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loneliness of a middle distance runner

I’ve always wanted to be one of those athletic types. Balls and things which move have never been good friends to me, and I can watch films for longer than I can walk. Since my work involves knowing about the brain and the vestibular system, I think I’ve accepted the fact that my inability to coordinate my eye with my hand is a product of my neurological wiring as well as the lack of guidance and practice provided to me by teachers growing up. With my parents working hard to make things happen for us as immigrants, school teachers were the ones that I needed to help me make my body do what my mind thought it could. But they didn’t. School teachers did little more than stand by the side, giving you the time and reminding you that if you didn’t finish the 4th lap within 10 minutes, you’d fail.

My proudest moment was always and probably only during our fitness tests – not the fitness portion, per se, but rather the BMI (body mass index) test, in which I prided myself on having a lower BMI than the rest of the girls in class. Nevermind the fact that my BMI was indirectly related to my performance on the rest of the fitness evaluations.

While I could barely run a mile without heaving in high school, I’d like to think that, now, gyming it 5 days a week has turned me into the runner of my dreams. You know, the kind who could throw on shoes and run for miles while dreaming up new ideas and goals for life…and more importantly, with all the right gear: belt fitted with tiny water bottles and tubes for drinking coming down from my visor.

This morning was my chance. It was Guatemala’s annual 5K Carrera Arcoiris (Rainbow Race for children with cancer), and it was my chance to let all that gyming prove itself. I was well aware that my grey New Balance tennis shoes would not cut it. Besides, they were about 5 years old and probably did not look as cool as they did in my mind.
So yesterday I settled on a pair of $100 Asics, on sale, and recommended as the best running shoes ever. Look, I’ve never spent much more than $60 on shoes, with tax, so this was something of an investment in my soon-to-be running career. Not only that, but the sight of the Asics line of running shoes nearly made me cry as I longed to jump ship over to the New Balance side. I guess Asics believes that style should be sacrificed for function, that the two things cannot be married…or even dating. But what was worse than seeing the shoes was needing to be in an athletics store, with a poor eager Guatemalan salesman, for longer than 5 minutes. With fortune, the model was in my size 6, so I took the shoes and ran. Figuratively.These shoes, I was certain, for all the pain that I had to endure just looking at them, would make me the runner of my dreams. I would be the 5K champion.

Before the exciting conclusion, I must preface it with three things: 1) I am currently on the 3rd day of a typically 7-day illness. Don’t ask me how I know this is a 7-day illness, I just do. 2) I have asthma and on the way to the race, I realized I forgot my inhaler. This 7-day illness is part respiratory so I knew that that would not bode well. Nevertheless I thought my shoes would carry me through, possibly even curing my asthma. I mean, I think $100 on a Guatemalan salary should at least do that.

And the 3rd thing I wanted to mention is that I KNEW, prior to my run, and admittedly even while thinking about this blog entry, that my theme song would be Belle & Sebastian’s “The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner”. I knew that would be mentioned in this entry, but what I didn’t anticipate was that the moment two of my friends would race off without me, that that very song would begin to play on my Ipod. There I was - between three of my friends who were off to finish the race and another friend behind me who was struggling with a bad knee - laughing, wheezing, and staring at my ugly new running shoes that didn’t feel any better than my ratty old New Balances.

The shoes didn’t make me the runner of my dreams. I didn’t come up with any brilliant ideas for work or develop any worthy new goals for life. I wasn't about to start a running career or start pounding the pavement every morning. The gels in the Asics only helped me to run a little farther, but my shins still begged me to pause and my ankles asked for their old friends back. Maybe next time, if I’m in tip top condition, these new shoes will show me what they’re made of. Or maybe I just need some running socks.

awkward-girl-turned-b-girl

Today I was made aware of a fanclub on Facebook called, “Life without Asians would be oh so boring.” I tend to agree with this, even if it’s perhaps not meant to be flattery. Without Asians, there would not have been any Pearl Cream, Engrish, baby mops or less important things like satellites, gunpowder and the abacus.









Really, who uses an abacus anymore? Besides this kid, I mean.













Although I would define myself as an American first, I am infinitely proud to be of Asian descent. Why? Because we can do everything well if we set our minds to it. Last year I went to a B-Boy event in which the Korean b-boys completely demolished the competition. I’ve always watched Asian b-boys via youtube but never had been so close to one before. I was in awe, and even more determined than ever to continue honing my breaking skills.

The thing is, I have always had an aversion to watching people dance at parties. My brain removes the music and the other people, and the person ends up gyrating in solitude and silence. The image is all too disturbing, and unorganized dancing therefore is something that is only appropriate in David Lynch movies. It simply creeps me out.

