circus animal

This house is full of poison.

I think this unfailingly at some point every time I come home. Temper Temper. What a beast it is! I used to revel in its shiny scales and feathers, but now it seems more like a tired creature of the circus, too bored to turn more tricks and too proud to retire behind the frayed, faded ropes.

Rearing its head, one inch off the ground and then two inches, circle once over the tent taunting its masters, one foot above them all and then two feet, raucous peal of laughter, a smirk and then

flight.

You know what the best thing about flight is? Pure, unrestrained freedom. The moment you unleash anger. That is what it feels like. Untethered by any sort of rationality or pretenses, it's the most joyous destruction. The sweep upwards. The uncontainable glide. The noiseless dive. All this I know very well, because I'm forced to watch it from the hopelessly mundane perspective of the ground. Every single time, I watch with a slight fascination and overwhelming repulsion.

The culminated crash back to me is always the most thrilling. Twenty feet away now, and then ten feet, the momentum it carries is like that of a freight train's, two feet and then one foot and then two inches and then one. The soundless spectacle finishes with a much too loud note from the crash cymbals. Whatever else Temper has going for it, nothing beats its theatrics.

**

struggles of dorian gray

I haven't written in here for a while, mainly because...I don't know. There isn't much turmoil in my life right now. And my writing preys on diseased emotions best, is that a little twisted? Happiness, contentment, guilt, they all breed a lot of silence, though the last is easiest to spell out.

So let's talk about guilt. Let's talk about all the times you swore you'd never be a certain way. That's for the shallow and the ones who believe in fairy tales. But you know so much better, and you are much much superior, and you'd be above it all, you swore and swore and swore to yourself, wearing that half invisible sandwich board of self-righteousness proudly.

It's like when you watch a movie and the moment before the hero shows up, no one stands up to do the brave thing at all, and you think, I would do that. I would stand up from behind that chair. I would beat that guy in the red cape to it. But then, if you take a little longer to think about it instead of getting caught up in the sweeping entrance of Clark Kent, you begin to doubt you'd ever straighten your spine at all.

This is what most guilt-ridden things boil down to. Bravery, none of it, not enough of it, not the right kind of it. Breathe, Pause, Exhale, Drop the second person mask now.

I am not brave enough to do it, I fear how it would look, how the silent judgments of each and every stranger would gush out from their eyes, how the monstrosity of the shallow masses would tower over me. I'm too afraid to face it all. And here's the truly twisted thing. I know with certainty this cowering will age into a regret, because hey, I don't believe in fairy tales like them, and I know Clark ain't coming. But I stay behind that chair anyway. Regret is a much more familiar enemy than the masses. And so a much more tolerable one.

**

outgrowing

I stumbled upon some saved conversations of what started past trysts, and promptly closed them after twenty-some lines. Oddly, a huge smile was bubbling up inside me as I read, which is a weird reaction to embarrassment. I can only attribute this to the fact that I have grown sufficiently out of that version of myself that I no longer feel affiliated with her, and thus I can laugh at these mistakes with a wise shake of the head. Or maybe it's because the partner-in-crime is no longer in my life, nor was he ever in any significant way, which means, among other things, not only no unexpected reminders from sightings in day-to-day life, but also no sudden recollections that make me squeeze my eyes shut against my will.

I spent a lot of blog posts about this particular incident, partly due to timing and partly due to the above-mentioned lack of knowledge, which made room for idealization. I spent a lot of time fantasizing how the story's extensions might play out, but reading the ignition of the whole thing, I realize that it might be best left as a full movement in itself. If he came back, he'd come back with these memories of the nonsensical and silly things I've said, and though I just said I have no problems recounting such things, I have no desire to know that there's someone else who could recount them as well.

**

perspectives of the militia

Regarding my last post, I can't tell if it was crafted with an underhanded move of denial or not. But that's not my main concern right now, if weightier feelings were to surface later, they'd, of course, be dissected with the due obsession I give everything. But "right now" is dominated with a slight frustration at the too-familiar sine curve I've found myself on.

"Bad Luck", that's how someone identified it to me. For general conversations in the generic bubbly air of coffee shops, "bad luck" suits just fine. But I get the feeling it's not just fine, not for the person who coined the term and not for me, who nodded in consensus. I think we feel like we should take responsibility for it. I think agency is bursting to charge forth in front of us, plant its stance resolutely, and announce: "this is somehow because of you."

"Because of your ways", it'll say, with the kind of tough love a general reserves for his fleet, "because of how you look, because of what you think." I think it'll say this with sharply clipped syllables, no mincing of the words spared. I think it'll march away with too loud clicks of its heel. I think it'll leave behind a trail of dust and shame hovering over my face, taking the veil of the "bad luck" argument with it. I think it'll do all of this if I let myself slip into the crutch of excuses. So I don't. I think it'll show no mercy regardless. And I'm right.

**

re-education

I feel like I haven't written in here for a while, at least not personal things. Even though I really wanted to record them somewhere, I'd stopped myself for fear of whom my audience might constitute. However, I think my desire to pour memories into words is outweighing the apprehension.

There were, of course, escapades that made great material for lighthearted gossip. They provide great release but evoke very little emotional unveiling for me. Then came the major plotline of the week, which, at this point, has become such a familiar pattern I hardly think it deserves yet another rehashing. My mind seems to feel the same way, as it has mostly vacillated between the realms of indifference and fatigue since. I sort of just feel...exhausted, not at the specific situation but the fact that an encore was not something I was looking for.

On a practical level, the timing is impeccable. The let down came at the tailwind of a letting go, molding my reaction into one of almost detached interest rather than a melodramatic internal affair. On the other hand, I almost miss the exquisite pangs that accompany struggling for something I care about. It's being a really long time since I really felt anything of such magnitude. Maybe not even in three years. And while the fluffy stories are fun enough, I can't help but feel like I have missed something crucial in my reformed education.

**

nostalgia

“Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed!”
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

I don't know if this is true. On one hand, does it even count as nostalgia if you've never had it? On the other hand, I certainly know what Pessoa might be gesturing towards. I too, had glimpses and ghosts of things and people I could have "had", yet they could not quite make it into the definitive realm called existence. These things I indeed have great nostalgia about, if it can be called as such. But I personally do not count them so. They are usually too diluted with fantasy and falsity to qualify for true, grounded nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a gritty thing. Not light on its feet nor painted over with too-bright colors. Everything is as is. All the unpleasant details. The smoke in the room the first time you poured your heart out. The chilling raindrops that fuzzed your vision after a homecoming. The melting makeup at the end of the night when you get your heart's desires. All of these you remember, and here's where nostalgia's sucker punch's going to get you: despite all that, all the smoke and the messiness and the imperfections, you still want those moments back, blemishes and all.

**

pearl harbor

I don't know why sometimes people break down over the smallest things. Given my drive to place logic into every crevice of reality, sudden meltdowns are not permitted in my equations. Imagine a foreign feeling suddenly envelopes you in some way, and you have no idea what caused it. What could this mean? For one thing, it means it could happen again. For another, you would not know when it would happen. And finally, you would not know how to prevent such things. Imagine having no such control over your own self, a thing that should be most immune to such incomprehension.

I just read a short story inspired by alcoholism. The narrator goes through the same sense of lack of control. The only difference is that she is too drunk in her narrative to care, so the reader cares doubly for her. It's easy for me to do so, because I can lay a concise solution out on the ironing board, waiting for her to try it on.

Such tactics cannot be used on things whose roots remain unearthed. I suppose the medicine is somehow embedded in the very process of physical release, but I don't just want a reactive patch-up. Not knowing would mean no armor to iron, no armor to put on, and consequently, no defense against the very first moment of the blow. No matter how instantaneously the pain recoils, it's always the unpredictability that hits the hardest.

**

sources

Can I just vent that I really really REALLY do not believe in a supposed "friendship" that consists of no time together? It just doesn't work. People have all kinds of grandiose ideas about how abstract concepts can subsist on abstract fuel. Love, friendship, grief, none of them have to be material based!

