the only thing worse
than bad memories
is no memories at all..
[dismemberment plan]
1.31.2006
Creep on the Phone.
I was at a meeting for an NYU publication when my cell phone rang. I quietly extricated myself from the table and answered my phone (which is currently this monstrous abomination, due to circumstances beyond my control).
It was a call from a man I met many months ago, whom I'll call "Greg." I really don't know the dude, so the conversation was quite awkward.
It went as follows:
Me: Hello? Greg: Oh hey, it's Greg. Me: Oh, hi. I'm kind of in a meeting right now... G: Oh, sorry (random apologetic mumbling). Can you hang out tonight? Me: Um. What did you want to do? G:To fuck you. Me: Uh. Oh. I see. No, I think I'm going to have to pass. G: You really have no idea what you're missing out on. I have an 11-inch penis... All of the Asian girls I've fucked love it... I... (continues ad nauseam)...
(**rapidly pressing "END CALL" button**)
Honestly. If I could reach through my cell phone and punch this motherfucker "Greg" in the brain, I would have. What the fuck is wrong with people?
I took swim classes at the YMCA when I was about 7 years old.
At 7, I was an awkward, shy, fat child. Being fat put both me and my mom in a constant state of distress throughout my childhood. I remember when I bent down to tie my shoes, I could hardly breathe. My mom used to pinch my flowing rolls of fat on my stomach and thighs -- pinch them HARD -- and say out loud, "What a waste. What a waste..."
I think she was surprised at how deep these experiences cut into my mind and my self image. I refused to go to pool parties for years because I didn't want anyone to look at me in a swimsuit. It didn't help that my swimsuit was black with bright neon green stripes and a frilly attached skirt.
Unfortunately, I think my shyness and hatred of my body being revealed in a bathing suit was taken as an inability to swim. Thus, at age 7, chubby, sad, and self-loathing, I found myself in a YMCA pool wearing aforementioned neon bumblebee spandex suit, practicing scissor kicks and coughing up snotty breaths in the deep end of the pool -- horrified, terrified, disgusted.
This did nothing to help the way I felt about my chubby rolls all over my body. I was the fattest, oldest kid in the Guppies class. I was surrounded by slender first-graders who cut through the water like sardines. I had so much trouble swimming on my back, that my exasperated instructor had to grab me by my swimming belt and drag me to the end of the pool while I thrashed my limbs wildly like a turtle lying helplessly on its shell, unable to turn itself back on its feet.
On the diving board, my fat legs trembled, and I feared for my life. I could see the small tiles on the floor 10 feet below the surface, and I considered that to be my grave. I could just feel the bubbles and water rushing into my nose, my mouth, my eyes, and my ears -- rendering me blind, breathless, suffocating, unable to scream for help.
I always thought I would never make it back up to the surface again.
It was so strange to me that these tiny water nymphs that were my classmates were so trusting that they would live through the diving board experience. How did they know they wouldn't perish beneath the cold, chlorine waves?
It goes without saying that I failed the swim course. My "report card" came back saying that I would have to repeat the same level once more -- I was yet a Guppy. If I returned the next session, I would without a doubt be the oldest Guppy, by an even greater margin this time.
The years went on, and I got by on the family trips to the beach and the eventual pool parties by relying on the wild flailing of my limbs that I had learned as a Guppy. Somehow, I survived these ordeals.
And at pool parties, when my friends and I played "Shark," an underwater version of "Tag," I would always end up being "it," unable to venture out to the deep end with much confidence, unable to catch my slim, buoyant friends to "tag" them as the Shark. So I found myself many times idly swimming back and forth by myself in the shallow end, a lonely shark with hidden tears in my eyes, as the more skilled swimmers laughed and splashed in the deep that seemed to be a mile away.
This feeling continues in me to this very day, beyond swimming.
It always seemed to me that somehow, I'd missed something along the way -- like a secret that everyone else seemed to know but me. How was it that I was barely making it day-to-day, struggling, crying, and uncertain about my future -- while everyone else was having fun, laughing, and enjoying life? Was there a meeting that I'd missed where we learned about living life? Had I even been invited to that meeting in the first place?
How did this happen? Did I get lost along the way, or have I been on the wrong road to begin with? How does everyone else know what to do with their lives, and I am just scraping by, trying to keep my head above the water?
This morning, I went to the pool at my school's gymnasium. I took in the familiar surroundings -- the scent of chlorine, the steamy humidity of the shower rooms, the sounds of splashing water. I noted the absence of one prevalent noise that I'd become used to from YMCA lessons -- the echoing screams and squeals of delight of children swimming.
I felt ridiculous. I was wearing a swimsuit I wore in the 7th grade (that's 8 years ago), a red swimming cap, goggles, ear plugs I'd saved from a plane trip last year, a foam floatation belt, and the final accessory to absurdity -- rubber flippers on my feet.
I went over to lane 8 to slowly slip into the pool unnoticed, when the pimply lifeguard called out very loudly, "Ma'am? You can't swim there. That's for the professionals. You have to use the recreational lane." She pointed to a wide lane marked with a cone that said, "VERY SLOW."
