“She wielded words and faith instead of guns and knives, but the Communists considered her just as dangerous.”
- Tháng Tư Đen: Part 2
Jump to...
- Winter 2010
- Spring 2010
Winter 2010:Honestly, there’s not much to say about this season except that it had some really terrible entries. But that wasn’t why I didn’t stop writing for three months—I just didn’t have the time with early morning classes every day that quarter—but from the very first entry of the winter, it was a downhill slope. Actually, I’d say that the downhill slope started with the last one or two entries of Fall 2009.
Probably the very first wrong thing with Winter 2010 was the new layout and new banner. I wish I had a screen cap of how lame the entire layout was. It was definitely a perky layout, but probably only good for blogs with like 200-word, short entries, because the font would make my eyes burn if I stared at it for too long. And the banner? Well, I knew that the “bbq dinner” title was difficult to read in the banner of the two previous seasons, so I made sure the title wasn’t too intricate this time, but everything else...the images are supposed to look like magnets on a refrigerator pinning that drawing of a Christmas tree up. Cute, but it didn’t really suit my blog.
As for the entries themselves, the direction I tried to head was not the right one. In “Photo Album” and “Photo Album 2000,” I tried to write the present storyline based off flashbacks that I wanted to force to the surface in order to fill in the last but significant gaps in the history of my parents and me. As a result, the present-time stories themselves turned out as equally forced as the flashbacks. In “Just like Summer Again,” I knew that my story would be dry, so I tried to make things interesting by co-writing it with Trung. I guess it turned out funny for the anonymous commenter at least. “Meaning,” I actually liked. It’s a reflective kind of entry, which I don’t write often, and it offers some (interpretive) answers about why I am (or was) such a self-loathing dick sucker. “Blessings: Part 2 & 1”—yes, two and one, in that order—the unchronological structure of these entries already made them more convoluted than they should’ve been. I wrote it like this to add that initial ambiguity in Part 2 to make it seem like it could’ve been Trung who I slept with, but surprise (!), it wasn’t. In retrospect, I don’t think the confusion was worth the mini twist.
After “Blessings,” that’s when I started school again and realized that I had too heavy of a workload that quarter. A lot of things did happen that I wanted to blog about, and I would tell myself I would do it the following weekend, but by then I would end up going one week with out blogging. Then two weeks, then three, then four, and then I gave up. And I wasn’t too sure if I wasn’t going to come back. Way to leave my journal on a cliffhanger too! Who was the mysterious guy that I slept with? Was I going to get into another relationship? Readers may have never found out.
Fortunately, toward the end of winter quarter, I read over some of my blog entries and realized that I built too much to leave behind. Too many questions, too many unresolved issues, and stories that were too interesting (maybe not for some) to discontinue. So, I got to work on planning out how Spring 2010 would look.
Spring 2010:General Comments
By far, Spring 2010 is my blog’s best season. Solid writing, a good mix of storyline-based entries and standalone entries that didn’t feel like filler, and some resolution. Overall, this season has been very different from the previous ones; I don’t know where to start:
- Layout got another overhaul, and this time I went for a simpler banner. I think the fork in a sausage makes enough of a statement.
- I still had overarching storylines running through my entries, but this season, I frequently jumped between storylines from entry to entry. One would be about relationships, the next would be about work, and then the next would be about dancing. Jumping back and forth might seem like a bad thing because of the lack of focus, making it harder to keep track of the stories, but I think this is a more realistic depiction of my life. I’m always juggling multiple issues at once; it’s just that I didn’t equally divide my attention among writing about each one during last fall and summer. Plus there’s more variety. I know some readers are only interested in the gay stories, or the dance stories, or the teaching stories.
- Toward the end of the season, I started writing entries on things that happened anywhere from a day to four weeks prior. On June 12th I wrote “I’m Fucking Awesome,” an entry about stuff that took place on my birthday, May 12th. (This isn’t considered a flashback because, so far, one of the rules of a flashback is that it has to have happened in a previous season.) At first I panicked about getting so behind, but then I realized that this was better because it allowed me to plan ahead, like include in an entry some seemingly minor details that become important later on. At the start of June, I already had nearly every entry of the rest of the season mapped out, which led to a tidy and neat ending.
