Diamonds on a Desert Island

Even on a day like today, he's limping around the yard burying the rawhide bone. The backyard has become a minefield of sinkholes and upturned dirt.

He never eats the bones. As he's gotten older, his holes have become more shallow; with just a light flick of a foot, I found many a bone half decomposed by worms and bugs.

What a bewildering beast who gingerly takes the fresh rawhide bone and buries it in the ground. Poor fool! He never remembers where he buries them, or maybe he simply is waiting for the right day to unearth his bounty. Maybe, in his mind, the bones are like wine: better aged after a few years.

Even on a day like today, in his thirteenth year, his debilitated legs carried him out of the kitchen and into the yard to bury his bone. From the kitchen window, he excitedly hobbles as if he has a ten-pound sand bag hanging from one side. He is slower for sure, but when he receives the bone, his ears and eyes look as they did when he was younger. For once, I genuinely hoped he would eat the bone, but like always, he buried it somewhere on the side of house, saving it for an undetermined day worth celebrating.

It's 10:30. With a jingle of my keys, he moseys around side of the house to meet me in the front near the Jeep. Fresh from burying his bone, his paws track dirt from the backyard and leave little mounds of brown on the white driveway. After knocking some of the dirt from the webbing on his paws, I smelled my fingers, as I always do after I play with him—the smell of gardening and the smell of Fritos.

The step up into the car has been too high for years, so I lifted him up, sacredly feeling the lump near the border of white and black fur on his chest. Of course, it's still there.

On the way, we passed his park where we would meet other dogs in the neighborhood. We passed the clubhouse pool where I let him swim when no one is looking. We pass the Jack-in-the-Box parking lot where I picked him out from a breeder who drove down from Oregon. With him, life seems to be measured in events we've done together, not years.

On the cold metal table, she shaves a small acre of his fur away. She dabs the area with alcohol to prevent infection; she must have done this out of habit. It's 11:10. I put my nose and upper lip on his face, just between his eyes. I held his ears between the circles of my index fingers and thumbs. With my palms, I mashed his cheek skin over his eyes and whispered, “Don't look.”

As the cold chill coursed through his veins and blinded by his own skin, I imagine he saw his bones, stored for a tomorrow—all the time and potential in the world to unearth his life's work.

Disney's Gaston Died the Worst

I grew up on Disney films. They were entertainment, but they were also the most important didactic medium of my formative years. The characters and events inspire children’s imaginations while providing moral centers. I wish I had half of Simba’s bravery, Aladdin’s inner nobility, Mulan’s honor, or Pongo’s sense of family. These characters are moral icons that got mass-produced by the Disney machine, but somewhere, behind the capitalism, lies truth of human character and spirit.

And for every hero, there is a villain, an antagonist to block our hero’s path. Often times, these villains test our heroes and push them to their limits. Pretty much all antagonists in literature or movies or Disney Movies have a goal. Maleficent wanted revenge for being snubbed to the most important birthday party in all the land. Clayton wanted fortune in exchange for gorillas. And Jafar, lovable twisted Jafar, wanted the all-elusive power.

On a brief tangent: Jafar’s three wishes were: be a sultan, be an all-powerful sorcerer, be a genie. Maybe he should have wished for a bigger brain.

These villains are sometimes more memorable than the hero’s themselves. Hades and Hercules? Please! I’d take the Underworld god with a fireball for a head over a pretty boy any day. But in the end, these villains always die. Well, to clarify, these villains always come to an endpoint. For example, lovable Jafar does not “die,” but spends his life in limbo while Aladdin lives on into the infinity of “happily ever after.”

Some men break their necks. Some dragons are struck by Excalibur-type swords. Some squids are impaled by ships. But no villain’s death is worse than Gaston’s in Beauty and the Beast.

Gaston is the mythopoetic representation of Narcissus. Throughout the movie, Gaston surrounds himself with mirrors or other objects that can reflect is own beauty. As Ovid says of Narcissus, “He looks in wonder / Charmed by himself…Everything attracts him / that makes him so attractive. Foolish boy, / He wants himself, the loved becomes the lover.”


And what a beauty Gaston is! He is physically fit. He has a nice cleft in his chin. I believe his physical beauty is not a point of contention; it is a given. We, the audience must assume he is physically beautiful in order to begin to challenge his moral center.




