nor did I communicate much with my father. When I returned and we had our first game after our long hiatus, I slaughtered him easily. I'd like to think that he realised that I learned things he couldn't possibly have taught me, and that if he were to keep up, he'd have to learn things on his own as well. However, I cannot get into someone else's head, and the emotional constraints of that situation means I'll probably never know.

In any event, I've started playing again, and learning, and reading, and playing. I don't think I'll ever be a dan-level player, but for the first time in years, I have something to work on in my go.

Permalink
20 September 2013 00:45


( page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 )


Creative
  Commons License this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. for more details, please see my license information.
valid?