Well, I'm calling bullshit. Their sources of subsistence are petty and tangible and necessary. If it's not some physical thing, then at least time, or visible effort, will be needed. This is how all these great concepts unravel--you take them for granted, justify to yourself how they don't need to be watered regularly, and turn your back on them, empty water can in hand, for one too many days.

You know how the most spoiled, fragile, delicate flowers are also the most beautiful? Pause from reading this line and think of the most exquisitely, deliciously, PAINFULLY beautiful flower you can imagine.

Now think of a cactus.

You're right, a cactus, with its super efficient needles, does not need watering at all. So go feast your eyes on a cactus. Because I'm done waiting for your water can to come back.

**

candles, revisited

Another night marked with candles, so now, yet another time to reflect on them. The image of warm yellow flickers is really comforting to me. They light just enough of the dark and are kind enough to leave the rest alone. Generosity rules this bunch--who bestow just the right amount of glow upon their mesmerized audience.

Of course, their biggest asset is still the associations they carry, with wishes, with celebration, with loved ones, all of which give a similar glow to the beholder, no? Hope for what you may have. Gratitude for what you do have. And support for achieving all that you have. There is a reason why these associations have the same effect in our insides as candles do in an ordinary room.

When Prometheus gave us fire, the gods punished him for giving mankind too powerful a tool. Greeks dubbed his gift the "means of life". And let's read this description more metaphorically than it was perhaps intended (like how we do with Septembers), a flame uncontrolled indeed has great potential to destroy, but maybe that's precisely why it renders life so apparent and visible to us.

In light (pun intended) of its power, I suppose it's not at all surprising what a simple flicker is capable of--to illuminate what we need to flourish, ignite what we were afraid of starting, and perhaps brighten again what we have left to gather dust.

**

love the way you lie

The prime of your life is for making mistakes, right? There's also something in there about learning from them, but I don't have that part down at all. All my chronicled mistakes. They are the same. Same source. Same actors that merely put on different masks during intermission. Same climax. And of course, same dénouement. The unraveling is so familiar I can see in my mind's eye how strings will fall away from the ball before it even rolls from me.

It used to be a very gung-ho process. Learn from this non-learning. A great tagline. There's even something vaguely socratic about it. How perfect. How appropriate. Then all the lessons, all the hope, self-destructs by the next act, the same way the plotlines do. You want tragedy? It's not a will vs. fate thing. It's not a fall from nobility thing. It's a refusal to change thing. Not because the gods are preventing you--in fact, nothing is barring you from the way out--but because something about yourself (ignorance? obstinacy? masochistic tendencies?) roots you to this theater that is ablaze. It's something simultaneously manipulable and not at all. It's embers fueled by tears. You want tragedy?

Come into the flames.

**

edges

There's this new show called my generation. Don't you feel like doing a show like that? Go back to high school? I suppose that's the allure of 10 year reunions...but I really want to go back further, middle school maybe, the wallflower. In high school I had just enough friends, enough good grades, enough quick quips and enough tenuous connections, to be lost in the shuffle, to be exceedingly ordinary. The one most extraordinary moment was the last week of high school, when my psych class taped blank sheets on our backs and wrote on anonymous nice things about each other. Then we chose one to read out loud and whoever wrote it could own up to it. One person wrote: I love your personality, seriously, I don't know what it is but I am attracted to it.

Of course I read that one out loud.

It was one of the more popular kids, kind of rebellious and never took classes too seriously. (Or as far as his asian parents would allow him to, I guess). It's incredibly shallow how much I secretly treasure that incident. Not because he was in the circle, but simply because I was in another one. Isn't it weird how extraneous players barely skimming the limits of your radius can be affected by you--and more powerfully, in turn, you by them? To be honest my effect on him has probably already washed out along with the last carefree summer before college, but the echo back to me resounds still. Not because of us or because of high school but because of something bigger, because it's a reminder that someone out there with no liability to you as a parent or friend, might presently be vaguely charmed by you. And isn't that a pleasant thought? So going back to the beginning of the post...

In our generation, where we pour our thoughts into condensed texts and behind computer screens (note the irony), where indifference rules with the iron-clad hand, where not even the most intimate act will merit anything except an awkward hello in the halls, will those moments only become more and more spare? Will we cease realize the quaint powers of charm and attraction? Will those who linger on our peripheral outlines spill over to the other side of the horizon?

**

keys

“If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don’t know. It’s what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.”
—

Don DeLillo in Point Omega

I had a similar conversation today about how there are things one knows that she will never tell out loud. Not even to her mother or the boy she is in love with or her journal. Some secrets are tantamount to the most physically impenetrable of safes. And it's not because of their precious value, but because of the value in their transaction. What happens when it is transferred to another? Will the sheer weight of them (embarrassment, shame, the heaviest of emotions) anchor down a relationship that would have otherwise taken flight? These are safes we are sure that no sliver of chance could ever peep out of. Though the thought that they represent our most accurate selves? Shudder. There will indeed be keys that allow us to know these selves, though for all but the bravest of us, they lie abandoned, faintly glittering in the shadow of our pretenses.

**

beginnings (or the illusions of)

I like the word September. I like how the syllables tumble out of my mouth as my tongue folds and unfolds. I like how no matter how loudly you say it, it invariably mellows out to a rhythmic murmur. I like how it's long but spelled just like how it sounds. Sep-TEM-Ber. This makes for great ease when spelling it on forms yet still maintaining a sense of accomplishment afterwords.

This all might be due to my birth month bias. But I don't think it's exclusively that: it's just a pretty word. It conjures up all these subtle images of slightly chilly breezes, of the first time waking up with the comforter still snuggled around you, of fresh smelling nights when the temperature, and you, teeter on some sort of change.

It's really a month of rebirth, I wonder if this intuition was weaved into the architects of the academic calendar. Or maybe I have the causal relation wrong--maybe it's really because my life has been constructed this way that I associate a pivotal quality with this month. I'd like to think it's the former; the word is too special to be borne out of term papers and three hole punched notebook shopping. Instead, I will probably continue to choose to believe in the romantic tendencies of the creators of schooling, add them to the growing list of people I photoshop and idealize, add another collision of the way things are and the way things should be to my mental revelations, add September to my box of illusions, along with other trinkets too pretty to shatter.

**

losing the self

“No one likes to have their sincerity questioned...the spontaneous act...is prized for its unimpeachable authenticity, yet the mind is fast enough that speed is no guarantor of truth. Everyone is always aware of how they look, even when they weep.”
—

Mills

This is so true. Most acts that pour out of me are tinged with self-awareness, not simply awareness of the act itself. The only times when self-awareness almost disappear into the background is when pursuing, ironically, beauty. Beauty not of the self as perceived by others, but beauty of an external something as perceived by the self. It’s the only thing that has power enough to take your breath away—and with that breath the last of you—if only for a moment. And in that exceedingly rare needle of a second, we have pure, pure sincerity. If that instant is sustained, maybe even a truly spontaneous act can be borne, such is something completely of the self, such is something utterly unpoisoned by a societal self, such is the accidental fruit of beauty itself.

**

guilt

After a careless mention last night, my mom murmured: oh that's right, your birthday's coming up. I barely registered this mis-memory. My birthdays have always been long-awaited, carefully planned, and came predictably with a cake of choice in my family (the only one that ever was--with my dad's birthday 3 days afterwards and my mom's a day after that, they always simply ate the leftovers of my festivities.)

A few years ago I would've minded my mom's atypical forgetting last night. A few years ago I did mind. For my 14th birthday, my mom was in bed with a stomachache, and no one mentioned anything as my dad dropped his work to tend to her. When I asked him about my day he snapped: we'll figure it out later, can't you see that your mom is sick? I got so mad I walked to the mall by myself and bought a quiznos sub. (Believe me, I wish I had a better story of rebellion, as this one is not only unimaginative and un-destructive, it's also just plain weird.) Then I felt terrible and nervous that I took it to-go and came right back, (Wish I was making this up...) when my dad promptly yelled at me for being so selfish.

