sinking slowly

Did yesterday happen? 

I need to stop smoking and drinking. It's making me rust. I am my worst person on these substances. It makes me lonely and depressed afterward.

Or at least it exacerbates my loneliness and depression. I didn't want to be at that kickback in the first place, and there I woke up. 

I didn't. Have. Any. Fun. I'm very... angry? Or sad, or something. I want to see someone, talk to someone, that isn't Memo, that isn't Catherine. I'm tired of everybody. I'm sick of people's faces. Their judging, their apathy. I'm fucking tired. I want to leave, without coming back. I'm done, goddammit. 

conundrum

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

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sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

sexisasmallpartofmyrelationshipsexisasmallpartofmyrelationship

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the singing man in the deaf parade--

I sometimes feel like a raving lunatic, or an eccentric scientist or mad prophet, especially when I am trying to explain something wonderful to a host of friends who could not be moved to care or understand.

Sometimes when I am at the library, I feel thus. Or standing in front of a clothes display. Yarn shops, or the word "yarn" also evokes this high and lonely feeling. The intoxicating and unique mixture of several chords and a drumbeat, coagulated into a perfect jelly of song, provokes me into speaking tongues. 

And lo, the image of me traipsing out with invisible vapours in wonder and awe amongst the more solid and sane statues of my confused and pitying friends, how it comes.

Ours is a high and lonely destiny.

I'm going to write something down, and you read it and you say if it makes you feel kind of funny, the way it made me feel.

"And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth's eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance."

- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

No, it probably won't. You'll need to have heard the rest of it all, have learned the whole of it. You'll have to have been briefed in that wondrous lexicon. I have been drinking steadily of the Chronicles of Narnia, one every day for the past few days. If I had not been working yesterday and been busy with the boyfriend before that, I would have finished the last two books already, but I've been slow.

I picked up The Voyage of the Dawn Treader this morning and just finished it this evening, after making beef curry for the boys in the family. The homely stew felt leaden in my mouth, as I read about boy kings and girl queens and talking mice and sailors supping on dazzling liquid light.

like clearing the fox den.

I am excited by neatness. On trips to Ikea, I am filled with a kind of intense joy to see things compartmentalised into sweet, stylish, and Swedish boxes and bookshelves, into underbed storage units. Like Kit and Nita fighting Entropy in the Young Wizards series, it is like watching the Devil get suckerpunched. Fuck you, Mess! In your place, pants! Serves you right, Errant Towel! Etcetera, etcetera.

But those of you who intimately know me will know that I am a notoriously messy person. It is not so much that I like mess or that I am incapable of cleaning, but my mind does not exist on quite the same plane as my body. I am always elsewhere. While I may be blogging on my bed in front of my Mac now, in Garden Grove, in the slightly chilly Southern California night, I am in Nazi-occupied France with the likes of Eli Roth and Brad Pitt. I do not notice the dust on my desk, nor the dirt on my sheets in the way angels in graveyards do not mind the lichen on their faces. They are not there to care.

But I admit sometimes it gets to be maddening, and the sight of the mess in my room throws in me into a mad kind of frenzy. I feel like there are ants all over my back. A rush of blood hits me square between the shoulders, right up into my head, and I clean everything out. I wipe clean the mirrors, dust the drawers. I organise my lingerie drawer into types of lace and colour. I throw out the trash and lo, I have made my peace.

It is the same with this blog, I guess. I come here when my mind goes crazy, when I have all the languages I have learned and all the songs I have sung all crash together like a cacophonous disaster in my skull. And all the long words tumble out like sequinned gymnasts, and all the big thoughts like marching elephants bespangled and proud. All the sad sentences and the small thoughts, the ponderous loon songs of self-abasement, like tiny clown-cars tooting round the ring. And the vain ideas, the lady shimmering bare-back on the white horse, why they come around too, all naked legs in the spotlight, all bejewelled breasts.

And it gets a little bit better. It makes the maddening crowd, the lions and tigers, the bears, it makes them all right. They do not so much snarl as snicker.

I get so many bad dreams I don't know what to do. I don't want to go to sleep, mother. Five more minutes. Five more minutes.

Listening to my brother's croaking song, for he feels like he can sing.

Have been filled with prose and prose and prose, ladies and gentlemen. Prose and prose and prose.

I am more restless by the day. Siiiigh.

Went last night to a Dodgers game with Memo and his friends. It was interesting, I was more amused by the people than I was by the game. I felt all yesterday as if I was in some strange dream. It feels gloomy and balmy by turns. The air is silvery gold, and my bones feel filled with mud.

It is 12:30, and I should be at his house at 3. I need to do laundry yet, and some knitting. 

