Treading Water To A More Solid Destination

Currently Listening To :: Get By ::Talib Kweli

Just when I felt like complaining about how nothing was happening, BANG! Work is all up in my face, which means everything else gets up in my face at the same time, which means I'm pretty much over today, which was really Monday.

A little slip up can be so costly, yet never as much as you would expect it to be. Where the problem lies is that there are probably a lot more forces at work then you could ever imagine, so making decisions seems to be increasingly difficult. A line of credit that seemed so solid is revoked after defaulting on a single payment.

Living life day to day gets harder when you're not living just for yourself. Like your petrol tank, the guage never stays full for long; you've got to keep putting more in to move forward. Bosses, friends, family members, partners, the web of dependents grows on and on, just like those dependant on you grow in number as well.

I'm sure if we all tried, harking back to "simpler" days is not more then a memory away, days where you'd always take a stand and know where you stood, and more importantly, being right was everything. Sometimes though, you just have to take things as a loss, no unlike backing the wrong horse or cigarette burns in your favourite clothes.

But if life got simpler, I'd get bored. I've unwittingly become an expert at parking problems and moving forward. Whereas I used to brood and brood, now I think I just think. I think.

Let me get back to you on that one.

Fade to Black/Champagne Supernova

Currently Listening To :: Family Business :: Kanye West

And so it goes. A few more hours and I'll be 27. Saying it quickly or slowly doesn't really change a whole lot, but then again, I don't think I'm too worried, other then the fact that I'm now closer to being classified as in my late twenties, as opposed to my mid twenties.

As a sort of celebration, I had dinner with my father the other night at some steakhouse in the city. Had a pretty good steak, drank the majority of a bottle of pinto noir, and even managed a side of salad. Having dinner with dad, both of us relaxed and talking, is a real treat. I sometimes wondered on car trips when my dad and I would sit in silence, was it just us? Do other sons have these silences with their fathers? Maybe our relationship was like that, a clear dileniation between father and son, which would always be.

But as we sat there, talking about our relationships, our family, his family, mum's family, it was as if the breaking of barriers was occuring. Perhaps the wine played its role, but I was a lot more candid and he was a lot more frank then normal. Asking questions I'd always wanted to ask but never found the right moment, it felt like that traditional dilleniation between a Chinese father and son, where a father is a father and a son is a son, was slowly becoming something more akin to friends, equals. Safe and secure in the car on the way home, I watched the streets fly by from a seat of self-awareness; I felt more in touch with my family then I had in a while.

Later on as the mercury sank even further, the buzz of the wine and cigarillo smoke made me brave the night and watch the city lights from the balcony of our house. After a while I couldn't tell if the smoke that traced away into the blackness was from the tobacco or my lungs, but the lights continued to twinkle in the distance, like distant stars that will never burn out in my lifetime. For me, the lure of the big cities is like the lure of the stars, the simple beauty in the distance, the complex interactions at their cores.

I wonder that once I've visited every city, gazed at every skyline, sated all my metropolitan desires, where will I go then?