Sin in the Mimosa Grove

green eyes

2011-08-22T22:01:00.000-07:00

They are kind, sharp, observant, and oh so beautiful when they fill to the brim with joy.

My darling green eyes slip beneath the lids of heavy, drug-drawn sleep into the swimming unconsciousness that buoys him to life, that bubbles with disappointments and gurgles toxic, pretty dreams back into consciousness.

I wipe the wet salt from your still and breathing face and watch your eyes jerk back and forth, as if they are following some small swarming invisible horde of flies. What, green eyes, are you watching? I feel the pull of the world behind your eyelids and I want to dip my toes in that swimming unconsciousness, playing with the ripples of your dream world.

My love, my love, I want to draw myself into your dreams and find myself in the chaotic or wondrous worlds you inhabit at night without me. And, feeling rather brave and clever as my dream self usually feels, I flit back and forth across the rolling aqua hills and tinge your waters with the colors of peace and delight. I find the shadows that haunt you and conquer them. I clothe you when you dream yourself publicly naked; I catch your teeth when they fall; I remind you how to fly when you keep falling, forever down and down. And when you dream yourself alone, I am forever by your side.

Instead I find myself on the outside, grazing the warm raspberry of your lips, tousling your straw bronze hair, hoping that part of you remains with me so that you can feel my touch into your dreams. Your face, ever bright, frowns in the faint light of our dark room, and turns from me. I clutch your hands and fall into my unconscious oblivion beside you.

on pride and threats

2011-08-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

I am the unfortunate owner of a premier unit of insufferable pride. I am not sure how it became so defective, or when I even acquired it. As far as I know, the tiny five-year-old girl in my past who suddenly acquired theory of mind became self-conscious in the same instant. And slowly the pride developed as a defense mechanism to protect me from the judgment of others.

It is not my friend. Pride has often left me feeling very alone, and very foolish.

I escaped to college partly as a way to escape my own pride, which I found to be growing powerfully and uncontrollably. Those four years were a comfortably and beautifully humbling experience, partly because I felt little need to defend myself with wanton pride. I found few threats, open arms, and friends who shared and supported me in what felt like my most ridiculous, alienating, and private thoughts. Defense mechanisms...unnecessary. It was freeing.

As I have quoted several times before--

"A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to make up more room in a room."

Here I find myself disappointingly shrinking in a room, as if every cell in my body has tensed up and turned away from the world, hoping to escape scrutiny and judgment. I hate this hiding. I hate feeling as if my sexual orientation should be masked, to refrain from making others feel uncomfortable. I hate biting my tongue when my political beliefs are challenged, though they are neither complex nor extensive--simply important to my everyday life. I hate living in fear of being myself. I feel a coward. I feel small, threatened, cold, and proud.

I know this is a dangerous combination of feelings. Before I am aware it has even happened, I might find myself stewing it all in bitterness and vengeance and feeling the noxious fumes of hatred suffocate the open air of free joy from my life.

All I know to do is meditate, breathe, and focus. I hope I will find the balance I am seeking.

A slightly different depression

2011-07-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

I have been depressed enough times in my life to know its every waking, dull pain. Suddenly your shadow has weight, which drags along with you into every room, every breath, and every thought. When you breathe, it feels as if you are suffocating for lack of air, that the world is slowed and that your breath is slow, and you refuse to gasp or yelp or inhale deeply because suffocation feels best. Social interactions are half-forced, half-earnest, and mostly confusing. So being alone feels more comfortable than being with anyone, and the sharp sting of loneliness is dampened by the weights that press and press and press and never leave you. Yet at the heart of things you know you do not want to be alone. Time passes, like molasses and like thin oil, and feels a burden.

The most peaceful hour comes when you are able to lie down and fall into seamless blank dreams. And when morning light streams onto your bed, bright, far past dawn and sunrise and reaching into the afternoon, your shadow returns, and drags you out of peace.

This bout of depression is slightly different. In those hours when my shadow wrestles me back into the darkness, I see light peeking from the corners, and I understand that there is an end. I can see the depression as clearly and starkly as any other, like it has visited some other body that is not mine. And I feel this so deeply that the depression seems almost incidental to the events that have brought me here. I lie in bed, waiting for peace, thinking, Of course depression has set in. What else would I expect after so many months of endless, hyperventilating anxiety, stress, and worry?

So in the morning, when the hot light and drowsiness brings me to an aching awake, I lie there and want to let the depression pass over me like a droning month-long rainstorm, a rain that will dissipate and evaporate like all other waters and all other storms. And in those few lucid moments I feel at peace.

Yet I am confused, because lying still in peace is almost indistinguishable from lying still in depression, and the two swap and mingle until I do not know what I am feeling except emptiness. Peace, like darkness, is empty, and to me has always represented the absence of something rather than the presence of another. I have long suspected this was a silly way to define peace.

I guess that I must be more thankful for peace, grateful for its presence, reverent of the factors that allow me to experience it so easily and gracefully. Peace, what I have sought after for so long, has finally come to me, and I want to drink it in. But you cannot greedily consume peace, you cannot rush it, and you cannot make more when you run out. You simply have to let it be.

I have a hard time with this, but I can learn. I have learnt so much about peace from Brandon already, from my dearest friends and from the ethereal drugs which wrest it from you and return it later.

Peace, I will find and keep you. From there, the rest of life will follow.

Self-administered therapy & an open-ended search

2011-06-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

I have read quite a bit about psychology, mental illnesses, and their treatment in the past few months. In my spiritual deprivation (and admitted, utter confusion) I guess I am seeking an answer using the only reality-based methods that seem to work.

In the end, however, I know I am already equipped with the tools to help myself. This afternoon I took a nap and slept fitfully. I dreamt that I was at home and becoming angry with my mother for no reason. I snapped at her while trying to explain that exercise, for me, was not mere fun but a necessity to keep my mental health in check.

Not fun, NOT fun, NOT, FUN, I repeated angrily.

My sister was in the room and asked, "Is it really not fun, or is this part of how you never want to be happy for the rest of your life?"

You can see how her question is simultaneously a non-sequitur but also an instant provocation for me to consider how I really want to conduct my own life.

I woke up, confused, head aching, wondering where Brandon had gone and why he had just left me alone. I started to become angry and think about my dream, falling into a despair upon the realization that my angry feelings were once again inappropriate and disproportionate reactions. I went to downstairs to get a drink and take a naproxen for my headache. I intended to come home and write in my blog to calm down. When I finally sat down on the bed again, half full of fumes and half full of self-loathing, I saw that he had written me a note explaining his absence. My anger dissipated like the crashing of water against a concrete sidewalk, a violent and grand emotion reduced, in the end, to a drab wet sidewalk.

In psychotherapeutic terms, I did the following (not totally effectively, of course):

1) Mindfulness: an attempt to describe my own emotions to myself in a non-judgmental and fair manner, taking a step back from the feelings themselves. I became judgmental quite quickly when I felt full of self-loathing, but that is a reaction I have a hard time quenching. I'm working on it.

2) In DBT terms, "taking a vacation." I took a short walk downstairs to do something else rather than focusing and intensifying my anger.

3) Writing therapy. My next step, which I am conducting now.

4) Cognitive restructuring. While I walked to the bathroom, I tried to re-word my anger, even if it was provoked by a mere dream. Of course exercise is fun sometimes. Why else would anyone do it voluntarily? It's not therapy for everyone.

And now I am significantly calmer, if not still disturbed by the ability of anger to seep through the cracks of my subconscious into my dreams. Yet I need to accept myself as a human who makes mistakes and has legitimate feelings. This has always been hard for me, but it is not impossible. I am who I am.

For that matter, who is that? Is she nice? I'm still not sure, I don't know how nice I want her to be. I never want her to be walked all over like a doormat. But when was the last time this really happened because she was too nice? Surely my sexual assault had nothing to do with my niceness--it was, partly, an accident of timing and the blame lies more with K than with me. Entirely with K, I'd probably have to say, though I feel reluctant to say it.

The assault has stirred up an extreme defensiveness in me that I have never known. I feel the need to be more assertive than I have never been--and why? Because I partly feel that when people are intimidated by me, I become more protected from another assault. But I know that can't be true either, that all sorts of women are assaulted. Although, as I learned a couple entries ago, some prior experiences (such as sexual harrassment or verbal abuse, in my case) may predispose others to a more intense traumatization than others. That those who experience a great deal of stress in early life are more prone to reactions that align with mental illness, than with milder forms of cognitive and psychological disturbance. (Early stress is not extreme, but certainly present, in my case). But how do I reiterate this complex truth to myself every time I feel the need to defend the content and character of my very person?

I can't. I just need to make it seem as silly as it is. Who cares if some man thinks I cannot lift a 35 pound rock by myself. Who cares if a passing stranger calls me a cutie and a sweetheart if the compliment I really want to receive is about my competence and strength. Who cares if a relative scorns me because I am not girlish enough. (Do I interpret this as a compliment or an insult?) The real truth comes through when I look at it. I am clearly a woman, but not a traditional one on every account. I simply want people to accept me for who I am, and not to harm me because of it.) This degree of anxiety about my own demeanor is silly. I am...who I am.

And in this weird transitional period of my life, I have no idea who I am. But I need to hang on and remember that it will come to me, if in fits and spurts and unexpected ways. I will get there.

And on

2011-06-23T15:32:00.000-07:00

The emotional and mental fatigue I have been waiting for has finally settled in. It feels strangely unfamiliar, heavy, as if the lifting of stress has left in its wake a stream of leaden, gross, misshapen weights littered across my psyche for me to lift up, too, and throw into the misty confusion that surrounds me. I have begun a spring cleaning of the soul, and am desperately unaware of how to rid myself of the dirty insidious suspicion that I will never finish cleaning. What taints me is distrust, anger, an unsparing cynicism about the future, as if optimism, hope, and calm will never quite exist in the same way again.

At the same time, I am distinctly aware that my usual optimism has vaporized and left me to wallow in whatever nihilistic sludge and swamps I have inhabited before. Not entirely nihilistic, no—that is quite impossible—but a stark departure from the cadre of beliefs I have so carefully cultivated over the course of my short intellectual life. Perhaps it is not so much a departure as the sudden vaporized disappearance of a few of those core beliefs.

One of those was the (ultimately baseless and arbitrarily chosen) belief that humans are innately good. Humans are complex, confusing creatures for whom ethical lines are blurry and sometimes difficult to see. This allows us to harm one another without overt evil intention, and to justify actions that were originally intended with overt evil. It is annoying to navigate a grey world where actions are not classifiable into black and white sections, to be generous to the complexity of humankind and the diversity of human feeling, human thought, and human condition. How exhausting to assimilate all the beliefs and experiences of others that might impact their behavior—and yet I feel no other stronger moral obligation but to grant my fellow brother or sister at least this.

[This is where you, dear reader, can infer which humans I am talking about who are evil, and how I feel compelled to empathize where I have not been empathized with. See previous entry.]

Sometimes I feel as if I am an almost-criminal, a delinquent that is merely repressed into the disguise of a proper person. I have been mistreated so often and hurtfully that I understand—I really do, I think I do—part of what drives harmful behavior. I have felt the intense and overwhelming desire to hurt another person, and in an attempt to ignore my own self-revulsion at this thought, the desire to simply cut off the vein of my emotions from flowing at all, a depressive apathy so deep it runs into psychopathy. (A feeling, if you can call psychopathy that, I experienced most deeply on a badly designed antidepressant in high school.)

How can I rid myself of this self-hatred? I can hardly reconcile myself with these feelings before being so overwhelmed by shame and guilt. No one can judge me for thinking these things—until I act upon them—except myself, the harshest judge (historically) of them all. If I cannot believe in my own capacity to be good and to act with good intentions, how can I believe in anyone else’s? (And here you see the twistedness of holding yourself to the highest standards, because it implies that most others are failing your standards, too. See every entry I’ve ever written about eating and body image.) I suppose the answer, derived from years-long knowledge of how psychotherapy works, is probably to accept the honest truth for what it is, without self-criticism and with total understanding of why it is okay to feel the way I do.

Is it? Is it really okay to feel so much anger and loathing? Having been on the receiving end of so much built up anger, anger that is self-generated, or societally pressured, or circumstantially borne, I find this an astonishing conclusion. That is, having spent most of my life convinced that harming others out of one’s own pain is the vilest way to deal with pain at all—this is hard to accept. I know that accepting my feelings does not tacitly accept harmful action, but it feels so dangerously close that I am afraid to feel at all.

I guess what I am doing is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) all on my lonesome, oddy-knocky self. It is easier to do with someone holding your hand. Writing can sometimes bring a crushing loneliness that makes it difficult to see clearly.

Please don’t leave me alone. I have never experienced such a gripping fear of loneliness as I have in the past few months.

I guess I have to write about it sometime

2011-06-21T19:08:00.000-07:00

I continue to resist and resent the idea that sexual assault has changed me. Part of me doesn't want to be that girl, who cuts her hair short and hates men and cries during sex and hides from the world crushed by the persistent fear that it will violate her again. People joke about how weak she is, about how obvious it is, about how you can smell the shattered self-esteem from miles away. Part of me reads these stories of women in other countries who face so much blatant, violent sexism and wonders how they cope in such dire circumstances if I can't seem to. Part of me will grudgingly admit, to only the kindest and most unassuming souls, that this experience has changed me. But I will forget the next day.

