My Toes Are Burning

My toes are burning. The rest of my body is happy in the warm shower, but my toes feel like they have been dipped into scalding water. Perhaps it is because they have been shrouded in wool socks over the last 36 hours to protect them from the dry ice-like weather of San Francisco. Perhaps they are trying to tell me that they miss the recent sunshine and freedom of flip flops as they traverse the Mexican cobblestone streets.

The comparison of my toes' recent experiences troubles me as I try, with delicate desperation, to hold on to the warmth of joy of a recent vacation. They remind me of falling again, into the mix of wet cement poured into the impassable sidewalk of my daily life. My brain, which has been held off for ten days, is going through the inventory of things to be done. I am pursued again by the same two familiar feelings with their intentional roots. One is the illusory experience of celebrating a newly found "good" intention, where premature feelings of accomplishment cause me to never lift a finger to bring it into reality. The second, is the suffocating confinement of "good" intentions to logically and efficiently tend to my chores, mundane tasks of daily life, obligations and commitments. I know these two too well.

There is a third feeling, far more fleeting and vague. It is like opening a perfumed letter that permeates the entire room with the pleasant aroma intending to elicit a particular feeling by the unknown sender. From there, you are guided by good intentions that draw you forward, clairvoyant and unknowing at the same time, like floating down a river to somewhere that you do not know. If you allow yourself the luxury of time and space then actions seem effortless and hard work is satisfying. But if you do not, then the good intention sits in the back of your mind like caked mud. After a while, your brain becomes too heavy for your back to hold itself erect and begins to hunch under the weight. Your back muscles, under the strain of trying to right itself, begs for rest, which you oblige. The absence of movement causes the circulation to slow in your legs and feet and eventually, your toes will protest by burning.

The Battle of Relxation in Mexico

So it came to be that I am in Mexico. I will spare you the details as to why, other than we are here to meet up with my husband's birth mother (whom he reunited with five months ago), her husband, her various cousins and their spouses. We are were assured that it would be a relaxed vacation with no strings attached to how much or how little time we wished to spend with them, since most of the group come here every year to get away, relax, read and nap.

Most of my life I imagined Mexico as a vacation place for college kids on spring break and unadventurous adults who wished to travel to all-inclusive resorts where they could over-indulge in food, drink, sun and laziness. That was until I heard of Oaxaca, a place of culture and beauty, which calls to me strongly and tempts my curiosity, like an adventure. But we are not in Oaxaca, we are in Puerto Vallarta, and I am sitting on a bugenvilia fringed balcony overlooking palm trees and sand along the Banderias Bay with the mountains spilling out buildings of central Puerto Vallarta all the way down to the water. 

This is my first time to Mexico, unless you count the couple of hours I spent in Juarez (after walking across the border from El Paso), which is not a place I recommend, especially considering all the kidnappings and murders you hear about on the news that occur in this hotbed of Mexican crime. Which brings me to another thought, I was a little nervous about traveling to Mexico right now, especially since the U.S. State Department issued a new warning to halt all non-essential travel to Mexico a few days before our departure, it turns out Puerto Vallarta is still okay.

The plane ride seemed really long and I finished the first book I brought with me, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I decided that it is an extremely awkward choice of a book to start a vacation, if you are like me. If you don't know what the book is about, here is a short synopsis - an American born Chinese woman is determined to bring up her daughters in America the Chinese way, which means they are required to be the top student in school, study Mandarin, do manual labor, show utmost respect and loyalty to their mother even when she is a tyrant, refrain from having friends, always do exactly what is expected of you even if that means relinquishing any hope for your own happiness, forget about having fun and study classical music five or six hours a day, even on vacation and when they are sick. She claims it backfires, sort of, but not really.

If you are like me and feel your own part-Asian guilt strings pulling at you then you might understand why a vacation that promises ten days of leisure, with no more expectations other than to drink, eat, sleep, read, nap and relax, might push you into the uncomfortable zone. In very few ways did I grow up like the Tiger Mother's kids, but I did grow up with a half-Asian mom with a work ethic that makes you exhausted just hearing about it. She was my role model and now I have had a very hard time determining for myself just how much I should push myself and what is a balanced life for me.

