Baldwin Center

For me, our trip to Baldwin Center was an eye-opening experience.

I was decidedly unenthused about it at first, as I'm in a tumulus chapter of my own life. That day was the last day I was going to see my brother for the next few months, as my stepdad finally found a job and was in the process of moving to Kentucky. Part of me wanted to say screw it all and just skip to be with them, but at the same time I knew I shouldn't miss any more class. This felt important in more ways than one, and I'm glad I didn't deny myself the experience.

It was more chaotic than I expected it to be, but somehow it was a comfortable sort of chaos. The statistics startled me as well, in both good ways and bad. It was inspiring to hear how many volunteers the Baldwin Center sees, and how rich the history behind the organization is. On the other hand, I live in Pontiac and I had no idea so many of its residents were in such dire straits. I also found it a little troubling how limited the Center's funding is, as the clothing closet looked to be in great need of renovations.

Though we didn't do much, the time we spent there went by quickly and it was fun for me. I felt a sense of camaraderie, of a shared goal as we organized the donated clothing together and joked amongst ourselves. If given the chance, I think I would like to do it again.

Fiction or truth?

I learned how to ride a bike so I could run away from home.

When I was small, my mother was always working and I didn't have a dad, so I was on my own a lot. And being small, I also had a lot of angst. Every day, it was just cartoons and angst. One day, I borrowed a rickety old bike from my friend Olivia who lived down the street. It was a terrible trip to the ER waiting to happen, that bike. Red and paint chipping and rusted. But it was a bike, and I was determined to run away on it so I got on it and started to ride.

I couldn't tell you how many times I wiped out, but after a whole day of trying I suddenly got the hang of it. It was like magic. One minute I was falling all over the place, and the next minute I found my center of balance and was riding like the wind.

I told Olivia I was going to run away then, and I rode off on that bike. She chased after me, and the two of us got as far as our subdivision's entrance.

"I'm going to run away," I told her again. She just stared.

"Well, give me the bike back. You can't take it with you," she replied finally, and for some reason that made me stop. She was my only friend, and all she cared about was taking her bike back. It was extremely disheartening, but I decided I wasn't going to run away after all. What was the point, if no one was even going to miss me?

"Let's go home," I sighed.

And after that, I mostly just watched cartoons.

Truth or fiction?

When I was little, around six or seven, my older cousins liked to terrorize me. Kevin and Henry were ten years older than me, and because I thought the world of them to the point of hero-worship, I tended to believe anything and everything they told me.

One day, my mother bought me a set of three adorable neon fish. Being still in my single digits, I wound up naming them Snap, Crackle, and Pop. I loved them, since they were the first living things entrusted in my care, and I doted on them diligently, following my mother's care instructions to the letter. I fed them twice a day, and always reminded my mother when it was time to give their bowl a good scrubbing.

My cousins, being teenage boys, decided they needed to intervene with my developmental milestone. They told me our cat, Tiger, had been watching my little fish and that the tiny neons needed a bigger protector. They showed me a gorgeous, colorful big fish they'd picked up at the pet store just for me, and told me I could have it and put it in with the neons. I did exactly that, then went to finish my homework before going to bed.

The next day, the only fish left in my bowl was the big fish, but I saw three tiny neon tails floating at the top of the water. The water was a little cloudy. My cousins hadn't bothered explaining to me that the big fish was, in fact, a fighting fish and would obliterate anything in its territory.

I was distraught, but I decided not to go running to my mother.

Instead, the next time I was at their house, I decided I would drop a bar of soap in their very large, very expensive tropical fish tank.

After that they never bothered me again.

Well I almost missed this in its entirety.

...Miss? I say-- Miss. Young lady with the brown hair and glasses! You wouldn't happen to be a figment of my imagination, now would you?

Oh, what fantastic pajama pants you have. Is that Tinkerbell? Why, I remember watching that film with Peter as a child. "That's my name," he said to me, pointing to the title on the video's cover. He was only three! Such a bright boy.

--But I digress. My apologies, Miss. Now what was I... Ah, yes!

This place you want me to go to. I'm afraid I must insist that this is a poor idea! I have only barely begun to settle into my new place with Peter. It's taken me weeks--weeks--to grow used to the nuances of the oven. Every oven has a sightly different constitution, you see. Understanding the specific behavior to your oven is the key to making a good souffle. My last one combusted inside the oven because there was a documentary on the mating habits of silk worms on the TV. Positively fascinating. Peter was quite angry.

