up up and away

[15-blade]

There’s almost TOO much going on in any given day to write any blog posts about it. I have thoughts, I have lots of thoughts, but nothing makes it to the dashboard. 

[lungpeiling]

I am brimming with emotions every goddamn day

[lungpeiling]

Heaven would be a comfy armchair, Kiwi decided, rubbing at expletives with his elbow. Beige and golden upholstery, beige and golden wallpaper (what he was actually picturing here, he realized, was the pattern of his mother's brown rosettes on their curtains). You'd get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life's melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy - the a capella version - or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussive cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backwards, back and back, and listen to the future of your past. You could lift the need at whim, defeating Time.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia

[dappermouth]

there’s a forest behind your eyes

[lungpeiling]

day 1 as an intern

me, holding a newborn who is looking dumbly at me - You and me both, bro. it’s day 1 for both of us and we both don’t know shit.

[artist-magritte-deactivated2020]

The Battle of the Argonne

The latest from the @artistmagritte Twitter account

[lungpeiling]

You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.

Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu

[lungpeiling]

Yesterday I said goodbye to my best friend for the past 3 years. I'll see him again, sure, but things won't ever be the same. It is hard to break up with someone I thought I was so compatible with on every level. He was simultaneously the one and not the one. We had an expiration date on us from the start. It didn't make it any easier to leave him.

All he could do was hold me while I sobbed uncontrollably and say sorry a thousand times for my pain. A heart break is so aptly named. It really does feel like the heart is breaking into two. 

Time and distance. Time and distance. Time and distance. 

[lungpeiling]

Oh. That’s because I’ve stopped smiling,” Mathilde said. “For so many years, I never let anyone see me without smiling. I don’t know why I didn’t stop earlier. It’s enormously relaxing.

Lauren Graff, Fates and Furies

[lungpeiling]

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savours of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing – the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

[lungpeiling]

connections

I arrive to my aunt and uncle’s place for thanksgiving, and right away I feel uncomfortable. They have preset questions to ask me, and I have a preset role to play. Half of them spoke only in English, without realizing that half of my relatives only speak Chinese. Gradually my grandma and oldest uncle left the table of conversation they were left out of to go sit in the living room. I follow, sitting with them watching a Chinese drama I only understand half of. My Chinese isn’t good enough to carry on a deep conversation with them, but hopefully my presence shows my solidarity.

My aunt and I are alone in the kitchen and she asks about my bf, asking about marriage, and barreling on with her questions even though my answers don’t line up with her belief of who I am or who I should be. “No, we’re not getting married, and we don’t plan to.” She kept on going like she didn’t even hear me.

They don’t have much to say to me or about me, and I feel acutely aware of how alone I feel. So many people around me, but none of them really understanding who I am as a person.

--

We take an uber to a random person’s house after Nora En Pure. Our uber driver is from France, originally from Congo, “the heart of Africa”. We talk about his stand up career, the best places to go get a laugh in SD and LA. I’m still high off of the amazing performance of Nora En Pure and feeling like I could keep the night going forever. He is relentlessly optimistic about his future in the way that young immigrants are (and have to be?). I felt so the opposite of who he was. But I was feeling happy and bold and content, and I surprise myself and say “There’s nothing quite like LA at night”. I tried on the phrase and it felt weird to say it. I wanted to be someone who lives with the same vibrancy and hope of an uber driver driving around semi-drunk people at 3AM. 

[lungpeiling]

interviews

my answers feel limp in response to the cheery, ever smiling interviewers. how can I have so little enthusiasm about myself and my experiences? Makes me feel like I haven’t found my passion yet. I envy those who found their niche and their drive. 

Feeling a bit lost at sea at these interviews, one right after another, my answers in constant flux depending on my mood of the day. 

[lungpeiling]

I’m talking to an elderly patient. I can tell she cares about how she looks. Perfectly manicured nails. Lipstick. Dressed pretty well. Can even pull off an ankle bracelet at her age. I’m impressed.

She looks me up and down, in a way that creepy dudes do at a club. And then asks "You Chinese?” Whatever, she’s old. Then she says “I thought so,” when I confirm. Gold star for you. “You're very pretty. And so tall, too! Not short.” 

I guess I don’t fit her stereotype of a short ugly Chinese. I wonder if she voted for Trump.

