Things I've Learned from my Dog

1 Conserve your energy and don’t bark unless you have something really important to say, or momma is withholding toys or treats, or she says, “talk!”

2 Just because someone sniffs your butt and wants to play doesn’t mean you have to like them back. Ignore politely. 

3 Similarly if they don’t reciprocate your interest - let it go. Life is short. Sniff a plant.

4 Occasionally when you do encounter someone you actually click with, have pure unadulterated fun, run around in zoomies until you can’t breathe, thrust your whole wiggly little body and soul into this brief wondrous moment. Then forget them. Go home and sleep.

5 Try to conquer your fear of flies.  

6 Greet everyone who visits with warmth and joy. Express how happy you are to see them. Then go to your bed in the other room and chill until dinner is served. 

7 Avoid the packs of dogs playing boisterously at dog parks. Stick to the edges, get your fill of all the delicious smells of earth and plant and air and light. Delight in being outside and free. Roll in something dead.

8 Avoid screens. Paw at momma when she has been on her phone or in front of the computer for too long. Sit in front of the TV and stare intensely at momma as she watches yet another episode of Ancient Aliens. Why momma, why?

9 Be happy with your hair - whether it’s short or long, frizzy or straight. Don’t worry too much about how others see you, whether you get mistaken for a bichon or a poodle or a moodle. You know you’re a queer white-passing schnoodle and that’s all that matters. 

10 Be secure in knowing momma, her friends (especially favourite aunties) and all your friends - Mr Blue, Snake, Patches, T-shirt Rope - will always be there for you.

© Jane Park 

Female Friendship (for B)

She said:

If I were a man

I would get blowjobs all the time

From hot, young women

Publish the same idea over and over

And be a dean by now.

 

We laughed

 

I said:

If I were a man

I would be a total asshole

And free.

 

Here we are

 

46

On WhatsApp phone

The world slumped in lockdown

 

We are having our weekly check-in

Rant rage dialogue monologue therapy heal

Bonding over carb comas, writers block and bloat

 

Both of us

Unlearning the scripts on perpetual loop

In our projector minds

Implanted by:

 

Patriarchy

Academia

Highly Sensitive Genes

 

Weak fathers and

Self absorbed mothers

Who didn’t see us.

 

Our tired, beaten up selves

Willingly caught in the gilded cage of 

The safe and known, the numb.

 

Together

 

We slowly build new habits

Erect and maintain boundaries

Drink more water

Take deep breaths

Learn to say no.

 

We put on invisible

Wonder Woman bracelets

To deflect the bullets that

Bounce off us

 

As our fragile,

Perimenopausal bodies

 

Break down

 

Break open

 

Bear new fruit

© Jane Park 

The Break

“The mind without the brain will finally have to learn to forgive the body.” –EJ Koh

I broke my right foot in June 2015 at a conference in Perth, Australia called “Mobilities, Media and Resilience.”

I had just presented a hastily put together PowerPoint on the growing online visibility of Asian diasporic celebrities. I was walking to the local Italian restaurant for the post-conference dinner with a nice young Anglo Australian woman, and we were talking about race and racism.

 

She had the usual blank and slightly terrified look on her face as I ranted about microaggressions, invisibility and hypervisibility – how my Asian American anger did not translate in the hopelessly vague well-meaning Australian context. I was angry at what she represented, the privileged cluelessness I dealt with all the time in the Anglo-Celtic world of sandstone academia.

 

I was also dreading having to grade a mountain of essays that would trigger me with their accounts of racial trauma growing up in predominantly white suburbs, or navigating the in-between spaces of diaspora and queerness, or lamenting the tribulations of interracial dating, or discovering white privilege as a “woke” volunteer tourist witnessing the miserable lives of Third World women in Timor Leste (or Papua New Guinea or Ecuador or …)

 

I felt trapped in my body, in academia, in my alternately dramatic and banal relationship with the unemployed artist boyfriend at home, who hopefully was watering the plants.

