The end, mayhaps?
I've grown a lot with Blogger, from like july 2002 when i first started this blog... from the blue blocky site, to the partly self crafted site you see before you. And as slick as blogger is, with it's easy to use interface, i feel like it might be time for me to move onto something a bit more powerful... I've also been realizing that i've been trying to incorporate too much into this place... like tagboards, and comments, and rotating banners, and all that nuttiness... not to mention the pop-up advertising that has infiltrated my site unbeknownst to me (since i use firefox, and it zaps those little mofos really well. I would have liked to get my own hosting, and start coding from scratch, but since i'm poor and unemployed, i'll be blogging from blogsome, at http://vagrantant.blogsome.com/, where they use wordpress, a blogging interface that can do more of what i want to do with my blog... So point your bookmarks thither, and i hope to hear from y'all there!!
It's been a slice!! :D

Intense..

Firstly some halloween scare before I start...
Scary stuff!!

well, it's been an intense past month... So much learning, so much experiencing of things. Coming back from a wonderful visit to Katie in North Carolina, I've been settling back down in Vancouver, at least trying to... There's been a state of civil unrest inside my mind. After living a year out of the watchful eye of my parents, i always feel like a bird in a cage coming back home, at least for the first few weeks.My first feeling when I was coming back home was that I felt inspired to go out in the world and live, and to take the world by its proverbial horns and hang on... Also was the fact that I was so lucky to have such a comfortable home. Everything is clean, fully working, and mostly new.

First I had to try to fit back into this life here though, just as I was trying to fit the past four years of my life into my room. I spent two weeks on-and-off unpacking, and trying to cram everything into something that I don't quite fits anymore. I ended up going through my whole room, and throwing out a large amount of paper that I know I would never miss.. Years of school notes, old clothes and magazines that had been lying forogtten.
It jsut seemed like there was this huge load hanging over me. a childhood's worth of memories and memorabillia, and the clutter was just really overwhelming.

My grandpa also passed away two weeks ago. It's so strange to realize that you won't be able to speak with someone, ever again. It was just hard to see him, such a proud and jolly man suffering like he did, with cancer. Like so many people have said, they seem fine until they start to fade, and then they fade fast. Really fast. I went to visit him at home at the beginnig of november, and it really hit me how hard it must be for him. He was starting to have trouble walking around and even getting up, and basically bed-ridden, . This is the man who a year ago, when he was first diagnosed with cancer, had a pedometer that he would carry around, and one day I looked at it, and it said something like 8000 steps and he said that was like nothing. That's an impressive kilometre and a half every day, for a 77 year old!!

Then two weeks, later, he went into the hospital. His room almost always had our family in there, to feed him, and just to keep him company. I don't think think he's woken up alone in the longest time, and when someone was there to see him in the morning, he told us that's what made his day brighter. He was in the hospital, trying cream of mushroom and minestrone soup, and yoghurt for the first time in his life. "It's pretty good, I've never tried it before" was what he had to say about that. And then over the next day or two, he lost consciousness. As sad as it was for everyone in the family, in a weird way, my grief was tinged with a bit of relief when my dad popped his head into my room that morning to say that he had passed on. Relieved because he was no longer in pain. My sister had a dream that night/morning that she was visiting Grandpa, and he had woken up, and his eyes were bright. My sister went to his bed and told him that everyone had been really worried about him, and he just looked at her and held her hand. Then my sister leaned in to give him a hug at the bed, and then he stood up, smiled at her, and gave her a hug. That was when my dad woke my sister up to tell her the news. My grandma had a similar dream, where he was quiet and bright-eyed, and my sister wonders if he had come to her in dreams to say goodbye. It seems like it.

So the past two week has been a lot of family time. Everyone's been coming together. all 5 of my mom's siblings, and their families. All twenty-two of us, even my uncle who flew in from Thailand. My grandpa's funeral was last week, and it affected me deeply, and opened my eyes a lot, about nature of death, my own beliefs, and who I am and where I come from.