With some trigger--a stray touch, a misspoken word, a sexist joke--and I can feel the clench of anger in my fists, and the stubborn contrarian in me assumes the defensive position. After a few beats, I can feel the immensity of my response, and its clearly inappropriate magnitude. And all I can think is, What am I doing? Why does this stupid thing still hurt so much? Who are you now?

The sexual assault dean told me that my letter to him was so powerful that it moved even her--who has been dealing with this for years. And of course I let her use it in the ASAP workshop. (Strangely after all these alternately traumatic and cold emotions I have kept the writer's touch to yield when I need it.) But I almost don't believe her. I haven't shown the letter to almost anyone else. I have avoided seeing old friends so that I don't have to recount the story, and be judged for not telling it well enough, or be judged for telling it too well. Too strongly. Were those emotions really real? Were they legitimate? Were they appropriate? I still ask myself these pointless questions every time I think about it.

I know everyone wants to ignore what happens to women every day across the world, that it's too much to think about everyday. But the shock and the pain and the anger have already happened to me, and it's crushing to think that I will change nothing and convince almost no one by speaking out about it. So I haven't spoken out. I still never told all the people I was going to tell. I fear an overwhelming silence, confusion, and ignorance when I tell anyone.

And certainly very few people would understand my emotions, even if they nod dutifully and say, Oh god, that's horrible and what an asshole.

My counselor keeps repeating to me that I am strong for keeping so many spaces open, for not closing myself off and giving in to anger and bitterness. I almost don't believe her either. She emphasized that it was important for me to find validation in others because it is a helpful reality check. But my recent pattern of behavior has not followed the sage advice I know to be true. I should be opening up and letting people know at home, people I care about, who I know care about me. But how could I shatter the joy of graduation and newness and excitement in moving on with our lives by telling this stupid, wicked story? I have said nothing. I have holed up by myself, wondering why I cannot get up in the morning, why I have written nothing, why I have spent the day watching television, why I have not exercised as much as I fantasized I would, why I cannot be nice to my mother, why I cannot sleep, why I still seem just a little, though not entirely, broken.

If I would just admit to myself that this sexual violation has hurt me, I could start to heal in the right way. I have no trouble admitting the intellectual truth--that being the victim of sexual assault has made it astonishingly, starkly clear what kind of sexism still exists in the United States, and what work feminism still has yet to do. That it has reinformed my views of feminist activism, and that admitting the depth and the wrongness of these everyday violations against women has helped me cope with sexism I personally experience. But I still have work to do, on myself. I am having trouble identifying as a victim because of the passive implications in the word itself. I am having trouble admitting that such a stupid, careless, arrogant, thrilling (to him), drunken act could have changed not only my entire world, but my entire self. I don't want it to be true.

Yet, late at night, when I stare into the blank darkness wondering why I have been so angry, wondering who I have become, and what will happen when I move to New York, to deal with this all by myself--I have to admit that it's true. I'm not admitting weakness to him. I'm not submitting. I'm not passively allowing myself to be hurt without fighting back. I'm simply being honest with myself. Something unfortunate happened to me on October 30th, 2010. I was not prepared for it, and honestly, it's unclear how any naive human could be prepared. I was surprised by my own reaction, by my own sudden tears around an hour after it happened, by how I could not stop shivering, by how fear consumed my day-to-day life, by the sudden torrent of emotion that was unleashed upon me.

I know this is long, but I'm just going to keep writing because this is working.

I still don't understand why I have been so hurt. In times of crisis, I tend to turn to academia to see if it has any answers. Here, from Kress et al. 2003 as cited here:

The person is unable to effectively answer questions regarding how the event has for a person’s life.This disequilibrium causes the person to experience a sense of crisis that lasts as long as the needs to organize and develop a coherent meaning system in relation to the assault.

This is true of me. I am in disequilibrium.

Secondly, reading this document did make me think that I would react differently if I was assaulted in exactly the same way again. Obvious, it seems, but I had not thought about it in detail before. I would immediately have left the second he made me feel uncomfortable--just pulled my dancing partner to another part of the room. This also makes me think of a time I must now label as possible attempted rape. When I lived in Philadelphia, my house mate tried to get me to drink a lot, and acted quite drunk while he had only had one drink in his 200 lb. football player body. I sipped and felt undrunk. He then pinned me to the bed and actually bit my skin while repeatedly asking me if I would have sex with him, while I repeatedly said no. I think the only reason I was not actually raped or sexually violated was that someone else was in the room. Not that he necessarily would have stopped anything from happening--but I think the guy felt a little self-conscious. I pushed the whole event out of mind and dismissed it as something crazy, though I completely avoided him after that and unfriended him on Facebook.

Now? I would have blown up in his face and told him exactly what he was doing. It would have traumatized me. I am now sure that part of why I reacted so strongly to a non-rape sexual assault was that my prior experiences with assault and sexual harrassment were not labeled as such. They were not defined, and this helped me ignore them. When I finally put the label on what K did, my whole world came crashing down.

I guess that helps me put this whole experience into context.

The third realization I had while reading that document (so helpful to have someone who is not steeped in rape myths talking about this) was that I did experience some feeling of loss of control. I naturally resist feeling out of control--and that's why I powered through the first few months trying to take action, confront my feelings, and get this over with. After I realized that my feelings were sometimes overwhelmingly strong and annoyingly persistent, I began to feel depressed and realized that some things were not in my control. (The justice system, other people's reactions, etc.) I guess that's part of why I have been feeling a little depressed. Part of me doesn't want to fight anymore--at least, I don't want to fight cleanly. I want to get angry and spin a little out of control and act the fuck out so that my emotions don't have to be so bottled up inside and monitored all the time. (and it feels like all the time.)

That's a lot of thinking, and I am hungry now. Time to stop my ridiculous food restriction that always accompanies my bouts of depression.

self-imposed writer's block

2011-06-13T16:20:00.000-07:00

I feel the thickened and softened sludge of my thoughts, murmurs, dreams, and memories fighting, pushing for a voice somewhere in my writing.

Somehow I have adopted the (nasty?) habit of silencing them all, of tucking them away into my palm and holding them with me, instead, never to see the enlightened word. Never to lie at the seat of my creativity, guiding me to form the tonally appropriate narrative, never to be devoted the attention and precision and tenderness of a writer, never to feel the release into the written word which calms and neatens them.

Instead my worst memories, my intensely rich and thematically significant dreams, my most divine realizations and appreciations of beauty...fall into the steep nothingness of an increasingly compacted mind, disappearing, I know, for ever.

Let me try to write down what I want to know and remember the most, what I can cling to in moments of confusion and emptiness, what I might reread in times of loneliness. I need discipline.

adele sketch

2010-07-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

Orange blue flame flickering in her teeth. It was fire suspended in the heavy swinging air between her mouth and the sky, an oppressive wet darkness colored ocean.

Do her teeth smile or grimace? They seem to act out the grace of Death, which to my imagination appears lipless, haunting, and full of teeth.

She brought the pipe to her mouth, full cerise lips enveloping the tip with a rare girlish coquetry I had seen only once before.

Cool noisy evening in the local puny park, fireworks crashing bright and intense red in the sky beside a calm yellowing big moon. A man confronted Della as he spied her running off with his full and polished picnic basket, foiled tip of a wine bottle peeping from the wicker lid. White collared and hair slicked he yelled and I watched from ahead, hidden, as she feigned horror and apologized. Her hips lilted and her toes pointed into the ground and her suddenly curvaceous legs pushed off the wet grass and she leaned forward into their conversation space, hands clapsed, the fine and subtle em of her neckline so shockingly alive. Anger melted and he brushed her off into oblivion and the few seconds of her feminine entrancement sublimate. Now only memory.

♥╭╮♥

2010-05-09T18:29:00.000-07:00

All I want to write about is sex.

Tense and unrealized dreams of women--bare, faint scent of powder and perspiration, neck, mouth, chest yielding to my touch--replayed again and again for their few precious invented seconds. The dreams slip from my grasp like green eels fighting a loose net of string. The harder I try to keep them with me, the fainter their touches, the more imagined their smell, the worse my wanting gets. It spills into brief and embarrassingly tense encounters with cute women I wave at, who, either naive or unthreatened by female lust, simply smile back.

Not to mention daydreams of male genitalia in class. Invisible and detailed doodles on my notes of the beautiful thing before my imagination, too charged and erotic to begin sketching in the margins. Thoughts saved for the darling man whose appendage I have been admiring and wanting in my mind's idle time.

And then there's the question of this fluctuating infatuation, which bobs behind in my consciousness, swaddling, smothering, smoldering. I'm not sure I want it, or if I do, how I want it. All I remember is the intensity of my wanting, which at once motivated and obscured my desires. It lingers, fading into time and confusion.

The only anxieties I have these days are from desire, and I do not know how to write of it.

to breathe

2010-02-18T16:57:00.001-08:00

i.

Clear and cold morning. Shivers of the beginnings of spring. Hints of sun breathe warmth into the still masses of snow, and they run into water on the paths.

The sun touches my cheek. I close my eyes and
breathe
shot of oxygen, infinitesimal moment of clarity.

A brief eternal silence and I am swimming in nothingness. I open my eyes and watch the trees sway in the wind.
This is why I am alive, I think.

ii.

Frigid. Virus colonizing soft tissue, clawing at my throat. I walk slow and gasp.

It seems that everyone is breathing, and I am not. Everyone runs on the impatient fuels of passion, breathing deep and fast. All of their energy runs into the search for the sublime, wringing drips of joy from each existence as if their throats parched as mine. And still they parch. I gasp.

Is this how to live? Am I missing this?

Every moment forced to meaning. Each iteration, permutation, combination of dust, stars, organelles, joints, and shadows shimmering with the sacred, a blast of overwhelming importance.

I am too tired to feel. Virus robbing me of this life.

iii.

A dear friend writes to me. She is not tired like me, but exhausted. In her trumpet voice:

and on its own accord, without your drear and worrying
this condition called existence
will die.

I breathe, and there is nothing. I open my eyes and cry.
Peace is necessary. When the blank sky of breath opens up above me I feel complete. But somehow still, in the emptiness before me, I want to rise above and stab the canvas of white with destructive color.

Just for something to look at.

That voice

2010-01-04T01:13:00.000-08:00

Hence, the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little "leap" in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the counter of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode. It was the timbre of their past, as if the past had put through that call, a miraculous connection...Goldenly, youthfully, it bubbled with all the melodious characteristics he knew--or better say recollected, at once, in the sequence they came: that entrain, that whelming of quasi-erotic pleasure, that assurance and animation...
-- Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov

I've tried to write this passage so many times. I was delighted to find it in Ada.

A voice conveys so much. In it we hear the tremble of emotion--a nervous tingle, an excited whisper, a tense snippet of sound--and in each tremble, the details of emotion. In its composition we discover stance, and character.

And god, I am so attracted to them. The right voice can send me tumbling in shock. I wake up only to realize that all of my erotic alarms are clanging, loudly, and it is all I can do to quiet them into a melodic buzzing.

Hell, what's next? An entry about the tongue?

2009.

2010-01-01T00:34:00.000-08:00

I contemplated finding a different survey, but I've already gotten so used to making this one meaningful. It also allows me to figure out where I started 2009.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?
Experienced new, intense, incredible sensations (synaesthesia). Strengthened many valuable friendships, to the point where I felt loved and cared about in two places at once. To the point where I always had someone to call. Blowjob solo. Successfully finished the hardest course I've ever taken: dissected fly brains, read about 70 scientific papers, proposed research, taught for three hours. Finally conquered debilitating body image issues by flinging my mind into the middle of nowhere. Visited Alabama, shot a gun, ate at a fried catfish restaurant, picked up a deer skull. Knit a grey hat and a dissected frog; sewed a full skirt. Programmed for hours, hiked up to the Griffith observatory. Really appreciated what my body could do, and demanded more. Attended NECSS and shook hands with Steven Novella. Improved my self and my well-being--with less and less contact with my family.>

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I handled academia--with intensity and fervor--while allowing myself an appropriate margin of rest and self-care. I made connections with people and realized how necessary and nourishing it is. I appreciate the beautiful moments in life that make it worthwhile...though I could do so more often. With more time.
More resolutions.
Be strong, and hold your ground. Speak your mind and do not apologize for speaking, or for thinking. Remember that you are not only capable, but extraordinary and worthwhile.
And of course: do what you truly love.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No.
4. Did anyone close to you die? No, thankfully. What will that be like?
5. What countries did you visit? None. Not Vietnam, either.
6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
I'm rather pleased to say that I have achieved everything I wanted in 2009, except perhaps peace. In 2010, I would like a good relationship with my family. Whether my family is the one I was born into or not is something to be determined. I would also like to spend more time with the man I love.
7. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Oh gosh, no specific dates. Though there are some very clear days in my memories.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? I can't decide whether it's in academics, friendships, or personal fortitude. To be honest, I think my biggest achievement is being able to take pride in what I do.
9. What was your biggest failure? Managing my emotional life. There was no significant aesthetic engagement, and almost nothing approaching spirituality. Usually I toe the line just to satisfy the little craving that I have.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Insect bite allergies are worse, but manageable. A few more migraines.
11. Whose behavior merited celebration? Brandon. Yen, Thy, An. Omer.
12. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? A certain cousin. My father. Some ignorant conservatives, and liberals.
13. Where did most of your money go? Books. Food. Essentials.
14. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Baking! Zoe! Sleep! Knitting! Seeing Brandon!
15. What song will always remind you of 2009? Stan Getz - It Never & Getz/Gilberto - Corcovado

Compared to this time last year, are you:
16. Happier or sadder? Happier, finally!
17. Thinner or fatter? The same, or slightly thinner. Fitter, certainly.
18. Richer or poorer? Richer in many, many ways.
19. What do you wish you'd done more of? Loved, loved, loved. Wrote journal entries and letters.
20. What do you wish you'd done less of? Agonized, or worried.
21. How did you spend Christmas? Cooking lunch for family, after being visited by a fairy bearing gifts. Then watched Avatar at the theaters.
22. Did you fall in love in 2009? I fell in love a long time ago. This year I developed a ridiculous infatuation that confused me greatly. And right afterward I fell in love again with the same incredible man.
23. How many one-night stands? Cero.
24. What was your favorite TV program? Ooh, 30 Rock and Arrested Development.
25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? No
26. What was the best book you read? I didn't read very many.
27. What was your greatest musical discovery? The saxophone and The Sound. Oh myyyyy.
28. What did you want and get? Self-respect.
29. What did you want and not get? Enjoyable family life.
30. What was your favorite film of this year? Fuck, I watched so few recent movies that it's not worth deciding.
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I had friends over in my single dorm room. Amy baked chocolate cupcakes and we ordered wings. It made me feel loved and appreciated, for the first time in a while.
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Brandon, by my side. No question.
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009? Exploratory.
34. What kept you sane? Stan Getz, Zoe, seminar folks, exercise.
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Padma Lakshmi.
36. What political issue stirred you the most? Healthcare.
37. Who did you miss? Alice and Brandon. Simone, Justin, Kyle, and my brother, who never calls.
38. Who was the best new person you met? It's hard to meet actually new people at a small school.
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009: Exercise balances everything out.
40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
This is giving me a difficult time, so I'm just going with this one.