The point is, moving again is completely out of the question. And you, young lady, have no respect or understanding of the art of science. In fact, if I recall my research notes on subatomic vibration caused you to eat an entire box of Oreos. Which I find very healthy, I might add. Not the cookies in themselves, Heavens no, but eating to manage stress has certainly helped me.

The fact remains should you pursue this highly inadvisable course of action, you may render yourself obese.

No, I'm afraid this is not up for debate. I absolutely refuse to move without Peter, and you certainly aren't moving me further from Busby's apple fritters. Absolutely not.

Well, it's been nice speaking with you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a cadaver to autopsy.

Hm?

--Squishy brain pans? Where? Ohhh are they silicone baking pans? In the shape of brains? Fantastic! Silicone actually bears quite a few beneficial properties, you know! They don't require that the baker grease the pan in any way, they heat quickly and bake evenly, they don't rust or stain, and they're terribly easy to clean! I only discovered their invention recently. They've become quite popular since I was in St. Claire's.

What are you feeling today, Peter? Oh, I think I'll make banana bread! Brain shaped banana bread, perhaps with a drop or two of food coloring? The fibers in the bananas which brown through baking can be pretend-synapses!

Not that synapses are visible, of course. It's merely a simulation.

Aha, wonderful. Squishy brain pains indeed.

And this is what it means to fall in love.

This week, my mother and I went house hunting.

We're only vaguely in the market for a house, only because she's tired of apartment life and the market looks good for it right now. We don't have very much money set aside for a down payment, so our options are pretty limited.

The first few places the relator took us to see were between 700 and 1000 square feet. The first was a dreadful, cramped sort of place. It looked miserable. The walls were a shade of dark brown that was caught between offensive and boring. The kitchen was decorated, and I use this term loosely, with yellowed floral wallpaper that should be criminalized and banned. The three bedrooms were barely the size of walk in closets, and the yard was hardly large enough to turn around in.

The second was a duplex with two levels of cramped bedroom, cramped kitchen, and a front room that wasn't sure if it wanted to be a living room or a hallway. These two levels were connected by a staircase that I immediately nicknamed Suicide Steps because the only way I could see someone attempting to scale it in Michigan winter was if they were either incredibly stupid, drunk, suicidal, or a combination of the three. The wood of the staircase wasn't even finished, and my skin tingles just thinking about the potential splinters.

The third house reeked of wet dog. The carpets were all torn up and needed replacing, but even if they hadn't been I would've wanted to replace them anyway. They were that sort of industrial grade, hard and dense carpets that are most commonly seen in schools and doctor's offices. I don't even consider that sort of thing real carpet. It's a floor texturizer, because god knows it doesn't do much else. The hallways were narrow enough that I felt claustrophobic, and there was a washer and dryer sitting in the middle of the kitchen. The bedrooms were larger than the first house, but not by enough to matter.

Finally, we stopped at the fourth and final house of the day.

It was a 70-some year old house. When this house was built, my grandparents were still in diapers. I had maintained a moderate level of cynicism all day, and I expected to hold steady at this last place as well. After all, it was cold out and every house we shivered through was more miserable than the last. I wanted to just tell my mom we were fine at our apartment and to give up this pipe dream.

Then we stepped inside.

I don't believe in love at first sight when it comes to people, but here I found myself warming up to this house in a matter of minutes.

The living room was painted a comforting shade of olive green. At about eye level, there were a series of diamond-shaped mirrors mounted on the wall. The mirrors were spaced apart a few inches and were made of tinted glass so that the reflections weren't too distracting, and I felt it gave the room a sense of sophistication and allure.

We walked on.

The first floor had two bedrooms, not large but not too small either. One was blue, and from what little remained of the previous occupant, I could tell it belonged to a teenage boy. The other was a peach color and had a ceiling fan. When we opened the closet in the blue bedroom, we discovered it led into the peach bedroom. It was a very narrow closet so I was the only one who could fit through it, but once I ducked in one end and out the other, I was smiling. I felt like a child again, and this house felt so very magical to me.

