20070914

Friday

CODEC

It’s Midnight. I should be going to bed, but I won’t sleep well if I don’t write.

I’ve made that claim two nights in a row now and both nights I had nightmares, so I don’t know who I’m fooling.

This afternoon, I went over to Yume’s to help her with recipe testing and taking pictures for her Thai-Vietnamese cookbook. I had a blast working with her. She’s very self-effacing and easy to work with. I’m blown away by how good her food is. It’s like every time we taste the sample dishes, I’m surprised to experience a twist on traditional Vietnamese and Thai dishes. Her food is very addictive.

I had a long drive home and on my back up North, my intuition told me not to continue on the highway. It told me to pull off once I’m three quarters of the way home and to take the inner streets. So I did.

As I pulled off onto Speer and was about to turn right on Lowell (a back road that I often take), a vague feeling came over me. I’ve often thought about how it’s dangerous to take the back roads of Lowell BLVD northbound at night because it’s very desolate and a bit hillbilly…there’s nothing along the dark stretch except for rail road tracks, freight trains passing through and a few modest homes sprinkled here and there. I’ve often thought that that area would be a shitty area to break down.

As I pulled up to Lowell, I signaled and moved towards the right to turn. At that moment something “popped” inside my car and the car broke down. The car would start up and the engine runs, but as I shifted it into Drive, a grinding noise would cycle. It didn’t sound good.

It was dark of course and late. I wasn’t happy about being broken down, but I was pleased that it happened at a reasonable intersection right before I head up that dark desolate stretch north. I happened to be at a corner of a modest neighborhood in Denver that’s increasingly becoming more affluent over the years–with Thai restaurants and small bars and hang outs cropping up. Diagonal from me was also a 24 hour Shell gas station. So for a breakdown–I did alright.

I put the hazards on and walked around the safer side of the car to look underneath. I knew I didn’t run over anything, but I wanted to see what that grinding sound was. So I checked to see if any parts were hanging down onto the ground. As I stood up, a young hip-looking couple turned the corner onto Lowell. I got back inside my car and proceeded to call for a tow truck.

The young couple had pulled over around the corner and the guy came over to help me. He asked, “Do you want to put your car in neutral and I can push your car around the corner so it’s safer and off the main road?”

Then his girlfriend (or nice looking girl) came out and they both pushed my car. They were so incredibly friendly–I felt grateful.

I knew better than to turn my hazards on. Since my car was parked–I didn’t want to draw attention to it. The last thing I wanted were strangers pulling over talking to me. So I rolled up the windows and sat in the car until the tow truck came.

I had called Road Side assistance and given them a description of my car. I told them I wasn’t going to turn on my hazards on although they insisted that it would be easier for the tow truck to find me. Having spent a lot of time in New York and being rather street smart–I wasn’t going to do that. I figure, if the tow guy has the plate number, description and location, he could figure it out.

I sat there thinking about what would have happened if my car blew out while on the highway…. I would have either been on the fast lane on the left or in the middle of a four lane freeway. I thought about the construction sites and congestion that occurs late at night and the hazardous conditions. I also thought about the industrial streets I would have pulled off of due to construction–and how creepy, dark and sparse those places were. Not only this, the freaks out west are different than in New York. I can sort of predict the behaviors of New York thugs–but the White Trash people–I’ll never understand.

I also thought about how opportune it was that I broke down in a neighborhood not far from my house. I really don’t know how I could have made it home if this happened near Yume’s (in the town of Lone Tree).

When the tow guy finally came, he said it was a shot in the dark that he found me. Apparently, I had given them the wrong address (33^rd Avenue instead of 38^th) and he took a chance and kept heading North until he saw me.

I had already decided that to make life easier for me: rather than having the car towed, I wanted them to take the car straight to the mechanic I had discovered two months ago. But then, I’d have to find a ride home from there.

When the tow guy met me the first thing he did was offer to give me a ride home, AND take my car to the mechanic. He was a gentleman and told me that that wasn’t standard protocol, but being that I was a woman–he wasn’t going to leave me out on the street.

Although most of his work is done in the Southeast side of downtown, he knew exactly which mechanic I wanted to bring my car to because he used to live in the neighborhood. He decided to drop me off first, and then drop off my car. I trusted him on that–I saw no reason not to; I recognized that he was being courteous and I didn’t want to question him. All I asked was that he’d park the car in an area that I wouldn’t be ticketed if the mechanic’s lot is full.

Tonight, I’m a bit impressed by the flow of events that happened sequentially with grace. My recent nightmares two nights prior may not have spoken directly of it–but symbolically, they make sense in retrospect. I kept dreaming that I was losing things–personal belongings, possessions, and identity related things; having to measure their importance (true value or lack of) and retrieve them.

I didn’t feel stressed or frighten by any of these events, just a little inconvenienced. I wondered if it was time to get a new car and I can’t help but curse VW for putting out such a shitty (lemon) make of the Jetta in the late 90s.

I felt protected the entire time. As each person offered to help me; they felt like human angels. It is true that people are much nicer in Colorado than in New York, but tonight was different.