"The time to hesitate is through
No time to wallow in the mire
Try now we can only lose
And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on baby, light my fire."

Undefined Relationships, part one

2009-12-10T19:19:00.000-08:00

He stands with his chest out. Not because it is thrust there, but because it must be filled with deep breaths and emphatic words.

Hair alive, askew, and up--his hands have run through the thick black mess too many times, in concentration and frustration--vibrancy in his veins, in his body.

Eyes that widen (liven) with interest, attention, conversation. That narrow softly with laughter, thought, and tiredness.

He wrings tenderness and intuition from me. I see him clearer than most, because his stance is mine, his breath is mine, his veins are mine, his laughter, thought, and tiredness, mine.

What is left for me?

His space, palpable, fills the room to smother me and to electrify me. Impassioned, stinging, and alive, I smile at him.

He does not smile back.

Tension

2009-11-19T14:21:00.001-08:00

I'm never sure how sexual tension manifests itself in my body.

I'm sure my mouth becomes slightly parted. I think I shift my body slightly, slowly--my back arches, I stretch out my legs, I cross and uncross them, I inhale deeply and feel the sudden, full weight of my breasts.

But can anyone see this?

Sometimes I want someone to notice. A come-hither, without explicit winks or smiles, or flashes, or deep seductive eye-locked stares, or slow brushes against the skin. Just body language, averted eyes, that says: I am incredibly turned on.

And they can do whatever they like with this information.

And then sometimes I am embarrassed, too-conscious of the fact that all the people in the room might all be able to see my tension.

Men in my Life

2009-11-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

1. My father, whom I do not understand. Who cares about me but seems to dismiss everything in my life I consider important (my interests, my love, my aspirations). Who calls, awkwardly spits out a forced sentence, and decides to hang up after several long seconds of silence.
Our relationship is so much silence.
Whose distant behavior now is better than his former anger. I think.

2. My love. Who understands me deeply and accepts it all, with the exception of my bizarre relationship to myself. Who treats me like I deserve something good from this world. (A welcome change.)
Who enjoys life with me, shares life with me, and nourishes the life within me.
Who is part of me.

3. My substitute father, teacher. Who encouraged me in every way to pursue, to use, and to demonstrate my worth and intelligence. Who seems to compliment me every time I see him. Who wants me to succeed, and shows it.
Who sexually assaulted another student. Who put her in a position that I have experienced, loathed, and cried over. Who clearly was not as happy as I believed. Whose glow and charisma and life ran into a wall.
Who, despite seemingly inhuman feats, is wholly human and alive.

4. A best friend, who lives to work. Who forgets everyone and everything when his life comes crashing down. Who is bad at empathy, but great at sympathy. Who accepts and confronts darknesses with admirable verve.
Who, most importantly, keeps me company when I feel strikingly, heart-sinkingly alone.
And this makes our relationship worth it.

5. Another best friend, who does not know it. Who still fails at happiness but succeeds at finding joy in small doses and details. Who listens to the harrowing details of my emotional life, nods, feels awkward, and moves on.
And respects this later, without fully understanding.
Who allows me to be fully myself, vulgar, ridiculous, and interested.

This list turned out to be longer than expected. This makes me grateful.

Uncomfortable

2009-05-30T01:15:00.001-07:00

Reading about the train-wreck that is Elizabeth Wurtzel, I began thinking about my head-in-the-sand approach to my own appearance. I am reluctant to remark on it aloud. I have a hard time categorizing myself as "attractive"--partly because I am surprised to be told that I belong in this category, partly because it seems unimportant, fleeting, and a little narcissistic.

But I've begun to realize, in unpleasant ways, that it is important to some people. Even barring street harrassers. Dressed up, salesmen show me the pink alternatives to all of their products. (Crafted for the great money-spending demographic: the explicitly pubescent, sex-and-feminity-define-me demographic, aged sixteen to forty-something, secretly beyond.) In conversation men (pretending to be suave, and failing) remark on my smallness, assuming it is something I take conscious pride in; on my prettiness, assuming it is something I want acknowledged and complimented; on my effect on other men, assuming it is something I am comfortable with, and am comfortable with exploiting. In conversation women are usually not so dense. If at all, they jab in with undermining stabs: weight, eating habits, skin care, hue.

I am confused.

I want to whip out femininity only when I need it, like donning a superhero costume that divides my feminine identity from everything else. But in the comics the hero is always part and parcel of the character himself. I can't even pull this off. Hiding behind cleavage and heels is someone who doesn't even understand what her identity means.

What I do know is that sexuality and beauty are not heroic. They are uncomfortably powerful.

2009-04-29T20:47:00.000-07:00

I feel nothing worth writing about.

Is there something worthy to say about emptiness? Soul-deprivation? Self-dissipation? I suppose one should keep in mind that emptiness exists to be filled and nourished.

Italian Leather Sofa

2009-04-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

"she's got a serrated edge
that she moves back and forth.
it's such a simple machine.
she doesn't have to use force.
when she gets what she wants"

Beautiful women.

Vignette of self-doubt

2009-04-25T22:33:00.001-07:00

I saw a girl in a summer dress today, lying in the shade of an aged and blooming crape myrtle. The vanilla cloth stretched across her back, draped across the back of her thighs, and stopped at her folded-up knees. pulled up to her body in a lazy fetus. I smiled in the 85-degree heat, sweat trickling down my back, eyes squinting into the sun, at her leisure and beauty.

A perverse thought: I want to interrupt her. How could I disturb something so graceful? I became the essence of a clumsy, unwanted awkward stumbling cripple, and clopped by as sweat soaked into my wrap. My dress billowed and felt too short, too lumpy at the bust, too awkward with the sock-wrapped foot trapped inside a stiff post-op shoe.

I limp inside and the full glass windows let me see the pink flowers hang shaggily down to the floor, the girl a small figure in the distance. The sun falls through to the lounge in a pleasant, summer morning way, and I sit, sweat-soaked, peeling the wrap away from my back.

I look up. I notice a man by the corner in his usual grey vest and red tie, with his new one-month haircut, dark jeans and flat shoes. His eyes avert everything around me. This boy writes a brave, amazing series in the paper about his struggle with OCD, undiagnosed, and then diagnosed. I wish I could tell him about my recent bout with almost-orexia. I am not brave or humble enough.

He has stopped looking at me. Weeks ago I could stand in boots and draping sweater talking about nothing and he would be listening, or watching, or both. I walked and felt his cautious eyes follow, sat and felt his eyes wander away, and shoot back. Now nothing. (Deliberately?) averted gazes, sheer willpower, or OCD. Fuck.

I need his eyes. Not his male eyes, but his shamed-curious eyes, which wonder whether I am neurotic and quirky and insecure like him. Eyes that seek something that grows more beautiful by the day. The same curious eyes I shamed away from the vanilla dress flapping in the breeze, folded beneath the shade of the creeping crape myrtle.

Without them I am in danger of being unremarkable, invisible, worthless.

She got up. My fantasy vanished as I recognize her face walking towards the building. For several intense seconds I want to cover or strangle my body in bandages, and disappear.

nostalgia glows

2009-04-25T22:19:00.001-07:00

I stepped outside today in 87 degree weather to be oppressed by the heat, to be surprised that this felt just like home, to be surprised that I missed it so.

Home--unspecial. Why does nostalgia for mediocre nights make my senses glow with gladness? I try to point out to my psyche that I was safe when I was there--I may no longer be safe when I return. When I return as my new self: young, independent, alone, vulnerable, horrified at how misogyny can make her feel, I may see things differently.

But I hope that I do not. I want this summer to be reaffirming. I want my return to Southern California to be both new and familiar. Things are different this time. I am not trying to do this alone. I don't need to shun my family. I know that I can use help, and that I can take it without guilt or shame.

2008.

2009-01-04T22:44:00.000-08:00

A little late, I know, but I finally worked up the courage to face the new year. So here I am filling out the same survey again.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?
Camped at Joshua Tree. Slept with my love for a week straight. Twice. Got punched in the face and scared shitless while naked. Finished an entire year of college. Got an internship. Lived on my own for 2.5 months. Got propositioned while standing at a bus stop in plain clothes. Trusted a stranger on a plane and regretted the intense connection. Ate peanut butter out of the jar for a week. Gained enough weight to donate blood, but was denied because of antibiotics. Developed an allergy to insect bites. Tried 20 different kinds of fried foods. Stained my feet with flea bites. Published an article in a cancer magazine. Worked in a sushi restaurant. Did official work on a website. Interviewed real doctors over the phone. Pitched a real article idea. Visited a professor during his office hours more than once. Cried for three hours while trying to write an essay late at night. Spoke fluent Spanish. Flayed open an earthworm and coaxed an action potential from his giant axon. Confronted a friend, and lived. Mushrooms and infinite hands. Saw the Toadies. Realized how love, love, love anchors life.
2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I learned how to better negotiate and tolerate my mother and father, especially after a summer living alone. It was much easier to appreciate everything they did for me--because they knew how hard it was to do it for themselves. I also think that cynicism is no longer a question for me. The relentless optimist in me is indestructible.
But I am going to reformulate my old resolutions now. I had a life-changing year.
Remember that you are worthy. Remember that you are capable. Be healthy, breathe, and remember that academia does not determine your life. Take advantage of the sweet, beautiful moments of life that make it worthwhile. Do what you truly love.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No.
4. Did anyone close to you die? No, but two grandfathers did die.
5. What countries did you visit? None. Vietnam should be up, winter 2009.
6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?
I have to restrain myself from listing too much. I would like: self-confidence, peace, companionship, and academic direction.
Strange how my goals have changed so much. I no longer need more freedom--I have achieved its bittersweetness--and financial independence is impossible. Solidness would be nice, though.
7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? 3/15. Old man, you're right--I will never forget that conversation.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Surviving a tough challenge, and having the resilience to begin my kickass recovery.
9. What was your biggest failure? Doubting too much.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Insect bite allergies.
11. Whose behavior merited celebration? Brandon. Alice. Siblings. Father. Mother. Simone and mother and brothers. Adam. George. Joy. Stewart. Nana. Jas. Random Carleton College roommate. Women across the street from the fire station. CR survivors.
12. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Levin. Fat Jewish asshole. Father-aged near the post office, dick in the red car, Chisom, Chris, smelly Haverford kid.
13. Where did most of your money go? Books. Food. Essentials.
14. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Brandon! Cleanliness! Food! (I am a base creature.) Also, skepticism.
15. What song will always remind you of 2008? "Lagrimas Negras" by Bebo y Cigala and "Elephant Gun" by Beirut.

