A Good Day

I had a good day today. For maybe the first time I had a small feeling of being at home here in Canada. I always have felt like I'm a stranger here, even after two years since we immigrated. Maybe because I haven't really been socializing much. I didn't feel I needed to. And even today, on my good day, we spent most of it at home. Cooked pancakes for breakfast, let Julia loose in the front yard and watched her collect cherry blossom petals from the street and re-planting them in a patch on our frontyard, rearranging the patio and hanging some pansies, cutting the grass in the backyard, playing badminton with Chris and having Julia as our net in the middle, having pizza and ice cream in the patio and then cooking dinner which was halibut fish simmered in ginger and soy sauce (my mom used to cook this for me). It is a day without much fancy stuff and filled with what we almost do everyday, nothing special. Yet it is a day which reminded me a lot of what I have felt back home.

Back home where the kitchen smells of sauted onions and ginger, where the dogs are barking at people passing by, where nothing much happens, just playing around with the leaves gathered from empty lots, walking with a stick in hand and wacking at almost any surface, and most of the time I'd just wait for mom to come home. Her presence in the house always made a difference. Today reminded me a lot of my childhood. And I find it amazing how much of my memories of it are of tiny, uneventful stuff.

My mind doesn't remember much of the details but if there is a "feeling" memory, I remember what I felt quite distinctly. Often times, I ask my husband what the purpose of my life is or was (since I'm almost halfway through it) and most of the time I was sort of expecting a grandoise answer (from myself mostly), like invent something that would benefit others, inspire and help people, or become somebody of value in this world. Maybe, just maybe, it is not as big as that. Maybe the answer lies in the smallest of things, nothing fancy. Maybe we don't really need an audience. Maybe our essence is best left in the tiniest of details or of feeling. Maybe we don't need a purpose because it is already there inside us. Maybe all we need to do is sit down and listen.

Alien loves spring! Me too!

Julia has taken into the habit of putting Alien (or any other stuffies) over her face when I take pictures of her. I thought it annoying at first but realized later how creatively ingenious it was. How in the world did she ever thought of it? I guess children just do and not think about stuff too much.

Below: In our early morning walk to daycare, Alien stops and wants to smell the flowers.

He says he loves daffodils. Me too.

When you give a camera to your 4 year old

This is what you'll see.

Shaun Tan and other bullets

I must apologize for not being too deligent enough on updating my blog twice a week. Sometimes life gets in the way I guess. I could share some things and insights that I have had experienced the past weeks..

I watched the movie August Rush which was lent to me by a friend. I expected it to be a love story but it wasn't, it was about a boy who was discovering his genius in music. I loved the music in this movie and the best thing that it did for me was remind me to listen to the sounds around us, that music is very much an important part of our life and that being different is something to be proud of.

While riding the bus, a man boarded it and sat across me, he was wearing a shell necklace which he took out and placed in a small tranparent plastic with pink ribbons on it. Then he pulled out a toothbrush and toothpaste out of his pocket and started brushing his teeth. Right there in front of me, in the bus, with many people watching. It was so hard to keep my head turned to the window and not watch him in amazement. In the next stop, when the bus doors opened for passengers to get in, he went to the door, spit out the bubbly toothpaste from his mouth to the streets below and then went back to his seat, toothpaste and brush back in his pocket, as if nothing happened. That redefined the way I see buses now.

Sometimes, when you yearn for something so hard, the universe would contrive to to fulfill it. It speaks in ways different than we do, yet if you'd try hard enough, you'd notice and understand it. Its' language is through silent signs or soft whispers, in every day things, in the tiniest details, in unassuming circumstances and it would only mean something to the right person, with the right need at her right mind.

This is my theory, that somewhere out there, is a person exactly like me but of the opposite gender as what I am. I have a good male friend in the US whose exact female replica I met the other week. It was so uncanny to be hearing her talk using exactly the same voice and intonation as my friend. Her appearance is similar and her intelligence, wit and thinking matches him. She could have been him. I wondered if ever the two would meet would they recognize themselves in each other? Most likely not, as the hardest people for us to know is ourselves.

Shaun Tan, an artist/illustrator/author, of very similar thinking as I am. I am glad I found him under peculiar circumstances last week. I suspect the universe had something to do with it. We are so similar, he has a painting in his book with the same lines as what I have written beside a painting I had made months ago. I accidentally found that he had acknowledged Gustav Dore in his book "The Arrival", the same French artist I have featured in my past two blogs ago and whom I thought noone would notice as I got it from an old old tattered used travel book of London which I bought for $2 from the library sale. I would like to meet him someday.

I noticed that I am moving towards the fantastic and surreal these days. After watching the movie, seeing the man on the bus, meeting my friend's identical persona and finding/reading Shaun Tan's surreal works, I have learned that being fantastic, surreal and in some ways thinking in weirdly ways, can be the best thing one can ever be.

      Below image and phrase by Shaun Tan from his book "Tales from outer suburbia"

'It floats gently above suburban rooftops... inspiring lonely dogs to bark in the middle of the night.'

                                              

Julia's Little People

I had been looking forward to the day when Julia could draw stick figures of people. It started with balloon like drawings last November 2009 and then sometime in January this year (2010), she started putting in eyes and noses and hands and feet. It is quite cool witnessing the "evolution of man" in the hands of a three year old.   

Julia, Mama, Papa, Alien, Kitty