Ironically, I had just returned from visiting Tim’s place in Highland’s Ranch before hitting the highway. Tonight, he happened to be up late because he was on-call 24 hours for his computer engineering job.

He was so nice to burn a torrent version of a documentary I’ve been trying to get a hold of. I wanted to study the Norwegian produced documentary because I was impressed by their editing and the use of sound and music composition. So I went to pick up the disk, and he made me a cup of black tea for my one hour trip heading North.

When my car broke down, I called him up because I knew he was on-call. Normally, he would be in bed early to get up at 5 or 6 a.m. I asked him to Google the contact information of my mechanic so that I could tell the tow guy where to take the car.

Tim was so nice. He took the liberty to search for a codec that would enable me to watch the documentary. The torrent file would only enable us to listen to the sound–so he found a way for me to install a plug-in that would let me see the entire documentary on my computer. Prior to that, we had tried numerous professional video editing software and other options to render the file. Nothing worked. He was even starting to consider running a Unix OS to see if the .avi image will show.

I sat in his kitchen looking at this disk and said, “You know, the pitiful thing about this disk is that you KNOW there’s an image in there. The ironic thing is that I wanted to see the documentary to study the sound–and the sound is all I’ve got!”

That part of the conversation was funny because here I am stranded in my car on the street and we’re sitting there talking about codecs and finding a solution for the .avi movie file. I was so thrilled that he got it to work because I was hounding down the distribution and production company to find out the release of the PBS show onto DVD. Since they weren’t anticipating getting that together anytime soon–I asked Tim about getting a hold of a torrent file. Lo and behold, he knew how to download torrents. One less technology I’d have to deal with.

My car breaking down is going to set me back financially since I have not worked a real job or earned serious income in perhaps 7 months. If it’s a transmission problem–I can expect to dish out a few grand. Yet, I’m not too worried about it because it’s just part of life. We live in a world where things break and someone’s got to pay for it.

People lose some “thing” on a daily basis–whether incidentally, intentionally or accidentally–and you get to a point where you accept it. Sure it’s a pain, and based on my low kitchen wages–I’m not banking on my cooking jobs to cover it. But to lead a liberated life, a Nomad needs a horse–so the car is a valuable asset to invest in. I’ll just have to make do.

In the end, I can’t complain. Everything happens for the benefit of progress—and I see this incident as another thing in life that is supposed to push me forward, backward or in any direction required to put me in the place I am supposed to be.

If anything, tonight truly reveals to me how close I am to a Divine presence; that it has confirmed and continues to reveal itself to me…. I could have been stranded anywhere–but it wasn’t just anywhere: like clockwork, everything was timed in my favor.

Incidentally, it is not a coincidence that I met Yume. All the dark experiences and difficult times I went through in the past years were not forsaken. I felt like I was the only one in the world going through the inner turmoil and experiences of a world crumbling beneath my feet; going from a very comfortable lifestyle to a dismal string of losses and chaos in a span of three full years.

But Yume’s been through it too–and around her are close friends that have fallen from the corporate haven, losing millions of dollars: going from having everything–to literally nothing. In just a blink of an eye, a couple she knew lost 4 million dollars in assets–had to get rid of everything and downgrade to an apartment; once self employed…now soul seeking and penniless.

I’ve always told my friends while living in New York that it often freaks me out how rapid our material world moves. “We’re always one paycheck from homelessness,” I’d say. There is something terribly wrong with our economic structure and expense of living that can take us down so quickly. In the past, it was very affordable to keep yourself many steps ahead of homelessness. But in today’s world: it’s literally one paycheck (or one disaster) away.

Yume lost a quarter million dollars risk-taking on a restaurant partnership prior to breaking out on her own. She has also made some impressive sacrifices to do the work she loves. She’s an extremely hard worker and her versatility, brains and personality is lined with Genius.

But through it all, she wasn’t going to just let the world fold in on her. She saw these set-backs as an act of progress.

When she tells me stories about her friends that share these themes of loss, usually material in nature; hence humbling, I start to gain clarity of my own experiences in life. I felt less alone; and in fact, I feel that I came out of all my troubles pretty okay…and even ahead, as with the timing of how my losses unraveled.

In hindsight, I can see now that it was not “I” who “Lost” everything. But that the world made a beautiful Sacrifice to me.

I couldn’t see it because I Suffered. Yet everything that left me did so in a way that gave me something in return and was very well timed. The last loss I had was with my cat, Freedom. She knew I was starting a new life: that I planned to move to Denver. She timed her death I feel. She died a month before my relocation so that I could move forward. I always felt very touched and guilty about this sacrifice. But she did it because she felt she was holding me back.

And then one day, after a dream wherein I saw a pool of blood and followed a group of people towards a University, they told me I could not come with them. I woke up and realize that Freedom was going to die. Shortly after that dream, she jumped on my chest, looked at me as though her heart was at her throat. Her look seemed to say, “I’m going away.” I said to her, “Freedom, please don’t look at me that way” and she jumped off. And then she rapidly deteriorated.