I feel so curious! I feel like I'm dreaming, even now. 

My financial aid has come in, so I am a few hundred dollars less poor. I pick up my pay check this week, lads and ladies, and I am so glad of it. Money, money, money. A golden balm to blind the eyes.

Have been reading a lot. Finished two books in the last two days. Grazing through the Chronicles of Narnia like a hungry sheep.

Buttermilk Biscuit Bitching

Probably need friends who are less flaky and more tender.

Just sayin'.

Bought new sketchbook, drove all the way to Westminster Library only find that they are closed for the next seven days.

Also need some Ricola. MMMph

Vulcan Mind Meld Me

Volunteered at the OC Fair today, which was intense. Met a girl named Denise who goes to CSULB and is an I/ST major. It was wonderful to hang out with her. Had chocolate-covered bacon, deep fried twinkies, and a Martha Stewart Dog from Pink's. So good. Sooo soo good.

Apres, saw Cameron and watched Star Trek together. I'm crushing so hard on Zach Quinto's Spock. I mean, I was crushing heavy on him even as Sylar, but man has sex appeal as an ice-cold Vulcan mastermind. 

Roar. 

Lately have been feeling the itch of the acting bug stronger than ever. Was looking up classes at OCC and SCR, shuffling my feet before the ice-cold water. I just want to plunge into that mess, but I'm so scared! I don't.. I don't know what to do, or where to go, or who to speak to. Maybe I should talk to the theatre advisor at my school? *sigh* Or Mr. Martin.

Maybe I'll go to him. That seems like the best decision... I miss him, anyway. I want to make amends.... I wonder if he'll accept me back. I feel like I owe him an apology. For creating a rift, for messing things up. I miss him. He said he felt like I was his daughter.

How do you go and fuck something up like that? Something so wholesome and beautiful, "If I ever had a daughter it'd be you." I am the fatted calf, the prodigal son, the spitting image of the home's harbinger. 

Miss Memo a little bit. Miss working a little more.

but it did happen

Just finished Magnolia. Ahhh I like it so much. The sheer humanity of it! It was so tongue-in-cheek and funny, but at the same time so mouthwateringly, eyewateringly tender. MMPH.

I think Doubt has arrived but I haven't yet checked. To be sure, I think my gloves should have arrived by now but they haven't :( 

I have spoken before, ladies and gentlemen, on my struggle with desire. As a Buddhist, I ought to cleanse myself of wants and wants, but I find myself spending most of my time, instead of researching and learning and gaining knowledge, I find myself wanting things.

My mother told me that recently my old Buddhist mentor was in the newspaper. He was the chairman of a large Buddhist organisation, and lived in a small temple in Long Beach. I remember him vaguely from my childhood. I remember hopping around like a kangaroo, and him calling me his little kangaroo. I remember liking him immensely. When I think of him, I picture the Dalai Lama. They did not look dissimilar. 

He was in the papers recently, though he died before I could quite remember. The man--I suppose you would call him the undertaker, he had been the one to undress my dear old monk--had recounted a story of this undressing. He had peeled back those orange bedsheets, ladies and gentlemen, and had found the old monk's underwear patched, threadbare, darned in many places. Of the many, many donations my old mentor received in his lifetime as a Buddhist monk and a leader in the community, he took none of it for himself, not even for underwear. 

On seeing the shabby evidence of my poor monk's selflessness and virtue, the undertaker burst into tears. 

In the light of so much goodness, how is it men can still live so close to evil? Though great things are born all around them, like the nebulous winking of stars being born, like millions of larvae blossoming into life in the dark spring night as we touch our heads to sheets to sleep, we seem to see none of it. We take none of that goodness into our own lives, and continue to want, and hate, and kill, and ignore. 

I wonder if animals know good or evil, or if morality is a new disease meant to control the population. Whether just or unjust, someone seems to die for it anyway.

My point is, I really want a leather jacket. With a hood. And one without a hood, for work. I want one so bad.

And I want to shop at MAC. I want. I want. I cry myself to sleep on the inside, though all it looks like is slavering jowls, wild wolves wishing and wishing.

idle time

i idle like an engine purring gently with park in gear

i idle with the supine laze of a lioness gorged on fragile flesh

i idle like a cannonball grating metallic at the back of the throat

of a cannon aimed straight at your mother's broadside

i idle simply because i can

i idle the way tornadoes are begot in the electric silence

on a sweltering Kansas afternoon

i idle like the last two seconds before tomorrow rushes in

all mysterious and shit

such a lie. i simply am idle.

white lights

Cat's sitting on the better half of the bed.

the day is nearly over. Time runs faster in this room, I swear. I can't wait to work again. Figures I didn't need to attend the orientation after all, and Athena (hopefully!) will contact me on the morrow for my id and shit. Sigh. This thing is taking forever.

