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.

**