I've never been to a funeral of anyone I've known well until now, much less a traditional chinese funeral. Unlike what I've heard of north american funerals, where you celebrate the life of your loved ones, it seems that what I went to was much more of a preparation, for the journey to the afterlife, and for, well, life in the afterlife. I've remembered trying to believe in reincarnation, and the afterlife, and I've had trouble trying to "convince" myself to believing. I guess it's just that I had no concept of death to grasp in the first place, and it really does seem like it's humanity's way of dealing with such matters, of bringing closure, or understanding the incomprehensible. Now I understand why burial ceremonies are seen as so important in human history, as a marker of our mental evolution. It just seemed appropriate that he needed preparation to leave, that his spirit was still near his body, not quite understanding what had transpired, not believing. Grandpa was decked out in his finest suit, hair slicked back like it usually was, and his face slightly unnatural from the way that his normally drooping ends of his lips were not pulled back tautly. The priest went up to him, and whispered who my grandpa was to his spirit, so that he would know who he was, in his afterlife, and know who his family in the living world was. There's a chinese custom to burn paper offerings to the deceased, with the belief that these paper replicas would manifest themselves in the afterworld. It's common to burn "ghost money" for the dead, and I think we burned him enough to last a long time. Something on the order of a few billion dollars, I guess, with a bag of "bribe money" to give to the guards of the afterworld to make the journey easier. Along with a red mercedes, a big house, clothes, a debit card, a stereo, toiletries, and two personal servants. I think he should be set for (after)life.

Something else I found fascinating about the ceremony was all of the evocative symbolism everywhere. The concepts of spirit, the fire, the burning, and the priest who performed the rites, and sang a song, where he read out all the members of my Grandpa's family in a sing-song voice. Everyone was dressed in white clothes, and a black ribbon tied around all of the family. Women wore these white shrouds, while the men wore these straw belts, and children of my mom's generation wore a white belt, and if unmarried (which we all were), with a red dot. There was a lot of bowing, to pay our respects for him, and we would line up, sons and the mother in the first row, the daughters in the next row, followed by male spouses, female spouses, male grandchildren, and female grandchildren, all according to senority from left to right. In a way, it was really revealing of traditional chinese culture and its hierarchy that is still prevalent, even today. Bowing would be done thrice, and with burning incense when first appearing before my grandpa.

The family sat on the left side of the room, and when friends of the family showed up to pay their respects (we spent the whole day there, basically waiting for people to show up), they were bow to the deceased with incense, and then we would bow to each other at the same time, before they went to take their seat.

One of the hardest parts of the whole thing was my grandma, who was so heartbroken that day. I've never ever seen anybody as sad as she was that day, and it was just so hard, knowing that there was nothing you could do for her to lessen the grief. I think that in the end, the fact that the whole family has been together has definitely made things easier. Being in a large group of 22 people, young and old makes it a bit easier to deal with the sadness, but it also just seems like there's something that's missing, doesn't it, when I look at my grandma staring off into space.
A bunch of us went to the cemetery to pay a visit to grandpa today. and we burnt some more incense and offerings, and even some offerings of brandy, by pouring it in front of the grave while bowing. But you can sense the sadness in my grandma when she's sitting there, just thinking... She's much quieter now. I put on her hat today while shopping at Yaohan, and it's nice to know that she can still laugh, despite everything.

| feeling: sad |
Today's Photo: Old photo of my grandparents

Impending

It's been a bit of a whirlwind tour the past 3 weeks or so... My parents took my computer mid-august, along with 5 other pieces of luggage to help ease my move back to vancouver easier. So I've been packing away all of the stuff i wouldn't need for two weeks, as well as trying to see some of the good friends i've made over the last four years, moving out of the apartment and preparing for my trip to north carolina, which is where i'm at right now. I've been here for a week and a half now, and it's just been so good. After being apart for over two months, you almost forget ohw nice it feels to have someone to snuggle up against at night, and to quietly murmur to each other as you fall asleep. We've gone to see a neat lighthouse, to the beach to just relax and watch the ghost crabs skitter on the sand. We've also gone dune hang-gliding on Jockey's Ridge, so close to where the Wright Brothers had their first flight. But really, just to be together to do everyday things, and to be in each other's company will do nicely. Even if it is getting ready for a hurricane, securing loose objects that the wind might pick up.
That's right, hurricane ophelia is coming right our way on the outer banks of north carolina. It's such a strange impending sense of... something. Doom, I suppose, but I don't think it's supposed to be nearly as dangerous as anything recent. But just preparing the house for the flooding from the hurricane is such a weird concept to me, as is watching the storm come in on the radar on the Weather Channnel, and then seeing it outside. There's a little bit of fear, just seeing the darkdark clouds outside, especially since I've never been in any kind of severe weather like this, so I just don't have any idea what to expect.
In a way, I feel a bit like this myself, in my own life. Like there's an impending sense of something big about to happen, in how I've been relaxing intensely this past 1 1/2 weeks, and just sort of trying not to think about figuring out what I'll be doing after I get home. I think that finally, the feeling of lost-ness is finally hitting me... Not more scrambling to buy textbooks, going to my first week of classes. I'm not sure if I miss it or not, but just thinking about school brings back certain smells of guelph, of old buildings mingled with countryside barns and the scent of autumn.

