Quoc’s Web Journal

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Just a blurb… This is my facebook update tonight at 11:10P:

“Quoc Lam’s heart aches in the most wonderful way… The ache is because I care for someone… This is what my spiritual malady worked so hard to destroy… I claim this as a victory for the work I’ve put into recover this and your unconditional love to experience it…  Today I am aching deeply and deeply grateful for it.”

My update earlier in the day was of me “learning the rules of engagement for dating, intimacy and just romance.. Ugh!!!  Seems as if everyone write their own book…  I am sooo confused…  Blargh!!!  I am glad to learn how to do this… I am 34 and barely learning to date in a healthy way…”

Again, I couldn’t be more grateful to have these intense feelings and have a host of friends I get to fall back on to help me… My friends have supported me unconditionally to walk with integrity and to reinforce the wonderful tools I have… My friend Joe reminded me just to be myself and claim my authentic self and share that with others… If others do not/cannot appreciate what I have to offer, then they clearly are not deserving of the love/care and support that I have to offer…  I just can’t help but feel sad that a year and half relationship I have unofficially had with this guy may just come to a crashing halt because I stirred the pot by expressing interest in taking it to the next level…

Sigh… Dating is sooo interesting and complicated!!!

Quoc

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Sooo… It’s Saturday evening, November 21, 2009… I just got home from a voluntary additional work day…  I am laying on the cool tiled kitchen floor of my studio… I just cracked open a can of Fancy Feast “Turkey and Giblets Dinner” for my cat…  I am on my stomach with my right cheek hugging the cool tiled floor… I am about 3 inches from my cat watching him eat…  I’ve always been a nerd like that; intrigued by little idiosyncrasies like how cat’s eat… I watched as the mouth and tongue worked in tandem with each other to lap up the food and swallow it down… I never realized that cats don’t have molars; consequently, they don’t chew… They swallow…  I watched as he impatiently bit chunks of the pate meal in his bowl; clearly he wasn’t lapping up his food quickly enough…  If one didn’t know how well I feed this cat, you’d think he’d been starving for days!  LOL… If you take a look at him though, his low hanging belly shows how well fed this cat is…  He glanced over at me just a few time; his focus and attention was on the feast that sat before him…

As he filled his stomach to the point of satiation, leaving just a few morsels left for later to snack on, he turned towards me licking incessantly to the left and right of his face and whiskers to clean off the scraps that were stuck onto him…  He meowed a couple times… I hear his little purring engine rumble… I turn onto my stomach with my head propped up against the refrigerator door; the door is a very poor choice for a pillow…  He climbs on top of my belly and waits for me to pet him… He knows me too well, that I wouldn’t be able to resist stroking his soft thick coat of fur; that my will would buckle under his loving and inviting purrs and his little wimpering meows communicating to me how much he appreciates what I am doing for him… He doesn’t like looking at my in close proximity for any lengthy period of time…  As a matter of fact, most of the time, when he is sitting on my belly/chest while I pet him, he is turned away… I try to block his tails swaying back and forth… His fuzzy medium haired tail smacks my face as he continues to enjoy the long slow strokes up and down his back…

BK tells me when he is ready to be pet and when he is done… With a final couple purrs and a curt little meow, he jumps off me and with a very proud swagger, walks away from me… LOL… I can’t help but love my cat…

I had a little moment spending this time with my cat…  It started as my request for an additional Staff Member for work to support my program was challenged with a request for further justification as to why I needed another Staff… Goodness, the fact that I am working on Saturday and that it’s my 7th day in a row at work; doesn’t that say something about the amount of work this program calls for to be run successfully?  Sigh…  I drove home huffing and puffing with indignation and confusion as to why my request was turned down… Suffice it to say, I talked myself down from the angry emotional ledge…

