Got It Wrong

  It always seems to me that I get everything backwards.  My intentions will try to convey one thing and the exact opposite will occur.  My intentions are simple: be healthy and provide happiness and health for my family.  Kayla says that everything I've done has shown her that I'm pushing her away and that she's nothing to me.  Confucius said, "Mourn not that ye are not known.  Mourn that ye know not men."  I think that I've lived a life complaining that no one understands me.  Maybe my problem this whole time is that I've never taken the time or care to understand others.
  Last night, Kayla called and we were both understandably emotional.  She had stated before she left that she would be open to attempting a relationship once I've gotten to a more healthy place in my life.  She said on the phone that she didn't want to feel obligated to get back with me at a later time.  I told her that it wasn't an obligation to get back with me, but just a desire for her to be open to conversations and possibly dates so that we can re-establish a connection.  I told her that right now, it may only be selfish reasons that I want her and not love because of all the issues I have to deal with.  I probably don't even know what true love is.  I said that once I'm healthy, we may end up just being friends.
  Hours later, she called back saying she's been nauseated and broken up since I said that about just being friends.  She said I should have no reason not to love her and want to be with her.  Again, my stupid mouth went and said something that conveyed the exact opposite of what I intended.  I was trying to comfort her and tell her that she is in no way under any obligation to have to spend the rest of her life with someone with whom she can find no peace, harmony and balance.  Instead, she took from it that I don't want anything but a friendship with her.  She knows how I usually need time to think of how to phrase things appropriately, but she needed comfort right then and I failed to give it to her.  Not only did I fail, I made it worse.  She said she'll never hurry me again.
  I texted her and told her that it's understandable that she would need comfort right now and that I'm sorry I'm not even healthy enough to do that much for her.  I said that me trying to comfort her right now would be like an epileptic trying to lead a blind person.  He might jerk them around and risk hurting them.  I told her that I love her enough to not risk that again at this time.  Please, all of you out there, pray for her to feel comforted in her times of turmoil.  If you can, please leave encouraging comments on her blog.  She needs friends right now and, try as I might, I'm not being very successful at being that for her.

She's Gone

  Today, Kayla packed up some stuff, picked up the dog and drove off to Tucson in our car.  I just am not in a healthy place emotionally, spiritually or mentally.  She needs to spend some time away so that she can have some peace in her life.  I understand that.  She left practically everything.  Most of our stuff is still here.  I still have the turtle, but other than that, this isn't a home anymore.  I've unfortunately never been the source of homeness here.  I think, even if she had left the dog, this would still never feel like home without her.
  I'm really glad that at least she's been keeping me updated as to her progress on her cross-country trip.  I told her to call if ever and whenever she needs anything.  I feel so lost and empty right now.  More importantly, she is in a place where she needs to safely bring herself and a small dog all the way across America.  The car needed an oil change, but she wasn't able to get one before she left so that's another added worry for me.  All I want is for her to be safe and happy.  That's what I've always wanted, but right now it's not in my hands how safe or happy she is.
  She keeps texting and calling with various rants and complaints.  I know she has a lot of pent up frustration and emotions to vent out so I listen intently because I know it's the least I can do for her at this time.  We both love each other still, but I know this is for the best.  I know I've never been any help on her spiritual journey and I've not made much progress on mine since we've been together.  We are both completely different people than we were when we met, but still nowhere near whole, healthy or happy.
  I think that trying to keep up a family life was overwhelming for me while I was struggling with inner pain and turmoil.  I unfairly took out my frustrations in ways that would negatively affect her.  All I was trying to do was react to my pain, but I ended up causing her pain in the process.  Now I can seek counselling and get all the help I need without hindering her daily life from having peace and balance.  She has stated that when I return to Tucson in May she'll at least try to stay open to establishing some sort of relationship.  We will be keeping up communication while I'm here too.  I don't know if any of you pray, but if you do, please pray for her to find peace and balance in her life.  I just need to focus on getting myself healthy, then I can treat others in a much more loving and compassionate way.

