Category Archives: Thinking Out Loud

What Naked Feels Like

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I step between the easels, watching their carefully casual gazes glide past my body. They had pointed me to a changing room, as if they weren’t going to see me nude, anyway. Beneath the clothes I change in and out of from day to day, I remain, for the most part, unchanged. No need for such a room.

I step onto the platform and suddenly I am Art, beyond vulgarity and eroticism, just lines and contours, shadows and highlights.

They can trick themselves, but I know the truth.

One girl draws me waif thin with sharp animal eyes, while a male student does for my manhood what quack medicine has promised for centuries. I almost point out the disparity in size, and then I remember that models aren’t supposed to comment. Besides, what guy wants an artist to draw him with a smaller dick for accuracy’s sake? I don’t know, and I can’t think of anyone besides myself.

Some admire, some desire, and some despise my nude body. But even nude, I’m covered in layers. Every day, I wear my “Asian” eyes, my “gymnast” physique. I wear black, black hair, the pride of my Chinese heritage. I wear flat feet and delicate hands.

Nude, I wear what others proffer. They drape me with coarse fabrics – “Asian” and “male” and “athlete” – with or without my consent. When I am nude before photographers or pencil artists, I wonder what it is they’ve clothed me in. But I will not apologize for my nudity, because what I wear when I am wearing nothing isn’t up to me.

Clothed or not, we are always nude. But I don’t know if we are ever truly naked.

I wonder what naked feels like – to be exactly what you are, with no concealing layers. I imagine that it’s a lot like being invisible. I imagine that it’s a lot like walking in a crowd on a busy day, mutually oblivious of the people around you.

I imagine that it’s a lot like wearing clothes.

Full Time Brian

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So far, I’ve felt the most productive in my career as an author when I wasn’t writing. Eight hours a day or more, five days a week, a happy buzz, and exactly 0 words written. Clearly, I was doing something wrong, so I began to write every day.

At first it was easy, but my subconscious was working against me. I wrote 8,000 words of drivel a day during National Novel Writing Month 2010, which, though crappy, still set unrealistic expectations. I couldn’t even write 2,000 words a day. I found myself less and less motivated, and the harder I tried and the longer hours I set, the worse it got. The more I forced myself to sit down and write, the worse I failed and the longer I spent contemplating that failure instead of living life – life, the fabric of stories!

I dreaded the act of writing. Meanwhile, the stories and world still came to life in my mind when I daydreamed, which I found myself doing a lot. The story was still alive, but my ability to set it down on paper was in the midst of a slow and painful death, 9-to-5 Monday through Friday.

I came to a few important realizations:

  • If I couldn’t make writing a positive experience, I would not be able to continue. Period. End of stories. End of dream.
  • Time spent daydreaming was productive, but it could not be confined to a 9-5 workday. Nor could I track it, since it happened in my sleep as well.
  • And finally, I read a BoingBoing interview with Ran Prieur that allowed me to give myself some slack. I was, and am still, learning to self-motivate.

“When you quit that, and you have these vast blocks of time where there’s nothing you’re supposed to be doing, people get depressed. What you’re doing during that time is you’re learning to self motivate.”
-Ran Prieur

So the new plan:

  • All writing “counts” as productive writing: dreams, journals, and blogs. I pay myself in karma and kudos.
  • Social motivation is huge. Get my stuff in front of people as soon as possible. I <3 Wise Readers! You'll see stuff soon, I promise.
  • Relax time constraints and do other things. Have more adventures. Have fun. Life sucked as a “full time writer,” so I’m making it a priority to be Brian Kung full-time.

What I forgot was that it’s not about wasting time hammering my head against the clock. It’s about telling stories and having fun doing it. It’s about being a complete person.

Alignment

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I awoke from the nightmare of the American school system bent on reclaiming my lost time. I spent the summer practicing spoken and written word with Jeff, biking into the heart of Missouri with Wells, and making trips out to Iowa to visit my sister and Albany, New York, for a friend’s wedding. I spent a month getting to know the Chicago trickers and wander around downtown. Then I returned home with a mission to carve out a work space from the untamed wilderness of my parents’ home or burn everything to the ground.

Living at my parents’ house is not something I’m ashamed of, whether it’s because of our Chinese culture or our ability to work out our individual problems. But after living in a car and out of my backpack for so long, “less is more” was not as accurate as “less and more,” and the house drives me crazy. It is in a state of endless clutter, which is what happens when there’s too much form and not enough function. Like their namesakes in web design, the function of our tables is to hold clutter so that we don’t have to deal with it in a concise, purposeful manner.