Needless to say, Gaston is arrogant and conceited. As the villain of the picture, he needs a goal, and what a goal he has: Belle. Gaston might be more sympathetic as character if he actually cared for Belle, but Gaston only views Belle as a supplement to his own grandeur. Gaston cares nothing for Belle, as made obvious when he mocks her books and passion for reading. He makes it very clear that Belle is his goal; in fact, he loves her so much, he points a gun at her in the opening scene.


Gaston tries a number of things to win his “love.” Most directly, he purposes to Belle in her own home. On the assumption that he will receive a “yes” he stages a public spectacle outside the house. To Gaston’s dismay, Belle forces Gaston out of the house with Judo-like finesse and Gaston falls into mud, humiliated in front of his followers. The mud of opaque, not-transparent, and the opposite of the pristine reflective surfaces in which Gaston typically views himself.


After a number of other feats, of which I won’t go into here, Gaston loses his footing. After a respectable attempt, as a villain, to blackmail Belle into marriage, Belle shows Gaston the magic mirror from the Beast’s castle. Belle yells, “SHOW ME THE BEAST!” and the raging Beast is shown to the entire mob. In this scene, the Beast’s physical ugliness in the mirror is a symbolic anti-Narcissus reflection of Gaston’s inner hideousness. Gaston’s face is horrified. This is one time we see Gaston truly broken.


This face, seen below, is the turning point for Gaston’s downfall.



The previous two examples show that Belle is Gaston’s undoing. Like the perfect hero, Belle holds the key to destroying the villain. Both examples show that Belle is able to manipulate the Narcissus myth and show Gaston the aberrations in his own reflection: the mud is opaque, and the mirror reflects not the outside world, but the internal world. One could argue this scene, the magic mirror and the mob scene, is the true death of Gaston. After this scene, Gaston loses sight of his goals and gives full control to his emotions.

In an illogical outburst, Gaston locks Belle in her own house and sets off into the night to kill the Beast. The awkward and somewhat ridiculous part of this act is that Gaston’s goal as the villain was supposed to be courting and marrying Belle. How would imprisoning her get him closer to his goal? He should have stuck with the blackmail plot, but he didn’t. He decided locking Belle in the cellar was a better idea.

I could give Gaston some leeway saying that killing the Beast would take his main romantic competition away from Belle, thus putting Gaston back in the front running to win Belle’s affections, but this is a stretch. There is no evidence that Gaston wants the Beast dead for that reason. While fighting the Beast, Gaston does shout over a thunderclap: “BELLE IS MINE!” but I don’t believe his words. He has passion, to be sure, but does he have affection? If he truly wanted Belle, he would have tried to manipulate her into marriage rather than running off into the woods.

Now, attempting to kill the Beast, Gaston seems more desperate to prove his own self-worth to himself: Narcissus trying to court his reflection. Gaston is no longer a villain trying to impede Belle’s progress; Gaston is simply a broken villain, lost with out a purpose in the movie. At this point in the film, Gaston is only fueled only by his rage—an admirable quality for a villain—but Gaston’s life is about to get even worse.


After shooting the Beast full of arrows and stabbing him, the Beast is about to die. Belle escaped to warn the Beast, but she is too late. As the Beast dies in her arms, Belle whispers, heart-breakingly, “I love you.” Of course, the spell is broken. The weird shooting stars fall, and the Beast turns back into a beautiful man, arguably more beautiful than Gaston himself. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Gaston fell to his death off a cliff while all this is going on.

When Narcissus died, Echo and the others “found nothing” when they searched for his body. “Only a flower with a yellow center / Surrounded with white petals” grew on the bank where Narcissus drowned. Like Narcissus, Gaston fell into oblivion, and a yellow and white flower grew at the site of his death.





The parallels between the Narcissus myth and Gaston the villain help clarify the overarching character development for Gaston as a man, but also as a villain. Narcissus was a fooled to love his reflection. Here, Disney took this idea further by giving their version of Narcissus power and the ability to change other people. Ovid’s Narcissus dies not really affecting anyone else in the myth, but here, in the Disney film, Gaston’s self-infatuation can potentially lead to death and despair, but as a G-rated mythopoetic reconstruction, the Disney Narcissus also dies without really accomplishing any personal goals. In theory, Gaston’s Narcissistic solipsistic self-indulgence is quite frightening; I wonder what might have transpired in a gritty, R-rated version.