Ubiquitous Iniquities

  If there was an ADD psychic, he could tell you what will happen tomorrow, he just couldn't tell you what he had for breakfast this morning.  One year when I was living in Connecticut, there was a huge storm one Saturday in April.  I called it the Neither Good Friday Nor'easter.  I write these things to you in a vain attempt to get them out of my head before I go to bed so that I can get some sleep.  You know how in the past, Czechoslovakia split in to the Republic of Slovakia and the Czech Republic?  I hope the same never happens at Lake Titicaca!  An over-active imagination is one of my ubiquitous iniquities that has often gotten me into trouble.  Especially when I was in school and supposed to be studying!
  You know how sometimes when there are double doors at an establishment, they won't unlock both of them?  I've observed that whenever that is the case, I will always choose the wrong door first.  I've heard this phenomenon called, 50/50/90.  If there's a fifty-fifty chance at getting something right, there's a 90% chance you'll get it wrong.  That's another of my ubiquitous iniquities.
  By the way, even though I am in the Navy, I am not a Chief, as you might think because of the name, Chief Loh.  The band name is a play on words.  The energy we get working up inside us while we're creating music is our chi.  When we're really on fire, our chi flows freely and prolifically.  Chi flow=Chief Loh.  I discovered after I created the band name, that the name is meaningful in another way.  I was thumbing through my English-Korean dictionary when I decided to look up my middle name, Young Su.  It turns out to mean chief/president/officer in Korean!  So my name is literally Paul Chief Loh.  In Old French, Paul means small.  If you look at it that way, you can use another word for small like petite or petty.  Put that together with one of the other definitions of Young Su and I would literally be named Petty Officer Loh.  I don't know if the name Loh means anything in Chinese.  Wasting my time looking this shit up is another ubiquitous iniquity.

Friendship

  I woke up at 4:30 in the morning yesterday with a warm white glow hovering over my bed.  I immediately thought my mother had died, but when I checked my emails, there was no word from my dad.  Kayla says she thinks it was my own soul.  That could be it, but I'm not sure what to think.  Not being able to fall back asleep, I walked all around the base deep in thought about my relationship with Kayla.  I've got a lot of work to do on my communication skills.  Most importantly, I have to learn how to be a good listener.  Hearing another's opinion does not mean it has to automatically become your own.
  I also had a lot of time to think about all those other stupid things that fill my mind when I can't sleep.  I mean like, why do people only point at the sky and say, "It's a bird, it's a plane!" when Superman's around?  On any other day, they never do.  Oh, and what did they call the Fu Manchu before Fu Manchu?
  The other day I was at Taco Bell.  There was a sign posted talking to people with food allergies to fish and other seafood.  It repeated the message in Spanish, but it put perscado for fish instead of pescado.  I asked the lady if that was a misprint or if I had been saying it wrong all these years.  She told me she didn't know because she doesn't speak Spanish.  I thanked her for the food and left with my question unanswered.  I wasn't asking if she spoke Spanish.  All you have to do is think of the Zodiac sign of Pisces.  I think it's related to the word pescado.  Also, people who don't eat meat, but do eat fish are called Pescaterians.  That's all I wanted to hear was that I wasn't crazy.  Boy, I'm a mean Taco Bell customer.  It's not like she has the time to think about those things while there's a line of hungry people waiting to be fed.  I really shouldn't be so selfish!  She's just doing her job, which does not entail answering stupid questions from assholes like myself!  Thanks, Kayla, for pointing out how cruel I was being!
  Anyway, I've been looking up a lot more old friends on Facebook.  I've found a lot!  It seems that no matter who it is, they invariably have like 500+ friends or something.  Whenever I'm sending a friend request, I think of David Spade in Tommy Boy saying, "You've made a friend, which probably doesn't mean much to you since you have so many, but I don't."  I also think of a quote by Andrew Wood from the song 'Until The Ocean' by Malfunkshun, where he says, "If you were my friend, I'd give you the ball on every play until the ocean calls my name."

