Free Running/ Parkour is an action sport, which I started to do recently. It’s a massive balance of bravery and body control. You try to accomplish new lanes through an urban area, either by jumping along rails or getting over bigger gaps, just with your feet and arm power. The motion should be one flow matching to the rhythm of the parkour you’ve chosen.

For me, it’s also a new opportunity to see experience the urban environment. As a photographer I once cut along a way, gathering impressions which could be impressive enough to put it on film!  Now I’m cutting along in other ways, not trying to observe places carefully with my eyes, rather scout if there are new ways to vanquish a lane.

The City is a playground and your workout studio is open-air now!

When I have nothing to go off of,  I like to refresh my inspiration board. This ritual helps me to gather snippets of feeling and content into something larger; even collecting them virtually helps me renew myself.

Here are some snaps from my Pinterest board:

And here is a quick peek of my real-life board:

I love the birds here, sitting on my front stoop. I am ready to move on from this apartment, but will miss it too. Baby’s first rent. The tree and the mailbox. The red doors and the dirty welcome mat that was here when we arrived.

—

Last night I went to half-price burger night with L and R. We went to her apartment after and sat on the stiff carpet next to her bookshelf until the light fell out of the blinded window. After that, a party for E’s birthday. Everyone was a little drunk and ridiculously good to me. Uncomfortable and nice at the same time, the foamy beer and citrus vodka pooling in my cheeks.

—

I rode the 7:02 bus to the garden. The light was perfect—how it’s always somehow more saturated, but dimmer, as it sets. Somehow yellow and rose and gray together on the page of my book. I’ll miss taking the bus every day: the kind drivers, the windows. I was glad to need it last night; the driver was the one who never turns on the rear interior lights and I sat in the pitch smiling, lucky.

The gingko in this garden is one of my favorites. The magnolia, the tall holly. That centuries-old live oak rebaking under its own suns.

I have that feeling right now—wabi-sabi, tender, soft, somehow tough simultaneously. Maybe not made for this place or world, but living here anyway, determined. Or how I feel when I read Jack Gilbert’s poetry, stomach open and small beautiful beetles kissing my insides, and birds.

—

By midnight I was dancing, my toes chipping off from my body, shoots angling away from their stalks, heavy-headed. The carpet striking matches on my heels, on the scar I got six years ago dragging the tops of my feet across the floor.

People can always been seen walking around with headphones on, in their own little world. The music you listen to, as you go about your day, can have a huge impact on your mood, frame of mind, and even how you carry yourself. But this also means that nobody from the outside has access into your own, personal sphere.

I asked a selection of students what they were listening to – some you may be surprised by!

“So, what do you guys remember about Wuthering Heights?” my English teacher asked us on the last day of class. Our AP Literature test being next week, we were in the process of reviewing books we had read in high school in about two minutes each. Considering the fact that we had read Wuthering Heights in tenth grade, I was sort of impressed any of us remembered anything about it, but also disappointed by how much I had forgotten. Beyond forgetting the majority of the characters’ names, I was having trouble recalling even the most basic details of the plot, which was shocking considering I had deemed this book a favorite a mere two years ago. Would I forget this much of The Great Gatsby in another year? How long before my current favorites would be a distant memory?

Suddenly, I was shaken out of my reverie by my teacher’s descriptions of the second generation of characters in the book. “Young Cathy and Linton have a romance at first, but then Cathy ends up marrying Hareton. And remember, Hareton is this beast, he’s sort of animalistic, almost, but he ends up being very nice to Cathy.” I had a strong feeling of anger, and couldn’t really explain why. All I knew was that Hareton was not an animal, Hareton was the sweetest boy in the entire world, and he was really just misunderstood.

Apparently, I remembered a little more than I thought – that is, I remembered how I had perceived certain characters, but not why. Oddly, although I had clearly felt my tenth grade self’s reading of the book to be nuanced and complex, I had clearly missed some of the basic literary devices in the book. And, in the end, I hadn’t come up with something especially thoughtful – I had simply decided Hareton was a good character, and therefore assumed him to be perfect. Was there some nuance in his personality? Probably, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.

