terrified of losing memories
dying to forget

"I sit there, eyes shut, plunging into darkness. How long will this winter last? A killing winter, the Colonel had said. And it has only begun. Will my shadow survive? No, the question is, will I survive, uncertain as I am?" (Murakami 225)

1) content

2) delivery

3) diction

I laugh a lot at 2 and 3 when most people don't. Usually because they conflict with each other or with 1 and present a funny juxtaposition of a statement but people almost always think I'm laughing at 1 and thus think I'm making fun but I'm not! I JUST LIKE WORDS.

why am I so bored with my life?

If you never expect anything, you're never disappointed!

It doesn't really work like that, though, does it?

This is so frustrating. I'd give just about anything to be in NJ right now.

Tuesday.

The cold snap that had turned the city into a subzero meat locker for the last fortnight was over, but still, the bitter wind that whipped off the water stung my wet face. At the end of the bridge, I could see The Beatles (now on iTunes!) staring mockingly at me from the side of the BFI IMAX. George, Paul, John, and Ringo, all twenty meters tall, all judging me silently -- especially Paul.

"I see in front of me a very real, intelligent girl with two BA's. You can do this." What was intended as encouragement felt like criticism, especially sandwiched as it was in between mild, veiled reprimands. It only made me feel worse. Where do these expectations come from, anyway? Why do I insist on unconsciously demanding to be considered as such? And what does it mean to be "real"?

I stopped on the bridge. Behind me, Embankment and Parliament glowed warm and golden in the early dusk. In front of me, the trees and shops along South Bank glared icy white and azure, with the National Theatre and the Millennium Wheel complementing them in a defiantly electric blue. On a flat barge on the Thames stood two magnificent evergreens, decked in lights.

It's too much. I don't deserve all this.

I kept walking. "Welcome to Lambeth." I paused beneath the IMAX.

You don't have to look at me like that, Paul, okay? I know. I know.

Maybe we've got it all wrong. Maybe loving someone is the easy part. Maybe love is easy, and respect is hard.

what am I doing!

There are a thousand other things I should be doing right now but I can't get my mind off the fact that none of it feels right. I'm an awful MA student and I don't have the intellect or patience for/interest in academia or formal theory that one needs to really want this, and I don't have the background or patience for any kind of MFA program, and I don't think I'd want to anyway. I'm tired of just writing about art all the time and researching it and all that and being judged on how well I do it. I want to make things but I don't know what to make and I don't think I have anything much to say about anything, nothing poetic enough for anything worthwhile at least, and it's frustrating. I'm not any kind of an artist. The only thing I am for sure right now is a student, and a bad one at that. I'm not a photographer; I just take mediocre pictures sometimes. I'm not a writer; I just bullshit sometimes. I can't draw or paint or do anything musical or anything like that. I dabble. And drift. And pretend. I can see things and feel them and recognize the value of the experience but I can't create it for others and I can't capture it for anyone and I don't know what I'm doing but I'm tired of constantly feeling like I want to be anywhere but here, everywhere I go, and I'm tired of feeling like I can't do anything right or well or adequately for anyone, least of all myself. I know I shouldn't complain and I know that if I'm unhappy I need to either just suck it up and stop bitching, or do something about it, but what should I do? I have to finish what I started so I guess I have 9 months to figure it out. Ohhhh that's depressing. I think I'm careening toward an unknown edge and don't want any kind of help getting centered again but wobbling to find balance isn't working out so well and this teetering is sort of getting out of control.

I hate this time of year.

<--end narcissistic insecure confused self-reflection-->

Hiding in plain sight is hard work.

PRIDE.

Okay, so like, I was watching Love Actually yesterday, and oh em gee, I love that movie like, so much. It's super cute and there are so many hot dudes in it. Colin Firth? Hugh Grant? RODRIGO SANTORO? He totally breaks my heart though. UGH when Laura Linney doesn't sleep with him because of what she feels are her obligations to her brother? KILLS ME. I want to be like, OH MY GOD JUST TURN OFF YOUR PHONE AND SLEEP WITH THE SWEET GORGEOUS MAN WHO IS TELLING YOU THAT HE THINKS YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. But of course she doesn't. Gets me every time yo. I cry inside. And sometimes IRL.

The only other sort of unhappy ending in that movie is Emma Thompson. She is so adorbz. And soooo classy. She knows her husband is cheating on her, she warns him about it, and he still goes and falls into Skinny Office Bitch's trap anyway! H8 U SKINNY OFFICE BITCH. And I always want to be like, ALAN RICKMAN WHAT ARE YOU DOING STOP SCREWING EMMA OVER SHE DOESN'T DESERVE THAT. Because in a way, it's so NOT about the fact that it happened. It's about the fact that it happened and EVERYONE KNOWS. When she calls him out on it, he doesn't deny it, and calls himself a classic fool, but she points out to him: "You've made ME a fool. You've made the life I lead FOOLISH." And then she goes and praises her awful son Bernard and her nameless daughter and tells them they made rockin Nativity lobsters because she rules.

That's what it's about though, in a way, isn't it? PRIDE. It hurts, knowing that someone you trusted and love has in some way betrayed you. But like, it's almost worse - maybe it IS worse - to be made to look foolish before the rest of the world. It's like, you were taken advantage of, you were used, and you trusted when perhaps you shouldn't have - you should have known better. And of course that's silly and irrational, but that's how it feels, right? Everyone will know and everyone will judge and somehow it will be YOUR fault, because who could respect someone that lets her husband who supposedly loves her go sleep with a Skinny Office Bitch? How can you respect yourself for being such a fool? You let your feelings cloud your judgement and it's embarrassing. In a way, I think the blow to one's pride hurts more than the betrayal itself. And like, how lame is that? To be more afraid of having your pride hurt more than of being emotionally hurt. That's more disgusting, more embarrassing, than actually having it happen.

Ugh. Pride, man. It's the worst.

'tis the season, folks

Why is the giving of one's self so valuable?

"...I think the best way to approach this is to start close to home, right in the gut, and then ponder what it teaches us. And the plain fact is that giving “feels right”—feels good, actually. Life seems to be better, friendlier, more connected, more whole, more flowing when we participate in it by givingness rather than taking. And giving isn’t just money and possessions; even more importantly, we give our attention, our listening ear, our commitment, our presence. And out of this giving, life seems to relax and go deeper. Connections open up, trust builds. It’s like oil on the cogwheels of life." (Bourgeault)

It's a high, and it's addictive, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

oh hey December.

Sagittarius

1 Dec 2010

You may try to ignore messages from your subconscious now, but the advice you receive from yourself is likely better than what you get from others. You might believe that you're open to listening to your intuition, but a part of you recognizes your emotional limits and you're afraid to stretch beyond them. Be careful; you could lose a wonderful opportunity for love if you become so inflexible that you miss what's right in front of your nose.

killing the American Dream?

You know, sometimes I think that even though the loud-mouthed conservative population in America may lead us to believe that our nation is one of people full of faith, we've become quite a faithless nation.

"No survey data can reveal the hurts inflicted by our wasteful, immoral wars foisted upon us by deceitful leaders exploiting our anxieties and gullibility. That only 2 percent may place them among our biggest national worries at the moment is a sign of sublimation rather than their discounting. As for the loss of faith in our institutions -- private and public -- from financial kleptomania and the compromised actions of government, it has become free floating. A constant presence that aggravates every fear and uncertainty." (Brenner)

Maybe we've finally killed the "American Dream." That whole highschool-career-family, white picket fence thing was all well and good for the conservative, high-moral Americans of the 1940s and '50s. I know the dissent of the 1960s was rooted and began in the '50s, but generally speaking, I think Americans had faith in the paradigm of delayed gratification by which they existed: get a job, pay your dues, and reap your consumerist suburbia dream reward later.

But now, in a post-9/11, mid-recession, Wikileak'd "information age," that paradigm is changed. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that today's 18-35 year olds no longer have faith in the promise of delayed gratification -- in the promise of the American Dream. We like fast food, smart phones, and the internet: we like NOW. Boomer parents have given their children everything, including a sense of entitlement. But I'm beginning to think that our desire for instant gratification may not be solely the result of us being spoiled silly.

Maybe we want what we want right now because we don't have faith that the future holds anything for us. Maybe we feel like we deserve everything we can get out of life this minute because we can't trust our flawed institutions and chaotic world, and we can't believe that the best is yet to come. Maybe we've realized that our parents were disillusioned and the American Dream doesn't exist. Maybe we're finally killing it. Or maybe we really are just spoiled, spoon-fed brats.

