textures | tones

So last week was the final week of rehearsals for the IFC before we performed on Saturday. The last week of rehearsals is always at the Children’s Palace (ShaoNianGong), right behind JingShan Park, less than 3km away from my apartment. Unfortunately, rehearsals are at 6:30PM, right when rush hour hits this wonderful city that I live in, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get there. At worst, the last day of rehearsals that Friday, I spent 1 hour and 45 minutes sitting in the cab, 1 hour of which was below the minimum speed at which the cab is considered “stopped” and I get charged a different rate. I could have walked there and back in less time. This just sort of reinforces what I’ve always known to be true: there is absolutely no reason not to either walk, take the subway, or bike to where you need to go in this city. Obviously walking has its pitfalls; some places are just too far, and the subway doesn’t reach everywhere. So lo and behold, the perfect solution: bicycling.

Apparently bicycle theft is rampant in this city. I’ve heard stories of gangs of thieves who specialize in stealing one particular type of bicycle. Due to this, I decided to go the cheap route when purchasing my bicycle in case it ever got stolen. So I had one of my staff help me and we walked to one of the nearby bicycle shops and there it was, the most beautiful bike I’ve ever seen in my life, for just 170RMB (not really, but it was that cheap). Add a basket and a lock and I evened out at just about 30USD. Very excited to finally own a bicycle and the new possibilities it opens up for me, I decided to bike to my father’s home and visit him and my grandmother who’s out of the hospital now. It’s just about 5 miles each way, and I made it in just over half an hour each way. It was great! So much fun actually, sort of reminiscent of the times I spent biking in New York City.

But then the honeymoon ended, one 10 mile bike ride later: the seat was starting to break, to the point where it was being bent in a very “awkward” way if you know what I mean, with the front pushing precariously upwards…And I’d also noticed that the pedals weren’t spinning very smoothly either; they kind of had a jerky sort of feel to them. But I ignored these problems, since I only paid 30USD for the bike, and put it away for the night in the little courtyard in front of my apartment. I was actually a little bit paranoid, but then once again reminded myself that I only paid 30USD for it.

The next day, today that is, I decided to bike out to the Western Academy of Beijing, which is about 18km away, just over 11 miles. I wanted to see if it was doable and in how long because there’s at least a chance I might be working there doing IT work for them. I make it half way there, the long way incidentally because I got pretty lost on the way, and one of the pedals breaks! Thankfully there’s a bicycle repair guy just at the street corner where I broke down and he fixes it for me but the whole incident kind of spooked me and I decided to just bike home and forget trying to make it out to the school. I still got about 10 miles of biking in, which is good, but the bike quite properly breaking down at just over 15 miles of total riding is a little…pathetic. I talked to the bike repair guy and he said that if I’m doing long distances, the bike I had will not be adequate; it was only meant for short distances.

Well, you live and learn I guess! But that means I’m going to need to buy a new bike later! Next time I get that cheap, somebody slap me.

As far as other updates, as I mentioned I was in a concert this past weekend, one in Beijing and the other in Tianjin. This is the first time I’ve been to Tianjin also; pretty neat city, it’s only like an hour away by car and half an hour by high speed train. It’s also a port city, which Beijing unfortunately isn’t, and on the way out I could smell the sea breeze and that was very refreshing. Being a port city though means that there’s actually a lot of Western influences in the city, maybe even more so than Beijing, especially in the architecture. For instance the concert hall we sang in reminded me very much of a European opera house. All in all the concerts were good, despite how weird the music was, and Maria and her friends like it as well.

Speaking of whom, Maria left this past Monday for the States. She’s going to visit her family and friends and run her first marathon in Cincinnati! I’m really excited for her and wish I could be there, but I’ll be seeing her relatively soon on May 10th when I also go to the States and we both go to attend Miguel’s wedding in San Francisco. It’s pretty convenient because this also allows us to get on the next entry of our Visa, though this is hopefully the last time we have to do this whole Visa renewal thing because our work Visas will be ready by then, fingers crossed. I also hope I have a job waiting for me when I get back…

I’m also going to try out the Chinese Medical System this Sunday! Woot! Not? I don’t know what to expect really, but it’s been over two years since my last physical and I figure it’s time to get one again. I had called some US doctors about taking care of it when I was in the States, but they wanted to charge me 1000USD to do it! I guess I had no idea how expensive these things were because I’ve never done them without insurance before but that’s what happens if you pay out of pocket apparently. So I discussed it with my cousin Michael in China and he suggested this chain of clinics in Beijing called CiMing that specialize in nothing but physical examinations. The prices are great, beyond great. For less than half the price of the US exam I can get so many more procedures done, not that I’d want to. I’m hoping to not have to spend more than 100USD actually to get everything I would’ve gotten in the States and more and thus satisfy my own paranoia about not having had a physical in a while.

