9.3.2013.

i'm so damn happy today. there is (literally) no other place in the world that i would be right now. (and i don't need to announce my mood onto social media). but wait . . .

8.26.2013.

friendship provides both security and treachery simultaneously.

give me two hours, joyce carol oates, and i promise something great will come of it.

to create a persona, you must start, of course, from those you know.

to start with an idea is too dangerous because it lents itself to cliches and trite characterizations, and in the end, all you'll have left is a piece of glutenous membrane slathered on the pages,
revealing only the skin of a human, and lacking all the necessary virility and substance of life.

like i can look to the Noble Savage for inspiration, but it's precarious to carry any story with coined, capitalization. We need to believe in the Noble Savage to believe that there is something beyond our own insufficiencies and doubt. Thus, Savage represents an idea, a imaginary culmination of all
that we wish we said and could have done.

like i can look to my parents. i spend a sufficient amount of time with them outside of school. i dine with them, and feast with them over the latest
blockbuster in air-conditioned cubes of space, and cry with them when bad news hits and i think i'm just not cute or cut out to be competing with my friends. i've seen them in fluorescent lighting, and they the same with me. beyond words, we communicate through our eyes and gestures. and i know the root of them and they know the of me.

so it's better when i formulate a hypothetical character based on my closest people. i can draw blood and muscle from them. and in that weird way, i'm drawing from myself. because what makes me me, makes them them. and isn't that what all writers want to write about? themselves, but in a different light?

on being 20

i feel obligated to move beyond the delicacies of a supposedly blurry-eyed childteenhood. during those teen years, we are overcome by the guilt to grow into our presupposed adult skins, a guilt reinforced by our parents, our teachers, and, eventually and sadly, ourselves.

this is a liminal period, we are told and have come to believe, a period of transition which follows a carefully mapped-out trajectory so perfectly set by those who breathed before us, in tracks like those chariot grooves i saw engraved into the cobblestone streets of Pompeii (perhaps even after the almost complete annihilation of a society and its elusive structures, its beliefs still haunt us).

i'm not sure what's worse: the discounting of teenagers or the discounting of education, of learning being limited only to formal series of years. what does the word pubescent convey? i'm becoming more and more interested how the "adult world" and the "teen world" merge together and function as an evolving whole. what, for instance, attracted a married forty-five-year-old pablo picasso to his muse, marie-therese, who, at seventeen, was seemingly helplessly absorbed into the aura of the famed cubist so much so that she was in bed with him in the week of their first, enchanted meeting? what drew an also married thirty-eight-year-old john steinbeck to gywn conger, who, at twenty, was both singer and avid reader of steinbeck novels?

perhaps a power dynamic exists in these relationships between older men and younger women, possibly set on the premise of these men viewing their partners as girls. did these artists take advantage of what they considered virginity and naivete? i'm not even sure marie-therese and gywn would agree. perhaps these women thought themselves out of fashion with their age group, perhaps they viewed themselves as more mature and emboldened to develop fiery affairs and tumultuous relationships with men twice and triple their age.

i, too, have wrestled with the slow twilights; i have considered the politics of being with someone who is significantly beyond his teenage years. it seems to me that when dating people with proximity to our age, we expect to be on the same page mentally; with the barriers of decades pulling couples back, we burden our lovers with stereotypes of what it feels to be many, many years older or younger.

in early june, i turned twenty. and, as expected, i don't feel a shade different now that my teenage years have been brushed away as when i had grappled with was it was like to be in the heat of seventeen. maybe it's pretentious of me to say that i saw it coming all along, that somehow i've combated with time and history and won enough dignity back to say that turning twenty did not change my outlook on what it means to be curious yet skeptical, daring yet restrained, knowing, yet not knowing at all of any years to come. but then again, i think we all have the drive to prove our ages wrong.

Categorized under fiction, please.

The joys of talking dirty and other pains:

5 will forever be my favourite number. It feels appropriate that it should be. After all, I was born on the fifth day in June, I was first introduced to ancient Chinese poetry at the age of five, I was alphabetically fifth on the attendance roll in my fifth grade class. . .

And, for me, the perfect number of past lovers would always be 5- if anyone ever asked. Because of typical gender predispositions, subjugating my number to one hand presents the tender medium between glaring innocence and wanton appeal on the experience spectrum. One hand, after all, could do so much. 

