I am about to be at the breaking point. This week just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The difference between life's previous swift punches and today's--is that in the former case I had felt helpless and passive, and I had saved myself only by licking my wounds after the fact with people who were there for me (suffice to say I'm so very grateful for this). However, in today's dealings, I've decided to take a decidedly more active approach. This injustice I will fight for. I'm so sick of the same people sensing passivity on my part and drawing whatever damn implications they want and forming underhanded moves from it. The things is, the consequences might pan out the same way as if I had done nothing at all. However, I've tasted the thrill of standing my ground when it comes to territory I thought I've already won, and defending it tonight felt maddening, but also empowering, and, dare I say it? Enlivening. Agency feels just as good as another's soothing caresses and well intentioned words. Better I've found it now, I suppose, before dust can settle, than finding myself in some post-war situation, where pieces flutter and litter all around, while the camera pans towards me, sitting on the ground, not having bothered to stand up at all.
**
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Monday, February 7, 2011
writing wrongs
I could write a song a hundred miles long, that's where you belong and you belong with me.
-Coldplay
Some things just belong on pages, can only breathe in between sheets of wrinkling paper. Mr. Darcy, first glances, the American Dream, do they really exist? If there were even half so much magnificence in this dimension, the world's seams would burst as dramatically as the evangelicals predict. So men try to fit them neatly on lines and lines instead. People, commitments, hurt, all neatly compartmentalized into rows of 26 symbols, that's where these things all belong. And they can neither leap out of the pages nor can they bother you again once you transfer them to these white spaces. Right? Write?
**
-Coldplay
Some things just belong on pages, can only breathe in between sheets of wrinkling paper. Mr. Darcy, first glances, the American Dream, do they really exist? If there were even half so much magnificence in this dimension, the world's seams would burst as dramatically as the evangelicals predict. So men try to fit them neatly on lines and lines instead. People, commitments, hurt, all neatly compartmentalized into rows of 26 symbols, that's where these things all belong. And they can neither leap out of the pages nor can they bother you again once you transfer them to these white spaces. Right? Write?
**
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
humbert humbert
So here's why I love and despise Humbert Humbert from Lolita. The same reason why we love and despise anything: because they reflect aspects of ourselves. And these love-hate relationships are more uncommon than you'd think: it's not the one with a romantic partner, because it's unsustainable, it's not someone you're jealous of, because you don't love them, it's not anyone you love and hate, but for different reasons. No. This is a relation of a singular focus.
Humbert Humbert and I, for example, share one thing, obsessive narcissism, in the form of post-facto analysis. We believe firmly that every occurrence defines not only the present, but re-defines everything that preceded it. Think how exponentially complex this becomes by pure mathematical reasoning alone! It's too much to think about. You know what's not too much to think about? How every thought currently produced by our minds transforms who we are. As we speak, that transformation's already done and filed away, only to be retrieved in the following second, still sticky and glued to the one before it. HH's ability to take a still scene, infinitesimally discountable in time, and write pieces and pieces of gorgeousness about, at, from, and beyond it, such that every composed sentence reveals beauty but also the fact that it's carefully doctored, it's such a profound waste of time, yet the only way we (and by "we" I mean only HH and I, and half of us is fictional) can truly tell if something warrants the term 'meaningful'.
**
Humbert Humbert and I, for example, share one thing, obsessive narcissism, in the form of post-facto analysis. We believe firmly that every occurrence defines not only the present, but re-defines everything that preceded it. Think how exponentially complex this becomes by pure mathematical reasoning alone! It's too much to think about. You know what's not too much to think about? How every thought currently produced by our minds transforms who we are. As we speak, that transformation's already done and filed away, only to be retrieved in the following second, still sticky and glued to the one before it. HH's ability to take a still scene, infinitesimally discountable in time, and write pieces and pieces of gorgeousness about, at, from, and beyond it, such that every composed sentence reveals beauty but also the fact that it's carefully doctored, it's such a profound waste of time, yet the only way we (and by "we" I mean only HH and I, and half of us is fictional) can truly tell if something warrants the term 'meaningful'.
**
Monday, January 17, 2011
underneath the pond
So yesterday I read this great sentence: "Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live." The entire article is about how silence is misconstrued as powerlessness, when really, speech, discourse, and analysis can make us even more entangled in a past that need not exist into the present.
