So, near the end of high school (I think), and definitely during college, my friend Mike and I got into the habit of buying each other gifts for Christmas and our birthdays. With our tight college student budgets, it was quite an accomplishment to do this consistently. I don’t know if we had set a price ceiling, but I’m pretty sure no gift ever exceeded $30 after tax, but it didn’t matter. We knew each other well so that it was easy to get something meaningful AND affordable. Our gifts were often of the geeky variety so to the non-geek, it seemed like we were giving each other random junk. What is one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, I suppose.
My mom was bemused by these gift exchanges because my mom is not a nerd, or at least not a nerd of our generation, so when Mike would buy me a sock monkey or a poster version of Jay and Silent Bob’s blueprints from the movie Mallrats, my mom would complain at the lack of quality gifts that Mike would give me. I, on the other-hand, would buy Mike books, and while these books were kind of geeky (David Sedaris – though Mike thought I was using this book to out him since Sedaris is also gay), my mom thought books were more practical. She didn’t mean it to be critical, and when I told Mike about her criticisms, he was really amused and not offended at all. In fact, for my 21st birthday, inspired to prove my mother wrong, Mike bought me a martini set, complete with a shaker. Not only was it a practical gift, it was kind of classy. My mom really thought Mike had finally come around and what took the cake was the fact that my mom doesn’t actually know what a martini is; she thought that he bought me really cute dessert cups for ice cream.
I don’t think my gift exchanges with Mike back then have taught me any lessons about gift giving that I use today. I’ve always tried to avoid the gift giving faux pas of thoughtless gift card giving and have avoided the other major no-no of gift giving (buying girls clothes/clothing accessories without them picking it out and trying it on). Gift giving isn’t particularly a science, but I take a certain pride in getting people original gifts that they would really like. If I can’t figure out something that’s perfect for someone, I prefer to take them out for a good meal so I can assure them some sort of satisfaction.
Charis and Allison perform for the local community theater a few times year outside of the duties with the Technicolor show. I haven’t been able to see them in all their different performances, and I’ve only seen them once since our last show, but I made sure that they remembered I was there. I came out to watch them on opening night as part of a sold out crowd. I missed them walking down the red carpet because I had to stop by the Fullerton Farmer’s Market so I could pick up some gifts for the girls. I couldn’t just stop anywhere to get the gifts, it had to be the Farmer’s Market. There’s a man who comes down from Gillroy to the Market every Thursday, and I needed to buy some garlic for Charis.
Charis is a very unique 10 year old child. For one, she’s a leap year baby (2/29), and two, she loves garlic, raw garlic. One of my first conversations with Charis consisted of her asking me two questions: Do I like raw garlic? (yes) and How much can you eat at one time? (I have no idea). She then proceeded to tell me how much she can eat at one time, and the fact that the number was greater than 0 was pretty surprising to me. So, I decided that as her gift for opening night, I was only going to get Allison flowers and I was going to get Charis a braid of famous Gillroy garlic.
I had asked her about this possibility before and she told me that she would rather have garlic than flowers, so it wasn’t a total surprise when I gave it to her, but she was still kind of shocked that I followed through with my plan. She wasn’t at all embarrassed to be walking around the courtyard of the theater carrying around a bag of garlic. She even stopped to smell it a couple of times. Allison seemed perfectly content with the more traditional gift of flowers and complained that the garlic made the bottom of her bouquet stink.
I’m sure that if I had pitched this plan to my mom, she would’ve told me that I was being foolish for wanting to buy a kid a bag of garlic, and I’m sure other people would’ve told me the same thing as well, but when a gift is given, (as I knew back in college with Mike) as long as it makes sense to the giver and the receiver, that’s all that matters.
My first job title in college was “Community Programmer”. Basically, my sole duty was to create events, or “programs” for the freshmen in the dorms. Since I was programming events for freshmen, people assumed that I was older. They also called me “CP Ryan” as a nickname. It was a fulfilling job that taught me a lot of important skills. I learned that food is a huge key to get a large turnout (BBQs or smoothie making workshops) and that a little creativity can make any sort of event sound like it’s educational (I booked myself a gig and explained that it was an event that broke down Asian-American stereotypes.) I learned how to deal with my shyness (I could just introduce myself at a hall meeting and then sing a song opposed to giving a long winded introduction), but probably the most important skill I learned from this job was the ability to plan.
