What's Wrong?

The question you ask is, “What’s wrong?” Or, “Is anything wrong?”

How a person answers this question is the “tell” for whether he or she suffers from a fear of rejection, a fear of abandonment, or a fear of feeling worthless.

D. learned this at a seminar taught by a Vietnamese monk, which feels more legitimate somehow, than if it were taught by a white person at the Learning Annex.

We are looking at his notes, which include his drawings of three human outlines that look like depressed Keith Haring figures or sock monkeys with the stuffing leaked out of them. Each figure is decorated with concentric circles marked differently, A for abandonment, R for rejection and W for worthlessness. There is one figure with a mental condition that spells out RAW.

I’ve been asked this question several times now. The second time I answered, “With who?”

Pico Iyer once characterized the difference between Californians and New Yorkers as “being” and “doing.”

Watching TV is doing nothing.

If you read too much, that, too, after awhile, can feel like another form of consuming without producing.

In my twenties I had a greater capacity for “hanging out,” which, in retrospect, seems even more impressive seeing as how I don’t drink.

The W Type, one who fears feeling worthless, imagines doing something is the solution.

A cultural portmanteau series we call “The Asian American Experience.”

Later, standing in line at the market for cat food, I find a frayed slip from a fortune cookie that I’ve been carrying in my wallet for what, a year:

“Idleness is the holiday of fools.”