shout it
shut it
shout it
shut it
shout it
shut it
shout it
shut it

do you care about her or do you just care about going on tending and nursing your feelings for her? it's not even for that they'd grow; it is only so that they would not perish. then it's worth holding onto?

everything that's so basic and taken for granted are given over a million assumptions, why should i assume i'm even capable of being affected by something like this? do i even have the right to be sad when a patient dies? doesn't that just mean i'm not good at my job? everything happens cosmically; nothing ever happens to me, i'm sure.

I don't know who you are anymore, and I don't know which one of me I'm supposed to be when I'm talking to you. It kind of pricked me when I thought you'd be more inclined to come see me because I can give you pills, and then you might have to pretend you wanted to hang out so it wouldn't seem so obvious that you just wanted to get home and get fucked up, but then I remembered when I was like that and I wondered how many people thought what I thought and if That's the me you'd want me to be, well, I guess she's not too long gone, yes surely she is still around or else who is it that i've become??

Authenticity

I wish I'd made you real.

Learning Curve

I have to keep reminding myself not to settle this time. I am learning about what I want through process of elimination, or negative selection. It's not enough, and it's not okay. But it will do right now. Sometimes I don't realize certain things, until I have articulated them, to no one in particular. Maybe I say it for my own sake; maybe I realized that's how I realize things.

Things are starting to come together. I find that I really don't care this time. There is not even the self-deceiving, sporadic, roller-coaster-y good-feeling anymore. No more reading through text message exchanges and letting out a sigh of contentment or yelp of excitment. No more worrying about what I'm wearing or what I'm going to wear. No more stealing glances and stealing kisses. No more negotiation. I have no grounds to give, and I'm not going in. And then I find that I am bored of this after all. It is just as unfulfilling as I'd always imagined. It is the reason for inventing emotional investment in the first place.

Now I wait for things to fall apart, to fall away. For when I should realize, I don't need the real physical attachment just as I don't need the invented emotional investment. For when I should realize, positively, what I want. Good things do come to those who wait. I read about myself, 3, 8, 13, 17 months ago, asking myself, when will it end, when will I be free... And I'm here. I might say it took too long, or I might just set the burden down. So now I wait again. It's not enough; it's not okay. But it'll have to do for now.

Some soul in me, before me, in my heart's mind, longs to go back to "God will be all in all."

As far as conscious memory and remembered consciousness goes, I have never been religious. But I know and remember the feeling. There is something that compels me to regard the feeling as almost physical, because I distinctly know that it has always been, and always been before me. "Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone" indeed.

I admire the energy, the surge to tax one's (conscious) self logically, intellectually, spiritually and ceaselessly for an answer. I only wish I too had an answer so sweet, and so sweetly irrefutable.

I do not want a violent awakening. I do not want to be cradled or caressed. I don't need to look back in the sand and know that those singular footsteps in my hardest times, belonged not to me. I don't need the voice in Herbert. I don't need the first or the last, the just or the merciful, the son or the father.

I just need the soul to come back home to me.

I've met the floor you can't fall below. I just want the reason you don't need to go beyond.

I don't subscribe to facebook relationship status updates because...

though I appreciate that they have attempted to accomodate a range of possibilities with "it's complicated", and have actually bothered to differentiate between engaged and married, there are simply no passive-aggressively delicious and wicked choices such as:

1) recently fucked but don't really care for ________
2) live with but secretly cannot stand _______
3) waiting to take the place of the wife/husband of _______
4) conceived a child with but in no other way related to ____________
5) ready to break up (over dirty dishes/carpet/laundry) with _______
6) single, stalked by and scared of _________
7) positively have never ever cheated on (baby I mean it please call back) ________

I mean, these are just a few that come to mind.

Radio/Image Dissonance

When you like someone on the radio, a-lot-a-lot, you should never look them up to see what they look like. I was sorely disappointed to find out Garrison Keillor of The Writer's Almanac did not look like that famous semi-profile of Walt Whitman in old age. Or even sported a pristine all-white suit such as the one seen here on Mark Twain. Instead he is passably a member (see picture, also, cf. 'red socks' link) of MWLLOL. And he wore red socks.


oh and I discovered hyper-links today.

Christmas

Played Monopoly with the cousins for, behold, 45 minutes.

My (nuclear+extended) family have no holiday spirit.

No wonder this is (at best) trite for me.

Tossing and Turning at 5:48AM

My most legitimate excuse is the air. It is too dry here. No hope of resting comfortably through the night. But my eyes have wandered to the corner of the bed.

So I became afraid of my pillow on which you had lain your head so often before. Casting this aside to the foot and corner of my bed, I opted for the fibrous wooden planks my parents had provided me. These I valued and despised for having nothing to do with you, opposite my apartment pillow (our pillow). That said, I will probably sleep for the night on our pillow, for I loved and despised myself the same- for having been, and being no longer, so long at your bedside. I don't stop to think which I despised, and which I loved.