Aside from missing Maria quite a bit and not having all too much to do these days, well, since I’ve not that much to do, that’s about all I have to write about for now. I have more I should write down but I’m feeling really lazy and probably a bit depressed, but that’s alright. Things will be better when they’re better.

This actually also didn’t happen today, but actually yesterday. Part of the problem I’m running into with my emotional distress is that it’s messing up my sleeping patterns. For instance, it’s 2AM and I’m awake and probably will be until well into the morning. Thankfully I have a full day planned tomorrow otherwise I’d most likely sleep until the middle of the afternoon, which is what happened yesterday. What that means is that I don’t get very good sleep either, because it’s bright, Maria’s doing things (not that I mind!), so I fall in and out and it’s really light and what not but the point is, I have very interesting and long dreams because I can come out and dive right back in.

I’m traveling in a tour group, visiting Seoul, South Korea. The bus takes us up to the riverbank to look at this magnificent suspension bridge that connects one side of the town to the other. (Incidentally, there is no such bridge, but there is a river) I come out of the bus and snap a few pictures. Then we’re told by our tour guide that the next spot we’re going to visit is on the other side of the river, but that we’d be swimming across it instead of going across the bridge because the bridge, being so beautiful, is not actually used but is really more of a decoration for the city. We all find this reasonable somehow, then fully clothed, with all our bags and such strapped to our shoulders, we dive into the water and start swimming to the other side.

Once we’re there, we’re walking down a sidewalk on a hill on a street of small gift type shops all over the place. We walk into a random looking one to buy some souvenirs because it’s going to be our last stop and we all want something to remember our trip by. I get in and look around and everything’s looking kind of familiar until all of a sudden, it hits me: everything in the store used to belong to me, and they had been missing for many years, ever since my house in LA was broken into. (There was a break in at my house in LA, but nothing was stolen)

I see my stamp collection albums, (yeah I’m a geek, I know), binders full of Magic the Gathering cards (yeah yeah, I know), old letters and birthday cards from my parents, drawings of my parents they had done, photos, and more. At this point I’m getting very angry because I see the price on all these things and it’s so expensive! There’s no way I’ll be able to buy all these things back. I then spot some things that don’t look familiar stuck with the things that I know are mine. There are these black binders, full of even more Magic the Gathering cards (rolls eyes…), though I never owned these things before. So I start cooking up a scheme to get all the things that were mine back, and then some.

I start making a big fuss in the store, shouting about how these things used to belong to me and I demand to have them back now. The person running the store is shouting back to me in Korean and I have no idea what he’s saying but I just keep shouting in that way that only tourists do when they have no idea what’s going on but insists that they’re right anyways.

Finally, the police show up, and they speak English so they can translate. I make a heart breaking case about how all these things used to belong to me, about how much they mean to me. I go through the photos and I say look, this is me and my father when we were up in San Francisco while I was a child. I point to the big binder of commemorative stamp envelopes (again, rolls eyes…) saying look, this was given to me by my mother; she had collected all of them for years to amass so many. I point at the hand drawn picture of my father saying look, he drew this self portrait and that’s really all I have left of him now. I’m crying and sobbing and making just a big to do. I recount in detail about the burglary that took place over ten years ago at my home in LA, how all of my precious belongings were taken away from me in one fell swoop. I say to the police officer, I demand to have these things back.

He and the guy running the store have a conversation in Korean that I don’t understand, then he turns back to me and tells me fine, you can have them all back, but you have to pay for them. Realize now that I’m buying everything in the store, because I’m pretending it all used to be mine, even the things that weren’t, because I really want those Magic the Gathering cards. So I say back, again, indignantly, that I will only pay a fair price, that I won’t be gouged for what used to be my property. They talk again in Korean, then the police officer says I can have it all for some ridiculously small amount of money, like forty cents. I’m taken aback, because I thought he was going to try to take me for all he could, and I’m glad because it’s so little to get so much. So I hide my happiness, and still through tears grudgingly accept the offer, all the while thinking to myself how hard it will be to take all these things in a bag strapped to my shoulder as I swim across that river again.

