SORRY, DO YOU HAVE THE TIME?

a little bit of this and a little bit of that - the first post of my last year of my undergrad

Hi everyone. Is this thing on?

I can’t believe it’s been 5 months and some change since I last posted here. You been alright? Eating good? I’ve been good. I mean, if you’ve spoken to me in the last couple of weeks, you’d know I’m not doing the greatest but - well, technically, I’ve been doing a lot of cool stuff. Working, school, grad school applications, TAing, travelling back home¹, eating, training, resting. I have a conference presentation under my belt², sits nicely on my curriculum vitae. Sorry, when’s the last time we spoke again? It’s funny how much a life can change in such a short amount of time. Months, weeks, tend to blur into days, hours. Since I last posted, I’ve been through a whole semester of school. Though, I’m not quite finished - technically, I ought to be doing schoolwork, ought to be marking, ought to be getting back to e-mails and messages, but instead I’m sitting here, catching you up.

Good friends of mine know of my peculiar research foray into pedagogy and free-writing over the past semester. I used to take forever to write something I thought was worth sharing, worth reading. I still do, really. I pore over my writing, until the alphabet starts to look like hieroglyphics, and if you’re unlucky enough to be close to me, I get you to read it over until you tell me I’m doing a good enough job. What’s great about running my own Substack account is that I don’t have to do any of that. I can afford to type a bit too much, be a bit too messy, spill my words out on the page all indulgent without feeling too bad about it. I am paying for the domain name, after all. This is my favourite way of putting school off. Oh, man. Can you believe that? I’m still doing my undergrad. I’m still amidst this semester. Still in these times I’ve been meaning to tell you about. Can you tell, by now, what I’ve been thinking about?

When I say ‘travelling back home’, I really mean flying all the way back to the Motherland. I got to see the beach, the ocean, with my own eyes again.

Until I was about six years old, I grew up in a tiny cul-de-sac in downtown Hamilton, about a stone’s throw away from the elementary school I went to. I say stone’s throw in the most literal sense; I revisited my childhood home earlier this month, and gauged the distance between myself and my former stomping ground. Maybe it’s because of how much I have grown, how long my arms have become, but I swear I felt like I could toss a pebble from the foot of my prior driveway and have it clank onto the metal of the school’s fence. That night, it took me about two minutes to walk from the school to my old home. It must have taken me about seven, then, when I was five. When Lolo was still around, he would walk me, every morning, to kindergarten, and every day after school I would see his face just barely sitting above the fence. I had a lot more pip in my step at that point. Minutes felt like hours, hours felt like days. Every morning, he would walk, and I’d sprint away, in front of him, albeit still a few meters away at all times, as if there was an invisible leash tethering the two of us. Every morning, it would feel like maybe this time, if I sprinted a little bit faster, Lolo would walk a little bit brisker, match my rhythm a little bit more. Every morning, I would sprint up, notice the quieting of his footsteps, and look back, and without fail I’d watch his slow, wrinkled frame setting the pace of our trip. Seven minutes. Hours to me then, only a fleeting moment to me now. Every morning, I would sprint forward, grandfather-bound, with a stern gaze Lolo would say to me, ‘Yes, yes. Just a little more. Just a little more.’ Words had become routine at this point, though til his last breath I don’t think he ever grew tired of my antics.

If you’ve known me since my very first year of undergrad, you’ll know of my brief stint as a spoken word performer. Did you know that there’s a whole laundry list of rules, when it comes to slam poetry? The biggest one you will fall victim for at least once in your slam career is that of going a bit too long. Performing a poem that lasts over three minutes will give you a point deduction³. Nobody, not even your fellow competitors, likes seeing people lose arbitrary points over arbitrary rules within arbitrary tournaments. Whenever time penalties do arise, there’s a saying that everybody in the venue will recite in tandem after the deductions are announced: ‘Damn you, linear time. You’re ruining it for everybody, but it was well worth it!’

This morning, I re-read a short story I wrote for a creative writing class last year. From Those Who Loved You, Before I Could. Crazy cool title. Way too cool, for a piece that is completely unpublished. I haven’t touched it since I submitted it, but I went a little misty eyed when I re-read the first few lines:

When I was smaller than you are now, your Grandmother would keep track of time in terms of your Lolo. Last night was never last night; it would be when Lolo had left for work. Two days from now would never be a Monday, but instead it would be when she gets to see Lolo next. In our household, there were no clocks I could understand.

Two weeks ago, there was a guest speaker in place of my professor for an English course I’m in. I was half-asleep, to be honest, so I wasn’t paying any mind, but there was a tiny snippet of her monologue that I remember - that stories have a tendency to disrupt linear time. In times of immense emotions - grief, joy, laughter - my means of processing is to spread the labour, so to speak. There is no better way to cope than to spend as much time as needed with those you love. I’ve been blessed by all the systems in my life, by the people who I can go to, who want to be there for me unconditionally. My primary means of communicating with them is often through recounting events that make me feel certain ways, through the intermixing of pre-meditated details and real-time ideas. In a sense, it feels like I re-experience these moments, that I re-surface what has already been etched into my body once more, laying it bare to the best of my ability for those to see while sprinkling in new thoughts, new reflections.

This isn’t a very unique experience. I think I’m just describing the mechanics behind how people tell stories. What I can’t ever possibly account for, though, are the ways in which these stories reverberate outwards. I say these experiences aloud, in hopes of getting feedback, consolation, honesty, whatever it is that I need from my loved ones. What I never anticipate are the echoes that follow, the ways in which bringing up yesterdays, or before the pandemics, or a couple weeks ago, disrupt my tomorrows, my next years, my few months from now, my next few hours.

I’ve been grieving a lot these past few months. I know a bit too much about loss. I’ve also been doing a lot of crazy cool stuff. I don’t ever regret bringing these moments up. Every time I do share a bit about how things have been, the labour - of mourning, of academia, of teaching, of working - gets a bit lighter. I’ve spent the whole post detailing the grief, the work, the labor - the how of the last five months. I’ll write up the official ‘what I’ve been up to’ post eventually. I think I’ll save that for the end of the year, or when I get accepted into a master’s program, or when I graduate. Who knows? That’s all to say that I’m doing good. For now, you’ll just have to take my word for it. In the meantime: happy half-way into Kislev. I had good reason, at one point, to keep track of time in regards to the Jewish calendar. I don’t have much of a practical reason anymore, but it’s a nice little artifact of a different time. I keep track of time nowadays based on how close I am to 11:59 PM deadlines by the minute. I think now is a good as time as ever to start chipping away at those, just a little more.

1. I went on a 10-day trip to the Philippines over reading week! I will dedicate a whole post to my travels there soon, but if you haven’t heard it by now: it was everything I could have ever asked for, and more.

2. I was a co-presenter at STAO Presents this year! So fun! Shoutout to Sarah. You’re the best.

3. Poetry slams were rated by audience members after each piece, from a scale of 1 through 10. Deductions varied, though the standard was 0.1 for every 10 seconds over. The point is not the point, the point is the poetry.