Furthermore, halfway home, I found myself wondering why my mind is still at work when I am NOT AT WORK!!!  Yes, part of the reason why I am spending time at work is because I care about the work I do and the program I manage; furthermore, I do indeed enjoy the work I do!!!  I get paid to be of service and build amazing karma points!!!  The work I do enhances the quality of life for those touched by my teachings… I am very very humbled and honored to get to have the job I have…  I kept reminding myself that the other part of being a good Manager and a role model of an employee is to not bring work home with me; to remind myself that life is not about work, work, work… That “working” on taking care of myself is just as important as it will help me recuperate and rejuvenate for the new day that welcomes me at work…  I worked very hard constantly redirecting myself away from work each time my mind started weaving back to thinking about work…  I thought about going home to my cat and cleaning up my home some more and making a warm and loving home that is at least as inviting as coming home to a comfy hotel room…  I thought of being greeted by my cat… I thought of the wonderful meal I was gonna get to enjoy with friends tonight at a fancy restaurant in Downtown Los Angeles… I thought about the wonderful drive I was taking home in the crisp cool evening air outside of the car and how nice it felt on my legs as it was met with the constant warm breeze blowing from the car heater…  A PERFECT COMBINATION…

So, what does this have anything to do with the title of today’s blog?  Back to me laying on the kitchen floor as my cat walked away… I thought about what my cat needed for him to be happy…  I imagined myself in his thick coat of fluffy fur… BK needs the following to be happy:

- a home that is familiar enough for him to feel safe, but spacious enough for him to explore and quench is innate curiosity

- delicious and tasty food that fills his belly

- someone (in my cat’s case, anyone) that is very loving and provides him with lots of attention and care and appreciation… verbally, physically and emotionally

- plenty of opportunities to play and explore the the world he lives in no matter how small it is… He manages to find new ways to appreciate and play with in the mundane and familiar home he’s lived in for the past 6 months

- and of course sleepy time… For him to sleep so soundly, he must have deep serenity (soundness of mind)…

My cat teaches me the lesson of wanting the things I have and appreciating those things that I own today; rather than taking them for granted and continuing to yearn and want more and more and sit on the perch of entitlement…  When I look at a glass half filled with water… Do I see it as:

- Half empty

- Half full of water

- Half full of sustaining water and half full of life giving air

Depending on how I see things is directly proportional to my level of happiness…  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh… It’s nice to find a moment in my incredibly rich and busy life to pause and do what I’ve loved for sooo long, blog in this journal… For 9 years now, I have maintained this blog… With a busier life and my sister introducing me to facebook matched with the convenience of accessing facebook and status updates on my blackberry, I have become more and more removed from blogging… It’s not that I don’t have time to sit down and blog eventhough I know there is a degree of truth to how much more busy my life has become; rather, the priorities have finally changed…

Those very dreams that I had of living a life rich enough that I wouldn’t have time to document it on a daily basis is here… My life is filled with miracles happening constantly and I have chosen to say yes to almost every moment I have been dealt and blessed with…  The desire to travel more often on the job is now coming true as my job is allowing me to do more and more traveling and mixing up the bag of routine of being stuck in the office all the time… Getting to live up my name as “To Unify and oversee a country” by teaching people counseling skills in communicating with others in a non-judgemental, culturally sensitive way and providing health education and harm reduction approaches via motivational interviewing techniques and application of transtheoretical models of behavior change does indeed allow me to help make this world a better place one training at a time… I am in a place where I stand more proud and comfortable than ever as a healthy, HIV positive, Gay, Asian-American, sober man who has sooo much to contribute to the world is by this very statement a miracle in the making…

These are but a few thoughts that freely flow out of me as I sit here momentarily in pause of the pursuit of happiness to acknowledge how truly blessed and happy I am…  I wish you all the continued opportunity to explore and navigate life and grow with each passing day…  I wish you all happy thanksgivings and hope that you have many thanks for the blessings we have in life…