A few months later my mom had her miscarriage. In her rage and pain I was the most terrified than I've ever been, so my dad sat me down and told me how hard it was on her. How it was her second miscarriage this year.

When was the first one? How come I didn't know?
Do you remember your mom's stomachache on your birthday? The fetus flushed out of her system then. It was a natural miscarriage.

The next year the birthday cakes resumed. And I was again the only child my parents bought cake for.

I feel a lot of guilt over my mom's miscarriages. Because of that incident. Because I think when they told me about her (second) pregnancy, beaming from ear to ear, they could tell I wasn't exactly thrilled. And even because when they came home from the doctor's on that fateful day, I was online when I wasn't supposed to be, so I signed off and rushed out to greet them a little too cheerfully, with a little too big a smile, the trace of which barely had time to leave my face as my mother's bloodshot look of hatred seared past me. At that moment there was guilt, I thought the look meant I was caught and she knew what I had been doing; panicked guilt.

Of course, none of these things are even remotely relevant to the outcomes. But we know that the deepest guilt never really have to make sense at all. When we unpack the buried wounds we find not knives but cardboard. Still, the cuts we carry remain exactly as they are. And I wish their poison too, would flush out of us.

**

beginngs or the illusions of

I like the word September. I like how the syllables tumble out of my mouth as my tongue folds and unfolds. I like how no matter how loudly you say it, it invariably mellows out to a rhythmic murmur. I like how it's long but spelled just like how it sounds. Sept-Em-Ber. This makes for great ease when spelling it on forms yet still maintaining a sense of accomplishment afterwords.

This all might be due to my birth month bias. But I don't think it's exclusively that. It's just a pretty word. It conjures up all these subtle images of slightly chilly breezes, of the first time waking up with the comforter still snuggled around you, of fresh smelling nights when the temperature, and you, teeter on some sort of change.

It's really a month of rebirth, I wonder if this intuition was weaved into the architects of the academic calendar. Or maybe I have the causal relation wrong--maybe it's really because my life has been constructed this way that I associate a pivotal quality with this month. I'd like to think it's the former, it's too special to be borne out of term papers and three hold punched notebook shopping. Instead, I will probably continue to choose to believe in the romantic tendencies of the creators of schooling, add them to the growing list of people I photoshop and idealize, add another collision of the way things are and the way things should be to my mental revelations, add September to my box of illusions, along with other trinkets too pretty to shatter.

**

fight or flight

I've been tagged in a lot of pictures online recently and I've untagged probably a third of them. Usually I pretend I'm above this kind of silliness, but my burgeoning face in the photos is more than cringe-worthy enough. Every time I go back to college I gain some weight, and every time I gain weight it goes to my face. I hate it. And I also hate myself for saying this: I really just don't like myself when I get to this point. I don't like the way I look, and I hate the way it makes me feel. It's all the consequences of my lack of self-control literally stamped on my face. And it doesn't matter if some don't see it. Out of towners didn't know what the scarlet letter meant, but that didn't change the weight of the shame it carried. My friends think I'm crazy, my mother, even more predictably, promptly tells me to lose 10 lbs. I can't tell who swims in the deeper end of delusion. I can't tell which admonition will get me out. If you meet self-loathing, should you simply cross over to another path or blast it away from this one?

**

surrealism in suburbia

My parents bought a house, we’re moving in 2 weeks, this will be the first time we lived in something other than a one-bedroom in about 7 years. And it really came at a good time, seeing as how when I come home, both me and my cousin camp out in the living room. It’s too cramped for anything here…

I’m also feeling apprehensive because the neighborhood, while nice, has virtually no people there, I feel like I'm in a suburban video game, like a parallel universe. And when I think of the house itself, it seems so empty, and it just takes me back to the only other time when I lived in a house, in New Mexico. It was a time when I still haven’t broken out of my shell, I was sort of drifting along, lost. I was just starting the awkward transition from a wallflower to something else. So I had vestiges of that brooding self-observer and new desires at the same time about fitting in. I don’t know, that house sort of represented a lot of things to me. Most of what I remember is tinged with loneliness. I guess now that I’m articulating this worry, it seems that there’s a good chance this house won’t be a repeat of the last, especially since it awaits so many's arrival, even after the first few straggles in.

Still, I hate suburban houses where everyone stays in their own rooms, and every street is littered with cars but nothing else. I hate how Southern California in general has no people out and about at all. The opening line in Crash goes something like: “Everyone’s behind metal and glass here, sometimes I think we crash into each other just to feel something”. It sums up my suspicion about this sunny place perfectly.

**

nuances

"Words have edges. So do you."

Words do have edges. They begin with a letter. They end with a letter. Bigger versions begin with a capital and end with a dot. Between a word and its closest synonym is a spectrum of space, where meanings abound. Meanings we can understand but words cannot articulate. Sometimes touch, glances, and tone can help narrow the gap. But still, our brain remains more precise than any of the rest of our faculties can hope to reach. It can wrap around an idea and swallow it whole like a clever reptile, ingesting everything but tasting nothing. So we attribute the phenomenon to "intuition" and leave it at that.

It's amazing, of course. But it's also a shame. The most sophisticated thing we are capable of turns out to be the psychological equivalent of the dark side of the moon. Because I can't get inside your head, and you can't tell me. Because I stand on the precipice of my final syllable, and you stand on the cliff of another.

And so we'll never know.

**

courage and foolishness

Today I was at a Chicago middle school and these 8th grade girls called out “ching-chang!” as I passed by, drowning in too-loud giggles. Minutes later, the same aged girls (albeit not the same girls) purposely got in my way as I went downstairs. She said “excuse me” a little too early and I swerved a little too late.

I'm not sure if it was the annoyance that I had built up from earlier, but I paused at the beginning of the next staircase, stood steps below, and stared at her. Her friends looked back in a mixture of defiance and fear. It was one of those moments that stretched a lot longer than actual time dimension would allow, culminating in a silent confrontation but not much else. I’m not sure what would have happened if things went further. In something physical she and her friends could have easily taken me, each barely inches shorter (though more than a decade younger) and easily weighed more than I.

I hate conflicts and am not nearly as brave as I’d like to be. But my ethnicity is something I’m fiercely protective about. Whatever misgivings I have about my own connections to a culture slowly fading away from me, no one else will ever have the right to challenge it and get away unscathed. Whatever this confusing “it” turns out to be (and I will toil forever to find and re-find out), the one stable central axis is that it is a part of me more than anything else is a part of me. Someday it won’t be first place anymore—and I do wait with anticipation at my next great priority—but I guard over the current reigning queen with the protectiveness of a lioness over her cubs.

I wish I could have laughed the incident off (as my mother will probably tell me to do…in fact an image of her is already taking place in my mental theater); it would probably also have been the more mature thing to do. After all, there is such a thing as knowing something is important without announcing the fact in such dramatic fashion, especially to irrelevant individuals; but I have no problem going about it the way I do now. It’s a grounding experience (but also a kind of thrill) to have something worth being brave for. To stand up for even though you might suffer damage (not just in physical terms but a myriad of other ways, as I'm sure this won't be the first time where my professional life will become entangled). To re-realize what you have that your pride will let you get away with.

**

direction

“[College] might be one of last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If you think that you’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, you’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.”
— Clayton M. Christensen,

The quote above is a really important wake-up call. Because college IS probably the last chance I have to really reflect on my purpose in life. When I’m idealistic and inexperienced enough to be unmarred by real life obstacles that bog us down. When I’m still relatively unspecialized and not yet shafted into a sliver of a million directions I could have gone. I strongly believe in the fact that a purpose is something you have to devote tangible energy and time to, it’s not in its full, perfect, complete form already, ready to be pulled from your subconscious. If I don’t get out my compass, my ship is probably not going to sail towards that sliver of the sea that’s right for me.

