We’re told that this is love, this giving, and that’s how I know we’re holding onto with; withholding from one another the pieces of ourselves that we cannot bear to let, yet when I hear your voice across a line, beneath a surface, I come to you again and again, throughout time and know you are undeserving of such a response, know that one day I will look at your face and wonder what I let go of; know that we will scream across a room, a distance, a separation of what we once had together.

Know that I will see your face with closed eyes and think of all the unwritten words, and I will know that I can’t but return again and again to that thing I gave you so long ago and wonder at the innocence that we once were.

My mother always said, “be careful, they can pull out your teeth,” and so I tried on enthusiasm and that exhausted me; it cannot be sustained, though when I was young I could fill pages with it.

My mother was my first critic, she looked at my words and sniffed, “too much dialog,” so I put down my pen and told myself I wasn’t very good – how can there be no scene?

I didn’t know how to describe the things that I saw, to convey feeling, I could only be a vehicle for what others said and that seemed to be my story.

The I wasn’t anything but observation for that’s all it saw, but the eye knew more than I did and it knew to look inward, to keep searching beneath the glaze.

It skimmed its sight over my cracks and said, “this must be told,” but how does one paint pictures with words, how does one create bridges so that others can walk across your ruptures?

I didn’t want trodden paths or feet upon me, I didn’t want other’s eyes telling my stories, so I hide in metaphor because I didn’t want to see my own telling.

So frightened was I that I never said anything really.   I used each stroke of each letter to build an abstract that one could hang on a wall, or in a coffee shop, or in a place where it was ok to not know the meaning of things because that was the point.

To not mean anything to anyone so that you can be anything to everyone

“That’s beautiful,” you said, “that makes so much sense,” but what’s left of you when there is no I?  So you swam backward in the sea of self and tried to grasp onto the familiar, to recreate what you had seen, but nothing was the same and neither were you.

You had twisted limbs, an uncertain scent and larger divides.

This is where the You began, the you that told the stories for you; that’s sitting here now grasping for the words of telling so that others can understand how it began.

How you reclaimed the unfamiliar and found the bound book that held only dialog and crayon drawings of stick figures trying to convey what you saw then.

How the pages were crooked and the spine weak; how to see such a thing was ugly; how you thought you were more but there you were.

But that’s all really, we are just our own enthusiastic telling, made in anger, made in truth, made with others eyes upon waiting to say, “there is just too much dialog.”

To attend a conference on such a campus makes me feel like I’ve done something right with my life, even though this school wouldn’t admit me if I begged them.  However, to move from beautiful building to building, to walk down the pathways and to sit in halls and listen to some of the most admired minds in our country is moving; it’s like I’m being sprinkled with some of the shimmering privilege that infuses Stanford’s students.

At first I was annoyed that the Education Writer’s Association conference was being held here.  Last year I got to go to Philadelphia, and I felt cheated out of the opportunity to travel and explore a new city.  All I had to do was hop on-board the Caltrain for 40 minutes; it was all very anticlimactic.

In my mind I grumbled about the long days and the fact my boss was attending, “I’ll have to be ON the whole time,” I said to no one in particular.

Though, after the first day I can already tell that attending this year is more worthwhile than last.   Our system of education (like every industry & institution) is being disrupted at never-seen-before rates because, as Thomas Friedman said, “we live in a hyper-connected world.”

Everyone, teachers, entrepreneurs, journalists, professors are all grasping at straws of prediction, hoping to align themselves with the transformers and future correct.  Hoping that they’ll be able to look back with certainty that they made the right choices; that they helped to transform our most important, antiquated system – the way in which we educate our youth.

Yes, technology is causing this disruption and massive open online courses (MOOCS) mean that people can be in the U.S. and their professor can be in Ireland, but also, people are being expected to compete at a global and not national level.  With this new technology it is clear that teachers and professors need to prepare students for more than just the “average” job, or life because that’s just not enough.

Students need to be prepared to compete in a global marketplace that calls for reinvention and flexibility, and sitting before a blackboard while the teacher drones on and scribbles in chalk clearly isn’t the way to go.

In bathroom stalls of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education are posters with the words, “Want to build your career in education?” and instead of having graduate students talk to teachers they’re invited to hear from entrepreneurs, founders of places like Tioki and Udemy.  New forms of learning are being invented like the Rosetta Stone and Khan Academy, flipping the classroom upside down from kindergarten to college.

Universities are even considering new forms of accreditation that recognize credits from MOOCS, which is an ongoing topic at this year’s conference.  Last year it was regulated to one session.

That’s how quickly everything is changing, and it feels both exhilarating and frightening because throughout most of the twentieth century the U.S. believed it had one of the best systems of education; that everyone wanted to come here to attend our higher intuitions.  If one did so, then there was some guarantee of success, or at least one could believe there was.

