"They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"

I'm presently making a huge mistake:

I'm attempting to multi-task while watching Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

Bad move. Most of the film is dialogue/discourse, and most of the discourse is thick with philosophy and heavy ideas. A lot of the people are speaking quickly and I'm having trouble keeping up, since I'm not devoting my full attention to it. What I'm catching, though, I love. It's giving me a much clearer sense of Linklater and his aims in film.

Now that I've seen Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, A Scanner Darkly (which I really didn't like), and this, I guess I have to go back to the beginning of his filmography and see Slacker and Dazed and Confused. And I want to find subUrbia on VHS still, since I really enjoyed reading the play.

As far as I can tell, 1990s Linklater seems to be preoccupied with Gen X angst and 20-somethings coming of age. One thing I love about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset is that in seeing how Jesse and Celine grow and mature between 1995 and 2004, you consequently see how Linklater's grown. I also like that about Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites and Before Sunrise is not the same as Ethan Hawke 10 years later.

A lot of people don't like him. I do. The more interviews I read with him, the more I respect him. Gen X-ers came of age in the mid-'90s and he had to do it on film for an international audience. It seems like he had to endure condemnation for that for so long, that looking back, he has a different kind of an attitude that seems to say, "I'm doing what I want, I'm looking for fulfillment, and if you don't like what I'm doing, fuck you." Very Jersey, haha. He did, if I recall, go to high school here. This is from an interview that came out right after he did Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

EW: Do you feel more in the zone creatively now than you did at the peak of your infamy as a Gen-X icon 10 years ago?
Hawke: Absolutely. We as a culture love to celebrate people in their early 20s. But it's not a comfortable place to be in your mid-20s. You don't know who you are as a person. You're screwing up left and right. It's very awkward. I've found that the older I get, the easier it is to be the person you want to be. Self-importance has a stranglehold on people in their early 20s. That's the razor's edge you need to walk: to take yourself seriously but not too seriously.

Did it make you feel vulnerable to revisit [your] novel [when adapting it for film] after being so criticized for its self-absorption?
If you're me, there's a lot of advantages that come with it and a lot of disadvantages that come with it. People never hesitate to tell me when they think I'm an asshole.

So aren't you tempted to bury that part of yourself and hope people forget?
I can't. I buck at that. I was too young to be held accountable for how you felt about me when I was 23. I enjoy life too much to let myself be defined by that.

Are you happy with how it turned out?
It was a weird opportunity to get to make such a personal film in such a corporate age. To use cinema for self-expression in an age when everything is supposed to be a commodity for sale, I felt so privileged, and all of that was such a luxury. People who don't like my film don't like it passionately because they get this idea that self-reflective art is an act of egregious narcissism. And if that is true, what do we say to Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, to Proust to Whitman? You start to take a certain pride in their hatred of it. But the truth is, I'm really not only interested in self-reflective art. There's also a bunch of other stuff I'd rather do.

That's encouraging.

I understand why people denounce anything that even hints at self-importance and -involvement--I do it too. But part of me thinks, what is art for, if not for expression? And what's wrong with a little self-reflection, when so many people go through life without ever stepping back and really looking at themselves? Or without anyone ever really looking at them?

I'll probably look back at this some day and laugh at how self-involved and self-reflecting I was. I kind of am already. I'm okay with that. Everything is absurd, and sometimes all you can do is laugh at it all.

Commencement.

Yesterday, I went to a funeral to celebrate the death of everything I know.

We stood stiffly shoulder to shoulder in standard issue uniforms around the burning pyre as they handed us receipts—proof that we had passed through town and stayed here for a while, and a one-way ticket out.

No one knew what to say.

The silence spread through empty rooms and barren halls where ghosts still dance on tabletops to the echoes of our soundtrack, the musical story of our time together punctuated with laughter and end-stopped with a teardrop.

After an hour or two, the fire began to dwindle, but still we stood staring until the last spark died and a cold breeze blew the ashes into the sea, taking with it everything but our memories.

So we packed away our uniforms and became ourselves once more, but nothing was quite the same, and they gently pushed us out and firmly closed the door.

Empty and uncertain, we looked at each other and shrugged, not knowing where to go next.

One by one we fell away without a word—no one dared to say “goodbye” because “goodbye” implies “forever.”

Until, we remembered the permanence of impermanence, and began again.


(Not about me, despite the first person. Just the general atmosphere. What else is there to say. And like everything else, it's a work in progress.)

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Now playing: Vampire Weekend - Walcott

It never ends.

About two months ago, I was talking to a few friends. One said she was afraid of the fact that she and a close guy friend had romantic feelings for each other because she was afraid of ruining their friendship, and even though it sounds corny, she can't imagine not having him in her life.

I told her that I hate that reason for not giving it a shot because 1) If it doesn't work out, you truly can still be friends if you BOTH want it enough, and 2) There are people that we think we can't live without. And then something happens and we find out, we can live without them. Life goes on.

I fully believe that.

I do, however, also believe in something I wrote four months ago:

You never really "get over" losing someone you love. You just learn how to accept it and turn it into something else. And if you loved them, you never really lose them, because they've had an impact on you--they've made a difference in your life and it's a part of you. The pain just mellows out.

