July 30, 2005

Murakami never fails to shed blood. I am floating out of sync, as if this rock spins too fast and leaves me out of touch with this dirt..

On the fifth of August, I will meet friends from elementary school for the first time in six years. Some of them have stayed here and are probably studying for Sunung, some have left this country for other schools, boarding schools, and some stopped going to high school. And we are going to sit in a movie theater like magnetized bits of iron facing the same way and later drink coffee and talk about each other, comparing lives, seeing old faces in a new way. Afterwards we'll all leave and separate, and that will be it. Or maybe it will be more and something else, different, important and uncertain, like scratches in a 35mm negative.

What I am now is someone diluted, half-existent. Every day the gap between my two front doors gets wider, and I have trouble staying up at night. Sleep engulfs me like the sound of raging rapids. There's this indescribeable lightness -- that means that I am not able to describe the way that I can't describe this indescribable lightness; I am left to trying to describe myself with the shape that car headlights leave on the inside of my eyelids and the pollution haze that lies all over this city, and I console myself with the hope that music will make it all right -- and it does, but only in short increments. Maybe tomorrow I will go downtown again, to Jongro, and I'll sit in a corner trying to take pictures like Cartier-Bresson. At the end of the day I'll ride the subway lamenting at the fact that, No, I cannot compress the infinite into a moment, isolate the frame, take photos like a painter; maybe I'll lose my pen, change a roll to black-and-white, listen to music, believe in bus rides, think about streetlights.

On these buses and subways I will think about Korea's hedonism and wonder about things like what Westernization is to Modernization and the paradoxical state of knowing things too well to write about them;

Something doesn't make sense, like the battery graph on my laptop telling me that I have twelve minutes left, at this time in the morning, and if I humor myself I can imagine that I can feel the ghost of a dawn arriving, these phantom flirtations of morning..

made a friend with a
turtle its seriously the
most beautiful thing

Little Tony, as Chris and Andrew are calling him, is a living, breathing, squalling miracle of life.

You see, five years ago, after her fourth son Jeremy was born, Christina had a tubal ligation. Then she met Andrew, who had had a vasectomy several years before they met. They were both in solid agreement that no more kids was what the life plan called for.

Sometimes, life doesn't agree with what it is you think you want.

I remember when Chris found out she was pregnant, she was in a panic that Andrew would be pissed off at her and maybe leave. I told her "If he's pissed about it and leaves, he's not the father you want for your baby, anyways." She told him that night, and his reaction was to pass out cold on the living room floor.

When he returned to consciousness,he told her that he guessed God had different ideas about family size than they did, because any couple who is twice sterilized and still gets pregnant is obviously meant to procreate at least this one more time. They looked forward to their son's advent with joy.

Three days ago, Chris went into labor. They lost the baby's heartbeat several hours later and performed an emergency cesarean section. Little Tony was born slightly blue, eight pounds, two ounces, and squalling mightily within moments.

While the doctor was closing her incision he took a good look around in there and said that her tubal looked solid to him, he had no idea what might have caused her to get pregnant.

I know.

Miracles didn't stop happening when the Bible was finished being written.

Miracles happen all around us, every day. Most of them are so small that we don't even notice them. How many of us really realize what a miracle it is that our hearts keep beating or our lungs keep sucking in air?

Andrew and Chris got a big miracle. A beautiful, bouncing, beloved baby boy to join Chris's four and Andrew's two.

And Little Tony is the seventh son of a seventh son.

Don't tell me there are no miracles.

Welcome to the world, Anthony Andrew Quintanilla. You're beautiful.