There is a battle going on. Sitting around to "relax" is torture but I have also come to realize that I push through the agonizing pain of the weight of too many expectations on my shoulders, most of which were placed there by me. What is haunting me is the addictive promise of what hard work, dedication, discipline and focus can bring you, like it did for the Tiger Mother's kids, sort of. Yet, there is an iconoclast that lives within me trying desperately to tear down these beliefs and whisper the truth. Now I am stuck in the middle, with nowhere to go, except maybe Mexico.

We are here in the open air reception area of our hotel, greeted by my husband's birth mother and her husband. The skies open up and rain comes down like a waterfall. It is a beautiful downpour. Welcome to Mexico.

The skies clear quickly and we go to a cousin's multi-floor rental overlooking the water. We meet some family for the first time, drink and eat into the night.

Our balcony doors are open through the night and the sound of the hotel staff setting up for breakfast in the outdoor dining area six floors below our room wakes me at 6 a.m. After some time I fall back asleep and sleep until 10 a.m.

We catch a Mexican bus, for six pesos each, and go into central Puerto Vallarta. We walk along the water and through the streets and down on the beach. We stop at a beachside restaurant for an early dinner. After some more walking around town, we watch some live music in the square in front of the cathedral, then we notice the amazing sunset. We manage to catch the Mexican bus back to our hotel.

I'm not sure how this vacation is going to shape up, its been very nice so far and I can't complain about the view.

Its good to be here.

I Am a Difficult Boss

A couple of weeks ago I had the idea that a morning walk, every morning, would be a good way to start my day seeing as how I have no job to go to and generally don't have to report in with anyone. I guess I only need to report in with myself. In order to do this, I need to leave and come back to the house, so that I feel like I have left home and then arrived somewhere, ready for my day's work. This may seem silly, but it is much harder then you would think to be self-disciplined each and every day. I am still working that one out.

Since I am really only accountable to myself (my spouse as well, but not any more than any other married person) I create my own additional responsibilities, to-do lists, chores and projects that I fill my day with just like a normal, working person would do. Being your own boss is both wonderful and incredibly hard. I think it is obvious why being your own boss is wonderful - freedom. Perhaps it is more difficult to imagine why it may be hard to boss yourself around. You have to motivate, manage, supervise and do performance reviews on yourself. These can be painful!

I have found that I am a difficult boss. I never do things fast enough, good enough or just plain enough. I give myself an unreasonable amount of tasks in an unreasonable amount of time. I don't let myself have breaks or take it easy. I give myself lectures when I am not performing up to what is expected. I am judgmental and critical of the amount and quality of work I do.

You are probably asking, what is it that you spend your days doing if you don't have a job? What kind of "work" are you doing? Well, I will tell you - I am doing things that I want to do, that I have wanted to do for a while, things I have put off until I had the time. And it is now time. So, I take these things that I want to do, many of which are creative projects that I really enjoy doing, and I turn them into work tasks that I beat myself up about because I am not improving, accomplishing or churning them out fast enough.

So today, when I told myself that I had to go for a morning walk because I told myself I would do it, I went. It was pouring rain, which is actually fine. I took some pictures, which was also fine. I drank my coffee while I walked - also known as multi-tasking. I hit the corner grocery store for my mid-week shopping run on my way back - gotta kill two birds with one stone, very efficient. Then I returned and started to write out my to-do list for the day while I did my hip and back stretches on the floor. Suddenly I realized that the main reason, the number one motivation for starting these morning walks is because I love morning and taking time to appreciate the new day, but I had just spent the last forty minutes doing almost none of that. I was so busy getting something on my list done that I forgot why I was doing it and instead was just grumbling about who-knows-what thoughts going through my mind.

So, enough of this craziness. I am working this one out, another thing for my to-do list. Just kidding, well, not really. All is not lost. I had my camera with me and it is the much kinder, gentler reminder to look around you, take it in and ask yourself, what do you see?

Below are a few of the images from my morning walk in the rain and fog in Alamo Square.

Donwtown San Francisco

Bush and Lamppost in Alamo Square

The church on Fulton Street

Horizon disappearing into fog.

Wet Grove Street

The Three P's of 2012

In the final days of the calendar year, I always take out a blank piece of paper and write down as many things as I can think of that I would like to do in the New Year. I long ago abandoned "New Year's Resolutions", preferring "goals" which really took the form of a Bucket List. (To my own credit, I actually do get around to a good number of things on my Bucket List each year.) I've always liked this concept of a New Year, a nice package of time in which our sins can be forgiven and we can start again, fresh, renewed, inspired. Alas, if only it were really that easy!