I would classify myself as more of a Type B personality than a Type A. I’ve always skewed towards procrastinating, being laid back and having a cluttered desk, so a job where I had to plan things and take care of the logistical details was quite a challenge for me. It was a crash course in being responsible and I had to learn from my mistakes quickly. If I wanted to have a BBQ and I wanted to play music, I would need to request an extension cord so we could power the PA system. After a couple of events, I started to plan better and figure out what I needed before the last minute. Of course, being prepares doesn’t necessarily mean that things will absolutely run smoothly, so over time, I’ve learned to roll with the punches. I’m not an expert at it, I’m not sure if anyone is, but it’s always safe to think that something will probably going wrong.
I think I always had it in me to plan. I don’t think I received some sort of Clockwork Orange style brainwashing. I’ve always been driven to do more than the average person. From starting bands, writing screenplays and music sites, to this blog and the show that compliments it, all those things have required a good amount of planning. While a lot of these plans have fizzled out, I’m still trucking along, constantly trying to figure out the best way to use my talents and my skills. Perhaps it’s a sign of this generation, but my planning doesn’t involve white picket fences, it involves hanging out and trying to advance my non-existent creative career. I don’t know how I shifted into this mode. When I was in high school/college, I wanted to be married at 22, at 22, I wanted to be married by 25, at 27, I wanted to be married by 25. Maybe I just got jaded, maybe I gave up, maybe I just realized that I can’t plan for that, no matter how good of a planner I am.
I remember listening to an audio commentary by the Writer/Director Wes Anderson, who is one of my favorite filmmakers. Frankly, it was pretty boring because he discussed all the meticulous details that went into his decisions. I probably would’ve found the commentary more fascinating if I didn’t see that same meticulous attention to detail in me. From the words I use in my stories, to the details in my plans (I try to leave room for flexibility), to the socks I wear at my show, I pretty much live in the details of life. It’s pretty exhausting and since most of the action is going on in my head, people probably don’t realize how much thought goes into each decision. I wish I could be more out of sight, out of mind, but probably at my age, if i haven’t learned how to do that by now, I probably won’t learn it at all.
I’m never going to be able to quite being a planner. I can get better at dealing when things go wrong, but that’s probably all I can hope for at this point. Whether one creative pursuit fizzles out, another one will be born, and hopefully one of these will bear fruit, and realistically speaking, I only need one of these things to work out to be happy. There will be days where everything goes right and days where everything goes wrong, and sometimes I will have absolutely no control in either case. I wouldn’t say planning is futile. I think it helps get you to where you end up, but often times you have no idea where you’re going.
In college, I started to get a lot of offers to film weddings. I took the offers back then since I figured I could use the money, but I never thought about filming weddings as a full-time profession. Even though the money was nice, it was a lot of work and there was a lot of stress to the job. For one, there are no reshoots at a wedding, so that is an unbelievably huge amount of pressure to get things right from the beginning. This is made extremely difficult by poor planning. I don’t mean to rail against wedding planners, but I think they should all have a basic background in how video cameras work (and how wind and dark lighting affect them) so they can take that into account at weddings. Needless to say, it’s not a profession that suits me and the gray hairs on my head can attest to that. It’s also weird to be at a wedding of a couple you don’t know. It ‘s even worse, and extremely lonely, when you’re sitting by yourself or next to a stranger (the photographer) with no friends in sight.
After filming a couple of weddings after college, I got out of the business entirely. It took me awhile to readjust myself to being a guest at wedding. I wasn’t thinking about how I would shoot a wedding when I was invited to one, but I needed to readjust to enjoy weddings again. It was a gradual process and after going to a couple of friend’s weddings, I stopped feeling bad about leaving when I wanted to or having more than enough to drink, and most importantly, I was happy for the couples again, instead of fearing what kind of crazy demands they would have post-honeymoon.
I spent my 28th birthday at my friend’s wedding. Some people asked me if I was bitter that my friend had his wedding on “my day”, but I was fine with it. (I know how much insane planning goes into a wedding, so if my friend had to choose that day, I’m sure it’s because it was the best deal or he didn’t really have much of a choice.) People are always out of town around my birthday anyways because it’s the day before the 4th of July and a lot of the people who were invited to his wedding were people that I would’ve invited to my birthday party, so either way, I would be spending the day with friends. Plus, there’s nothing noble in saying “I’m not going to your wedding because it’s my birthday, and I’m going to fight you for our friends.”