 

The sun was setting. I was pissed off at everything and in my grey cloud of discontent failed to see a particularly high curb. My right foot got caught, bent forward in a swift, grotesque mimicry of Chinese foot binding.

 

I heard a loud crack.

 

I thought at the time it was just a sprain and sprouting self-deprecatory jokes, drank three glasses of pinot noir at the restaurant to numb myself. A few hours later, with the help of kind, tipsy colleagues I limp-hopped to my hotel room.

 

I woke up at 3 am in awful pain -- pain like the pain I would experience a few months later from the cracked tooth I would have to get my first root canal for -- cracked from failing to wear my mouthpiece for the constant grinding I did in my sleep probably dreaming about grading and fake smiling through meetings and reading endless thesis drafts summarizing Foucault badly.

 

Pain like the tooth pain my mom said was like the pain of childbirth that comes and goes in undulating waves like little knives piercing you then going dull again, giving you a false sense of respite, of closure.

 

The next morning I am taken to the ER, and the blond female doctor says I have a Lisfranc fracture – common among ballerinas, football players, and extreme athletes – named after French surgeon and gynaecologist Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin who noticed this fracture pattern among cavalry men during the Napoleonic Wars.

 

Their feet got caught in the stirrups when the horse bolted. Either you would be dragged along in excruciating agony until you died, or your foot would break in half and you would lie there in the grass, in excruciating agony, waiting to die.

 

I got this extremely rare fracture – not on the battlefield, not parachuting out of an airplane or doing hard core pirouettes or trying to score a touchdown – but crossing the street, to eat pasta with professors.

I was angry, bored, tired. I was not present in that precise moment.  

 

I was not present in my life.

 

I spent the next year as a “tourist in the land of disability” as my sometimes very funny boyfriend put it.

 

I learned to go up and down stairs in crutches. I showered sitting on a dotted plastic Ikea stool. I navigated cobblestone sidewalks in moon boots. I blazed through three physical therapists – all of whom gave me conflicting advice.

 

With resigned sadness and some relief, I threw out my heels for multiple pairs of Mizuno Wave and Asics tennis shoes and transformed my wardrobe into minimalist athletic wear accordingly. I wondered if I would ever walk normally again and steeled myself for the inevitable onset of arthritis.

 

Still I got out of grading and a semester of teaching which, perhaps, was the break I needed.

 

The break my body gave me.

© Jane Park 

Single Dog Mom

Unlike my consistently happy brother, I went through sachungi, Korean for “adolescence.” Like most Korean words, sachungi signifies extreme emotions – in this case, deep angst and discomfort with one’s place in the world which results in an almost pathological inability to be pleasant.

My sachungi lasted from age 13 to my early 30s. During this time, life felt like an outfit that looked ok but didn’t fit me right in certain places. When I pulled at this outfit, annoying and disappointing my mother, she would yell: “My curse on you is to give birth to a daughter just like yourself.”  The logic ran that if I ever did give birth to my clone, I would finally understand the grief I had put her through since my accidental birth.

As it happens, I haven’t given birth to a daughter nor do I plan to in the near future, or ever really. It’s my contribution to sustainability. However, I did recently adopt a non-human, furry-faced son.

Meeting

In early February I fell crazy in love with a three-month-old second-generation fluffy white toy schnoodle. His parents are half-schnauzer, half-poodle, making him an expensive designer mutt. I’d seen a photo of his brother, the diminutive Hercules, on Facebook, had liked – then hearted it – and written something suitably sappy in the comments (“OMG. SOOOO CUTE.”). My colleague, one of his fathers, mentioned Hercules’s brother was still available if I was interested. 

Fast forward to me in Darlinghurst meeting the breeders, who were friends and neighbours, another gay male couple, both hairdressers. The whole thing was starting to feel staged and destined, like the puppy episode of Ellen meets Tales of the City narrated by Margaret Cho. The younger guy looked familiar because he used to work at a salon I had frequented many years ago. We both had left: he for professional reasons, I, because I could no longer take the Farah Fawcett layers the owner kept giving me in a vain effort to put more body in my fine, Asian hair.