Select Entry Commentary
“Nothing’s Really Changed,” “Money Doesn’t Matter,” “The Right Stuff,” “Gay Shit”
One of the main goals of early spring was to retell what happened during winter 2010 in flashbacks. “Nothing’s Really Changed” is supposed to introduce some surprising turn of events to you, surprising presumably because these things occurred during the winter and because you didn’t know me in person. These things were: I wanted to quit my job at the Education Academy (which I seemed to really love fall quarter) and find a new one, I was on a dance team but quit, and I wanted to go to a gay kickback. The following three entries presented flashbacks that explained how I came to these points in my life.
These four entries also established my format of jumping back and fourth from story to story for the rest of the season.
“Tháng Tư Đen: Part 1” and “Part 2”
I had never painted my dad in the best light. Entries were always from my perspective, what I always thought about him. He never had a chance to tell his story, express his thoughts, or defend himself. This entry gives him the opportunity. And suddenly my past arguments with him are put into a different light.
Originally I had never planned on writing this kind of entry. It was a spur of the moment thing when I saw some of my friends mentioning “Black April” in their Facebook statuses on April 30th. I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up, and then I got inspired to write this, already knowing that my dad had to go to one of these reeducation camps after the fall of Saigon. I really like this entry for going somewhere no average young adult’s blog can really go, to a flashback in 1975 and to the site of a grisly type of concentration camp. And, from this entry came one of the best quotes of my blog, I think: “[The nun] wielded words and faith instead of guns and knives, but the Communists considered her just as dangerous.” I like to think that, much like the nun’s words, my blog is a bunch of words of protest to some kind of established structure of society.
“Sunshine Days” & “Just Smile and Nod”
I like these entries. In an intense season of constant relationship drama, gay drama, skank drama, and flashbacks about war time in Vietnam, these two entries were the much needed, light-hearted comic relief, and they were the only ones of the season.
As my commenters noted in “Just Smile and Nod,” pretty much everything I said in the interview was a lie. Maybe you could believe that I was on my high school swim team, but the point of the flashback is to disprove that. There’s also another subtle irony that you didn’t catch: The flashback in “Luh Moar Jwayuh” tells how my cousins and brother, no matter what career passion they pursue, become owners or workers at bagel shops, and in this flashback I declare that this would never happen to me. Yet now here I was, trying to get a job at a bagel store.
“What All Guys Want”
Other than introducing my skank storyline, this entry isn’t really that great. It’s definitely not my worst entry, but it’s probably one of the weakest out of a rather strong season. Felt a little rushed, lazy conclusion, my feelings are written a little too ambiguously, and the food motif gets a little mishandled.
“I’m Fucking Awesome”
The development of Trung’s character became central to this season. Last summer, I never wrote much about him when we were together, and then he got a little bit more attention after we broke up. During the fall, he was my constant source of angst, but in spring, he was his own character. In my life and on my blog, he took up a much bigger role, one that becomes apparent in “Gay Shit.” For once, I’m not just pining about our broken relationship. Instead he actually gets his own voice, and he’s advising me on my life. Same with “Never Alone,” which, ostensibly was about my break up with Ranier, but really, the spotlight shined more on my friendship with Trung. I knew that I had to eventually write an entry focused on him to show his life beyond helping me in my needy times.
There’s no real plot in this entry, but looking at it in the context of my entire blog, this entry does a lot of things. It develops Trung’s character; that’s the most obvious thing. The flashbacks show that, when we were still dating, he hated UCLA and didn’t do much except wait around all day for a call from me, his evil, emotionally manipulative boyfriend. After our break up, he became very successful. He’s obviously very passionate about important, political things, and he’s obviously pretty damn smart (he does go to UCLA after all). However, the most important thing, the reason I wrote this entry, is that Trung’s living the successful and happy college life that I want to live. He’s involved in clubs and politics; I’m not. He goes to party and gets fucked up; I don’t party because a beer can knock me out. He’s a queer activist; I piss on queer shit. He’s even on a dance team; I’ve tried multiples times and I’ve failed. (Though for the record, his dance team is open to anyone who wants to participate and the ones I’ve tried to get into required auditions. To be fair to him, though, his team is still very well known and established at UCLA.) After our break up, he went places; I stayed standing in the same spot. That our interests lie in totally different areas adds another dynamic to our friendship.