Many thanksgivings for my blessed life,

Quoc Lam

quoclam@gmail.com

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Hey folks… I have been grappling with what to do with this website as I am not sure it continues to serve the purpose I had in mind for it since it’s accidental inception when my friend Brad so generously bought this domain as a birthday gift for me about a decade ago!  I can’t believe that about 1/3 of my life has been shared with you folks!  That is a whole lot of good, bad and uglies in the multitude of blog entries I have made…

So, I continue to pray and see if this is still a good venue to share on as I become more and more satiated by Facebook in helping me stay in touch and keep up with my friends… Most of my friends are on facebook and even some that I hadn’t anticipated meeting…

With that being said, tonight I received a HUGE heaping of spiritual goodness with my kindred spirits…  Here are a few of the learning lessons I heard tonight that really resonated with me:

1) MY INFANTILE EGO TELLS YOU TO TREAT ME SPECIAL SO I MAY FEEL NORMAL!

2) MY SEX LIFE AS OF LATE HAS MORE OR LESS DRIED UP… I HAVE BEEN HAVING SEX WITH 1 PERSON FOR QUITE AWHILE NOW… I AM MORE THAN SATIATED BY BEING WITH THIS ONE PERSON… WHAT I DO WANT IT TO DO IT MORE OFTEN WITH HIM… SO, A QUOTE I HEARD LATELY REALLY MADE ME LAUGH… PERHAPS THE REASON WHY MY WELL HAS BEEN DRY IN THIS DEPARTMET LATELY IS BECAUSE IN MY PAST LIFE, I COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY USED UP MY SEX RATIONS… I’ve taken all the booty in the past years than rationed out for me and both my neighbors in the next lifetime!    So, perhaps this is a time for me to get introspective and figure out what’s up…

3) SOMEONE SHARED THAT THEY WERE WILLING TO JUMP IN FRONT OF A TRAIN TO SAVE ANOTHER PERSON, BUT NOT WILLING TO DO THE SAME FOR THEMSELVES…  I was able to relate to that sooo much as I do have tendencies of self-sabotage!!!  That as someone with a spiritual malady with symptoms that manifests itself by hurting myself with my wounds rather than nurturing and mending the wound…

These are but some of the powerful messages I have heard lately… I have had a world of living and experiencing and growing and contributing in my life… In this given moment, I identify with the self that is abundantly blessed on sooo many different levels… I have all my spiritual needs met and thankful to resist from acting on having all my physical wants met.  I have been able to incorporate the spiritual tools set at my feet in combatting life as someone who experiences a malady of a three fold nature:

1) Spiritual = NO GOD which leaves a gaping void in my gut that creates the

2) Mental Obsession to fill with drugs/alcohol/sex/food in excess and by acting on this mental obsession it creates a

3) Physical Allergy that manifests itself not by rashes or hives, but in irresistable craving to continue acting on that unhealthy behavior that will only lead me to jails, institutions and very realistically death…

I couldn’t be more grateful to be surrounded and immersed in a culture in a time when both my “willingness” to do the work matched with “clarity” as to why I am doing th work is bringing about such HUGE blessings and awesome spiritual awakenings that is leading me to discover and recover a person within myself that I never thought possible… One who is able to be self-supporting emotionally and not need as much outside validation as well as a spirit of continued altruistic actions…

I am so blessed!!!  I hope you are just around me to get to experience life as I am living it right now… Words no longer serve that purpose… It’s more in the action and living life that I find myself of maximum service to those around me…

What do you think I should do with this website?  Think it’s time to retire www.quoclam.com?

I welcome your feedback as I continue to contemplate and pray about this….

Always in service,

Quoc

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So, it’s more like 1 year, 1 month, 1 week and 4 days… free of all mind altering substances.  And of course I would do my check in at a time when I am experiencing sadness and a heart full of tears that need to be shed and shared…

What’s going on with me?  Well, I’ve been deeply connected with my Higher Power…  I have learned a new way of living that grants me freedom from any consequences of being deceitful and dishonest…  This is incredibly new for me…  I have been waging internal battles within my mind about various different quality problems… I need to vent and share some of them…  Of course they would be in the area of finance and romance… or otherwise known as dollar or d*ck or otherwise known as money or men!

