Sunday hiking

Met a bunch of nice, interesting people on a hiking trip out to one of the outlying islands today. I learned from a Chinese Malaysian banker that you can't buy gum in Singapore unless you have a prescription from a doctor. A French music journalist turned health care consultant told me that the difference between bourbon and whiskey is that bourbon mash is always at least 51% corn. An American economist who decided to take a break from work when his girlfriend got transferred to Hong Kong informed me that there were no poisonous spiders in Hong Kong, but that wild boars and snakes were a danger on some trails.

Such conversations and people are the best part of expat life.

It was disgustingly hot and humid today, which affected my enjoyment of the views of Lamma Island, but here are some shots:
Bananas!

Although the water is clear, lots and lots of trash, probably dumped by the last typhoon, littered the water and beaches.
Nevertheless, the sound of the waves breaking on the sand soothed me. I'm not a water person, but there's nothing like the sound of water in motion. It seems to generate a biochemical response of peacefulness. It will be all right. Everything will be all right.

Shattering

If you're not careful, you start to see signs everywhere.

For instance: Before going for a run today, I did my usual Saturday morning thing of waking up late and watching TV over breakfast. I caught a surprisingly decent film on one of the movie channels. Proof features Gwyneth Paltrow (less annoying than usual) as the 27-year-old daughter of a math genius/professor (Anthony Hopkins) whose mind has slipped, due to age, dementia, Alzheimer's, all three, or some other mental disorder (it's never specified).

For another instance (yes, this will make sense by the end): After the run, I went to Laney's apartment again, re-shooting the scene in Monty's short film (that student film I told you about last week). While hanging out afterwards, I watched part of the tearjerker The Notebook because Monty wanted to incorporate it into his storyline. (If you're not familiar with the storyline, the next sentence is going to be a spoiler. Fair warning.) The titular notebook is one written by an old woman with Alzheimer's, filled with the story of her meeting and falling in love with her husband, who is reading it to her to remind her who he is, who she is, who they are together.

My aunt and uncle have been married for 35 years. Three weeks ago, I saw them for the first time in two years. They chose not to come to my graduation in 2007 because they felt they wouldn't be able to see my father without making a scene. (There's a long and boring history to this.) I felt horrible every time I talked to them after that, unable to let go of the disappointment and hurt. It didn't help that it would take 2-3 emails to get a response, or that my birthday and holiday gifts to them sometimes didn't get acknowledged unless I called them. (Also part of the long and boring history.) After several months, I stopped trying.

But traveling long distances usually makes me think about death, and what I might regret the most if, say, the plane I was on crashed over the Pacific somewhere. Number 1? Not making up with the people who were second parents to me, who gave so generously of their money on a minute's notice, who took care of me and bigbro during the summers when we were kids, who instilled in me and embodied the values I hold dearest now. So I called them for the first time in months and arranged a visit.

I noticed while I was there that my aunt, who is 72, was having memory problems. She said about half a dozen times that it was a shame I was leaving after only two days. She didn't remember the location of my mother's business trip that weekend, and seemed surprised all over when I told her for the second time. I told her half a dozen times in two days that I was mildly allergic to milk, and half a dozen times, she asked me if I wanted milk, or cereal with milk.

My uncle mentioned that my aunt had been having memory problems, and I acknowledged that I had observed that. But I didn't think it was that bad yet. My maternal grandmother had fairly severe dementia before she died in her late 80s, and would forget things a few minutes after the fact. She also hid money and other items, driving my aunt crazy. My aunt and uncle never put my grandmother in a nursing home, and taking care of her for the last few years literally turned my aunt's hair gray.

I was in college at the time. If I could go back, with any wherewithal at all, I would insist on professional care. My aunt grew old, taking care of her mother.

The past few days, my aunt's been on my mind, and after seeing various clips from The Notebook tonight, I felt compelled to call her and my uncle. It's Saturday morning in Tacoma, and as fate would have it, my aunt was having a memory episode when I called. I could hear her sobbing in the background, under the delusion that my mother, her sister, had stolen her jewelry. "She took it!" my aunt cried. "She stole it all!"