(I now have an otaku Japanese hairdresser with a frizzy perm who runs marathons, loves animals, and gives me racially suitable blunt cuts. I am trying to find him a “hot woman with PR who speaks Japanese” so he can stay in the country.)

Hercules’s brother, named Boufa at the time for his huge bouffant like fur, came bounding up to me, kissed me all over my face, and it was over. Of course I said I would take him. A week later my friend Julie and I picked him up, he settled himself into his crate, and intense animal-human bonding commenced.

Naming

I named my furbaby Jae-young, phonetically in-between his cousins in Texas – a beagle named Jun-young and a huskie named Sae-young (he also has a transgendered cat cousin named Mia). People who aren’t Korean mispronounce it to make it sound more like how they think Chinese sounds (like my elementary school teachers mispronouncing my name the first day of school – Chaaiii-hyooon Park?? Where is Chaaiii-hyooon? – met with a squeaky, “Just call me Jane”) so I tell everyone his name is Jay. For what it’s worth Jae-young sounds like the letter J + the word, “young.” J-Young. Easy. Like a K-pop star.

When white people encounter an Asian name, they always ask, “What does it mean?” They never ask what Western names mean, presumably because they already know that Jane means “gift of God” and Nigel means “no friends.”

Jae-young can mean lots of things depending on the Chinese characters you use. I looked it up on Google which told me “young” usually means “great” and “jae” can also mean “great” among other things, so I’ve decided my baby’s name is Great Squared. Double Great like Double Happiness only better.

Repressed Memory

Once upon a time when I lived in the exotic prairie-land of Oklahoma, I had an unusually vivid dream that stayed with me when I woke up. The dream began with me walking up a long, winding, rickety staircase. It was dark and scary. At the end of the staircase was a little room, and in the little room, a little fluffy white dog. I wasn’t immediately attracted to the dog. It was cute but in a slightly creepy way. It had a very human face.

I knew it was a puppy, and even though it scared me a little I knew that I had to take care of it -- that it needed me. So I took it in my arms, and we went down the stairs together.

By the time we were on the ground, it was still a puppy, but I also realized instantly, in the way that you do in dreams, that it was also a little girl, and that little girl was me.

My inner child was a fluffy white puppy.

Who knew this dream would come true years later in Australia? Sometimes when I see Jae’s little face looking at me in that adoring, stalkerish way I get startled because he does look so eerily human, like a precocious child. And I imagine I must have seemed something like that to adults when I was a baby, a cute and vulnerable pink lump of flesh, talking before I could walk.

Koreans, Golf, and Dogs

Creepiness aside, Jae is awesome. All the clichés about dogs are true. He has changed my life. I knew this would happen because the same thing happened to my mother when she got her first dog in her early 60s, an affectionate, pensive-looking beagle with a Napolean complex that she and my brother have lovingly nurtured. People laughed at me for getting a dog stroller when Jae was tiny and couldn’t walk long distances, but my mother was the pioneer.

When she took her puppy in the stroller to the golf course which, like every golf course in the world, is overrun by Koreans, two ajuhshi came over to admire the puppy and ask its name. When she replied Jun-young, they burst into laughter. Because this is a common human name (indeed, it’s the name of our younger cousin who was adorable as a child), and Koreans do not name their pets human Korean names. They name them human Western names. For a long time, Koreans called their dogs Mary or John, depending on the gender. Sometimes the gender didn’t matter.

Also, Koreans and East Asians generally prefer white dogs over darker ones (unlike my mother who has always been a maverick). I wondered about this and the western naming habit. Were they symptoms of Koreans’ colonization of consciousness by Western/American culture? Cue double eyelid surgery, whiteness creams, budejjigeh, and the sad fetishization of ugly white men teaching English in Asia. Or were they subversive attempts to literally domesticate whiteness, raising white dogs with western names as surrogate children?

Or, as my friend Julie astutely pointed out, maybe it simply had to do with Asians’ proclivity for cleanliness. An aestheticized health choice.

I’m prone to agree with Julie. Jae-young matches my home décor, even though I didn’t plan it that way at all.