Another notable thing about this entry is that this is the first one in which I strictly stuck to writing in the third person (limited to Trung). In past character-centric entries, I still referred to myself as “I,” but in this one I finally referred to myself in the third person. A few reasons for this: I felt like using “I” slowed down the quick pace of the entry’s tone, and not using “I” for myself totally puts everything into Trung’s perspective and perception. And well, the way he perceives me, you can see in my only two lines in the entire present time story of the entry. Each line is one sentence long, but, each sentence has about four hundred words. In other words, I ramble. About really trivial stuff. And both lines end the same way: Me asking Trung to fix my problems. Realistically I probably only spoke like the first four or five clauses of each of these lines in response to Trung’s questions, and I definitely didn’t end by asking Trung to fix my problems, but usually when I open my mouth to Trung, it’s to ramble or to ask him for life guidance.
My first line doesn’t mention anything really significant, but my second one introduces the idea of absurdism. This will become important later on.
You probably didn’t take the time to read through my lines because you thought they were so horribly grammatically incorrect. Let me remind you though that grammar has nothing to do with punctuation, or run-on sentences. I double checked the two “sentences.” They are indeed, grammatically and syntactically correct. With regards to mechanics, however, I guess a comma here or there would help.
The idea for these 400-word sentences came from Lucky’s Monologue, in Waiting for Godot, a play that I mention in my second line.
“Memores Acti Prudentes Futuri”
This just might be my favorite entry out of all the ones I’ve written so far. It’s poignant, it’s different, it’s surreal, and it’s weird. The entire entry is kinda like a flashback of three different events, and I wrote an entry like that before, but this entry is different in that my present-day, 20-year-old self is actually experiencing these flashbacks from ten years ago firsthand.
Yes, I did have a dream like this, but it was not as elaborate as what I wrote. What did happen in the dream, as much as I remember, is I appeared as my 20-year-old self in my fourth grade classroom, I had a conversation with my fourth-grade teacher in which we acknowledged that he was dead and I was dreaming, and then I saw brief flashes of the three specific memories described in the entry. Everything else in the entry was some creative licensing.
There are some different ways to interpret this entry. Is it saying that all the shit I got from Seth as a kid the source of all my angst and woe today? Definitely not. Well, possibly, but there’s more.
And this entry marks the climax of this season, as in the next four entries, I resolve a lot of issues presented throughout the season and throughout the last year.
“XY Attraction”
I only have one thing to say about this entry: Affirm and accept my own identity by rejecting the identity of entire sub-culture? Sounds right to me.
I’d also like to point out another long time motif of this entry: the fact that I can hardly utter the words “I’m g...” or “he’s g...” and instead say, “I suck dick” or “He likes it up the butt.” It’s a reoccurring phrase, and besides the fact that I find using such phrases abrasive, blunt, and amazing, there’s a deeper, underlying meaning behind my usage of the phrase. It’s probably pretty obvious.
“Every Game has a Sequel” & “Look Back, Let Go, and Move On”
The season comes back full circle with these entries. In April, Ranier and I broke up for reasons I didn’t state (“Never Alone”), and the only hint came from a flashback of me telling Ranier at the end of my week-long spring break that we had “one hell of a week” (“Our Souvenirs”). In June, the flashback in “Every Game has a Sequel” reveals what happened during that “one hell of a week,” and “Look Back” at least explains what we argued about the night we broke up. Given what’s on my blog, it’s pretty clear why we broke up. There are still some more details I need to explicitly state, but those will be for later.