[lora-mathis]

The rape joke is that you were eight. The rape joke is that at the time, you didn’t know people had sex to express love. The rape joke is that the only other person who’d seen you naked was your mom. The rape joke is that he called you ‘beautiful’ first. The rape joke is that he held your hands together and told you to ‘try harder’ when you struggled. The rape joke is that you believed him when he told you were overreacting. The rape joke is that your grandma called him a nice boy and asked him to stay for dinner. The rape joke is that he winked at you when you apologized to your parents for not coming downstairs the first time you were called. The rape joke is that his friends high-fived him for “getting some.” The rape joke is that you still don’t feel like you’ve regrown the pieces he stole. The rape joke is that he was conceived when his dad slapped himself into his snoring mother. The rape joke is that her friends told her she was lucky someone wanted her. The rape joke is that each year in the United States, 32,000 other women’s bellies ripen with life against their will. The rape joke is that he never learned to touch without scarring. The rape joke is that your classmate thinks ‘have you seen what asses look like in yoga pants?’ is an argument. The rape joke is your new boyfriend kissing you and telling you he ‘raped’ his math test. The rape joke is that ‘Why are girls so scared of rape? Y’all should feel pride that a guy risked his life in jail just to fuck you’ is a popular Tweet right now. The rape joke is that you wake up to the memory of him laughing, “now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” The rape joke is that it’s been twelve years and you still quiver when someone touches you. The rape joke is that he hasn’t stopped laughing. The rape joke is that you forgot how to.

The Rape Joke | Lora Mathis Inspired by this. (via lora-mathis)

[surgeonator]

This is the letter I wrote to my friends and colleagues regarding my resignation

Friends.

As some of you have heard, I recently resigned from surgical residency, and am leaving clinical medicine.

Ten years ago, I decided to be a doctor. It was a decision that made perfect sense at the time: I wanted to help people who were suffering, and I was fortunate to have the ability and resources to gain entry into medical school. I wasn’t sure which specialty would be my calling, but shortly after starting my clinical rotations I fell in love with surgery. I loved seeing and evaluating patients who had a very clear and usually dramatic surgical problem that I knew could be solved by an operation, by putting hands on the patient and potentially curing them of whatever it was that was ailing them. 

Keep reading

[lungpeiling]

One of the med bloggers I really enjoy reading divorces surgery. I’ve stalked her and found her posts insightful, darkly funny, and genuine. Still shocked she’s leaving, but also recognize that I’ve had those nagging thoughts myself. I’ve always told people that healthcare is so arbitrary. I’ve caught things that may or may not have affected a patient’s outcome (who knows if someone else would have caught it later, or if my decision to speak out made the situation worse?). Things are not standardized in healthcare. It’s crazy how small, seemingly harmless events, can alter a patient’s clinical course.

I’m going into family medicine, but the fear of missing something when I’m the one responsible, will still be there. It just will not be as acute as practicing in the hospital.

[lungpeiling]

Yes it seems like the doctors go home, the nurses go home, and I never get any answers. Everyone gets to go home except me.

patient

 the worst part is I never have any answers bc I never know anything bc I’m just the med student. all I can do is listen and hope someone figures out his problem.

[plaintofu]

Afterlife

There is a perfect view of the San Francisco skyline from the Rockridge Bart Station. In the morning, the Transamerica tower peaks out from beyond the fog, washed out and faded–a flattened two dimensional image. At dusk, San Francisco seems to recede back into the red depths of sunset. Ephemeral.

I don’t know how I came to be here.

Sometimes, in the midst of the morning hustle to work, in a crowd of homogenous and placid faces, I wonder if I have assimilated. If I become part of an identity larger than myself, if I have dissolved into the solution of the workforce. Or am I simply fooling myself. I am a ghost; a voyeur in the realm of mortals. Some part of my soul has gone away. I am not completely here. 

I haven’t yet decided what is more unsettling: To be here completely or to always be just a little bit removed, detached? Phantasmic. 

Today is the Tomb-Sweeping Day. 

In China, families exit the urban maze to pay respects to those who have left us. Loved ones, hated ones, complicated ones, tragic ones, premature ones. Death washes out those feelings and drowns it in a muted sadness. 

But for my students Tomb-Sweeping Day is a day of fun and festivities. They skip into the hills with their families, slaughter a chicken and turn a grave into a picnic. Sadness and joy are two sides of the same idea. 

Life and death are two sides of the same idea. 

Sometimes I wonder if to truly live I have to convince myself to forget death’s face and feeling. To live as though death does not exist. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I lose myself in joy and exhilaration.

But then I take an extra moment to observe the washed out image of San Francisco fading into nothingness and I find Death standing beside me. And my incomplete soul longs for the West or the East–longs for the afterlife where my loved ones, hated ones, complicated ones, tragic ones reside. For a time that is not this time. For a moment that is not this moment. And this living world of washed out colors and happiness and corporeal relationship–

it just isn’t enough. 

[jenmyers]

I think there is a certain age, for women, when you become fearless. It may be a different age for every woman, I don’t know. It’s not that you stop fearing things: I’m still afraid of heights, for example. Or rather, of falling — heights aren’t the problem. But you stop fearing life itself. It’s when you become fearless in that way that you decide to live. Perhaps it’s when you come to the realization that the point of life isn’t to be rich, or secure, or even to be loved — to be any of the things that people usually think is the point. The point of life is to live as deeply as possible, to experience fully. And that can be done in so many ways.

Theodora Goss (via jaclynpaige)