I’ve been noticing this a lot lately. When I watch TV shows that I watched in middle school or even later, I remember feeling strongly positive or negative about a character, and wait through endless episodes to be reminded of what gave me that feeling. As the relevant episodes come and go without a satisfactory explanation, I begin to realize that the younger I was when I watched something, the fewer nuances I saw in it. Characters were Good or they were Bad, and any characters that got in the way of good characters became evil by process of elimination. This was a comforting way to view the world, but it’s recently been making me feel like the entire world was keeping a secret from me that it’s only just beginning to trust me with.

The other day I saw a play that I had seen two years earlier, and while I got the same basic message, I felt very differently about it. Oh, this play had some political message? Two years ago, you could have fooled me. And no, I didn’t think this time that it was obviously the saddest thing in the entire world. It’s nice to have a concrete measure of how I’m growing up, but it’s also bittersweet. The same way I’m completely ready to move across the country for college, and only this year realizing how difficult it will really be to say goodbye.

There’s a benefit to seeing the world in black and white until our brains and reasoning develop more fully – it provides a sense of security. When you can safely classify things as friendly or dangerous, you don’t have to work nearly as hard to understand the world or at least feel that you do. As our security blanket of obviousness falls away, the shades of gray in the world are revealed. At first they’re scary, because they’re so vague and unclear and we haven’t had much practice looking at them. But gradually, they become as much of a comfort as our earlier certainties. I wouldn’t be who I am today without the philosophy that there is no right way of looking at the world, and middle school me could never have come up with that.

I’m happy to say goodbye to these former versions of myself, but sad to see them go. I’ll miss the days when I didn’t realize the Chronicles of Narnia were a barely-veiled religious allegory, and could safely declare Hemingway to be a Bad Author. Of course, I won’t miss the ridiculous things I thought then – but they were a part of me, as much as anything I think now, and so if nothing else I feel a bit of nostalgia towards them. I feel like the philosopher in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who emerges into the sunlight and, upon returning to the cave he grew up in, is mystified by things he previously considered obvious. Maybe I’m not one of the enlightened yet, but I’m on my way. And that’s both scary and completely exhilarating.

The night before the end, I could be found proofreading my final math paper due the following morning. It was on the inherently contradictory nature of math and the mathematicians that struggled with this reality. I took a momentary glace at Facebook when the spinning wheel of death jumped into view. And stayed. I watched, as nothing moved – not Facebook, not my paper, not even the mouse. I put the whole laptop on my lap, and leaned back on the couch, waiting.

I’ve had this MacBook for seven years now. For a while, the particular black model I have has been discontinued. Two friends and I were obsessed with the idea of owning one back in middle school, and after saving up some money we all went to the store together to buy our very own. The attachment I have to it is strong – what started as a purchase inspired by youthful impulse quickly transformed into the best tool I could have imagined. It grew up with me, up until a point. It traveled with me to Hawaii, Greece, Kenya and New York. I clutched it as I applied to college, and later opened my letters of decision. It even helped me to discover my obsession with art, and in turn meet some of the most expressive, thoughtful people I know today. One day about two years ago I decided with some friends it would be fun to decorate faces on the back of our computers with pipe cleaners, googly eyes and such. Attached is perhaps an understatement, I even made sure to clean it regularly.

Lying back on the sofa, I put my hand slightly to the right of the track pad. Somewhere within it, I felt a disturbance like something rhythmically catching. I had a sudden crackpot theory, I felt sure that the hard drive was located directly under my hand, and the sound was the disk within it catching on some piece of debris.

thunk thunk… thunk thunk…

I turned the computer off and on, and the same blank screen displayed each time. It was already 9 PM the night before my huge paper was due, and I contained my panic as much as possible. An idea hit me – I would open up the computer, clear whatever was in the way of the hard drive and then quickly print my paper.

“Terrence!” I called, and my stepdad entered from the other room. “Put your hand here, do you feel a thumping?”