Regardless, I think we need to accept that the old model is in need of an upgrade. I think the dominant ideology is slowly beginning to gravitate away from the old idea of the American Dream, and I think this is a good thing. Perhaps popular culture has taken to cultivating a sense of nostalgia for the 1950s because it's realizing that the old paradigm no longer applies. Yet, in the same way I think no one really knows what will formally succeed postmodernism, I can't say I really have any idea where post-American Dream social thought will go. But I'm pretty eager to see it happen.

Sometimes I think I scare people by talking about non-normal things.

I wish this was not true but I think it is.

scattered thoughts

"Though justice be thy plea, consider this:
...That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy..."

- The Merchant of Venice

This is one of my 2 favorite Shakespeare quotes. I was thinking today, though - maybe, sometimes, the most merciful thing one can do is be just.

I don't know. I like fairness. Lack of justice frustrates me and pisses me off, even though sometimes I can accept that realistically, life isn't fair, and often justice isn't served. But if that's true, then I guess we should pray for mercy, right? I'm all about forgiveness, and mercy is forgiveness given freely, whether it's deserved or not.

Maybe, then, that's where love is. Maybe love is mercy - maybe love is a place where forgiveness is given freely with no expectations of reciprocation. Maybe our friends are the people who are merciful to us - the ones who love us and forgive us, whether we deserve it or not. Maybe we just need to trust in their mercy. As hard as that sounds. But then... aren't most forms of Christianity supposed to be about trusting in the mercy of God? I wonder if trusting in the mercy of God makes it easier for one to trust in the mercy of those who love them.

Although, I guess it's hard to know who really loves us. "I love you" is an easy thing to say, but saying it doesn't matter so much as acting it, right? It's nice to hear, and sometimes saying it is an act in itself, but it's meaningless if you don't act it. Whereas I guess that's not so much of a thing with a relationship with God. Or maybe it is. I guess I wouldn't know.

I don't know if I believe in God. I'm not really down with organized religion. I believe in something, but I don't really have a name for it. I guess I believe in timing? Things happen when they're supposed to happen, we meet people when we're supposed to meet them, we make the choices and decisions that we're supposed to make when we're supposed to make them. I tend to doubt when the going gets tough, but it's not faith without doubt, right? I think I really believe it though. Whatever "it" is. Fate? Fortune? I just think it's time. Moments.

Maybe certain people come into our lives when we need them most; maybe we make certain friends at certain times because at that time, we need them. Maybe we happen across certain songs or movies or writings to comfort and awaken and inform when we most need them. I can't count the number of times I've gone to a class, only to leave thinking that the perspective or truth of the movie we watched or the article we read was something I really needed in order to move forward in one way or another. And then I marvel at how it seemed to fall into my lap when I needed it.

Maybe everything, everyone we need, is waiting right under our noses, and we just need the grace to see it.

Sometimes I read the Bible. It's a pretty swell book with some great stories. And sometimes it makes me feel better. This is my favorite verse: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32.

If grace is a touch of truth... and truth is in the reaction... and the reaction comes from intuition in a moment of crisis... and sometimes you have to have the strength to force a moment to the crisis... then I suppose times of crisis are freeing. Cathartic.

The melding of pity and fear. Pity. Fear. Pity. Fear. Cleansing. Purge. Release. Making the truth known. Knowing the truth. Maybe letting the truth be recognized is justice. Or maybe it's mercy.

Maybe it is both.

I wonder if I will ever be able to write truthfully, with total honesty. Sincerity. Vulnerability.

I feel like I have been here before...

can't fall back asleep.

THINGS I AM GOOD AT:

-- Wanting things I can't have.

-- Making excuses.

-- Procrastinating.

-- Whining about ~1st world problems.

-- Being paranoid and overly self-aware.

-- Being paranoid that I am not self-aware enough.

-- Being overly sensitive and thin-skinned.

---- Being super insecure and pretending I'm not.

-- Being awkward.

-- Indulging.

-- Overanalyzing.

-- Thinking about things I shouldn't.

-- Having stubborn pride.

-- Being narcissistic.

-- Making lists as a feeble attempt to organize and control my messy, unstable life.

---- Realizing that these lists don't really make me feel any better but making them anyway.

Today, I am thankful for:

-- There not being an actual fire in my building when the fire alarm went off an hour ago.

-- Not getting hit by that bus that almost hit me outside of Waterloo Station.

-- Sallie Mae for reminding me today that my loan payments go up next month.

-- Wonderful friends who send me mail!

-- Wonderful family who send me mail!

-- Titus Andronicus for giving me a dose of Jersey tonight.

-- Amazon for putting Mad Men seasons 1-3 on sale.

-- This chicken and stuffing sandwich.

-- Clothes and food and a roof and all that.

favorite body parts

hands

wrists

ankles

neck

I guess I like for things to connect.

chit chat small talk bullshit etc.

I've been talking too much lately. It's kind of a problem. I really, really hate when I do it. I feel like talking so much makes me inaccessible and makes it harder for other people to talk to me, which is the last thing in the world that I want. I would, 9 times out of 10, prefer to just listen. But I feel like these days I don't shut up, ever.

And I mean, I'm not stupid...I know that I need to talk to get other people to talk to me. Trust begets trust. I just feel like I've been doing too much talking and not enough listening. And it's not even good, interesting talk. It's fruitless and empty talk.

Rambling, nervous talk.

Rambling, nervous writing.

Meh.

liberation

It is possible to exist between fixed identities.

Not only is it possible, but it's exactly what we do, mostly.

We attach ourselves, at times, to concrete archetypal identities, but we move around within and without them.

This is such a simple idea, but it's one I tend to forget, in trying to organize and control everything all the time.

We don't have to identify as black or white or even gray. We can, and do, exist with fluidity in the spaces between. We can let go.

Inhale. Exhale. Mmmmmm.

I want to reread The Tao of Pooh.

nostalgia.

Well, technology is a glittering lure, but there is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged beyond flash - if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job - I was in house at a fur company - with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is "new." Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. He also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It's delicate, but potent.

Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain of an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. [Kodak's projection wheel] isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. Goes backwards, forwards. Takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called "the wheel." It's called "the carousel." It lets us travel the way a child travels: around and around, back home again to a place where we know we are loved.

- Mad Men, 1.13 - "The Wheel"

Andre Jordan.

I like him.

love this blog.

think think think

I've been thinking a lot again, over the past few days, about the day in Venice when my professor Kathy - who at the time was 67 with bad knees in a city with no cars and lots of steps - sat with me and my friend Jess at lunch and talked frankly with us about how she had been struggling with feelings of what she termed "intellectual alienation" for most of her life.

Some background: When she was 18 or so, Kathy left home and moved to India for three years, and only came home after giving birth to her first child. Before she was 30, she was living back in the US with an MA and PhD in Literature from Harvard, writing and publishing youth travel guides with her husband, and she had another kid. Eventually she got divorced, and since then she's taught everywhere from Italy to Russia to Turkey to Thailand. She worked at Ramapo for years, directing the telecommunications center (that a lot of people don't know exist) and teaching. A lot of people who had her as a professor said she was awful, but as a person, she's unbelievable. She's mainly retired but she still runs the Venice trip every May, and she still knows the city well. She lives in a gorgeous little house in the Bronx right on the Hudson River with a view of the cliffs and the GW Bridge that'd knock you silly. She has a dog named Pablo and a cat named Ringo, and her house is decorated with things she's collected over the years from all the places she's been: masks from Venice, ganeshes from India, street paintings from Africa, hand-carved wooden benches from Bali. This is her backyard. I want it.

But anyway. Kathy is as liberal and sharp-tongued as most Ramapo comm professors, and she would always talk to me in Venice about how she gets slack for being intellectually curious and holding a mix of knowledge and experience in higher regard than straight academia and bureaucratic bullshit. She said she's always felt a bit on the outside for thinking differently from most people, and she realized a long time ago that that struggle never ends. The first time she told me this, I groaned and told her that's depressing. She fixed me with an earnest stare and said, "Well, it's true. I don't want to lie to you. It doesn't go away."

It was reading week, this week, and I didn't have class. I didn't catch up on reading or get a head start on my papers, like I should, but let my brain rest for a week. I love my classes, I really do. But at the same time, even though I only have 6 hours of seminar a week, they exhaust me. I find myself questioning everything, all the time; in a sense, turning everything into a struggle of ideology and social issue and so on and so forth. I look at something and I can't just appreciate the basic aesthetic value; I immediately start deconstructing it. I find myself placing even the most mundane things in academic or critical frameworks, and it's tiring. I really appreciate having the opportunity to be here and learn and be made to feel totally lost and clueless on a regular basis. Seriously. It's a great experience, so far. But having this time off this week also made me realize that I am a much, much happier person when I don't think so much about things.