Photorama!

I've recently joined up with trekearth.com and photo.net, both very nifty sites, where you can look at other people's photos, critique them, upload your own and get them critiqued... You can check out my growing portfolio at the links above, if interested. But damn, getting a review was like the most exciting thing ever!! I guess it's just always fascinating to get feedback on shots I take, especically when it's not necessarily positive, but constructive. I can see myself really getting into this online photography community more...

| feeling: Excited |
| listening: fan blowing |
Today's Photo: Goldenrod , Killarney Park, Willows

Randomrandom

Hmm, another lazy saturday afternoon... And some time to blog out a bit...
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I could meditate.. These people are able to concentrate ridiculously intensely on one thing. Usually, when I try to focus on a single thought, I last something like 5 seconds... and some of the retreatist monks can last for 723 seconds!! Then again, I guess it's almost their full time job, just sitting there concentrating on one thing.
And in other news, I found this nugget of goodness on the net... The backstroke of the west. This guy saw Ep3 Revenge of the Sith in Thailand, and it has some of the best translations....
here's some samples:
"obi wan, may the force be with you" becomes "anakin: "ratio tile, the wish power are together with you", or "giving first aid the already disheveled hair projection". Hoo man... I heart engrish!!

hokay, enough silliness. Life here has been good... My boss just randomly decided that we're going to have a 3 day weekend, with monday being a paid holiday! sweet!! i know i'm not complaining!! Tommorow will be some underwater hockey action.. I'm going to give it another whirl... the first time I tried that, I was REALLY intimidated by it all. We played in the pool that sloped down to a good 20 feet, and I could make it down to the bottom of the pool, before I had to head back up, without going after the puck. heh. Hopefully the people won't be as intense as last time. I'm going with a few friends, so I hope that mellows things out...
Farmer's market was also this morning. The apple cider has returned, even though it's rather sour, at this time of the year. I didn't find a whole lot that I needed this week... I'm currently in the process of eliminating food from my pantry... so just trying the most random concoctions of food. And trying not to buy tons of food, since I'm not plannign on bringing it home to vancouver. And I'm realizng that I REALLY need to start packing up my stuff. And the next week or so will be interesting, as I find out just how resourceful I am with my ninja packing skillz. In a way, it's starting to feel like an end of an era... I know that I will still be friends with people here, but in a way, it just won't be the same... it's not a matter of just calling them up and hanging out... I feel like it'll have to be much more planned... in order to make the transcontinental journey.

Just the past little while, I've also been realizing how much I've been missing my family. Usually, they are at the back of my mind, always there for me, but this past two weeks, I've been sorting my photos again, and I stumbled across a folder of family photos, and I dunno. Just like photos of family dinners, and other random silliness. like so:



My dad is a ridiculous man sometimes. He is a definitely a funny guy, but sometimes I just forget just how funny he is. This picture to the right was at the pearson airport... One of the pay meters was ridiculously high, so my dad decides to play it up. Oh, dad.

But I think I can say that my photos are finally organized now... Or at least there's a framework of organization that works well. Right now, I've organized photos by year, and then by events (parties, holidays, vacations, etc...) And then I've been going through them all, and giving them keywords for easier searching later. I'm also in the midst of sort of assembling a portfolio of sorts. Just some of my more memorable photos, and assembling them into one place. Gonna get in some of the Photoshopping action. I've gotten much more into this photography hobby this summer. They're the only magazines I've been buying, and I've bought like 3 or 4 books on them, especially after I got my new digital skr. I'm finding that when I've been walking around and I see some ads on billboards and such, I've been trying to analyze them, and try to figure how it was that they took those pictures. Sometimes, it feels almost like a state of mind, when I leave the house, putting on my "photography hat", and try to look at the world through newborn eyes

| feeling: inspired |
| listening: Metric - Combat Baby |
Today's Photos: Spiral, Silhouette, Buoys