It's funny. I was thinking before about the day in Venice when we went to the Universita Ca' Foscari and heard Kathy's friend Shaul lecture about the Venetian ghetto and The Merchant of Venice. After that, we took the vaporetto up from Dorsoduro to Cannaregio and had lunch in a cafeteria and then walked down to the old apartments that used to constitute the ghetto. During lunch, I somehow got to talking to Kathy about "intellectual alienation," as she called it, and we continued talking about it the rest of the day. I don't even really remember what we said, but I do remember that she emphasized to me: the struggle never ends.

I remember exclaiming to her that that was terribly depressing to hear. She shrugged, and told me very earnestly that it's true: she's been struggling with it her whole life, and even now, she still does.

She told me that nearly one year ago, to the day. In the past year, I've found myself oscillating between contentment and hopefulness, and despair and frustration, fairly evenly. When I came back from Venice, I was still pretty high. By July/August, I was falling hard and fast. September, I started getting better again. Pretty mellow for the most part, aside from some moments, through the fall. Winter break I went nuts, and it was even worse when I got back. I started looking up in March, and after Relay, I was pretty content all through April, though tormented by other things. Now I'm back home and frustrated and angry and feeling this dull ache all the time again. I'm trying to embrace it and channel it toward something productive, but sort of failing so far.

In a strange way, this past semester has kind of mimicked the second half of my junior year of high school. All of that year was pretty great, but the second half was just so crammed full of new friends, old friends, adjusted relationships, and crazy emotions, that the first two and a half years of high school are barely memorable by comparison. I can distinctly recall vivid, isolated incidences from those six months, while the two and a half years before that seem like a blur. That's how I feel about this past semester--as though I have lived more in the past five months than I did the two and a half years before that.

I wrote in my journal a lot at the end of junior year. I journaled a lot this semester. Mmm.

Well, I just hope senior year of college is a lot better than senior year of high school. Well...less painful. I don't know if I could go through that again. Although, isn't that what life is--fearing pain, taking a chance and living anyway, getting the shit kicked out of you, and then finding the strength to get back up again?

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Now playing: Vampire Weekend - Oxford Comma

Anticlimactic.

The past two weeks, I've mostly been too busy, too cranky, or too overwhelmed to write anything.

Super lame, right.

I don't really have anything to say right now, either. Womp womp.

I realized before that I've put a couple hundred miles on my car since getting home on Friday, purely from driving up and down Rt. 35 aimlessly so much.

I do a lot of that when I'm home--driving around feeling frustrated and angry and lonely and scared and like a failure and trying to pinpoint why I feel that way.

Is summer over yet?

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Now playing: She & Him - I Thought I Saw Your Face Today

I know that I know it.

"The response we make when we 'believe' a work of the imagination is that of saying: 'This is the way things are. I have always known it without being fully aware that I knew it. Now in the presence of this play or novel or poem (or picture or piece of music) I know that I know it.'"
- Thornton Wilder

I would add "person" to that list.
Art is an awakening to something you always knew existed but were never quite aware of.
You could say the same about love, I suppose.
I love being woken up. Especially by people I know.

A poem.

I'm in the middle of hurrying to write 3 more pages about the Holocaust in media in the next hour, but I had a moment of inspiration(?) so I stopped and jotted this down. It needs work, but I like it. Especially the fat lady.

hidden gazes
stolen glances
across a crowded room.

soon, I say
I’ll walk on by
nonchalant
casual like.
trying not to stare at her…
there’s a lump in my throat.
she turns.
I duck and cover
behind the fat lady
with the red purse
and three kids who go running by.
I peer…
she's still there.
the brats spill fruit punch
on my shoes.
over the fat lady’s shoulder, I see
the laugh rises in her throat.
she chokes it back
but her eyes can’t lie.
amid the chaos they dance

and then
the fat lady moves

and there he is.
his dark eyes widen.
in the headlights, he freezes
crimson climbing up his cheeks
like a bounty paper towel
soaking up spilled punch.
I can’t hear anything.
just Bach running through my head
the lone cello…
I can’t see anything.
the fat lady has dissolved and it’s only
him.
the second lasts for hours in my mind
and when the music stops
he turns away.
I’m not blind.
you don’t want to look me in the eyes
because that’s the only place you see yourself
because you know I always see you.
I see you.
I see you.

Generally speaking, I think we lose a little and gain a little every day. Some days we lose more than others; some days we gain more. Keeping it in balance and finding the perspective to see the gains outstrip the losses is how we keep on keeping on.

"We choose love...

...We choose anger. We choose happiness. We choose boredom. You pick and choose based on the rush you give your body when it experiences a certain emotion. Some people, or the lack of some people, help you to trigger these emotions. So if you want Joy, all you have to do is trigger it yourself."

- Jason Mraz

I have discovered that recently, I have acquired the ability to trigger joy myself. There are about a thousand different things (and people...) right now that should be (and normally would be) making me stressed out, angry, upset, sad, and a ton of other not-so-pleasant. emotions. But I'm actually embracing my anger and frustration and disappointment and riding it out, for the most part, and enjoying the experience and the moment. It's kind of a miracle, given how super sensitive and overly-caring I am, and my tendency to let things get me down. I'm feeling buoyant though, and I like it. I said to someone today that I'm a pretty happy person, and right now, that's actually true. I'm pretty proud of that.

I suppose that explains why I haven't written so much on here lately. Haven't felt the need to. I like feeling like that, sometimes--compelled to obsess, to try to write out my frustrations. I like not needing to do that, too, though. Or channeling it into something different and more creative. That, I need to do more. And I still need more discipline. But in general, I'm okay with myself and my life right now. That'll probably change once school's over, but we'll see...