And then that makes me wonder: which is the better way to live? Blindly accepting of the problems in the world, of the various "meanings" of works of art, unaware that they exist, and relatively happy? Or trying to learn and grow intellectually and constantly questioning everything, but struggling all the time? Where is the joy and wonder and excitement and passion in "intellectual alienation"?

I think I'm gonna go to church next Sunday.

hahahahahahahahahahaha

This isn't really funny. Except it kind of is. From: TOP TEN FACTS ABOUT LOW SELF ESTEEM

3) Characteristics of Genuinely Low Self Esteem

1. Social withdrawal
2. Anxiety and emotional turmoil
3. Lack of social skills and self confidence. Depression and/or bouts of sadness
4. Less social conformity
5. Eating disorders
6. Inability to accept compliments
7. An Inability to see yourself 'squarely' - to be fair to yourself
8. Accentuating the negative
9. Exaggerated concern over what you imagine other people think
10. Self neglect
11. Treating yourself badly but NOT other people
12. Worrying whether you have treated others badly
13. Reluctance to take on challenges
14. Reluctance to put yourself first or anywhere.
15. Reluctance to trust your own opinion
16. Expecting little out of life for yourself

...

7) Build on Solid Foundations

For anyone to be psychologically and physically healthy then core needs have to be fulfilled. Being clear about what you need and making efforts to meet those needs constructively means you’ll naturally have better self esteem as a by-product of living well.

This is useful list of basic human needs:

1. The need to give and receive attention
2. The need to look after your body.
3. The need for meaning, purpose and goals.
4. The need for a connection to something greater than ourselves
5. The need for creativity and stimulation
6. The need for intimacy and connection to others.
7. The need for a sense of control
8. The need for a sense of status and recognition from others.
9. The need for a sense of safety and security

Of course, it is likely that at any one time, one or more of these may be slightly lacking in your life, without dire consequences. However, in the long-term, they must all be catered for one way or another.

Something else the “low self esteemer” needs is the capacity to focus off their own emotionality and merge with experience so they gain more enjoyment from life.

2, 7, and 9...never gonna happen, hahahahaha.

reductive

It's easy to get lost behind a camera, where people cease to be persons with any kind of meaning as such, where the main focus is on the surface. It's easy to see you through the lens, construct you within the frame, as a figure of lines and curves, as an object that moves and acts and is acted upon, that is seen but does not see. It's an easy way of life but I guess it's not much of a way to live, is it?

posting this everywhere I possibly can so maybe I'll remember that it's true

Letting go of our prerequisites for worthiness means making the long walk from "What will people think?" to "I am enough." But, like all great journeys, this walk starts with one step, and the first step in the Wholehearted journey is practicing courage.

The root of the word courage is cor -- the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.

Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics are important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we've lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we're feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage.

Heroics are often about putting our life on the line. Courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. If we want to live and love with our whole hearts and engage in the world from a place of worthiness, our first step is practicing the courage it takes to own our stories and tell the truth about who we are. It doesn't get braver than that.

- "Want to be happy? Stop trying to be perfect" by Bréne Brown

Fictional Relationships That I Would Love To Be In

-- Before Sunset / Before Sunrise's Celine to Jesse.

-- Mad Men's Peggy Olsen to Don Draper. (Weird, right.)

-- The Philadelphia Story's Tracy Lord to Macaulay Connor. Or CK Dexter Haven.

-- Holiday's Linda to Johnny.

-- Gosford Park's Mary to Robert Parks. (Really weird, right.)

-- Eternal Sunshine's Clem to Joel.

-- Little Women's Jo to Laurie.

-- Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy. (lol duh.)

-- Gilmore Girls's Rory to Jess.

-- A Wrinkle in Time's Meg Murry to Calvin O'Keefe.

-- The Anne books' Anne to Gilbert.

-- The View From Saturday's Nadia to Ethan. (Really, REALLY weird, right.)

-- Atonement's Cecilia to Robbie.

Most of these relationships are either extremely weird or dysfunctional, or they're total failures. Or they're totally romanticized and completely unrealistic. This probably says something about me.

"We say that we read to escape into fictional lives, but before we know it, we’re finding our own lives in the fiction we love. That’s why we love it"

What was this compulsive need to be lovable? They both had it, were driven by it, bound by it. They would even sacrifice each other for the sake of it.

But she sensed they were afflicted differently. He wanted to preserve his worthiness in the eyes of other people. It was because of losing his parents; it had to be. Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

And what about her? Whose love did she so compulsively doubt?

She knew without thinking. From her earliest memory she had perceived the chasm between how she looked and how she felt. She knew whose love she doubted. It wasn't her parents' and it wasn't her friends'. It was her own.

forever in blue - ann brashares

more lengthy academic notes; disregard

Oh, also.

KH: I was just showing my work as part of a panel at UCLA. I attended another panel of women artists where the first audience question was, "Do you find working with your autobiography self-indulgent?" I was struck by that question. Why is it that the first question about this work is whether or not it's self-indulgent? Will women be making work about their experience always be accused of being self-indulgent and narcissistic? So it is interesting for me to now hear you say that people made the same comments to you in the early sixties. Could you speak to this? Do you think that this relates to your teacher's comment, "Don't put your heart into art [because you're 'just a girl']"?

CS: If a man crosses a threshold to depict or engage a lived reality, he becomes a hero. To deal with actual lived experience--that's a heroic position for a male and a trivial exposure for a woman. A woman exploring lived experience occupies an area that men want to denigrate as domestic, to encapsulate as erotic, arousing, or supporting their own position.

Culturally it has to do with the whole diminution of the feminine, what is female. Being so saturated with our own contradictory traditions and the degree of freedom that we have within these shifting traditions, it is hard for us to see where the deep hatred of the feminine still maintains its squirmy hostile boundaries.

This reminded me of two criticisms I read lately of Jane Austen. One is from Martin Amis (1996): "Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping everybody busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors--all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself." This is one of the great things to me, about Austen: in a weirdly pre-feminist way, she depicts the "feminine" side of English country life - society and relationships and the mercenary institution of marriage - and in sense, she does so with very little romance. She was high minded morally, and though her stories are often given stronger romantic overtones in contemporary adaptations, her work is deeply ironic. In the context of Schneemann's comments on the continuing denigration of all things feminine as trivial, Austen's triumph feels even greater to me.

The second criticism is, more broadly, an argument that the depiction of Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's 2005 Pride and Prejudice is a post-feminist Elizabeth, a postmodern one even. She isn't a middle-class English country girl fighting for her liberty and right to marry who she chooses - she's won that battle already, and she assumes her freedom carelessly. This is something that I suppose might be a negative criticism, but it's something that I really, really appreciate about this particular adaptation. Austen adaptations ride waves of popularity over the years, with filmmakers repurposing her stories and introducing them to new generations. I love that this latest incarnation of Elizabeth Bennet can be viewed as post-feminist. Though I know we aren't really in a place where the feminist fight is no longer relevant, we're still in a place where depicting a woman as possessed of her independence and liberty is a positive thing. It's subtle, in this adaptation, but it's still there. Lizzy roams the countryside at her leisure, oversees her own formal education, and forms her own opinions (or judgements) of people's characters regardless of their class. At the same time, she partakes in feminine pleasures with her sisters. She goes to town to shop for ribbons, she enjoys dancing, she takes pride in preparing and dressing for the ball, and she girl-talks with her sister under the covers at night. She's both strong-minded and independent, and feminine and girly. And don't contemporary women have the right to be both?

I would also just like to observe that it is 10:30 on a rainy Friday night and I am in pajamas in bed eating a bit of a baguette and drinking white zinfandel while watching Atonement and reading scholarly articles on feminist experimental filmmakers for fun. I can't decide if I am completely satisfied or if I think I need a life.

but you are an artist, and your mind don't work the way you want it tooooooooo

It's funny, every time I have a critical reading that interviews the filmmaker or discusses their intent or point of view or whatever, I always find myself reading in sympathy with them, as opposed to in sympathy of whatever view the author of the article is taking. Things like this sort of make me wish I'd taken some production courses and applied for MFA programs instead, but I've never been that kind of learner; I've always learned by exploring the abstract and then applying it in life, wherever it seems fitting. This is how I used to end up using my 20th Century American Foreign Policy notes to write papers for Literature and Film. Things like that. Besides, I like to think of theory and study kind of like the way I think of rules: you can follow the rules or break them, but you gotta know what they are, first.