People ask me why I want to go to law school, and the answer is always: “it’s been the plan since I was five years old” But that’s not good enough at all, not for anyone listening and not for myself. I can’t base a decision on a whim whipped up by 5 years of experience. If it’s going to be right for me, it’s going to have to withstand so many more years, more experiences, more thoughts. Why do I want to go where I want to go? I’ve never quite answered this because I thought the answer stopped at knowing where the path is, not why I’m on it. But it’s time to start asking.

**

spheres of all kinds

I went to a homeless shelter today and I’m just blown away by the boundaries of my bubble. It encloses so little—so little—of this world. Even in the richest country of the world, even just a few miles from me, there are these people with next to nothing resources and unfortunately, not enough ability to get out of it. Either from an inattentive upbringing or repeated societal reinforcement, too much has molded their bubble, their hardened and still stiffening bubble. The thing about mine is that it can expand past its present ignorance, but for their spheres of concrete, no patch can stretch into a place I deem passable.

I think that’s the hardest part. To see that nothing can be done. We always think to be spoiled is to be overwhelmed with materialistic yellows and greens, but that’s not all that spoiled is. What is spoiled? It is to have accomplishments that you think you’ve worked hard to achieve, but it turns out the very existence of such possibilities have always been conveniently within arm’s reach…do you retreat from the apples? Or do you grab on and take a greedy bite? What is the "right" thing to do here? Or is the very term, in a world where shapes come in unequal sizes, already rendered moot?

**

inarticulations

I’ve been feeling out of sorts all day. I had such a long day at work, 6 hours of stuffing paper into transparent sheet protectors led to hours of mind wandering. And this, in combination with a background of indiscernible and irksome noise, led to a general panorama-like view of--what else--the most popular topic my autopilot conscious fixates on. Against the black and white static, the two horizons, one before me and one behind, both seem definitively and equally bleak. (Although, think back to the last rainbow your eyes met, wasn't it against a gray blend of sky and land? And if you were really lucky, you saw two rainbows, the main act and its shadow, slightly blurred and nowhere as bright. The second--let's call it the phantom--at least makes a dependable appearance on my mind's stage, though it never shakes off its identity as the understudy.)

Usually this thread leads to a surge of depression or cautious optimism, depending on my mood. But today it just led to frustration. I just feel generally pissed off. A virtually target-less frustration. How can something you spend so much time thinking about not even be part of your real life? Is that even within the realm of sanity? I just want to get out of the skin of my life for a while. Maybe try on someone else's for size.

**

haiku

(truth is, I’m jealous.

I said it. Now leave me to feel

—insignificant.)

**

self-deception

I am so stingy with my happiness. For other people. For myself. 99% of my batteries run on loss aversion. I just want to be genuinely happy for people I care about without worrying how things will change, and if they will change for the worse, and what to do just case they do take a turn for the worse. It’s like I’m constantly prepping myself against becoming collateral damage of other people’s happiness. What a terrible and irrational thought. Shouldn’t my mindset run something like: happiness begets happiness? Maybe it’s just the old fear of putting too many eggs in one basket. And if that basket happens to beget little chicks, then the insurance premium would of course, have to go up.

Yep, that’s everything. Everything and not a percent more.

Even losing you, the joking voice, a gesture

I love, I shan’t have lied, it’s evident

The art of losing’s not too hard to master,

Though it may look like (write it) like disaster.

**

feverish

I used to think drinks simply induced a sort of reckless abandon. Fun and full of surprises at best, awkward yet harmless at worst. But now I worry it’s also tinged with a kind of evil. Maybe that’s too strong a word, but it eggs on a kind of selfishness, capable of unraveling things that took so much time and care to be weaved. It also betrays the most worthless of desires…but this is, of course, old news.

Pure evil. Destruction. We often take so much pleasure in it, despite all of our sober consciousness’ efforts of denial. Though it has an easier time in the freedom from such efforts. The author of A Clockwork Orange meant for the title to symbolize a kind of mechanistic morality imposed on something full of juice and life. I will here, in a wild guess of optimism, claim that it is ultimately effective, but never quite the perfect fit. Spurts of incomprehensible bad sprout up from time to time, its refusal to be understood so very terrifying. The fear of not only what we are capable of but also what we can take pleasure in…it is…in a realm where words (among other tools at my disposal) fail me.

The breeze is streaming in through my window now, as is the sunlight. As the day creeps still further along, some of the fear leaves with the first blush of dawn. The cold sweat dries slightly. This time, though, something lingers from the night before, something tells me this lesson is not a repeat. I think what’s fundamentally different is that this time, the crime almost committed would not have simply led to self-destruction, but will have spread to others…would have spread to others…as it hasn’t happened yet (nor will it).

The writer of mechanisms and juice goes on to tout the importance of change. Characters must be capable of change, without it, no matter how sensational, the story simply remains a fable, never a novel. As I scramble to root my belief in his preachings, I barely register the irony that this nightmare I am trying to flee from turns out to be a fairy tale. The copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales someone gave me so long ago sits mostly unread, because there runs a deep kind of morbidity absent from Disney films…but maybe the lesson is that they are, in essence, all that fairy tales boil down to. In any case, it’s time for me to stretch into novels.

**

abandon in the winds

Whenever I watch a glossy reality show I feel an odd inspiration to mimic their lives. The way they live is, according to us, silly, without substance, and melodramatic. But I need to look no further than the sterile academics I'm swimming with to know what attracts me to the golden tresses on the other side of the TV screen. It's the ability to own up to everything they feel. They drink their mocha lattes and complain to their girlfriends and confess to their crushes and express their dislikes without any discernible barrier between the throat and the mind, whereas we are rendered mute.

If any of those actions dared spill over this side of the screen, it'd be quarantined into whatever that shuts up the desperate and passé and irrational. The one get-out-of-jail-free card is, conveniently, the inducement of alcohol, an always reliable scapegoat. Why so proper? Why not rein in abandon? Why not let what you do say something other than that you know where social boundaries lie?

I'm so sick of people telling me: "don't do X because they'll know you feel Y". Maybe that's exactly why I want to do X. Maybe I want an other to know I feel Y. Maybe actions should signify desires. Maybe the external world should reflect internal affairs.

Maybe I want my X to mean something.

**

foster pet

The green eyed creature is back with me today, but its stay won't be long this time. I've well prepared for it. It and I have a relationship kinder than most. Others indulge and despise it. And I've certainly done a great share of both. But there's not so much fear and hatred on my part, at times there's even open welcome, sometimes, if it's lucky, scratches behind its ears.

I've always maintained that it can keep our self dignities afloat, more effectively than most other, bitterer pills. Inherent in keeping the emerald deity around is the condition that you must feel entitled to something, and hence, that you are worthy enough to deserve something of this world. This is perhaps the life raft that preserves us from plunging into self-pity. Maybe the overcompensation speaks more of an insecurity in this belief than anything else, but on the face of it, there is enough to tide us over before the real rescue can begin.

**

impeccable timing

A storm came today, and I got caught in it. It was not at all how I imagined it would be, or rather, not how I imagined it would not be. It was, contrary to my predictions, reminiscent of some sort of romance, or a sense of free abandon. The drops came in formidable sizes, each announcing its right to be reckoned with by a righteous splatter on my arm. Soon, uncovered skin becomes coated by glistening sheets of running water, the feet slip in and out of flimsy flip-flops, and pit-pattering footsteps push past with no apologies in their quest for shelter. And the rain just keeps on making its point.

**

pleasantries

This summer is going by so pleasantly. That's my word for it. It's nice. Lots of hangouts and down time. Work's not so time consuming that it gets in the way of being productive. But still, it's not violently passionate...

Speaking of which, thunderstorms have yet to come. I want to see a really big thunderstorm (though probably not be caught in one--it's one of those things that only sound romantic but the essence of which reality would never permit, like glass slippers). I want the same intensity around me but also in me. The heat is sweltering here but it's a languid heat. And the breeze blows but to no avail in our quest for some escape from the air. At the same time, none of it is so oppressive yet. It's just...pleasant--at a standstill, hovering somewhere above limbo but below nirvana.