Compared to this time last year, are you:
16. Happier or sadder? Perhaps just as discontented. But sadder. This is temporary, trust me.
17. Thinner or fatter? The same, surprisingly.
18. Richer or poorer? Richer in experience and wisdom.
19. What do you wish you'd done more of? Set boundaries. Stood up for myself. Enjoyed.
20. What do you wish you'd done less of? Doubted. Avoided people.
21. How did you spend Christmas? Constructed a 500-piece puzzle with my sister in one day.
22. Did you fall in love in 2008? I fell in love a long time ago. But I fall in love again, all the time.
23. How many one-night stands? None.
24. What was your favorite TV program? Not sure. I cycle through them.
25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? I hate fewer people now.
26. What was the best book you read? Am reading Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Beirut and Latin music.
28. What did you want and get? Independence.
29. What did you want and not get? Fearlessness.
30. What was your favorite film of this year? Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona.
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I opened presents that week in my dorm room, including a beautiful poster of the universe. I ate cake with my hall and folded a dollar bill into a penis. 18.
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? I don't know. Too many choices.
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007? Conscious of the weather (cold) and the stains on my feet.
34. What kept you sane? Diane/CAPS. Brandon. Neena. Distraction from brooding.
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I don't fancy.
36. What political issue stirred you the most? Obama, Obama, Obama.
37. Who did you miss? Brandon, clearly. And family.
38. Who was the best new person you met? Scott Gilbert.
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008: Home welcomes us.
40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
"Clavo mi remo en el agua
Llevo tu remo en el mío
Creo que he visto una luz
al otro lado del río
...
Oigo una voz que me llama
casi un suspiro
Rema, rema, rema
Rema, rema, rema"

I am not Blind

2008-11-23T21:11:00.000-08:00

specter : from French, spectre, "an image, figure, ghost." from Latin, spectrum, "appearance, vision, apparition." (see spectrum)

i can't see. this specter wraps its dark smoke tail around me and i see nothing.
closing eyes relieves panic.
i can't sleep for ever. the specter drags me into the daylight, obscure, blind.

pit pat patter pat rain bows invisible
spectrum : "apparition, specter," from Latin spectrum "appearance, image, apparition." From specere, "to look at, view." (see scope) Spectroscope is a hybrid with Greek -skopion, from skopein, "to look at, examine."

sounds marvel/gorge ous.
ask tomorrow if i can see

2008-10-24T22:42:00.001-07:00

I must keep telling myself that I have come a long way: last year at this time I was barely adjusting to college, barely confident of my independence, barely understanding how I fit into the world as a citizen and a human. I knew nothing, came as a blank canvas, and expected life to paint me.

I should not be disappointed that this summer did not unfold neatly. Messiness is expected.

Sometimes I just want someone to hug me and tell me to stop worrying.

The Question Persists, Uneagerly

2008-10-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

One moment I think I've got the entire world figured out. The next moment, I have no idea what I want, where I'm going, or what kind of person I am becoming.

These issues were so clear to me two years ago. Today I only have the vaguest of answers. The only thing that keeps me moving is the aching, lingering, and unhappy hope that I have the ability to answer these questions.

I wish someone was here to help me sort out this mess.

It's too awful to do this alone.

Dear Homeless Oil Man

2008-10-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

David:

Once I was standing near the bus stop at night, leaning against a pole, watching the street and the tourists wading by, carelessly, drunkenly, happily. It was almost nine. I was almost gone from this wretched city, glad it was my last evening bus ride home, glad this was over with.

I became lost in thought.

Suddenly I heard a deep, unrecognizable voice behind me: "Gotcha." I felt a presence behind me. True to my slow reflexes, I calmly turned around and said, "Hi."

"I coulda got you there, couldn't I!" An aging homeless black man grinned back at me. I recognized him--he wandered by this street every other night, sometimes proffering advice, sometimes wobbling with a brown bag in his hand. He was harmless, or so I thought. Luckily I was never proven wrong.

"You better watch out where you standing, yeah?" The panic, seemingly delayed, finally started to rise in my throat.

"Yeah, thanks," I told him. As he sauntered away--a stylistic limp--I swallowed, hard, and frowned. So much for relaxing on this last night.

I resumed my usual arms-crossed, ankles-crossed, frowning stance leaning against the side of the lit building near the bus stop. I tried to look as unfriendly and ugly as possible.

That is what you did to me, too. I never want to hear your words again. I never want to hear the city ask me for my money, for my patience, or for my sexuality again.

Fuck you.

How I know I'm better

2008-08-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

"Thinspiration" doesn't make me envious anymore.

Object

2008-08-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

I am tired of being an object.

I do not enjoy being the silent wallflower, which is only sometimes noticed and sometimes acknowledged. Which breathes in only the social residue of others' joy and exchange. This I can remedy--I am not actually silent, nor am I actually uninteresting. Luckily, I am not designated to become the resident wallflower every day. Or multiple times a day. I can handle being her, sometimes.

I do not enjoy being the token, hilariously small Asian, which is mostly observed and joked about. But this, too, I handle mostly well. I am not A Stereotype every day, or even multiple times a day. There are laws to handle most of that, now.

I do not enjoy being a sexual object, every day, multiple times a day, without my express consent. It is tiring to be an object, which is faceless, spiritless, and made only for a single purpose. But I understand--such is life. I handle this well enough, knowing fully that there are others who love and appreciate me for my

But it is so damaging to find that someone who appreciates you for your spirit and for your character--someone who you think will help you slog through the dull and acute pains of life, someone who seems to understand so well--doesn't want to help you at all. Really, you are just the object--the Asian, the woman with the pretty smile and the yielding vagina, the thing that will satisfy appetite and postpone loneliness, that will distract you from your mid-life regrets, temporarily brighten your dulled, sexless world, that will serve you selflessly, without expectation.

To be an object first and a person second is cruel and effacing. Even more so when it is relentless, ever-persistently robbing you of your focus and your desires and your sense of self in order to shove your person into a tidy, useful, easily comprehensible form. Again and again. Tomorrow.

Soon, I will be gone.

de lagrimas

2008-07-07T20:28:00.000-07:00

My siblings will readily attest to the fact that as a child, I cried at everything. I remember crawling into my room, climbing up the bunk, and sobbing my face into the pillow. It was dark. I had room to cry.

In the midst of my sniffling, my sister interrupted: hanging off the side rails, staring at me, she asked—“What are you even crying about?” This was one of the first times (of many) that she would intervene when I became hysterical.

“I don’t know,” I sniffled. And I stopped sobbing just to think about it. How astonishingly reasonable her question.

—

Last week I cried listening to a song on my iTunes, narrating to myself how heart-wrenching and beautiful this song was, unraveling its horns and ukulele, its imagery and elephants.
He lay beside me and wrapped his arms tighter around my waist. Eyes closed, smiling.

I closed my eyes and let myself go.

It felt marvelous to cry. To weave in and out of Condon’s trembling voice, and to sob where he nearly did, to gulp and to be so incapacitated by beauty—and to find someone behind you as your eyes blinked open, blurry and wet and deliriously content.

Sobbing is full of upset, and grief. Do not equate this with tears, which often trickle down your cheeks to cement, in memory, what a gorgeous moment you have just lived.

2008-04-17T19:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I return to old diary entries and marvel at my honesty. I expressed my emotions so freely that I cringe to remember them--overwhelming anger, sadness, and angst that I don't even remember. I wrote about them to forget them.

Now I don't even write. I wander through my days, inexpressive, forgetful, and removed. Encased in intellectualism. Ivory tower discussions about real-life problems, by people who have never experienced the real brunt of racism, poverty, or educational disadvantage. They remove, abstract, distill, analyze.

I am complicit. I write, speak, and breathe jargon in my veins, remove, abstract, distill--I analyze until emotion dissipates, until life just becomes a series of dull, practical decisions. My solution to my problems is to focus on my work until exhaustion takes over and throws the problems to the background. This is life.

I ran away from the antagonists, and feel strangely undefined without them. What is a protagonist without a well-defined villain? He is content, mundane, and uninteresting. He is on his path to success, to stimulating education--but he's still not there yet. I wonder if he will ever get there, or if he will be perennially dissatisfied. I wonder if he will always close himself to others, avoid the possibility of rejection, and sulk in the vacuous space of self.

Why do I insist on having friends who can see into my soul?

2008-03-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

You surround/embrace/envelope me with love.

2008-03-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

I miss you.

-----------------------

I hate breaking hearts.

My mother, whose heart I have broken several times, whose voice and touch will never leave me, tolerates this the best of anyone I know. She clings and cries and for this reason I never want anyone to get this close to me, to scrape away my skin and to look inside of the hollow cavity of my chest and sob: please, your heart looks just like mine.

I remember the cold quiver of one boy's voice on the walk to a sushi restaurant. He remarked, surprised, that I was shorter than he had remembered. This meant I was less intimidating than he remembered. We said little that day, for lack of interest or for a heart full of nervousness or for the slow comprehension that nothing would ever work out between us. His speech fell thinly on my ears, too soft, like water trickling down the edge of a raincoat: his words fell into the cracks of the concrete sidewalks.

Driving back he mentioned that he was writing some music. He was better at song than at words. He asked if I would like to hear it, and I responded more enthusiastically to this than any of his other requests--this would prevent him from trying to talk--and we sat awkwardly on the sidewalk with his braces obstructing his words and his hands slowly merging into his guitar, chords and chords melting into one another. His voice cracked at the high note. His hands unmerged and fumbled. I smiled and bid him goodbye, and felt his heart cracking in mine.

He was the first boy to fall in love with me in all of my bitter, postmodernist anger, in my vitriol and my obsession with learning and beauty and how it all betrayed me. I don't know why he did. I did not think I was a beautiful person.

Now I see the pain of lust and loneliness pleading with me, pleading for a drunken respite from a daily misery, for the immediacy of contact, for warmth. I know their hearts look like mine. I want to help, somehow, if I could.

But I can't. You're waiting for me in my mimosa grove, and I know I want to return.

But that mimosa grove--the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since.

2008-01-07T00:32:00.000-08:00

Often I fear to love because I don't want to find it unreturned. I do not want to love an image--entirety of soul, mind--and discover that the truth bares ugly fangs instead. So fiction and literature are easy to appreciate and to love, to adore: they return, timelessly, to my hands, only layered with a greater depth of beauty and of complexity on re-examination.

But I learned this year that I am capable of loving so much--that I can love with such intensity that it overpowers my own misery and disillusionment. Of course this means loving another person. But it also means loving, simply, what I am experiencing: the sweet bowing of a violinist's recording, the bright swirls of leaves on a dark rainy autumn day, the strength of my body inhaling into a straining yoga pose. I see flashes of these in my memory and I can feel my own awe, revel, and love.

These moments never return. I cannot re-examine and re-adore. The next day I find the trees have been stripped bare, that my body aches, that awe does not revisit but wrecks and re-wrecks. Too often this pattern has stamped itself into my life: I spend a night reading with my father, and the next afternoon he yells angrily that I have left my books strewn about, that I read too much and clean not enough. A boy whispers into my ear, his voice shivering through my body. And I realize he's only asking me about her, I in the middle of their flirtations.
I speak and my words dissipate into the air. I love and am invisible.

So, I thought, to love is to self-efface. Selfless. Vulnerable, weak, terrible.

But what is more self-affirming than love? What is more fully expressed, with the entirety of one's mind and heart and person, than love? To be able to glimpse the perfect elliptical descent of the leaf--what can be more real, more raw, more dynamic--more evidence of one's livelihood and presence?

What can be more open and genuine? Not divulging one's deepest pain, but expressing the greatest, most transcendent love.

In 2008 I will love more.

2007

2008-01-03T23:20:00.000-08:00

I need to reflect some, and can't organically. So here's the decent set of questions I answered last year, for this year.

1. What did you do in 2007 that you'd never done before?
Got into college(s). Received scholarships. Said goodbye to high school. Fought (passively) with a best friend, for months. Felt alone when I had achieved everything I thought would set my life straight. Felt delightfully happy for days and days and days on end. Month(s). Flew to the East Coast with my family. Missed my siblings. Missed my house. Stepped foot on campus. Trekked, ran, drew, mused, comforted, loved, and reveled in the woods. Visited an arboretum without my family--and the teacher I was with told me I pierced and energized him. Fought. Learned (more acutely) why reason is importantly. Learned why fighting is important. Learned, learned, learned--mind sped up to what seemed to be full, satisfying, capacity. Tripped, with and without. Met more new people than I have in a couple years. Lived away from my family, loved it. Went to the MoMa, stayed in a hotel in New York, understood snow. Saw Muse live. Vomited. Loved, loved, loved sans fear.
2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I think the resolutions I made in 2005 are life resolutions. "Take chances, write, not give up, learn, talk to mother/father [may vary from year to year], keep healthy, stay sane, and ultimately: learn how to avoid cynicism."
I always forget the last few--that's why they are at the end of the list. But next year I will learn to tolerate and negotiate with m/f. And keep the rest.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No.
4. Did anyone close to you die? No, thank goodness.
5. What countries did you visit? The country of free thought and action! (college)
6. What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?
The things I listed have mostly been fulfilled: college, time, freedom, honesty, transparency. More strength.
Next year: even greater freedom, financial independence (slowly, think about it), another friend or two, solidness.
7. What date from 2007 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? 7/18 and 10/16, for truth and beauty.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Getting into, going to, being independent at college. Learning how to fight and play the game.
9. What was your biggest failure? Not loving enough.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? UTI (hospital), migraine.
11. Whose behavior merited celebration? Brandon, Mr. Ramirez. I want to make this list longer, honestly--but I don't know how.
12. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? M/F.
13. Where did most of your money go? Tuition. Gifts. Essentials.
14. What did you get really, really, really excited about? See #1 and attempt to parse the excitement.
15. What song will always remind you of 2007? "My Lovely" by Eisley and "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues" by The Eels.

