Category: Philosophy

It’s bee a few months since I last actively blogged. Maybe it’s time to pick it up again…
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It’s been seven months since my dad passed. And in this seemingly long time, quite a bit has since taken place — the birth of our daughter, a huge almost grant-like photographic assignment, a well-paying full time job that my cousin hooked me up with, and a fallout with the same cousin that got me the job over the very job he helped secure… Oh, the ironies of life…
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The busy life style of the job, coupled with the fall out with my cousin, makes going to work somewhat unpleasant. Yes, the money is very good but the life style and all the misunderstandings that caused the fall out with my cousin make it almost unjustifiable. I now know that when money was more of an issue but time and patience weren’t, everyone seemed happier then. There are certain things money just can’t buy — time and happiness being on the top of my list.
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The same client who hired me to photograph her action pistol shooting event offered me more money to help promote her cause by becoming her campaign manager of some sort. I know that I can pretty much name my price and she’d be happy to pay for every penny with her trust in my work. But after some soul searching, I decided that I just couldn’t be part of any campaign that has anything to do with pro-guns (even though the whole campaign is really about her, not the guns, but because of the nature of the work, dealing with the NRA and pretending to not dislike that part of the world is a prerequisite… something I can’t live with no matter how much I’m paid).
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The real reason I stopped blogging was a promise to myself to first finish my clients’ projects before I can indulge myself in blogging. Today I finally posted the final edits of the “gun event” for the client to see. Technically I still owe her a few things that came with the package. But I think I’ve crossed the biggest hurdle that’s made me feel uncomfortable about doing what I like before giving my clients my priorities. I’m thankful for my clients’ patience to allowing me to slack for a few months… I’ll find some time to post some images shortly… and hopefully even find time to post process images of my own family!
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I love photography. But until I can find a way to live off of it comfortably, being a programmer will have to do.
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To be continued….

I thought pretty hard on what to write or even how to begin on a new blog entry following the last one. No topic seemed appropriate. And it felt too soon to start blogging again. But then I thought it’s probably better to start writing than to bottle things up inside like my father did.

While I didn’t have any gripes with my father when he passed away, I feel incredibly… helpless for not being able to “see him off” at the funeral. I feel useless for not being able to help out with all that has to be done for the funeral, the ceremonies, the legal dances and everything that supposedly marks one of the defining moment in a man’s life. I don’t have a closure.

Everyone tells me my father wouldn’t blame me for the situation… for not being able to be there and for not being able to help. He’d understand. But I still don’t feel that a closure is upon me anywhere or anytime soon.

I recall this is how one can be messed up for not getting a closure to something important in life. Well, I don’t see myself going crazy anytime soon. But I am still looking for a closure that I can’t have, a way to say goodbye to my father, a way to find peace in myself and accept that he’d have understood my circumstances. Something like this made me question the wisdom and logic of the decisions I’ve made in the past several years, and how all this would have been averted if I had just…

Yes. There were a lot of “what ifs”, “what might have beens”, and “what could have beens”…. But I am living with “what is”…. I live with facts that I can’t change.

Now I will also have to learn to accept that maybe not everything has a closure. I’ll just have to live with my non-closure in peace — whenever I find it, the peace.

Grace: “So how long will it take Tibor to replace both break pads?”

Me: “He said two to three hours…”

Bryan: “Me talk first….”

Grace: “Bryan, please don’t interrupt. It’s impolite. It’s your turn when daddy and mommy are done talking.”

Home phone rings… Ignored.

Grace: “So to replace both breaks, it’d cost….”

Grace’s cell phone rings…

Grace: “Hello? Hi, Ma… Ok…. Hold on a second…”

Grace, wide-eyed, walks toward me extending her arm out to hand me the phone.

“It’s your mom. Your dad passed away.”
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The news came very unexpectedly. But then, any news bearing the death of a family member always does. It was like a 6-foot-3 guy throwing a punch in my stomach with his full weight behind him — shockingly painful, but at the same time, numbing.

How was I supposed to feel? The sound of my mom’s trembling, sobbing voice sent more shock waves through my empty mind than the news did. I simply had no idea what to make of all this.