Once my room was in a workable state, I began to launch ideas. Real estate, t-shirts, drop shipping, digital goods, movement concepts, videogames. Websites, godawful websites with cats. Thankfully, they failed. Most either turned out to be unactionable at that point in my life or just a momentary infatuation. I learned a lot, in terms of knowledge and self-knowledge, but when the perfect opportunity came up, everything else faded into the background. My life clicked into alignment.

When I wake up, I know what I’m supposed to do. I know where I want to be next week, next month, next year. I have a reason to get a full night’s rest every night, to exercise every day, and to eat well.

Our time on earth is limited. We’re all counting down from about 100 years. What would you do if you had to spend just one of those years doing any one thing of your choosing?

And why aren’t you doing it? Because you will end up doing what you choose. As difficult or unrealistic as it may be, why not choose what you like?

Life is better in alignment.

PS, I’m following my childhood dreams of becoming an author: http://eepurl.com/fjpKk

Love of Movement

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Tonight, I got double fulls for the first time.

It’s one of the tricks I told myself that, once I got them, I would be able to rest easy and stop tricking.

That was a complete lie. I’m not about to stop tricking.

Perhaps it was related to getting a double full, but I had a thought about dance that I posted on Tim Tang’s Facebook Group, Insight. I said “All movement is dance.” I had immediate misgivings about the way I phrased it as I took a shower and added a comment to clarify. As it turns out, I had it backwards. All movement can be dance, but not all movement is dance.

Movement is everywhere. The arc of an arrow in flight, the vibrations of an atom, a ballerina’s elegant, pointed toes. I realized that there is nothing to differentiate the radiation signature of a red dwarf star from the ballerina – all just molecules. What really makes it different is that someone appreciates the ballerina. Not to say that no one appreciates the star. Actually, someone does appreciate the star and its radiation signature.

That’s what makes dance different. The human element. The human appreciation of movement. This appreciation is what makes sports entertaining. This appreciation is what makes the arc of a rocket as it escapes Earth’s orbit a beautiful, man-made gift to the heavens. This appreciation is what makes bboying, ballet, and tango irresistible and captivating to watch. As the music moves us through time, the dancers move through space. It’s why they call it a “movement” in music composition, is it not?

Maybe I am alone in this nearly universal appreciation of movement. After all, I am the only person I know who will stare at an iMac’s screensaver for over ten minutes, mesmerized. I played with Google’s bouncy bubble logo for 45 minutes. I have a witness to my weirdness.

But if anything, I think I’m just an extreme case. Everyone has some sort of appreciation of movement, unavoidably. Everything in our universe is in a state of change. So while you admire the football player’s charge toward the endzone, you may equally enjoy the wild stallion’s charge through a racing river, and the sure, rolling thunder of a bowling ball headed for a strike. A dancer may duck and dodge like a football player, charge like a stallion, or even roll like a bowling ball. Even if you don’t appreciate the similarity the dancer will. She will appreciate the movement that she is trying to bring to life for you.

Try. Please. For your own sake. The entire world, and every instant we spend in it, is full of opportunities for enjoyment and amazement. And it’s all in the appreciation of movement, whatever that movement may be called. I’ve been calling it dance, but I’m beginning to think that there might be a better term.

What would you call it?

The Worth of a Word

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Family comes first.

I carefully wrote down each thought, each idea, each quote. They were like little gems handed to me from ages past, from the greatest thinkers and the wisest sages.

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

The little shreds of paper were like oversized fortune cookies. It was somehow disappointing that these ideas would even deign to fit on them.

 Be yourself and I promise people will enjoy it. And if they don’t, forget them.

Each one fluttered to the bottom of the bin in a different manner, some twirling like helicopter blades, others tumbling, some dropping directly while others looped in circles.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try.

My hand was beginning to cramp up. I hadn’t written anything in a long time. Nothing by hand, anyway.

There are three choices in life: Be good, get good or give up.

I swept my arm against my shirt to soak up the sweat. The sun arched overhead, hot and humid.

Seek to understand before you seek to be understood.

When the wind picked up, it was like a giant dog panting at my back. I could feel the air, heavy with its slobber, wetting my clothes against my body.

Love is wanting others to be happy.

I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. The metal bin was filling up.

What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow? In a month? A year? Everyone dies. Only a few truly live.

Sometimes I didn’t realize where the thoughts had come from, or how they’d affected me.

People first.

Sometimes, I didn’t remember who had said it, where I’d read it, what it even meant. Just that it was important.

Courage, originally meaning to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart.

Like tattered photographs of relatives I barely remembered, but photographs that made my lips turn upward in a smile nonetheless.

Who would you be, what would you do if you could not fail?

I took one final look at the words that provided guidelines for my life, words that have comforted me in times of sorrow and driven me to strive against my limits.

Ideas are worthless.

I took one final look into the bin and then lit the match.

Execution is everything.