Contemplating dropping my Monday Wednesday class since it's like, 11-12. Would give me more opportunities to work, though lord knows I make enough money 2 days a week, I don't need to do more.. But... Sigh. We'll see.

In other news may get a new Siamese kitten.

My brain is just not into thinking lately. Even typing this shit is hard for me. I can't think straight for two seconds. Aggghh.

knit knit knit

All this knitting is making my head spin. MMMMMmm.

but when you said

but when you said she hated me

it stung like a slap

and

left 8 shades of bruised regret

blossoming on my astounded cheek

no surprise.

i woke up knowing

that though flies see

with many eyes

cling to any old thing

fly straight to the stars

they are maggot-born

and trash-bred

and even i would

smash them dead.

fuck that shit it's disgusting.

for being so anorgasmic i have a freakish sex drive. sheesh.

found random thing i wrote when i was very young.

"when they kiss, it is like an eclipse--slow but inevitably sure."

i like that sentence somehow. i wrote some fucked up things as a kid. geeeezzzz.

until we go the way of all flesh

My commie heart explodes with guilt.

You ever come across stuff, and once you touch them or hold them or place them upon your guilty crown you realise "this is gonna be with me until I die?" 

Hats, ladies and gentlemen. Since I've shorn off my locks, I've realised how much I loved them. 

What better invention was there for the human head? Fuck helmets, I want a bowler derby. 

I've been getting musicks nonstop for the past few days now. Insomnia begets progress. 

Mostly Nujabes stuff, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Also some misc. Lady Gaga shit, because I'm crushing hard.

I set my laptop to UK spelling sometime in Hong Kong because I was paranoid about spelling errors in class, but now I'm afraid I'll have to switch back and I can't recall how. Huh.

Thinking the Other Day

Was thinking the other day about this stuck up OC hipster crowd. 

I mean, it seems like if you wanna talk to somebody or do anything or get in anywhere you gotta know somebody first. And I don't get it. 

I used to get it, before I went to HK. Now, HK was my first experience being on my own and really, I mean really, socialising with people and experiencing all those various consequences and benefits. 

Little did I know that my jaunt to HK might well have been a jaunt to the moon. As on the moon, nothing in HK fell with quite the same gravity.  People seemed to talk to each other with little introduction, to bond, to connect, to kiss and to fuck and break up all in the same breath. As if none of the usual shit mattered.

And I wonder, as many do, why can't we bring that home? What's wrong with that? I was watching Transformers today, and it's such a typical "boy too lame to get into girl's pants" story. But I wonder if it's outdated in the here and now. I mean, are we still playing by those rules? Perhaps in Buttfuck, Wyoming, but here, really? 

Do we still chain ourselves to those same systems of consequences? Do we still judge each other by those same rudimentary and superficial guidelines? Must we still judge? 

What are we, animals?

People tell me all the time that race is a social construct. Sex is a social construct. Social classes, tribes, cliques, groups, socially constructed to divide, to unify, to group, to classify. Therefore null and void, therefore unimportant.

But we cannot extricate ourselves from these systems, from these myriad networks. We participate in them wholeheartedly, whether academic or wholly ignorant. To even participate in the argument is to subscribe to a network which believes that anyone who willingly participates in these "socially constructed" systems is a bigot or something.

Roberts criticised me for thinking that sterile hypothetical academic debates were useless. He told me to get out of politics then.

Well, maybe that's what's wrong with teaching kids politics in the first place. We study all kinds of perspectives and ideologies with which to view the world, as if it were a painting or a book.

But the 6 billion people on earth do not typically view the world from these viewpoints. They exist within social constructs, they live and breath sex and race and sexism and racism and hate and love and all that mess, all together. 

To try to place yourself somewhere outside of that is to study something else entirely, to devote yourself to serving the Utopian instead of the dystopian, the devolving, the degrading society in which we were born today.

To ignore that some people are actually alright with being ignorant is to be just as ignorant. To criticise the Crusades with bladed tongue is to be yourself some kind of Crusader. 

Sorry for the rant. In other news, gonna try and cop my girly's moves. She can dance so well. I dreamed about volcanoes last night and swore I felt the burn of those flying rocks like lava on my fingertips.

What does it mean when your dreams are more real than your reality? I was raped the other night in my head. It was just as traumatising. 

Where do these terrifying thoughts come from? Is there a dark place inside my consciousness that wishes to do me in? I have never been more hurt than by my own self.

