This is it. It better be it. December 2010. The finish line. I entertain the idea of pushing the date a month further into January 2011 in order to create the greatest amount of time between the fact and the realization by people that something's not right.
I can't believe I've even gotten here from the August attempt. There was that mourning period of failure, then the Tibet trip announcement, then the Tibet trip. Then the parents' visit, and the Taiwan east coast trip to mitigate waiting for the parents' visit, and now waiting for the parents' December visit.
The wait is hard, the day-by-day is hard. I seriously think if not for this waiting, I would have made a second attempt already. Maybe even today. That would have been good. The "something's wrong" for other people, insignificant people, really, would be my "something's right".
The day-by-day hard is twisting my head around the lovely thought of ending my life and the explosion of loving life and all the little things that make life on this planet such a unique and wonderful thing.
And my parents continue to ruin it by calling more frequently since that fortune teller told them something was seriously wrong. Their inane phonecalls. While they were here expressing concern, I tried to tell them flat out that even if there was something wrong, they shouldn't worry about it because they were not the people who could do anything about it. They are unqualified to do anything positive in my life. They are disqualified.
The worst thing they could do is think they can have a positive effect, but as delusional as they are, as parents, they think they know it all, they think they know me, they think they can help. They don't and they can't.
Not long ago they kept ending phone calls with "...as long as you are happy", after which I noted they never asked if I was happy. And since then, they have, but they are not people I'm going to ruminate about happiness because they have no idea what happiness is. What they think is happiness is actually, to me, suffering in the profoundest sense.
Saying that, it also occurs to me that they have spent most of my life unintentionally making me unhappy, in effect guaranteeing that I would be unhappy. When I wanted to find a job during summer vacation while in high school, they said "Don't work, study". Thus robbing me of real life experience to engage in the world. Did I study by not working? No.
When I started getting into music as a teenager, they said, "If you want to do music, that's fine, but you have to be like Michael Jackson".
And then when I explored the monastic path, they said, "If you want to be a monk, that's fine, but you have to be like the Dalai Lama" (this didn't have any real effect on me because I was an adult and I could see their idiocy for what it was. I just mention it to point out their adherence to idiocy).
But when it came to law school, they said, "It doesn't matter if you go to the worst law school or get the lowest grades, just go to law school".
And law school is always a reminder that after college I went to Japan to try to find my way, and they stymied that to the best of their ability. There are so many things that if they hadn't done, I would be what they want me to be now, which is "happy".
They were rotten parents. It was unintentional, but all they had to do was look a little deeper into life than making money. They still don't. And I may still sound bitter about them. But there was that unilateral truce that I declared in August 1996, and I abide by it. But to some extent, when there's no closure, you have North and South Korea, you have an armistice, you have a cease-fire, but you don't have a peace treaty.
Their inane phonecalls now only serve to infuriate me to some extent. But actually they just bore me. They bore me by their sheer lack of knowledge of me, they bore me by their futile attempts to "help". They bore me because the obvious is right in front of their faces and still choose to ignore it.
I dig deep for compassion for them. I don't have to dig deep to believe my suicide will be good for them. To me, that's obvious, easy; and a terrible reason for suicide, but fortunately, it's not my reason. My reason is my own path, not theirs. If they can take something good out of it, good, fine, I'm glad. If they don't, c'est la vie. I didn't expect them to with their mundane, normative way of living this extraordinary life. But I hope.
I twist my head around the lovely things in life, the things that I'm currently loving. But even in that regard, I'm just an observer. Life is still just a spectator sport, and I don't need to be here for all the wonderfulness to go on, even with the negativity, the haters and the shit.