Small Talk

Last night, I noticed something.  Its been weeks since I've had an enjoying conversation with someone.   You know that kind of conversation where there are no purpose, topic, or complaints.  Its not about work, its hardly about the concrete issues in our life, its just here and there.  There were jokes and sharing of interest.  We talked about my love of parenting blogs, our love for Carrie Underwood's Casanova Cowboy, the pleasure of inspiring quotes, and his tax-filing status.  Its like beginning to know a person all over again.  Even though you've known this person for over a year now. 

Then, as I am driving to school, thinking about work, mentally mapping out my day, and thinking of all the people I have to talk to, I realize I don’t talk to people.  I have not converse with someone for the enjoyment of it,  where my attention is committed and vice versa.  I miss small talk.   I miss the ease and lack of attempt. 

Small talk is what we call it.  A big help it does us.  Dale Carnegie is right.  I just forgot the shelf his wisdom sits on sometimes. 

1st time I fell in love.

Beginnings (Reposting from his blog) 

“Can you feel that?” you snuggled closer until I could feel the abnormally faster beating of your heart.

“It does that every time I am near you,” you murmured while at the same time putting the palm of your hand to rest on my chest where my heart should be.

“Your heartbeat is quite normal though!” you joked with only the slightest hint of an accusatory tone. You are perhaps wondering if I feel the same way about you.

Do you really wonder?

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“How do you know that you more than like me now? Why do you like me?”

I liked your questions.  I didn’t answer right away deliberately.

These labels do not exist in discrete points. They are in a continuum with no marked transition. And while ordinarily Reason dictates to proceed with caution, and only to declare loyalty or affection when you are several spaces away from the grey area of shift - where colors are vivid but smudged, where sounds are loud but often cacophonic, where infatuation can be easily mistaken perhaps for romance - our particular circumstance calls for a certain amount of irresponsibility. As seconds are equivalent to hours, days to months, and months to years.

And why do I like you? How could you dare to ask the why really when all you need to have is the mirror that shows how enchantingly spellbinding you are inside and out. And though there is undoubtedly a deeper magic in all these, it is sacrilegious to allude to it now. It will unravel itself in time. To reveal this now would just be my final undoing.

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This is the hand of fate. Slapping me. And I am offering the other cheek.

My Valentine

It was a typical plot line about not accepting your past in the last episode of Ugly Betty. As I am quick to judge the writers for bringing the cliché feel-good message up, I went to bed wondering if I had the same issues as Betty (yes, TV shows provoke deep thinking for me). Then, last night, I went to bed remembering my self-perception. I pulled out a bunch of old photos that I saved during the big cleaning—filled up a 20-yard dumpster of old un-donate-able things—I did about a week ago.

I smiled to myself seeing the pictures of when I first immigrated to America: bowl cut, hand-me-downs, dorky smile, over-enthusiastic about the simpler things in life. There were also a few pictures of when I got really chubby, really fast over my second summer back in Vietnam.

Most people that know me have probably heard way too often of the stories of you childhood in Vietnam but probably never heard about what it was like when I moved here. It is the typical story of an ethnic immigrant boy trying to adjust to a white-dominated Missouri county. Sometimes I was out-casted, my accent was constantly ridiculed and my obsession with my cousin’s big coats did not help me fit in with the other more-athletic boys. I remember how obsessed I was with my sister since I never really found a friendship that lasted during my tween years. Perhaps these stories do not make a fun and laughable evening and I wonder if I am embarrassed of the me that weren’t so sociable/flirty. But I do want to start telling them.

Growing u, even as a sorta grown-up, I have always been extremely critical of myself. But when I was looking at all the photos, I would give up a good meal or two to go be back in time for a day. Since this Valentines Steve is in Manila, I am going to spend all the love I would have given him on myself, with more old albums I have not yet looked at. Wine, chocolates and all.