Shanzhai Lu

Catching up at lunch yesterday I was telling my insanely smart friend Kevin about this frustration of mine.

He said I was a Tummler.

So now I feel much better going into the new year feeling like there's a place for me at the big kids table.

But I'm still not sure how to answer the "what do you do" question.

Loading mentions Retweet

it's 2010.

wow. where'd the decade go.

i spent much of new years eve on a flight from boston to los angeles looking back on the past ten years. a little out of character for me because i am perpetually moving forward trying to outrun myself and i hate looking back. but a 6 hour flight across the country on new years eve will do that to a person i guess.

ten years ago i was living in shanghai. 23 years old who refused to spend her post college years climbing a corporate ladder within the confines of an office cubicle. china dotcom bubble was in full swing. i had to be in shanghai. it was my first failed startup. and i was hooked. drive fast, take chances my friend jd used to say in our early days in china. lots of crazy drunken nights at bonne sante with jeff, weaver, miyuki, sok, sam, michelle...

i spent 5 fast paced years in shanghai. new york on crack people sometimes say. i loved it most of the times. i hated it towards the end. the money was good. the work hard, drink hard took its toll. you worked hard to try and keep up with the pace of the city. a city constantly torn down and rebuilt while you were living in it. you drank hard because at times it seemed the only thing left to do at the end of the day. i dated a nice australian guy for much of those years. he wanted to marry me. it took me one question about where i wanted to live in sydney to realize i didn't feel the same. i was 27. i missed the states. my parents were aging. my marketing director position was getting localized. a new version of shanghai was emerging. one that didn't need me anymore i felt. it was time to head home.

i looked to hawaii as a transition in 2003. i met joe and can honestly say i know what it feels like to fall madly -- and blindly -- in love with someone. i knew i was going to marry him. i even told miyuki nine months before he asked me. he was a naval officer. a navy diver. and a nuclear engineer. we eloped in hawaii. we were so happy. that was half a decade ago. it sounds more dramatic when you can say it that way. i'm a drama queen at times so indulge me for the duration of the blog post.

life. seriously, you can't script this stuff. because if you could, i certainly wouldn't have written the next chapter the following way.

my sister susie committed suicide 3 days after joe and i got our marriage certificate. i became pregnant with my son a month after. 4 months after he was born, joe deployed to iraq on an aircraft carrier. 6 months after that we were trying to piece our marriage back together. 6 months later the bush administration got the idea to do a surge deployment. off he went again. 3 months later we were trying to piece our marriage back together - again. 6 months after that he left us. 6 months after that the divorce was finalized.

as downward spirals go, we never stood a chance.

...

the past ten years of my life. exhausting at best. depressing at worst. but absolutely necessary in lessons learned about myself.

so what do you do when you find yourself afraid of standing still for fear that you'll stop dreaming.

1. you work.
2. hustle with purpose. because you're a single mom with a boy who needs you.
3. challenge old thinking. because you realize everyone is making things up as they go along in life. some are just better than the rest of us at pretending they know what they're doing and where they're going. 
4. disrupt with new ideas. because change really is the only constant. and i don't know about you but it's much more fun being part of change than holding it back.
5. connect and share. because you realize you spent an insecure part of your 20s thinking you had to deal with a wide variety of assholes who knew better than you in order to move forward. then you wake up one day and realize it doesn't have to be that way. no more. you choose to surround yourself with good people. devil's advocate to your dreams. what is that? sorry. there is no room in my life for the devil or anyone who advocates on his behalf. 
6. move forward. because moving forward is all you really can do when you don't have much to look back on. the other alternative to that would be to stand still ...and stop dreaming. that's just not an option for me. my big sister's depression taught me that.

so here i am. moving forward into the new decade simplifying my life with three lessons i'm carrying over from the last one.

...

stay resilient.

surround myself with good people.

don't stop dreaming.

...and do it all from hawaii. i can't wait.

...

happy new decade.

Loading mentions Retweet

cool little horoscope for Pisces this month says:

At school, they teach us all to read, to write, to add numbers together and to behave ourselves.

They give no classes in how to develop intuition - or how to build deeper, more meaningful relationships with our fellow humans - or even how to relax and enjoy life without feeling constantly pressured.

No wonder our world is in such a state. We are all urged to value achievement more than empathy and money more than love.

Yet life now offers you a real chance to unlearn all that.