Compared to this time last year, are you:
16. Happier or sadder? More content, just as happy, less sad.
17. Thinner or fatter? The same, or slightly thinner.
18. Richer or poorer? Richer in appreciation, mental capacity
19. What do you wish you'd done more of? Loved. Spoke my mind.
20. What do you wish you'd done less of? Told myself I was disliked.
21. How did you spend Christmas? Read and crocheted at home. Nothing.
22. Did you fall in love in 2007? I fell in love in 2005. But you can say I fell again.
23. How many one-night stands? Guess.
24. What was your favorite TV program? None.
25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? No.
26. What was the best book you read? Dermaphoria.
27. What was your greatest musical discovery? iTunes and drugs.
28. What did you want and get? College.
29. What did you want and not get? Nothing notable.
30. What was your favorite film of this year? I'll skip this.
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I went to a Muse concert; turned 17 the next day. (Hurt a friend.)
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Another friend.
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007? I wouldn't.
34. What kept you sane? Swarthmore and its relentless exercise. Brandon.
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I didn't.
36. What political issue stirred you the most? Negatively: radical feminism, evangelism.
37. Who did you miss? Brandon. Alice. Mr. Ramirez. Mr. Ontiveros. My siblings.
38. Who was the best new person you met? Maaah!
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2007: All truth is beautiful.
40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
"Goddamn right it's a beautiful day."

Presence II

2007-12-23T13:18:00.000-08:00

"A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to take up more room in a room."
--Amy Hempel, from "Tumble Home"

Going back to California, I opened the door to my old house with too much force. The room felt small. Things suddenly felt lighter.

2007-12-18T19:00:00.001-08:00

note to self: ASIAN WOMEN

2007-12-12T09:35:00.001-08:00

Surprise surprise, I feel again as if the entirety of me is fading, disappearing, crumpling.

Why does this happen? More thoughts later.

Women & Weight, II

2007-12-05T16:23:00.000-08:00

The problem with the assumptions I detailed in the previous post are not simple to pick out. Of course there is some correlation between weight and attractiveness--it is not the sole factor, nor is it something that ought to go to either extreme, but few modern societies idolize the overweight woman. (I don't mean unskinny, I mean overweight.) And sexuality is something deeply ingrained in us--I don't believe that through some process of socialization, women could eradicate their tendency to intertwine love and sex. It's important to note, though, that men who have sex with you don't automatically love you.

So where to pinpoint the problem?

It lies in self-esteem, and self-validation. Without love or security, women may often feel as if the only way to garner universal respect and love lies in the power of her sexuality and her attractiveness. And thinness, of course, is the most accessible avenue to attractiveness--it is something she can control, and something she can constantly struggle against. Of course she wants a constant struggle: this means she is fighting against her worthlessness all the time, that instead of confronting a need for comfort and care, she can simply hate her body. Hating your body is much easier than going through the humbling process of realizing you have emotions that must be fulfilled, and tempered.

The solution? The only way out lies in identifying real avenues for self-validation. Mostly that the only permanent ones are seated within oneself--internal, rather than external validation. The one path I can see to pursuing this is to do things you truly, fully respect--self-improve, without throwing yourself into a cycle of self-deprecation and hatred. (Hint: hating yourself is not improvement.) If you respect ultra-thin women for their painful ability to eat nothing, you need to really think about your moral system and revise it.

When you respect yourself, others will respect you, and love you with respect.

Women & Weight, I

2007-12-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

This is why many women equate weight to self-worth:

skinny = attractive = sexy
No, skinny is not necessarily attractive or sexy. But some believe that not eating and exercising compulsively is an indicator of excellent discipline, self-control, and self-respect. This last trait, 'self-respect,' is especially perplexing--as if loathing your body and its natural weight indicates that you would never allow fat and sloth to seep into your life, and that you disdain it in others, and that this is a value everyone universally acknowledges. (Fat is unhealthy! Don't be a lazy, ice-cream stuffing bitch!) Having self-respect and discipline are attractive personality traits, certainly. But many women believe that hating your body is a step toward having those traits, as well as self-confidence (so they think.)
And women often think that if they lose weight, they'll be so much sexier. Really--"just a few more pounds!" they always say. "Then I'll be perfect."

sexy = people will have sex with you = people will love you
What women really mean is, "Just a few more pounds--then I'll be perfectly fuckable."
Simply because penises dote on you does not mean that hearts will dote on you. So often sex for women is about love--read women's erotica and you'll find her heart fluttering at the thought of his romantic words. Honeymoon stories are especially creepy: while having hot, wild sex in the middle of the woods the 'heroine' stops to think, "Thank god, he's all mine, this penis is all mine!" When suave men whisper romantic words into women's ears they get aroused. Love is so deeply arousing to a woman that they begin to equate sex with love, and begin to want to cuddle, and begin to want to marry. I think this must be a biological response that can not be mitigated much by reason.

The end result is that skinny = people will love you. One, because they want to fuck you so badly, and two, because you have such discipline that it's admirable.

More on the faults of this reasoning later. Just wanted to post the framework of this discussion (idea I had in my head) before I went to class.

Waiting for this, and more

2007-11-24T14:48:00.000-08:00

Writer's block.

I feel as if there is some crushing loss (void) of beauty in my life. Not to say that I live in an industrial warehouse of depressing smog, smudge, and soot, or that the people who surround me are rat-like, nasty or brutish. Just that I miss eloquence--the swift, smooth weave of words that make it such a pleasure to read, write, speak, listen.

Academic eloquence is not the same. Too many -tions, too many flat and unresounding nouns, falling heavy and heaving in a mass of dense meaning, ideas and ideas that sludge and slide, that make it hard for you to slice through, to grasp!, unless you're willing to push your thick head through, hoping for a divine reward of an idea.

And when the reward is meager, or indefensible, or poorly constructed--and poorly written, too--your head groans.

"Again?" it asks. Yes, again. We wait for the light of the real, poignant idea, that shines by its own merit of sound evidence and argument, that lights us to progress, exploration.

Waiting for this.

2007-10-23T21:43:00.001-07:00

To be brief about it, Pennsylvania has indeed filled up my soul. God, all the things I could write if I weren't [happily] obligated to read about complexity and self-organized critical systems.

I inhale the scent of blooming flowers and the wet lawn beneath me that isn't.

Looking back

2007-08-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

The final entry to my first (and maybe only) real journal [12/2002-04/2005]

04/13/05

So this is the end. My only friend, the end.
I wonder what I'm going to do. How I'm going to change after I get off of these antidepressants. I wonder how I'm going to cope, what I'm going to see, whether my near-psychopathic images of violence will go away by then. And what will happen in my search, my continual search, for an intellectual partner or two, and how adolescence is going to end up.
I recently turned 15, by the way. This has been with me a long time.
I wonder when I'm going to stop getting headaches because I feel threatened that I don't know enough. Headaches, insecurities that began with . I wonder when I can really face & be myself. Fully, truly.
The world is composed of shifting, blurring, pulsing grey-lavender spheres, phases that intersect, move, merge, grow, disappear. I flow through these phases in my invisible electrical pulse, strong, emitting a signal, going deathward, as all plots do.
Who will I merge with one day? Where? When? When can I finally, finally, after all this trial and turmoil, find a few people that I can face this world with? [...]
"I'm ready, ready, ready, ready, ready," I answer. [...]
And in a gorgeous explosion of emotion, reason, and self-knowledge, my plot will move deathward.
Will I be me, by then?

How strangely lucid and articulate. I can answer her questions now.

Today I have none of that new excitement. I feel grey, as if I have emptied out my soul and expect Pennsylvania to fill it back up again.

7.18

2007-08-03T20:46:00.001-07:00

(introspection. may be an uninteresting read.)

"Driving home I see those flooded fields / How can people not know what beauty this is?"
-- Neko Case

For some reason I enjoy seeing the beauty in tragedy. It's a perverse consolation--that if there is some wonder and awe in suffering and loss, an ordinary and uneventful day must be full of such calm and gracious peace that I ought to truly enjoy life.

But I'm drawn to the horrific far too much to take pleasure in the mundane. Pain, at intense, distressing, dissociative heights, pares down the human soul to its barest and most beautiful elements. There is a truth in pain one is hard-pressed to find in a society full of insecurity and half-facts. People are usually humble when they are in pain, and may discover gratitude and openness. And when they do not, can not, or will not discover these beauties--well, it is easier to sympathize with some sad and shivering egoistic self than some cheating and wife-beating drunk who buries his muffled agonies in drugs and rage. I think sobbing is closer to pain than anger is, and I think it is much more interesting.

And that may be it. I sympathize better with the crying ones.

That is not to say that all of the shivering selves all reach profound epiphanies in the depths of their misery. And it is not the only reason why I am so perversely drawn to tragedy.

It is also that the self-denial that comes with terrific, blinding pain is less ordinary and far more interesting and revealing about humans in general. The convolutions people go through to survive. I mean--tentacle sex, Stockholm syndrome, autoerotic asphyxiation, the Stanford prison experiment--the list of the bizarre goes on and on. Akin to how medical anomalies can reveal so much more about how the body works.

But it is too easy for me to become wrapped up in tragedy. It grabs hold of my heart. It intrigues me. I justify long stretches of crying--slipping into depression, only unaware--by declaring I am only thinking about tragedy, inching closer to the truth that it contains. I am really only feeling tragedy. And then it overtakes me.

Silly for two reasons.

1. There is, obvious or not, just as much beauty (if not more) in events and environments less painful.
2. If there is beauty in truth and truth in tragedy, I cannot allow myself to become depressed by the tragedy. I may not be able to appreciate the beauty in tragedy without depression, but then I would not be able to appreciate the beauty in the rest of life, either. Nothing makes real sense and reveals real truths when you are depressed--life is distorted and blown out of shape to comfort the self, protect the psyche. So, dear silly self, become intrigued by the beauty and truth in something less sad.

Empathize with something that does not rack your soul so. I've a particularly virulent strain of empath-desire, though I've trained it to exist without guilt and unnecessary burden. Unless, that is, I am empathizing with a loved one--then it eats me, and I cannot continue living until I have found a solution or comforted or changed a perspective or temporarily mitigated the displeasure in daily living.

A pessimist said to me: I know it becomes such a weight. An optimist said to me: it is also such a blessing.

It simply is. And I deal with whatever pains and pleasures it deals to me.

2007-07-19T23:19:00.001-07:00

For those of you tired of my familial themes and self-loathing, there's something new to write about. First I have to think about it for a long time--I've been thinking for at least two days, ever since it began, and I still need more processing. Categorizing. Learning.

There's so much; I hardly know where to start.

But it'll involve a lot of images--where I reside best.

And lead us not into resignation

2007-07-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

I work most days of the week--eight hours that evaporate into a nothingness and leave checks behind. I endure the nothingness to pick up the checks.

Dismal, maybe. But my alternative is to waste away into the long hours of pain in a bare house--my method of coping squeezes the hours into a nothingness that leaves behind an inexplicable weight, a sad gravity.

It is when my mother complains. Her brown eyes faded into a gray shriek at the top of her irises, pigment sinking into the circles underlining her tired lids. I watch them blown wide, emotive, screaming at her depressed son, her insomniac daughter.

It is in my sister's resignation. The way her thoughts pervade and plague her, confounding, angry that she cannot cram her pretty ideals anywhere she wants them. When she is faced with a decision and offers up meekness, weakness--at first angry, and then depressed.

It is in my brother's solitude. In his private room and private games until he crumples into his shows and Stevie Wonder, finding refuge beneath them until he does not feel a failure creeping behind him with every step. When he rages--refuge is not enough--I feel the knot in my stomach, churning and crying for an emptiness, for a sheer lack of happiness. A fog.

It is in all of this stagnation that I want to rise up and infuse drive into each of them. I realize every time that they find drive on their own, that it is the only reason for their existence, that they persist and stride against the sad gravity that pulls them back toward the center of unmoving--the center where we all reside at the dinner table, silent and spiteful.

Presence

2007-06-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

"A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to take up more room in a room."
--Amy Hempel, from "Tumble Home"

I have stood above clean sinks and toilet faces with a stretched stomach, waiting for the self-loathing to fade. I told myself not to do it, not to try, because bulimia was weak--I said to me, if you're going to do this, do it right. Don't eat.

I rode cars that made me queasy, grimaced through migraines who announced themselves with nausea. And still I swallowed my gag reflex, convinced vomiting was weak. Not one drop of impotence, of incompetence to creep past my lips.

I've read that anorexics starve because they want to disappear. I never became anorexic, never below 92 pounds, convinced that my problems weren't dramatic enough to push me into clinics and the cluck-cluck of mother's tongues. I didn't want the attention. I've read that anorexics starve to take control of their lives, to feel powerful--I never became anorexic because it was weak. I wanted to be. I did not want to dissolve into the sadness of the night air.

But watching my stomach in the mirror I would mind that it wasn't flat, flat like a computer monitor, flat like a thin sheet of paper over my bones. I stopped eating meals until I saw my sides cave in like triangles cut-out between my hips and my ribs. I wanted to be as small as I felt.

I was never small enough--I was never below ninety-two. Because I was convinced that I wasn't that weak.

A psychiatrist and several months of headaches later, I realize that I was that weak. Am.

Form

2007-04-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

Emotions require energy.
I do not manufacture vitality and dole it to the lifeless. It's rationed into careful reserves.
I vacuum the leftovers of others' energy, claw at their scraps thrown into the air. I absorb ideas and peoples, empathize with loss and angst and wax existential and indecisive on life. I am no one and no thing but the fucked-up amalgam of my surroundings, smushed into the female form.
It's ill-suited, for the female is meant to transcend reality and live on her own plane of ill emotions and little rationale. But that's a story for another day.

It is this form, and the ever-changing surroundings that pose the problem. Perhaps there is no personality behind my eyes, no creativity but weak pulses of thought, glaring out of my pupils even in their weakness.