Maybe silence is sometimes the best option available to us. What is so interesting about ordinary days, ordinary thoughts, and ordinary people? What is so significant about them that merits so so so many words in proliferating memoirs, reality shows, blogs? Wasn't speech invented for bridging a gap between I and the other? When did it become a tool for making an insignificant, self-important distinction (and thus, barrier) between me and the next? Has it really become so perverse that it now completely serves an opposite purpose to its original one? Have words now, spearheaded by an obsession with Freud's id, Madonna's self-exhibition, and the overuse of terms like "special snowflake", become the chosen tool of an egocentric generation, sharpened into a shiny, colorless point?
Its edges are so sharply defined, its reflective surface so smooth and vacant, its stabs at the defenseless air so persistent and never-ending, its sound(lessness) and fury signifying nothing nothing nothing at all. Is this what words have been reduced to and imploded into? Where has the silence gone? If it's indeed a "drowned" thing, does it still "live"? What would it mean to live underneath such a pond? It's been unthinkably long since I bathed in silence with another. For all I know, the world of communicated silence could have evolved into literal firework shows between two sets of widened eyes, and I would have no idea, because I choose to wade in uncommunicated noise instead.
**
Maybe silence is sometimes the best option available to us. What is so interesting about ordinary days, ordinary thoughts, and ordinary people? What is so significant about them that merits so so so many words in proliferating memoirs, reality shows, blogs? Wasn't speech invented for bridging a gap between I and the other? When did it become a tool for making an insignificant, self-important distinction (and thus, barrier) between me and the next? Has it really become so perverse that it now completely serves an opposite purpose to its original one? Have words now, spearheaded by an obsession with Freud's id, Madonna's self-exhibition, and the overuse of terms like "special snowflake", become the chosen tool of an egocentric generation, sharpened into a shiny, colorless point?
Its edges are so sharply defined, its reflective surface so smooth and vacant, its stabs at the defenseless air so persistent and never-ending, its sound(lessness) and fury signifying nothing nothing nothing at all. Is this what words have been reduced to and imploded into? Where has the silence gone? If it's indeed a "drowned" thing, does it still "live"? What would it mean to live underneath such a pond? It's been unthinkably long since I bathed in silence with another. For all I know, the world of communicated silence could have evolved into literal firework shows between two sets of widened eyes, and I would have no idea, because I choose to wade in uncommunicated noise instead.
**
Saturday, January 8, 2011
the examined life
“I never talk about feelings with anyone but you…because you think about these things…and you’re so wise about them.”
This is one of the most flattering things I’ve heard about myself, because well, the main struggle in my life is my overthinking, so it’s nice to know there’s some sort of an up side to that. However, this doesn’t change the fact that this approach to emotions (thinking rather than feeling them) probably prevents me from experiencing them in the right capacity. But this is perhaps the price I’m willing to pay in order to note happiness felt, that I might preserve it for later, instead of simply being present in the moment, perhaps made greater and more magnificent, unsaddled by concurrent mental analysis, only to be left with fleeting shadows afterwards. Or perhaps it is the price I pay for a kind of insurance premium, against the risk of not knowing where feelings come from, or horror of horrors, feeling wrongly. Feeling content when I should be indignant, jealous when I should be grateful, etc etc.
Ignorance is bliss, how I loathe those words! I’d trade it a thousand times over for knowledge of what is true. Happiness is never the end goal, only truth. And somewhere in the unilluminated shadows, there lurks the fear that the truth will not turn out to be beautiful, nor simple, nor happy at all. Every path, whether the destination be happiness or otherwise, has a burden to bear, though for the truth-obsessed, the seeker is made all the more painfully aware of it.
**
This is one of the most flattering things I’ve heard about myself, because well, the main struggle in my life is my overthinking, so it’s nice to know there’s some sort of an up side to that. However, this doesn’t change the fact that this approach to emotions (thinking rather than feeling them) probably prevents me from experiencing them in the right capacity. But this is perhaps the price I’m willing to pay in order to note happiness felt, that I might preserve it for later, instead of simply being present in the moment, perhaps made greater and more magnificent, unsaddled by concurrent mental analysis, only to be left with fleeting shadows afterwards. Or perhaps it is the price I pay for a kind of insurance premium, against the risk of not knowing where feelings come from, or horror of horrors, feeling wrongly. Feeling content when I should be indignant, jealous when I should be grateful, etc etc.
Ignorance is bliss, how I loathe those words! I’d trade it a thousand times over for knowledge of what is true. Happiness is never the end goal, only truth. And somewhere in the unilluminated shadows, there lurks the fear that the truth will not turn out to be beautiful, nor simple, nor happy at all. Every path, whether the destination be happiness or otherwise, has a burden to bear, though for the truth-obsessed, the seeker is made all the more painfully aware of it.
**
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
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.
**
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.
**
Thursday, December 9, 2010
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.
**
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.
**
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