Boundaries

After getting out of my last relationship, I moved into a brand new apartment that I proceeded to decorate like a zen retreat. I got a new white leather sofa and white bedframe, a glass dining table and glass end tables to match my glass coffee table – all air and water like my astrological chart. To add wood and fire elements, I got an entertainment center that looks like a tastefully weathered log and threw a few yellow, red, and orange cushions onto the sea of blue and green pillows and throws that undulated softly on the marshmallow sofa.

My home set up was immaculate. A tranquil oasis of good feng shui and North facing sun that not only acknowledged but celebrated my mild OCD.

This was my space, not to be tampered with in any way by roommates or partners who did not know the rightful place of things. It proclaimed to myself and others that finally in mid-life, I had boundaries, and these boundaries were beautiful.

My new dog child joyfully jumped over those boundaries. Then he dashed back – with his horse gallop meets bunny hop (he has luxating patella and will get arthritis in his old age, like me) -- to shit, pee, and vomit on them. 

The pristine virgin that had been my apartment was deflowered by a dog.

There are no boundaries between me and Jae. We eat, sleep, train, play, and watch nineties TV together. We watch each other go to the bathroom. He has witnessed me break down at 2 am on the balcony with gin-spiked orange juice because I ran out of tonic water and couldn’t be bothered to go to the grocery store because all that choice gives me panic attacks. And he has come over and patted my hand and licked my tears when I have burst into spontaneous weeping fits from anger, frustration, exhaustion, boredom.

Then we have cuddled and gone to sleep.

Dog Child

There is a ferocious battle currently being waged on the Internet between dog parents and human parents. Many human parents are pissed off at dog parents (or “owners”) who refer to their dogs as their children. I understand their ire to a point. Human children require more investment in time, energy and money. They grow up, become adults, may take care of you in old age, and are more of a direct reflection on your character.  And we all know dogs are not human.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t love. And …  love is love. There’s even biological proof. According to Salon, a study was conducted recently that recorded the hormones dogs and their human mothers secreted when they gazed at each other. Each got a big hit of oxytocin (the happiness hormone). For the mothers the amount of oxytocin was the same as when they gazed at their human offspring.

So while I remain committed to staying childless, I also get an inkling of what it might feel like to be a mother. You make sacrifices (like the carpet and dating -- the only men who approach a small Asian woman with what looks like a toy poodle are gay, married, or drunk) but you don’t mind because you love your child. The great thing about having a dog child is they never grow up, they stay the equivalent of human two-year olds but better behaved, if properly trained, for the rest of their lives. The sad thing is they live such short lives compared to us.

Two things I’ve done differently this year from past years, is to meditate and get a dog. Both have had a similar effect on me. They have taught me to be more present and grateful.

My love for Jae is unconditional. Because language, thinking, performing don't interfere when we communicate. There is a simplicity and truth to our love, a bond that I know I will never have, except in fleeting moments, with other human beings.

© Jane Park 

Why I Hated the Last Bridget Jones Movie but Kept Watching it Anyway

I’m in business class on New Zealand Air and the movie options are depressing. Nothing, after Hunt for the Wilderpeople which was charming and quirky in that Kiwi way with a cute chubby Maori kid and Sam Neill grunting in the gorgeous LOTR bush, especially caught my eye.

Because I teach a class on race, I then watched Birth of the Nation which elicited the emotions I knew it would. It was not Sankofa, not Mandingo, not even 12 Years a Slave. The trauma/torture genre is a staple now, like the disaster/apocalypse/post-apocalypse genre – you know what you’re getting, like porn. You wait for the emotional triggers, and there is release. In the end you feel empty but you’ve come.

So what compelled me after watching two films by and about people of color to turn to Bridget Jones’s Baby? The same thing - all movies are potential teaching material when you're a cultural studies academic, romcoms no exception. I occasionally give lectures on post feminism – and the Bridget Jones films along with Sex and the City are the classic texts, updated with Girls and whatever newish TV show or film is out that foregrounds the self-absorbed first world problems of white women who can’t figure out why white men don’t want them.