You can take your highest ideals and pursue them with pride and confidence.

woo hoo. unlearning. i like that.

see. i was a mediocre student.

never felt motivated by the belief that my grades directly correlated with my ability to make something out of myself one day.

i cried during my first algebra test in 9th grade because i got automatically stuck in the honors class since i was Susie's sister.

my transcript was a trainwreck and disproves the theory that all Asians are straight A students.

i secretly think part of the reason I moved to Shanghai in the 90s was because you needed street smarts more than straight A's in that environment. i did well and finally made my mom proud.

proud enough that to this day she still says it's not too late for me to go back and get my MBA.

um, seeing as how that involves taking a standardized test, I don't think I'll be doing that anytime soon.

besides, i'm too busy these days.

so many things left to unlearn.

:)

Loading mentions Retweet

We plot, we plan, we assume things are going to go
A certain way and then they don’t and we find ourselves
In a new place, a place we haven’t been before, a place
We never would have imagined on our own,

And so it was difficult and unexpected and maybe even
Tragic and yet it opened us up and freed us to see
Things in a whole new way

Suffering does that—
It hurts,
But it also creates.

How many of the most significant moments in your
Life came not because it all went right, but because
It all fell apart?

It’s strange how there can be art in the agony…

~Rob Bell

My favorite line is the part about how suffering can also create.

I can relate to it.

I live with a restless desire to make things happen and move things forward every day.

Since my sister's death.

Since my divorce.

Since the failure of a recent startup.

It took the observations of a friend to confirm what I already know about myself.

What I'm doing now.

Where I'm going.

Where I want to be.

Has everything to do with that rear view mirror of where I've been.

...and where I don't want to see anyone else end up if I can help it.

Loading mentions Retweet

I first wrote this back in May. It was inspired by reflections of my sister's life and death. A few months after her suicide in 2004, I found a journal she had kept during her depression. On a few pages she had noted the things she had said she wanted to do one day when she made enough money or had enough time.

Kind of sad that fear of not having enough held her back from doing things that would've given her more by way of meaning, purpose and balance.

Pushing Proverbial Pencils

I don’t care who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done or what you’re doing now.

We all have stories in our lives we want to write. Big life changing ideas in our minds of things we want to do one day. Things we’d like to be doing now but don’t have the time or resources for. Things we’d do in a heartbeat if things were different for us or if the opportunity presented itself.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around and tell ourselves we’ll get to writing one day.

And then time passes.

And we’re too busy with the life we have to live to start writing the story of our life we want.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around the desk and tell ourselves that now’s not the right time to start writing the story of our life because maybe our pencils aren’t sharp enough. Yea, that’s it. We need more time to sharpen our pencils. We want the story to be perfect.

And then more time passes.

And we tell ourselves the time isn’t right to start writing the words we really want to say because we’re too busy living the life we THINK we’re supposed to live in order to eventually get around to living the life we really want.

And so we push our proverbial pencils around the desk and tell ourselves we have to make more money and gain more experience in order to start writing the story of our life.  Besides, we haven’t found the right paper. We don’t even know if we have the right pencils. We want it to be perfect. We’re not ready to start writing yet.

And then more time passes.

And our pencils start getting old

…along with the ideas we wanted to write about.

And the reality of this sets in along with the regret.

And we pound the desk real hard out of frustration.

And some pencils fly off the desk in different directions.

One lands in the trash can next to us.

Another rolls under our desk and out of sight.

Another falls straight down and breaks its sharpened tip as it hits the floor.

And then more time passes.

And then life passes.

…leaving sharpened pencils and perfect blank pieces of paper strewn around a desk with a now empty chair.

Sad thought? Yes.

The end? No.

Just start writing.

Anything. Unrehearsed. Off the top of your head. In the direction you want to go.

Complete with typos and bad grammar.

And go ahead and talk out loud as you write so people can hear you. The story gets even better that way.

See, the problem is — and the problem that Susie had — is thinking that the story of your life needs to be written by you alone in the form of a big huge book that no one’s ever going to buy, read or share with others if it’s not perfect. So you proofread it in your mind indefinitely. And the world misses out.

Pushing pencils around a desk is a waste of time.

Just start writing.

Now.

Proofread later.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some writing to do. And so do you.

Loading mentions Retweet

Life has always had a way of getting me to where I want to be -- but only when I'm ready to appreciate where I'm going by accepting where I had to go first in order to get there.