Anyway, today I read an interview with this formalist avant garde filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, who made this film called Fuses between 1964 and 1967. It's now considered to be an "important" experimental film, but at the time, it was disregarded, to an extent, because it was an experimental film made by a female filmmaker and it dealt with sex on screen. She made it in a response to Stan Brakhage's brilliant Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which is an experimental film depicting the home birth of his first child. It's a fairly ungendered depiction of the birth, but as Brakhage did most of the filming, it still has that inescapable male lens. Schneemann was interested in showing a more equal partnership in sexual terms - "I really wanted to see what 'the fuck' is and locate that in terms of a lived sense of equity...we have to remind ourselves that throughout the sixties, only men maintained creative authority: women were muses, partners."

She continues, saying how as she was making it, no one stood by her except for her sexual/creative/intellectual partner Jim Tenney, who is in Fuses, and afterwards, virtually all feminist critics ignored it because it was a woman's film that showed a woman having sex. Primarily a performance artist and a painter, Schneemann was trying to liberate the female figure from the traditional, immobilizing framework of "the nude" in art. She had dealt in previous works with the questions, "Could I include myself as a formal aspect of my own materials? Could a nude woman artist be both image and image maker?" and she was tired of her work being qualified by her gender - "You're really good for a girl, but..." So she made a movie showing the equality and intimacy of her partnership with herself as image.

The interviewer, Kate Haug, a more contemporary experimental filmmaker and critic, asked Schneemann about her identity as an artist.

KH: On one hand, you have this desire to be an artist. On the other hand, you are producing work which you know is highly controversial. It seems you would feel like you are taking an incredible risk; you know you are in a very combative situation.

CS: It's not that I had a desire to be an artist. I'm in a very combative situation because I am an artist. Whatever an artist is or was, I was it. This wasn't a choice, and that's different. It means you have a certain character structure.

KH: How would you describe that character structure?

CS: You have to make images or you're going to die, basically. That is the most interesting, satisfying, compelling, necessary function--like love and sex and breathing. one hears people say "I don't know what great art is, but I know it when I see it." Somebody somewhere recently wrote a variation on this: "I can't tell what produces a great artist, but I know a real artist when I meet someone who has to create images or she'll expire."

By this definition, I think that someday, I would like to feel like I am an artist.

we're not real, anyway, right?

Jesse: What do you think were the chances of us ever meeting again?
Celine: After that December, I'd say almost zero. But we're not real, anyway, right? We're just, uh, characters in that old lady's dream. She's on her deathbed, fantasizing about her youth. So, of course we had to meet again.

before sunset

I hate that

when I'm talking to people ~online, whether it's in real time or in a message or email, it's really hard to convey sympathy or interest. I hate that when someone's telling me about something, I can't nod encouragingly and say "Mmm" and make eye contact to show that I'm interested in what they have to say. I have to spell it out, and it always rings false in my head, even though I mean it sincerely. And I hate that when someone's telling me something and I want to show them that I can relate to what they're saying, I can't nod emphatically and gesture and look at the person. I have to say "I get it" or "I feel that" or something equally as weak. And sometimes I feel like I have to give an example of a similar experience of my own to back that up. And I hate doing that, to me it always sounds like I'm trying to make whatever the person's talking about, about me, but I'm not! I just don't want them to think I'm just going along, or saying that I understand with no qualification for it, and ughhhh. It's really fucking hard to be a good listener online without seeming self-interested and I feel like I fail at it all the time and it makes me paranoid and self-conscious. I hate the internet sometimes. I like words and all but I hate having to rely on them so heavily for communication, because there's so much more to it than that, and I frequently feel like something important gets lost and I hate that. Hate hate hate.

/rant

~lifegoals

-- Write movie reviews for a newspaper or magazine.

-- Write film crit for a legitimate periodical or other publication.

(I think this needs to happen in this order.)

-- Write a full length feature screenplay that I don't hate.

-- Write a play that isn't terrible.

(This also needs to happen in this order, I think. I don't think I could write a play before finishing a screenplay.)

-- Bring back screwball comedy, goddamnit. IT CAN STILL BE RELEVANT.

-- Teach. Preferably university students.

-- Write a media literacy curriculum for elementary/secondary school students to teach them how to sort through and critically digest images/moving pictures/the stuff on the internet with actual content instead of just fucking consuming it mindlessly.

---- Make friends who will get this curriculum implemented for real in public schools.

------ Make other friends who will save public education.

------ Make other friends who will save liberal arts higher education.

------ Make other friends who will effectively reform the university admissions process.

-------- Find the patience and means to do all this myself should the friend-making fail, which it probably will.

In the mean time:

-- Write more letters.

-- Write more in general.

---- Write less about me and more about everything else.

---- Finish that goddamn screenplay adaptation.

-- Read more.

---- Books, I mean.

-- Consume less. Sort through the shit and critically read/view more.

-- Finish my masters without being a total failure.

-- Keep going. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't count my days on a rosary

I count my days by little blue pills

they're equally meaningless I think

seven more rows of little blue pills

and then what?

I can't feel them slide down my throat

so sometimes I forget if I've taken it or not

I don't feel much of anything, I don't think

or maybe I feel too much of everything

what does that even mean

I'm beginning to suspect

that I don't exist.

I think I may just be a shadow.

a collection of images and words put forth to float forever through cyberspace.

nothing feels real. not even me.

this is weird.

[angry post about gender identity and feminism and societal pressure to be either a feminist or a product of a misogynistic patriarchal society]

We're both in the same business, and I'm not embarrassed to say that it's about helping people somehow to sort out their deepest conflict: …In a nutshell, it all comes down to "what I want" versus "what’s expected of me."

- Psychologist Faye Miller on Mad Men.

(lol irony.)

EVERYTHING IS STRANGE.

I don't know what it is about the end of October, but I feel like I fall into a similar funk every year around the same time, and I don't think I'm the only one. Everyone is being all jaded and strange, everyone is withdrawing - like they're going into early hibernation or something. There's this pervasive mood that's just making everything feel weird, and I don't know what triggered it. I feel like I should do something, but I don't know what to do, or what to say, even. I don't know. Something feels off. I don't know.

I don't know.

comfort tunes

It's funny to me that I consider "comfort music" mostly to be music that would comfort me when I was depressed or upset when I was 17-20 or so.

When I was 17 and 18, I listened to a lot of Anna Nalick's "Wreck of the Day," Howie Day's "Stop All the World Now," and Missy Higgins's "The Sound of White" when I was upset. And a lot of Bruce, except now I mostly associate Bruce with being 18 and in love in the summer time at the beach, so that doesn't really count any more.

When I was 19 and 20, I listened to a lot of Mandy Moore's "Wild Hope," and I am so not ashamed of that. It was like...my barely-post-adolescent break-up album. Hahahahahaha. I was also really into John Mayer and Ingrid Michaelson. And Chris Ayer saved my life sophomore year, I think. Love him always.

Around then, most of that got replaced pretty quickly by M. Ward and Wilco. And since then, I'll usually just listen to whatever's tickling my fancy at the time. But some days, I get into weird moods where the only thing that satisfies me is this music that used to comfort me at very specific times in my life. I'm always surprised by how quickly it makes me feel better. It makes me wonder though: will I still be doing this 5, 10 years from now? Turning to this music that comforted me as a teenager? Part of me is like, "OH GOD I hope not." But part of me hopes I still do this - part of me never wants to fall out of love with anything, even if it's just music.

heroines

When I was little, I wanted to be Jo March, Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and my mother, all rolled into one.

I sort of still do.

I really hate overly demonstrative couples who feel the need to display a little too much public affection on the tube.

I am slightly uncomfortable with how much these couples irritate me, as I suspect not a little of this irritation is born of jealousy, and I would very much like to not want what these people feel the need to flaunt.

Fuck split infinitives. It sounds better this way.

My memory sure ain't what it used to be, but it's still far, far too long for its own good.

I wish it was easier to forget what I don't want to remember.

now what?

I want to know what happens next.

Existing conditions change moment to moment and things don't stay the same.

We make choices and what is meant to happen as a result, that is what happens.

We act and react and we move and shift, looking for the rhythms that bring us together and the beats that pull us apart, and we go on and on and on, adapting constantly.

Sometimes these changes seem to unfold naturally, appearing as direct results from small choices made, but at other times, I feel like these changes explode in an absurdly dramatic fashion, upending lives into states of chaos, as a result of a whole confluence of indirect influences. These explosions can catch you by surprise, but sometimes, I think you can anticipate their approach. Once in a while I sense this electricity in the air, this feeling of heightened possibility, that I refer to in my head as a feeling of "Things About To Happen." There's this sense of imminence. The universe is stirring, and something game-changing is afoot.