Organized dance and dance performances, however, that’s a different story. I love watching people dance as part of competition or on a stage.

For the aforementioned reasons, parties make me uncomfortable, but performances excite me. Watching Asians in performance inspires me, and I feel connected to them in a way that is really quite unfounded.

The problem is that my motor skills are in the 5th percentile, I am guessing, when compared to preschoolers. Consider this – Asian preschoolers, these days, can do this.

What?! Puts me to shame.

Even after seeing that, I still feel a confidence that is completely ill-supported. I say ill-supported because the support has mainly been provided to me by my friends and family who love me too much to tell me that my moves are just not in-sync with the music. They have not the heart to tell me that not every song should be a robot dance. I believe they have both faith and fear that I may try to pursue a singing and dancing career after my work in special education ends here in Guatemala. Fear, especially because I usually am breathless even before the song’s bridge hits.

Malcolm Gladwell proposes a 10,000 hour rule. Practice for 10,000 hours at one thing, and you’ll become an expert at that thing. I’ve danced an average of 5 minutes everyday, from the time I was a young child. I’ve calculated myself to be at about 1000 hours. At that rate I’ll be dead by the time I’m an international dancing superstar. Or if I pick it up now, with whatever little time I have free each day, I’ll be a senior citizen at the very least.

I only just realized now that my dream of becoming an-awkward-girl-turned-b-girl may never come true. Maybe I should start working on the world’s hardest math problem, using an abacus.
Before that kid beats me to it.

james the king

Last week I discovered that James, the first cat that was entirely mine, passed away from diabetes. James was a beautiful orange tabby with a perfectly round kitten face; it was the kind of face that remained kitten-like even when he was an adult cat. Always, whether as a kitten or cat, when closing in on James, he would let out a kind of kitten roar, accompanied by a rather grumpy expression. I believe I might have encouraged that behavior by inappropriately worshipping him when he was very young – always holding him up by his tummy and proclaiming him king of the jungle as he let out that same kitten roar as a response to being held up in the air and rotated.









Some of my friends have commented that it’s funny that my cat’s name was James, a name usually reserved for extremely pale, curly-haired boys from England. In reality James was given his name during my Britpop period of musical affection. So he was named after James, the Manchester band most popularly known for their song “Laid”. It was during those years that probably everything I owned was named after a rock star. A white Nissan 200SX named Thom after Thom Yorke, a cat named James after the band, a computer called Moz.













James was a curious little guy, well-loved by all who got to know him. As a kitten, he enjoyed carrides, often propping himself up by his front legs on the dashboard, checking out the Austin scenery as we drove around the block. Most mornings, during my college years, as I walked from my duplex apartment in West Campus to school, James walked me across the street and up to the second block before turning around and going back home. Oftentimes at the end of the day, I would find him hanging out with the fraternity boys who lived below my roommate and me.

If there was one thing he wanted, it was friendship. No matter the size of his potential friend or the possible danger they represented, James would attempt to be near and rub up against any creature, making friends with black labs 10 times larger than him, terribly ugly raccoons and frat boys. Once he brought to the door a bird in his mouth. Upon my opening the door, he opened his mouth to greet me with that usual kitten roar, at which point the little birdie flew away. He couldn’t even hurt a cat’s worst enemy: the bird.









James died just short of his 12th birthday. For two days I cried and regretted handing him over to my parents when my ex and I could no longer stand our congestion and itchy eyes in response to the daily ticks and critters that James carried home on his lovely orange fur.

But I know James is in a place now where his legs work just fine, rather than having his diabetes eat away at his muscles. His skin is immune to the numerous things that caused him to itch incessantly, no matter the amount of medications and washings he received. In that new place everybody accepts his offers of friendship. They all know that that little kitten roar is an exclamation of something he really is, a gentle master, not just something invented by someone who loved him.

Twelve years later I have stopped naming my possessions after rock stars. Well...children aren't possessions, are they? Because I think Belle and Sebastian would be adorable names for babies.

i'm a jesse lover

I found out recently that an old friend of mine from Harvard passed away a few weeks ago. Jesse was 30 and had pancreatic cancer. We hadn’t really kept in touch since leaving Harvard 7 years ago, but just the thought of such a fine human being such as Jesse not being around anymore is completely heartbreaking.

I have vivid dreams that I remember fairly clearly. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of one but if I lay back down and will the next part on, the story of my dream continues. Early this morning I dreamt that I saved a little boy’s life, over the course of a weekend, simply by playing him the most beautiful songs that my ITunes possesses. Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Magnetic Fields, Jens Lekman, Yo La Tengo, Nico, Bettye Lavette, Architecture in Helsinki, Neutral Milk Hotel, Elliot Smith, all comprised of the soundtrack to saving a life.

