maybe it's the weather

Maybe it was the last weekend of summer, but ended up doing many things this weekend that brought into the forefront of my vision the changes happening at so many different levels/layers of my life. I mean I just don't even resonate in the same way anymore.

Of course, Sunday morning in kali class, I was confronted in full force to these things. And I ended up being very emotional in class, which is not so rare of a thing. Even though, by practice, I've learned to, when going for the kill, to be emotionless, kali in and of itself is a very emotional thing. And I've probably cried more time in kali class facing reality than I have cried in pain.

Sunday morning it seemed more confusion than actual physical pain. I felt like I had no real way to communicate to my body. It was all such a foreign language. And a language, that even on a basic level of picking up visual queues, I could not understand.

Tuhan would demonstrate a move, we would watch, he would demonstrate the technique on us, then have us do the technique. And when it was my turn to do the technique, I went completely and utterly blank. And then I came to realize rather quickly that my body felt like it had been rearranged, like when someone else organizes my room, I can't find anything. The passageways I had travelled to make my body move in certain ways had been moved. And so went the morning, where I had to very consciously think about every move I did or was supposed to try to do.

I have been going to acupuncture 1-2 times a week and that had been changing my energy around, but I don't think I realized part of that until today.

I had written before about being lost in your own body. It was like that again today. The emotion seemed more from the confusion of being lost than actual pain to the body. But it wasn't just that, but also layers of fears that didn't have a voice until that moment. The difficulty of fear is that once it creeps in, it is quite hard to get out.

I did what I could throughout the class to keep my mind on other things to keep the full on tears at bay. All of this made for a very exhausting class.

I had to confront the fact that even though I have made various decisive moves regarding enacting changes in my life, that while I desired these things, I also hadn't whole heartedly accepted the changes. There's a difference between saying and doing, wanting and having, trying to be as opposed to actually being.

If there's anything that the fear, uncertainty, lack of confidence, and emotional outpouring was telling me yesterday, was not the struggle of becoming, it was the struggle of accepting. Acceptance has always been the harder thing. To accept that I was no long trying to be anything, but that in fact I already was and it was time to own up to being something. People notice the change in ourselves faster than we ourselves notice the change. While we look into the mirror everyday, we often keep the image of ourselves of who we once were, our last iteration as it were.

That my fear came from this dissonance between who I thought I still was and who I actually am now. As if one part of my brain didn't get the memo, like really really bad jet lag. Once I realized that, then it was a matter of bringing the two realities in sync.

Today, I've been reminding myself to breathe and believe, to take a leap of faith in myself. I am reminded watching my nieces learn to swim, how they had to get over the fear that just because you are not touching the ground or that you are not in someone's arms, it doesn't mean that you are not being supported by something, that you have no other way of holding yourself up. Though, too, it doesn't hurt to ask for a pair of arms once in a while.

I have felt the changes in season so much more powerfully this year than previous ones of my memory. And this, in California, where we're not known for our changes in "season", the seasons seem more than dates on calendars and changes in weather. Perhaps it is the unconscious sensing of all these cues that our ancestors observed and followed.

In the end, I have to accept the person I am in order to focus on what needs to get done.

when the news suddenly becomes front page

Most of the time when I watch the news, I don't make much of it. I really like international news, and then I perk up during sports and weather. Last week I had remember seeing a story about a man who was killed by a motor vehicle. Some guy had gone crazy and jumped the curb. They showed his picture and I thought he looked Filipino.

Before I jumped out of my chair when Filipinos were noted as "killers" on the news, since Filipinos never made it to the news like that. I mean really, there is a stereotype that only single white males go off their rocker and kill folks and everyone else kills folk because of some gang or vendetta. And up until then, the only Filipino you saw on news was Marcos or his wife. That all changed with Cunanan, who made national news taking out a famous designer. Since then, Filipinos have hit the American news: the student who stock piled explosive to go columbine at a local college, the Filipino who held a woman in his parent's home against her will.

But yet, while surprising, the stories never made me think any deeper than the story they reported. I didn't think too much about their families, their children, their parents.