As the store keeper starts packing everything up, I notice there’s a small doorway in the corner. I go to it and find a thin staircase leading to a basement where a small boy is playing video games on a big TV; I think he’s the store keeper’s son, and I’m impressed at his skill. Looking around, I then notice that the bookshelves down there are full of Magic the Gathering cards! I start thinking to myself if it would be reasonable to try to claim that these used to belong to me as well and demand to have them “returned” along with everything else.

OK…I’m a dork, I admit it; but I do like Magic! :P I also think this dream may have something to do with my missing some of the things I left in the States, books mostly, but other, little mementos that help make a place home. I mean, our current apartment is quite temporary, but I would ultimately like to make a Home for Maria and I, and if I want it to really be HOME, it may need some of these things that helped define my childhood and ultimately my life.

This actually happened a little bit ago, but I thought it was neat and I still remember it now so I figured why not. Going forward, these entries will hopefully happen if not right after I wake up from a dream, but at least within the same day.

China is having a massive celebration for some reason, something akin to the 60th Anniversary that happened recently. There’s a large square with hundreds of thousands of people sitting on the floor in it. They’re all wearing color coded clothes for some reason, and in groups, so that the square looked like multicolored patchwork when viewed from the stage, which is where I am seated.

The stage was massive, with a big TV screen in the back that just magnifies what’s actually on the stage. There are going to be many singing performances by small groups, each singing some patriotic song commemorating China’s greatness. I had been approached at some point and invited or more rather insisted upon to sing. I was sitting in one of the patches of color in the square, looking at the stage, chatting with some people I didn’t recognize, until someone officious looking came up and requested my presence.

I had agreed to perform only under the condition that I would be given the music before hand because I told him I didn’t know the songs they were going to be singing. They had nodded in agreement, but the time before I was supposed to go up and sing was growing short and I was getting anxious. I looked around and found someone to talk to and asked them if they were getting me the music any time soon. They said not to worry, that I’ll have it in time. I go back to waiting for a bit, until I’m called upon again, and I’m thinking great, that must be my music, until all of a sudden a microphone is thrust in front of my face and the entire audience comes to a dead silence and my face is magnified on the big TV screen and I’m supposed to start singing.

The music begins, and it’s “Country Road.” (For those of you who don’t know, “Country Roads, take me home, to the place I belong. West Virginia, mountain mama, take me home, Country Roads.” NOT that I knew the words at the time of the dream mind you! I had only heard the song in passing before and had most recently heard it while wandering around Kowloon in Hong Kong at the night market where they were selling pirated karaoke DVDs and this song happened to be on) So I don’t know the words, or the melody, and the music’s started! I’m singing with a small group, though I’m supposed to be the soloist, doing a kind of “call and respond” thing with the main melody, so I just fudge my way though it, making up weird harmonies, picking out words here I knew, and when I didn’t, just sang on a random vowel. It was quite embarrassing, and the audience wasn’t happy either.

They booed the entire time of the performance and when we had finished, someone came and told me how disappointed they were in me and all I could think to myself was how it wasn’t my fault; I just wanted the damned music.

Hard to believe it’s been a week since I last posted anything, and even longer since I last posted anything of any substantive meaning. The short and only answer you’re getting is that I’ve been feeling a little off, emotionally, and it’s made it difficult to muster up much if any excitement for anything. However, I believe this to be a temporary state of affairs, and I expect that it will soon make it over that proverbial hill and it will be smooth, clear, fine sailing from then on. Maria has been very supportive and for her sake, for our sake, for her support, I will write this entry, and a couple of extra, and introduce a brand new idea into my blogging repertoire as a reward.

The idea being I think I’ll start keeping track of my dreams. It’s really that I run out of or lose interest in the things I’m writing about rather quickly, so I find it best to have multiple things to write about. Of course I am not abandoning my trip down memory lane project, I am simply adding another parallel project, something to help me vent my writing steam so that it doesn’t pent up yet is less restricted in that I have other topics now. So dreams. Plus, many people have suggested I keep track of them, and my dreams are rather brilliant if I do say so myself, and Maria likes them a not, so hey, what the hell.

