Post for the New Year's eve

On my way home from my daily walk, as I was yawning involuntarily in my sleep walking state down Broadway, NYC, I heard this guy passing me by said...  "Disgusting."

I kept walking on and let my body finish up with the yawning routing... naming... mouth opening and closing.... and so on...

And, I let these words out simply out of my mouth without disturbing anyone... hopefully... "You are disgusting."

And... move further on.

Such captures some essential lessons learned this year.

I would have stopped right here except for something tells me to say more.... therefore, I decided to copy the following from my internal journal posted 2 days ago.

This has been a strange year in the sense that....

I spent hundreds of hours sleep walking.... mostly on Broadway.... in and out of psychotic episode grade of sleep walking... hundreds and a mile... in between... yawning, tearing.... trying to keep my eyes not closing.... floating around in the sea of hallucinations and delusions.... as well as the never-ending waking-up moments.  (Thank God. 8-O)

I also spent hundreds if not thousands of hours... swinging... to make sure the existence that is in gazillion a piece not breaking apart.

In addition, it had come to my realisation that... what I usually thought as intuition might be more than what is commonly considered as intuition.....

So I have often said... my intuition blah blah blah... therefore I blah blah blah... to follow my intuition.

Then, there were times when I tried to follow the intuition not (to defy? 8-O lol sh....)... thinking to myself... I could plow it through... like what I used to be able to... and, I realised... I simply could defy the force what I thought as intuition not.



Sort of like... da illusion of control... spoken of by da turtle... 8-O lol

Get to the core now.... to link all other categories together... simple or simply love.



Happy New Year and a happier New Year!

凡人歌

Interesting concept... people have 雜念.... ummmm... it is normal....

凡人歌 李宗盛

你我皆凡人 生在人世間
終日奔波苦 一刻不得閒
(你)既然不是仙 難免有雜念
道義放兩旁(把)利字擺中間
多少男子漢一怒為紅顏多少同林鳥已成(了)分飛燕
人生何其短何必苦苦戀
愛人不見了向誰去喊冤問
你何時曾看見這世界為了人們改變有了
夢寐以求的容顏是否就算是擁有春天

A place in the Sun

Came across this fine song as I stopped by Starbucks during my walk in the sun...

A place in the sun-- Stevie Wonder



Like a long lonely stream
I keep runnin' towards a dream
Movin' on, movin' on
Like a branch on a tree
I keep reachin' to be free
Movin' on, movin' on

'Cause there's a place in the sun
Where there's hope for ev'ryone
Where my poor restless heart's gotta run
There's a place in the sun
And before my life is done
Got to find me a place in the sun

Like an old dusty road
I get weary from the load
Movin' on, movin' on
Like this tired troubled earth
I've been rollin' since my birth
Movin' on, movin' on

There's a place in the sun
Where there's hope for ev'ryone
Where my poor restless heart's gotta run
There's a place in the sun
And before my life is done
Got to find me a place in the sun

You know when times are bad
And you're feeling sad
I want you to always remember

Yes, there's a place in the sun
Where there's hope for ev'ryone
Where my poor restless heart's gotta run
There's a place in the sun
Where there's hope for ev'ryone
Where my poor restless heart's gotta run
There's a place in the sun
Where there's hope for ev'ryone...

Not again

It feels like I am getting born everyday.

Anyways, 7:15 AM Taiwan time or 6:15 PM New York time, I was born again... What a asynchronous lifestyle! 8-O lol

Today also is my 2.5 years old birthday into my physically disabled life.  What a synchronous and asynchronous lifestyle! 8-O lol

In addition, today marked the day I see a paycheck deposited into my bank account since my I-20 expired on May 15th because the reinstatement notice finally arrived the day after I heard the sad news about the passing of my dear uncle.  ;-(

I finally can get pay now even though my bosses were kind enough to put up with having me hanging around like them little friends who are driving everyone up the wall in the office these days all these times. 8-O lol

The reinstatement only gives me up to May to finish things up and it gives me more time to finish things up.

The lesson learned... today...

Gratitude makes you happy and brings forth the sunny side of life even when it might feel as if the whole world is coming down... including your ceiling....

It is because, when you have gratitude, it means something good has been done for you... even though sometimes you do want to use your stick to beat people up really good when they get on your other side.... 8-O lol

罪過罪過善栽善栽... 8-O lol

T'is the nature of being human...

Among many things and people I am grateful about this year if not this life so far is that... I thank the opportunity I have been given to continue to "work."  Something tells me that I might have gone back and out of my bird nest if I had sat there everything-less and drowning myself in sentiments of blah blah blah while waiting for the decision on my reinstatement application to arrive, provided God knows what the outcome might be.

I am still psychotic but I am on 150-200 mg Seroquel while still kicking at large and I had never stop living for a moment( (Thank God) ... other than them never-ending waking up moments...