I’m always impressed by this chain of events: because they are so powerful and also unstoppable. I feel incredibly grateful that my cat struggled that hard to speak to me. It seemed like it took every ounce of her soul and energy to communicate the way she did. She’s given me the greatest gift that life can offer: Servitude, something that I never would have learned in life otherwise.

I was just speaking to Tim tonight while waiting for him to burn me a CD, I looked at his TV and asked him how many inches it was. He then told me the story about the TV and how he acquired it. To make a long story short, it was an outrageous story about a man abandoned by his wife and kids. At that moment, I realized how I wasn’t the only one in the world that faced these dark truths about humanity. People are ugly, they do ugly things. They do ugly things because they’ve chosen to. Someone pays the price, someone always does. But one does not always have to accept the price; or to consider it as price tag of one’s suffering.

There are two things about Loss and Suffering that stand very far apart and are markedly different. But when one experiences them; it is hard to make the separation.

Loss is actually separate from us; but when we go through it, we are drowning in it. We see Suffering and Loss as being simultaneous, interwoven and married. But they are not.

Loss is an external event, whereas Suffering is an internal event. You usually don’t acquire this insight or clarity until the storm has passed. It took me two years to finally meet people who had it much worse than I did; but that does not mean they suffered more or less. I suffered greatly. I also believe that suffering is relative, and one can’t compare one’s depths of suffering to the conditions of someone else’s.

The only way to really deal with Suffering is to recognize Loss as a powerful destructive force that can sweep one’s life away. But in order to survive it, one has to force oneself to believe that Loss is temporal–like a passing storm.

The degree of one’s Suffering is measured by one’s perception of the storm. So if one experiences Loss to be like an earthquake–one will break like the earth and suffer as such. But if you can see that an earthquake is dangerous yet focus on how to survive it: one’s attention is less on the suffering and more pointed on a view of progress. This doesn’t mean that one denies oneself of experiencing pain. On the contrary, one is more conscious of it, hence actively participating or having a dialogue with it.

Only when the Loss has passed will one understand the experience of Suffering; and to begin seeing Loss and Suffering as two separate (strands of) events. When you can see them as separate events, it makes it easier to survive the experience.

Suffering inflicts Loss and Loss inflicts Suffering, appearing to happen simultaneously connected and enmeshed. At that point, that’s when you drown.

Yume was able to make the separation; that’s why she refused to sit like a lame duck feeling stupid for her business mistakes and to suffer the abuse and criticisms of others. She didn’t infuse Loss and Suffering as the same strand of events.

Loss and Suffering are uncontrollable, but Suffering leads to progress and power. Ironically, Loss Gives, Suffering Takes. Loss gives us the opportunity to Suffer, and when we do so, we are able to receive Redemption; it empowers us in the end.

Minor things in life such as having to pay for a broken pipe or mechanical parts that fail are often handled matter of fact. Things break, you pay for it. But rarely in life, when it comes to emotional, personal and deep spiritual loss can one cope or repair.

I think that when it comes to People hurting other people, or when an Ideal or Lifestyle gets smashed, it pulls us closer to suffering in ways that we’ve resisted (or never had to deal with); it’s foreign, anti-gravitational, and even seemingly inhumane. It’s new and it just feels like it “shouldn’t happen.”

But tragedy DOES happen. Human tragedies are the only thing that excels humanity or promotes progress. As unfortunate as it is, it’s the truth. Being pulled back always reassesses the forward motion—like the sling on bow and arrow.

We don’t know why life works that way. But I think after a few hits, you realize that the best way to deal with it is to accept it and work with it; rather than against it. Yet I am not suggesting a Reductionist attitude of skipping over the troubles of suffering in order to achieve progress.

Without suffering, there is no progress–one has to spiral downward and hit rock bottom. That’s a requirement. It’s not a choice. If one doesn’t know what it feels like to have failed–how could one recognize the meaning of success? If I were to ever meet anyone who claims they’re always happy without having once experienced great tragedy, or if a business person claims they are successful and have never failed–I would turn and run quickly away. Such a person is not alive.

When I first met my friend Katai, she seemed to be the happiest go-lucky person you could ever meet. Her smile attracts people and she’s very easy going. It wasn’t until we sat down one evening and talked about our past that she told me stories about her violent behavior that landed her in prison. And in that incident, a black female officer told her to walk up to the mirror and look at herself. She said, “You’re a pretty girl. Never let anyone have that much power over you.” Katai hit rock bottom…and you’d never expect it. This past, I have found in every great person. Everyone who has succeeded in life has truly suffered and overcome.

There comes a day after the storm has calmed–things start to separate and settle. Then you can see that Loss and Suffering are two separate aspects of a singular event. The Loss becomes a “broken pipe” and the Suffering is the reaction to the condition. One learns how to master suffering and to accept loss. Mastery doesn’t mean that you stop feeling pain. It also doesn’t mean that pain will ever end in life. If one “pities” the broken things in life–one breaks with it. But if one simply sees that something is broken–one cares enough to fix it. Ultimately that is the meaning behind to “Heal Thyself.”