DINNER

Best impromptu dinner made for Izzat, Pedro, and me courtesy of Julio.

It was a night of banter and eating between two Malaysians, one Mexican, and a Puerto Rican.

BOYS

This guy showed up in my brother's living room with his brand new guitar and started showing off while I was sat on the couch, eating a whole chocolate cake from its container.

I showed the above photo to Julio later when I went downstairs and he asked what I had been doing upstairs. He gazed at the picture and then said, "I have that exact same IKEA carpet."

TELL ME ALL YOUR THOUGHTS ON GOD

Some of the best conversations I have are with my atheist or agnostic friends. They range from heated debates, to tactful discussions about religion when the subject arises, and it inevitably does.

And what I am grateful for is that my atheist and agnostic friends are not idiots, so the conversation is not reduced to the usual questions (to which there are numerous theories, depending on which philosophical school of thought seems more reasonable to you) posed by smug types — if God exists, and he is so powerful, why would He allow for so much evil and suffering in the world? Why doesn't he intervene?

There is nothing wrong with asking those questions, of course. It's using it specifically, and completely as the basis of your argument, with smug arrogance, that immediately outs you as an ignorant, self-serving prat. Because it is disregarding the ideas of free will, of morality, of choice, of human inclination towards evil and selfish desires. Should God only intervene in wars, perpetrated by human beings, and not when an individual behaves immorally in more isolated incidents with less tragic results? At what point should one actually take responsibility for his or her actions, or the actions of others, instead of looking elsewhere to place blame?

I much rather prefer, and enjoy discussing religion with my worldly atheist or agnostic friends, more than the "religious" people I've known. In an ironic way, the atheists/agnostics I know have spent more time thinking about God than those who actually claim to believe in Him. As Immanuel Kant pointed out, the wrong education of one's religion will only produce inward hypocrites, and speaking to many self-proclaimed believers has revealed this to be true. Hence, debates with Julio, my committed atheist friend, over dinner at his apartment is always more meaningful and sincere because his character does not contradict his words.

PERSPECTIVE

Paid a visit to the used bookstore in Fairmount, a few blocks down on a lazy afternoon.

Reminds me of how little I've been reading lately, or writing, for that matter. So I browsed for awhile and ended up in the poetry section.

I don't know why, but I was slightly distracted by the fact that these lines by Rumi reveal that narcissists already existed as far back as the 13th Century.

IN PHILLY

The last time I was in Philadelphia I witnessed a man kick a violin out of a young female busker's hands as she was sat playing it on a street corner.

It was so bizarre. It was one of those moments when you think out loud, what just happened? And then you stand there across the street, looking around incredulously to see if anyone else had seen a violin fly through the air and land with a crash some feet away from a sobbing, wailing girl. A bunch of people had seen it that quiet Sunday afternoon in Center City, and while most of us simply stood there in shock, a bike messenger went after the aggressor, who had brazenly walked on down the street. Bike messenger guy confronted him, and then grabbed the man's briefcase and flung it to the ground in a fit of rage.

Philadelphia is interesting that way.

Yet it shouldn't be, since there is always so much hate one witnesses on the streets of America.

Spending time with my dad and brother for the next few days. 

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Rittenhouse Square Park

When casting a glance back into the past, far behind, the fractured remnants of my memories seem to live on like ghosts. I remember a time and place, the drab structure of my old high school, the sunlight filtering through the branches of the lone mango tree in the front yard of my old house, how I drove the empty roads of Kuala Lumpur in my beat up grey Proton Iswara late at night, or too early in the morning, looking for adventure, for solace, for escape. I remember looking at certain people I'd only just met, and wondering if I could leave a piece of myself with them, if we ever parted ways. The romantic in me always persuaded me to. The realist in me convinced me I could not. It would be like dismembering myself. The poet Aracelis Girmay wondered something similar. Parts of my body strewn here and there, shed like dead skin, and I would lay in wait for an Isis to recover those pieces, and re-member me, like she did for Osiris time and time again, so that I could be whole again. But real life is not like Egyptian mythology. Or is it?

My brother, the bicycle mechanic always tries to fix things. He joins together different components to build and make something whole again, but only to the extent of inanimate objects. He is the one connection to my past, in that he is in the present with me, albeit five states away. He has changed, as have I over the course of our different explorations through the years. But he’s a link to the ghosts of my past, while others have faded mostly into obscurity. I am glad I haven't lost parts of myself, not the more important parts, anyway. Instead I am able to build myself upon my entirety, unimpeded by grievances of what I've lost or no longer have. 

I suppose it is like when people say they want to “find myself” and feel they have to go on a journey to do so, when in fact a person can find what they need in the people in their lives, past and present, or their memories. I am cautious, because the thought of leaving a big piece of myself with many different people is a devastating one, for I constantly think about the importance of the self as being complete, and it’s not exactly something, like books, or a sweater you can ask from an old friend, partner, or family member, “can I have it back?”

The late science fiction author Philip K. Dick was born with a twin sister, Jane, who died a few weeks after her birth. The loss of his twin affected him for the rest of his life, and is apparent in the recurring motif of a phantom twin in many of his novels. I tend to think that was a way to always have a part of him that he had lost present and alive, a way to re-member with a missing piece of himself. And when he died, he was buried beside his twin sister, under a tombstone that had been made fifty three years earlier with his name already inscribed, waiting until the day he would be reunited with her.