In any case, focus on live a happy life regardless!  A suggestion I could offer to whoever might want a suggestion...

Your choices are now permanent

I, unofficially speaking, have more than one mafia war account... for fear that if one accounts gets closed, I have other accounts to work with to see what it might be like towards the end of the journey.

Funny enough, some time after I created the second account, my dominant account became disabled... and it remained disabled since....

That rain-day account I created eventually surpassed the growing speed of the dominant account... Today, it is the main account....

So, I finally get to finish the Third Tier of Episode 6 "Pakhan" in Moscow today...

The day when I was not yet awake while starting to feel regretful about not having gotten up early enough to catch the free shuttle to see my shrink... and heard my voice said..."If you push harder, you will break."

Not you "might" break.  No uncertainty here but you "will" break. Psychotic symptoms or not... scary enough... especially when I am all broken and still try to find way to patch myself up... 8-O 8-X lol sigh

The day when my voice force me further to reexamine my life... and the prices...

I knew it is time to really put down and let go da thing relating to academia.... And, apparently, there is still this thought in the back of my head saying... maybe one day, after I retire from something else, I will try out academia...

There might be other people both mentally and physically disabled like me and who could continue to pursuit a career as such.

Good luck to you and take care of your health and life. Of course, best wishes to you non-disabled as well... ya... non-discriminating.... 8-O lol

I have now made a conscious choice... weighting all things... and decided to preserve myself for a wonderful life ahead and it ain't like my non-existence in academia would mean a ding to no nothing and nobody.  It seems like IT or number-related jobs are best for me.  Running a craft shop would be nice except for I need to first really win my mega-million... 8-O lol

It is not like I have come to this conclusion simply because I am disabled in the head and in the body.... Like... OMG... I am too constrained by my disabilities such as my head status to do it.

Rather, it is... based on my estimation and since the past seems to have some pretty good predictibility on the future... what outweigh what and what is the cost-benefit ratio?

Do I want to go against the odds if not Gods regardless... perpetuating the modus operandi of my past life... which seems to have led to the shattering of my existence bottom up... literally... because I want to prove that I can do it, whatever it is?

Not saying anyone should simply decide to not pursue no nothing without any effort because I did conduct my dissertation experiment all the way into the psychiatric ward and came out jumping right back into it and I have not stopped.  And, I did work and study while living with them ups and downs of my mental health conditions all the way and all those years till I deposited my dissertation and got that doctoral degree.  In other words, don't let nobody tell you that because you are psychotic... you can't get things done... provided you get your jobs done (oops... am I reacting to something? Imaginary or not? 8-O lol).

Yet, do I want to, above and beyond the acceptance of my updated self-concept, recalibrate for a "nicer" path (see page 154 about the process of coming back again in Strauss and Corbin (1990) Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques.)? (love the word nicer... 8-O lol)

I have no regret about my life so far other than not making big money to take my parents for trips... it is just, at times, one just has to recalibrate.

Then, upon the completion of da Pakhan job, I saw this message...

Your choices are now permanent... 8-O lol

Speaking of synchronicity.... and no wonder I am delusional... 8-O lol

And, only hope this note will reach someone... positive way.

Now I can shut up again for a while.

Normal

Told the shrink about voices and presence of my uncles ...

So he said...

You know normal people could also experience it during the grieving process.

On a second thought, I do remember two guys told me that they could hear their fathers voices and sense their presence... including someone who is a physicist...

8-O

Then, I had this thought... if our ancestors still come over and check on us once in a while.... the empty spaces surrounding us all might actually be not so empty and might actually be really busy... then... 8-O

Etiology and its implications: Why I went nuts

Sometimes I think the reason why I went nuts might have to do with the fact that...

I tried to hold back judgment on people because I understood blah blah blah blah blah blah...

Somehow I think the whole holding judgment and being understanding thing might have used up all my available memory and caused the system to constantly hang or crash.  8-O

One thing I have been trying to learn in this new life is to be "normal" or "human"... to reclaim the rights to make judgments about people's deeds and speech as per my "perception" and to authorise myself to feel pissed off...

For instance, one thing that really pisses me off is to see how evil people could be to use my disability as a weapon against me.

I am not BS-ing you that I don't have an evil side since I have this belief that everyone has an evil side except for one might just not want to face it. (see 墨子)

Since God forbids me from cursing people as per my delusional thoughts...

My evil side is that... the next time somebody pisses me off by using my disabilities (e.g, physical) as a weapon against me, I am gonna beat them up good with my cane 8-O to teach them a lesson on what it means to be like me to be in a "extended partial recovery course." (see page 154 about the process of coming back in Strauss and Corbin (1990) Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques.) (Oops... a bit too violent... no good modeling to children... not to mention I can't even kill a bug  without squinting or move my own butts fast enough... sigh...  Guess this is the reason why they took my cane away and gave me a walker instead in the cuckoo cuckoo's nest. 8-O lol)

zen moment... zen moment ... God I have sinned... 8-O

Apparently, I am gradually moving into a state of anger... rather than simply low and depressed....

