I just want to share everything beautiful with everyone all the time.

I think I'm getting better at asking for help when I need it.

I think this is a good thing.

grav ity

Sometimes anxiety is easier than anger. I'm more at home with it.

I am easily intimidated, but I try to hide it. I generally try to hide a lot of things, but now I try not to try.

My birthday is next week. Usually I hate it. I was looking forward to it for once but now I'm not.

I listened to the Counting Crows last week and it made me feel 18 again. That happens too much to me lately.

Looping Stars' "Sleep Tonight" all day every day for the last three weeks.

In the mood to reread Hardboiled Wonderland... but I lent mine to someone who will probably never return it. (And I still haven't finished 1Q84.)

Bill Pullman circa While You Were Sleeping has the best hair.

Disappointment stings.

"I believe in love. Not just getting it: giving it. I think as long as you can love someone, whether or not they love you, then it's worth it."

What IS passion, anyway, and how do I go about finding mine?

PALIMPSESTUOUS INTERTEXTUALITY!

the sublime

I wrote this nearly 2 years ago, the December I was in grad school. I still feel the same way.

In one of my seminars last week, we watched Crossroads - not the Britney movie; a 1970s experimental documentary made entirely of footage of atomic bomb explosions. The professor asked us if we were familiar with the concept of the sublime in aesthetics and gave a rudimentary explanation, saying that most simply, it's beauty so great in magnitude that it defies intellectualization, it exceeds language. You can't communicate it, replicate it, imitate it. Then she said offhandedly, as though to a stranger in passing, "Imagine how frustrating that must be, to not be able to put your reaction into words!" And moved on.

Two things about this struck me. First, I was interested in how she managed to so aptly describe how I feel about everything we discuss in each of my seminars every single week through an explanation of the sublime. Secondly, I was moved by how unbelievably tragic this simplistic description of the sublime sounded. If the sublime can't be intellectualized or put into words, then in a sense, an individual can never experience the sublime independently and then share that experience with others -- except through art, I suppose. Maybe that's why some visionary artists are so compelled to create images -- maybe they feel like they need to find a way to communicate their experience. Maybe they're just trying to diffuse the inherent tragedy of the sublime.

I think I deeply sympathize with that need.

I found out. And I kind of wish I hadn't.

My level of self-worth may be dismal, but I at least know I am more than just a "nice girl". I'm sorry you had to forget that. If only I could forget you.

Loss scares me. I hate growing attached to people, places, because I know inevitably, I will lose them - and in one sense, that loss will be forever. What leaves us, often does not return, and even if it does return, it's never the same. We are left with only with the memory. What was is what was and can never be again.

Once in a while, though, that loss is not entirely permanent. Sometimes, if we let go despite our attachments, the wild and unpredictable return to us. We find ourselves in the same places, with the same people. But the circumstances have changed - we have changed. The attachment can't be recreated, but in some cases we can move forward and grow together. In other cases, we can only cling to that memory of the attachment as it was, and let it die gracefully. A new chapter does not begin, and the book closes forever.

Sometimes I like that things come full circle, that we, in ways, occasionally regain what we have lost.

Sometimes I wish that what is lost, like a pail and shovel caught in the surf, is lost forever.

Came across this at work today.

"If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it."

David Foster Wallace

I worry that I am settling instead of striving. I worry that this is indicative of laziness, or of letting fear get the better of me, or of lack of courage. I keep reducing my small "successes" to nothingness and thinking too much of that damn "potential" that everyone talks about. And what if I should never move beyond this stasis? The thought is too much to bear.

"The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without."

- Joan Didion

I lost my self-respect a while ago. But I think I found it again. I was looking for validation in all the wrong places, but I'm learning.

Life is good.

So far away, doesn't anybody stay in one place any more?

Missing my faraway friends a lot tonight. Everyone I went to elementary and high school with did a really good job of getting away from here. My oldest, best, and favorite friends are in North Jersey, Colorado, Los Angeles, Pearl Harbor, Chicago, Virginia, Florida, Philadelphia. And my college friends are scattered around New Jersey and up and down the coast. I feel really close to everyone in spirit tonight, but so far away at the same time. I hate how much I miss people, no matter how close of far they are from me, all the time. The older we grow, the more I miss my friends, and my memories of them. Everything hurts tonight.

For me, one of the most difficult things about coping with the loss of a person, in any sense, is dealing with the fact that you can no longer share your life with that person, or share that person's life. It's wanting to tell them good news and not being able to. It's wanting to ask advice about a problem and not having them there. It's wanting to hear how they're doing and not being able to ask. Losing a person is losing the ability to share, losing the privilege of it. In that sense, it may be a selfishness you might never have intended for yourself.

I hate being selfish. Even if it's for the best.

If you don't feel like you have roots anywhere, in anything, can you really feel like you know yourself? Or will you always feel transient and displaced? Unsure of who you are? What does it mean to be known? By yourself, by others?

And what is any of it worth without self-respect? I was sorry and then I wasn't sorry, and I think that's okay. In fact, I think it's better than okay.

"But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?"
The words that the others withhold, only,
And the hope you understand what I meant.