One of my favorite quotes ever is from Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: “If visibility equals power, young white girls should be ruling the world.” This is the fantasy world BJ sucks you into. A world where white girls rule.

It’s a world I want to reject yet one I live in.

The movie targets me – in every way except racially since I’m not white though I guess as a model minority Asian American woman who performs whiteness really well in an all-white department in a mostly white super gentrified neighborhood in Sydney which is diverse in the way that a shopping mall in Singapore is diverse or a food court is diverse – anyway, I digress – I mean to say, I’m conditionally white, like my Jewish friends only with special Yellow Girl Magic, which translates automatically to slutty Hello Kitty -- to all men of all colours. This is also called Asiaphilia, or Yellow Fever. I’m told most men have a touch of it.

White women are jealous of Asian women because we look and apparently act like children, and everyone knows that every straight man at heart is a paedophile. Because that’s how patriarchy works. Men like you on top if you’re tiny and they can pretend they are ‘letting you’ fuck them, letting you have the power for a little while. I’ve had guys actually say this to me while I am riding them and not thinking of them at all, just pretending they are expensive Scandinavian vibrators. It’s hilarious.

I am supposed to like this movie. I am supposed to identify with Bridget Jones, weirdly recognisable and not recognisable as Renee Zellweger post-eye surgery (Internet says she is Sami which makes sense, because that eyelid thing she got done makes her look more ‘white’ like a conventional blond, not the ‘unique’ look she had before which was sort of Asian, the small slightly squinty eyes – once a guy said I looked like Renee Zellweger and I got really mad because I was fat then in my twenties, like baby pudge fat, and so was Renee and also I found the characters she played, with their gaping wound vulnerability and cuteness and abjectness infuriating.)

I am supposed to identify because like that character I, too, am in my early 40s, single, reasonably but not too successful career-wise, a klutz, no longer fat and on occasion, after a drink or two, and what I convince myself was scintillating conversation, I have been known to accidentally fall on a dick and mistake that for love.

I have also gotten accidentally pregnant. How I felt when I found out was very different from how Bridget felt. I have never seen what I felt ever, on screen. It would probably work better as a performance art piece, spoken by Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo. I guess you could argue The Golden Girls was a precursor to the postfeminist shows of today, but really it was a different creature altogether. Not glossy, not young, not hip. Revolutionary for showing us female bonding in all its messy, complicated realness without the constant, tiresome spectre of fuckability looming over the characters and the audience. How I miss it. How I miss them.

Picture it. Dulwich Hill, a quickly gentrifying suburb in the Inner West, Sydney, Australia. Autumn (northern hemisphere spring) 2014.

You’re 41, in an off-on again relationship with a white Australian ex-music producer-rapper who thinks he was Korean in another life (seriously, he tells you straight up that he’s more Korean than you because he knows slang that he learnt from an international student). He wants to be a photographer, is talented enough but has no follow through, can’t keep a job, is an alcoholic who says he will change for you, and manages to stay sober for a year, giving you hope. But the rest of the time you walk on eggshells, taking the silent treatment like a pro, and the rages and the blackouts because he makes eggs for you in the morning. You love the cuddles and his smell. The warmth of his side of the bed. He’s a constant +1 at boring dinner parties.

He is hot enough, he doesn’t talk much (which is a relief) and looks like he’s listening – actually to be fair, he was a great listener. You love the sound of his voice, it’s rich and thick like chocolate syrup and so sexy, and you don’t like chocolate. You are very comfortable together, you have the same sick sense of humour, you get annoyed by the same things. You think he’s the one so you put up with all the little meannesses, because you’ve invested so much time and energy into him, into the project that is your relationship, and he loves you so much, he keeps telling you over and over. Even though he eats most of your food and doesn’t do his share of the housework and refuses to pay rent. 