First the finance…  I am actually in the midst of making a very very mature decision…  I am doing incredibly well in my job…  It’s scary being in a position of a decision maker…  I have a supervisor that I do respect and really knows his stuff… However, he comes off very very very very condescending… Well, at least most of the time when I am around him I feel sooo inadequate!  I know he doesn’t mean it all the time; however, intentions do not change the results from a person’s actions.  Sigh…

The other side of the coin is me visiting the campus on California State University, Northridge…  I have been pondering going to Grad school for my Master’s in Social Work or Master’s in Public Health… OR BOTH!  I’ve been feeling scared, insecure, old and well… IN FEAR of what is to come and what the right decision is.  I know there is really no wrong decision here…  I can’t help but feel some sense of fear of the unknown…  And indeed FEAR is based in the future!

Now the romance… 

So, God has been very kind in allowing me to explore that part of me which I feel is more broken than any other part of my life…  Allow me to reframe, romance and intimacy with others is one area in my life that I need to work on more than any other area in my life…  Lately, I have had opportunities to explore mutual intellectual, emotional and spiritual intimacy with a couple best friends…  It’s been amazing building that up…  Then all of a sudden I got busy and they got busy and then life started happening and the things that we did and hung out on a weekly basis as we used to…  I got scared since we haven’t hung out for over 2 – 3 weeks… I know it’s just as easy and just reconnecting again and catching up with each other…  We’ll be good as new in just one visit with each other.

In the area of physical intimacy, I’ve been blessed with having 1 consistent person I have been physically intimate with for actually over a year… I am not sure if it’s been over 2 years now!  Wow!  Anyway, we’ve been doing this regular thing… Little does this person know how much he’s help build my confidence in the time.  He’s incredibly HOT…  He’s physically beautiful and I feel our sexual chemistry works really really really well!  I am sooo incredibly attracted to him.  I have not allowed it to go beyond that.  Well, recently in the past couple months, we’ve been doing more than just the fleeting get togethers followed by him leaving…  There seemed to be time spent connecting on a different level after our “fun.”  That’s lead me to have feelings for him…  I want more than just what we’ve had for a couple years…  I don’t want to jeopardize it by going beyond the parameters that have been set for us since we’ve gotten together…  I also don’t know how to reconcile the feelings I have for this guy when we do get together…  The time we’ve spent together for the lack of a better phrase has moved from down south up to my heart…  I feel we’ve been connecting on a different level…  What I do know is that I am incredibly attracted to this man.  He makes me feel incredibly attractive.  The physical chemistry we share is AMAZING!  I don’t quite know how to proceed with him…

What I want is to actually be able to hang out with this guy like a bud and go camping and do fun things like go see a show or movie every now and then…  We wouldn’t lose touch of the physical fun we’d have with each other…  I’d like to say no commitments, but isn’t what I just described what dating is about?  LOL… 

In meditation, I keep hearing the following message…  Since I have developed feelings for this individual, it’s no longer just conjugal visits I am making with this person.  It’s gone beyond that.  I need to be honest with him and share with him that I want to “date” him.  Then after courageously and honestly sharing my feelings, what I get to do is respect the decision he makes, up and including him terminating our current arrangement if “other” things disrupt what we’ve had for awhile.  The other message I receive is that there is no way I can only be friends with him because I see and feel for him more than just as a friend.  I am physically and emotionally attracted to him.  This is by definition counters what a platonic friendship is.  So, if I am not willing to continue maintaining just a physical relationiship with him, then it’s time to move on and save myself from hurting myself by continuing to experience a partial of what I keep hoping will come about…