These are not complaints, and certainly not rage (which, let's face it, is a welcoming tide after those past that crashed into the cliff, their resounding roars lapping closer to the tip of drop-off point. Not unlike those fireworks I saw last night, each exploding closer and closer, until I think the next huge bubble of red and green sparkles will envelope us all) So maybe it's a blessing, I suppose. The pangs, exquisite and insufferable as they are, stand in the future with certainty

...so why be in a hurry to get there?

**

perfection

The other day I saw a picture of these lovely chinese roses, dozens of their white petals fading to a light magenta at the roots. It reminded me of something I drew in chinese watercolor from drawing class when I was little, the teacher hands out grades to all of the drawings at the end, the most elusive of them all was a "99"...a year of classes later, I had yet to get one

this was the painting that did it for me, it was many petaled and the ridges were just like this one, and just as thickly layered, and the pink is the exact same shade, which I'm still not so fond of, objectively, though of course now the color is tinted over with some sentimental value.

a "99" was perhaps more important to my mother than to me, that first 99 she didn't get to see right away, because she was in a hospital in beijing with my father, for brain surgery.

a few days later my aunt took me and my cousins to visit her, lying on the hospital bed, she looked on quietly as my cousins bestowed upon her all these pencil drawings of bunnies and suns and clouds, and I went last, and I gave her that painting, and I gave her that "99"

I know it's probably not nice or even healthy to think your present is superior than others, especially when they are for an occasion like this, when no present is quite the right fit, and I probably shouldn't feel like I have to earn my mother's admiration and hard-to-come-by praise (though I always do),

but I did feel disproportionately good that day, it was the most poetic timing that fate could've had the tenderness to arrange, and it was perfect.

years later I revisited the school and some paintings were on display, one was of grapes, it was nowhere nearly as good as mine (and I'm not just saying that from some personal bias), mine, a couple years earlier, garnered a 98, this one had a big 100 written on it in red. They probably got another teacher for the class, I think. In any case, the painting took me back to my first 99. Not my first 100, because my teacher then didn't believe in perfection, but then again, she didn't know the story of my pink roses.

**

cylinders, bubbles, lines

I came home the night before last and saw plastic barrels in the bathtub. To soak our feet in, my mother said. I stared at her, at a loss for words. It was neither something I could come up with an answer for nor an idea I wanted to ponder too much. It seems that every time I come home some new poor man's treasure claims its hold in my home, seemingly plunging us still further into something that denotes a poor living.

We are middle class; definitely above the poverty line, at least. Yet I have no idea why my parents hold on to these things, and come up with more ways to make our one-bedroom look as much like a garage sale as possible. Today I was digging for my suitcase amid the pile of furniture near my parents' bed, when I found that their sheet was laced with inch-wide holes, lined along the same two lines that make up a soft pink and blue checkerboard pattern, like some artistically arranged bubbles. It's a sheet that I remember well, which translates to at least 13 some years of wear and tear. They need new sheets, I think, as my subconscious pours guiltily over my recent purchases of frivolity.

None of these things should bother me. And they don't bother me in the worst way possible, that is, they're not an embarrassment to me. But they make me guilty, and they don't have to exist at all. At least I don't think their existence is necessitated.

When I was little and complained about becoming collateral damage to my mom's frugality (I was the only kid who didn't have an allowance, which meant no snacks to share with friends...and eventually, no friends who would share them with me. Tit for tat), my uncle told me that if my mom weren't the way she was, we wouldn't have what we have now. That might be true. That is definitely true. Even now, invisible wires tighten around us to support every new project: my tuition, plans to move out, maybe a trip back to China. Her trace runs silent and everywhere. Something is piled still higher amid all the clutter, and it's all her little tricks that turn our possibilities into something lived. Still, I feel like the wires can be relaxed a little bit. Maybe my parents too.

At the very least, they should get new sheets.

**

vaccination

You are so frustrating, it’s terrible. I hate to come back to the same word over and over again but it's enraging.

You can't ever fall for someone harder than they for you. These were the pearls that flowed from my fingertips last night. Except he disagreed with me, and I secretly agreed with him. No matter how good some pieces of advice sound, they remain drifting from one ear to the next, because simply, we are not willing to internalize any of it.

Take right now. Always a classic case. It will probably turn out to be the same road I went down last fall, except it’s barely summer. The asymmetry is aesthetically unpleasing to me. But the rest I can handle. A cold needle prickle is always easier the second time around. Maybe this time I'll rub on the alcohol a little earlier. Feel the odd cooling sensation a little sooner before something foreign penetrates. Sterile. It's that image again. I wonder if my unwillingness to internalize will transfer here. Maybe the vaccine won't work. Maybe you won't work. Maybe I caught you just in time. Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

**

夏天的一晚上

I found this browsing through my computer. It was the very first composition I wrote for Chinese in the fall. The English translation's not the best, someone once told me. And he is right. The Chinese is better. It's like there are two planes, and a graph on one cannot exactly project onto another. The blurriness is always what people who write fight against, and also what we want to preserve. The mathematics of language is an oxymoron, but only because the laborers make it so.

**

夏天初期的一晚上，我碰见了你。

那时候，夜里吹着一股凉爽的微风，悄悄的来，偷看我们之间表演的戏。你好像也感觉到了这个未被邀请的客人 ， 因为你什么也没有说，虽然你的眼光告诉了我很多。

那天晚上，我以为那风是空手的走的，但是后来我才明白，时间和它，什么都有权利带走， 包括记忆中的一晚上，包括记忆中的你。

夏天，也就是这样糊里糊涂的过去。

转眼就到了九月的第一场雨。那些蒙蒙的雨滴， 和树上的黄叶，一个一个的掉下来，落到一股熟悉的风中。那一刻，风带回来了你原先的眼光，但是没有带回来原先的你。

Some time in the spring, when the air was filled with possibility, I met you.

That night, there was a crisp breeze, quietly creeping up, watching the play that unfolded between us. You seemed to also realize that we have an interloper among us, because you didn’t say anything, though your glance betrayed more than the wind can tell.

On that night, I thought the air left empty-handed, but this summer I understood; time and the wind, they can take away everything, including the memory of a night, including the memory of you.

Summer was more or less spent this way, hazily yet in a flash…all the way until the first rain of September. The lazy raindrops and yellowing leaves fell from the sky one by one, until they land in a familiar breeze. And in that instant, the wind brought back last summer's glance, but didn’t bring back last summer's you.

**

hospital hallway

There are no words. Just perfunctory hugs, friendly smiles, some empty, general niceness going about, like a lazy kind of flu or something. Except this is not a sickness I can cure. Besides, if I were to complain about anything, it's that we are too sterile. Too bleached. What I want most of all is probably exactly like a sickness.

I don't know. I can't say much, not just because of others' constraints on me but because my mind is literally muffled. Nothing but incoherent noise reach the linguistic cortices of my brain. So there are no words. No words. Just noise, and niceness. Two very neutral things. Like beige, or a nice, forgettable blue plaid.

**

quilt

It’s the hope
That makes me

Put on a blindfold,
spin three times,
and trust that the darts
hit the bull's eye.

They have landed now,
(but only for now),
And now I've
wriggled them out,

a little pang each by each,
every pluck
merciless, fair, clean like bleach.

It’s the hope
That makes me

lay out more and more
red and blue chips on the table.
And this time I will win it all

The cards have been dealt now
(and already I’ve taken a vow)
the jacks won’t do me any good
I shout and I know and I say out loud

It’s the hope,
the hope of something so great I know not just how—-
It’s the hope.

It’s a rush.
It’s a monster.
It’s an out.

(It rears its head and I
beckon to its call
before the roar
's vibrations hit the air.
Its breath landed--just now--
in my ear.)

It's the game. It's in your head. It's the pre-original sin
It's my drug and it's his power and it's their win.
--It’s the goddamn hope.

I know that now.