Because - without him, what would you do? How could you face the exhaustion of playing the dating game, especially now that it’s all online and ‘ghosting’ is a thing and nothing is ever clear or permanent and everyone is scared. (Never mind that you’re in Australia where dating, like everything else, is vague. If the person you sort of remember having sex with is still in your bed in the morning, congratulations! You may be in a relationship?)

How could you stand the loneliness of coming home to an empty apartment and no one to watch Netflix with?

So you keep taking him back, and one time when he’s back, you’re watching one of those historical re-enactments of Jesus and for some reason this turns both of you on like crazy and you end up having sex on the couch. No worries, you think. You’re on the pill.

Who knew you would get knocked up on the pill at 41 watching Jesus? You feel so betrayed by your body. By science. By your gender and orientation. He’s convinced the baby is a miracle, a miracle baby and he cries and pleads with you to please please please have it. It will change him, it will change the relationship. You’ll get married. His mother will take him back. You’ll finally get to meet his mysterious parents who disowned him. And you actually consider it. Since, as the girlfriends your age you confide in tell you – it may be your last chance. You know the kid will be cute, smart, with a great sick sense of humor. It will be Aussie Korean Keanu. You could shape this little life.

But then reality kicks in – as does your body which can’t stop throwing up everything, including water and air, for two weeks straight. Your body rejects the poppyseed of pink tissue growing inside you. You realize there is no way you can have this child. You cannot raise two children. So you abort.

And it’s the most wonderful thing ever.

The nausea and the pain go away. You wait for the sadness to flood you and it doesn’t. Just the idea of sadness that you feel you should be feeling. The loss of potential. And you remind yourself how your love of potential always gets you in trouble. The future perfect doesn’t exist. At heart you are -- you have to be -- a ruthless pragmatist. You live in the now. You cope.

No one rescues you.

Unlike Bridget Jones. Who never once considers not having the baby. A film that glorifies motherhood – updating it for Gen X audiences who think they want to be Gen Y but in the end, smugly (and with non-ironic awareness) concede they want the happy heteronormative ending, the script of their parents, or rather grandparents (Baby Boomers experimented).

I don’t want this.

I don’t want Colin Firth who looks severely constipated all the time. Nor do I want Patrick McSupposed to be Hotness or any of these male ideals that are thrown in my face. I don’t want marriage. I don’t even want an equal relationship – I don’t believe in equality, it doesn’t exist. We measure it (like intersectionality). We quantify it as a mode of sameness.

What I want is dynamic equilibrium. Neither top nor bottom but glorious, perpetually fascinating, moving, changing switch. Someone who doesn’t crowd me or cling to me but also doesn’t flake on me, someone who actually has my back. A co-conspirator who gets the joke, who breaks the script, who realises there is a script.

Someone who, like me, has given up hope but still has a soul. 

This person lives in my head. I finally get that it's a fantasy, my fantasy, and I'm done projecting fantasies on people. Better to project them on screens. 

That is the romcom performance art piece I would write. It would have no white people (except as background and sidekicks), maybe some Jews, and they would be queer. There would be no happy ending. I would have a lot of great, empty sex, fall in and out of love with lots of inappropriate people, break and grow.

I would get over my writer’s block, Colin Firth would die, and I would finally get a dog.

The end.

© Jane Park 

Deep Sleep

In my teens up to my early 30s, I got by on very little sleep. At most 6 hours a day, usually 4-5. I felt most awake in the early morning. I woke up mentally around midnight and hit my most lucid moments around 2 am. According to my grandfather, my father and various uncles, this is the time when ghosts come out. Scary, long-dead, amorphous (usually) women with long hair and no feet who waited for you in outhouses and country schoolrooms. Before Park Chunghee modernized the country through military “democracy.” Before the 1988 Olympics when I got my first bra and perm and playing cards buckled in the humid summer air. Before segyehwa. Before KPop.

When you write or party or watch a movie or have sex or do anything after midnight, time stops or slows down, and everything feels like a deeply significant event. Images, actions and moods take on an enhanced, dreamlike quality. For me it used to be the best time to write. Whether it was a poem, an academic paper or just me communing with myself and my future selves in the many journals I have kept since I was 8.

