Changming Yuan: Outbursts (3)

born in 1957, i used to feel too mentally old and too physically young for my age, but now i am feeling otherwise. i never keep a diary, but today i want to have an online journal entry to record an important night in my life.

since i went to bed around 11:30 last night, i have been burning with thinkings and, as a result, i did not get any sleep. i have had most of these ideas for quite a long time, but they haunted me so badly last night that i feel the need to release my outburst now:

- i hit upon / developed a lot of publication initiatives, intellectually:
1. east-west / sino-america / english-chinese review, a yearly online publication to begin with. a non-gov't, non-profit journal, with editorial focuses on cross-cultural issues such as political, military, cultural, diplomatic, economic, literary and folk topics;
2. w w / www yearbook. an annual online publication to start with, focusing on human wisdom;
3. poetry pacific press / pp press / yuans press. a publishing house to publish poetry online first, then chapbooks, full-length collections, and other genres of literature;
4. changming yuan, a blogsite publishing/archiving all my writings, even those to be translated from chinese into english or otherwise. currently, yuanspoetry does not seem to be fitting, esp since Allen is becoming less and less active poetically as he is to attend university, majoring in commerce. or perhaps i should just change yuanspoetry into changming yuan - my chinese pen name i used when i published my first academic essay and monograph in china in 1988.

besides, i found about 10 topics to write mini-essays about in chinese, to be posted on my chinese blogsite at creaders.net; also decided upon two sub-genres of 'found verse': 'last stanzas,' and 'newspaper poems';

- i reflected upon my health condition, physically:
since childhood, i have been suffering from many symptoms of a weak heart, with my heart muscle born to be deformed or abnormally thicker. hcm as it is called and known to me now, but nothing is really confirmed. short breath,  constant dizziness, more frequent nausea, chronicle fatigue, frequent insomnia - unfortunately, i have never met a good or helpful doctor, either in china or in canada.

from head to toe, i am having too many problems: a pair of poorly-focused eyes with a troubling weak vision, chronicle tmg, occasional toothache, neck problems, frequent stiff shoulders, chronicle back pain, stomach issue, bad prostate problem, etc; nothing seems to be really normally good;

- i thought about my inner reality, psychologically:
all my life, i have been suffering increasingly from unfair and often unbearable lack of luck, love, friendship, and understanding (not to mention appreciation and recognition). lonely, isolated and totally marginalized, i strongly feel i have been overdraft mentally as well as physically, always trying to challenging myself and push myself beyond my own limits. my family, esp my wife, has been treating me as a money-making machine - now i am 99% of such a machine. as a matter of fact, there are too many paradoxes about my life as a human being - i wrote a poem listing all such major paradoxes. for instance, i always love but seldom feel loved...

strangely, this time i did not cry my heart out, not even shed a single teardrop as i probably might have, being such an emotional and sensitive guy.

i still vividly remember my first two outbursts::
1. on the chinese new year's day in 1981, while still a graduate student at tianjin normal university, i cried my heart and soul out when i spent the cold evening alone on the entire campus, crying for nearly an hour over my loss of first love, my stress from studies, my feeling of loneliness and, in particular, my worries about my future or career;

2. on the rainy evening of 6 august 2004, while climbing all by myself a hill behind our hotel during our first and so far our only family tour (to banff, alberta), i burst into tears and almost cried myself to death, as i thought about all the hardships i had been suffering, and about the meaningless life i had been leading. that was the day i began to write and later to publish poetry in english;

indeed, i feel i am too mentally young and too physically old for my age now. i am aware i could theoretically die a sudden death anytime as result of a heart failure and, instead of fearing it, i actually anticipate and welcome it, although i do wish i could live another 10 years at least so that i could do some of the things i have wanted, to write, to publish, for instance.

as Keats wished once: o for another ten years, please...