The kitchen was something my mother loved. It was done in earthy tones, all browns and dark greens, with wood cabinets and spiraling ceiling fan. Just behind it was a small pantry that almost looked it was lost in time. The unpainted wood walls and shelves held up by spiraling metal arms reminded me of those historical documentaries I used to idly watch as a child, and it thrilled and delighted me. I could imagine filling that pantry with our food.

Behind the pantry was the laundry room, which was empty but spacious. While mom discussed repurposing it as a dining room with the realtor, I ventured on.

I discovered this small, narrow stairwell that ran behind the pantry. It was child-sized, barely big enough for me to climb up without stooping over. At the top of the stairs was the second floor, which turned out to be just one bedroom. It ran the entire length of the house, though it was narrower due to the slope of the roof. I was beside myself with joy. There were so many things to discover, so many things to see! I had never been in a house so unique before, a house with such personality. The closet door slid through the wall when I opened it, and I learned that to shut the door to the stairs I had to open the closet. In my heart, this room was already mine and I couldn't stop thinking of all the things I could do with it.

This is not to say the house wasn't tragically flawed. Or how else would it be selling for so little?

It's in complete disrepair. The roof has to be reshingled. The shed is a lost cause. We would have to put a new door on it and redo the roof. The doors in the house all have to be replaced as well, and the bathroom needs a new toilet and tub. Everything except the living room and kitchen needs a fresh coat of paint. The hardwood floors have to be cleaned and refinished. The windows have to be replaced. The upstairs needs more work still. The heating in the house is so old that it uses radiators still. There's no central air.

But I can't help that I'm so, utterly in love. I've never lived in anything but cookie cutter houses and apartments. It feels like a dream to me. It's going to be so much money and work, but I've been calling my friends to see who's willing to help. I feel like it would be worth it in the end. All the trouble and pain it'll be do restore this house to something resembling order. It'll be worth it. It's a labor of love.

I look at that house and I don't see a seventy year old building at the end of its days. I see a house that must have once been so very beautiful, that I want to make beautiful again.

There's so much there.

I want it to take peoples' breaths away for another seventy years to come.

Any of you want to help? ♥

A remedy for homesickness.

Last summer I visited home. To me, home isn’t contained in any four walls, not in any set city or district or town. To me, home is the country I was born. I find that strange. As a person, I feel very American. I feel most comfortable functioning in an English-speaking society. My upbringing has been thoroughly steeped in American culture, although I’ve also been exposed to a fair amount of Chinese culture as well.

The fact remains that I’ve been here since I was two and a half, and if you asked me what nationality I was over what race, I would answer that I’m American. I include myself when make generalizations about American society and our people as a whole.

But still, to me, home is a tiny spit of an island off the east coast of China. A little place called Taiwan. I know, I know. That place all the really cheap stuff you fish out of dollar stores comes from, right? Well, then, I’m a kindred spirit with those ten cent baubles, because I was made there too.

It’s tiny and cramped there. Life is completely different. It’s polluted and noisy and dirty, and I love it. I like to think of it as Taiwan being a miserable little island, but it’s the miserable little island I was born on, and I love it unconditionally in my gratitude. I’ll take the good things with the bad, because no country is perfect. It’s just a matter of finding one with flaws you can live with.

At any rate, we finally visited Taiwan again last summer after over five years of absence. It’s strange how the trips are all thrilling and dramatic, like chapters of my life unfolding while my time spent in America is just the space in between. The first time I visited since I was a toddler was when I was six and my grandmother was dying from stomach cancer. I remember only snatches, mostly of the funeral. Then I didn’t go back again until I was thirteen. That year I saw my deadbeat dad for the first time in ten years. He made excuses, he gave me some spending money, and then he vanished out of my life again after promising to take me out to a meal he never showed up for. Two years later, I met with my grandmother on my absent father’s side. She cried and she held me and she gave me pudding to eat like she would when I was little. She passed away before we returned this summer, something we only found out when we got there.

Something about life there feels surreal, and I wouldn’t trade that feeling for the world. The cost of living is cheap, the food is fantastic, and the people are for the most part kind. They work hard, most of them laborers or running their own small businesses. Chain stores are few and far between in Taiwan. Aside from fast food and convenience stores and shopping centers in large cities, everything is family owned. The food is almost always good in the hole in the wall restaurants because word gets around if it isn’t, and then they don’t make enough to pay rent and close down.