Finally I concluded it was a mistake. Mom always jumped to conclusions.
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In the back of my mind, there was always a way to get out of this immigration hell hole I am in now, a way to finally resolve everything that’s stopping me from realizing my full potentials, a way to finally take good care of my parents like they did for me. I had an exit strategy — all planned; almost everything set in motion… all except for this immigration hell hole I am in.
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The heart attack swiftly robbed any chance of him ever seeing his grandchildren and denied him of seeing his other son and the only daughter getting married. He’d worked so hard all his life, but the only time he got to rest was when he took his last breathe. Fate has its ways to mock a man.
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So my exit strategy is probably flawed. It doesn’t account for emergency situations delicately, especially with the kind of shitty predicament that I am currently in. Maybe it’s time to revisit this again sometime. I’ll revisit this when I am in a better mood, or when there’s enough money in the bank, or when Taiwan has a new president, or maybe when… Whatever.
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It’s funny how time is conceived and measured in such precise terms. Scientists can measure almost anything relative to the time. And yet, to us humans, time is just an abstract concept that really doesn’t mean anything. And it’s relative only to the mind that perceives it. To Bryan, a two-and-a-half-year-old, having to wait for a minute to speak is like a life time — because a minute relative to his young life IS indeed a much bigger unit in proportion to his life than what a minute is to an adult. Time literally loses its meanings when human perceptions are thrown into the equation.

What I thought I had years to do and plan for turned out to be all garbage and fruitless idealistic dreams when the news of my dad’s death struck. It turned out that there was simply no time for all of that. It was either done or never to be done. The false hope that “time” will eventually take care of everything simply tramples any hope and opportunity that might have left to actually bag the issues in question.

With that, all plans will be re-assessed and re-valued in a more concise manner — especially with Grace’s pragmatic approaches, my dad’s legacy shall be to have brought us a new set of objectives, maybe a new direction, and maybe a new life. And that is our new exit strategy.

I’ve been lucky in that most of the tough choices in my life had easy answers — which school to go to; what to do after graduation; whether or not to take that risky startup job in NYC; if uprooting from NYC and moving to California was the right decision; how did I know if Grace was the right girl… etc.

Most of the time these choices would have the answer staring me in the face before I even had to lose sleep over them. But deciding whether or not to end a house pet’s life was an abstract concept that required some soul searching and constructive voices from others to help clear the fog in the head.

In that, this is an open thank-you to Jason and Alicia for all the emotional and moral support they’ve provided in the past month over Baobao’s condition.

We are also very pleased with our pet ER with their handling of our very difficult cat. And they also provide very sound medical and practical advise from various perspectives. For anyone living in the San Jose area, I can’t think of a better place to take his/her pet to in the case of emergency…

Another reason I recommend them is, they don’t sell any products in their clinic. So this could only mean that every penny they earn, they’d have to earn it from the servicing and treatment of the animals they admit, which is a pretty drastic departure from almost all the other day-clinics I’ve been to, where the lobbies are stuffed with overpriced products and brochures. And to know for a fact that they don’t charge much like other day-clinics, it makes me wonder if they actually do this for the love of the animals, not trying to take advantage of pet owners who’d probably pay anything just to get their pets out of whatever dire conditions their pets are suffering from. I don’t know how they do it, but they have my respect and trust. And that’s a good feeling.

Brian and I used to talk about how toddlers would distort reality in their own minds and become obsessed with this one thing that s/he really wants at that very moment. And for that moment, and in that moment only, the notion of reality is just him and the action/item — nothing else matters. And some adults sometimes are quick to dismiss and discourage that altered reality.

I’ve come to find that the theory is also quite profoundly true when applied to adults. The notions of fate, faith and reality get all twisted and intermingled that sometimes it’s impossible to tell which is which even when the adult is at his most capable mental moments. We all bend realities in our minds to suit our circumstances to some extent — let it be fantasies, make-believes, wishful thinking, dreams, illusions or just blind faith. But sooner or later, all these altered realities have to land at some point. And the higher we spring above reality in hope to reach possibly the impossible, the harder we land when the indifferent gravity that is reality yanks us back to earth. We can always dust ourselves off and try again, but sometimes the collateral damages are too great when the landings make too big of splashes.

Now, some people may attempt it again and again until even the collateral damages are internalized and calculated as part of “doing business”. But others may be so timid at going at it again that they are fixated only on the tangibles.

I am sure I had a point when I started writing this. But now it’s all just an idea with which if I ever get locked in in a conversation with Brian, this topic would be discussed and debated for hours on end while dueling on few games of chess.