Usually when I get this feeling, it comes on quickly. I step back and see that all the natural, little changes that have been unfolding are a set-up for the explosion that's on its way. It's not unlike watching a well-played game of chess begin to draw to a close: suddenly, the game plan is clear, and everything makes sense. I'm starting to get traces of this feeling again, but it's more foreboding - something doesn't feel right. It's like the board isn't set up properly, and something is going to go wrong. The timing is off. Something isn't right.

This feeling is making me anxious. It's looming over my head, hanging in the air like the heavy humidity that comes before a storm, before the thunderheads roll in, when the sun has that peculiarly harsh glare. I don't feel like the explosion is in the immediate future, but I can feel it working its way closer. I'm not worried or excited, though, so much as I am curious. Something big is coming, and I don't think I care whether or not it's good or bad. I'm just eager to see, what happens next?

Insincere apologies are the worst.

same old story.

Ugh, I've been dying to rant about this for two days now. It's nothing new. I've gotten worked up over it a thousand times. I still hate it. And it's stupid, because I shouldn't. It shouldn't bother me. But I really, really hate when classes put me in a position where I'm forced to consider my "cultural identity."

At this point it's like, okay, you know what, I get it. I get that I'm the exception. I get that I am 100% Korean with an English-French-German-etc. mother and an Irish-Norwegian father who has an Italian stepmother. I get that I grew up in a predominantly white suburban New Jersey town from the age of 4 months on. I graduated high school with a total of maybe half a dozen other Asian kids (out of 450), except they were all from traditional Asian families. And nearly every other one of my friends was Irish or Italian American, or both. I had no idea that Catholicism wasn't the predominant religion in the United States until I was 17 or so, purely because most of my friends were Irish or Italian American.

It's just frustrating. I've been living against a stereotype, against an image, since day one. I've never, ever been that skinny, quiet little Asian kid who's freakishly good at math, amazing at piano and the violin, good at tennis, whose parents insist that I be a doctor/nurse/accountant when I grow up. That's never who I was. If you tried cheating off me in math class any time after seventh grade, you were shit out of luck. I never liked science. I quit cello when I was 12 and piano by the time I was 16 because I was tone-deaf and had no rhythm. I can swing a golf club but I'm awfully unathletic in every possible way. And frankly, my parents don't care what I do with my life as long as I'm passionate about it. I was that kid who sat at a corner of the lunch table and read through recess. I liked art, history, and English class and watching movies. I was serious about school but I liked having a social life too. I wanted to be a writer.

None of this bothers me, really. It's part of who I am, and that's cool. Whatever. What bothers me is that society's constructed image of Asian Americans forces me to constantly challenge what other people expect of me. I confuse people, and that's fun and all, but it gets exhausting, having to always explain what, to other people, is the conundrum of your existence. "Your name is Irish! But. . . but. . . you're Asian!?" And you know, having the physical characteristics of an Asian means I must know every other Asian in the tri-state area and eat cats. I hate going to nail salons purely because I hate dealing with the Korean employees who inevitably will make small talk with me about how I am Korean, and do I speak the language, and how long have I been in the United States? But I've ranted about this before...

I don't remember ever not being in the United States. I do remember being in Intro to American Studies in college (bear with me please), discussing an essay by a young woman born in Iran or Iraq - I can't remember the specifics - but she was raised, from age 15 or so on, in Ohio or somewhere else in Middle America. Though she retained some of her traditional culture through her family, she was fairly assimilated, and she considered herself to be a "daughter of America." And I was furious because most of the students in class - at least, the ones who were talking - didn't think that she had the right to refer to herself as such, because she wasn't born in America. Because where does that place me? Do you not consider me to be a "daughter of America" just because I wasn't born in the United States? And the worst part was, I had to admit that I understood if they didn't consider me as such, given that the federal government doesn't consider me to be enough of an American to be president. Thanks, Founding Fathers. I hated that, when I was little - "You can be anything you want when you grow up. You could be President of the United States!" Well no, no I can't. Because for the first four months of my life, I lived in a foster home in South Korea before someone wanted to raise me. This makes me un-American, apparently.

And because of those four months, people want me to identify myself as Korean, not American. When people - especially creepy gas station attendants - ask me, "So what are you?" or, "Where are you from?" I always want to say, "I'm human" or, "I'm American," and, "I'm from New Jersey." I had to mark on college and grad school applications that I am Asian/Pacific Islander so they could recognize that I'm not an underrepresented minority and hold me to higher standards. Cool, right. For UK applications, I usually defaulted to "I prefer not to answer," purely from confusion - I'm not British Asian, I'm not Indian, I'm not another Asian national, so what am I? "Other"? Awesome.

And now here I am. I spent the summer working at the Seaside Heights boardwalk where international workers would ask me how I knew English so well and was this my first time in the States? I'm at an internationally renowned university in a masters program of 20 Highly Educated People who are mostly white, listening to casual conversations about how they didn't want to take a module over at one of the other University of London campuses because the high Asian population makes them uncomfortable. I'm listening to seminar discussions about the way Western and Eastern cultures are both represented in overtly Westernized ways in Bride and Prejudice, and how these students think the film is weaker for not committing to engaging in a legitimate discourse on the role of ethnicity and race in modern transcultural relationships, even though the source narrative's thematic focus is class structure. One guy is bitterly fuming about the way every Indian woman cast in the film is pale-skinned, about the way the protagonist complains about how the West doesn't want to see the "real India" only when it's convenient for the plot. And part of me wants to scream, WHY DOES IT MATTER.

I get why it matters, I do. I wouldn't be in the program if I wasn't interested in representation and identity. But on a certain level, I fail to understand how a discussion can take place over a filmic representation of cultural identity, when none of these Highly Educated People are willing to discuss the nature and role of cultural identity in real life, because no one thinks of it outside of the confines of artistic structures. You know, we can talk about Western depictions of Eastern culture all day long, but we all just get that no one wants to go to university with a bunch of overzealous Asian students in London, because we don't identify with them. But here's the humdinger: on another level, I identify with that, because at the end of the day, I culturally identify as white. And I hate these discussions, and all these aspects of my life that make me feel like I don't add up. Because really, why does it matter? It doesn't. No one cares. My friends seem like me well enough, my family loves me, and I'm just me. Why do I need to have a cultural identity? Why can't I just be me, and let that be enough?

I'm tired of being angry about this.

rocking out so hard alone in my room right now

I'LL BREAK THEM DOWN

NO MERCY SHOWN

HEAVEN KNOWS IT'S GOT TO BE THIS TIME

AVENUES ALL LINED WITH TREES

PICTURE ME AND THEN YOU START WATCHING

WATCHING FOREVER, FOREVER

WATCHING LOVE GROW, FOREVER

LETTING ME KNOW, FOREEEEEEVERRRR

typical Wednesday.

I was sitting eating a chicken pie and mashed potatoes at Gabriel's Wharf like I do every Wednesday now, listening to "Location" by Freelance Whales and rereading Linda Hutcheon's "A Theory of Adaptation." Then all of the sudden I realized there were tears in my eyes, and I don't know why.

I am starting to sense your location

in an old abandoned mansion
in a countryside of England
spirits trapped inside the linens
and you’re feeling quite at home there
also feeling somewhat lonely
no one sees you in your pixelated fishnets...

please give

Been thinkin' lots lately (again) about how all relationships are a trade: what I can give you vs. what you can give me. I give, you give. And that's all that really matters in the end, right? We can feel whatever we want, say whatever we want; it's what we do for each other that counts. The actions.

I'm trying to keep giving and let what I do for others be enough to make me happy. It's hard, here, for me to find ways to keep giving, and most days, it feels like that's all I have to really keep me going. I don't feel like I have much to offer, and I feel like I end up giving in weak, empty ways just so I can feel like I'm giving something, even though it feels like it's not enough. And then, sometimes I think I expect too much from others in return. But sometimes I also start to think, maybe I don't expect enough.

Back in June, one of my friends told me I have to take care of myself, and let others take care of me; I can't just take care of everyone else all the time. I wish I could. I wish I could sustain myself fully on giving to others. And I wish I didn't need to be taken care of, ever. I don't want anyone to feel like they owe me anything, ever, but I also don't ever want to feel like I owe someone else something. That's not how it works, right? Everything we do for others should act independently of everything else?

I don't want all of these ideas floating around my head any more. I don't want to be stuck in my own head so much any more. But if I'm such poor company to myself, how can I be adequate company to anyone else?