The Path to Success

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Stick to the path, reap the rewards

I rested my hands on my navel, glancing briefly at the empty plate before looking up at my long-time friend. I had sworn off eating here years ago as a result of working there and ruining my taste for it, but the memory was beginning to fade. It really wasn’t bad.

“So what does success look like?” I asked.

He and I had been on separate tracks in life for a long time since we’d met as children, but I felt like our paths were, if not converging, then moving in parallel.

Needless to say, we left with a vivid picture of what success looked like, and the steps to get there. Much like on the Katy Trail, where we had trailheads to mark our progress. We could rest there and gear up for the next couple of miles.

The thought stuck with me. Sometimes we were forced to go off the trail, but we always returned. Success became a glowing golden line in my mind, a treasure map. Yes, there was a destination in mind, but it was impossible to get there without taking it step by step. Then it struck me.

Success was not a destination. Yes, that was part of it, but it was a very small part. Ninety nine percent of success was the path itself. To succeed was to be on that path, and though we could diverge from it, as long as we returned or charted a new path, then that was success.

Where are you headed? What steps do you need to take? Take just one…and taste success.

Be a winner. Start today.

The Things We Own

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Just as we considered moving the dresser, the lights went out. The entire house had gone black, devoid of its electrical pulse.

We carried the dresser into the kitchen and left it there. There would be no navigating the stairs with such a heavy load in the dark.

We fumbled our way around the house and found the matches, lit the candles and brought them to the far corners of the house, lines of light trailing out from the center like the explosion of a firework in slow motion. We lit up the crucial areas: the bathroom, the living room, the hallway. We settled in for a bit, expecting the lights to come back on at any minute. But they didn’t.

In the dark, it became obvious that the light of day had faded. A simple observation, but when was the last time you saw the world go from being lit with the fire of the sun at dusk to the soft black curtains of night and the gentle caress of the moon? Beyond our walls, lights, and computer monitors, we unconsciously slide into the shadow of the earth every day.

In the darkness, there was only the flickering of the candles to illuminate this or that thing, as if we’d never owned anything else beyond the small circle of light. The things we owned metamorphosed from inert possessions to ornery wildlife living in the darkness, eager to strike back at our shins and feet for years of callous, dispassionate ownership.

I was reminded of a short story I’d read years ago. With the invention of electricity and the incandescent light bulb, families everywhere had been forced to clean house in the austere illumination it provided. Perhaps we could do the opposite and just forget about the things that inhabited our home. Let them go free into the night.

My parents went to sleep. My sister and I stayed up and told stories.

We told stories about dreams, about family, about adventures. We traded – here, have this. This is what happened to me then. This is what I thought. These are my friends. These are the events that made me. This is what the future will look like. These are my stories. Take them.

We told real life stories – we were too old, too mature, our imaginations too prune-like to wring tales of pirates and skeletons and zombies from the fertile darkness. Instead, we merely took the ones we had and set them out, each one a little lightening of the spirit.

Maybe another day, during another blackout, we’ll recount the things we own.

New World Order

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I was just going to move the phone. Where it sat on the floor, in the middle of the piles of books, clothes, and other pieces of my life, just wasn’t very accessible. Ironic, because its enormous dial pad was adorned by inch by inch-and-a-quarter numbers. An elephant could use it to dial home. Somehow, I had more doubts as to the abilities of the aged demographic it was targeted toward than the elephant’s.

The problem wasn’t the phone. It was the trio of tennis balls right next to it. If I could just leap to the phone over the pile of belongings I had left on the floor my Sophomore year and not land on the tennis balls, I would be alright. Or maybe it was my Junior year, piles and piles of papers I would never look at again, stacked against the wall, that was the limiting factor. Or the two mattresses from the bunk bed I had disassembled when I was bored. They took up a good chunk of my room and they weren’t even particularly comfortable.

I had to move the phone.

So I had to move the tennis balls. And in order to clear a path to the tennis balls, I had to shift my Sophomore year out of the way, and to really clear a space, I had to get rid of Junior year, too. And while I was at it, I tossed Senior and Freshman year in the trash. My fifth year in college didn’t count – I had checked out by then. I had graduated on time, I was just bogged down by bureaucracy for a year after that.

I bumped into middle school and elementary school and found them a home with college and high school. They had swirled around, vagrant for decades, and only now could I usher all these scraps, like little puppies yipping for attention, into their respective cubby holes. I gave each a reassuring pat on the head before I bid it good night, to be cherished another day. What remained, I simply tossed out. I didn’t have time for memories that didn’t love me back. And I didn’t have time for objects that didn’t have memories associated with them.

I tore down the corkboard in a fit of pique and discovered a hole in the wall that my house uses to breathe. The picture I hung over it flaps idly with the house’s tidal exhalations.