In the area of working on building intimacy without physical intimacy…  I’ve been blessed with an opportunity to chat with a guy via a webcam who actually found me from reading this blog… We’ve been chatting for over 3 weeks now…  It’s been interesting getting to know someone who is pretty much halfway around the world…  It’s unlikely we’ll get to meet anytime in the near future… But getting to know this person in this kind of a venue allows me to get to know a person and experience mutual appreciation and correspondence with a person without the hang up of actually needing to meet someone…  So, I actually have to experience and practice all the other ways of getting to know a person without the physical stuff…  It’s been interesting…

Suffice it to say, there are going to be peaks and valleys in life… Today, coming home to my sweet and darling cat and petting him wasn’t enough…  I craved for physical attention with another human being… Sigh… 

So, betwixt missing my best friends, the stress of work and decisions that need to be made with school, and since mind altering substances are no longer an option, I am left with getting to be physically intimate with someone to be distracted… Now I haven’t even had that for a few weeks… Sigh…  Thus all these emotions coming up…

I feel fat… Out of shape… I am doing the right thing by honestly disclosing my HIV status and taking that chance of accepting rejection and being able to live with an honest life where another is just not comfortable with that…  I am living a very very courageous and new life…

I need to remember to tell my storm how big my God is rather than tell my God how big my storm is….

Q

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Hello family!  May each of us remember to celebrate and honor liberation from bondage of our personal battles in our daily lives!  What did you work hard to fight for and now get to take a moment to celebrate and honor?

Happy 4th of July all!  Make it a safe one!!!

Quoc

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So, I have been in pain in the past couple weeks…  Allow me to explain this emotional pain I have been experiencing…  I recently was gifted with an individual who sought me out as a spiritual guide…  I just willingly agreed to help him with hopes that he would receive the same opportunity at a different life as I have…  What I learned is that I can’t want “sobriety” for another person more than they want it; it simply doesn’t work that way.

I have been re-visiting my character defects of needing the person I am helping to validate me as someone who does have something to offer in helping save a life…  The truth is that I am not powerful enough to carry another person; I am only powerful enough to carry a message via my experience with hopes that the other individual will take to that and try what has worked for me and countless others…  The gift of getting to help another person is the guarantee that I get to stay sober as a result of helping another; not get them sober!

So, the past few days, this individual has verbally resolved to do whatever it takes to grow spiritually; his actions however told of a different story.  He has demonstrated lack of respect for the power of an insidious disease which wants nothing to do with spirituality as it finds spirituality poisonous and toxic!  I have been experiencing pain as a result of racking my brain in trying to get him to do what I am doing to grow spiritually… 

In calling my great-spiritual guide for help, he shared with me the following:  First and foremost to give thanks for the gift of this individual to teach me and show me the defect of characters I get to work on letting go:

1) Control = trying to control this individual when I don’t get to be controlling and make this person do anything!  I am powerless over that…  All I get is a healthy perspective of the power of this disease that separates me from a connection to spirituality and also the consequences of lack of gratitude for the help that others who have more spiritual maturity give to those in need of help.  What I get to do is pray to God to release control of that individual and just make myself available to assist him if and when he wants the solution to that very thing blocking him from the sunlight of the spirit… I ask God to help me “accept that all those in my life belong to our Higher Power and that person I am trying to help is not my personal responsibility to TEACH, CARE FOR, CORRECT OR CONTROL!  The ONLY responsibility I have to all other people is that which my Higher Power dictates for me!!!”

“THAT RESPONSIBILITY IS TO RELEASE THEM; TO LOVE THEM AND HOLD A POSITIVE FOCUS FOR THEIR HIGHEST GOOD!!!  I ask God to take full and complete care of them.”  What I get to do is model what it is to be a spiritually fit mature and wonderful man named Quoc with hopes that will be attractive enough for them to want what my Higher Power has graced me with.