I find something about the way life is in Taiwan strangely romantic in that regard. And then I think that it’s not because I’m particularly Taiwanese that I feel that way. It’s because I’m so American that the Taiwanese way of life is exotic and enticing to me.

As for our trip, we started off at my uncle's restaurant, which I haven't visited in quite a while. It's changed a lot, but then again we opened something like sixteen-odd years ago. I once asked my mother why we opened a Chinese restaurant and her answer surprised me. She told me that it was only because it was all our family knew how to do when we arrived in this country.

After our obligatory stop there, we left for the airport and I took a handful of photos of Detroit Metro. It’s the airport I frequent to most because we go there to pick people up as well as leave. I like going places a lot more than I do picking people up, and the entire reason is I love going into the little plaza behind the security screening.






I would like to state now that I am terrified of flying. Or, rather, the idea of flying. Once I’m on the plane, I accept that my fate is no longer in my own hands and sit back for the ride.

We were in row 41, and I was in seat G. (All very irrelevant, but I like putting these things down for my own personal accounts.) First we waited on the runway and for some reason or another there was a huge delay. Our flight was supposed to depart at 3:10 but didn't get off the ground until just after 4:00. The reason?

(I've learned to tremble every time I hear the captain come on the intercom. It's never anything good unless he's talking about how much jet fuel we'll be burning [which, by the by, makes you feel like an awful person] or how the weather is.)

The captain came on the intercom to say that there was a delay because of a thunderstorm moving in, so either we'd get clearance in a few minutes to take off ahead of the storm or we'd have to wait on the runway another hour. This left me very, very nervous. For one, our layover in Japan was three hours, but with enough delays we were going to miss our connecting flight. For another? To the best of my knowledge, thunderstorms do not play well with planes.

So cue the second most terrifying takeoff I've ever experienced. (It was just shy of that Spirit Airlines flight we took on the way back to Florida which smelled of burnt rubber just as soon as the engines started.)

First they psyched me out by continuously playing with the cabin lights. It was like a light show on crack. They'd cut the power and then turn it back in in sections, then they'd turn off just the overhead lights or just the aisle lights and just. Then the plane's turbines started going and almost immediately the entire plane began to rattle. I'm not talking like a mild rumble, the way a train rattles when you're shooting through a dark tunnel. I'm talking my camera case made a suicide jump off my lap because everything was shaking so badly. I had to cover my ears because it was so loud, and even with my ears plugged the sounds were still perfectly clear. I was so sure we were going to rattle apart before we got any lift.

Somehow, though, miraculously, we managed to get in the air and thus started the next chapter of trip: The 13 hour flight to Tokyo.

The plane ride was uneventful for the most part. The only complaint I really had was that the cabin was so cold my legs cramped almost the entire way. In the future, I’m going to dress warmly for the plane ride regardless of whether or not my destination is a tropical island. My brother even gave me his really thin airline blanket in addition to mine and I had a hoodie on and long jeans but I was still cold. I'm just glad I packed my hoodie even though my mom was adamant I wouldn't need it. :|; I made an excuse about using it to pad my external HD, and then I started wearing it at my uncle's restaurant because it was chilly there too and didn't take it off again until we landed in Taiwan.

Anyway.

We were served three meals on the plane ride to Narita, which was a hilarious excursion. I took pictures of it all, and actually it was surprisingly good for airline food, especially the fruit and the desserts. The entrees were also startlingly edible. For dinner we had a choice of braised beef with potato and veggies or 'asian soy chicken breast with rice and carrots'. We all went for the braised beef.

It also came with a delicious shrimp cocktail and salad. The dessert was this marble brownie stuff which was fantastic. Then they gave us a mid-flight snack of grapes, water, an egg and cucumber sandwich. Lastly we had a swiss cheese omelet for breakfast, along with some of the most delicious sausage I've ever had. The menu said there would also be 'muesli and orange juice'. What the hell is muesli?

edit: dictionary.com says it's "a breakfast cereal similar to granola, usually consisting of rolled oats and dried fruit." ...which is a lie because we had nothing like that. B|




The only thing that dampened the trip was that I think the airplane deities could sense when we were about to eat. Every time food started getting passed out, the seat belt light would unfailingly come on. Followed shortly by turbulence. Every. Single. Time. I was so nauseous I saved most of my food for later.