Gaston’s physical death is not what makes his ultimate demise so painful. Gaston’s goal was to marry Belle. Of all the Disney villains, Gaston was not even close to this goal. Belle always hated Gaston. He made no forward progress at all, and, in the end, his “killing” the Beast acted as the catalyst for Belle to confess her love and create a more beautiful man than Gaston.


One might argue that Belle already loved the Beast before his stabbing and arrowing, but then why did the spell break only when Belle vocally said the words? The truth is that Belle needed to have to Beast "die" in order for her to discover her feelings fully. Her love was subconscious, and the brink of death forced her affections to the surface, thus breaking the spell. Had Gaston been slightly more patient, had Gaston went to the pub instead of into a rage, the last petal of the magic rose would have fallen, and the Beast would have stayed a hairy brown mass for the rest of his life. Gaston simply had poor timing.

Gaston not only failed in his own goal as the villain, but he played a large role, if not an integral role, in the eventual happiness of his enemies. Gaston failed in all aspects of his life, and, to top it off, he’s in hell.

A Carrot’s Destiny

After visiting my mother, who is apparently on a health food kick, I recently have been pondering the following question:

If I was a vegetable, like a carrot, would I feel cheated out of my destiny if I was processed in a juicer and served as a drink?

I can imagine a Nantes Coreless yelling, “I’m a carrot! I’m crunchy! Bite me, don’t sip me!”

This is not an easy question. Carrot juice is incredibly sweet. My mother gave me a cup or two, and it was so sweet it felt wrong and unhealthful drinking such huge quantities. I had to remind myself that it’s vegetable juice, no worse than V8 or eating a bag of carrots. But that’s just the point, isn’t it? From the carrot’s point of view, I have essentially taken his essence, his nutrients, and disregarded all the fiber, all the pulp. I’ve taken what I’ve wanted, and left his other parts. I’ve consumed him on my terms. It was not symbiosis, but parasitism. I loved him, conditionally.


As a carrot, I would have no destiny; I’m just a long orange taproot. But I’m a man, and I just might have a destiny. I might have a destiny, and I would like to think that whatever and whomever my destiny included, that it would include all parts of me, good and bad. I would not want a juicer destiny!

I would want my destiny, my all-powerful purpose in life, to include everything that makes me “me.” I would want my destiny to embrace my impatience and my boorishness and my insecurity. I would want my destiny to welcome my pathetic skills in geography, math, and science. I would want my destiny to welcome me unconditionally, like a soul mate welcomes its other half. I would want those things, but when my euphoria wears off, I don’t believe in destiny.

On my happier days, I guess I do believe in destiny, but perhaps I’m only happy because I’m doped-up on a fantasy. Destiny is an opiate for my all-too-realistic life.

I always think of Lt. Dan from Forrest Gump. He blamed Forrest for cheating him out of his destiny of dying on the battlefield. Now we all know Lt. Dan went on to get married and have a better life, essentially spitting the face of his destiny, but I know I’m not that lucky. I am not a movie character; my life doesn’t fit into 2-hour chunks. I would love to have a destiny, but I probably don’t have one. I’m just a carrot, waiting for my eventual juicing, my eventual conditional and parasitic "destiny."

Sometimes I pretend though: Maybe a carrot does have a destiny. Maybe I should envy the carrot. Does he not want to be in a fancy salad at Morton’s? Does he not want to be sautéed in extra virgin olive oil? Doesn’t he dream of being that iconic carrot Bugs Bunny nibbles in the all those cartoons? I’d like to think so.

I guess I do envy the carrot. The carrot has endpoints: finite points in a nihilist infinity. My destiny seems more uncertain, more elusive, and, in all likelihood, more fictional.

I’ll Raise a Glass to the Drivel

I was a freshman in college when I found Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. The story was enthralling. But it wasn’t just the plot—although the deformed supermodel and her transvestite road friend were certainly entertaining. The writing style spoke to me. I thought, “My GOD! Someone wrote a novel that sounds and thinks like me!” This novel, like so many other books to so many other people, was not a book: it was an entity, a force with which to be reckoned, an icon. I spent many a lunch or phone conversation describing this book to friends. The phrase “I think you’d dig on it” often fell out of my mouth.

“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when a pool of their blood edges up too close” (15).

“I was the picture of calm. I never, never panicked. I saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly” (50).