People wished me a happy birthday at the reception and there was good food, cake, and an open wine/beer bar. I spent a part of the night talking to two pastor’s wives about the intellectual value of Sponge Bob Square Pants and why I respected the girl from iCarly (she’s the teacher’s pet in School of Rock) until I found out she wanted a singing career but that she’s still better than Hannah Montana (who is the spawn of the man who wrote “Achy Breaky Heart”). So basically, I acted much like I would have if it was my birthday dinner.
The past couple of years have been very transitional for me, so while I enjoyed the weddings I was invited to, those weddings also brought up a host of issues that I’ve had to deal with either because of the people I ran into or because what was going on in my life in general. Starting last year, with the wedding of my friends Ed and Nicole, I’ve been able to enjoy these special days out of sight, out of mind, and while I’m not advocating that my friends constantly get married on the weekend of my birthday, I don’t harbor any feelings of resentment, because honestly, in my early to mid 20s, there wasn’t a whole lot to celebrate anyways and the fact that I’m enjoying the things I’m supposed to again is hopefully a sign that I’ve survived a lot of the volatility that I’ve had to experience in my 20s. An older friend of mine told me that around 30 is when people really figure themselves out (with exceptions of course). I didn’t really know what that meant and at one point of my life I wanted to be 25 forever. Professional athletes tend to peak around 27-29 and now that I think about that, it makes sense. It’s a time where people are physically, mentally, and emotionally in good shape, and hopefully I’m also at my peak.
Perhaps I’ll never be #1 at anything, but I hope at this point, I can let the game of life come to me and that I can put myself in the best position for success. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a paid writer, or paid to do my show, but at least I can be happy on my own b-day and happy for my friends when they find happiness, and while that sounds petty, I sure feel like I’ve come a long way.
A few weeks ago, I received an issue of Maxim Magazine in my mailbox. I’ve never subscribed to Maxim, so my first thought was that it must be my neighbor’s, or that it had been misplaced in my mailbox, but it was clearly addressed to me and it was the correct address. I guess this is a common practice nowadays, but I was pretty irritated, mostly because Maxim thought that I would be the type of person that would subscribe to their magazine. To be honest, I’ve never really gone a full issue of Maxim, but just by seeing what they typically cover/write about it, it is safe to say that Maxim Magazine is not my cup of tea. I do know the kind of guy that does read Maxim, or at least I knew him for a year, he was my room mate from freshmen year of college, Steve.
I moved in a couple of days after the official move-in day, and I walked into my room seeing that his stuff was sprawled out over my side of the room, I believe he had his TV sitting on my bed for whatever reason. I didn’t take it too personally. We were 18 year old kids who had never lived outside of home and things like this were bound to come up. We initially got along. We both liked sushi… and that was about it, and so since we were very different and immature people, things quickly started to go south.
Steve wanted to make our room a cool place to hang out, and I actually didn’t have a problem with this, but our definitions of what made our place cool definitely clashed. I was cool with just keeping the place relatively clean and putting up a couple of posters, but Steve had a very specific definition of what was cool, or what he referred to as “pimp”. He thought the only posters/calendars we should have in our room should consist of “girls and golf” and the more things that had cheetah print, the better. I’m not sure where he got this definition of “pimp”, I can only assume he read about it in a magazine, like Maxim. He also wanted to get a neon sign that he put in our window (he moved in first, so he got the window) that read “Open”, and of course he wanted me to pay for half (I didn’t).
To mess with him, I bought a Power Puff Girls calendar and put it up on my side of the room. It really upset him. ”I wanted hot girls, not a cartoon!” to which i replied “she can shoot LASERS OUT OF HER EYES AND LIGHT THINGS ON FIRE”. I thought it was really funny, predictably he did not. I continually ignored his requests because it was my side of the room and I thought his ideas were ridiculous, so eventually I got my Monet print and my Trainspotting monologue poster and he had to accept that only half of the room was going to be “pimp”. We hung out a little at the beginning of the year. I tried to be nice to him and be his friend. I went to his orchestra performance (though I don’t remember what he played), we went to get sushi a couple of times, but we quickly realized that we were just going to be just roommates, not friends.
Since we were 18 year olds, we were not equipped with the skills to make our situation amicable. There was a week where we didn’t talk. We didn’t exchange information to stay in touch after we moved out. The last I heard about him is when my friend met him at a party. After saying some not-so-nice things about how I would manipulate girls to hang out with me, my friend (also a girl) asked if maybe girls like to hang out with me because I’m a nice guy. Steve fired back with “Are you on your period or something?” and that was the end of that conversation.