Dysfunctional

2007-02-25T15:22:00.000-08:00

Reading about dysfunctional families, I discovered a list of "symptomatic characteristics" of the codependently fucked-up people in or from problematic families.
They are listed below. Red bullets are the ones I identify with, emphasized by bolded phrases.

- difficulty in accurately identifying and expressing feelings
- problems in forming and maintaining close, intimate relationships
- higher than normal prevalence of marrying a person from another dysfunctional family or a person with active alcoholism or addiction
- perfectionism, having unrealistic expectation of self and others, and being too hard on oneself
- rigidity in behavior and attitudes, having an unwillingness to change
- having a resistance to adapting to change, and fearful of taking risks
- feeling over-identified or responsible for others' feelings or behavior
- having a constant need for approval or attention from others to feel good about themselves
- awkwardness in making decisions, feel terrified of making mistakes, and may defer decision-making to others
- feeling powerless and ineffective, like whatever they do does not make a difference
- exaggerated feelings of shame and worthlessness, and low self-esteem
- avoiding conflict at any price, and will often repress their own feelings and opinions to keep the peace
- apprehension over abandonment by others
- acting belligerently and aggressively to keep others at a distance
- tendencies to be impatient and over-controlling
- failure to properly take care of themselves because of their absorption in the needs and concerns of other people, and acting like martyrs, living for others instead of for oneself
- dread of the expression of their own anger, and will do anything to avoid provoking another person. The particular expression of these codependent traits by each individual is often a function of the type of family in which a child grows up.

I know this is hopelessly boring to all of you. But I have more quotes.

'Another symptom of stress disorder is psychic numbing, which Dr. Cermak describes as suspending feelings in favor of taking steps to ensure personal safety, or splitting between one's self and experience—disconnecting from feelings in order to survive.
Survivors of trauma also experience hyper-vigilance, an inability to feel comfortable unless they are continually monitoring their environment. Cermak relates they "remained on edge, always expecting the worst, unable to trust or feel safe again."
Finally, survivors of trauma, veterans of a war or children from chemically dependent families, feel survivor guilt. "Whenever they experience the fullness that life has to offer, they immediately feel as if they are betraying those who never had the chance. It seems somehow wrong to go away and be healthy when those that are left behind are still suffering.'

I guess there's some hope somewhere. It just takes time.
It's like I was born with a handicap that I have to resolve.

dull.

2007-02-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn

-- "Dream Song 14," John Berryman

The rollicking sea of change! Fitful frets of earth, heaving and churning: the very soil at your feet breaking loose. Medusas and monsters thrashing wild tentacles, fiery red eruptions blasting into the skies, and another day passes. Another suburb minute ticks past. And tick, tick, tick until the day is gone, and the eruptions pass into a violent blue, and you go to bed.

Wake up! The heavens heave, chariots tread the blooming skies, thrash monster change sea rollick.
How I tire of these words. I can see you, neighbor, slap your alarm clock off, black and tired eyes half-open. How easily you seem to express boredom, and exhaustion of this routine. How easily you seem to wade through my worlds of visual archetype, and pierce me, right here: you, neighbor, the very vision of b-o-r-e-d-o-m.

Nothing excites you. I've followed you through the rooms of your house (me, nosy neighborino), weaving your way in and out of groceries and Time magazine. Automation. Frankly, it's fascinating, and--as you must know--it's so difficult to find anything to hold one's interest, nowadays. Formerly fascinating venues disappear, entire friends lift off and disapparate, and oh, what is left?

You, and me, neighbor.

dial, click.

2007-01-13T22:18:00.000-08:00

"Everything okay?"
"Yeah."
"Until they're not, huh?"
"Okay for now."
then nervous and pleasant laughter.

The next day, things are not okay. But they were, and perhaps that was the point.

"Take care."
"I'll try."

2006.

2006-12-30T11:12:00.000-08:00

Looking back.
I am disobeying survey rules (for purely informative and expressive purposes) and listing more than one thing under certain questions.

1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?
A fuckton. Did too many interviews, sent out too many job applications, worked retail. Learned the dismissive rage of the customer and the quiet rage of the manager. Wrote a centerfold. Visited a closed AIDS center. Ran a journalism class. Sold ads. 2380. Pokemon Emerald. Very many unmentionable things. Got lost in downtown L.A., got whistled at, jumped on a bus without knowing where to stop, went to a book signing. Watched certain films. Shook hands with Frank Warren. Flew on a plane alone. Went to Oregon. Wore a jacket over a jacket over a shirt over a shirt over a bra. [It was cold.] Walked for Down's. Hugged.
Said things that've never been said before [Chomsky: "but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied."] Went entire days without writing. Exercised regularly [summer]. Baked 100+ cookies. Made a juicy turkey. Used my own cell phone.
There are too many fucking things to list.
2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I went digging for my resolutions. 2005 I made good ones and fulfilled them.
- "take chances." Yes.
- "write." Not enough.
- "not give up." Yes.
- "learn." Yes. Not enough.
- "talk to mother/father." Yes. Unfortunately.
- "keep healthy." Not in December. But yes.
- "stay sane." Yes.
- "and ultimately: learn how to avoid cynicism." It's been hard this month. Not enough.
Next year is the same goal with circumstantial variants, including adjustments for college.
3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No.
4. Did anyone close to you die? Almost.
5. What countries did you visit? The vast expanse of intellectual drought. Somehow I must visit year after year, even though it's really rather unpleasant there.
6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?
A college to attend. A better job. A life with who I want to spend it with. Time. Freedom, honesty, transparency. More strength.
7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? I'm sorry. I generally don't remember dates. But Christmas Day, and not for holiday reasons.
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Job, 2380, learning how to bullshit and deceive. The last one is unfortunately essential.
9. What was your biggest failure? Getting caught. Having deficient negotiating powers. Printing Nov/06 two weeks late. Not writing my college essays as I'd planned. Not exercising this month. Still being insecure.
10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Nothing big. Chronic daily headache, major clinical depression.
11. Whose behavior merited celebration?
Alice, Brandon, John, Mr. Ontiveros, Mr. Ramirez, Mr. Viramontes.
12. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? If you really want to know, ask.
13. Where did most of your money go? Gifts. Essentials.
14. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Meeting. Giving. Talking. Thinking. :)
15. What song will always remind you of 2006? None.

Compared to this time last year, are you:
16. Happier or sadder? More content, less happy, and just as sad.
17. Thinner or fatter? The same. This year, patterns of weight fluctuation differed, but boundaries did not. Thankfully.
18. Richer or poorer?
Richer in gratitude, love, connection, knowledge, and material wealth.
19. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Told myself to be happy. Wrote. Exercised. Read. Expressed emotion.
20. What do you wish you'd done less of? Told myself I was upset. Ate. Experimented with disappointing games. Pushed my mother away.
21. How did you spend Christmas? Thinking about someone in the hospital. Reluctantly followed my parents to strange houses in San Jose. Listening to By the Way in my cousin's clean, dark living room, next to a flashing Christmas tree.
22. Did you fall in love in 2006? I fell in love in 2005.
23. How many one-night stands? Please use your imagination to answer this question.
24. What was your favorite TV program? None.
25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? No.
26. What was the best book you read? I don't do superlatives. As I Lay Dying, Wise Blood, Pnin.
27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Rediscovering Muse. Belle & Sebastian, Regina Spektor.
28. What did you want and get? Job, 2380. Meeting. Comfort, love.
29. What did you want and not get? This is essentially #6.
30. What was your favorite film of this year? Unanswerable.
31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I ate carrot cake and turned 16.
32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Honesty and transparency. The sudden, inexplicable, irreplacable disappearance of AP Government at Oxford.
33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006? I didn't have one.
34. What kept you sane?
Alice, Brandon, John, Mr. Ontiveros, Mr. Ramirez, Mr. Viramontes. Meeting. Giving. Talking. Thinking. Addictions--reading, writing, Pokemon Emerald, point and clicks, Internet rounds [kottke, dooce, metafilter, NYtimes, Gmail, Yahoo!, juno. cockeyed, explodingdog] , Sunday rituals [PostSecret, pbf, LA Times: Front Page, Business, California, Comics I, Comics II, West, Parade].
35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? None.
36. What political issue stirred you the most? Invisible Children, gay rights, abuse, disabled rights. Practically any health or science-related issue.
37. Who did you miss? Brandon.
38. Who was the best new person you met? No superlatives, especially in reference to people.
39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006:
I didn't. Someone told me this: "But certainly you are cultivating a more abundant, fuller life even in the course of suffering."
40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
This is not an accurate sum, but an important facet.
"I hear in my mind
All these voices
I hear in my mind all these words
I hear in my mind all this music

And it breaks my heart"
- "Fidelity," Regina Spektor
--------------------------------------------------------------
On another note, addictions are indeed, wonderful.

Mad, I tell you! Mad!

2006-08-27T22:09:00.000-07:00

It is maddening to have such uncontrollable feelings.

It is maddening to swing up and down in a moody fashion, knocking over lamps and lives in such a glazed, unreasonable stupor. I elbow somebody out of the way because I'm in a hurry and I can't be bothered and if anyone dared to speak to me I'd punch his gonads with Furious Bitch intensity. It would be his fault for offering me any damned phrase absent of vvreify praise. If he'sn't said, 'Your Highness,' 'm'lady' or 'Kosmokrator,' I'd just have to rip out his testes. For insolence.

It is maddening to be so prone to collapse and mushiness, floating along the piano keys in the middle of a pretty and lingering French piece--and suddenly, vision blurred, throat choking, begin to cry. I upset loud wooden chairs and crack glass vases in the houses of peoples' lives. The unfortunate person who happened to have her eyes fall upon me would instantly be cast in a dark and brooding light in my mind. It would be her fault for possessing an optic nerve, for in her one x-ray perceptive glance are all of my flaws: the wrinkle at the waist of my off-color shirt, the extra skin on my neck and wrist and chin and undereyes, the stress seeping into my forehead, the wideness of my hips and thickness of my thighs. I'd scowl at her. For my insecurities.

It is maddening to have these feelings and moments while I'm trying to finish a job. It's an annoyance to go about your day, doing mundane things, but feeling such monstrous and disproportionate emotions. I suppose it makes things a little more interesting, but by no means does that equate to 'a little more enjoyable'. I know, it's strange, since those two phrases can usually be equated. But no. Not in this case.

Worst of all is the thought that I am not even premenstrual-syndroming. I'm not menstrual-syndroming, either. I simply exist, foul-mouthed and irritable as I am. I think it is a very shallow and very temporary bout of depression. Just a wash of blues and greys over everything.

But oh, it is inconvenient, and oh, I wish I could somehow force myself to feel better with the force of sheer and glorious reasoning.
Hah. As if that ever works.
------------------------------------------------
Growth is the slow widening and redefinition of boundaries.

Elsewhere Self, Self Elsewhere

2006-08-11T00:39:00.000-07:00

Apologies, but I'm going to delve into existential angst and lofty ideas. Leave if you want.
------------------------------------------------------
I feel as if my sense of self is dissipating into the air. When I walk I can feel it hiss from my pores, seep out of my skin and spill onto the floor. My store is running low, steaming and gasping and gulping in the Self pump tank as the essence leaks out into the air. It sifts around with the air, 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and an additional one percent of me + argon and all. In the end it'll be Ar and V and the rest, Ne, H, Xe, etc.

Then this thick and dull corpus, empty of essence and Self, can migrate out Elsewhere. Elsewhere being the strange land that I've never understood, Elsewhere being all the hobbies and indulgences of men that I have never found interesting, Elsewhere being someplace I've never occupied or wished to occupy. You know--in a hair salon with a high couture fashion magazine in my lap, ordering someone to highlight, to cut, to trim. Splashing pedicure waters into someone's face. In a pew. Dipping a dirty finger into the Holy Water and looking up toward the priest with a smile. At a frat party. On myspace. Never alone. Without a book. Cut off from the flow of information. Comfortable never enetering a library or bookstore. Without reading material. Without discussion.

These are all the places I never want to be, and easily, oh so easily--I could slip into this Elsewhere if these last drops of Self didn't gravitate me toward what I really enjoy, and push me away from the places I don't belong with their magnetically aligned ions.

Yet if this decay continues (V seems to have a rather rapid half-life) then I will have to resort to extreme measures. Perhaps I'll have to withdraw and rewrite the Self, endow it with new and stronger properties. V 2.0, perhaps, released with the intent of longevity and high reliability.

But fuck, if I keep doing this 'growing' thing I'll have to retreat and rewrite quite frequently. It means periodic liminality, suspension, uncertainty. Fuck the choices! Fuck postmodernism and its wealth of freedom, the possibilities for social climbing, the wide width and breadth of man and society and study--fuck all. You've all pressed upon me with such an existential weight that I want to slap you all in the face and tell you to get into line. Get the fuck into line! The Universe Does Have An Order, and I want you to follow it!

Yet of course, in a nod to my liberal ties, I can't help but enjoy this freedom, this course to a greater life, blah blah hypocrisy. I understand both sides. I am choosing a side. I am choosing the uncertainty and existential angst and misery and fuck-all; I concede to its overwhelming correctness, helplessly agree to the choice and wonder and beauty of it all.

But I'm still angry about it. Fuck you, though, because I have a right to be! Universal Order my ass.

