quote of the day

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

my state of being

i broke my ice cream fast. it's that bad.

it's becoming a theme

this past weekend, i was in college station, tx. my younger sister and i went for a morning walk, and on this walk we found an abandoned bicycle tire. now, it just so happened that my sister needed such a tire, and we thought, "look, here's one, just lying in the middle of a field...what to do?" our answer: we took the it with us, hauling it between us like the trophy it was. she says if it doesn't fit her bicycle, she'll mount it on her wall.
genius.

this, however, is not my first early morning adventure. the weekend before, i was in berkeley. and while running up milvia, i realized that, to my left, there was a padded, black bra in the middle of the road. it looked about a D cup.

deciscion...i mean, decision

berkeley. i chose berkeley.

while clicking "accept," i almost threw up. but it was ok. i didn't. no animals were harmed in the making of this film.

i'm in california

but this is what i'm thinking about.

If in John it says "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God," was that word a palindrome?

Ha.

news flash

today, a senior asked me to prom. the conversation went something like this.
"miss, i have a question to ask you."
"yes?"
"miss, will you go to prom with me?"
"no."
"c'mon miss!" the bell rang, and children streamed toward the door. the senior followed me to the front of the room where i began to rewind a video. giovanni, sensing a show, followed him.
"miss, why won't you go to prom with me?"
"you're a student."
giovanni cut in, "yeah, she can't go with you because she's a teacher." he really has an uncanny grasp on reality.
"miss," said the senior, "c'mon."
"find someone your own age."
"she'll be at the dance anyway," added giovanni
"you will?"
"sure, and i'll dance with you."
"ok...man, now i'm going to have to ask some girl from another school." i thought to myself that i didn't see the relationship between asking me to prom and being forced to ask a girl from another school, but said nothing. he and giovanni finally started toward the door, with giovanni making some joke about how he's going to make me come back for his prom and hey, by then i wouldn't be a teacher and so maybe...

making the numbers public

i'm nervous about this. in one week, i have to decide.

Brubeck13: how have things been going? has a decision been made about grad school?
JoieTang: not yet
JoieTang: by april 21
JoieTang: i'm torn right now
JoieTang: uc riverside is offering to waive tution and fees and give me a guaranteed 7000 per year, plus maybe 5000 for two years, and it's a phD program in dance history and criticism
JoieTang: berkeley is offering to waive tuition and fees, but has no other funding, and it's only a 2 year masters in folklore...but then again, it's berkeley, which is its own selling point
JoieTang: i can't quite figure out what i want, because...i can make both work
Brubeck13: that is a tough choice. have you had a chance to visit both universities?
JoieTang: i'm doing that this weekend

landmark

i can now say that i've driven an SUV around San Antonio with 4 teenagers in tow. and that I've lived to tell the tale. oh the power, the power and the majesty of Ms. Tang.

dreamlife of bees

there is something going on with my dreams. last night, i dreamt that i was chaperoning for a school trip, but it was some bizarre, the-entire-school-is-going-on-this-trip trip. we were in a hotel, a truly nice hotel, the kind in which the queen beds have feather mattresses and the rooms are decorated in this deep jewel tone...and the heavy curtains had gold braid sashes...
we, the teachers, because it was school day, were required to teach mini-lessons in given hotel roms. and i, joy tang had been informed of this particular requirement about 5 minutes before students were due to arrive. i had no materials, no books, no paper, no anything, and i had to teach something about folklore, and the joy in the dream was leaning her head against a chest of drawers thinking thinking about "what on earth am i going to teach them?" when it came to me (me in the dream).
i jumped up and started filling the tub with water. (in the dream, the tub was outside, sunken into the balcony, and the balcony was a polished all-wood contraption with a railing and a trellis with vines climbing all over it.) the tub was filling, and i was scribbling down some notes on a hotel pad. the students were coming in; the tub started overflowing; i had stephany diaz, a student, turn it off, and we began the lesson with water dribbling over the edge of the tub, onto the balcony, and pooling against the glass sliding door.
the lesson was designed to create hypotheses about how certain folktales about magical creatures, etc came about. the students were supposed to put their feet in the tub and observe how the water distorted their toes. "they look webbed, don't they?" i asked. everyone agreed. then, we had this discussion about how people came up with mermaids, etc. so on and so forth.
dream-joy was exceedingly proud of herself, and after the students left, she marched back into the room to share her happiness with another teacher. but linda trendell, Lee High School's school improvement coordinator, was in the room. the dream shifts a little here, because apparently, the room was her summer home, or something to that effect. the balcony became a full patio with a backyard. she was walking around the patio and complaing loudly about how some people just didn't know how to take care of things and look, look how the wood was stained and look at all these dead leaves. there were chairs strewn about the porch, wet and black and steamy, and she was straightening chairs and wondering which one of the teachers was so irresponsible. and i just stood there, looking very guilty and not saying anything. mary frazee, one of our elective teachers, was also there, helping her and commiserating, and somehow, i knew that she knew i had done this, but she wasn't going to tell. by sympathizing with linda, she was scolding me indirectly, but she wasn't going to tell on me, whereas linda was increasing the pitch of her fit.
i started helping and avoided eye contact.