Imagine that, if music could really save a life that was slowing or quickly slipping away.

I imagine that as Jesse passed away with his mother by his side, he laid by the beach in Jamaica, taking in the view of the beach and the smell of the salty air. I don’t know what songs may have been playing recently or near him or what notes he had running through his weary mind. In my dreams, my soundtrack could bring Jesse back to Jamaica, to his family and to the things he loved to do.

However, this ability is only dreamt up, a weak consolation for all the things that I hope one day science and technology can really do. Or perhaps they can, one day, extract the magic of music and pump it directly into our bloodstreams, our spines, our synapses so that we can be made whole again.

Jesse passed away the day that he was to return to Massachusetts. I’m sure that he felt like Jamaica was home to him already. You can see it in the photos posted on the Facebook Jesse Lovers page. I’m sure that the soundtrack that saved his life comprised of the voices of his loved ones and maybe the beating of drums. And in my dreams, Yo La Tengo played for him, by his bedside, this song, and he put his feet firmly on the ground and walked forward.

the toddler with the thorn in her side

Sisters are strange. My sister Christine is completely unlike me. At 9 years younger, she knows how to fix her own hair and owns about 100 bottles of nail polish. That really is no exaggeration. Christine changes her nail color at least once a week. Me? My first pedicure took place here in Guatemala City, at the age of 32.

When I started this blog, Christine responded immediately to my first entry with something like, “While other 5-year-olds were singing along to Raffi, I was listening to Morrissey.” This is true, and while now I might complain that my entire youth was spent babysitting Christine, the truth is that I enjoyed every second of using her as a receptacle for all the music I listened to back then.

Just come to my house sometime and I’ll show you. There is evidence on video of Christine as a toddler modeling swimsuits and large leather jackets, while Depeche Mode’s “Dangerous” played in the background. I have her lip syncing and acting rather lasciviously, especially for a 4 year old, to “Little 15”. There’s also the one of Christine’s eating popcorn at some crazy midnight hour to “Black Celebration”. It is definitely a black moment when you realize as an adult, from old videos, that you didn’t do such a good job of feeding your sister or putting her to bed on time.

I guess Christine learned at a very early age about synthesizers and depression. She just didn’t know it at the time. To her, at the tender age of 5, “The boy with the thorn in his side” was a brilliant dance song, one in which I forced her to shake her hips back and forth while staring upwards to the ceiling and encouraged her to maintain the forlorn expression in her eyes. To think about that on a small child is painful now. If only she would have agreed for me to put the bouquet of dead wild flowers in her back pocket.













“A question of lust”, obviously an inappropriate song for a toddler, was used by Christine to model our father’s wifebeaters. She was adept and amazing at turning one into a jacket from a dress, while wearing it.

“Sometimes” was interpreted by Christine as appropriate background music for an instructional workout video. That particular video includes an entire segment in which we have to watch this Vietnamese baby put on some thick adult leggings. Her tiny hands scrunching those leggings up to her thighs, she stands up at one point and runs in place while Martin sings, “You can’t tell me honestly, you’re happy with what you see, only sometimes…”

Watching those videos now, I have to wonder, was I committing child abuse? I have no idea of the effects that all of this may have had on Christine. Maybe the days that she paints her nails black are when the memories of these things return to her. Maybe her inability to accept hugs from me, her own sister, was brought on by having to answer one too many questions about Morrissey and Martin Gore (see blog entry January 31st): when was Morrissey born, what is Martin’s favorite food, what does Depeche Mode mean by this or that song, etc.

I am sure Christine is reading this now. I am sure she’d like for me also to mention that eventually even our mother took to wearing an almost cut-off Belle & Sebastian shirt as well. The day we saw her in it, I think, was one that reminded us of all the good times we had when Christine was a baby. I just wish I had had my video camera.

a country girl, indoors

Everyone has these ideas of what it’s like to be raised in Texas. Much like my ill-conceived ideas of what it would be like to live in Guatemala (houses made of earth, lack of modern facilities like hot water, flushing toilets, etc.), even other Americans wonder if I might have lived in a small Texas town with a saloon and only 3 stop signs, 1 not even on a paved road. I tell them that I was raised in Houston, where the highways never end and the houses are bigger than Walmart parking lots.

Cowboys, there must be cowboys at least, someone might insist.

Well, there are still cowboys in Texas, but despite my vast collection of acoustic, guitar-laden music, I have never been acquainted with one. For that I am sometimes ashamed.