In one week it will be exactly five months that I have not been working. Five months! An incredible amount of time that I never fathomed I would ever have off. I have the contorted notion that someone with no job and no children and a long Bucket List would be crossing things off that she has done at a high speed. Not so. Another bug in my thinking is that even though I actually do quite a few things on my Bucket List each year, that only covers about 5% of the list. That's right, 95% of the things on my Bucket List remain undone by the end of the year and I actually thought I would be able to get to 100%. How is this possible, you might wonder? How is it that I spend a good deal of my time on my Bucket List items and still only get maybe 5% of them done?

If this were a problem solving question you might have already concluded that I either have too many things on my Bucket List, I take too long to do the things on my Bucket List, or both. The answer is both. Well, sort of. I have this ideal about how I should operate, on a daily basis, in this world. Here it is: I should be Productive, Prolific and Perfect. And it is a completely flawed system. These are my "Three P's". They are the source on much unhappiness in my life (how lucky I am) and they ultimately explain why my Bucket List is such a ridiculous sham.

If you are scratching your head wondering why being productive, prolific and perfect is so terrible, I will explain. Its easy for most of us to understand how perfection can be a curse. To be fair to myself, I am not a real perfectionist but I do have very high standards that slow me down significantly. I have a saying that I repeat in my head when perfection stands in my way, "It is better to finish something good than to never do something great." It is still really hard for me, especially at the beginning of a project or task.

I have never been a person to sit around and do what most people call "relax". This does not mean I can't relax, because I can, it just doesn't take the form of sitting on the beach or on the couch. Hiking relaxes me, especially if there is no one else around, I can feel hiking.  For me, the opposite of relaxing means being productive. Hiking is not productive because it relaxes me, I feel into it. I have a hard time being lazy. I have a hard time not being productive. Not wasting your life means getting things done.

This brings me to the last "P" - Prolific. Large quantities, I envision large quantities. To complete this "Three P's" image I imagine a life well lived as someone who is always accomplishing something (Productive) in large quantities (Prolific) and does it extremely well (Perfect). But this is just not realistic. No one can live up to this, maybe Mozart, but I am not even a very big fan of Mozart (it's blasphemous, right? Don't tell anyone). Something has to give. In general, it happens this ranked order, I am always productive, I generally try to do things really well, I just don't get a lot of things done. Prolificacy always comes in last, so, day in and day out that I do not have a a job and a long Bucket List, I feel like a bit of a failure for getting so little done.

This brings me to 2012. I still have a Bucket List, I actually like Bucket Lists but I will attempt to approach it differently, its purpose is to remind me of the things I dream of doing and to resist the urge to become complacent. I am going to forget resolutions, goals and lists, I have new "intentions" for this year. The most important one just occurred to me, while writing this paragraph, and it is the most profound. I need to become more Prolific. Maybe that was obvious to you. Or maybe you are thinking, like I was thinking, isn't it better to concentrate on doing far few things? Yes, it is, or not.

I need to become more Prolific. I need to reverse the ranked order of the "Three P's". I need to try a large number of things, make a lot of mistakes, make a lot of starts. I need to create an abundance of experiences. Then, I need to not finish them, drop them, not follow through, quit. I know from the large quantity of ashes I will accumulate from burning my bridges, will rise the phoenix, something that will be pure and worthy of excellence. In that one thing, I will pour in all the perfection I can summon. Alas, I will only be able to call to me that which I can feel into, which will require me to spend more time, for lack of a better word, relaxing. You know what this sounds like? It sounds like I am not going to get much more than 5% completed on my Bucket List for 2012.

This intention of trying a lot of things, quitting a lot of things and relaxing more may sound a bit reprehensible. In a culture where we generally choose one career, one path, one partner and stick with it, there may be many people knitting their eyebrows at me. Oh well, I'll have to deal with that. This is going to be a hard process and it will take a lot of habit breaking and reforming. But now, I am really tired of concentrating on myself. I had to make this intention known, like a proclamation, a reminder to myself, groundwork.

I hope to share lots of new things, some will be good, okay, bad or mistakes, maybe. I will leave you with this:

A new day, a waning moon. We start again,
All things at different times.