Now that doesn’t hold true, and at the K-12 level, U.S. student scores are just globally embarrassing.  The curtain has been pulled back to reveal a broken myth: we are not number one in everything.

Today ended with a documentary of how New Orleans used the devastation of Katrina to transform their school system, meaning their schools were so bad that they needed complete destruction to make space for any kind of positive change, and change did occur.  Most of the schools in New Orleans are charter, children’s test scores are improving and more students are graduating; however, those students who are unable to attend charter schools are doing worse.

And I can’t help but see this documentary as a metaphor for what’s being discussed: how complete destruction can be a good thing, how we can utilize the nontraditional to increase student achievement and how brokenness is an opportunity for transformation.  Also, I can’t help but also see what will never change.

Not every student will get the opportunities that they deserve and some don’t deserve the opportunities they get.  There will always be the dropouts and failures whatever the form and the lucky ones who get to sit on a lawn and kiss at Stanford secure in their glistening privilege, secure as they tell those with less, “I will try to fix you.”

I want to push her knee-deep in clichés, as
The dogs and cats rain around us, but instead
I say, “same song, different tune,” because
I don’t want to explain.

See Hass no one understands you I do,
Who else can hear Shakespeare in Whitman?
(we can his sing songs together)

Who else can frolic through pastoral leaves
that pepper the Vietnamese jungles,
causing colors so Brilliant they remind us
of the Fall.

Tell me,

Who else can fling out Greek odes
that honor the Romans?

No one can.

In my sleep, I dream of monsters standing
Next to my bed, and I think this is why
We are poets because we can see
What others don’t, the inter-connectedness
The criss/cross/crass beat of our nation

And I don’t sleep anymore, but who cares
Who cares, when history reflects back
An identity that we don’t want to own and
When I say, “Czelaw,” only you
Know that the brightness has forsaken my city

Hass, I love you.  I can’t count the ways; there are too many
And please, don’t tell me that today is
No different than a thousand yesterdays
We really are on the same page

Instead dear one, in-between the
Seam of you and me, and the pitter-pat
Of the black cat who lapped up
All the porridge, please,
please be.

Please be the beef that lets us all
Know, “how do you do it so good?”

Considering half my office has been sick, and both my roommates, I came to the conclusion that there was no one of knowing the culprit.  Then I blew my nose and noticed my box of Kleenex was getting empty.  I felt that I had to take matters into my own hands.  I couldn’t take another week of the head cold that was starting to develop, like the flu’s last parting kiss – the final Fuck You.

After much contemplation (because my Dayquiled brain could barely make decisions), I decided to attend a Restorative Sound Healing Yoga workshop.  I was vaguely concerned that I was making the wrong decision.  However, from what I knew of Restorative Yoga I felt that a couple of hours lying on the ground with blankets, listening to soothing music wasn’t the worst thing I could do.

I’m a big believer in natural healing.  Not that I’m entirely for homeopathic treatments, but it makes sense to me that nature can provide solutions, as we are of it.  Often we turn our backs on what Mother Nature has to offer in our own hubris, and I like to lie with her occasionally.  Anyway, who doesn’t want their Mom when they’re ill?  And so, I drug myself to this Sound Healing Yoga workshop.  I figured if I started to feel really bad I could just leave.

At first I was pretty nervous.  My stomach was still talking to me, and I didn’t want to sneeze into the silence; then the instructors starting talking.

“Sound is a powerful healing tool because it is vibrational in nature and everything and everyone has a vibration.  Every organ, every bone, every cell in the body has its own resonant frequency. Together they make up a composite frequency like the instruments of an orchestra. When one organ in the body is out of tune it will affect the whole body, especially since the human body is about 90% water, and water is a great carrier of sound.  That’s why music is such a large part of our lives, and why it’s used in commercials, jingles and to express – our bodies respond to the vibrations and pull them in.  That’s why music can be soothing or it’s opposite.”

Everything they were saying made sense to me.  I had taken some Auditory classes in college and was somewhat familiar with Nada Yoga, or the Yoga of sound.  Nada Yoga had always fascinated me because in Spanish Nada means, “nothing,” and when there is a blank space, it can be filled with anything.  In Nada Yoga this means the unstruck sound that sits deep within us; this is supposed to be our essence, our true, pure sound.

And, hypothetical speaking, if a sound sits deep within us then like all sounds couldn’t it get out of key?

So we were told to take Savasana pose, the final resting pose in Yoga, which was the same horizontal position I had been in all week; except there was a cushion beneath my knees, so my lower back could release, and I was lying on a Yoga mat.  A blanket covered me and another was placed behind my head.  There was even a pillow for my eyes.

“This is supposed to be spa Yoga,” the instructors told us.