I know that doesn't make sense. But neither do a lot of things when we first come across it for the first time. :)

Those of you who know me can say that you're not surprised. This move back to Hawaii is 5 years in the making.

...and with that, there's some good people downstairs who've taken the time out to share an amazing week with me.

I'll explain more later. In the meantime. Get ready to rethink everything. :)

Loading mentions Retweet

In the days following Susie's suicide in 2004, I felt like finding a quiet place to hide where I could just cry my fucking eyes out, scream at the world, blame myself for not saving her and feel sorry for myself for the rest of my life -- all at the same time. But there was no time for that. My parents were completely devastated. There was a funeral to plan and there was no way my little sister Diana and I were going to put them through that so we got to work.

You learn a lot about the business of death when you're planning a funeral for the first time. For starters, it's a very profitable sector. There are different funeral homes to choose from offering different package prices and a la carte options. You learn that caskets are like cars. They come in all makes and models and the funeral director is well versed in the art of the upsell. Before you know it, you've been upsold on a really nice cherry colored wood casket. You choose a service package that's all planned out for you because you don't want to deal with the details. You even opt for spending the money for an upgraded tombstone. And you also find yourself shopping around for a cemetery plot and feeling the pressure to pick out the nicest final resting place you can afford. And you have to make all these decisions and spend all this money in the span of a few days.

When we decided on burying Susie at Rose Hills, we thought it'd be as simple as making an appointment at their office and taking a look at some map of available plots, choosing a few to see and picking one all in the same day. Not quite. It's just like buying a home. There are real estate agents who have access to cemetery plot inventories in a second hand market where someone decided - rightfully so - that it was a good business to buy up a bunch of plots at prime locations and resell them at a higher rate. Their prices fluctuate by season and are negotiable. Oh, and of course the funeral director you're working with has a list of "preferred sales agents" they work with and everyone makes money at the end of the day off referral fees for your grief. Who knew right? Diana and I didn't.

The first agent we met with was a nice woman who looked and acted like a real estate agent selling a house. In a suit. Very professional with her list of inventory on hand with different prices and selling points on why one plot was better than another. Diana and I looked at a few and found one we liked (the one above that i took a shot of today) but there was some parts of Rose Hills she didn't have access to and we felt the need to shop around and compare prices and plots with another agent.

I really don't remember how we got the contact info for the second agent. These memories are five years old and it's of a time I would rather forget so details get lost. But there we were. Day two of shopping for a cemetery plot for Susie and we're told to wait at a certain section of Rose Hills. So we're sitting in our cars waiting. And it sucks. And cemeteries really suck. And we're tired. And we're quiet and just trying to process the grief that we've been trying to hold off on feeling for the past few days so we can do this one last favor for our sister and make sure she has the best casket, funeral and final resting place that she deserves. And we're sitting in this car and an old white pick up truck pulls up. And a tall old guy with a ponytail and beard gets out of the car wearing worn out jeans and a ratty t-shirt with a piece of paper in his hand. Diana and I at this point are giving each other the WTF look. Yup, this was the other agent showing us another group of plots to choose from.

He was totally weird. Even more so because the first thing he did after introducing himself to us was go to the back of his pick up truck and take out a big freakin' shovel. Again, Diana and I are giving each other the WTF look. So we follow this guy around and he's staring at his piece of paper and trying to locate the plots he's supposed to show us. Walking all over the tombstones with his dirty boots and shovel in hand when we've been trying to be respectful and walk around them. It turns out the shovel is used for digging up a bit of grass that grows over the numbers of the cemetery plots.

But seriously. Imagine two Chinese girls following this old bummy looking guy around who's carrying a shovel and digging up  random little parts of the cemetery while other people around us are paying their respect to other grave sites and giving us weird looks. Totally weird.

So it turns out this guy didn't really have any plots we really liked compared to the one the first agent showed us the day before. No big deal. Just another day in his life doing his job really. So we walk back to his pick up truck and our car and he's scribbling notes on that piece of paper for us to keep in case we change our minds and Diana starts elbowing my arm as we're standing there saying "look at his license plate. So I looked at his license plate and OMG I wanted to laugh.

So this dude gets in his pick up truck and drives off. Diana and I get in our cars and for the first time in the days since our sister died, we started laughing out loud. Seriously. Just cracking up in the car at this weird guy who sells cemetery plots for a living driving around in a white pick up truck with a license plate that said:

DIGHER.

Loading mentions Retweet