“Yes but… it’s really faint,” he said frowning.

“Do you have a small screwdriver?” I asked, making it clear I was totally serious.

We walked into his office; he turned away from me to fish through a desk drawer. “Aha! Yes here’s one,” he announced triumphantly. He handed me a plastic bag with one single tiny screwdriver in it. I profusely thanked him and went back into the TV room with my laptop.

I turned the lights all the way on, and watched a few YouTube videos to learn how to take apart my computer. I took the tool to my laptop, and slowly began removing the screws that held it together. After about thirty screws, I was able to move on to the most difficult step: prying the lid off. It is held in place by about a dozen sharp magnetic hinges. I started from the back, relived at the ease by which it gave way. As I pulled towards the front though, it became nearly impossible. No matter how much strength I used, the middle part stayed stuck down. I put the lid back down, and flipped it over to observe the problem. I realized that I had missed one screw in the battery compartment. It was visibly smaller than all the others, but I had come too far (and was too stubborn) to stop trying. I twisted with all my strength to get it out, but only rendered the task impossible. The screw had been stripped.

“Well, fuck it, I’ll just prop the top case open with something while I slide out the hard drive to see what’s wrong,” I thought. I flipped it over once again and began to pry the lid off once more. This time to hold it open somewhat, I shoved little objects on the TV room table into the small gaps I could create. Pens, magazines, and a remote stuck out of the sides of my laptop, wedging a gap just small enough to see into the computer. I grabbed a flashlight to peer into the small crevice I created near the right of the track pad. At first, I thought I did something wrong, the inside of the computer just looked gray and fuzzy.

“…Wait,” I thought, realizing that the inside consisted of a hearty, thick layer of lint, dust and debris. I was unexpectedly faced with the condition my computer had for years been working under and was overcome by a feeling of poignant respect. I stuck the nozzle of a can of pressurized air into the gap, and squeezed the trigger. Lint flew out of the tiny slits I created, filling the air with a gray snowy filth. My cats napping next to me woke up and began chasing wildly around the room, batting at the air. After a little, the front right corner was satisfactorily clean, and my suspicion was confirmed. Indeed there was something labeled “Apple Inc. Hard Drive, 120GB.” My heart dropped when I saw that the drive did not have the spinning disk exposed. Rather, the whole unit was neatly tucked into a little mechanical square. I shoved my hand into the little gap, removed the drive and felt a sharp pain. I was able to quickly pull the drive out, and looked down at my fingers. The exposed sharp metal hinge had cut my finger open. After washing my hand and putting a Band-Aid on, I returned to my task. I cleaned the little drive, put it back, removed the array of objects wedging my computer open, and turned it on once again. I prayed that somehow cleaning the outside would fix it, but the same blank screen appeared. The only difference was that now, the thumping was obviously detectable.

THUNK THUNK… THUNK THUNK…

The reason I say my computer had grown with me to a point, is that about a year before it failed all together, the hard drive had run out of room. About once a month it would remind me that my computer was about to be full once again, and I’d move files onto little USB drives. I have about a third of my music on a drive at my mom’s house, all the photos I took in tenth grade on a drive at school, and all my high school writing on another drive at my dad’s house. Pieces of my information lay all over the place, partially on little ragtag USB drives, and partially on my old pulsating laptop drive.

The next day I took it to the Apple Store. “Would you mind taking a look at this? I don’t really care about a repair at this point, I just want the information back,” I asked the chubby lady behind the Genius Bar counter.

“Well do you have an appointment? I can’t simply be asked a question unless you have an appointment,” she answered without looking up from her computer screen.

“Well no… Alright one second.” I went to the man at the front, and scheduled an appointment for five minutes later.

I walked back to the bar. “Alright I have an appointment or whatever, will you look now? Last night my computer made a weird thunking noise, and I had a huge paper due the next day, so I cleaned the hard drive attempting to fix it. I couldn’t figure out what it was though so I just put it back.”

“What? You opened it? Do you even know which one is the hard drive, sir? Well I obviously would have been glad to help you. But if you opened it, well, I’m afraid there’s little I can do.”