Clearly under enormous strain, my uncle confessed that they had gone to the doctor, who diagnosed her with dementia. "She's on medication for dementia and Alzheimer's," he said, "but I don't know how it'll work. I just hope she doesn't go too fast."

"It's hard, hk," he continued. "We had a lot of plans, your aunt and I, to go here and there and do this and that, you know, after I retired. But I don't know now."

She usually had an episode every day, he said, and he didn't know how long he could continue working, or when he would need to get some help for her. "I don't want to put her in a home," he said, and it must have been breaking his heart to say that, because my heart broke to hear it, "but ... I don't know."

I encouraged him to tell my mother (it's difficult, since my aunt seems to regard my mother as a thief and betrayer), and to look into home care soon, because he needs the support. Then I asked if I could talk to her.

"Sure, hold on," he replied, and put down the phone.

The next thing I heard was: "No! You're the one who hid my jewelry from me! You're the one who moved it!"

I could hear my uncle making soothing sounds, but my aunt burst out again between sobs, "No! I don't want to talk to anyone! Get away from me! Get away from me!"

My uncle came back on the line. "She's convinced I moved her jewelry," he sighed, somewhere between sorrow and exasperation, "when she was the one who moved it last night."

A few minutes later, after giving what encouragement and support I could, I hung up. And then I opened the laptop and wrote this entry.

Doing my civic duty

I volunteered last night at Democrats Abroad, calling people to check if they’d received their absentee ballots, and telling them how to vote if they hadn’t. Good times. I’ve always voted in federal elections, but this is the first time I’ve done anything more than that. I felt quite virtuous.

Jeannie, the woman in charge of voter registration, happens to be someone who left my firm six months ago, so I was curious to hear her version of events, because I’d heard it was not a friendly divorce, as it were. But she was quite restrained, and after a few pokes and prods, I gave up in the name of dignity. (I can do that, you know.) (Sometimes.)

It was just Jeannie, her friend Sun and I on our phones in Jeannie’s firm’s conference room for an hour. After we called all the people on the list, we went out for a light dinner.

Sun is a quiet, save-the-earth type who’s been in HK for just over a year now. She thought HK would be fun, but hadn’t found it to be. “I thought it would be glamorous and cosmopolitan,” she said, “and it is, but in a very superficial way. People are all about how much money they make, how many miles they have, how incredibly important they are in the social scene. That’s all!”

I asked Jeannie if she liked HK, and she replied, “I like it for what it is. I don’t have any illusions.”

They were kind, and invited me to go to brunch and a hike on Sunday, to help me get plugged in, but I think I’m going on a hike with a coworker, so I had to decline. But I added their two business cards to my slowly growing pile.

One must try, and I am trying, dammit.

An evening out

1 ticket for 39 Steps: US$52

Taxi fare to and from the HK Academy of Performing Arts: US$5.15

Approximately half a tube of the darkest, reddest, vampiest lipstick I own: US$5

Slinky dress: US $40

Dressing up 'cause I felt like it, getting ogled while leaving my apartment building, laughing out loud a dozen times in two hours, and feeling in general like an international woman of mystery: Priceless

Almost famous

I spent three hours tonight acting in a short film being made by a lawyer in another firm whose real passion is filmmaking. I play a woman watching porn and discussing karma on the phone who kills a cockroach. But you really only see my legs, since the camera is from the POV of the cockroach.

I also did some voiceovers: an orchid smuggler and a woman who's just had an abortion.

It was pretty damn awesome.

Afterwards, the filmmaker and his camera person, another filmmaker (but she's not a lawyer), walked with me to the escalators. He's a fourth year associate, in real estate. The film is for a competition, but he doesn't expect to place or anything. He just wants to make movies. And he's applying for film school in the States. He doesn't have the money for it, but if he gets accepted, he'll figure out a way to get the money.

