Hold Those Eyeballs Tight

Hold those eye balls tight. Don’t let them stray away.

As an East Asian, small talk is not my culture. Cultivated by gatherings of different groups of people is not an easy playground to navigate. On top of the lacking the practice — weather talk, political correctness, the lip service of the compliment — I don’t feel the conversations a satisfied one after the party with only these.

Tell me your dark little naughty bits of thoughts. I love to hear your delusional dreams — the one you feel shy to even write in your journal, because you don’t want to embarrass yourself, in case you never make even the first step.

Let’s not bore ourselves with your goody-goody-good, politically correct, judgmental comments.

Hold those eye balls tight. Don’t let them stray away.

The judgmental opinion or comment about others is, to me, the guard we put up in front of ourselves to try not to get the judgmental comment from ourselves. It makes us conservative, makes our worldview narrow and closed-minded, makes me say, ‘Oh, good to see you again, there’s my cousin, I say hi. Toodles.’

I understand that your new separation from your partner is still raw. You put the good face on, and the voice a bit erected. That’s the guard, to hold the emotions from leaking to someone who sees you only at the gatherings like this. I honour that.

Tell me the process of your preparation for the concert, as a pianist. How do you decide on the songs you play. Tell me in the details that only you know.

But skip the peacock costume to make yourself fancier — that makes me look for the flaws in your story and want to disengage already.

I hear you covering all possible concerns, worries, saying that’s love — all the things you hear and watched over and over again from the Hallmark movies, with ‘let me know whatever you need.’

I start wondering about myself first. ‘Why am I annoyed by this good person’s intention? She’s worried about me. Telling me she will help me with whatever I want. Am I tainted?’ This is not a comfortable feeling. I don’t want to feel this about myself. Therefore I can’t develop the deeper connection with this person.

Then I see what the person is doing. ‘She’s sitting on the throne of the nicest person/girl! She is guarding that throne with her life. She wouldn’t let anyone be a more caring person than her. That’s why I am annoyed. Not because of what she said — because of what the concerns and worries are wearing!’

Hold those eye balls tight. Don’t let them stray away.

‘How are you?’ ‘How is your life?’ Is this the best conversation opener? That reads like ‘I don’t know your life at all, I don’t rememeber anything about your life. Did we even meet, and I’m not interested to know about it either. I can’t wait to sit with my phone, watching someone talking about their rescued dog.’

You are explaining things you watched on your phone for too long, as if you’re telling me, ‘how much I know is insane!’

‘How are my eyeballs?’

I want to know what you did when your children were in overnight camp for a month. I want to know what, and how much more protein you are eating to make your body feel stronger than last year. I want to know what it is like now your children are starting to live independently. I want to know what you do and feel when the hot flashes coming up over and over again? What is your husband’s funny reaction about this? And it would be nice to be asked once in a while, ‘How was your oyster shucking experience in Prince Edward Island? How many did you eat?’

If you project your judgmental comment, covering all the boxes of worries, tree-hugging love and world peace on for only your people — my eyes will stray away to look for my invisible cousins to say hi.

“Pardon me. My cousin just arrived.”

It would be nice to see your sliver of interest in my life sometimes. ‘I dreamt of the chocolate cake you made the other day! How did you make it?’

Then I share my recipe with you.

Here it is.