Just as I am drawn to Jesus-referenced music, I am equally driven to seek out bands that worship horses (Band of Horses), mountains (Iron & Wine), the ocean (Bright Eyes; Okkervil River), North Carolina, South Carolina or any Carolina (M. Ward) or getting shot (Wilco; in their case, I think it’s about getting vaccinations shots, not 50-Cent kind of shot).

I don’t know where this connectedness comes from. I imagine that most people who like this kind of stuff like to have picnics, go on road trips for fun, camp deep in the woods, hike up and down mountains, basically feel one with nature and their surroundings. I choose to do none of that. The idea of all of those things sounds pleasing to many folks, but in reality, once I am placed in any situation like that, I long for my laptop, Ipod and cortisone creams.










On a roadtrip from Houston to Seattle in 2005, my ex and I drove through supposedly beautiful places like Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Oregon. The wind in Kansas, the mountains of Colorado, the flatness of Wyoming and the rolling dune hills of Oregon, all of these things frightened me nearly to tears. Unintelligible fear overcame me, and all I could do was turn up Jeff Tweedy’s voice in my head to console me. Ironically these countryside backgrounds were the most appropriate for the music coming from my car speakers, but I wanted them gone. I wanted to see storefronts, coffeeshops and people in full-length pants.

I’m writing this entry while sitting in a café in Guatemala City with several SUVs and high end vehicles parked in the parking lot, a group of Korean women near me chatting and enjoying their frappés. Jeff Tweedy sings to me from his more twangy days of Being There, about being “red-eyed and blue”, and all is right with the world.

you gotta have faith

I’ve never been a religious person. My family is Buddhist, but my sister was really the only one who frequented the temple with my grandmother. Growing up, my closest friends were atheists, agnostics or nothing at all. I have mainly dated men dedicated to science rather than to faith, not that the two cannot be married but I have not found an attraction to the latter.

Living in Guatemala, I find myself surrounded by people of faith. Greetings or salutations usually consist of God’s blessing me. My friends’ after work or weekend activities are generally related to some kind of Church activity or retreat. Faith is an integral part of the lives of Guatemalans, but not the way that it is in the United States. Faith here is a relatively private matter, not something to be advertised or to be won over. Here, I don’t have to hide, as I did when I was 12, from the people who visited me weekly to discuss the book they had left for me. That book happened to be the Bible.

No, I have not converted to Christianity. My small core group of friends, my closest American friends today and I still remain as secular as we were in middle school, head-bopping to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”. However I do find myself, here at least, explaining things with “God”. “God’s gift to us” and “God made it that way” have come out of my mouth several times, before I can think about what I’m saying or why I’m saying it. I chalk it up to its being easier that way – rather than explaining some hard science, I can just say it’s God’s gift. The Ipod is God’s gift. Email is God’s gift. Corn and Judy's Nespresso machine are God’s gifts.











Bill Withers's voice, Yo La Tengo’s longevity, Stuart Murdoch’s songwriting, and on and on, those are God’s greatest gifts.

The thing is that I’m not saying these things in jest, there is a part of me that really feels a certain way about that. I am especially connected to songs that just allude to God or to Jesus (Wilco's Jesus, Etc., Neutral Milk Hotel's King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3, Iron & Wine's God Made the Automobile, to name just a few). I doubt these guys are making light of Jesus or God or religion. I believe that they really do feel close enough to God to include him in their songs. How else can one describe the lightness you feel when you are lying on the floor when the first notes of Iron & Wine / Calexico’s “Prison on Route 41” (or anything from that album) come on?

Before I moved to Guatemala in June of 2007, my friend Gita advised me to carry with me and in my luggage, a picture of Saint Christopher and his prayer. Out of a real fear of being hijacked for all of my belongings, I did so. More than anything, I found the words beautiful and comforting.

Dear Glorious Saint, you have inherited a beautiful name, Christbearer, as a result of a wonderful legend that while carrying people across a raging stream you also carried the Child Jesus. Teach us to be true Christbearers to those who do not know Him. Protect all drivers who often transport those who bear Christ within them.