Also, as a general update, here goes:

1) Maria got in to both business schools she applied to! Yay! She now has a choice :)
2) The restaurant is sucking, business wise, and there are many things moving and shaking within that realm that I’m not currently at liberty to say, but suffice it to say that there are many exciting things about that hopefully just around the corner as well.
3) My concert is next Saturday; hard to believe I’ve only a week or so left to fully learn all the notes; just kidding.
4) Maria leaves for the states in just over ten days :( Booooooooo! Whatever am I supposed to do with myself for two weeks in Beijing, unemployed for the most part no less?
5) Lots and lots of web projects to do, though mostly for free. The Connections restaurant site is up, I’ve made a Document Management System for Maria and my father, and I will soon be revamping and redesigning literally all of my father’s company’s sites, for no pay; again, Boooooooooooo!
6) I’ve also gotten quite wrapped up in the inner machinations of the choir I’m in. At the moment, it’s all volunteer on my part, but I hope to be able to fully insert myself into their circle and ultimately be compensated for my efforts, which thus far has included taking on their ticket sales, to the point of actually going around to people’s homes and tracking them down to give them their ticket and take their money and agreeing to escort around the composers of the piece we’re singing. Not that I don’t do all of this out of the graciousness of my heart, I do enjoy doing it, but my finances are very tight at the moment; though I look forward to being compensated for working with the Youth choir in May, which apparently I will be; I wonder if I can get that to be a full time thing?

Otherwise, life trudges on, the adventure that it most definitely is; my father has become enamored with the iPad, and we’re wondering if we should get one. Both our power cords are dying, and my battery is as well. Hard to believe but my laptop is two and a half years old! Time sure does fly; I wonder if I should get a new laptop…maybe I’ll drool a bit at the new computers that are available, though, and hold your breath, I’m thinking of switching back to a PC!

Whirlwind tour!

In order:
Jiuguloudajie (Old Gulou Street)
Gulou (Drum Tower)
Dianmendajie (Peace on Earth Door Street)
Jinshan Park
Tiananmen/Gugong (Peace in Heaven Door, Old Palace, otherwise known as Forbidden City)
Tiananmen Square, with National Museum of China, Hero’s Monument or something, some other massive government building, Mao Zedong’s mausoleum
Qianmen (Front Gate)
Qianmendajie (Front Gate Street)

10.6 miles, 7 hours, including a lovely lunch of traditional Chinese food a.k.a Vegetable Fried Noodles and Egg and Tomato Fried Noodles and Tsingtao beer. Also had milk tea for snacks/breakfast! Also lots of shopping including:

Panda backpack
Light up and music playing “dreidel” is the best word for it I think
Packs of cards with top sites of Beijing printed on them
Scarves, scarves, and more scarves
Lots of tiny little embroidered gift bags
Yet another pair of gloves for Maria since it was much colder out than we thought it would be…
Porcelain container set
“Cereal” (puffed corn and rice)
“Golden Brick” (wonderful chocolate bread) and pre-sweetened/pre-creamed coffee and “chocolate” sticks

Photos to follow!

No, it’s not a Sepia tinted photo; it is dust! Apparently, and I’d forgotten all about this, but Beijing gets pretty bad dust storms right around this time of year, between Winter and Summer. And here I thought we’d have a lovely Spring to look forward to. Apparently it has something to do with the winds that kick up this time of year as well which brings dust from the neighboring deserts. Thankfully, this only happened once, and hasn’t happened again, and as can be attested by the previous post’s photos, the weather is lovely, although it still rains occasionally for some reason, but today was supposedly 70 degrees! But, without further ado:

Dust!

Maria and I took a walk today (it’s also her birthday!), along the Second Ring river and the little park that’s there and seems to run at least the length of this northern portion of the road, then got to Yonghegong, the Buddhist Lama temple in Beijing. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been here as I don’t think I came in 2005, the last time I was in Beijing. Maria had also been wanting to do more tourist type things so this will be a first in a series I expect of us hitting all the top destinations of culture and historical relevance. Though our expectations of good English especially in the museum type piece captions were grossly disappointed. Some of the photos were taken while on the way and after we left, but it’s in basic chronological order; just look out for the ones with temple type stuff and those will be when we were actually at Yonghegong.