Pretty damn inspiring.

Activity Report
(or, How I Managed to Get Off the Musty, Smelly Sofa and Actually Have Human Interaction in HK)

I fell down on the job today, but have been trying my darnedest to adhere to the Code this week. If it weren't for the unholy trifecta of (1) not having someone to drag with me, (2) not having the right clothes to wear, and (3) being tired from last night's effort, I would have gone to the club in Tsim Sha Tsui tonight, I swear! I would have gone and danced and wondered what the hell I was doing there and whose sweat was getting on my clothes, but you know the trifecta. Resistance is futile.

Oh, the Code. It's this: When new to a place, never turn an invitation down.

This is how I ended up going to dinner at a steak house last night, and then to a bar afterwards, which turned out to be the venue of a weekly networking event for finance industry types, at which the partner ended up talking to a friendly English blonde finance type and I ended up talking to the blonde's clever Welsh-Polish salesman friend until midnight. They take networking seriously here -- both actually followed up and emailed me today.

(Side note: There was something oddly rapacious about the encounter. I told them that it was my first week in HK, and amongst the welcoming words, I felt radiating from them a kind of knowing cynicism -- or perhaps envy? -- about my newcomer status and a touch of hungry vampiric interest, simply because I was new.)

Following the Code is also how I got invited to the aforementioned dance party, to which I would have gone, but for the trifecta (and some suspicious sushi at lunch, I think -- ugh). And why I'll be going to my co-worker's fiance's birthday tomorrow night on a rooftop bar.

But acting in a student film on Sunday, that was more about begging, I admit. I've always rather fancied being a star.

Taking it personally
(or, Today's Internal Dialogue)

One of the best and most valuable lessons I've learned this past year is to keep things professional at work, meaning that I've gotten pretty good at not taking things personally.

Partner Man sends an email in all caps, electronically shouting: "SEND ME THE DRAFT NOW"? Well, dude, it's only my 3rd month of working, didn't realize you got priority over another deal I'm doing that's closing earlier. Got it. Won't happen again. Here's the draft.

Mid-level Associate emails in response to my query at 11 pm, "We should have gotten this out this afternoon but I guess it's all right"? Sorry, missy. It was foolish of you to promise it in the first place, since it doesn't give our client much info. But okay, you want it out tonight, I'll get it out tonight.

Senior Associate calls up and snaps "I don't know what your last email means. Why did you send that out?"? Turns out I made a mistake, Senior Associate, partly because I didn't understand what you meant when you said to do X, Y and Z. Oops. I'll correct it. Whatever.

The not-taking-it-personally thing is invaluable at work. And I'm starting to apply it outside work too, which makes life easier overall. Instead of worrying that I've done something to offend when my friend doesn't responded to my email for weeks, I think, "Well, he's probably just busy." Rather than getting hot under the collar because someone invites me to lunch as an afterthought, and possibly out of pity, I say to myself, "hk, you don't have lunch plans, do you? Well, now you do. Go forth and have sushi." After a moment of fretting that the cute-ish guy at the bar last night thought I was boring, I shrug. I might be boring to him, but what do I care about his opinion anyway?

So, all fine and good. I used to be so sensitive, and so sad, and now that I'm not so freakin' sensitive, I don't waste time and energy worrying so much. And that's good, right?

But then I wonder. Why is it that I think of things to write sometimes, but faced with my laptop, am unable to muster the motivation to express myself? Why is it that I have to notice first that I am putting off making plans for the holidays, wonder why, and only after pondering, figure out that it's because I'm afraid of the family drama that inevitably springs up around the holidays? Why do certain snippets of music or scenes from movies bring on mini-weep-fests? Last weekend, I found myself sobbing during Matrix: Revolutions. Uh, okay. Tonight, it was the scene in E.T. where Elliot entices ET into the house with M&Ms. Ummm.... yeah.