Unsettled, Unresolved

2006-07-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

I have a penchant for correspondence.
A few days ago I started to write a letter to myself, and all my thoughts began to pull together. The feeble little threads of thought wound into a thick and satisfying cord. It became a lasso. I used it to snag as many insights as I could, relishing each and every single catch. It was great.

A snippet from what I wrote to myself: "If you don't want to be fucked-up, you're going to have to ignore your fucked-up feelings."

I've felt unsettled lately. Unsettled, ignored, and unresolved feelings lead to discontent, dizziness, and depression (collectively). Yet I've had to abandon resolution, because I realize that they're fucked up, and I don't want to feel them at all. I don't want to think about them. I don't want to remember them.
Who'd want to remember the terrible urge to be violent? Who, other than maniacal psychopaths, would so want to slice open a child's head and have its insides burst out theatrically, and splatter the entirety of the white pediatric waiting room? Who'd want to remember the absence of dread, the absence of remorse, the absence of fear and any mitigating feelings of empathy? Who'd want to remember a second being snaking away from her real self, strangling, ripping, grinning in some imaginary world above (below) her own. A second being, lacerating, grating, scraping--

Exactly. You see what I've done? I've tried to delve back into these feelings. I want to remember their intensity. I want to remember their overwhelming, terrifying, empowering ways--but it's so wrong, it's so fucked-up, it's part of a self that I don't want to be.
So denying it is my only choice.

Part of the reason I wrote to my self was to persuade her to accept this decision, and to resolve her unresolved feelings about unresolved feelings. She is unhappy if they sit unreconciled. But I've come to realize that part of maturation is letting these emotions dissipate. Shutting them in a room to crumple and dry and disintegrate into wisps of mahoganic dust, for other emotions to whirl in and take their place.
She won't be happy with her irreconciliable emotions. But she will forget them.

"I'm sorry, desperate inner child yearning for showers of affection, but you're going to grow up and be happy whether the fuck you like it or not. Okay? Okay."
---------------------------------------------------------
On another note, I am in love.

Widening

2006-07-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

I finished Decoding the Universe... yesterday. As the book approached its end my eyes kept widening and I swear, I just practically gasped in the middle of the library as I hit the 'climax' (if there could be such a thing in a plotless, but intentionally-ordered book) of the book. I mean, of course I knew that an idea such as the multiverse existed, I just didn't realize why the theory had developed or exactly what sort of implications came from this idea of 'many worlds.'
Suffice to say, I know a little bit more about it now.

Anyway, I'm tired of hearing about child molestors. Disgusts me. They're revolting. Despicable. Ignorant, immoral, and callous to the development of a highly sensitive child.

When I grow older, I think I'll have to volunteer to mentor/take care of/possibly even adopt! one of those children. Ugh. If I am passionate about any cause, it's this. The corruption of children, whether through sexual or violent means. You're just going to mess them up for life.

First Post

2006-07-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

So I have to confess: I actually write privately very often, and act as if I'm writing for a public audience. But being bored this summer, I decided that I might as well post these things all at once, and then let you sift through the bizarre thoughts that float through my head sometimes.

You might be surprised by the things I'm write. I've no apology or excuse to give you--that's more of a warning, really.

2006-07-12T22:40:00.000-07:00

I kept beginning several entries but I never managed to finish them. Just a bunch of writing y'all will never read.
But yes.

My body feels miserable. I am mentally intact, but my torso always begins to contort in pain as the sun barely starts to set--by nightfall, I'm fully hunched over, wondering what the hell is wrong with me. Long running nerves sprawl across my abdomen, shot with pain. They're shriveling and crying over my little muscles and intestines and bellybutton. If I stretch out to straighten my spine, these nerves shut up for a little bit so that their cousins in my lower back can join in on this chorus of hot-cold aching and aching and aching. The tendons that run up and down the cinched part of my waist start to contract, and leave the rest of my torso wondering if I can still support my weight, the ribcage and the arms and the head full of cerebrospinal fluid sloshing my brain back and forth, back and forth.

My back hurts, and I have cramps. It's hard to stand up straight.

None of this would seem too out of the ordinary were I on my period. Or nearing it, even. But au contraire! I just ended that devilish thing, for, at the very least, 20 full days--so what is this horror coming to devour me now? Why, I ask the almighty God--why!

Other than that. I'm feeling good.

Well, this entry has been fairly mundane.
I'm going to brush my teeth and nurse my ailing body now.

Father's Day

2006-06-18T18:01:00.000-07:00

I know, it's an old story. You've heard about it before. But I gotta write something down or I'll never get over it.
If you don't want to hear about my father then skip the entry.

Anyway.

Father's Day gives me mixed feelings. Mostly because I have mixed feelings about my father.
I mean--what am I supposed to do on this day, again? And then a more important question--all customs aside--what does he really want from us? And then, finally, the most important question boiling deep down inside myself: what if I can't make or do or say what he wants me to?

It's not just that I've such a tiny, almost nonexistent desire to show affection toward this man. It's more that I'm afraid he's impervious to my affection, that he will reject it with the wave of a hand and a big booming voice, that he will sweep my efforts away under the rug as he gets up to turn on the World Cup game.
Because, you know, I could just fake my affection and learn to feel something for the guy. I wish I could, too. It'd make things so much easier.

Despite all my egoism, vanity, and haughtiness, my father can make me feel absolutely worthless. He can reduce me to a small speck in the gigantically cruel universe, a stupid little girl who doesn't deserve a thing. Though he's never outright said "you are worthless," I just sort of assumed that he meant that when I pieced together everything he's said. I mean, he's said, "get out of my house, you are not my daughter" and "why can't you just do this one thing? This ONE THING, you stupid cow." He storms and kicks and scolds. In the wake of his shouting and yelling I can feel a hot, ugly bristle heavy in the air, a demeaning mix of animosity and guilt raining upon my shoulders.

And then he swings into these terrible, unpredictable moods where he's suddenly happy, suddenly nice, suddenly tender, suddenly human. He wants to buy me things. He wants to give me money. He squeezes my neck with a broad smile, and taps the desk with one purposeful finger: "good job on your report card, girl." Or "so you got all these awards, eh?"

In light of these two very different views of my father, I decided on one infallible approach: apathy. I wouldn't react when he yelled at me, which was more often than he praised me. It was a good defense mechanism because, after his screams, I'd mostly be able to continue writing a discourse on European art in the 1700s. I could, instead, get lost in the blue brocaded cushions of a French chair. I could imagine myself marveling at human craft in the Getty again. I could, instead, triumph over my math homework. I could empower myself through learning and knowledge, and then who gives a flying fuck what my father says. By the time I'd thought about it again, it was already time to go to school and listen to the sweet song of teacher praise.

Some of these teachers saved my life, built me up when there was no one else around who wanted to do the job.

But as is evident in this entire entry, I didn't do very well with the apathetic approach. I honestly tried very, very hard to not give a flying fuck. But, sometimes, after three months of real strength, I'd just break down and start to care. I'd just break down and get so fucking angry at myself for doing it. I started to cry because I couldn't take it. Not because my father did this or that, but because I didn't know how to brush it aside.

So now I'm emotionally detached, but I'ven't completely flown away yet.
So now I'm a little bitter, but not a downright cynic.
So now I hate my father, but I think I want to love him at the same time. For no reason whatsoever. I never understood why children always told their parents that they loved them, when clearly they couldn't really understand what that feeling was. I suppose I understand now--they just want something to hold on to. To depend on.

I guess I look for all these things in love, with a great man who'll cause me none of the pain my father did. At the same time, I want to be able to stand on my own--I don't want to need and cling and depend on someone else who might fail me. I just want him to help me through all of this. So that we can just fucking live together unafraid of this goddamn monster of mine. In the "maddeningly complex prospect of my past," as Nabokov would have said.

All of it is a struggle of two things, where the answer turns out to be floating somewhere above, in the middle of what I thought were my two options. Two opposing poles. Ambivalence. What should I choose? What will work?

Anyway, I'm done. Maybe I'll go for a run now.

2006-06-02T22:44:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in the feeling of vulnerability. I don't believe in powerlessness.

Sure, there are some things you can't change. Lots of things, maybe. But the key to eliminating helplessness is to absolutely deny that you can't do anything. Make believe that if you take little steps toward progress, then things'll get better. It'll make you feel better to be moving somewhere, even if you end up nowhere at all. The trick though, is to seriously believe that you are going somewhere. And if nothing happens, try again.

There is no such thing as powerlessness. It doesn't exist if you don't want it to.

On another note, I edited one of the short descriptions I'd written earlier. It's actually a complete story thing!

Cardboard

She ripped out a big hole in the side of the cardboard box.

A big, sagging hole in the corrugated layers of the brown papery thing. It smelled like cardboard. You know, the vague smell of wood that reassures you of its cardboard strength, that harks back to dry long hollow slices of bark and tree. The smell rubbed off on her hands clenching the ragged piece of board she’d torn away.

Then she set the piece down carefully on the smooth factory floor and vomited.
She set her palms flat on the cold, worn-away concrete and remembered to fling back her hair so it wouldn’t hang in front of her gaping acid mouth. She just opened her lips wide and let it all spill forth, splash onto the ground and fill the fine grooves of the old floor. Thick dribbles of her internal liquid galoshed and glunked and spilled over the cracks between her fingers, dark and a little sticky and still warm.

She just felt suddenly sick and couldn’t hold it in anymore.

Three weeks later she felt like she’d finally vomited her guts out. It had happened every day, right when it struck five o’clock, and she just choked and spilled and gagged for 90 minutes straight. It would sputter and she would clean up. 25.25 minutes later the after shocks would begin, the slim shivers of carrot slivers and partially digested cow parts swimming up her esophagus, leaping out of the slit between her eroding teeth. The aftershocks were sporadic.
Everything would cease at 11:30 p.m, totaling 8.75 pints of vomitus, stomach acid and food driblets and orange chunks and all.

She decided that her sickness was so violent that there was no use leaving the cardboard factory. “I’ll stay right here until it’s all over,” she mused. “I don’t want to get other people sick.”

Three weeks later and she knew it was her final day of puke-a-mania. She’d marked off her “episodes” on a calendar, a small pocketbook she’d purchased just for the occasion. It came with a free pen with which she detailed, on the pale fine pages, what recognizable chunks flew out of her mouth, and when unusual things like gobs of black tar plopped out of her pharynx. She’d studied everything rather carefully and decided there was no pattern to the unusual materials she’d been egesting, but thought the log might be useful someday. Looking at that month in her black leather book, sitting on a cardboard box, she realized that everything would round out to an even 21 days. It just occurred to her just that way: “of course, it’ll be the gestation period of a little chicken! How silly of me not to realize that.”

Afterward she looked back and had no clue how she’d figured it out, how she just knew when it would be over and what she had to do. But it turned out she was right. So that day she set out her prepared bucket and prepared herself to use it for the last time, at least for now. She would be done with this egestion and she could get back to her sickening exegesis, and then perhaps in another 15 years it would happen all over again, another 21 days, no known emetics, exhaustion and a bitter acrid taste inhabiting her pale mouth.

She set her palms carefully on the floor, this time mindful enough to keep them apart from each other. Then it began, as it always did, a violent lunge of liquid pushing against her throat

And the last day happened.
After she was done, she dumped the vomit away into a large sink and washed it gone.

Then she began to clean everything up. She scrubbed the vomit out of the grooves of the floor, as best she could, and threw away all the boxes stained with flecks of stomach juice and disintegrating grape skins. She poured bleach on the floor and down the walls until everything stank of chlorine. It masked the vomit smell.

It felt clean, sterile, and oppressive.

She sat down on another cardboard box and expected to rest her tired and pruny toes. Instead she fell right in, ass-flat on the concrete floor. Sigh! First an irritated esophagus and eroding teeth, now a bruise the size of a tangerine firmly imprinted into her buttcheek. She sank into the silence of her own thoughts for awhile (not like anything else made sound in this place) and plopped back, knees hanging over the edges of the box, feet up in the air. A deep breath out of her irritated throat and she got up.

Examining the box, she found a big saggy hole in the middle of the cardboard. Of course she fell through it—it had a hole in it. And then it hit her like a wall of vomit: she had torn that hole!

Re-examining the box, she found a big terrible confusion written all over it. The corrugated layers had collapsed underneath her waify weight. The cardboard smell disappeared, fading into a stench of chlorine and puke. It was just a nearly soggy piece of mushy paper. Paper.

She decided the erosion was a sign that this world was about to collapse in on her, and that she had to hurry before it crumpled and fell in on itself, taking her with it.

So she took a brief look around her. Everything smelled of her insides and her stomach.
So she jumped into the big hole she had ripped, and fell into the next world.

The piece was edited for the litmag later on.

Fession, Facade

2006-05-31T21:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not real.

I had the unfortunate luck of growing up with a verbally abusive father. He pretended he was decent--and I'm sure he is, to some extent--by always scolding us when we name-called. He insisted, "don't call your sister stupid!" A good principle.

Of course, inevitably, sooner, later, he'd refute his good principles with his own baffling logic.
My brother and sister and I would arrive home and need some rest from a hot, tiring day at elementary school. So we plopped down and watched some afternoon cartoons, usually mindless, usually bright, usually distracting. We took to the habit of bringing our snacks--steamed green beans and ranch, cantaloupe, Goldfish, juice and crackers, grapes--to the television and eating, mesmerized, indiscriminate. We'd sometimes even watch infomercials just for the hell of it. Hell, we were very easy-to-please children.