Look at that language! Look at those topics! Love. Blood. Betrayal. Solipsism. Self-consciousness. Violence. This book preyed on my sophomoric need for attention and brooding emotions.

I didn’t even have to pull out the text for those quotations; I was so in love with this book, I have a word file on my 6-year-old laptop titled “Rocking with Invis Mon.” Oh my.

I often hear people refer to their favorite books influenced by what I call the “Charlie Syndrome.” Charlie being from Flowers for Algernon: You can’t go home again. I hear people say how ridiculous their ex-favorite books were and how elevated their tastes have now become.

As snobbish as it sounds, I agree. Invisible Monsters is drivel. It catered to my fledgling tastes, and when I leafed through it again recently, the narrated masturbation, sex acts, violence, and emotional brooding seem no more literary than pornography. After a few years have passed since I first read the book, and loved the book, and lived the book, and subjected my friends and family to the plot of the book, I doubt I will ever read it again in its entirety.

But I believe there is more to the Charlie Syndrome than a simple denial of past passions. I often forget that Invisible Monsters lead me to more “Chuck Books” (apparently a genre), and while I was in a store buying more “Chuck Books,” I bought a copy of The Lovely Bones. And I loved Alice Sebold so much, that I went back to buy her memoir Lucky. While I was in store purchasing Lucky, I saw a folded Japanese crane on the cover of When the Emperor Was Divine. And Julie Otsuka’s book is now one of the four books I am analyzing in my thesis discussing Japanese-American Literature.

Perhaps what I’m saying is that I owe Invisible Monsters something more than simply calling it drivel. The book made me love reading. The book made me feel smart and learned. The book gave me a reason to buy more books and join the Border’s Rewards Program and ask for B&N giftcards. Invisible Monsters might be drivel now, but it inspired me at the time. I don’t think people can jump right into Hemingway; they need a spotter to lift a behemoth like that; my spotter was Palahniuk. I couldn’t love Jake and Lady Ashley without Shannon’s self-loathing and self-destructive behavior.

It’s fine to have a Charlie Syndrome moment; in fact, I applaud the self-awareness and growth in readers. But let us not be too hasty. Remark on the ephemeral enjoyment of a novel, but let us not disregard the enjoyment completely. I probably won’t read any more “Chuck Books,” but I still smile supportively, and, more importantly, empathetically when people tell me they are “DYING for Chuck’s next one.”

I’ll drink to that.

Umbrella

I don’t really listen to music by Chris Brown or Rihanna, but I am still aware that they both are powerful figures in society. Their recent trouble involving physical abuse is unfortunate, to say the least. I have been loosely following the story from the initial reports to the leaked images of Rihanna's face, and it got me thinking.

Domestic violence is horribly “under the radar.” I read several sites and talked to several people in the Social Work field, and their specific statistics vary, but there is a trend: only a small minority of physical abuse cases are reported. I’m not a social worker, nor am I a statistician, so I’m not exactly sure what “reported” means, but there is a general consensus that domestic violence is an underreported crime.

Perhaps surprisingly, I’m not going to impugn Chris Brown. There have been many public comments made concerning Brown’s guilt or innocence. Most notably, Kanye West spoke out on Rihanna’s behalf while SNL’s Kenan Thompson took a more neutral stand. Either way, I think the overall focus is wrong. This is not a story about Chris Brown and Rihanna, and this is not a story about the public reaction to said relationship. This is a story about awareness.

Chris Brown is not a god who has fallen; Chris Brown is simply a famous mortal who showed his own mortality.

Chris Brown is a regular man with regular emotions. His anger and his passion consumed him, and he acted out in a rash and criminal manner. I am certainly not defending his actions, but I’m certainly not going to jump onto a soapbox and invest all my energy into a story that is just a fragment of the overall issue. I will not impugn Chris Brown; I will impugn domestic violence.

As Jose Saramago said in reaction to the protests against his book Blindness, “Stupidity doesn't choose between the blind and the non-blind.” I agree; domestic violence doesn’t choose between the “gods” and the mortals.

Whatever the reason, and whatever the context for domestic violence, it boils down to this: One person’s emotional charge overwhelms their inner being and leaks out onto another person in the form of physical aggression. The repugnant act is not Brown beating America’s Sweetheart; the repugnant act is an emotion in one person manifesting itself in the form of violence on another person.

If I choose to be angry or impatient or depressed, that is my choice. But my partner or my friends should not suffer for my flaws. And for that, I impugn Brown’s inability to control his inner self. I also impugn the others who have had momentary lapses in judgment and control.

