Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I don't know why I should be so surprised, but I didn't expect to be so coldly indifferent to my parents during this visit. Recently I've been able to maintain an impressively high level of courtesy, and whenever I met them in Taiwan during their passing-through visits, I did my best to be helpful in getting them around. But this time, I just had no patience for them and just did my best to control myself not to be rude.

It's possible that because of my negative experience in a foreign country, their country, I may be childishly lashing out at them in response. They represent Taiwan to me, and all the crap I've been going through has not, at least, been mitigated by them. I'm an island unto myself on that island and it means diddly that my ancestry comes from there or that I have relatives there.

Backlashing against Taiwan, I'm in the U.S. now, my home country, and unlike in Taiwan, when I say something I expect people to understand the words that are coming out of my mouth, and when other people speak, I expect to understand with no interpretation of language in the way. My parents don't fit that bill.

After I got off the plane in San Francisco on the way here, I found myself engaging in whatever little conversation I could with whoever, just because I could.

In any moment they're completely innocent, of course, but considering the whole parent-child relationship spanning the years, if I'm looking for a reason to blame them for my woes, their deficiencies get magnified by the smallest thing; a wrong look, a tone of voice I don't like.

It doesn't help that I know better, that blame doesn't do any good, nor does anger or thinking I can be happy by something they do. It doesn't help that I know this thinking is negative and unreasonable. All I hope for is that no expression of the negativity or anger is expressed, and that I can just keep working at it to transform it into something else.

So my three weeks in the U.S. are just about up. I'm not caring much to go back to Taiwan. I'm just going to float. I'm just going to work on not caring. Did I care before? What's going to be different? Am I just going to fall back into the same repetitive dysfunctional habits?

I want things to be different. I want to proactively be more productive and positive, but I'm just not like that. So I can't be caring about such things.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 1 - Baby Zayden. Bottom pic 12:21 p.m. All black & whites Nikon N70, Ilford XP2 Super.

FRIDAY, JULY 3 - Taking the train to Philadelphia, transferring systems (NJ Transit to Septa) at Trenton.

Philadelphia

Sarah Rebecca

7:01 p.m. - Christopher getting creative about being photographed.

SATURDAY, JULY 4 - Philadelphia street shooting.

MONDAY, JULY 6 - Paramus Park shopping mall, New Jersey.

Edgewater, New Jersey

Grant's Tomb and Riverside Church across the Hudson.