Memories of childhood friends whom I no longer even remember their name:

The very first apartment I lived in when I got to the States still exist today in exactly the same condition as it did back then. They’re two stories and built in the faux “Adobe” style to reflect the South Western nature of Southern California. One family lived on the first floor, one on the second. There were no yards, but a small patch of grass in front, and even more apartments in the back though I don’t think I’ve ever wandered through them. There were some trees between the buildings. Back then, we had a neighboring Chinese family who had a son just about my age. I remember spending some time with him playing, mostly after school while my parents were both still working.

Of the things I remember doing:

We played Nintendo; Duck Hunt, Metroid, and 1941, a vertical scrolling one-plane-versus-a-million-enemies type of game. I was never that good at those games, and still am not today, but I remember even then enjoying watching other people play, demonstrating skills that I would secretly be jealous of.

Now this is a little out of order chronologically, but I want to take care of everything I remember about this particular child, but around 5th grade or so I was really into Magic the Gathering, the card game; more on that later. This friend didn’t play, but he had a lot of baseball cards. At some point I became tired of playing Magic, again, more on that later, but for some reason all of a sudden really wanted baseball cards. I remember offering him a deal: all my Magic cards for as many baseball cards as I can wrap up with rubber bands. He agreed, and I spent an entire evening sitting on his carpet, wrapping up neat piles of baseball cards with rubber bands. He was busy doing something else, watching TV I think, so he didn’t notice that by the time I was finished, I had wrapped up all of his baseball cards. He was a little angry at that actually, but I reminded him of the deal and he got over it.

In the trees in between the buildings of the small apartment complex we lived in were lots of different kinds of snails. One time, we found a derelict old plastic rodent cage, the kind one would use to house small hamsters and such, and decided to use it as a snail cage. We ran out to the trees and started looking and it didn’t take long before we found a fine specimen of snail to put in our cage. We filled it also with some twigs, leaves, and a bit of dirt, and were quite proud of ourselves for having created such a perfect little habitat for the snail. We brought it in and set it like a trophy on top of a bookshelf, then busied ourselves with other things. Hours later, we decided to come back and check on our catch, only to find that the cage was empty. Apparently, the cage was so decrepit that it had been punctured in certain places and allowed the snail to escape; in our excitement we neglected to thoroughly examine our find. All along the wall right around the cage were trails of slime where the snail had ran off, trails running the entire height of the bookshelf even before disappearing somewhere in the carpet. We searched for quite a long time but never found the snail again. Even after the escape incident. I remember being paranoid about slime trails on the walls and started seeing them everywhere, constantly on edge and worried that I might accidentally step or sit on a snail; the thought disgusted me. This is the first time I remember being afraid of slimy little things like snails.

There was another friend who lived a little further away but was nonetheless within walking distance of that first apartment. I think they were people my father had met while at Caltech. They also had a son, just around my age, and I also spent some afternoons there when my parents were away. I spent most of the time I was there wandering the grounds of Caltech since they were just across the street. I remember that the large circular fountains were rarely turned on, all the water having dried up, and that I’d climb up into it and play in the dried leaves that stuck to the bottom of the fountain bowl. I remember fishing for crayfish in the large rectangular lily ponds, poking at them with a stick until they were just angry enough to grab on with their claws then pulling them out and getting a real kick out of the splash they made when they let go and fell back into the water. I remember afternoons spent eating deep fried fish that the boy’s mother would make, whole, tiny fish, fried golden and delicious.

That’s all that I remember about these two, though I think years later when I was a teenager I ran into both of them at least once again and completely did not recognize them.

A note:

It’s going to get more and more difficult keeping things in chronological order from now on, especially since I’ve somehow decided to structure this thematically as well as chronologically. I find it easier to group memories together because I can then be sure I didn’t miss one. It’s also a kind of “getting out of the way” type of mechanism so that I can move on to other, more detailed memories; these early ones are still quite fragmentary.

Shameless self promotion time. So the choir I’m a member of, the International Festival Chorus (IFC) will be performing the African Sanctus by David Fanshawe at the Beijing Century Theater on April 24th, 2010 at 7:30PM. Tickets are available through the theater, Beijing Home Delivery, or me! I am actually the new ticket coordinator for the IFC so I’m handling all internal sales, but I can handle non-internal ones as well! I also hope to in the future play a greater role in the IFC, perform in more concerts, and promote more of our up coming events. :)

EVERYBODY COME!

