05 I 2003 - 13:44 - o novum annum!

I'm back, a little better.

The past week or so has been spent mostly with family. I spent New Year's at the house of my cousin's un-shared grandmother, celebrating her birthday, and so I got to see the grandchildren of hers that I don't usually get to see. About fifteen minutes after we got there, everyone was glued to the television screen, watching some college football thing, which left me free to help out in the kitchen and talk to my favorite quasi-aunt. In the middle of this conversation I realized just how poorly equipped I am to reassure anyone. It never seems as if I, floundering, find the right thing to say, and it's made harder when the conversation leaps from someone else's son's lack of focus to your mental health to the nature of God and back again very, very, quickly.

Maybe I just don't deal with surprises well.

I can see how she's worried, sometimes. I understand that she wants her son to do well and that she thinks her son would be better off thinking less about football and more about finding something to study and to love (with an unspoken like you which hurts, because it never seems true. I too can read the unspoken.) But somehow I believe that her son will turn out fine, that he will work well, even though I don't think I understand him.

He's very different from me -- there's enough of a difference that he has much more in common with my father, who actually speaks the language of scores, penalties, blocks. I know we're both tongue-tied in the other's presence. But why I can't say any of this to his mother -- that I don't know. And it bothers me.

We now take a moment to describe what went on from the 26th to the 4th.

New Year's Eve was spent uneventfully, with apple cider shared with the parents, two sisters, one of their boyfriends, and the big ball in Times Square.

Before that, there were board games, CDs made for a couple of people, and trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the SFMOMA, and the waterfront.

The weather has been beautiful.

Yesterday, I called a family friend who was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. She's gone through a first round of chemotherapy. And to listen to her say so matter-of-factly that it is very difficult for her to play the cello now and impossible for her to teach because she is weak and because even the pressure of a cello hurts the bones of her chest -- nothing, I think, ever prepares me for that, because to me she has always been defined by her teaching.

As hard as it is for me to offer comfort in English, it's even worse for me in Chinese.

I don't want to think about this and I don't want not to think about this. If I could give her some relief by some sort of exchange... I can't. And I don't know what to say when she asks me, 'There's a chance this won't help, isn't there?'

There's this doubt, see -- I don't know whether it bothers me more that I don't know what to say for her sake, or that I'm left speechless. And I don't have the sort of internal clarity that would let me see.

Happy New Year.