“How does opening it affect anything? I just want to see if I can get the information off it. Here, look.” I took my 75% dust-filled computer and laid it on the counter, followed by a baggie of tiny screws and various pieces of the battery I had removed the night before. “I don’t even want my computer fixed, can’t you just please see if I can have any of the data back?” I pleaded, making a show of desperation. Maybe there’s some sort of human inside of this fat woman that feels some sort of human sympathy. Maybe.

“Um… no put that away please,” she said, quickly looking around. It was clear on her face that I had embarrassed her. I could imagine her thinking, “Heaven forbid somebody sees we used to make a product like this, nonetheless with all the pieces aflutter! This might affect my income, for god’s sake!” She forced a smile, turned to me and said, “It’s too much liability to do that for you. If we were to take your computer and try to recover anything, you could potentially sue us if we ultimately find anything. Now sir, I’m very busy here, please take your bag of junk and leave.”

I looked her up and down and walked out. After driving home I told my mom about what happened.

“Well since we were planning to get you a new computer for graduation anyway, I was thinking of just getting you one now. But this morning I looked up buying tips on an Apple rumor website, and saw that they will allegedly release a new MacBook in a few weeks. I think it would be smartest to wait till graduation after all,” she reported to me, and I nodded in agreement.

I sat down at my desk, glancing at a box in the corner. This box contained all the stickers I had been collecting for the past two years for my future computer. So far it contained stickers from Coachella, City Lights Books, Human Rights Campaign, and a few random ones created by artists and activists. “Just one month,” I thought. “Then I can aggregate all these broken, hodgepodge pieces into something. Until then, I have this little box, that may or may not contain anything of this past.”

THUNK THUNK… THUNK THUNK…

One of my favorite books when I was little was e. e. cummings’ Fairy Tales, which I didn’t realize he had written until my family moved when I was 16 and I found it god knows where. At the time I was obsessed with e. e. cummings’ poetry, having had no idea that I’d read him over a decade before, memory quiet.

I remembered this earlier and it got me thinking—along with the many blog posts and articles about National Poetry Month and Poem in Your Pocket day, especially two beautiful ones from Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog (1, 2)—how much words form who you turn out to be.

I was lucky: I grew up in a shy, bookish family, in which spending time together was quietly reading in adjacent rooms. Home to me is silent sunning trees and dark wood bookshelves lining walls; the only sounds my mother’s tea spoon stirring in sugar, the cat chewing, wind, coffee continually bubbling from the filter.

Here, then, I wanted to write about books I distinctly remember finding, from childhood to present, to roll in the serendipity of finding what you need precisely when it’s needed.

My father brought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone home in paperback. I remember thinking the cover looked dumb but he read it out loud to my brother and I and we loved it. When the movies came out we figured out that we’d been mispronouncing Hagrid and Hermione for years.

I found Emily Dickinson in the school library, stone and sticky with murals, in the sixth grade. A white cover with a bland cluster of pink roses—an image I now associate inexorably with Dickinson despite its incongruence to the intensity of her feeling, her fierce quiet. I memorized “I heard a fly buzz—when I died—” from reading it too often in the hard-cushioned, waxy-sterile armchairs that seem unique to school libraries.

In my first week of college my mother sent me a card with a Rainer Maria Rilke quote, and I had read before in Plath’s diaries that Rilke’s poetry was fantastic, so I bought his Letters to a Young Poet and, just when life was weird and very alone, I had someone to tell me: “You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.” I put the card on my desk every time I go somewhere different, to remind me.

Last semester I posted a Jack Gilbert poem I’d found randomly online—“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”—on the online discussion board for my poetry workshop. That night, without having read my post, my professor got up and began a reading of his poetry with the same poem. I borrowed his copy of The Great Fires, from which the poem comes, read it that night with a coffee mug of wine, and bought a used copy which arrived in my mailbox pre-annotated by a person I’ll never know who writes in black-inked block letters.