I’m no better than any of the other people out there. We are the same humans with the same emotions and urges, and we all walk the same line between criminal and passionate. We are not Brown, but we should not cast him out either. I’m sure we could all benefit from a little awareness.

Rihanna was more wise than I gave her credit. Her lyrics of unity and togetherness seem quite fitting.

When the sun shines, we’ll shine together
Told you I'll be here forever
Said I'll always be a friend
Took an oath I'ma stick it out till the end
Now that it's raining more than ever
Know that we'll still have each other
You can stand under my umbrella

Good luck Chris Brown. And good luck Rihanna.

These are some sites I used to learn more about domestic violence.

Next Door: A Santa Clara domestic violence service agency.
http://www.nextdoor.org/

National Domestic Violence Hotline
http://www.ndvh.org/

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
http://www.ncadv.org/

Tragic Hero

If I were a tragic hero, my tragic flaw would probably be my lack of patience. I can't roll cookie dough. I can't knit a scarf. And I certainly can't stand when people don't pull up to the front gas pump.

Notice the big rig on the right side of the picture stopping me from going around this woman, and notice the lack of a car at the front pump. I was pinned in; I had nowhere to go. And if you know Costco gas stations, you know I was pinned in from the rear as well.

With my forced practice in patience, I decided to take this picture.

Now, in the woman's defense, she stopped her car while the car in front of her was still pulling out. If this woman had waited another five seconds, she could have pulled forward, but maybe this woman was in a hurry. Under those circumstances, I would be more understanding. I'll take this as a learning moment; I will be a more-patient person for enduring this, at the time, egregious violation of common sense and courtesy.

Improving myself should not be the only goal though, should it? Shouldn't society also be looking to improve? Should I not ask this women, who may NOT have been in a hurry, please to pull up to the next pump, so that I may also utilize my time wisely? I didn't yell at her, but my passenger riding shotgun certainly got an earful. I should just learn to be more patient. If I were more patient, events like this wouldn't be blog-worthy.

But again, I'm a tragic hero waiting for the knife in my back, so you'll have to wade your way through my immature blog posts.

I'm Oedipus. I'm Hamlet. I'm Macbeth. I'm me.

Full Circle

My grandma and I are hospital mates; we were both patients of the same hospital. Our visits were under different circumstances, but we are technically linked beyond our genetics: we are hospital mates—just 24 years apart. I was being born in the maternity ward, and she is getting blood in the oncology ward.

When I visited my grandma, it was strange to see her receiving another person’s blood through tubes, but, oddly enough, it was stranger seeing her hair matted and tangled from resting her head against a hospital pillow. My grandma always seems to have her hair in order; this oily and flattened bed head looked very out of character. Oddly enough, the IV blood or sagging skin from fatigue did not bother me as much as the hair, the untended hair—the dethroning of a beloved queen.

I sat down next to her bed, and we watched “Wheel of Fortune” together. Despite her being bedridden, the sole source of entertainment, the TV, was electronically snowing all over Vanna White. I felt sad that her procedures were reducing what little hearing she has. At least shows like “Jeopardy” and “Wheel” are largely text-based so an essentially deaf person could still receive enjoyment without knowing what CC means.

At a commercial break, I tried to fill the silence with small talk about how cool it was to get free ice cream; I’m sure that’s exactly what cancer patients want to hear. The cool refreshment of Vanilla in a plastic cup makes my uncontrollable cell mass feel so much better! I might be an adult, but I still don’t understand what true pain and true sacrifice means.

I remained silent in hopes that my echoing feelings of idiocy would disperse. “Wheel” was ending, and visiting hours were over. I told my grandma I would be back to see her again later in the week. She nodded, and her shiny eyes read, “Thanks for coming.”

My grandma has supported me my whole life. She picked me up from school. She signed my pink slip when I pushed a kid at school. She rubbed my stomach through my first bought with constipation. She drove 3 hours to Fresno to spend time with me. She sat quietly at the kitchen table when I decided to switch majors from Bio to English. She welcomed every single one of my girlfriends into her home. She held my hand at her husband’s funeral. She gave years of her life. My grandma has supported me unconditionally and voluntarily, so I already knew the answer to the question I asked as I was leaving her room.

“Were you in this hospital on the day I was born?”

Full Circle.