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.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
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.
**
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.
**
Friday, May 14, 2010
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.
**
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.
**
Saturday, May 8, 2010
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.
**
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.
**
Friday, April 30, 2010
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.
**
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.
**
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
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.
**
-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.
**
Thursday, April 15, 2010
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.
**
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.
**
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