Rapture

After about a week, I finally finished the first 20 rows of this bitch. This ain't some bitch's regular stockinette knit shit. It's got all kinds of directions in it, all kinds of holes, all kinds of shapes. This is the kind of stuff you look at while you're knitting and cry softly into the wool. 

I'm going to take a break from it and work on my beanie now. Two beanies perhaps. Even a turtle. A brainless fucking turtle.

In other news, my mother is still insane. It's a hot day, and the woman is obsessed with cooking a masterpiece for dinner tonight.

I'm a simple kind of person. I don't expect a lot of food, really. I like boiled spinach and some fish. I like roast garlic and a toast baguette. I eat some yoghurt for brekkie.

My mother tells me I'm putting on weight and then yells at me if I don't eat. She cooks for ten people at a time for a family of three very picky and light eaters. We end up throwing the food out every week. It's absolutely ridiculous. She throws tantrums if we don't eat, telling us we're wasting food, or that we eat out too much.

Truth is mum, when I'm out I really don't eat that much. Geez.

ermine furs adorn imperious

I've been knitting the same three inches of scarf for the past week. I keep on ripping out rows. It's always the little things I fuck up on. A yarnover here, a missed stitch there. 2 knit stitches instead of 3, so on. so on. It's a complicated checkerboard lace pattern, and I'm knitting with very fine dark blue yarn. If I can just focus it would be beautiful.

I saw my girly today. I can't wait to go out tomorrow night to Pistol. It will be my first time clubbing since Cassie's last night in HK. It will not be as mad, as drunken, as disappointing, but I shall enjoy it. 

Lately I have been thinking only of material things, and the thought is depressing. I think day in and day out about clothes and shoes and makeup and it frightens me. My head is empty, empty, empty.

Last night I saw Memo and find myself more and more comfortable with him, able to open up, talk about more than pleasantries, reveal the throbbing sadness and disappointment I always feel just below the surface, groundwater in the blistering sand. I don't know what exactly it is I want out of this besides sex and attention. Maybe that's it. It's such a new feeling. I've never been indifferent about dating anyone. I've always been head over heels. Since HK I've been seeing relationships and love in an entirely new light. I used to think that I couldn't have sex with someone if I wasn't in love. And then that whole thing with Roberts happened.

What had happened, I think, was that I had talked myself out of falling for him. These days I think I can talk myself into and out of anything. 

I believe what makes me a great actor is that in my life I am acting every single moment, that I possess no genuine feeling or emotion that motivates my actions or words. Yea, my words motivate my emotion. It's ludicrous and ludicrously complicated to describe. 

I often wonder if I wasn't really in love with Emmanuel; I wonder if he was just there at the right time and had fit relatively well into that vague man-shape I needed. If, by mistaking my lust and my neediness and my excitement, I created something like love, maybe even love itself, for him. 

If I quelled all the temptations, those numerous temptations, because I felt my increasing boredom was my own fault and not his. 

When I spoke to him I broke out in tears, but as soon as I hung up they would cease, I would be silent and empty. Was it real? It scares me to think on it. Was any of it real?

Am I real? I mean my personality and my words, my traits, my reactions, are they really and truly mine or am I like some preposterous mirror or parrot. 

Uggghhh. I have lost so many words since coming back. Right now, I've got such an anger inside I can't seem to find the words to describe it, and that maddens me further. I just want to punch somebody. I want to hit myself. I want to steep myself in violence and smoulder into smoke. 

 

notes on first kisses.

the first makeout session is always awkward, unless it is amazing. there are no in-betweens. unlike having sex with a new person for the first time, it will always feel like the first time you ever kissed a person. the fumbling, the groping, the maneuvering around the gear shift. are there any polite ways to conduct yourself during this nascent ritual, or will it always feel like you have braces on? with onion breath?

lame.

An observation, perhaps naive, but really wholly innocent, on women travellers: 

The girls I have met while backpacking in SE Asia fall into a few categories. 

There are the european girls, lithe and golden and tan, floating through the islands of Thailand and the rivers of Laos like angels. They are scantily clad, unimaginably beautiful, but in their eyes I think they are empty, naive. They are on holiday from Sweden, on easter break from London. 

we stand anchored to our vanity, eyes wide all jealous and shit.

and then there are the earthen women who trod in the mud of Asia and bloom like lotuses. They are fleshy and beautiful, their eyes shining with earnestness, overflowing with a simple kindness and love for the people here. they are brimming with stories, absolutely jubilant and joyful. 

i wonder, should i be like that when i return to america? should i be so bright-eyed and optimistic? 

brain is too scattered to contemplate all this. is destroyed. no words anymore. sigh sigh sigh.