I still like my life.

supermoon

I wrote this nearly a year ago. Feels right still.



few streetlights, fewer traffic lights.
I can’t seem to speak.
my speakers are broken.

bbbzzzzZZZZzzz, in stereo
until we hit another pothole

– silence.
time slows.

shy mind too content to spoil with words
a straight and steady road unwavering,
I round a blind internal curve and wait, impatient.

my eyes roll over miles of moon shadowed fields,
trained away from you, framed within
frames, for fear I won’t see what I feel.

and now the window falls, escape wisps of silver,
sparks red, sparks of energy invisible – microscopic
specks from our small cosmos, fleeing.

time folds in, a soft and stifling linen sheet,
the end of a wave rushing to reach the crest

– trapped.
it catches us

me with one hand on the wheel, twirling my hair
to keep my spare hand from straying out of my chaos
into yours, and you, turned away.

"Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish."


H.M. - Norwegian Wood

"And then there's my father...He went off to Uruguay in June last year and he's been there ever since."
"Uruguay?! Why Uruguay?"
"He was thinking of settling there, believe it or not...once he's settled he'll send for me and my sister...he never answers our letters."
"What would you do if your father said 'Come to Uruguay'?"
"I'd go and have a look around at least. It might be fun..."
"Do you like your father?"
Midori shook her head. "Not especially."
"So how can you follow him to Uruguay?"
"I believe in him."
"Believe in him?"
"Yeah, I'm not that fond of him, but I believe in my father. How can I not believe in a man who gives up his house, his kids, his work, and runs off to Uruguay from the shock of losing his wife? Do you see what I mean?"
I sighed. "Sort of, but not really."
Midori laughed and patted me on the back. "Never mind," she said. "It really doesn't matter."

I wish I had a dollar for every person I believed in like that. Who, despite how I felt about them, I believed in.

Okay, so I'd only have about five bucks, but still.

excerpt

Hi friend,

...I haven't had any thoughts of hurting myself and haven't been doing anything to hurt myself, but in a way I guess my apathy is self-destructive. I always wonder, though, if everyone doesn't have self-destructive tendencies of one sort or another.

One of my favorite shows that I used to watch with my family was "Joan of Arcadia," about how God would appear to this 16 year old girl named Joan and give her different tasks to do. In this one arc, she has this close friend named Judith, who is in ways neglected by her psychiatrist parents and has bad drinking and drug habits. One night, when with a bunch of friends who are meeting a guy for a drug deal, Judith is fatally stabbed. Joan is freaking out, and her boyfriend Adam, whose mother had committed suicide a few years earlier, is hard on Judith and leaves Joan at the hospital.

When he shows up again, Joan rages at him.
Joan: How could you? How could you just leave me?
Adam: I'm sorry. I tried, okay? I couldn't do it, Not after my mother, I couldn't, I just couldn't see someone throw her life away like that, not again.
Joan: She didn't, she didn't kill herself.
Adam: Some people do it all at once, and some people do it a little bit every day.
Joan: I loved her.
Adam: I know. And I don't know why that doesn't matter.

I always think of that scene when I think of people's self-destructive tendencies, or even just of the way people neglect themselves. Maybe everyone is just killing themselves a little bit every day. And if that's true, even if only in ways, I don't know why other people's love doesn't matter to us. And at the end of the day, if my apathy is my worst self-destructive tendency, I guess things could be a whole lot worse.

- Me

EVIL.

AMER 317-01

Dr. Shannon

February 11, 2008

Summary: “When Evil is ‘Cool’”

In his 1999 Atlantic Monthly article “When Evil is ‘Cool,’” Roger Shattuck provides a comprehensive analysis of evil: the forms it takes, the different categories of evil, past musings on it, its role in literature and contemporary culture, and the connotations it has.

...Shattuck proceeds to give definition to four specific types of evil.  The first is “natural evil,” which he says can affect anyone, and over which we have limited control (76).  The second is “moral evil,” which Shattuck says is, “actions undertaken knowingly to harm or exploit others in contravention of accepted moral principles or statutes within a society” (76).  The third, “radical evil,” is what he attributes to “immoral behavior so pervasive in a person or society that scruples and constraints have been utterly abandoned” (76).  The last is “metaphysical evil” – it identifies an “attitude of assent and approval toward moral and radical evil, as evidence of superior human will and power” (76).  Though Shattuck says these definitions are useful, he says he learns more about evil in narratives (76).

...Shattuck closes with a discussion of Quentin Tarentino’s crime film Pulp Fiction, which Shattuck says portrays evil as “cool” (78). “By depicting evil in this fashion the film neutralizes it—absorbs it into ordinary life, broken by a few thrills and laughs, and desensitizes us to evil” (78), he writes.  He also notes that evil and sin have been given a positive connotation in being called “transgression”: “As used by postmodern critics, ‘transgression’ refers to conduct that aspires…to an implied form of greatness in evil” (78). Shattuck finishes with a call to action, warning readers not to condone evil, as, “We cannot afford such blindness to history and such naiveté as to embrace the morality of the cool” (78).

Works Cited

Shattuck, Roger. “When Evil is ‘Cool.’” The Atlantic Monthly Jan. 1999: 73-78.