I feel like I stood out like a circus clown at a high school dance. I flip-flopped in my flippers over to the recreational lane for idiots like myself and plunged into the shocking cold.
I felt the familiar feeling of alienation as I purveyed the other lanes. Confident splashes, limbs kicking and stroking, nobody choking for air... I looked down at myself, decked out in SCUBA gear, trying to make it to the 10 foot end without dying.
How did everyone else know how to do this but me?
I pushed these thoughts aside as I pushed off the wall, cut through the water like a dull butter knife, and swam and swam and swam -- for more than an hour. I clumsily scraped against the rope on one side and the tiled wall on the other -- again, a reminder of my childhood experiences at the YMCA -- but this time, I didn't have a swarthy Greek instructor yelling at me to kick my feet "like this" as my entire class waited glumly at the opposite end of the pool for me to finish.
I still can't breathe right in the water, I still panic when I see the tile floor ten feet below the surface, and I still can't jump off a diving board without my life flashing before my eyes. I hate the feeling of water in my ears. But even though I may get manly, big shoulders from swimming, I am determined to keep trying -- trying until I can swim like everyone else. I want to swim in the ocean without fearing death. I want to swim in a pool without breaking into the doggy paddle.
And for chrisssake, I want to graduate from being a Guppy and finally become a fucking Minnow. I may never be a Shark in my lifetime, but if I can step up from being a Guppy for once, just once, I think I can be happy with that.
(I usually don't get along too well with my dad. We don't really fight often, but I find that I try to avoid him as often as possible because he tends to go into long lectures about fascinating topics, like: whether I'm eating enough, on time, at the right time; whether I'm getting enough sleep; how I am doing at school; why I spend so much money at Starbucks (I know, I know..); and my favorite -- whether I am pooping regularly.
In any case, I've realized that the reason why my dad can go on and on and on ad nauseam is because of the fact that whenever I hear his soft, socked, stealthy footsteps coming at me, I run. The man slowly accumulates things to talk about, and once I am in a helpless position, unable to escape, he lets it all out -- all of it at once, slowly -- until he is deflated, like a beach ball with a tiny hole in it.
Hopefully by spending more time with him, he will go easy on those hour-long lectures about whether I am pooping regularly.)
So today, I went out with my dad to a number of cheap opticians covered by our insurance to get an eye exam and a new pair of glasses. I lost my newish pair in an airport last year and my older ones make me look like Liam Neeson wearing goggles, so I figured it was due time that I attain a new pair. My dad had lost his glasses about two years ago (must run in the family) and has since been driving to and from work at night, blind as a newborn wombat.
My dad, ever the efficient strategist, devised an elaborate money-saving plan. First, we would swing by Lenscrafters in the mall, get insurance-covered eye exams for $40 each, then hit Pearle Vision, Costco, and Target to check out who has the cheapest frames. Ready? Break!
First stop: Lenscrafters. It was really weird -- my dad and I had decided beforehand that both of us would return home with glasses. Once we got there, he suddenly said, "I don't wanna. You do exam first. I will come back maybe next week."
What?? My dad has this strange idiosyncracy in which he suddenly backs out of plans for no reason. "We don't have much time. You do it first," he said. This vexed me greatly because the exam takes all of 20 minutes or so, and it was only around noon. Plus, I knew he would put off getting new glasses for probably another two years if I didn't push him in the right direction.
I grabbed one of the clipboards and made him fill one out. He grudgingly acquiesed after I insisted repeatedly.
Once the optometrist was available, I went first, and ran the gamut of tests including the incredibly terrifying part where a puff of air is shot directly onto your eye. That is the fucking worst. And not only that, the nice young lady who was doing it FUCKED UP and had to do it twice. Thanks.
After I came out, eyes weary and disconcerted, my dad looked up at my face from the waiting room chair and asked me softly in Korean, so that the people around us wouldn't understand, if I would come and stay with him during the exam.
It was then that I realized he was scared.
It's an uncomfortable feeling -- knowing that someone who has taken care of you feels frightened and helpless in the hands of practicioners, not knowing whether they will tell you that something is wrong with you or not.
There I sat, in a dim room, watching as my dad held what looked like a plastic rice scooper up to cover his eye and read off numbers from kaleidoscopic colored circles. I watched with a weight in my stomach as he put on a pirate eye patch and pushed a button whenever he saw a light in his peripheral vision.
"Did I get 100% right?" he shyly asked the girl, about his test performance thus far. "Hahaha," she responded noncommittally with a nervous laugh, avoiding eye contact, not wanting to offend him.
We moved on to a different room where the actual eye doctor sat him in a big dentist's chair, with one of those huge binocular-esque things that you can find on the Empire State Building, put a quarter in it, and look at the view of the city below. I held my breath as my dad read a line of letters, incorrectly.
He read the number "2" as an "N."
"That last one is a number," the doctor said. "Number? Oh... It look like... maybe.. 9?" my dad replied.