**

lioness

I’m afraid I’m becoming the party to invest more than my partner does…again. Some part of me just loves the gamble…almost unconsciously, I lay out more and more red and blue chips on the table.

It’s the hope, the hope of something so great you don’t even know exactly how great, it’s the hope. It’s a rush. It’s an expensive habit. It’s a lovely monster.

It rears its head and I beckon to its call before the roar even vibrates through the air. It's my drug and it's his power and it's their win.

It’s the goddamn hope.

**

paint

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

-Plato

Beauty indeed makes man enlarge his kind. In ways of physical attraction. In ways of creativity. In ways of attempting immortality. People think pursuing beauty is shallow, and in the most base ways, it is. But it is also the way to paint elements of the fantastic in our lives. If we knew how gray the world really is, we wouldn't write, or look, or love another imperfect being. It is through the splattering of these colors on the canvas that we can even begin to understand these self-portraits--the only path available to us...without becoming so colorless we sink into non-existence.

Maybe in higher dimensions of reality we can live and desire and create significance without the pursuit of beauty. But in our constraints and in that here and in this now, we live only by seeing it everywhere...and not at all if we do not.

**

black holes

I saw a softball game today in the first wave of the sticky summer heat. It was wonderfully out of the normal scope of my life. To see these people doing something so different--and to see them doing it so well--leaves me a little in disbelief. It's weird what has the power to change entire perceptions: a little game, or two little hours.

Last night I went to a party where people of my peripheral circle came center stage. Similarly, to see them in their context, with their main characters, with their histories. I realize again how difficult it is to break into such bubbles...or at the very least, I see the bubble that needs breaking into. In that situation, the new context serves as a blockade, in the other, it is a new way of entry.

It's always unsettling when we realize the limits of our own visions. What else could we have missed? Are there more black holes undetected by our telescopes floating around out there, only to be guessed at by the presence of a dark ignorance, instead of a positive existence that we could have seen, had we only turned our lens earlier? The mind teems with unimagined possibilities.

Anyway, I would say it's something to think about. But I'm afraid the very act of thinking about it will be the exact time-thief that makes me miss these sights. What makes the bubble so limited (though clearer) is precisely the narcissism in thinking.

**

SIDENOTE: I realize this is all too worn a subject. All I have to do is get out of my head. Stop thinking so much. And get rid of my narcissistic self-examination. But I can't. I can't. And I can't. It's like I am that patient in psychoanalysis who, in the moment of the breakthrough, clings even tighter to the mirage of being a helpless child, praises the analyst instead of attributing to herself the solution, so that she would not lose the comfortable relationship with Him in her newfound possibility of independence. God I hate myself sometimes. (But maybe there is something about the allure of self-examination that speaks truly of some Good it will give me. However, I cannot postpone admitting that there's a real chance this might be a blind faith rooted in a sick pleasure rather than a sure bet stemming from the truth)

**

SIDESIDENOTE: In honor of making a real change I think I will stop posting on my tumblr so much, at least none of the mundane things that contribute no artistic value.

dartboard

I don't know why some people are built with softer skin than others. And the easier a target you are, the more darts you attract. (Or is it only a skewed perception? Yet it's gone on too long and too intense for it to pass for a coincidence or incorrect vision. Maybe it's group think, or whatever it is that makes people jump on the bandwagon).

In any case, there's something confusing about what's going on here. These people are not my enemies. They care. Or at least, I think they do. So I justify it in all sorts of ways...and they do too, mostly with the claim of a lack of intention to harm. They don't think it's anything bad, so it's not. Right?

How do I make people realize it's not all about their own view? That what they thought was painless actually prickles deeper than I care to even admit to myself? How do I make myself realize it's also not all about my own view? To what degree can I--as I've been so often told to do--"get over it?" How do I bring these things up without sounding immature or demanding or egocentric? Is it too much to ask? Is it necessary to even have to?

The darts have landed now, (but only for now), yet I'm still wriggling them out, a little pang each by each, every pluck even, fair, and merciless.

**

theft

this is from a blog i read today

I...remain prone to ill-thought-out sentences and disguised clichés, clichés buried under baroque cruft. Every comma, every pause, every dash: if I think long enough I can recall the novel I’m lifting it from...

I feel like this is the recurring theme of every person who writes (because i can't call myself a writer, just like how i don't think i can ever call myself a philosopher, they are settled in too lofty a place for me). The first memory that popped into my head was about a year ago when I hated every word on my own blog, but the second is rooted in a time long ago, when I wrote an essay and promptly confessed to my mom that, like I had stolen a five dollar bill from the kitchen counter, my opening line was "lifted" straight out of my textbook. (*i love how this blogger uses the word "lift" here, an ordinary term that usually gives off nothing at all, except a faint neutrality like some unscented fabreze, except, wrapped in these surrounding words, reminds me of shoplifting, a theft of some sort. Clothed in its new context, it reeks of the discreetly sinful)

When my mother heard my confession she assured me there was absolutely nothing wrong with what I did. How are you going to build a house, she said, when you don't allow yourself to pick up the bricks? That logic sounded desperately like a justification to me, and still leaves me dissatisfied now. Every time I read something original I am filled with wonder and a slight envy for the writer, it is what i (a person who writes) crave most of all.

I have spent all my years searching for those pieces, and when I've found them I tucked them away somewhere in a corner of my own creations, artfully arranged to highlight its sparkle, but not so polished that its stolen status becomes too blatant. And so, i get to display what i love most of all, originality, in its blinding, borrowed glory.

**

circus

Right now I have the heart of a six-year-old, I want to close my eyes and stomp my feet over and over again faster and faster, in hopes that it would take me out of here. Of course, this is all impossible, because as someone said tonight, we are "contingent" in our right-nows.

This limbo-like state, it’s not even the good kind. Not the kind where your heart pumps bass-like beats of a rock concert, the kind where you feel like you’re walking on a tightrope many feet off the ground. No, not that kind. This is more like a cloudy mess. Like a dance floor of a cheap prom with a fog machine.

This mess is so very unappetizing. Probably because the signs aren't pointing anywhere, because the situation doesn’t depend on me, yet. I feel like I'm getting all the right things from the wrong people. Maybe I just pick them badly, maybe I'm just bad at catching the right ones. In any case, why should this signing up process be so impenetrable? Shouldn’t it be the actual race that’s the hard part?

Raise the platform and tighten the rope, I’m ready to play.

**

flight

I haven't thought about you in so long. How long, you ask. Today I was counting in my head and I forgot about you. For a moment in time, you were simply a number. "The fifth". The unnamed. It's like you fell off the edge of my brain for a second. And this was deeply unsettling. Because between you and me, you were my favorite.

But maybe now the colors of that nostalgia is somehow whitewashed. fading in spots, like a picture taken in the sun. Maybe the brighter something is, the more quickly the exposure washes it out.

Let it be what it is, I always thought about us. Because deep down I always knew you would never be mine. I was always aware of how high I was to never reach.

Determined to learn from Icarus, me and my waxed wings weren't going to suffer the same fate.

**

real and wonderful

Everything you can imagine is real.

-Pablo Picasso

Isn’t this something wonderful? It’s wonderful because the things I imagine can be quite wonderful. It’s wonderful because the possibility of something other than reality is wonderful. It’s also wonderful because it validates our most buried thoughts, which we don't think are quite so wonderful. But maybe, like Picasso says, we are not as crazy as we’d judge ourselves to be.

At the same time, I hate to think that these not-so-wonderful things are real too. Sometimes, when I’m not so careful or controlled with my thoughts, when they go on autopilot, I have this recurring strand that pops up without prompting, it goes something like: i love you, don’t go. And I have no idea whom I am saying this to. Everything in my ‘real’ life is in order and no one is going as far as I know. Yet it always manages to break the surface from time to time. This probably sounds a little crazy, but I (though maybe I’m just desperately clinging to strings here) honestly think that everyone has these kind of thoughts once in a while, floating around and unattached to any sort of justification, which we use to tie around so many silly things--in any case, it could just be that some people (intentionally or not) don’t quite catch them as they fly by.