And why does all this kind of stuff seem so much worse late at night? I'll probably laugh at this in the afternoon. I hope I do, at least. I could use a good laugh.

save it for a rainy day

I'm a total dork for arts & crafts stuff. I have been since I was little. I go through phases with it - I'll get really into needlepoint for maybe a month. And then it'll be knitting. And then rubber stamping, and then scrapbooking, and then acrylic painting. It's a form of distraction that I miss. I've been going through decoupaging phases a lot in the last couple years, and during one such phase, I did a thin, plywood archival document box in purple and green tissue with pink and white flower prints on it. It came out pretty decently.

This is where I keep all of my correspondence from the last five years. There's not a whole lot of it, especially from the last year or two. Letter-writing has become a method of communication that requires infinite patience and a certain level of selflessness - it's no longer considered rude not to reply to a handwritten missive, and most people don't take the time to write back, even if they intend to. I've learned not to expect anything from anyone that I write to. It gets discouraging at times, but mostly, I'm okay with it. It's a small way of giving, but an unusually satisfying one. The majority of the letters I've received come from seven people, from very specific points in my life.

I have three or four letters from my one friend who attended the US Naval Academy. During his plebe summer, letters were his only allowed form of communication, and I wrote him frequently. He hates writing of any kind, so the fact that he wrote me back at all was some kind of miracle. Every note from him is filled with gratitude for the fact that I took the time to write him to begin with.

I have maybe a dozen letters and cards total from three of my closest friends from home, which were written throughout college - more from the beginning than from the end. One of them transferred twice and spent a summer away working, so hers come from all over the place. She had very few roots during that time, and I think that writing to me helped her feel more established when she got to her next destination.

I have a number of funny little cards and notes from my mother - she believes in random little acts of kindness, which is where I get it, I guess. I also have a series of letters from my father, who has written to me on "important" birthdays and at different milestones of my life. There is an unfathomable amount of love in these cards, notes, and letters. Sometimes I hardly can believe that they are mine.

Then I have maybe six to eight letters from my best friend, our freshman year of college. I suppose they're love letters. A lot of them are depressing stories about depressing things. A lot of them are encouraging responses to my depressing stories about depressing things. Every time I used to get a letter from him, I'd take it outside to the "amphitheater seating" in the Oak and Maple courtyard, no matter what the weather or time of year, and I'd glory in it - a whole delicious letter, just for me! He always wrote the juiciest and best letters.

When our friendship faded and the letters stopped, it was one of the things I missed the most. For a long time, I kept them in this purple and green box, and didn't touch them. Last winter though, I was having a hard time with myself, and one day I opened the box. And I reread literally every piece of post in it. It was amazing - here laid fresh perspectives of the person I used to be, seven of them.

I always forget this. When you write a letter to someone, you capture your perspective of that person in it, as much as you capture yourself. You give people a piece of themselves, in addition to a piece of yourself. In this sense, letters received are invaluable. They're the kind of thing you save for a rainy day, for the times when you really do need some fresh perspective.

I wish I had that box with me.

weather or not

I talk about the weather a lot.

Inevitably, I sound like I'm making the most banal small talk ever. That's unavoidable. Sometimes I am making the most banal small talk ever. But not always.

I'm one of those people whose mood is severely impacted by the season and by weather. Spring and fall are lovely; summer is hot and bad and winter is cold and awful. A moderately warm, sunny day, can't be bad. A cold, wet, blustery day is all the more likely to be miserable.

You'd think that this is something I'd have given more consideration before moving to London.

Oddly enough, though, it's been a gorgeous fall here so far. Not too much heavy rain. A fair number of sunny days - the past few have been bright and clear, 65-70ºF and beautiful - and mostly a lot of gray, foggy ones that don't bring any consequential precipitation. Those are my favorite. London is lovely when it's sunny, but it doesn't feel right. The city doesn't look as it should unless it's hazy and overcast, in my mind.

I know these days can't last forever, and won't, and I am seriously dreading the winter. As far as I'm concerned, wintertime is miserable everywhere. As much as the summertime humidity of New Jersey makes me claustrophobic at times, it has its own comforts: the closeness envelops you, and the air contains this full, drowsy tranquility, inviting you to breathe at your leisure. And when you breathe, you don't just breathe oxygen and CO2 - you breathe fragrant plant scents, and other life smells.

Winter is the exact opposite. After the leaves fall, there's nothing left. The earth dies, and it drains all the color, light, and smells from the world - except for the smell of hearth fires and the smell of cold. It hurts to breathe. The sky, which never grows truly black on summer nights, resembles nothing so much as fresh pitch, sprinkled with faraway white specks of stars.

Everything expansive about the warm months - the people outside planting in spring and raking in fall, the children playing in sprinklers in summer, the dog-walkers - they retreat. No one spends a single second outside longer than necessary, and everyone keeps to themselves. Gaps grow larger the way water expands when frozen - with scientific precision - and we grasp at poor ways of closing them.

Oh god, and then comes the onslaught of holidays designed to shrink those gaps - Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day - in my mind, they're the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as far as holidays are concerned - and they always manage to make things worse. Thanksgiving is nice, and I'm all about Christmas, but in recent years, the joy that an innocent child experiences at Christmas seems more and more impossible to recreate as we get older, and no matter how much of myself I give, I always end the day feeling hollow. And the latter two...not going there.

There's really no way to twist it. Winter is a dead, lonely time. I suppose it must be, in order for the promise of spring to bring so much joy. But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, and I'm more than a little concerned about how I will manage it here.

One year.

It's funny how much things can change in such a short period of time.

One year ago today, I was going to the birthday party of a person I hardly knew. Getting my ass handed to me in a game of Civil War against strangers who are now friends. Pulling other friends out of back bedrooms. Being asked to run interference between someone's exboyfriend and a chick he was hitting on, without knowing why. Getting dragged to the apartment of a friend I was terribly angry with. Watching someone literally bow down on the floor to an empty whiskey bottle. Standing in the rain under a novelty umbrella listening to a distraught friend that everyone else was too wasted to pay attention to. Playing one-on-one beer pong. Going to another party in the 1st quad by myself, only to run into the one person I was trying most to avoid, who told me he liked my kicks. Dance partying in the 3rd quad with a coworker who was so drunk that the next day, she didn't remember seeing me. Hanging out on the balcony of 21 at 2:30am while everyone else smoked, and having it feel like the most normal part of my night. Crying for half an hour in the parking lot at 3:30am because no one could hear me.

Six months ago today is blank in my mind. I don't remember it. I don't remember what happened. I was supposed to go to MoMA and I didn't. I don't know why. There are a lot of gaps in my memory like this, in regards to last spring. It's slightly disconcerting.

Three months ago I was working because the day before, I had gone up to school for my boss's going away party, I had hung out at Moe's for four hours, and I had tried to see The Front Bottoms in Montclair but a lot of unfortunate circumstances caused me to miss most of their set. And the next day I was set to go to a hat tournament in Sussex which got rained out, and I went to a graduation party where I felt so beyond awkward, it took 2 hours of beach therapy and a sunrise to feel properly myself again.

One month ago I was being awkward and getting lost in Monmouth County.

Today I slept. Now I'm going to forage. And get some work done. And go out to Kew Gardens in the morning. And photograph a lot.

Change is good.

It makes me sigh; I do believe in love.

Sometimes I forget that I've been in love before.

That sounds really dumb, I know. And I mean, okay, I was 18, 19 years old. And of course it sounds silly and ridiculous now. And of course in retrospect, it seems unreal. But in the moment it was real. He was my best friend. It was innocent and pure and all that. You know. The kind of youthful first love you can experience once but never get again. That kind of thing.

I was recently recalling one of the stranger moments of our relationship. We had spent the weekend together hanging out at home, and I was driving back to school on Sunday evening. Mile 112. I hit the rumble strips next to the right express lane, jerked the wheel to the left to get back in the lane, and lost control of the car. Hit a mile marker. Turned into the swerve. As my car 360'ed counterclockwise across the express lanes toward the median, I thought, "There is no way I'm surviving this. I hope everyone I love knows that I love them."

And then, I was coasting up the left side of the left lane. Shaking violently, but alive. A car in front of me had its left blinker on, and pulled onto a strip of pavement on the median. These two sweet older couples from Pennsylvania. They were fine. I was fine, but terrified that someone else was hurt. They reassured me that everything, everyone was fine. They had hit a mile marker getting out of my way, but that was all. My car mostly just had some dents and scratches. That's it. A very impatient, very bored officer came and lazily wrote an accident report. Just before I called my parents, my phone vibrated. One New Text Message. "Are you okay?" Weird. I had just left his house. He knew I wasn't due back at school for another hour, at least, and wouldn't reply while driving.