the dream shifts again here. i'm walking across the patio with a chair, and then i'm not. instead, i'm walking across a kindergarten classroom with two, small, paper cups -- the kind you get at McDonald's for your condiments. i'm in kindergarten, and i'm going to my teacher to get more tempura paint for my art project. we're supposed to be painting a picture, anything we want. i'm asking the teacher for white and aquamarine.
"Is that enough, Joy?"
"A little more."
She pours more. "Is that enough?"
"Just a tiny bit more."
She pours more. She looks at me.
"Thank you," I say, and walk back to my desk.
Kindergarten-dream-Joy sits down to paint and there's this sense that she's completely overwhelmed by her colors. She wants to paint the colors next to each other so that the subject of her painting is about the colors, and she wants the colors to stand out against each other. She wants everyone to understand how vibrant they are to her. So, she uses her paint brush to paint irregulary shaped strips of color all over her paper, sort of blobs the paint where she intuits the blobs should be and uses wide strokes where she thinks swaths of color should be. She's very absorbed, and doesn't notice anything else while she's painting.
But then she finishes and looks to see what her neighbor is doing. Her neighbor has painted people and a house and a sun. Everything is very neat and the lines and figures are very clear. Kindergarten-dream-Joy looks back at her own piece of construction paper and realizes that her painting is actually just a big mess, that all the colors are mixed strangely and that there is nothing to look at. It's a disaster. It looks like a toddler could have painted it. She hates her painting. And there's this sense in the dream that ever after she is going to try and paint houses and people and other, more recognizable objects.

This is where I wake up, as dream-Joy is trying to discard her painting. I sit up in bed and think, "Weird dream," and then I realize that actually, the second half of this dream, the part in which I'm painting, is not a dream at all. It's a memory. I was younger than 5, and I was staying with a family by the name of Kirk, but the rest of it is true.

much like AA

i talk alot. and i'm not always sure if this is a good thing. i've got this friend...with whom i talk for at least an hour each day, usually on the phone. but the conversation is all me, and contrary to popular belief, this makes me very uncomfortable. i try to stop and ask questions, but sometimes when i do, it's still just silence. and so then i talk some more. and then there's more silence. so then i talk some more, etc. is this wrong? i can't believe i'm going to post this, but i am.
hi. i'm joy.
(hi joy)
and i can't stop talking.

my sisters and i have discussed our shared paranoia of people suddenly growing bored with us. i think this applies here. no response means that the listener has hit the joy quota, the "if i were to never speak to joy again, it's ok, because i can't handle anymore of her words" syndrome -- especially as everything i discuss nowadays is nonsense. as in, if it's not about exercise balls, cauliflower, or what color i should dye my hair, apparently it's not joy-worthy.
and so, i tend to wonder, if in the third hour of a conversation i am still expounding on topics such as how the sibs and i used to play make-believe, is the other person wondering, " why doesn't she just stop?"
logically, yes. and i keep hoping it's no.
because in the end, this is all i know. all i know in life can be summed up in moments such as... what it feels like to roll down a hill at night... and when i'm not not being careful, this is what tends to come out of me.

my friend ili used to say that my babbling was different, that somehow i was not that annoying girl who hadn't really been invited to the party but who wouldn't let anyone else talk because the story about her pet hamster was just so interesting. instead, i was some sort of subplanted joy-guru. and while it's weird to have one pontificating in your kitchen, in the end, it's still a guru perched on your dining table and how cool is that?
logically, impossible. but i keep hoping it's so.

i know that it's 1am on a school night and that this wreaks greatly of sentimentality. i also know that those of us who worry about talking too much should most likely just, you know, learn how to listen. i do work on it. i promise. i think, i just hope that...i just hope what all of us hope -- that at the end of the day, we discover that we are not full of crap.