Even though I painstakingly charged all my portable game systems, the only thing I ended up being able to use was my MP3 player because looking at the game screens made me too nauseous. I listened to 158~ songs from Detroit to Tokyo.

When we landed at the Narita airport, I... lost it. Good god, I ran off that plane like my life depended on it. We got through security again, and then therein was the Promise Land. I should mention that I’m a Japanese major, and I intend to study abroad in Japan someday.

I bought some kind of milk coffee I spent ten minutes trying to sound out the katakana of before realizing there was an English sign for it. It went something like みろやかミルクのカフェラッテ. I think that's trying to tell me it's a coffee latte? With milk? Oh screw it, I'm never going to get this language.

I also realized that I recognized the kanji for 'airport' but forgot the reading. Good job, self. Good job. (Annnd Japanese toilets scare the living hell out of me. All those buttons make me nervous.)






Next we boarded the plane to Taiwan. When we first took off, it went a lot more smoothly than the Detroit departure, and I got to see Tokyo from above at night. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful. I was exhausted so my thoughts weren't entirely lucid, but I couldn't stop watching. It's not like during the day, when Japan looks like the shore of some alien planet, all glittering silver facets. It was this world of inky darkness, intermittently broken up by rivers and glimmering lakes of light. The highways held a golden sort of glow, and the headlights of the individual cars gave a slightly greenish cast. From so far above, they seemed to move slowly and the highways pulsed with the hundreds upon thousands of soft, halo-wreathed lights. It was a clear night but there was enough humidity in the sky to soften every individual light, and just watching them made me want to write and made me want to dream.

I wondered if anyone else had seen this sight and let themselves be inspired by it. I wondered if the glimmering rivers of gently undulating lights was where the dream of pyreflies and Lifestream came. And I thought to myself, what a wonderful place. Here, I stared into what was by all means an abyss, a void where there was no light, and I did not fear what might not be there but instead dreamed of all of the darkness' possibilities. I tried to capture it in photographs, but it's something that really has to be experienced.



This would be a three hour flight, during which we would be served one meal. Guess what happened when they tried to serve it? If you said turbulence, you get a cookie! This time it was so bad the captain had to come on the intercom and to say in a very grave voice that we had hit 'significant unforcasted turbulence' and that he had to delay dinner service. They stopped for a while, started again, managed to serve half of us, and then it started and kept going so bad they had to cancel the rest of the service, which the captain apologized for. I still got to eat but I soon wished I hadn't because I spent the rest of the flight in a nauseated half-coma.

Anyway, somehow we arrived in Taipei's airport, and exhausted as I was, I still found it in me to be excited. Because I was home.

Humorously enough, the airport was full of a metric ton of signs showcasing the beautiful places to visit in Taiwan, of which I've never previously been aware existed. It was like they were afraid you somehow stumbled upon our country by accident and were trying desperately to convince you to stay.






After that, Mom got us a taxi van which took us the two hours to Taichung. I slept about the entire way home too, I was just so exhausted. I did wake up enough to catch my mother lamenting to the taxi driver that her favorite bento shop closed and she doesn't know why. To which the taxi driver replied that it was probably because the older generation earned enough for the younger generation to get the hell out of the business, because selling food for a living was a hard way to make ends meet.

For some reason that really made me give pause. I'd never thought about it in those terms before. Food is really absurdly cheap in Taiwan. The currency conversion rate is about 33 Taiwanese dollar to 1 US dollar. Almost everything on the breakfast menu of the places around here is 25 or 10 yen. It's nuts. You can get a delicious sandwich with egg, cucumber, mayo, and your choice of meat for 15 yen.

I never thought about how miserable the people behind the counter might be, though I've known since I was a child how hard the restaurant business is.

The way people live here is really different.

I'm not even sure how that makes me feel, except pensive.

Anyway, we went out to eat something, then went to the convenience store and stocked up on drinks and snacks and then I showered and went to sleep.




And so my first day in Taiwan came to a close. I spent four months there and took many more pictures and had many more fantastic experiences. I just haven’t gotten around to documenting it all yet. Maybe with this class this semester, I’ll finally find the time to.

...last pic:



...the last pic is just because I went lol, King's nuts. I know, my maturity is astounding.