PS. No promises of return or revival is to be found here, as any promises will be made only to myself- the singular and occasional reader, and I have yet to cognitively embrace the notion of breaking a promise to myself.

google search auto complete

ways to make yourself-

Happy: 6,140.000 results
Go into labor: 437,000 reults
Puke: 251,000 results
Fall asleep: 369,000 results
Feel better: 2, 170, 000 results
Sneeze: 233, 000 results
Look better: 2, 900, 000 results
Tired: 1, 200, 000 results
Sleep: 1, 890, 000 results
Pee: 390, 000 results

Ah google, you never fail me with your bag of tricks.

Blabbermouth

I had meant to be kind. Last night he said we ought to turn the light off and listen to the rain. Having just finished an 8 page paper on Donne's Holy Sonnets, I fell asleep after we turned off the lights. Perhaps the rain helped.

This morning, Los Angeles is wet. I woke up, found some clothes to put on, said 'happy birthday' to his sleeping ears, and went merrily off. Everybody looked glum. I missed the campus express, and since they stop every 8-10 minutes, I had to watch it go by to realize I've just missed it. I watched it from across the street. This happened for two reasons, I'd stopped by the corner store to pick up smokes and a sugar free energy drink. And my bus driver was particularly gun ho about sailing through an orange traffic light. Everybody is, always.

And I thought the rain would have washed off some of these people's discontent. On the days when the basin isn't filled with water, these people are brittle like bones. Skeletons walking around shouting into their phone, or changing the radio station in their cars and honking at pedestrian traffic. No sparks, or these would flame up like the chapparal bush we hear so much about on the surrounding mountain sides. Don't these people crave water? Dried up and would up as they are. Don't they ever want to fill the tub until it overflows, or drive to the beach? No, the landlord who pays their water bill will threaten to up the rent for the whole complex, and the six mile ride to the beach translates into hours in westside traffic.

As I walked towards the empty bench where my bus had stopped moments ago, I thought this was a good change of pace. I thought I could sit down and write some of these down. But then I realized the bench will most likely be wet. And then I too, frowned. Los Angeles was wet, and to make a poor analogy, our brittle bones all ached with arthritic pains.

As I cut across north campus because the bus dumps me out diagonally across from my building, I crossed a small road barely the width of a pick up. A minivan was driving through, and it had collected a lot of rainwater. I watched the splash and couldn't help but be excited. I thought I would jump in there, then the thought of sitting through a 2 hour lecture in wet clothes, stopped me.

On the way home, there was a dark girl on the bus who had the worst speech pattern imaginable. She punctuated all her thoughts with like and hmms. I thought I would be very tired if I was her. She warns the voice on the other end to "proceed with caution" AND "a grain of salt" regarding a potential mr. right now. In the way of evidence mounted against the chump, she rattles off a list of names, people who were introduced and subsequently hit on; she said "he has a thing for all my friends". I wanted to tell her that maybe she's just jealous because he never had a thing for her.

Then I realized she's just some stranger on the bus. I have no place making a commentary like that. If it were a friend, whom I didn't particularly like, maybe. Then she make up some scenario wherein they were both drunk (invariably), and he actually did try to make a move on her. I could pursue it and go on asking, teasingly, how drunk he was. Or maybe we'll just talk about something else that wasn't as awkward or telling of my perception of her. Either way, I had no business telling the girl on the bus, about my perception of her.

I had to stop by school again later in the day, to drop off my paper. I felt an unspeakable sense of warmth at some point after the bus trip back onto campus. I think as I walked away from the class, was when I couldn't help but be giddy. I wanted to be nice to somebody. I wanted to make a new friend. Waiting for the bus, there was the girl I secretly accuse of copying my haircut, and a girl who looked as if she didn't know how to smoke a cigarette, whom I've never seen before. Because I like to beat things up with my feet whenever I wear boots, I made a little dirt slope with my foot while waiting for the bus. It climbed all the way to the beginning of the sidewalk. And I thought maybe some handicapped ants will appreciate the ramp. Then I thought if I had accidentally maimed some ants while kicking the dirt up, that would be unfortunate.

We all piled on to the campus express. I sat next to a guy who was filling out a sudoku. I thought over and over again how I should tell him I've figured out where to put a six. He left the box empty, and his hand is stopped. He's twirling around his pencil; he's thinking. I become plagued with a heightened sense of urgency. Finally I pointed to the box, and I said "I think that's a six." He checked my work before replying, "yes it is." Then I apologized for interrupting and got off the bus one stop early. I didn't know how to make a friend after all.

stupid blogs

what is it about this stupid thing that compels me to write prose? i am not even capable of thinking out a sentence that contains a complete thought!