An hour and a half later, I was at home on my couch, incapable of movement. Incapable of thought. I realized I had to answer that text. So I called him. He saw my home phone number come up on his caller ID, and immediately asked why I wasn't back at school, was I okay? I said I was fine. I spun out on the parkway but no one was hurt. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Why had he texted me? It turns out that he had just been overcome with a sense that something bad had happened to me. He just "had a feeling".

This is one of the most unusual things that has ever happened to me. I don't think about it any more, really. It used to make me feel lucky to be with someone who cared so deeply about me, who could intuit these kinds things about my life. Now it mostly just makes me wonder, will I ever be lucky enough to experience so deep a connection with another person ever again? The idea that the answer might be "no" is something I don't want to reckon with.

So I don't think about it. I don't think about what it was to be in love, to have a connection to someone that resonated with a richer timbre than the squeaky whimper of more shallow attractions. And I forget that I'm one of those people who doesn't "believe" in love, because of course I believe in it. I can feel very little conviction but still speak the words and know that one day I'll feel what I say. When I meet people who really have forgotten the face of love, or who perhaps have never seen it, I sympathize with them. I can pat them on the back and attempt to substitute sincerity in place of the inherent patronization of the only hopeful response - "some day" - even if I don't fully believe myself.

Very rarely, though, I will come across someone in this sad state who makes me realize the sadness of my own state, someone who makes me believe that I can believe in love again. And then, I don't have to try to be sincere when I tell him, "some day," because it seems I may have reached that day myself. For a moment, I'm grateful for this person who has unintentionally made me believe again, and I want him to believe, too. Then I feel an acute ache because I realize: he hasn't reached it yet, but when his "some day" finally comes, I won't be able to help being jealous of the person who makes him believe in love again.

fortnights.

I love that word. I wish people still used it.

• One fortnight ago, I was on my way out of Jersey and wishing I wasn't leaving.
  
  
• Two fortnights ago, you couldn't have paid me enough to stay another second longer, and I was dying to escape from everything that I believed was causing all these feelings I didn't want to feel.
  
  
• Three fortnights ago, I was in the moment and loving every second of it.
  
  
• Four fortnights ago, I was wishing the earth would swallow me whole, because it felt like that would be the only way I could get enough distance from everything to stop me from feeling anything.

Funny how things change.

For the moment, I'm fairly content. I'm still lost, upset, happy, terrified, and still screwing up my life in some pretty big ways. But I'm also learning a lot, and not just about this city, this culture.

---- I'm learning that you can run away from everything that you thought was making you feel the way you do, but you can't run away from yourself. When there's nothing and no one left to hide behind or hide from, all that's left is yourself - and that's terrifying. The only truth is in how you choose to react, and that's scary too.

---- I'm learning that distance lends itself to clarity. When you're too close, it's hard to see things for what they are. Distance over time and distance over space. They help you see the big picture more clearly - they help you see the important stuff more clearly, be it people or things.

---- I'm learning (again) that you need to take care of yourself first. No one else will. No one else can. Other people can be indispensably helpful, but the only person you can fully rely on is yourself.

---- I'm learning how to see which relationships are the ones worth working to keep. Convenience of location makes a lot of friendships easy to maintain - or hard to dispose. Here, geography works against everything. I'm finding that I can distinguish what I am capable of and willing to give people, and what they are willing to give me in return. And I think I'm going to find it easier than I expected to let go of the ones who can't give me what I'm looking for.

---- I'm learning, in that same vein, that distance can bring you closer to some people. I'm learning again how I can be there for people who are far away. Unfortunately, it's mostly only through words, and I feel like mine keep growing weaker and even less adequate.

---- I'm learning how to have faith in people who love me. Apparently it isn't all some cruel joke and they really do love me! I don't understand it, but I am grateful. I'm appreciating other people for what they do for me, and learning that others appreciate what I do for them - "Maybe it’s not important [to know who you are]. It’s about what we do for each other, isn’t it?"

---- I'm trying to learn that there are some things, some people, that I can't understand, that maybe I'm not supposed to understand, and that all I can do is try to accept them and let them roll off my back. I am having trouble with this one, but I need to find a way to come to terms with these things fast - I can't afford to keep being so preoccupied with things I can't understand and can't change.

---- Oh, and I'm also trying to learn film studies. I guess maybe I should be focusing more on that, since that's what I paid to come here and learn...

This is long. Oops.

^_^

Me: ...I dunno, I just get really happy when people who make each other happy are happy together.

!!!!

Head, meet desk. Desk, meet head. You're gonna get to know each other pretty well over the next year.

what I can't have

And what I wouldn't give to find a soulmate
Someone else to catch this drift
And what I wouldn't give to meet a kindred
Enough about me, let's talk about you for a minute
Enough about you, let's talk about life for a while
The conflicts, the craziness and the sound of pretenses
Falling all around...all around

Why are you so petrified of silence
Here, can you handle this?
Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines
Or when you think you're gonna die
Or did you long for the next distraction
And all I need now is intellectual intercourse
A soul to dig the hole much deeper
And I have no concept of time other than it is flying
If only I could kill the killer

And all I really want is some peace man
a place to find a common ground
And all I really want is a wavelength

All I really want is some comfort
A way to get my hands untied
And all I really want is some justice...

- alanis morissette
"all I really want"

scattered

-- I came across a marvelous little comic book shop yesterday up past Leicester Square, but didn't get to go in. I really want to find it again.

-- The pound is killing me, and my wallet, already.

-- Compared to New York: Fewer people here walk around with headphones on. More people on the Tube read.

-- Fashion Week just ended. Yesterday, outside the menswear exhibition by Somerset House, I saw a woman with a headpiece modeled to look like a Campbell's soup can. lol couture.

-- I got hopelessly lost on my way to my department induction. I ended up in the engineering wing which, incidentally, is under construction. The one man I saw had no idea where the film studies' rooms were and told me to go to reception. I couldn't find reception.
---- Fun fact: apparently the film studies' rooms are in a building located over the old Roman baths.

-- I tend to pick up words from other people pretty easily, and I can already feel myself borrowing the local language. I say "pardon," "mum," and "quite" all the time as it is, and I can't decide if using these words make me sound like more or less of an asshole here.
---- Either way, I don't think I care.

-- South Bank is probably my favorite area so far, minus the touristy factors, and I really wanna shoot at the skate park down there on the next nice day. It's 5 minutes from my apartment, right by the BFI, and I feel like I'm gonna be there a lot.
---- Found a decent Italian place that’s not ludicrously expensive, hooray. It’s down at Gabriel’s Wharf at South Bank, so it’s really close and super cute and I like it a whole lot.

-- Camden Town tomorrow? Whee!

-- I feel rather like the little guy glued to the bottom of a snow globe, if that little guy broke off when someone shook the globe, went all topsy turvy, and didn't land on his feet.

Sometimes I think about the people that I've gone to school with who are doing productive and interesting things with their lives and wonder if they're flukes, and if they feel like they are frauds the way I do.

Seven friends/people I know from home:

- One went to UPenn and double majored in biochem and English. She quit her position as first chair in Penn's orchestra to direct plays for an underground Shakespeare company and sing in a Catholic church choir. She declined positions at UChicago, UCLA, Columbia, and other med schools in order to stay in Philly at UPenn Med and hopes to complete their joint MD/MBA program in the next four years. One day she wants to be a fashion designer or fashion magazine editor.

- One went to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, overcoming a heart problem and various injuries to get in. By the time he graduated this year, he was second in command of his platoon and had completed an internship with the NSA. He got drafted for submarines and now is in nuclear power school in Charleston.

- One went to Lehigh and graduated a semester early with his degree in computer science. He did artificial intelligent work for the government in Virginia this summer, and now he's finishing up his masters at Lehigh. For free.

- One went to St. Peter's with a full ride - and hated it. He got an internship with a law firm in Newark, and got a job there after graduating in three years with a degree in philosophy. He hated the job and quit, spent some time in Tunisia, and now is starting law school at Washington & Lee.

- One went to Villanova and is finishing up his degree with honors in philosophy. He's applying to a number of philosophy graduate programs, including ones at Oxford, Cambridge, and Australia National. In his spare time he plays classical and jazz piano and works on learning various metal pieces on the guitar.

- Two went to Stanford. One just finished an internship in Germany and is finishing up his degrees in biomechanical engineering and music performance - piano. The other is finishing up his two degrees in physics and music performance - classical saxophone - and both are applying to music graduate programs at Manhattan School of Music, Peabody Conservatory, and Florida State, among others.