And, of course, if you say... this chick got issues...

No truer words... my head splits and my body broken... etc...

There ain't no doubts that I've got issues... so many that you don't wanna know... 8-O lol sigh

And, I got an issue with being disabled?  Which part of my English don't you understand?  8-O lol sigh

Quotes from Coding in Grounded Theory Practice

Charmaz, Kathy (1999). Constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis.

Quotes from Chapter 3: Coding in Grounded Theory Practice

Check the following link for an alternative version of the paper
http://www.colorado.edu/ibs/pb/thornberry/socy5031/pdfs/CharmazGroundedtheory.pdf

Dey (1999): 

"There is a difference between an open mind and an empty head."

Verbatim of an individual with Lupus erythematosus:

"If you have lupus, I mean one day it's my liver; one day it's my joints' one day it's my head, and it's like people really think you're a hypochondriac if you keep complaining about different ailments... It's like you don't want to say anything because people are going to start thinking, you know, 'God, don't go near her, all she is-is complaining about this.' And I think that's why I never say anything because I feel like everything I have is related one way or another to the lupus but most of the people don't know I have lupus, and even those that do are not going to believe that ten different ailments are the same thing."  Page 52

A quote from Charmaz, 1991:

"A desire to recapture the past reflects yearning for a lost self.  That yearning results from grieving for accumulated losses from illness.  Here, the person defines losses and acknowledges illness.  Though she writes that she learned to live moment by moment after her stroke, poet May Sarton simultaneously longed for her past self: "Now I am frightfully lonely because I am not my self.  I can't see a fried for over a half-hour without feeling as though my mind were draining away like air rushing from a balloon'. (1988, P. 18)

The sorrow for a past self increase when people believe that they might not reclaim it.  Even after trying to wait out illness or treatment, regaining the past self and recapturing the past may remain elusive.  Sarton suggests this elusiveness when she writes that 'to manage such a passive waiting life for so many months I have had to bury my real self-and now realize that bringing back that real self is going to be even more difficult than it was to bury it'. (1988, p. 78)

A quote about preconceived notions (P. 68):

"You cannot assume what is in someone's mind-particularly if he or she does not tell you."

"If you reframe participants' statements to fit a language of intention, you are forcing the data into preconceived categories-- yours, not theirs."

"A fine line exists between interpreting data and imposing a preexisting frame on it."

Our little friend

An imaginary portrait of our little friend... 8-O 8-X lol

March of penguins

Watching march of penguins while eating...

So narrated Morgan Freeman...

"one way or another, they all find the one they were looking for."

With the camera zooming in to two penguins together...

So I thought....

How do they find the one when they all look the same?

Then, I thought again...

Maybe that's the same way the penguins think when they see human...

How do they find the one when they all look the same?

So I spent the rest of the movie trying to sort through the unopened mail.... 8-O

Two thoughts came to my mind...

First, how did the mama penguin find the husband and the chick after they came back from the sea since... they all look the same to me...

Second, them chicks are so cute... if only I were a penguin... but no... their life seems to be too tough.... the cold and the marches....

Culture-bound

Today, as I stopped by Barnes and noble during my walk, I somehow decided to swing by some non-craft book section, scanned through the title and found this book on the table... The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us

The table of content was what I wanted and I found in Chapter. 11 what I was thinking of and might be unconsciously looking for... "Chinese Bereavement Ritual".... Unfortunately, my understanding of much of what is written here have been based on personal experiences... including polytheistic religion, orchestrated crying ritual and so on....

If only I could be simply God-blessed-ly ignorant...

Interesting enough, as I was preparing this post, I tried to look up this book... it was not until when the book was loaded on the webpage did I realise... I know that guy who wrote this book... I see him all the times at the College.... 8-O

Culture-bound

I don't like the grieving process... it makes you feel really sad even if you want to make yourself believe that... perhaps, all of those passed now have become Gods.. or 仙...

The thought of them becoming 仙 makes death not so awful... because now they have supernatural power and they could protect you.

Yet, regardless whether you believe in it or not, you still get overcome by sadness when it comes.

And, like what my grandma said to me in a nightmare years back... years after she passed away....

"It is just the way it is."

So many other people have lived through and out of it. So could others including me.

The bad habits of hallucinations and delusions do make it more complicated for me to deal with the process... I think... not to discount anyone else's experience... and, perhaps, this is why they were trying to hide the news from me...

So... my uncle's funeral took place on Dec. 13th Taiwan Time.... which translates into yesterday night in New York time....

Then, I thought of the idea of a funeral....