I find traveling by car the best way to make a journey. It’s the only way I can be in charge of the paths I take and the time I spend. I can watch the landscape seamlessly change: from the city to sunflower fields to ancient mountains to forests filled with birds. Moving in the wind, thousands of leaves shift and come to life. Wait, when did my awareness shift to those trees? When did all this happen? I think about the time it takes for a seedling to grow into one of the full-fledged tress before me. The sky turns pink for some reason, and gazing through the window, cars move past me. I find myself smiling at people in other cars I actually don’t know, yet they smile back. Perhaps this amiability is from our shared family road trip experience. We are all one big family travelling towards some final destination.

I take a stop and get out of my car. A breath of cold, fresh air fills my lungs and I take a moment to appreciate the stark contrast of scenery between now and where I first started. A mosquito tries to bite me and I find myself staring at it. Maybe that mosquito dies, becomes dirt and helps to make a seed into a tree. I want to be part of that tree. I put my hand on its bark and look up into its branches.

Recently I’ve been having a lot of dreams about flying. Usually I have trouble remembering my dreams but these ones are very vivid. The bizarre feeling of defeating gravity is extremely liberating.  I have this floating feeling with me all day long. I believe it means one thing: spring is finally here and I can’t wait for school to be over. I have zero concentration. All I want to do is collect freckles on my nose and daydream while listening ”Seabird”. I am yearning for summer’s freedom.

“Freedom” is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days. It’s a great buzzword and motivator, a noble concept sprinkled liberally throughout speeches and debates, although no-one seems to know precisely what it means anymore. Living in Hong Kong, I straddle the fine line between great personal freedom, and the very real possibility of it one day being stripped from me. For most teenagers, to “come of age” implies the realization of our freedoms and the occasional exploitation of them. But for me, it has also been to reconcile the many different kinds of freedom around me: the freedom I am perceived to have, the freedom of people just across the border in China, and most importantly, the beautiful paradox of how one can choose to be free.

I first began to question the notion of ‘freedom’ as a 15 year old with a burgeoning interest in history, human rights, and activism. When I attended the Tiananmen Square Massacre vigil for the first time, I was shocked by the disparity of permissions around me. Surrounded by football fields of people, we were campaigning for rights that couldn’t even be mentioned a mere 50 kilometers north of us. It struck me as laughably absurd (for in China, the nouveau rich possess hundreds of designer handbags but not the right to free speech), but also unbearably real – even in Hong Kong, I won’t be able to vote for our Chief Executive when I turn 18. It seems like a hugely anticlimactic culmination of youth, that the truth is I wield no actual power or freedom at all.

And as my interest in human rights shifted towards a more personal, vested interest in feminism and LGBT issues, I felt increasingly alienated by peers and family members who regarded activism as frivolous, unnecessary, and overly idealistic. But it’s true that for many people in the safe bubble of economic prosperity, personal luxuries outweigh any fight or struggle for those esoteric concepts of “freedom” or “democracy”. And such superficial freedoms – the freedom to earn money, be comfortable, and watch TV (although nothing subversive) – keep masking people’s need for a true sense of liberty.

That’s how I’ve come to realize that freedom can be both a blessing and a trap. It’s far too easy for the prosperous to sink so deep into the comfort and routine of everyday life, that they forget how to care and feel. And it’s far too common for the educated to judge based on ideals and principles, rather than what’s right in front of them. Despite the rhetoric that comes along with the word, I believe that “true freedom” begins with the mere awareness and realization of our containment: that just understanding our limitations, be they physical, intellectual, or political, is our first step to escaping them.

In his speech This Is Water, David Foster Wallace says that the greatest freedom “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to care about other people and sacrifice for them in myriad petty, unsexy ways everyday”. I have since taken the philosophy of This is Water as my personal mantra. I am incredibly lucky to have been born into relative economical and political security, but it is the way I choose to harness that freedom, education, and awareness that truly defines me. The everyday choice to simply think and care is the greatest freedom of all, and the conscious decision to fight for that freedom – to actively learn, explore, and protest against mindless acceptance, is the most important part.