Boys who are primordially interested can be, but rarely are, as sensitive as, what Fitzgerald calls, “those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away”. When, on their part, the opportunity for inquiry of the past arises, it’s really a matter of responding quickly and confidently and in some ways, you could argue, welcoming of a folded fallacy to reality. 

When also, on their part, the opportunity to gravitate beyond casual, sterilized talk into, what I like to call, affective scandalous musings arises, 5 rescues and reminds you to sound seasoned but not sloppy. Suddenly the question of “You want to do what? With my what?” is removed from its ulterior allure and becomes, instead, a glamorous attempt at projecting the future of a young affair.

But unfortunately, your 5-experienced self recognizes the improbability of extending the fantastical into the light of day. Without the vulnerability to accept and speak precious truth, all this talk-and-muse turns into phlegmatic mush, parasitic, even, for your health. And so you move on, beating against the current, drawing ceaselessly into the past.

now that i'm finally getting around to it-

we'd always refer to "back home" as "point a" - the starting line, a mark for comparison's sake.
back home, i used to drift and haunt on two feet; valleys, mountaintops, fields of grass limited me to an urbane, suburban setting.

back home, i am now living the convertible dream i never had, rolling down both windows, driving 60 in a 35 with the dense summer sunset splayed out across the front windshield. i've always liked how neat my hair is, and how easily i could mess it up.

5.22.2013

sidenote: i haven't written anything since summer started- then i read these poems and these menegeries open up and i never want this gush to subside

rapid moments of two weeks

cloudy days in the arctic are the most fulfilling.
because the arctic is already hostile; you didn't think it could get any worse.

then the sun comes to shine over the glossy ice,
and just as you anticipate warmth, it glares at you.

Colds days in Michigan, hugging coffee cups, its warmth transcending through the ceramic mug in layers
knitted sweaters with static, a lake view, tall tall windows.
-the pungent smell of deep trees drapes the air.
----

a secret delightful shiver amidst the masses with their dull, blurry eyes and goldfish memory.
a simple rejection, incisive, a soft whisper that moves mountains.

----

i know you as i would know my own hands.
your soft puff and swell, pink flesh, joints all too loose for this mechanical world.
yet, you, my bridge, fuse my tendons together; you tie my shards of bone and nerve into an elaborate weaving of
wind-washed lace.
under this canopy, i've found my home. 

i'm close to you- close
like how folk music hangs in the purple evening air
like the thin residue of sticky toffee on the tips of my fingers
like the smell of rose couched on its petals.

to engulf

in no order-

History of Art- H.W. Janson
The Diary of Anais Nin Vol. One
The Enduring Hemingway
Raising the Bar: The Story of Clif Bar, Inc.- Erickson
The Feminist Papers- Rossi
A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 2nd Ed.
The Year of Living Biblically- A.J. Jacobs
A Year in Provence- Peter Mayle
Toujours Provence- Peter Mayle
Lives of the Artists Vol. 1- Vasari
The Memory Keeper's Daughter- Edwards
Roots- Haley
Great Britain to 1688- Ashley
Things Fall Apart- Achebe
The World is Flat- Friedman
We Were the Mulvaneys- Oates
Saving Fish from Drowning- Tan
Thirteen Moons- Frazier
John Steinbeck- Parini
Freakonomics- Levitt

2 2 13

A two nights ago, I was called out. It was an unexpected event- I never saw it coming because I thought there was a general understanding and stance everyone took when I told them I intend on going into the commerce school.

"Well yes, I'm taking Management Accounting right now, but I'm also taking a course on Feminist Aesthetics."

"Do you think I'd be more interested in hearing about the latter?"

Well, yes. Because technical beauty takes time to digest- everyone can be easy enthralled by a Picasso or a philosopher, or even Woodman; no one can initially grasp the complex geometry of credits and debits. What is interesting to us is all that provides instantaneous gratification- some kind of little revelation we can mark down about how fascinating living is and life is. We would eventually tuck these facts, facts, facts into our pockets and choose to resurface them or, most likely, forget about them when the next day rises.

She would later go on to tell me how beautiful spreadsheets are to her.

1 10 2013

i have nothing to write about now that i'm home. except i vow to only drink red wine for the rest of my life. no liquor. (none).