I don’t know that Christ is within me. I imagine people like me never figure that out in their lifetime and I don’t look for that nor do I mind that other people have something that I may never. I don’t have an organized religion that I look to when things aren’t right. I have the sounds of guitar strumming and major key melodies. I have inexplicable lyrics sometimes and carefully layered instrumentation. My faith is in my ears.

my rock star family

In response to my first blog entry, one of my oldest and dearest friends Judy posed this question, “What about Depeche Mode?!” I mentioned The Smiths in that entry, but the truth is that my first complete collection of tapes was that of Depeche Mode. While most girls my age in middle school were dreaming about Axl Rose or Jordan Knight, my heart was set on one blonde, curly-haired genius known as Martin L. Gore. I kept on the wall next to my bed a picture of Martin himself from a French music magazine, hair teased to perfection, beret in place, lips pursed in order to avoid showing those adorably crooked British teeth, pearl necklaces galore and overall stylishly fitted in a fishnet top and a skirt. The picture was carefully ripped out of the magazine, placed in a sheet protector and thumbtacked directly next to where I laid my head on the bed. Unlike other preteens, at the age of 11 or 12, I had the ability to rationalize that there would not and never could be any kind of romantic relationship between Martin Gore and myself. In my dreams I never thought he would be that much older boyfriend who could sing ballads to me. I’ve never been one for that anyway. (At this point, all I want in a boyfriend is one who can hold his own while singing Tom Waits’s song “Old Shoes (and Picture Postcards)” with me.) So how could Martin Gore factor in my life, if not by being inappropriate, imaginary boyfriend? I decided that he would be my second or adoptive father, not that my own real-life father wasn’t good enough, I love my God-given parents (see the next post) but it just didn’t make sense for me to have a boyfriend who wore a skirt. I preferred to have a father like that, I guess. With that firmly in mind, I decided then that I would need to make a home for us. I spent weeks, maybe even my whole three years of middle school, designing a 3-story home for my adoptive family. Martin and I would live on the 2nd floor while the others, Dave Gahan, Alan Wilder and Andy Fletcher, would live on the 1st and 3rdfloors. We had rooms just for listening and just for singing. In my dreams, Martin would often take me along with him onto the Arsenio Hall show to sing songs from Black Celebration together. When The Smiths came along, I was suddenly overwhelmed by this new figure Morrissey who captured my attention and vocal cords. I knew that I had to find a place for both of them (after all, Martin did have another 10 more or so good years in front of him). He would be Uncle Morrissey, and we would oftentimes have afternoon tea together, while talking much crap about Robert Smith and the Cure. I’ve read that the peak of rock star idolization occurs around the ages of 10 – 11, that it is developmentally appropriate and healthy to some extent. I am happy to know that I was developmentally on track at one point but I am not sure how healthy it was. I watched recently a video of Martin singing on stage with his real daughter. I admit feeling a tinge of jealousy. I doubt her floorplans are as good as mine though.

go ahead and get it big time

When my visitors sit down and leaf through the issue of Paste Magazine that sits inside the laundry basket in front of the toilet, they come out of the bathroom thinking that there’s a new Okkervil River or Voxtrot album. If they know anything about their musical timelines, they’ll check out the front cover to find that the issue they hold in their hands is dated August 2007.


I moved to Guatemala City during the summer of 2007, and that issue of Paste was officially the last issue of the last music magazine subscription that I had in the States. The laundry basket that sits inside my bathroom, filled to the brim with books and magazines, is essentially a “This is who I am” kind of container, with old issues of Paste, Details, the New Yorker, books on special education, Superfreakonomics, the not-so-funny Best Required Nonfiction 2009 edition. Whenever I travel back to the U.S., I am sure to pick up one or two things to replace, but they typically always align with what I’ve already got in there. One thing that never gets replaced, for some strange reason, is that Paste August 2007 issue. Even when the bathroom lights burned out and couldn’t be replaced, due to a flaw that’s typical of Guatemalan design, forcing me to get a lamp to put inside, that issue has remained a fixture.

You see, music has been that fixture. With every start of the new year for the past 4 years, my life has taken some wild new turn or undergone some ridiculous stress. This new year was no different as I was faced with a decision to take a job (that would start after my work here in Guatemala ends) that I wasn't quite sure suit me. I decided not to, eventually, but not without some internal and external battles, as well as a full body rash. What got me through it? Besides the pills and cream? The Dark was the Night compilation. First Andrew Bird for a little over a week, for the brooding, and then Yeasayer for almost two weeks now, for the redemption.

For years I’ve wondered if I could pull off a blog and be consistent about it. My friends encouraged me to do something on Guatemala or special education or something else that I love. Tonight as I read the January 2010 issue of Paste, more specifically a blog entry from a girl who works on a farm and listens to Iron & Wine while tending to the chickens, I thought, I would love to be with chickens, just to feel closer to Sam Beam. And to be in a circus to feel what it’s like to be Zach Condon of Beirut.

I’m 32 years old and I still love music with the same unwavering intensity that I had when I was 13 and listening to The Smiths for the first time. Music is the one thing that I can go on and on about, I think. So why not start tonight?