One walked around playing singing Tibetan bowls and rainmakers.  Another came back and massaged Aryuvedic oil into my neck.  I was finally able to breathe deeply, which hadn’t been possible all week.

A third instructor struck tuning forks and placed on them on the unseen meridians of my body, and they vibrated all the way from my lower back to the top of my head.  I didn’t cough or sniffle for three hours.  My chapped lips and red nose thanked me, as I rose from the ground, two hours later, feeling much better than I had when I went in.

We are oceans, of water and feeling, and we wave back and forth to one another.  In sickness the tide is low, the water is still, and we want someone, anything to rock us back to health.

I lived in the dark and came into the light.   The blinding, terrifying beam struck me, and so I went back down again, into the earthen mud and coated my face with it.  It was easier to see that way, it was what I had known.  The beam-like waves of illumination moved across the places that were clean.  The little bits of skin I had missed because my fingers trembled when I had stroked my face with dirt, fear, and all that I found comfort in.  Mud-streaked and face-naked, I lifted one arm toward the radiating light and let the heat pass through my fingers, allowing it to burn away the churning inside.

II

We rise again and again, shooting upward, while the ground tugs at our feet.  We crawl, belly-down through soot because the sky sits heavy on us.  It asks too much; that constant expansion, a remainder we are small.

We drop down because we cannot deny gravity’s demand, and are reduced.  It is easier to live this way.  In the back of our minds we know that giants walk among us; that they throw fire-balls of glory and we think we cannot grow so tall.

This is the plea that people, including myself, whisper to themselves as they move through their lives.  It is the one that allows us to ignore the fact that we’ve been at War since 2003, the one that allows us to ignore our overexerted finite resources, it is the one that doesn’t want to read about the fiscal cliff; it is the hopeless, helpless cry that makes us asleep to our society’s truths.

It is overwhelming.  Our nation’s structures have been laid on a broken foundation, a belief in the infinite, and fostered in the spirit of the individual, not the collective.  People are subconsciously afraid of the collective because Communism/Socialism has tainted the word; however, in a globalized age, I believe the word Collective should represent Community.

Social and political structures should serve, nourish and support the communities that they upload.  It is ever-obvious that the roots of our economic, social and political systems are poisoned, drawing from short-sighted wells of greed and commerce, stepping on the faces of the common-man who is enslaved with debt to maintain.

With broken fingers and broken backs they are put in chairs and fed entertainment, mind-numbing television shows based on a false reality, virtual friends and a device that can fill any empty space with angry birds.

There is no real spirit of change.  Even the Occupy movement didn’t stand for anything, only what it is against, and when an entire movement’s momentum is an opposition force what will it push against when it achieves its goals?

I call for an awakening to the problems that plague our society.  I believe that it is not an external problem but an internal one.  Our spirits are taught to glory in individualism, nationalism and to distract ourselves from problems, instead of solve them; that winning has replaced compromise.

“What is a democracy without compromise?” a government of people that tries to squash one another and rule individually through commerce or an imposed corporatacracy.  This is what we are, or have been becoming for longer than most care to admit.  It is a betrayal of the way in which the United States began.

A group of people (yes only men) sat in room and wrote documents that have withstood the test of Civil War and time.  Every citizen of the United States should be able to refer to the Constitution and Bill of Rights without a second thought; that when our nation is lost these documents should be our return.

With that I’d like to quote the Constitution’s opening words because these ideals are what our nation should stand on, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for common defense, promote general Welfare, and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

It is We, it is Union, it is Welfare, Liberty and Posterity, so let’s wake up and revisit what those words mean and how to live them.

However, I’m a big believer in reaching for things that seem beyond reach.  If you evaluate my life, I’m sure you would see this pattern.  A ridiculous belief in what one can do if one just tries, even if it is not successful.

I want this Fellowship because I know my work is not good enough, and needs to be nourished to grow.  My poems need focus, love, time and dedication.  I want to use the fellowship to feed my poems and myself creatively.  I want to walk away with a body of work I can be proud of.

I also want this Fellowship because like most who apply, I didn’t chose this path.  One day sophomore year of High School, while the teacher was speaking of mollusks, I wrote a poem.  It just arrived and told me to write it down and so I did.  That was my beginning.

Also, and probably more importantly, I want to help people liberate their own stories.  I want to show others that poetry is worthy and that it can help them express the things they cannot say but feel.  It is painting with language.  It is breaking open the mind’s structures and creating a mosaic, and I want to become the person who shares this message with others, and makes sure there is always a place for poetry in this twenty-first century world.

I came to San Francisco to make my own life.  I wanted to see what I could create on my own, outside of my comfort zone, and in a space I wasn’t born into.  I thought it was so brave of me to do this on my own, but a lot of my friends here took a bigger leap than me and moved countries, though at first SF did feel very foreign.