Because have you ever tried to really pay attention to how much you think in a given minute? It goes lightening fast. If you typed it all up the words would run down the street before you could see the commas, Is it so impossible that in those infinite thoughts, that one or two are churned out as ‘defective’, so to speak? And by ‘defective’ I mean irrational, not built on rhymes--though whether they are any less real…

is really a question for Mr. Picasso.

**

redefine

Today my professor talked of this concept of love, how there are different ones across times and cultures. Of our own, she said: "we have this notion of love that must necessarily contain reciprocity." Essentially, we cannot understand a love that isn't reciprocated. We think it isn't love. An unrequited crush, maybe. A mistake, definitely. But a love, never.

Then I saw this Bollywood where the man who reciprocates his love's love dies and passes her on to another man. The girl said: you love so much that you were going to leave love for me even after you die? Even if it's a love that isn't yours?

Later her mother told her: Make a mistake today, it's a girl's decision. Realize it tomorrow, it's a woman's regret.

There's all this time constraint almost, on choosing from a pool that doesn't include the ideal. In Chinese there's a word that comes up repeatedly with the talk of love, 缘分. It can be translated to something like 'fate' or 'destiny' or 'compatibility', specifically relating to two lovers. Usually, it's used in longing utterances, loaded with unfulfillment, perhaps from a star-crossed heroine's mouth: there isn't enough 缘分 between us.

I've always rejected that idea. What is this about some arbitrary, intangible force having a say in such an important part of my life? How can something other than myself prevent me from living my ideal life?

But I think now the better question should be, why should I even define love to be significant part of an ideal life? Isn't it possible to only possess it a short time, or only as an incomplete, one-sided ghost of a thing--or, horror of horrors, not at all?

The possibility is so huge and incomprehensible to me I hardly know what to do with it. It's here like that still still lake in the previous post. Looking at it face to face, I come up a little short of breath.

**

aporia

One of my former teachers just posted about something like an existential crisis, when everything that we ever believed in to get to the meaning of life, intellect, learning, academia, philosophy, seem futile to get anywhere at all.

He used the image of a screen door, unhinged and swaying in the wind, coming off slightly and yet still creeking and "making too much noise".

As for me, I always think of that scene in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, when Harry and Dumbledore enters the dark cave, and there's this vast, unknown, creepily calm yet oddly inviting lake before them. And for that moment, you feel like you've ventured past the rest only to arrive at something still more frustrating and deeply frightening, feeling like you might have been better off not asking the things we did or thinking the things we did.

It's kind of tortuous to have that mind. Still, everyone goes through it in some way or another. And we all get through fine. And that's enough for now.

Right?

**

allure

My fiction teacher (for an hour of my life) said the best way to get better at writing is to just write. On paper, (pun intended), that sounds like a great idea. But I feel like I go through these dry spells when nothing inspires me, and it's usually periods of happiness. I just realized this means pretty much only angst inspires me. And that is just so cliched...it possibly makes me more angsty.

And then my professor goes: who was that writer who said, to write well, you must first go out and live? Is it within my purvey to assign you guys to go out this quarter...and live?

That sounds like a line out of dead poet society or possibly some retired book from an author trying to make a comeback sequel. But at the moment I felt totally inspired. The trouble with this kind of assignment is I have no idea how to start it. I feel like all my stories come from mistakes, which are fun and inspire a great deal of creativity, but also judgment, disillusionment, and mostly rejection of some sort. (All of which make more interesting topics than contentment and warm spring days)

I suppose anticipation is something of a possibility. But who can write about the unknown? Also, who wants to live their life in anticipation? Its charms only work for the first hour or so, then it becomes dreadfully boring. I suppose that's the problem with goodness in our worlds, they're so positively boring. Nothing God has to offer draws us in like Dante's Hell or Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee...

**

preoccupations

I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love.
-Carrie, Sex and the City

A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought.
-John Keats, Bright Star

This movie is so full of wonderful tension, I love it. It’s ridiculous and it’s inconvenient and it’s consuming and it’s all of those things.

When I first heard that quote on sex and the city I rolled my eyes, she delivered it in such an over-the-top manner. There she was, skin a little leathered from years and years of jaded relationships, still babbling like a teenager. That’s not love, I remembered thinking, that’s just good old fashioned horniness.

But then who am I to say what love should or should not be for someone? Maybe that’s just what it is. Bright Star certainly convinced me that it exists in that form. Perhaps it would’ve had a short fuse anyway, regardless of John Keats’ inevitable end...but

but it was so real. I felt it past the penetrable camera lens and computer screen, in the light, weightless drapes rippling with the spring breeze, in the soft candlelight when she sewed quietly, in the bed of violet wildflowers that cushioned her fall when she read his letters.

So who am I to say if that was not real love simply because it had not outlasted time? I feel like I have these fixed conceptions of what love is, when really, I have no idea.

My professor today said that there is nothing we could say about love that hasn’t already been said. But despite all that, who can really say something about it? That middle-age, jaded woman looking for a childish, disney ending? That ill-fated lover of one of the greatest poets of all time, who was dying from tuberculosis? That twenty year-old whose preoccupation with it far exceeds her experience?

In the end, I think the closest answer I can grasp lies in the violet flowers, not these tangential, irrelevant thoughts in my head—the most ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming of all.

**

disconnect

To be honest, I tell you these things just to tell them, to give them something of an audience so they can be let go. And isn't that just the point of being the other? just taking this one seriously?

One of the reasons could be just that you've got every aspect of life figured out, and it's probably hard for you to imagine wasting time on anything less. But for those who don't have everything in life, or barely floating above the line of average, little things become just parts of our lives, and I'm sorry if they seem insignificant or petty to you, but at the same time, I can't apologize for thinking about them. And even if they're not the most fairy-tale ending of stories, will they not yield a reaction besides one of impatience? Things just happen, and if they've happened for the first time I look at them with a view of partial awe, but I can't share that feeling honestly with you if you're going to have a laugh at them instead.

It's one of those ironic things where the person in question is so open minded and easygoing that they can't understand anyone else who's not like that, which, ironically (always ironically, because I can't have my inner life be any other adjective) becomes a kind of naivete or narrowmindedness on their part. Whatever the label, these miscommunications become inevitable from time to time. And maybe the only thing I should be letting go of is not my overly analytical thoughts, but their way of listening.

**

dronish gadflies

Deep breath, set, wait.

What a frustrating process, am I supposed to come to peace with that? Though let's face it, the alternative is admittedly, much, much worse, something about go-getting (or desperation, to snooty people) makes one want to slap a huge yellow "UNSEXY" sign on the offender's forehead, it's just not how we operate.

The higher up I go, the more waspish my life becomes, the drones infiltrate every last opening standing. And the compressed mess of unoccupied passions remain the attractive, polished queen bee it always seems to be.

**

coming of age

It's so weird to see people break out of the canvas of the two dimensional painting you held in your mind. The gaps filled in by your imagination become torn apart before you, and new puzzle pieces fall to your feet. Some surprisingly elegant, and some a little vulgar and offsetting.

At the same time, these new pieces presented to me might not hold any more truth value than what I had beforehand, so who's to say the new construction will be any studier than the old?

Still, (I don't know whether it's because I am becoming wiser in my perceptions or if these people have genuinely captured my heart more strongly than I realize)--I'm not so disappointed by this shattering disillusionment as I used to be.

And this is perhaps the most startling revelation of all: could this be (gasp) something like maturity? Are the strings that clung to fairy tales finally becoming untied?

**

summer storm

(I don't know what suddenly came over me. Maybe because I just saw an overindulgent film, and now I want to indulge my moodiness, or melancholy, I don't know. Or maybe I needed a few hours to recharge by myself and I just never got any.)

Do you know what it's like to have such rage and urgency to move and yet nothing they could be directed at? It's terrible, like a famished, fantastical beast that doesn't know what it should devour. Worst of all, I don't know how many chances I get before I'm labeled unintelligible. Or irrelevant.