I'm still in touch with all of them but one, I've known most of them since I was at least 14, and I therefore know that most of them are as great as the look on paper. I don't think I am. I don't feel like I am.

I don't know. I know plenty of post-grad successes, of my college friends. People working at Radio City, Lincoln Center, Nickelodeon, ACS. People helping to run towns. People in grad programs at UPenn, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Columbia. I know that you make your own success; it doesn't just come easily. Mostly I'm satisfied with my undergrad career, both socially and academically, but sometimes I wonder if I should have gone somewhere else. Not even Colgate or Vassar, but Fordham or Loyola or St. Joseph's or Fairfield. I don't feel like I've earned what "success" I've had. I don't feel like I worked very hard or very long for it. I don't feel like I deserve it. I know I can't change that now. I just wonder if I am where I'm supposed to be.

This post probably makes me sound like an ungrateful bitch. I'm not ungrateful. I just don't feel like I deserve what I have. Like everything else does, lately, it makes me wonder, who decides who deserves what?

I just had an awful dream.

First of all, I was student teaching. That in itself is a nightmare. The teacher was a skinny, freckly woman named Mrs. Gray, and the class was a bunch of little kids mixed with a bunch of older people - my sister, Alyssa, Stephen, and two dudes I went to high school with. It was Valentine's Day, apparently, because everyone was giving out Valentines and assorted sugary treats. My sister was giving out Reese's peanut butter granola bars, and I remember vaguely thinking that it was a bad idea - what if someone had a peanut allergy?

At the end of the day, Mrs. Gray told me I had done a nice job and she would give me a good report. The only problem is that I had forgotten to ask about the kid's homework and review it, but she could tell I was nervous because after she prompted me, I had been fine, so she was just going to overlook it. My friends were waiting for me to be finished speaking with her so we could hang out. We talked about 'Love is a Mix-Tape' and how I had lent it to Stephen, who loved it, and how the author had another book out that mentioned Duran Duran in the title.

The classroom was in a castle of sorts - a damp, medieval-y place made of mossy stones and whatnot - and I was excited to wander around it. Except as soon as Mrs. Gray finished talking to me, one of the boys I went to high school with, a dark haired guy whom I had been close friends with when we were 19 but don't really talk to any more - he came up to me. I hugged him, exhilarated that I had had a successful day, and he held me really close and tightly, which surprised me, and told me he was scared for me. I asked why, and he said that he can just remember this time we were going to the movies a few years ago, and he had this vision in which we were in a castle and a mirror appeared, and we stood looking in it, and my reflection disappeared, and when he turned to look at me, I was gone. He said I should leave the castle because he was afraid this was going to happen to me. He wouldn't stop holding me.

When he finally did, the other dude I went to high school with, a blond guy who I haven't talked to since we were 14, I don't think, he started doing the same thing: holding me as though he was afraid I would disintegrate. He was being super poetic and Romantic and dramatic, and I have a feeling that he was supposed to be someone else, because in real life this guy had been all about math and science, not English. He held me and kept telling me I couldn't leave, I couldn't go away because he had this vision that I would never come back. I kept saying that it was for only a year, and I would of course come back, but as I said it, I had an uneasy feeling that it might not be true. He kept saying that he had this feeling that something was going to happen to me there, that it wasn't safe for me to go. He wouldn't let me go.

Finally I said I had to go outside and was going to get something that would reassure them that I would be safe and come back. I went outside and over to this big chest in the courtyard gardens that had all these locks, but there was a key in it. I opened it and there were seven different compartments. Each one was filled with Swarovski crystal charms and jewelry. This wasn't what I was looking for. I was about to go through the last compartment.

Then I woke up. And I almost immediately burst into tears.

And then my mom came in and told me I was supposed to wake up 3 hours ago, I have to pack, that it was just a dream and I wouldn't have had it if I had gotten out of bed 3 hours ago like I was supposed to, and if I didn't stop crying she was gonna turn on all my lights and open the blinds, and to get up because my aunt is on her way.

Awesome.

Tracy: It's the only stand a woman could take and keep her self-respect!

Sometimes I wish I didn't care about keeping mine.

I am really tired of friends who make me feel guilty about things I haven't done wrong. Or rather, I am tired of people who say they're my friends but make me feel guilty about things I have no reason to feel guilty about.

Jules: I’m just so tired, Billy. I never thought I’d be so tired at 22. I just don’t even know who to be any more.
Billy: Join the club.

everyone will know.

-- You, on the motorcycle.

-- Yes.

-- It's only a matter of time.

-- I know.

YSKOV!
Dave Eggers.

I wish I didn't feel like I'm always subconsciously looking for an ideal I'm never going to find.

There isn't much that frustrates me more than the disparity between what people say, and what they do.

Robert McKee says that in a great story, a character never acts against his true nature, and that there is truth in his reaction to the events of the plot. Story mimics life. There is truth in the way people act, in the way the react to what happens to them. There is not always truth in what they say. This drives me crazy. This is why I like stories. Control.

It's just infuriating. There are people who tell you they love you but then treat you manipulatively and are indirectly disrespectful in their actions. There are people who don't like you but act as though they do. There are people who love you but hide it and act indifferently. And so on and so forth.

I suppose it's one of the more heartbreaking aspects of human nature, this tendency to deceive and hide and lie. It makes for good stories but frustrating relationships, and it feels like little more than a giant, unnecessarily complex game. I think I'm rather tired of it all.

No, I don't think I'm tired of it all. I just am.

"And what about your friends, don't you love them enough to stay?"

And I say, "If I don't leave now, I will never get away."

Let me be a blue raft on the blue sea, and I'll blend right in.

the front bottoms
(lol.)

I could use some 3D glasses.

In health class 6th grade, I learned from a goofy old PE teacher in short shorts about the “health triangle”: physical, social, and mental health. Good health doesn’t just refer to your body, he told us - it means having healthy relationships and an active mind. It means being physically, emotionally, and intellectually healthy.

I know that I’m terribly unhealthy in pretty much every way, but I realized the other day that I have started considering my relationships in the same way I consider my health - with the potential for multiple dimensions - and that I’m pretty dissatisfied with how one-dimensional so many of them seem.

With some friends, we talk about what’s happening in our lives, but about nothing deeper. With other friends, we only talk about everything deeper than what’s right in front of us. I feel a physical or mental attraction in some of my relationships, but not much more than that primal interest. I can just hang out and relax with some people without feeling any kind of pressure to give them anything; with others, I always feel the need to give everything. I constantly feel like something is missing.

I don’t like this. I don’t like how I compartmentalize my relationships, or the way I’ve reduced them to this unjust categorization of single dimensions. It invokes a keen sense of failure and an acute awareness of my inability to connect with a single person in multiple ways. I don’t know if this comes from a lack of practice, or if I just am not actively searching deeply enough for what I want.

It has also occurred to me that perhaps more dimensions exist in my relationships than I am able or willing to see at this moment. Everything is blurry - like watching a 3D movie without 3D glasses. I need some fresh perspective. I need some distance.

Or something like that.

I've said it a thousand times before, but...

I HATE WHEN MY HOROSCOPE IS ACCURATE.

You can talk yourself into nearly anything today because your key planet Jupiter is aspected by persuasive Mercury. You are able to motivate others by sharing the power of your own dreams. But your performance could be disconnected from your real purpose now, leaving you with a hollow feeling. Instead of trying to inspire anyone else to support your idea, check in with yourself to confirm what you really believe. It's most important to be in integrity with yourself.

Why can't I just be happy with everything I have? Why can't that just be enough?

I feel lost, but I'm trying to turn it into feeling free. I mean, they're the same thing, right?

I don't understand how I can be so complacent and so dissatisfied all at once.

Maybe I'm just afraid.

I am so in love with the way the character of Don Draper unfolds in "Mad Men." The way he blows through all of his relationships like a fucking hurricane, grasping wildly at whatever he can get his hands on, just to see it all slip through his fingers. The way he holds himself responsible to no one but himself, hurting every single person he cares about because he doesn't know what he wants - he knows only the impulses that move him moment to moment. The way he manipulates everything to see it only how he wants to see it. The way he's constantly searching for a way to fit into everything that's changing around him. The way he tries to escape in every sense possible.

I have got to stop immersing myself in fictional worlds instead of dealing with real life.

One of the many things I love about my mother is that a few years ago, when I was going through a particularly rough time at school, she stopped saying "Have a good day" to me whenever we talked. She knew that I'd always say dully, "I'll try" or that the cynic in me would spit out "I probably won't" before I could stop it. So she started telling me simply, "Have a day," because no matter what, I always would. Whether it was a good day or a bad day, it would be a day.

I had a day today.