I guess I knew this already, and I'm guessing you know it too, but it turns out that you can't turn away from your emotions and expect to feel things when you want to feel them. The wall is ecumenical -- it keeps out the ugly little petty energy-draining negative feelings, but it also keeps out all the positive ones. And some feelings have a way of getting through the cracks in the wall at the oddest times.

Same town, different times

I left town (New York) on Oct. 4, high on the knowledge that I had a sublessor, anxious about starting over again, and not at all excited about anything.

Since then, I've played the part of a chauffeur, counselor and cheerleader in Seattle to my relations there, and favored child, functional illiterate and newly minted adult to my relations in Seoul. All while being simultaneously badgered and reassured about my singleton status.

And now I'm in Hong Kong again, having a harder time adjusting to the expat mindset and lifestyle than I expected.

It was only two years ago that I was here, sitting on the same type of couch in an apartment in this very building, with the same exact layout, going to work down the same long, incredible escalator to the same office in the same office building in the same area of town. But then, the office was hopping. My officemate told me that on an exceedingly good day, which was rare, she might leave at 6 or 7. More usually, it was like 9 or 10. A bad day was leaving after midnight. A really bad day involved barely leaving at all.

On each of the past two days I've been at work, my officemate (a different senior associate) has left before 6:30. Today, I asked half a dozen people if they needed any help. No one did. Most didn't have any work themselves. The partner suggested that I reach out to the partners I worked for in New York and offer my hours up to them. "It's no secret that we're slow here," he said.

It's strange to be here, and stranger still to be not working all day. Perhaps that's the problem, the reason why I feel so distant and odd. When you practice law for a living, and there's no law to practice, what are you, then? Especially when practicing law pretty much takes up your whole life? And if this is the type of reaction you have after a year of practicing law, what do you do when you come across a lull after practicing for years? At least right now there's very little expected of me, and no pressure to bring in business.

Well. I feel odd, I'm guessing you can see, and I don't know why. It could be the economy. Or it could be that I'm in a city I never found charming, after coming to the realization that I love the countryside much better than the mean streets. There are even fewer trees here than in New York, and though half of the island is thickly forested, you can't see much of it from the crushing density of Central and Mid Levels.

Ah well. I don't know what I expected -- I guess to feel a little excited? -- but there's not much that turns out to be what you expected. Maybe I just need more time to adjust.

366 Days
(or, Upon ending a leap year of being a corporate lawyer)
(or, After sharing a bottle of cava with Joiner until 2 am on a Tuesday night)

A year ago, I walked to my first corporate law job, hating every step that took me nearer, heavy of heart and foot. I was the last person to arrive. Only extra-large Firm t-shirts were left. I picked up my name tag and walked into the first day of work as a corporate drone.

Today, I am 2 pounds heavier and about $50,000 lighter of debt. I've met some smart, interesting people. I've done some moderately boring work. I've done some mind-numbingly boring work. I've done some moderately interesting work. I've exceeded expectations and met them. I've begun to delight in New York. I've discovered I'm lonely. I've mended some fences and broken others. I've learned to take things less personally. I've written less in this forum than any other year of the five previous.

I have deliberately begun to stop ending posts with the number of days I'm into this job, because I'm not hating it the way I thought I would, and because on some days, I look around and think, "What a dizzying, lovable city! What a well-paying menial job! What a life!" I have some thoughts about the future. About the present.

It was Rosh Hashanah today/yesterday (it's 2 am, so I'm not sure what to call it, plus I might be drunk), the new year, which seems to me much more appropriately located in the start of fall rather than the beginning of winter. On Saturday, I leave the city I've begun to delight in, for six months in the far east, working in the international capital markets we have left. The world markets are spiraling downward, the U.S. is on its way out of the Empire Club, we have a moose-dressing beauty queen on the ticket, and things are only going to get more interesting. As a partner advised, I'm embracing change. It's about the only thing you can do, if you want to maintain some sanity.