These are such dark thoughts to wrestle with, and they descended upon me so suddenly, like a summer storm, the perfect kind where the drops come crashing down, so violently they burst into bubbles the moment they touch ground. Like a pot of unstill, boiling water, they squeeze and seep into every crack to make room for more more more. So maybe, like a storm, it will also cease as quickly as it came. Leaving wherever it touched slightly more cleansed.

When I was a little girl I stood under the front entrance of grandma's house, watching the flood rush by, fascinated by the sheer intensity of it all, willing myself to be swept up in it. When the wind snaked into the space between my neck and where my hair falls, wrapping itself around me, I swear I felt it calling.

To give up such control is, admittedly, uncharacteristic. Still, this peculiar desire rages on, at once desperately appealing and unattainable.

**

fragments

I feel like everything that fell to pieces kind of convey some sense of relief, or peace, I don't know. It's heartbreaking, yet liberating at the same time, like the tension of holding everything together is no longer there, the point of no return is also the point of freedom from responsibility.

At the end of the day, what we truly want, we cannot articulate. Not to ourselves, not to the pair of eyes next to us. It's just an endless line of vases and vases, each straining to hold itself together, to contain all this water that threatens to overflow at the brim. At which point is it okay to knock the vase over? At which point is it okay to fall to pieces?

Shatter shatter. Spilling to the concrete, the shards sparkle quietly. Step on them, make a sound. Feel the little crystals multiplying beneath your feet. See how they catch the fluorescent lights above you. The water on the ground creeps slowly outwards, staining everything in its path the way it always does. See how beautiful broken can be.

So just fall apart with me.

**

hummingbird

Sometimes I forget how fleeting self-esteem can be. Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson said. I venture to guess that she meant something more specific--our hope in ourselves. It's lighter than the flutterings of a hummingbird, and just as escapable. Bat your eyelash for a second, and it could be gone. Keep on walking, and it could come back, waver in midair, all its powers of temptation right before you.

I suppose the only thing any of us could do (or perhaps the only thing I could do) is to keep on walking.

**

reboot

I am so tired of possibilities scrapped out from under me. It's literally been more than a decade. Shouldn't I have caught at least one break now?

Also, please don't give any bullshit about being intimidating or non-receptive, that's just what lonely people say after the fact. Trust me, plenty of windows of opportunity were left open, no one can accuse me of being closed off.

To a careless, skimming eye, this must all seem terribly cynical and whiny, but honestly, when there's not a cloud in the sky, why keep on forecasting rain?

I wish I were a robot so I can program the Hope Button off for a while. It's so very exhausting.

**

scrapbooking

The more peripheral scraps I get of you, the more perfect you seem. Putting the corners of torn images together, I'm kind of falling in love with you. This air of mystery is just the right dose to enhance the sort of self-effacing charm you hold. That, coupled with your quiet confidence, is enough to start a cacophony of thoughts inside me. I think I can safely say that I've never been so infatuated with anyone like I am with you in the last half decade.

I wonder what it's like to be the object of such secret obsession.

**

the dress

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived.
--Helen Keller

When I was little my mom had this ratty old dress she wore at home. It must have been fiery orange-red when she first got it, but for as long as I can remember, it was a soft faded coral color, with a couple of unobstrusive holes hiding here or there. It was also terribly made, sleeve-less and curve-less, it resembled two pieces of cloth that someone decided to staple together.

For some reason, I loved that thing. Folding it carefully into a compact size, the four-year-old me would cradle it in my arms, feeling the soft air-like texture against my skin, occasionally burying my face into it. "It has a mommy-smell" I would explain to my dad, much to his delight and amusement. At the time, I did not understand what was so funny. It did have that familiar scent that lingers around, which I found, inexplicably, like a first home.

A few weeks ago I caught my mother trying to throw it out when she was cleaning out the closet. I didn't even know she brought it to America. Looking at it with a (somewhat more) objective eye, it was even more tattered and unimpressive than I remembered. I wonder why my mother had even brought it here, it seemed like she too, found this particular piece, filled with such memories, hard to let go, even though she hates displays of sentiment. I stopped her from tossing it, without much protest on her part. The dress is so old at this point that every aspect of it have begun to reverse itself. The fabric became a little harder and leathery from more than a decade's time, and as I buried my face in it once more, it no longer had the full fragrance of that comfort known to every lucky child on earth. Still, I'm convinced I caught a slight trace as I threw it back into a cardboard box. Maybe it's my psychology at work, unable to accept that what I loved so much is somehow fading. But even writing this, I don't think I mind this self-trickery on my part.

Memories are memories. Sometimes they are so strong one can manifest itself into a physical scent, transporting me across thousands of miles, and across all the years I have lived.

**

the ride

i hate it when people say, it'll come to you when you stop looking for it. Is that supposed to be practical advice? Hey you, you want this thing here? Good, now do nothing about it, don't even want it.

The thing about desire is, once you have one, you can't not do something about it. It's got only one lever, and that's the gas petal. Can you ever brake a desire, get out of the ride, and say, no thanks, I'd rather catch the next one?

On the roller coaster cart's way to the top, you wish for all the world for the cart to pause indefinitely at the apex, rather remaining indifferent forever than take the inevitable drop. But at that point, nothing's in your hands anymore. So you throw them up in the air and hope for the best.

At that moment when the earth becomes frighteningly small through your eyes, how do you stop it all?

**

through the looking glass

While life hasn't been boring, per se, none of the events has touched me on the inside, I suppose. I really wish I could start a blog chronicling the mundane details of my life, because honestly? I find some of them really interesting. But I save them for spoken words. They deserve to be found by the people who really find them interesting. Enough so that these people will come into my life and place themselves in front of my face, that's the only form of communication that's enough for me.

In a way, Narcissus settled, a silver screen was enough for him, (and as far as these thoughts go, enough for me), but sometimes I don't want just a looking glass. Plato once said that a mirror is not enough, we need to look into another eye to really see ourselves. It's not just that another eye gives you another perspective, it's that it's the only option for us. Despite its appearances, the enticingly shiny surface gives no perspective at all.

**

SIDENOTE:

I officially created a tumblr account two days after this was written. Throw your hands in the air if you're a hypocrite.

barad-dûr

I think I have a problem of letting go. Okay, that's probably an understatement. I definitely do have a problem of letting go, but before, I only focused on letting go of things that were already fading or dying, not petty things that I had no business of possessing in the first place.

I think stress just magnifies the pettiness in everyone, until the need for control becomes the most out-of-control of all, looming over the rest like an eye atop a lone tower, until the inescapable gaze rests upon the most insignificant things, setting it aflame, until every thought and stilted perception becomes shrouded under a cloud of smoke; until our fears dive under it, unseen; until we are lost in what we are afraid of.

**

existence

I don't know why these surface, sensory (or mushy, as you call it) things affect me so. It's like they gently reach inside me and wake something up there. These crystals fall and I don't know where they come from. And if I turn the connection back to you, it melts like wax, seamlessly into place.

It's like I constantly have to say good-byes, if not in this physical realm, then at least somewhere that you'd never know about, but that doesn't diminish their existence into any less.

Augustine reasoned, I doubt that I exist, and the very fact that I doubt proves my existence. And Descartes, even more succinctly, simply concluded: I think, therefore I am.

You know how I know these good-byes exist? Because the pain is always real. I can pretend them away, but their absence is actually the true superficial, sensory experience. Because these white lies have no power over me, certainly no more than those across a silver screen.

**

economics

"'I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member.'" That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships."

This is pretty much the Cliffnotes version of my histories, except some older, more articulate man beat me to it.

Though it doesn't follow logically, the reverse is also true. If someone were to reject my application for a membership, its stock instantly skyrockets in my book. Even though I'm getting better at managing my assets, the blow never completely leaves me unscathed. What is a perfectly rational agent supposed to do in this case?

**