In just a few weeks

Myspace is getting kind of relentless about the ad "Overweight at 19???? Try the diet specifically for 19 yr old women! As seen on CNN, ABC and more!" Someone once told me about search-specific ads. I don't think they are very effective. I don't make so many self-referential searches I guess. Don't get me wrong, like every goddamn girl on the planet, there is at least one week out of the month where I think I weigh a hundred pounds more. But I never make the effort to look up the best diet plans or workout routines, knowing in advance I will be sick of the novel idea, in maybe a few days.

I think the difference is I've genuinely ceased to care. It's like being a little dishonest, a thought which has been nestling and burrowing in my mind a lot lately. Now, I'm not a compulsive liar. But every now and then, I won't say compelled, but it just occurs naturally to me, that I should alter One detail in the retelling of an incident, that I should add something, or leave out some specifics. The leaving out I can attribute to for convenience's sake, the adding, i don't know what's gotten to my head. I sometimes get so used to telling a story so far apart from the way it happened, I have to remind myself what really happened.

Occasionally it's absolutely necessary. Creepy guy from school invites you somewhere and not your boyfriend, what would you have done? Sometimes it just saves the pains of narration, when your parents ask you how you spent your week, and it really doesn't make any sense to go into every detail, you end up going into none and just saying something like 'fine' when in fact it wasn't quite fine at all, at least at one time you might have not thought so. Sometimes it's just something inexplicable that leads you to believe things will change based on the way it was altered in the retelling, and you can't wait to erase some embarrassment, or hurt, from the way it actually was. Sometimes it's just plain old fun, until you sit down, just a few weeks before you birthday, and reflect on being dishonest. But this is very much a tangent, ironically revealing, but a tangent nonetheless.

What really struck me about the ad I guess, is that I've just a few weeks left at being 19. Without fail, every time I see the ad, I wonder if it will be a diet just for 20 yr olds when I turn 20. Then I reflect on an incident from a past life. I once had an acquaintance tell me the thing that made him feel oldest was turning 20, (I say acquaintance, he still calls me, though not for the sake of catching up), at the time he was 22 and had been through rehab, an extended stay at a mental facility and was diagnosed as having dementia, bipolar disorder, and clinical depression. You would think just waking up made him feel so old.

I have been through some things in my life. I had a stint with drug abuse, and was expelled from my old high school. I was always grateful that that was what got me started in JC. I've met and hung around some questionable characters. One summer, I damn near slept with everything that moved. At one point my mom told me I was adopted, but now it seems she might have been kidding, or so wholly besides herself with anger, that she couldn't think of anything that could sting like a denial of biological relations. I wonder if turning 20 the thing that will make me feel burdened with old age. Or if it's the numerous lies (big and small!) I've told. Or the realization that I am becoming my mother in spite of some, let's say biological ambiguity.

Revival

I don't know what to say here. Of the times I tried to revive various blogs I have created, I've never felt less inspired.

it's the unbearable lightness of being, biotches!

don't you hate it when one of your favorite books becomes the "it" thing for girls to talk about when they are trying to impress some guy you fucked? ...or blog about when they're trying to impress some general audience?







....it's kitsch

Opening Manila Envelopes

Truthfully, I am hurt by T.S. Eliot's comment about how amateur or bad writers imitate. The pages, they were put into manila envelopes with a time written across the cover (summer '04, old, somewhat recent through '05). You can see I don't really have a good system going for me. Anyhow, I put them there, I wrote across the front- these are the things I had written down in all these time that passed. I pass through obvious stylistic transitions, some of them so obvious that they were obviously not mine. The awkward transitional attempts were definitely mine, but the styles I tried on recognizably someone else's. (Or maybe that's even too generous, I'm assuming I actually did a good job imitating.)

And it is frustrating now, to pull apart the pieces which were heavily influenced by other writings and encounters in general. I have nothing to savor.

It is strange meeting myself like this. Through pages and pages of lined and blank papers, typed or written on, doodles or whatnot. I wonder which part(s) of it comprises of the real me. Do I bare my soul in these lines as every writer ought to, or am I lying even to myself. These times, I can't even explain why I write. There are plenty of impulses I could have tried to follow through with. My eyes and ears meet with stimuli every moment, and I am learning all the time about the world around me. But I write. I say I don't care much for criticism, but I study my work with zealous care seeking the flaws others have found. I say I don't care much for praise, but I read over lines which have struck someone particularly, and smile, or let out a content sigh.

What then, am I driven by? I don't have that sense of obligation to truth as a journalist. And I certainly don't have that sense of obligation to beauty as an artist. Does my work, and my person, truly comprise of the things I cannot identify myself as? I don't really want the remainder of my life, my academic career, my professional life, to pan out in the form of a literary mechanism- an instance of lytosis. I must be beyond it somehow. And to find that somehow, to find myself, I should quit looking back, sifting through whom I was in search of whom I am.

testing, testing

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