Eye of the Beholder

  My friend request was accepted by an old bud from my El Paso years.  His name is Chris.  He was in a lot of my little home movies.  He would play a zombie, a victim, a thug or any other character my mind created.  Hat's off to him for being such a trooper!  Funny story about him: My parents were driving him, my sister and myself to have some dinner one day.  Chris was sitting in the back on the driver's side.  The sun was hitting him in the eyes the whole way there and he didn't like it.  We were planning on going to the mall after dinner, so at the restaurant, we decided that he could sit on the passenger side this time.  He did, but the direction we were driving caused the sun to be in his eyes again!  It doesn't end there.  At the mall, we decided that he could sit between my sister and me on the way home.  He did, and this time, homeward just happened to be in the direction of the sun so for a third trip he had the sun in his eyes the whole way!  Sorry, Chris, I just had to tell them that one.
  So anyway, I just finished reading Friendship With God last night.  One of the many wise things said in the book was, "The soul is that which beholds beauty even when the mind denies it."  What that tells me is that I can find the perfection in all the bullshit I've put my family through and what I've been going through.  My wife says it's like a tapestry.  Once you step back from the weaving, you'll see the full beauty of the big picture.  Right now I just happened to be mired in the black threads.
  There was a cartoon in Mad Magazine years ago that always stuck in my head as incredibly deep, sad and beautiful at the same time.  In the first panel, a little girl comes home from school and tells her parents that she's going to be in a school concert.  She needs to be dressed like an angel.  Subsequent panels depict her and her parents buying cloth, props, sewing materials and craft supplies and then frantically putting the costume together to meet the deadline of the performance.  The last panel shows the little girl on stage in her ornate and spectacular outfit among a sea of children dressed in plain white robes, paper wings and pipe cleaner halos.  The parents are sitting in the audience with sweat dripping down their faces.
  When I first saw the cartoon as a child, I mistook the beads of sweat for tear drops.  I took that to mean that, despite their child being surrounded by a sea of angels, they only had eyes for their special angel.  For years, whenever I thought about that cartoon I would cry.  Even now, I had to interrupt my typing to wipe my eyes.  I searched and hunted for that cartoon for well over a decade.  I happened upon it once at a used book store.  I finally realized that those were beads of sweat, not tear drops.  The cartoon was showing that the parents were tired from having exerted more energy than they had needed to.  I put the magazine down and have never looked at it again.  I much prefer my idea of what that cartoon was about.  It has more meaning to me that way.
  Right now, I'm buying materials and assembling a life for my family and me.  One of these days, I'll sit back and adore the beauty of the special angel I've helped create.  Yes, there will be sweat, but more importantly, there will be tears of joy when we gaze upon the tapestry.  What are the threads in your life?  Will you seek to view the breathtaking larger picture or drown in a tangled web of threads?

I sound happy. Do I sound happy to you? I think I sound happy.

  Hee hee hee, haw haw haw.  I called my chief to help me get some stuff to my wife and to get some stuff from her.  This was all per the restrictions placed upon me by the MPO.  I interrupted the poor man's Super Bowl time for this so now he's gonna see that we get the MPO lifted!  Woohoo!  Chalk one up for the Lohs and nada for the Navy.  What a jerk he was to my wife too.  Geez, I'm glad we won't have to deal with him anymore.  I mean, does he think that just because there's an MPO, my responisibilities to my wife and family have ceased?  No way, buddy.  And does he think that a damn football game is more important than my family's needs?  (buzzer sound) Wrong answer, McFly!
  I'm still gonna be staying at the barracks, but now, at least, I can patch things up with my wife without going through El Jerko as the middle man.  Yabba dabba doo!

Reconnecting

  I ran into a sailor named Rowe.  I told him, "That's my name sometimes, depends on who you ask".  He got a kick out of that. ror  Once, when I was young, a friend of my mother's was over at our house.  She didn't speak English very well, but my mom wanted me to at least be polite and introduce myself.  I told her my name, but she kept looking at my arms.  She said, "Paur, you so chubby.  You got to eat!  You too chubby!"  I kindly nodded my head, smiled, excused myself, then went to my room and laughed my fuckin' ass off for almost half an hour straight!  Engrish as a Second Ranguage.
  You know, this Military Protective Order is a crock of shit.  My wife and I can't have any contact with each other.  How are we supposed to work things out this way?  It's like putting a cast on a severed leg that has to stay on for a month, then expecting it to somehow, magically reconnect to the body.  We'll have to figure out our own way to reconnect with each other.  I know we still love each other.
  Speaking of reconnecting, since I've had so much time on my hands, I've been been reconnecting with God, myself and with a lot of old friends.  I've been reading a lot of the Friendship With God book, as I've told you, but I've also started praying again and meditating.  I've been reconnecting with myself by thinking about what's truly important to me, talking to myself and just being with myself in general.  Last night I put on some headphones and just jammed out on some music.  I was fully giving myself to the movement, feeling, energy and rhythm of it.  I haven't done that since my college days!  It felt so amazing!
  You know, I've developed so many inhibitions over the years.  It's been terribly unhealthy.  I'm trying to let go of fear and inhibition so that I can truly just be myself.  It feels so good to just be yourself, not caring what anyone else thinks.  I hadn't checked the stats for my blogs for a while, but I checked them last night and there's a steep drop off in readership since I've changed the title of this blog.  You know what?  It didn't faze me at all.  My old goal was to become famous and have lots of adoring fans.  Now I just want to express myself without fear and without expectation or need.  Now I'm separating the fans from the friends.  Just a few days ago I didn't have any friends, but I had fans.  Now, I may not have any fans, but I've got friends.  God, I'm tearing up as I'm writing this.  I haven't had friends in such a long time.
  Speaking of friends, I've been reconnecting with some of my old buddies from middle school, high school and college on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.  I find that I do genuinely care how they've been doing.  They're no longer just some inconsequential ballot stuffers in the great voting box of Paul's ego.  My stats can go to hell.  Jessica Tandy had it right in Fried Green Tomatoes, the most important thing in life is friends.