About the flashback in the church in “Look Back,” I know the entry could do very well without it; it already had another flashback about Ray’s surprise to me. So why the church? I was setting up for the final entry of the season. ;)
“Metablogging”
Yes, I consider this entry to be canon. It’s definitely different from all the rest of the entries, and it’s hard to make something of this entry. It doesn’t really fit into any of the storylines or the themes this blog has tackled before. I wrote this entry for two reasons. First, this is my response to criticism that I try too hard to literally write my life into a neat little story and that I should instead just let things in life happen and go with the flow. My response is that everybody does the same thing (“narratology”). We all try to fit our lives into this neat little story where every thing makes sense, despite how random they are. The difference between me and everyone else is that I choose to actually write about it.
The second reason I wrote this entry was to tackle fate from a different perspective. I’m not going to get into for now, but the big questions are: How are the life I try to write for myself and the life I actually experience different from each other? What does this difference mean? How does it connect to absurdism?
“Beautiful Sinners”
This is probably the first final season entry that didn’t take a departure from the typical storytelling techniques of most entries. “My Lie”/ “My Life” used flashforwards, and “Transcendence” had me engaging in an imaginary conversation with myself. This time I stuck to intertwining a flashback with the present-time story. However, that didn’t stop me from doing something really different, and something really surprising—at least I hope it was surprising. You had to have already understood the format of my blogs and known some prior plot points to fully understand what little trick I pulled on you at the end. Spoiler warning! As in, you should actually read the entry before continuing on with the commentary, because I think the twist I wrote was pretty clever.
In the flashback in “Look Back, Let Go, and Move On,” I talk about my second time at church back in March, and I state that the only reason I would ever go to church is to be with Ranier. Thus, we can assume that the flashback in “Beautiful Sinners” goes back to some time in March because in this entry’s flashback, I’m at church, presumably with Ranier because his name is mentioned after all, and I state that this is “my first time here” in this church.
As for the second storyline where I’m hooking up in the woods and in a dressing room, we know that this is in the present because firstly, we already ruled the other storyline as being in the past, and my entries usually always have a past storyline and a present storyline running together. And given my blog’s recent hints at my skankiness, it’d make sense that we finally got to see some detailed encounters. Plus, there are some more subtle indicators that this is the present: I mention having to do stuff for my English and psychology classes, and I established having these classes during spring quarter in “Metablogging.”
And just when things are looking up in the present, when I’m finally declaring that I will take responsibility and get back that certain someone who I really cared about, presumably Ranier, it all turns out that no, that certain someone is actually black John, and this skanky story is actually taking place in 2007. No one probably remembers this, but in an entry from October 2009, “What It All Comes Down To,” I flash back to the end of 2006 when I cut off ties with John, who was one of my closest friends. That flashback plotline was never resolved until now in “Beautiful Sinners.” So, at least this entry provides some kind of resolution. It’s just not the one you thought you were getting.
Now let’s go back to the story at the church. At the end, I have a conversation with my old high school friend Brandy, and the conversation reveals that this story is actually occurring in the present. I am single, I just finished my second year at UC Irvine, I am back up here in San Jose for the summer. I’m not at church with Ranier in South San Francisco back in March. This is where all the questions come rushing in.
Why am I at church alone? What am I trying to take responsibility for? How is church supposed to help me? Before the twist, it seemed that my experiences from church pushed me to get over my skankiness, but since that is not the case, how do the stories of the actual present timeline and the past interact with each other? The story of skankiness in this entry occurred in 2007, and I supposedly got over it, but recent entries on my blog have hinted that I still get some, and a good amount of it. Is this one possible reason I’m at church? Didn’t I say in a 2007 flashback from a long time ago (“Falling Star”) that I thought those who turned toward religion were “only making a vain last-minute ditch effort to fix or understand something that they and everyone else failed in trying”? So what does that say about me being at church now?
As it turns out, if you go back and reread the entry, I did mention Ranier in the church storyline, but I never explicitly stated that he was there sitting next to me. It my “first time here” at this church because, literally, it was my first time at this particular church in San Jose. Third time going to church overall. And in the real flashback, I mentioned having work to do for English and psychology class because I also happened to have these classes during my junior year in high school.
After a bunch of issues get resolved in the few entries of the season, “Beautiful Sinners” presents many new questions, to which there are many possible answers. I bet very few will be looked into the next season.