2) Need for validation…  I shared with my great-spiritual guide that this person’s lack of action and follow through makes me feel ineffective and a bad spiritual guide in turn.  He shared with me that this issue is not about the person I am helping; rather, it’s all about me and my need this person’s “success” to give me validation that I am a good spiritual guide and have something to offer.  I get to ask God to remove this need to seek outside validation in turn for internalized pride and to seek that self-validation from within and from being a good role model and carrying the message despite the successes or failures of any around me.  I get to carry the message and remember that God does not do to me or do for me; GOD SHINES THROUGH ME…  God gets to shine through other people if they choose to let God shine through them.  When I am trying to reflect that light shining from others, it’s but a mere fascade and light from them and not God radiating from within myself!

I had such a powerful moment in hearing these things… So God, I give thanks that you brought this person in my life to help me identify my defects of needing to control and to need validation from others.  I ask that you remove the desire to control others and want of validation of others in return for PRIDE for the work that I have done in growing spiritually within myself… I ask that you remove my need to control other people and do what I think is best for them.  Please do not remove this person from my life until that person has taught me what I am here to learn from them!

The other unresolved parts of my life are this deep sense “grief” revisited for the loss of my Mom…  Mom’s 4 year anniversary of her passing is coming up on the 26th of June… I can’t believe it’s been 4 years already!!!  I can’t help but yearn and want to lay and sit back lazily on that couch in Bellflower and watch TV while the sweet delicious aroma of home cooked chinese/vietnamese food permeates the home… I would hear the clang of Mom’s cooking utensils against her oversized cast iron wok…  You can hear the sizzle of hot water and oil as it hits the hot metal as delicious vegetables and meats are instantly cooked as hot water, oil and food meat the searing hot wok…  These are the things I miss… My birthday is coming up in August…  I want to wake up to Mom surprising me with my annual bowl of soup filled with a chicken leg and noodles for long life and scallions to keep me clever…  I miss the smell of oil of olay that mom puts on her face and skin walking around the house after taking a shower… I miss the especially clean aroma that Mom gets the laundry (especially the bedsheets and pillowcases)… I can never reproduce what she created…  Sigh…

Then, I sit her feeling like a big tub of lard from many months of lack of exercise while continuing to pay month after month of my gym membership…  My stomach has finally umbrella’d over all my pants… This includes my fat pants!!!  It’s tragic to think that someone like me who stands 5′5 has gone from a waist size of less than 28″ over six years ago would surpass 32″ at present day!  I feel and look as unhealthy as ever…  Instead of challenging that self-disgust with action, I meet these self-deprocating thoughts and feelings by stuffing myself with more food matched with apathy…

In the last month, I just realized that I have also been stuffing my feelings by aimlessly spending money without regard to my income matching the expense… Goodness knows I still have thousands to pay off from my car repairs made back in January is it?  It is going to take incredible frugal spending for me to financially break even by December of this year…. This didn’t include the surprising additional thousand dollars I spent this past month.  I mean, WOW!!!  I really was spending as discreetly as possible but giving myself a chance to have a little fun in the past month…. How easy money is spent by me…  Sigh…  And this is without any other expenses from vices such as smoking cigarettes or eating out too often!!!  I am just bumfuzzled as to how quickly money bleeds out from my own pocketbook at any given moment…

So, here I sit concluding this blog so that I may commence upon a goal to assess my current financial standing and how to adjust my budget to pay off all debt as quickly as possible so that I incur the minimal amount of interest from the loans on my credit cards… I also am trying to incorporate what Suzie Orman suggested as an 8 month emergency cushion… I always thought it was 3 months… 8 months of emergency funds is indeed a much more realistic and safe cushion to fall back on if I should get in trouble and lose my job… Goodness forbid that happen aye?

Would be nice to make more money… I know my value is worth more than twice or triple what I am currently earning.  Now, how do I get creative in realizing that internal feeling of worth?

Before I go on babbling some more… Let’s stop and get my current budget in order and on-track to being balanced…  I still continue to share gratitude for your continued love and support… I know some of you who read it, but the remainder of the 100 or so blog hits from you folks every other week, I still am totally clueless…

Ciao,

Quoc