My Chinese name 巧 means something along the lines of a lucky coincidence or skillful. I carry this name with pride because it must mean lucky things are always coming my way. But…how come my high school English teacher always made the order A-Z, making me one of the last few on the list? How come I am so good at losing things and having to let it go because “it’s just material”? Some things are unexplainable, like October 2025, May 2024, September 2023 and so on.
It’s easy to use confirmation bias to draw the lines, trace the patterns, and make the conclusion that in fact, I have shit luck. I can’t help but think to myself, I must be the most coincidental person in the world. How does one person have fleas, sewage troubles so twisted that the kitchen sink looks like blk. water and be pepper sprayed by proximity to harm for the first time on Halloween? If I knew, I wouldn’t be here writing my lines with an ice pack on my swelling arm at 6:45AM on November 1st.
The sky is still a deep shade of grey, clogged up by pollution and the winter that comes to haunt every year. The color palette of the deep night being grey, infrared red and yellow calls to me like no other. If you come to sit at the top of the city, you will see all these wonderful geometric shapes framed by trees and confusing highways. In a strange way, I think it’s just as magnificent as midnight blues with thousands of stars.
My eyes flutter awaiting the sleep cycle. I must wait for the laundry to finish. Anyway, I suppose, luck—like anything else in the universe—sits on a balance scale, unpredictably tipping over the weight of opposing ends. If the world wasn’t so grey, maybe I’d have a better answer to every inquiry waiting to be experienced. So I sail on, eating shit every step of the way to make sure a future version of me must know better.
I am grateful for the fact that nothing seems to faze me anymore. I mourn a sensitivity I embraced for a long time, but also cherish that I need not to place so much emphasis on happenings or things that always pass. Unlucky or not, everything must be handled regardless of whether I undergo the Feeling Bad About Everything Process or not. Lucky or not, I have try to give it everything I’ve got. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a rainbow waiting at the end of the road.
I wrote a separate thing about the sewage in particular, but this is probably the only paragraph that I needed:
I keep gripping the phrase distress tolerance by its neck that I don’t even know if I’m exercising it. I mumble to myself, “distress tolerance” followed by a big sigh, scooping gallons of rancid, rotting water into the toilet. I am tolerating it. I constantly ran away from the root of it in my heart by whatever means possible because I know the easy fix is to not confront myself in that manner. At the same time, I know I am not a coward because I’m here, aren’t I? It feels as if every week, every moment, I’m reiterating to myself that I do have permission. You’re allowed to take this route, and you can do things in non-accordance to what Reddit user28923 said. I am bound to the mothering police in my mind that watches my every move. It tells me that I am horrible, when in fact, I think I could be quite delightful.
shari wei 