These days, I find myself craving sleep. Just like I crave food. Constantly. It’s as if living in my mind all these years has finally caught up with me at age 40. And all I want is to live in my body, experiencing as much pleasure as I can in it and through it. This means often turning off my brain. Not analyzing. Not thinking. Not judging. This is difficult for me. Believe me.

Sleep is good for this, because it allows for dreams. I read recently that Thomas Edison used to sleep only 3 hours a day, much like Leonardo Da Vinci, both famous eccentric inventors. Edison would tie metal balls to his wrists and sleep sitting down (while working, one presumes). As soon as he dozed off too much, the sound of the metal balls hitting the ground would wake him up and he would immediately write down any genius ideas he had cooked up in his sleep before he forgot them.

Impressive.

Insane.

I’ve been trying to write down my dreams. It’s hard. I think sometimes forgetting dreams is not bad. Why do we try so hard to remember? To document memories through writing or photos or videos? As if, by reminiscing over who we were in the past – through selective memory – we can better understand who we are and what we have become, or shouldn’t become? But sometimes the memories are burdens, just like histories. Writing can become a burden. Language is a burden.

Deep sleep – with no lucid dreaming, no neoliberal attempts to mine productive commodities from subconscious play – this is what I crave these days, and have decided to indulge in, with wild abandon. It is the most wonderful luxury.

To sleep in.

To not do anything.

To slow down.

To NOT GIVE A SHIT.

To become Luscious Vegetable.

Of course I can only do this when I’m on holiday or depressed. I’m an academic after all. I make my living by being awake, alert. This – “alert” – is the adjective that a PhD supervisor once used to describe me in a glowing reference letter. The sentence went something like, “She is one of the most alert students I have ever had the pleasure of supervising.” I think he probably meant “neurotic” and “paranoid” as well. These are the companions of alert. One becomes awake in this hyper conscious way -- of one’s environment and others -- through training.

When I was a kid, I had to develop really good nunchi. Because my mother who I love and who loves me but who used to be crazy, had a way of communicating her desire and anger in the most inconsistent ways. I had to learn to read her body language so I wouldn't make her mad, or disappoint her, or turn into my father whom she hated. With (some) good reason. My dad – now he really liked to sleep. He slept instead of writing the academic papers and books that would have gotten him tenure. He slept, I think, because he was afraid of the failure that he had become and kept becoming. He slept to escape a life he probably never wanted.

My brother, who is younger than I am, and much more successful (he owns his own company and can make friends with anyone) also liked to sleep. Once, when he was in elementary school, the teacher asked the students in class to to go to the blackboard and write what they most liked to do. Other kids wrote things like, “I like birthday parties … ice cream … Transformers.” My brother wrote, “I like to sleep.” The teacher thought he was a very peculiar child.

Almost everyone I’ve dated – except one strange exception who slept 12+ hours a day – has slept few and irregular hours. In my last serious relationship, I managed to convert my lover into someone who went from sleeping 3 hours a day to a regular 7-8 routine. He was very grateful. He also stopped being an alcoholic for 3 months because, he said, he loved me. But old and bad habits die hard. The lovely fairy tale we lived for a little while is over (the messy dramas documented neatly in my journal for future analysis). No doubt, he is back to the drink and 3 hours of sleep.

I write this in Kuala Lumpur at my friend’s quiet flat in the suburbs. The sky is overcast. I arrived 2 days ago from a conference in Hong Kong. I feel very glam and grateful to the universe. This morning I got up at 6 am then went back to sleep and woke up at 11 am. I am looking forward to delicious Malaysian food tonight. In a few days, I’ll be back in the air (my favorite place, nowhere), watching another bad movie while everyone else sleeps. Then to Korea, the place that didn’t feel like home for a long time. Oddly, it’s beginning to since I left my adopted home of America to live in a third space called Australia. A place where I have no history and no commitments. An in-between, interim place where I can indulge in deep and dreamless sleep every night. 

Part of 잠물결"Restless" - an art exhibit by Taey Iohe, Seoul, December 2013