Hello Again

Update: I now live in East Harlem in New York City. I work as a housekeeper on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I vacuum a lot and run a lot of errands and I enjoy my job very much!

Tania (my fiancee) and I are in the process of petitioning for her K-1 visa which will allow her to come to the States, where we will get married civilly (not violently... bahaha... i.e. we will get our civil marriage done here in the States), after which we will petition for her "permanent conditional residence" etc etc etc so on and so forth happily ever after blah blah blah.

My family is doing well. We just went to a Kyle family reunion in celebration of my grandparents turning 90 years old, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Mike, Dixie, and Tania couldn't go, but the "pre-Troxell, pre-Castro" Kyle's were all present.

I am preparing for life with a wife here in East Harlem, buying furniture (there's a first time for everything) and trying to be patient for Tania's arrival. I ride my BMX bicycle to work and my commute is less than 15 minutes, which is absurdly short, relatively speaking. On rainy days, the subway is an option but I normally just walk.

I have very little to complain about and much to be thankful for. Put another way, I've definitely been in much worse places (physical and emotional) than I am right now. There is an undercurrent of joyful peace that is characterizing my life right now, and it hasn't always been so.

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I've realized that my pride does two things (among many others):

-My pride makes me think that I'm smarter and better (and more ______ (fill in the blank, according to the circumstance)) than I actually am. This is the more obvious manifestation of pride.

-My pride blinds me to how difficult it is to put up with me, live with me, listen to me, like me... love me... This is a slice of pride I hadn't seen before.

In other words, with one swift action, the results are two-fold. I'm fooled and blinded simultaneously.
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What is happening when a culture or a society plays dance music but scorns dancing? It feels like it is missing the entire point, like an ancient society that might re-purpose an iPad as a plate or a cell phone as nothing more than a reflective device.

Blasting dance music but everyone is just standing around with their hands in their pockets? This isn't what this was made for.
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This is so funny... 
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This is a story I'd like to call:

Two Men and the Dove Baby

Where I work, there is a room on the fifth floor that is for staff. It is a small room with a desk and a chair, a TV, and typical housekeeping materials like a washing machine and a dryer, an ironing board and a coat rack, etc.

There are two windows in that room. Every spring and on into the summer, apparently, a pair of doves comes and makes their nest on the small landing outside of a window on either the 5th floor or 4th floor. There, the female lays an egg, and the pair of birds cares for it until it hatches and it can survive on its own. This sometimes happens twice a year, even.

There is also a door leading out to a small balcony outside of the room on the fifth floor. This balcony leads to roof access, the emergency fire escape, a view of the surrounding buildings, etc.

I arrive to work at 7am. My co-worker, the maintenance man, arrives at 8am. The maintenance man, Gerald, is a 50+ year old Jamaican man with a fun-loving yet feisty and somewhat argumentative disposition. He doesn't like to let on that he cares about things, but he cares about things, a lot. Gerald and I check on the birds routinely to make sure they are doing well. We close the blinds to give them their privacy and not scare them away.

This story begins on a pleasant Monday morning in April.

Gerald and I were in the fifth floor staff room. None of the other staff had arrived yet. We decided to check on the birds. We opened the door to the balcony to find the mother outside of the nest, and the baby dove sitting inside of the nest, its head dug down into its body such that its neck was not visible. The head could have been resting on the body, for all we knew. And, given that the bird was motionless, absolutely motionless despite the arrival of two humans on the scene, well...

Many people are familiar with the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words". Gerald stood at my side. Observing a sort of ancient rule that prohibits grown men from looking at each other when they find themselves in potentially emotional, tear-inducing situations, we didn't look at each other. I didn't need to look at Gerald to know the words that were racing through his mind and his heart, because they were the same words that were in my mind and heart. "Move...move...do something...move...please...anything...just move...". Please.

I felt the muscles of my eyebrows start to tense up in the way that renders one with a look of pity on ones face. Time slowed. Only the adult dove moved, looking at us, looking at its baby, looking at us, looking at its baby again. I felt a knot in my throat. I felt my tear ducts swelling. In the corner of my eyes, Gerald remained motionless.

"Move, dammit...please..." 

And finally... the baby dove blinked.

"Hoooooooohooooooooo!!!!" Gerald and I hooted and hollered, we laughed and punched the air with our fists. Our voices echoed off of the walls of the skyscrapers and buildings that line our block. Curtains shifted to the side and I've no doubt that multiple people, residents and house staff, were filled with curiosity at the joyful yet distinctly odd scene which was taking place on that fifth floor balcony.

Gerald and I composed ourselves and walked back inside with smiles on our face, the adrenaline and rush of relief still fighting to reach our fingertips and toes.

The baby dove was okay.

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My experience has me agreeing with everything in this...

"Once, a gentleman in a business suit, standing on a country lane, wondered if morality was more important than wisdom."

"China is the next superpower? Wake me when urban tap water is drinkable, when an ambulance will come when called and can make it through traffic, and when there's transparency in government, law, and the finance sector, to say nothing of a civil society, environmental protections, freedom of speech, and-- but usually by now, the questioner's eyes have glazed over."

Thanks to Ben Boyd.
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Looking back on my Mandarin language education in both China and the United States, I realize how sterile my Mandarin vocabulary was and is. I can't remember lessons devoted expressing myself clearly regarding abstract concepts. I can't remember lessons devoted to discussing feelings. I remember millions of lessons that involved the words like "Technology", "Development", "Progress", and other China-central words.

Meanwhile, in learning Spanish, an entire slice of the larger umbrella of the language is saturated with discussion of abstract concepts, soft nuances among tenses that indicate possibilities and hopes, theoretical events and what I feel about them. And Sure, Spanish has it's clockwork, nitty-gritty robotic, mathematical, "play by the rules" aspect, just like any language. But still...

If Spanish is an emotive heart, unknowingly articulating emotional nuances and feeling in nearly every sentence, modern Mandarin Chinese is... your microwave.