It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve had to see Steve or hear about him so I have no idea where he is now or what he’s done with his life. He may very well be living in a “pimp” apartment with cheetah print everything, a neon “Open” sign and all those other bizarre requests he wanted when he was 18 or he may have outgrown those ideas. If were to show up at my door today, I would actually be nice and ask him how he’s been doing. Though I know that instead of actually having this hypothetical chat with him, I could just ask him if he wanted my copy of Maxim Magazine and that would answer all my questions about whether he was still pretty much the same guy as he was 10 years ago.
Back in the times where cell phone companies charged local roaming fees, there was very little reason to take your phone on trips with you, unless you were willing to be charged ridiculous fees per minute. I was a poor college student, but I brought my phone everywhere with me just in case there was a family emergency that I needed to attend to. It’s kind of a paranoid thought to have and it probably shows my over-reliance on technology, but I actually did need it when I was on my way back from Minnesota back in 2004. My sister was going into labor with her first child back in LA and she needed me to get ahold of my parents to tell them to head for the hospital. I racked up a pretty hefty cell phone bill that day, but it didn’t matter to me. My sister needed me and I came through even though I knew I was going to get hit hard with some serious roaming fees.
A few months later I was at my apartment in Irvine. I was working during Spring Break (I cannot explain why I chose this), and my roommates were mostly gone for the week. Alan, in particular, was in Chicago on a Habitat for Humanity trip, or something like that. I remember at one point I walked by his room and saw that he had left his keys and phone on his desk. Even though I knew that they don’t allow the use of cell phones on these Habitat type trips, I thought it was odd that he decided not to bring it or his keys at all. (Obviously he didn’t have a pregnant sister at the time) I saw him at the end of the week at church, on Sunday, welcomed him back home and then, without thinking, went off to a meeting. I had forgotten about the fact he didn’t have his keys or phone, but I guess so did he.
When I got home from the meeting, I was really tired. I just wanted to take a nap and play some video games. As I walked up the stairs (we lived on the 2nd floor), I saw Alan with his bags sitting at the front door. This is when I remembered he didn’t have his phone and keys. Upon further inspection, Alan appeared to be extremely pale. I told him “You don’t look so good.” He quickly replied “You need to take me to the hospital.”
Here is what had happened between the time I saw him at church to the time I saw him at the front door: Alan arrived at the apartment and found that the door was locked, he proceeded to climb up our balcony to try to get in through our screen door which was also locked, and then he decided to jump down from the balcony and proceeded to break his ankle in the process. To this day, I do not understand why he decided to come down from the balcony or why he thought some empty cardboard boxes would cushion his fall, but I wasn’t there to talk these things out with him, and that’s why Alan was lying the backseat of my car in total panic while I was trying to maneuver my way on the freeway. I had a general idea of how to get to the hospital, but I had never been there before, so I had to call my friend Tom to get directions. Naturally, this kind of freaked Alan out, since any sort of stress was going to exponentially add to his woes. Alan would tell me his ankle was turning purple and then I would yell at him to stop looking at it and to keep it elevated. (Why I knew it should be elevated, I have no idea. I guess TV and movies have taught me well.) I felt really bad that I was yelling at him and that I didn’t exactly know where I was going but driving people to the hospital was a new experience for me. We were both stressed and really scared.
We finally arrived at the emergency room and had a doctor take a look at his ankle. We were there for awhile, and I stayed knowing the last thing Alan would’ve wanted was to be left alone in the emergency room. After being there for 5+ hours, we finally left and Alan now had crutches and a cast. I’m not sure if they put a screw in his ankle that night or if was a procedure done at a later time, but that’s how severe the break was. After months of being in a cast/with crutches, Alan was finally able to live his life normally again.
I’ve known him for over 10 years now, and while lots of friendships in that time have faded out, ours has managed to survive the test of time, and since he no longer lives in Irvine, I can safely say that it’s not out of convenience. We no longer live in the same city or go to the same church, but he’s really good at letting me know when he’s in town, which I really appreciate, and that’s a skill that surprisingly few amount of people have these days. He hasn’t broken any more limbs since that fateful day back in college, but I can safely say that Alan will continue to perplex me from time to time. I just hope that if he’s learned anything from me in our friendship, it’s that he should have his phone on him at all times, because you never know when it could come in handy.