Nine

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"If you stand too close to a painting — all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail."

-- Dead Like Me: Nighthawks (Season 1, Ep 12)

Eight. Dead.

What a coincidence to be meeting a dad trying to teach his son to spin tops.

What a rarity.

I just had a chat recently about childhood games, as in the ones that don’t involve buttons. The ones that are powered by nothing but a little ingenuity and kiddish egos. The ones that don’t try to add your dexterity or gold, nor unlock any new skills that make you feel vaguely awesome. Until the battery runs out, anyway.

He told me about kite-flying, and how his dad would balance the wing-tips with ribbons. I never knew that about kites. He told me about the game galah-panjang, and how the game was played with such intricate strategy. I never knew there was such a game. He told me about playing with marbles, and how the marbles would actually break if they were rough enough (and being boys, they usually were). I never had enough marbles to know what to do with them. He told me about spinning tops, and how he and his friends would try to wreck (or “tikam”) each other’s tops by spinning it with a certain force and angle. I never knew a seemingly harmless game of top-spinning has such a, ahem, twist.

What did I do with my childhood?

Perhaps my obsession with living-life-to-the-fullest is a sort of compensation – for times lost, and laughter unknown.

At least he promised to show me all of them. Recaptured innocence seems more appealing than premature maturity.

*****

If I may be allowed to make an honest observation, living life to the fullest can wear you thin.

(Now, now, put down that pitchfork before you hurt someone. Unnecessary excitement is never healthy. I promise that I’ll climb into the meat grinder by myself as soon as I explain my seemingly obnoxious statement.)

With only a year in the States, I sometimes feel like I’m not doing enough with my seconds. What do you mean I cannot write/feed/chauffeur/scream on a roller coaster/photograph the streets of San Francisco/cheer to a gig/skydive/sing lullabies/comb through the motherlode of movies that is Netflix/take a road trip/calm nightmare scares all at once? There ain’t no limit to the “multi” in multi-tasking, innit?

And therefore, every weekend, I promised myself that I would do something new. Something exciting. Something American.

I’d like to say that my weekends have been fulfilling. I feel quite proud of dragging myself out of the room before the lumpiness settled, and See and Did things. Sometimes it isn’t worth it. There were some things I saw and did which were, really, nothing to shout about. But at least I felt like I lived.

Feeling alive, however, was another matter altogether.

This weekend, the blues caught me by surprise. I could feel the lethargy in my body, the heaviness of my heart. It wasn’t as if something happened. I just didn’t feel like doing anything. And heaven forbid, I did nothing.

And then I realise, boy, am I tired.

I may eat my words several months from now, but I actually had fond thoughts about going home, to recuperate from this… pressure, for want of a better word, of always having to Experience the World. I’m not complaining, no. It’s a privilege to be living your dream.

I’m just a little worn out from trying to keep up with that privilege.

It’s probably a personality flaw. I have lots of them.

This weekend, I just lazed. And I thought about all the things that I didn’t do. I didn’t go to the Mardi Gras parade in San Francisco. I didn’t work on my Challenge for this month. I didn’t wash the car. I didn’t take my Smena Symbol out for a stroll.

But gosh, it’s too darn depressing to measure life by what you didn’t do, no matter what Mark Twain said. So I decided to think about what I did, instead.

I Dreamt, and that was doubtlessly the best. I napped, and it was sheer bliss.

But the most significant thing, I suppose, is that I fell in love with the world again.

And all I really did was just watched the tv series Dead Like Me, and cried.

(I realise, that could actually be my achievement for the weekend: shedding tears for a story well-told. Sure, I didn’t set out to do it. But heck, life is too short to spend the days making the goal. Sometimes, making up the goal as you go along would have to do.)


Dead Like Me is, essentially, a dark comedy about an uninspired, sulky 18-year-old Georgia being killed by a flying toilet seat (as freak accidents go, this one isn’t even the most bizarre one in the show). However, she doesn’t have the convenience of being dead. She got recruited as an undead – a grim reaper. Yes, “a”, because she is not alone in her duties to escort newly-expired souls to their Destinations. Along with an eclectic and experienced bunch of undeads, who have to hold day jobs or a life of crime to survive and squat in dead people’s houses (grim reapers are not paid because it’s considered public service), Georgia, as Netflix wrote, “doesn't quite know what she's doing -- or even why she was chosen for the job in the first place. But soon, she grows to recognize the poetry in her purpose.”

In short, it’s totally my kind of TV series.

I’m a sucker for humanization of the supernatural and mythical. That is why I’m so hooked on Pratchett’s Discworld – be it dragons or trolls or dwarves or vampires or werewolves or witches or humans or Corporal Nobbs (who has papers to prove that he’s human), everyone is just trying to live the best way they know how, and even if that involves selling you Dragonland souvenirs or counterfeits (or in Corporal Nobbs’ case, rummage about in your pockets), then so be it.

The motley crew of soul escorts in Dead Like Me is no different – they do laundry, smuggle drugs in their asses (it went horribly wrong) to pay the rent, order the cheapest things on the menu and keep pets because that’s the closest they can have for a friend. They also have to put up with the Rules of being a grim reaper, i.e. no messing about with fate. Ask Georgia; she tried.

In other words, being an undead has all the peskiness of being alive, with the added disadvantage that you can’t have contact with your loved ones, lest they can’t deal with the excitement. There are Inconveniences that you can’t run away from, like money issues, and Rules, and human relationships and well, death.

But as Episode 5 “Reaping Havoc” showed, even if you can’t run away from these certainties, you can find poetry in them – in money issues, in Rules, in relationships, and yes, even Death. It’s not that hard. I mean, it’s gotta be easier than finding poetry in, say, Taxes, at least.

So a grim reaper left a post-it note on the door of a victim’s sister. It says,
“M.J.’s okay.
:), Jesus.”

And a grim reaper buried a lone, old woman whose children do not visit her anymore, even though she can be haughty, when she’s not making him smirk.

And a grim reaper shut down one building’s electricity, so that the alarm clock of a resident – who had remained jolly and kind even though the undead wrote him a parking ticket in her day job – would not ring, and therefore he would not wake in time to meet his ill fate.

And two grim reapers watched a man having the time of his life doing an Irish dance on the bar table before his time was up. One of the grim reapers took a last polaroid of the man smiling in mid-dance, just like she did to every other soul she escorts, before they died.

And I watched all this, with tears streaming down my cheek, and found myself stubbornly believing that this is what the world is. A world I can really love; a world where everyone is just, really, human.

And because the Bible said that everyone is created in God’s likeness…

... therefore, maybe everyone is just, really, God.

*****

I can do with more weekends like this.