I was relieved when the doctor said the round bump on my dad's eye was normal and not harmful. A few horrible thoughts had been running through my mind: Cancer? Tumor? Eye surgery?
(Suddenly, I had a frightening thought -- I pictured my dad in a hospital cot, wearing a paper gown and matching paper hair net, helpless, frightened, old, and ill. I kept thinking -- in 20-30 years, will I have to take care of my feeble parents, rendered infantile with old age? Would I be changing their diapers and tucking them in?)
In any case, my sudden irrational panicky thoughts about elderly parental abandonment aside, we were both fine, much to my relief -- just near-sighted, so we left, with prescriptions in our pockets. Whew. Next step: finding frames.
Next destination: Pearle Vision. After deeming Lenscrafters' frames as too expensive, we went to their step-cousin store, Pearle Vision. Unsurprisingly, they were just as overpriced.
I watched patiently as my dad tried on a few pairs of women's glasses by accident. I think he liked a pair of Donna Karan's and I momentarily panicked. I could not let my dad purchase a pair of women's glasses.
"Hey Dad, those are $250." "Let's go."
We left.
Next yet: Costco. It was really surprising to me that besides the enormous warehouse full of value-sized packages of toilet paper and buckets of gummy bears, Costco really has some decent glasses. In fact, they had a bunch of the designer frames that we saw for about half price: DKNY, Versace, Armani, D&G, Prada, Calvin Klein...
It took us about 2 hours of trying on just about every pair of glasses on the racks before we both found glasses we liked. My dad had a sweet pair of plastic framed Versace's and I had these kick-ass black plastic Anna Sui's, and once the saleslady behind the counter stopped ignoring us, she told me to try my pair on so she could see how I looked in them. I did.
"Yup. Those don't fit you," she said, in a sassy matter-of-fact tone. "What? What do you mean?" I was pissed -- those glasses took 2 hours to pick. And I liked them. "Those. Don't. Fit. You," she said, slowly, as though I was retarded. "On your nose, specifically." "Well, I know I don't have much of a bridge on my nose but.." "-- I'm glad YOU said that first so I didn't have to." "But.." "Plastic glasses just don't look good on Asians. ... That's why Asian people really don't buy this style of glasses."
I was absolutely incredulous at that generalizing remark. Obviously this attitude-ridden bitch had never visited Flickr or read a Xanga (a.k.a. blog server for 99% of the Asian internet community), or maybe she'd never even SEEN an Asian person before -- because as far as I know, ASIANS FUCKING LOVE THE BLACK PLASTIC GLASSES. AND LOOK GOOD IN THEM. Obviously the bitch didn't know what she was talking about.
She went on for a while longer, speaking very loudly so everyone could hear, saying that my face was too flat (thanks) and that I didn't have enough of a nose to carry off a pair of plastic glasses. This pissed me off, not only because she was talking about my flat face (a.k.a. my Garden State Brickface), but also because I used to have a pair of plastic glasses and everyone said they were hot.
Since I didn't have the iron swinging balls to tell her off, I instead said, "Thank you very much," put the frames back on the rack, and nursed my wounds in a corner. Instead of saying, "Excuse me bitch, I would like to earnestly recommend that you go fuck yourself," I did the next best (and very juvenile) thing -- make a call on my cell phone and complain about the ordeal loudly enough so she could overhear me call her a dumb bitch.
My dad felt bad getting glasses by himself, so he scribbled down his Versace frame model number for future reference, and we decided to leave.
(Before we left, he bought me an ice cream bar [Costco sells this divine vanilla ice cream bar that they dip into fresh, melted chocolate and cover in crushed almonds -- mmm! For only $1.50!], which he'd never tried before. I told him to take the first bite, and instead of taking the stick and biting into it, he tried to break off a chunk of it with his fingers. ... My dad is the only person I know who has ever, ever, ever tried eating an ice cream bar with his hands. WELCOME TO AMERICA, DAD!)
So we left, with our hopes still high and with our bellies full of ice cream.
Next: Target. Yeah, this location didn't carry frames. We left.
Finally: Home. All in all, a very fruitless, frustrating, pointless journey through some crappy stores and getting humiliated by some stupid sassy black chick with a bad attitude and even worse salesmanship. But I'm so glad I got to spend the day with my dad, listening to him cracking jokes (which I've very rarely experienced and were actually funny as SHIT), watching him try on ladies' sunglasses, sitting with him during his eye exam and translating what the doctor was saying into Korean, calling him on his cell phone when he didn't come out of the men's restroom for about 15 minutes ("Hold on, Yaejina, I will be out in 10 more minutes," he grunted), and my favorite part of all, on the drive home, we made fun of the stupid obnoxious bitch at Costco:
"Dad, her butt was like a sideways peanut. Did you see that thing?" (I really have to work on my insults.) "Yes. She walk like a duck it is so big. She must eat so much."
We laughed and laughed. And I tried desperately to remember and hold onto everything that happened throughout the whole day, and how much fun we had together, because I knew days like this would be few.
[Peek-a-Foo]