I stood back and looked at the work I’d done. My room stood, empty and barren, like the first time I’d seen it at seven years old.

I lay down in the middle of the blank room and looked up at the ceiling. The tiles were scarred by a sabre blade. Some things, you couldn’t get rid of. You just had to clear your mind, mind your scars, and move on. After all, there was so much more left to do. So many more things, carefully chosen and carefully placed. It was the beginning. Another beginning.

It’s time to start again.

The phone would need a desk to rest on. It was a rather large phone, after all.

Trail Etiquette

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A day after our journey, some habits stuck. I found myself walking up to random strangers. I found myself wondering about who they were, where they were going. I found myself wondering if I could help somehow.

All along the trail, we’d found generous, kind people. Wells had joked early on that Missourians were either very nice, or very drunk, and we never encountered the latter kind. There was just a warmer kind of people than you encounter in your day to day life.

I asked a man on the bus in Champaign if he was alright and he said “Yes,” then asked, “Why?” suspiciously. But on the trail, there was only “Yes,” and “Thank you.” There was Bob the Brewer and Kansas City man. There were store owners who would leave their stands completely open and unmanned and trust on the goodhearted nature of the bikers to pay anyway. We stopped to ask for directions and a woman handed us ice cold water bottles from the rear seat of a truck, completely unasked for.

Wells and I got into the habit that most everyone on Katy Trail had been practicing the whole time we’d been biking. We got into the habit of kindness.

When I think back on it, there’s only a few other times where I’ve experienced such camaraderie, the most recent example being the 2011 Illinois Marathon. There’s something about doing difficult things that brings everyone together. We all fight our own demons on the trail, or on the track, or on the road, but the fight is easier knowing that someone else is there with you, that someone else has come before you, and that you pave the trail for those who come after you.

That’s why we smile when we see each other on the trail. “Fight the good fight,” we urge each other, “I’m rooting for you.” And if we can, we help each other out. We tell each other about fallen trees along the way, abandoned towns to avoid, and we tell each other about “bug hour.” We stop worrying just about ourselves and we worry about each other, because we’re all in it together. You and I becomes “we.” And that mentality is what is so strikingly missing from our day to day life.

Think about the last time you saw a stranger and you thought something negative. Maybe you thought they were a bad driver, or had an annoying voice, or that they had no sense of style. Maybe you thought that whatever it was, it just made them a bad person somehow, someone not as good as yourself.

It saddens me when I catch myself thinking this way, and I think that way plenty. But why? Why do we think like this? Because in reality, we are all toiling away at something difficult. We are all on some sort of path – a life path. We know the destination. We know how the story will end. It’s incredibly hard work to make what comes between worth it. We are in it together.

I have stopped feeling the urge to go up to strangers and ask them how they’re doing, what the weather is like, and inquire how I can help them. I have stopped practicing trail etiquette. I have stopped practicing the habit of kindness.

That’s something I’m working on.

By the way, the road ahead is rough, but the sky is bright and the people are kind.

Family

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Whenever people ask how it’s been living with my cousin, I’ve found it pretty difficult to explain. I instinctively want to say, “It’s like living with family,” but I’ve found more and more over the years that family, tragically, does not mean to others what it means to me.

My earliest memories are of family. They are of kissing my newborn cousin. Running with my cousins through the halls. My uncle’s scratchy mustache. My aunts and my grandmother cooking, beautiful aromas wafting through the house. My dad coming home at 11:30 and me and my siblings staying up (so late!) to surprise him. Running underneath the tables of a restaurant during a family gathering, playing tag with my sisters and cousins, and then being carried out of a car, only semi-conscious, afterward.

Then, as we grew up, we cousins figured out how to buy candy for each other. Remarkable how money worked to share joy! And then we grew into our other shared passions – pogs, Pokemon, and videogames. We held sleepovers as much as possible when we discovered how the phone worked. My aunt’s house is the first number I memorized, and it’s still in my muscle memory. In this day and age, where cell phones dial for us, I still remember most of my cousins’ house numbers.

To me, it’s simple. Family, and I mean my extended family as well, means tranquility. Peace. That is our shared story. I can always tell my family the complete truth. I hold no ill will toward any of my family, and none, I hope, hold any toward me. I have been amazingly lucky and blessed.

I recently graduated. It’s a turning point, I suppose. But I have such a strong sense of peace from the idea of returning home that I feel relief and joy rather than fear, as so many graduates do.

So when people ask me how it’s been living with my cousin, Kevin, I respond, “It’s like living with family.” And I know that I need to explain that, but I don’t. There’s too much to explain. Too many funny stories, too many family camping trips, too many proud moments.

Thank you. You are my family. You made me who I am. You inspire me to be someone better.

And sometimes you forget and leave me in gas stations, but that’s alright.

It builds character.