The first two years here were challenging.  Everything I built: career, home, job, friends, eventually fell apart.  I almost moved back to Chicago a few times, but I am stubborn, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could create my own happiness, so I just kept rebuilding.

This Thanksgiving I looked at all of the assorted people around the table, and I felt so grateful because I had achieved the goal of building a life that’s entirely my own; one that’s full of kind and interesting people.

And I saw this shared community and experience, everyone at that table had taken a leap, so we sat together and shared our stories and tasted each other’s food, and each seat at that table was our own.

As a transparent person who accidentally built an absorbent and flexible wall, I am fascinated by those who stand stoic.  When a co-worker or friend confides in me, often my reaction is, “I had no idea,” and that little, evil voice that lives inside all of us whispers, “you should be this way, what’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know,” is my response because when I am sad my life often begins to fall apart.  People might find me crying in a bathroom, or spending hours on the phone, or having one too many glasses of wine, but the intensity of my own feelings can usurp my logic and calm.  This, of course, is not my reaction to every minor catastrophe; however, when crisis hits, I cannot stop my own visible reactions.

In the past, this has led me down the past of self-criticism, which starts with the words, should and why, “Why am I not the way I should be?”

Recently, I discovered Margaret Cho.  I had heard her name for years but had never seen any of her shows.  After watching her latest, Beautiful, on Netflix, I began to fall down the rabbit hole of YouTube – the one where you stumble blindly from clip to clip, wasting hours of time.

Though, my time was not wasted because I found her show ‘I’m the One I Want,’ which is about her failed sitcom.  Margaret was the first Asian-American woman ever to land a sitcom that was supposed to be based on her life; however, the network spent a lot of money trying to turn her into an image that they though the U.S. could swallow.

They bought her a trainer to help her lose weight, they bought her a coach to make her seem more Asian, and they turned her character into a caricature of her own self – a stereotype of a socially acceptable Asian American woman.  Definitely not a person who referred to herself a faghag and made blow job jokes.

Margaret began to lose her confidence and crumble under the criticism.  She ended up drinking, drugging and sleeping around, and as she said, “it isn’t easy for an Asian person to become an alcoholic, but I achieved it.”

Then she woke up in a piss-filled bed and realized how far she had sunk just because she had lost her sitcom, just because others told her that she was wrong; that she should be something else.

This resonated with me because I have written theoretical essays on the mental prisons of the world ‘SHOULD’, and yet when I am true to my feelings, when I react in a different way than society has told me; that I should always have my mask on; that as a PR person this is part of my job, I spin in a spiral of  self-criticism and regret.

But, as Popeye said, “I am who I am,” (or yam), and I’m a person who lives very close to the heart of life.  This means that my being forces me to be true to myself, and when I’m not, there are always unwanted consequences: breakups, moves, lost friends, a tangible falling apart that calls for me to make changes.

I don’t think that life holds everyone accountable in such an obvious way, but we all suffer consequences when we don’t live our truths.  Yet, we are society that’s always promoting the brain, the power behind our ability to craft our masks.  Being authentic is frightening; people see your pain, your fear and vulnerabilities and all the aspects of you that others might view as weak.

While I don’t believe we should all rip off our masks off (some are in-grown), I do think that people should strive to live more from their heart because this cultivates more authentic happiness; life begins to reflect back passion and love that wouldn’t be reachable in a prison of other’s Shoulds.

Margaret Cho screamed, “I’m the one that I want!” meaning that she’s the person that she wants to be and that it’s the most important person to be; that we can admire and be proud of our own imperfect being if we’re most happy being it.

It all starts within, with us.  If we’re the ones that we want, it doesn’t matter what Shoulds are thrown at us, maybe we shouldn’t be there anyway: with that person, in that job, in that house or country.  Maybe it’s not a criticism but life telling us, you, me, to ask, “Is this feeding my soul, is this driving me crazy?”

Lately, I can’t help but notice that much of my current life is defined by Shoulds.  I’m pushing back against them because I know how difficult it is, and the Shoulds are getting angry because I’m not lying to myself and letting them strap me in, but I’m not exiting the aircraft either.

My legs aren’t moving because they’re split in two, and I know I was meant to hear what Margaret Cho said, to be the person that I want, the others will come, and I must hope that I will find my place where my heart can rest; that I can accept myself as a person who might not be walking down the traditional path of life: marriage between 28-30, kids to follow, settled down into a practical career, a person who never cries in bathrooms.

That I can accept myself as a creative spirit who can live a disruptive life, full of the breadth of human feeling and emotion; that sometimes I send gifts late; that organizing will always be difficult for me, but in return for my syncopated beat, I can make my own song.