In addition to using it as a function to show our respects and everything else to the deceased... who we would love to believe to have now 成仙 and taken by Buddha to 西方極樂世界......

The funeral provides a space for the survived to be together and give each other supports....

I would have preferred to stay home and mourn... listening to them useless thoughts in my head in whatever form...

Yet, something told me that I need to be with people...

So... I went out to be with people....

I did not tell no soul what the heck was going on in my mind other than simply being a melancholic drama queen for the night. For me... that was good enough since I was not 涕淚縱橫...

I did stick to the 素菜 (vegetarian) diet for the Taiwanese December 13th....

Later I thought...

If my uncle really has turned to be a 仙, he would rather me to stay with people and listen to real people talk... What it be like if he has something to do with that something that got me out of the house?

Where is the boundary between pathological magical thinking and cultural beliefs?

How bad is such a thought?--- a question for myself... (and, I guess, as long as I can keep it real... 8-O)

How long does it take to break a rat?

The topic came up today about the concept of proving oneself...

To prove that I am in dispensable to human race.... including the United States... 8-O lol

To prove that I am all encompassing... perhaps... I am or I will do all that I could do to be the best... the expert... the whatever...

Been there...

Done that...

Today, OMG...

I am done proving myself to myself.

This piece of wreck is literally a perfectly broken piece of work... especially worsen in winter times... the longer I stay out in the cold... the slower I walk... And, that head of mine? God bless... 8-O lol 8-X

Yet, I guess... well... could always try to fine-tune it in some capacity... yet... good enough for myself.

From one perspective, 2 and a half years seem to be a long time.

On the second hand... ain't seem like it took all that long to break a rat till all that the rat wants is to be healthy, happy and play... so they say... play therapy... I guess... (of course, I could manage to learn to be rich.... 8-O lol)

Of course, only my unconscious knows whether I really think I am good enough for myself... Therefore, the burdon of proof is on my unconsciousness and got nothing to do with I who am in a state of one country... God knows how many governments.... 8-O lol

Milestone

Today marks one historical milestone in my life.

I actually woke up early to cook string beans and ground beef with black bean garlic sauce. Not quite sure how edible it might be though since this is the first time I did it (sh......). 8-O 8-X lol

First of all, I used oil in my cooking.

Second, I used black bean garlic sauce to cook for the first time.

Third, I used garlic to season.

Fourth, I added meat.

Fifth, this dish included multiple ingredients and multiple steps (as opposed to putting everything into the pot to bring everyone to a boil together).

Most importantly.... OMG... cooking involving all of the above already do I hardly do... less than 10 times many in my life... not to mention doing it 8 o'clock in the morning... 8-O lol oops...

Psychosomatisation

Ever since I started going through the grieving process, even my body has gone into a much worse shape with aches and pains and discomfort taking their comeback...

Might have something to do with the cold weather as well...

In any case, perfect scenario of psychosomatisation.

You know it helps nobody to be in this state... Yet, it simply is the way it is until I finally get myself out of it.

Three issues

There are three major issues in life...

Life and death and all the nonsense in between...

The only room we have been spared with is the pursuit of happiness unless you find suffering more to your taste.

風颱 day

I have been in a foul mood today... especially since this afternoon...

It is the kind of foul mood that, if you rub me the wrong way, be careful being swiped by the tail of a typhoon... 掃到風颱尾...

Extremely irritable to any non-sense perceivable...

A reaction to a bad news... this dear uncle of mine passed...

It is through him that I learn... Life is a gamble... The higher you roll, the more you could gain and the more you could lose...

But.. when the investment went down south, bite the loss with grace. Take the time to regenerate and to restart...

When thing are fine, share with friends with good food and drinks...

阿沙力 and 兩肋插刀 he has been the entire life...

My gratitude... no way to him directly... pay back...

So they say....

受人點滴泉湧以報...

Not to mention that we have always been... so they say... 稱兄道弟... or... buddy buddy... sigh

Seroquel commercial

The Seroquel XR commercial caught my attention... especially the side effect section..... death... uncontrollable muscle movements as it might be permanent... 8-O 8-X

Blog

Heard this funny comment today from a student...

"They want us to blog every week..." if not every class...

I was laughing my head off on the inside...

I tried to make my students do blogging on a daily basis years back when I was teaching graduate school class... and, that, among the plausible simple fact that I am a really bad teacher, got me away from them teaching jobs.

The moral of the lesson...

Until you get tenured or established...

Don't try no nothing funny..... though what was once funny might eventually become the norm... 8-O lol

Eating my dinner while watching Rudolf on TV...

What on earth did I have to be different? 8-O lol

While... the matter of the fact... I just had to do it.... 8-O lol sigh

(Where is the misfit toy land? Expect for... living things can't live on da land...) 8-O lol

To be serious, it would be wonderful though if it's implications could really be realised... Would be wonderful...