IFC African Sanctus 2010

First, a tangent: I think I want to redesign this site. I’ve been looking at it for a while now and it’s starting to get boring. I’m thinking something with a few more colors, mostly earth tones or darker tones, and possibly a three-column layout. I’m imagining maintaining most of the elements of this current layout, specifically the sidebar, but splitting it in two so that I can keep one that’s static along with a static and much thinner header. I’m thinking of also moving the two dynamic footers into the main body and have them plus the actual blog be in a sort of accordion style display so one can toggle between them. But who knows!

Some short memories of my first school in the States, Don Benito Fundamental in Pasadena, for first and perhaps second grade, I don’t remember specifically; these are all the memories I have of that school:

There was one teacher who I liked the best, and who seemed to care about me the most. I don’t remember her name, but I remember she was old, had curly white hair, and wore glasses. She used to help me figure out difficult math problems because she knew that those were the only problems she could help me with since my English was still so poor at the time. I’d be sitting at my desk, she’d be hunched over me, and she take me step by step, showing me by example more than anything, of how to do fancy addition. She’d show me once and I’d understand, and she’d give me a big smile telling me how pleased she was that I had learned something new.

I stopped wanting to speak Chinese as soon as I could speak any English. It was just the nature of the time; my parents wanted me to master English as soon as possible so it just disappeared. I touched on this before, but only until very recently I found the prospect of speaking Chinese highly uncomfortable. I didn’t like how the language sounded, and I didn’t like the idea of having to make those sounds. Obviously those prejudices have changed, but the point was that at that very early age, I stopped speaking it, and never wanted to again. But there was one time, at school, when it became necessary for me to do so. There was another Chinese student there, of all things, not much unlike myself when I was younger who also didn’t speak any English. I had learned English by then and so it fell to me, or so the teachers would like to think, to try to speak to this young child. They wanted to know what time his parents were coming to pick him up. I made some show about not wanting to speak or not knowing how, but they finally convinced me. I was embarrassed. I walked up to the child, unsure of what to do, then leaned in very close to his ear and literally whispered to him, asking in Chinese what time his parents were coming. I was terrified that someone would overhear me so I spoke as softly as I could, to the point where I’m not even sure if the other boy understood me because I don’t remember anything that happened after. I don’t know if I was successful in getting the answer.

The only time I’ve ever cheated in school was during these surprise spelling quizzes they would give us at the beginning of class. There was a big stand at the front of the classroom with lists of words on it that the teacher would flip to a new one of every day. I remember the words as being quite challenging actually, very long with many letters, and I hated having to do these quizzes. I felt at the time it wasn’t actually as if I was learning anything. It didn’t include the meanings of the words so it’s not like I acquired some new vocabulary, it was really more of a lesson in rote memorization and who can do it the fastest because the teacher would flip to the new set of words and only give us a few minutes before asking us to write down again all the words on a piece of paper. Now I’ve always sucked at rote memorization, and still do, and definitely did then. There was no way I could do what they wanted me to, so I would take my mechanical pencil and very lightly, all the while still looking at the words intently as if I was trying to memorize them, write all the words on my desk as small as possible. When it came time to take the quiz then, I had all the words written down and would of course ace the quiz, every time. I’d then lick my finger casually and smear my cheat sheet off the desk nonchalantly.

Even though I sucked at rote memorization of words, I seemed able to do it quite well when it came to spatial patterns. My school at the time had a “gifted” program that I was accepted in to. It took place during a special class session and we had our very own teacher and there were just a few of us. I don’t remember doing very much along the ways of studying, but we did play a lot of cards. Specifically, the teacher she’d lay matching cards shuffled face down on the table and you’d have to pick out the pairs; I’m sure everyone’s played this game, and I was quite good at it. Due to my lack of actual memories involving learning anything special, by which I mean my lack of doing anything in this “gifted” program other than playing cards, I’ve since to wonder whether it was really a “gifted” program or more of a “special” program…I mean, I was an immigrant, with only limited grasp of English (though I did fix that rather soon), maybe I’m painting too pretty of a picture on my early, early education to think that I was already “gifted” instead of just “special” at the time. And by “special” I mean “short bus” special if you know what I mean.