From Bend to San Francisco

Again, I am in Bend, Oregon. With a smile, I remember walking with Rose, eating soup with Stephen, making baby Aiden giggle as I pretend to gobble his hand, hearing Abby's contagious laugh, seeing the fuzzy deer and rabbits from Dawn's window and getting warm hugs from my favorite people in Bend.

My favorite image in Bend was not one that I captured. At night, I walk the patchy path of crunchy snow and ice from one street to another. I look up and see the criss-crossing, thin branches of a young, bare tree with a few shriveled leaves clinging and glowing in the moonlight.

I eat by myself at a narrow counter by the window. Three of the staff members stop by to check on me and I can feel their kind and somewhat pitying expressions for the woman all alone. It makes me uncomfortable. I do not feel lonely as I write in my battered and worn, green journal. I appreciate their concern, but would feel better if they had a different conclusion of my solitude. But I get it and maybe they feel more about me than I do.

I appreciate my time walking with Abby. The calm morning turns blustery and you can see the wind from the flying, sandy dirt and debris. I wipe the film of sand from my lips caught there by my lip balm. We walk along the loveliest of all rivers, the Deschutes.

I exit the wind into the airport and breeze through security. We are buckled into our seats, ready for takeoff, unknowing that the plane will not move again, at least not on this day. In line to be re-ticketed, I call my sister to check the weather for the towns I would pass through if I happened to drive back to San Francisco. At 9 p.m. snow will fall in Dorris and the same for Weed, California but Redding looks clear. I want to be home. I could get past the snow before 9 p.m. but it is not my fate to drive this time.

Instead, I board a plane for Portland, in the tenth and final row of the small plane. I trade the aisle for the window seat with the young man next to me. Better than a movie, I watch the land of central Oregon stretch out below me and I salivate as I look north and east to the remote stretches of desert and I strongly desire to explore it. That is the kind of alone-ness that energizes me, in it I feel who I am.

We fly into the clouds and above them and the ground is gone again until we near Portland. Then the clouds break up and the rolling green hills and forests appear. I can see the farthest reaching western touches of snow, the trees are dusted in white and then finally, only green. I am grateful to see the Columbia River Gorge as we fly parallel to the huge river. We land smoothly.

I spend five hours at the Portland airport, sitting in the large open area at a table next to the tall windows. Businessmen are scattered about on their laptops. One man is engaged in a video call and by his looks and hand gestures he must be talking to his kids. A large crowd of people gather just beyond security with balloons and signs and they start clapping and cheering for someone who has finally arrived. What a nice welcome, I wonder if I would ever like that.

I sit next to two off-duty flight attendants by my gate for two hours waiting to board our delayed flight. I can tell they have lots of practice waiting. I finish the book I bought at the San Francisco airport before I left, never expecting to read a whole book on my short trip to Bend. I am not sure the book was good for me. Many times I wanted to stop reading, throw it out, even burn it. It wasn't all bad. It glared at me the addiction of doing, doing, doing things, lacking passion, and bloated with shallow activity. But it wasn't all bad.

I talk to another of my sisters on the phone. It is her birthday and I wish I could be with her. I miss her nearly every moment I am not with her, I don't feel that way about too many people, maybe only her. Why is that?

The air feels very rough and I tighten my seatbelt as much as I can. We are over the runway, but we have not touched down yet. I like flying but I don't always like landing. We bounce and swerve small amounts and then brake hard but we are safely on the ground. We wait for 15 minutes just short of the gate in San Francisco. I have finally run out of patience. I am at the back of the plane and it takes a long time to empty. Paul picks me up, curbside.

At nearly 1 a.m., I walk in the door of my house exactly 12 hours after I walked into the Redmond/Bend airport. Knowing that fact turns me into a complainer. But really, I want it as an excuse to take the morning off, to gather myself and clear my mind. I need that time. If I take the time without an excuse, I fear I am weak and lazy. I roll my eyes and shake my head at myself, "Give me a break!" I tell myself, literally. Okay fine, I just might try.

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