The clock creeped toward 4:00. The shows winded down into prime time.
Then, the customary knock on the door. It was banging and clear and it meant two things: clean up and shut up.

We all fell silent and watched a strange, foreboding person create dark blobs in the crack of light under the door. The knock, again. A loud voice yelling over the TV--no one was even watching it now, their eyes were on the door--and one of us would have to get up and pull the door wide open for my father to storm into the house.

Now, if we didn't obey the two golden rules, my father would rip loose. Why are your things strewn all over the floor? Don't eat in front of the TV! How many times have I told you that? Turn off that disgusting stuff! Are you going to clean up or not? Well, don't just stand there, go do your homework!

We quietly filed down the hall.

We were children; we forgot everything. Everyday, though, my father would arrive home and remind us of all of our shortcomings. Since I could hardly remember to set my backpack down in my room, instead of the living room, I was the reason my father was so upset. Since I tended to leave my peeling sneakers by the door, instead of in the proper closet, I was a family failure. Since I hated the silence and talked back to my father, I was disobedient, impudent, and deserving of every single ounce of guilt I could humanly muster.

I quietly filed down the hall.

I heard my father thrash his tongue in the waters of the kitchen, berating my mother for anything she decided to cook that day. Or berating my mother for anything she decided to not cook that day. Or berating my mother for the shortcomings of her miserable children. Or berating my mother because he couldn't remember how to speak to her as a human being.

It was like this for a long time.
Sometimes we would get everything right. We were spot on. Our backpacks were put away, we turned off the TV before he came inside, our shoes were gone, the house was spotless. We were diligently crunching away on our homework, looking up spelling words and filling out multiplication tables. My mom had picked the right thing to cook that day. My father came home, enraged, and couldn't find anything to yell about.

So he muttered unpleasantly as he looked about, and we cowered in fear, my father the army sergeant coming to inspect our bunks. And, at the end, he'd yell at us to drop and give him 20, anyway. Just because.

Thus the verbal abuse would turn into ambient abuse, for a few hours, days, perhaps a whole week--and then it would slide back into the shouting and screaming and stupid, useless pain.
Sometimes he seemed to want to calm himself down. But it didn't work. He had just fallen into the habit of taking it all out on us. And you know, you just get into the habit.

My mother didn't know how to cope. I'm sure she's a decent person too--just frustrated, maybe, at both her trouble communicating with her second-generation children, and at the emotional quagmire that trapped her independence and happiness. So she did what worked--she began transferring the abuse.

"If you don't clean up," she nagged and nagged, "he'll come home and yell again. He'll yell at me and it's not even my fault." My mother was scared and depressed and powerless, and she made us feel her fear and growing sense of helplessness.

I grew older and quietly filed down the hall without so much as a glance at the TV. I'd eat my spaghetti at the table, toying with my peas and eyeing the slits of light lined up on the linoleum. I took my backpack to my room. I stayed in my room when my father came home, and all I could hear was relayed frustration, from my mother, my sister, my brother. I heard their grunts under their breath, and the subdued slams as they set their things down in the room. I heard the stress cracking in their voices. I was still afraid that perhaps my father would storm into the room and take his turn at me. Sometimes he would. Sometimes he wouldn't. That's the way things were.

The end of this piece will not be posted here.

2006-05-27T12:46:00.000-07:00

It is strange to realize that my parents are neither mature nor well-adjusted.
Granted, they are wiser than me in some ways, and probably much more experienced in the matters of life and its hardships. But honestly. Sometimes I think my parents are pretty immature.

For one, my mother has said to me:
"I love you, but I don't always like you."
This is sort of a backhanded insult (I used to dole these out all the time, after the fashion of my mother, before I learned what I was doing and how I could improve). One, it's a statement of unconditional love, so it's [theoretically] great. But two, it's a statement of how unlikeable and simply disgusting I am, implying that my mother is forced to love me against her will.
What the hell is that?
My mother has her own esteem issues in that she feels as if her self-worth is solely determined by exterior, quantifiable characteristics such as "weight," "wealth," and "education." This is a sad state of affairs, both for my mother and for her children. She attempts to project these values onto her children.

[+ thoughts that will remain unposted]

So, as you can tell, I am unusually callous and very pretentious when dealing with my mother as a human. It's all ameliorated, or at least mediated, by my irrefutably innate connection to her. I am weak before her because she is my mother, and she weak before me because I am her child. I shouldn't exploit those vulnerabilities to gain the upper hand. I will only be slighting myself by denying tenderness and all those other things.

Anyway I am developing a headache and I should get up and get some blood circulating.
----------------------------------------

lastly:

St. Leonard touched a philistine
a sacred tongue, a perfect rhyme
But even he was "not much nourished by modern love."

So I told her that everything she does is divine
and she replied with a blank expression (an object lesson in making me feel benign)
Then whispered, "independence and indifference are the wings which allow the heart to fly."

Feelings I've had too often, still no plan in place to soften the inevitable blow (the rituals we know).
And with the right revolting piety of tone,
the word "freedom" can make you want to lock yourself in a deep dark dungeon.

But I know everybody follows pleasure, everybody gets somewhere.
I swear, I wish I could be less aware...
now it's absolutely clear to me that solitude is not the same as singularity,
but that's not why I'm lonely.

Street

2006-05-16T22:24:00.001-07:00

Watching people on the street is interesting.

On the car ride home I spied the usual group of kids crowding at the streetlight corner, waiting to cross. Some of them pull rolling backpacks and rush along the wavy concrete bobbing up and down.

It's an ethnic mix, as always--a number of Hispanics, a black kid or two, and perhaps the occasional whitey. I usually take note of these kids because of the great variance between them, in height, weight, dress, mannerism, race--there are lots of variables. I found that once you drive by the junior high the kids all begin to look the same.

I remember a pink-shirted brunette, maybe five years old. Her stomach rounded on top of her legs almost as if she were pregnant, and her hair was wrapped in two wispy pigtails sticking from the sides of her head. Short and little.

A few steps after her was a thin woman with ratty, dirty blond hair, about 40. I'd never seen an adult without a child on this street corner. Her old frosted jeans tapered across her long calves to her thin ankles, and a black jean vest wrapped over her slouching chest to reveal thin pockmarked arms, spotted with sun and years of age.

Upon a closer look it was painfully obvious she'd probably jammed needles into those pockmarks. Drug junkie. Skinny and wasted and walking saggedly swift, past the fat little 5 year old. They seemed of different worlds.

"She looks like a coke addict," I remarked in the car.
"Yeah, she's definitely a smoker," Ann nodded. Her eyes followed the druggie and my eyes followed Ann. The two women had the same skin, the same frame, the same forward slouching shoulders of the tall and thin. They could've been sisters.
"Or it could be heroin."
"Yeah."

More kids filtered past, so young and taut-skinned. The light turned green, we drove past in contemplation.

I had no idea how to end this one, but felt like describing it.

Nausea, Mnemosyne

2006-05-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

I feel like throwing up.
I don't mean, "I'd like to stick my finger in my mouth and tickle my pharynx until I stimulate my gag reflex." No, I don't mean that at all. My stomach is actually churning. I almost threw up several times in the last few days, but I can never manage to let anything out. This could be symbolic. It's me instinctively holding back all the acid, making myself swallow any piece of crap I put in my mouth. It's a sort of self-punishment and self-discipline.
It feels terrible, and it's probably not good for me, but even when I try to throw up, I can't do it. It'd make my mouth feel so unpleasant. I'd rather suffer and squirm in the depths of my gut. My mouth is too close to the surface, too close to the real world, too close to everything else outside to open up and let everything out.

But it's never a conscious decision to swallow the hydrochloric acid, force it back down. I don't remember, actually, what it's like to be completely, utterly overcome by the need to vomit. The last time that happened was maybe 3rd grade.

I'd like for that to happen again. All my rational functions would cease, my physiological instincts would take over--then there would be a big fluid plop on the floor, dripping and choking and chunky--but, alas. Not anymore. Any instance of the acid creeping up my throat and, flip, goes my epiglottis, and slip, the first bits of chyme slide back down the esophagus. And they plop onto the floor of my stomach.

It makes me feel sick, partly because it leaves me nauseous, and partly because I realize that I can't force myself to let go. It's a little obsessive-compulsive, actually, and that scares me.

Sometimes I feel like my neuroses might take over and win, and my little self will be swallowed up by overbearing needs and uncontrollable drives to do this or that Extremely Unimportant Thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing myself to unconscious violence, to repression and depression, to headaches and backaches and neckaches.

Hopefully, as all the other times, I'll just get through this.
I'll know better this time though. Instead of using stupid coping strategies--like going half-crazy--I'll actually deal with my problems at face-value and realize that I'm only human.

I am only human.
That sentence imposes/leaves/fills me with a simultaneous fright and calm.

NOTE: I apologize for revealing the depth of my existentialist crises to all of you. I'm just posting what I've written, and the beginning of the post seemed like it needed posting.

Babblings on Neuroticism

2006-04-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

Ahh.

That wasn't a sigh of relief, or contentment, or sadness. I dislike the word sigh, really, which is why I hardly use the emote /sigh.

You see, it was more like the brief breath you exhale before you take on a challenge. The puff of readiness that calms your lungs and sets your nerves in stone. The air pushed out, lips pulled into a tight "O", accompanied by either straightening shoulders or narrowing, focused eyes.

Well, yes. I'm ready.
I'm scared and I'm ready for whatever comes next. I like to think of breaks as a time to gather and recuperate and reset my mind before I enter the chaos again. It's just too bad that when I actually get a job and such I probably won't have very many opportunities to take real breaks.

But hopefully, by then, I'll have settled and figured things out and set a pattern which I will never deviate from lest something happen like, oh, I don't know. The death of my SO or a sudden absence of all laidback people on Earth. I mean--you know what I mean--there will be no person who I can turn to and hear the trustworthy words, "Don't worry."

"Things will be fine. Take it easy."

I know I'm neurotic. I couldn't pretend to be one of those laidback people, as much as I try. Though, in certain spaces, people could count me as part of the apathetic number, it isn't quite reality. Those 'certain spaces' would be filled with the petty types, the ones who are obsessed with obtaining such-and-such status or xxxxxx hair color or |this many| square feet of real estate. Of course I don't give a shit about any of that.

But don't mistake me for the calm Buddhist monk or the stoner walled inside his aromatic apartment. I. Can't. Relax. That. Much.

And oh well. I guess it's just something I'll have to deal with.

Somebody pulled the string

2006-03-02T17:29:00.000-08:00

A grey, dangling string eats the sky before you.

It occupies its space without pretension, without the private air of insecurity--without arrogance, presumption, lameness. Already this string has accomplished more than your idling self, you biting the tips of your fingernails and the backs of your knuckles.
How you want to just bite hard and lash away at your skin. How you just want to tear a big long strip of epidermis away until only raw red and white (and pink) speckled flesh shows through.
The string is still just hanging there, enticing, waiting for somebody to pull it.

And so you do.

And f'in hell rains down upon you.
A dark sticky mass of blood and people and guts of dead insects plops onto the floor. It sounds like suction, except backwards. Everything wet and slimy slurping, soiling the smooth wooden floor. You can smell hot steaming placenta and the acrid fumes of sweetly melting flesh as it falls down all around you--on you--mushed between your toes, under your fingernails, between the crevices of your wrinkled elbow. Everywhere. And it piles and piles and piles on top of your poor scrawny frame, burying you deep underneath an indistinguishable mass of disgustingly dead body parts.

You open your mouth and can't manage to say a thing. You don't squeak forth. You don't gasp or moan or yell or anything. When you open your mouth the only sound is that backward suction. Butchered cow intestines reaching inside your throat. Thick purple blood pooling around your warm tonsils. Fragile lacewings tickling the hollows of your cheek.

And a pumping gag reflex jerks your head forward, but there's nowhere to jerk forward. Your eyes fly open and smush into more shiny red membranes, pig stomachs and chicken livers.

Those are the last few convulsions of your small, idling, weak body. And then you die, and who the fuck knows what happens to you next.
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That, my dears, is what angst does to your writing. It sounds like something a screamo band would sing about.

Can't you just imagine their epic guitar riffs and the moaning lead singer, clenching his fists knuckle-white? Can't you just imagine everyone in the audience going fucking insane? Can't you imagine the girls screaming their brains out, coughing up bits of blood and pieces of their lungs? Can't you imagine the mass of human sweat and pain rocking out together in the most mindblowingly awesome concert of their lives?

And then it'd end. Everybody tired from expressing their intense, petty, overwhelming human suffering. Everyone's mind gone blank in the best exhaustion they'd ever felt.

Then they'd stumble out to their cars, and sleep, or drive slowly over to their motels or hotels or Goebbels. They'd nap soundly, happily, smilingly. Then they'd fucking wake up two months later, feeling the same aggressive rage, rocking out all by their oddy knocky selves to a sweet screamo song they once headbanged to at the best concert of their lives.

Anyway, I'm just being delirious. I can't think straight. I hope this goes away real soon.
I forget what greatness is. I don't remember the swelling feeling of admiration anymore. I haven't felt any newness or awe for ages, it seems. All I know is this floundering aimlessness called adolescent confusion.

This is why I like to learn. I'm grounded when I've something to pursue, to analyze, to learn. Otherwise I just feel so lost.

Oh well. Tomorrow I am going to see my hero, and I think that might take care of things.