I found out today that the Filipino who had gone nuts in Alameda is 3 degrees away from me. Meaning, we've attended parties together though I never spoke to him personally. The story really became the heartbreaking story that all of them are. A family is shattered, both for the victim and the killer.

Suddenly, I felt a sadness, a remorse, a failure. So many questions. Was it mental illness? Were there signs? Did they have problems? Money, marital, stress? What of his children too young to understand? And his wife who is suddenly married to a murderer? And really, ultimately, the question that could never be answered was there anything any of us could have done to prevent this?

Because in the end, they are our community. Before he killed man, he was and still is a father, a husband, a friend. He was part of a community. And that same community must step up now for his wife and his children, and the family their husband/father destroyed.

jubilation

Have I mentioned how facebook has a way of sucking you in?

It's kind of crazy as I find myself adding people I haven't seen in ages, it's like looking through the roladex of your life. And even though you don't really hang out with most of them that often facebook is a place to poke them and send them other cordial, cute messages and play silly games like biting vampires or parking cars. For someone like me who loves little things that occupy less than a minute or two of attention span, facebook is a complete time sink where you can also peruse what people are up to.

Not so much for my generation who are in our 30s, but much more so for people in their 20s, you can find just about everyone you may have ever known. For me I can't really expect alot of people to be on facebook necessarily. My generation still knows what actual privacy is.

But one day while I was sick I decided to cruise through the searches and see if I could find people I knew from junior high and even elementary school. I found three people and two of them wrote me back.

One of them is Josh Staub creator of Jubilee Animation and the writer/producer/director/animator of the award winning animated short, The Mantis Parable. I've only known Josh from four square games and tag and I remember we worked on a project together in like 5th grade but I don't know exactly what that was about, but I do remember that even in 5th grade he had a drafting table like serious artists and wasn't just for doodling.

I hope to get a copy of The Mantis Parable soon with a review here soon.

when the lanes were silent

While the 20-somethings start coming in around 10pm in large groups on an outing of their club or dorm floor, the leagues are full of bowling lifers. And while there are a few young folks (30-ish), most everyone is well into 40s and 50s and up. The day leagues are mostly seniors.

When we first started bowling I think we were treated with some skepticism, beginners who really weren't all that serious about competing, but then we stuck around for a winter league then a summer league and winter league again until we became some of the usuals, the leaguers. Many of them bowl twice a week. Alot of them have bowled some 20+, 30+ years. The bowling alley was their hang out place. You see and compete and play with the same people week after week. You wonder what happens to people when they miss a week or two.

This last week, Albany Bowl, lost 3 long time bowlers. One of them in our league. We had heard last week that his partner had found him collapsed and unconscious and that he was at the hospital in a coma. His partner had even come down to the alley last week to let us know what happened. Today we found out he passed away.

When we first played his team, we dreaded them. Fierce and quiet competitors that would quietly and quite deliberately put together a bone crushing game against you. While playing other teams were quite jovial, the silence was deafening with them. After a while, we found out that they were just the quiet types and well they didn't mean to look mean, particularly for him, that's just what his face looked like when it was neutral. The hubby was the first to figure out their funny bones and after that they were a fun team to play with. It was particularly interesting watching Oliver play his always very consistent games as he read the oil and its patterns.

At one point last year, his partner had fallen ill and we didn't see him for a while and didn't see her for quite some time but she returned this season. We had hoped it would have been the same for him.

There have been lots of studies about the number of relationships people have and how the younger generation doesn't join organizations or teams any more and where is out sense of community. And sure it's important to have the handful of really deep connections, but it's also important to have these tangential connections. Bowling league is one of those places where each week, you make your rounds and say hello to everyone, ask how they are doing life wise or bowling wise, compete against each other, and congratulate each other in the end. A few people have brought their grandchildren or children to play. They are small connections. These aren't people I write into my will necessarily, but for a few hours each week, there's a place to put things aside to have fun or be serious. For a few hours you are a community.

And so this evening we spent a moment of silence to honor and pray for those who passed away this week. There were still a few recreational bowlers still rolling balls down the lanes because they had no reason to pay attention to the announcer speaking to the league bowlers. For them the bowling alley, is just a place that could be any other place. But for us, once or twice a week, it's our space.