i am a dying cat

sequences

2010-05-24T17:52:00.000-07:00

1. the principle reason for my lack of blogging the last couple of months, if you'll allow me to self-diagnose, would have to be my inability to find any sort of uniting theme to my thoughts.

2. not that such a thing is necessarily necessary for a blog post; but still, it's nice.

3. so but in which case isn't a blog post just a jumbled collection of disparate thoughts masquerading under an arbitrarily chosen theme anyway?

4. vis-à-vis; (with the addition of my general laziness at this point in the year) i will present you with this admittedly entropic list of thoughts without any previous deception of theme or overarching purpose.

5. beginning principally with the thought that to never again be forced to submit myself to the brutality of a high school monday morning is a truly glorious thought indeed.

6. yet it turns out that, excepting the experience of all those younger than the age of 10, literally having nothing to do is deceivingly maddening.

7. if ever you inexplicably find yourself with the belief that the citizenry of america (or the world at large) has made significant progress in terms of interpersonal politeness, linguistic/grammatical/orthographical ability, logical reasoning, or just plain intelligence, i perilously invite you to locate and read (for however long you can stand) any one of numerous internet comment threads on a) yahoo! b) amazon c) youtube d) it seems basically any web site these days.

8. some people really really suck.

9. finally achieving a long-term/dearly-held goal, i've found, is actually more puzzling than anything else.

10. my father now stalks birds.

11. he does this with a web cam he has placed in a birdhouse. i thank you, 21st century! we marvel at your technological advances each day anew! how you so deeply enrich our lives by enabling us to peer into the previously-mysterious day-to-day lives of common passerine and subsequently share our findings with our children!

12. baby birds most definitely rank up there with rats, leeches, and any number of small slimy creatures in terms of general ugliness and undesirability to look at.

13. the word beezy may now be used as a general-purpose superlative adjective, noun, and pronoun.

14. it is impossible to entirely avoid self-contradiction.

15. actually, it's not.

16. the world would be a genuinely better place to live in if everyone behaved like IKEA employees.

17. the fact that people (or at least circumstantially selected teenagers that i've observed) now physically write out "less than 3" rather than simply draw a heart, use the word "delete" when "erase" would have been far more suitable, and announce their feelings using acronyms spanning OMG to TMI (myself readily and admittedly guilty for propagating the latter) -well, this is really more (excuse me) lolz than anything else i could say about the ubiquitous influence of the internet or the degradation of language in the modern world.

19. as far as i am concerned, higher level mathematics is magic.

20. episodes from the earlier seasons of the office seem so much better now that they are slightly aged. sort of like wine or the experience of remembering pokémon.

21. it is apparently irrational to believe that people will do what they say they will do.

22. facebook has irrevocably and fundamentally changed human interaction and the way people study it. it's not just that facebook has changed the way people look at sociology as so much as facebook now is sociology.

23. we live in a society in which men who throw spheres into nets for television cameras earn thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of $ more than people we entrust the fate of our youngsters to.

24. although maybe we do entrust the fate of our youngsters to the men throwing spheres into nets for television cameras.

25. finding one's place in this world is probably the most notoriously difficult act (and yes i do mean that word in its truest meta-dramatic sense) one must undertake, and is certainly that of the teenage years.

26. my perception of a book can be almost completely (and probably unfairly) altered by the selection of font by the publisher.

27. does that make me some sort of elitist?

28. probably.

29. the continued existence of television, radio, magazines, and books is most likely to be at least in part a testament to the true power of nostalgia.

30. for some reason, extreme complexity in story-telling is incredibly captivating (see: proust, LOST, ulysses, 100 years of solitude, infinite jest).

31. sleep is like, important.

32. scheming about the future girlfriends of your kid brother is surprisingly fun.

33. there is something about listening to your favorite music that makes you simply want to write out the lyrics to some of your favorite songs (not that the millions of AIM/facebook status messages of teens nationwide haven't already demonstrated this ad infinitum).

34. i am an american aquarium drinker. i assassin down the avenue. i'm hiding out in the big city blinking. what was i thinking when i let go of you?

35. sorry.

36. 私は日本語を話すふりをして多くの楽しみがある。

37. honestly, why are so many people afraid of roller coasters? it's not like this sort of thing came pre-programmed evolutionarily speaking, like snakes or spiders or bodies of water. maybe it's the heights or loss of control?

38. "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." - ludwig wittgenstein

39.

40. alright, let's be honest; at this point, this is just getting gimmicky.

41. as it turns out, making absurd, lengthy, and rather random lists seems to be a perfectly suitable way to fill a blog post.

community

2010-02-01T11:44:00.001-08:00

(author's note: please be advised that the following post contains two lengthy and seemingly-disparate accounts of separate events that will be attempted to be implicitly amalgamated together in a somewhat meaningful way by yours truly. should you be averse to such things, or just inclined to stick to more succinct posts, posts devoid of great emotion, or posts with clearer and more understandable connections, be advised that no one will hold such things against you if you decide to wait this one out, or perhaps just read the bits that catch your eye. we now proceed with our feature presentation.)

i went to miami for a week.

believe me when i say it was truly spectacular.

a national organization took 143 artists from all about the nation and threw them together in a miami hotel for a week of madness and adventure. i made up 0.7% of those artists, and 4.8% of the writers present. in summary: i met people there whose talent surpassed my basic understanding. i went to a botanical garden with giant floating plastic objects in its lake. when people asked me what i was, i said 'a writer' and i meant it. i rode on buses. i took pictures of kinetic art. i expressed skepticism at a scheme involving shenanigans with anti-hulk juice. i did a public reading of the post "utility," which you can read for yourself below. i gave high-fives. i laughed when a woman handed me an article written by malcolm gladwell on talent that was supposed to convince and inspire me to succeed in my artistic endeavors. i taught some people the 'single ladies' dance. i considered the future of the publishing industry and was ironically informed that blogging will never get me anywhere. i nearly cried upon reading an essay on a waffle house; such was the essay's beauty, i'm serious. i stood awkwardly by the side of a pool while dancers and actors jumped in the freezing water at 10:30 PM. i wore fake glasses. i became widely known, and rather endearingly so, by two simple syllables: meepmeep. i suffered with allergies for the first few days (do you know how terribly difficult it is to meet people when you have a runny nose?) only to emerge with newfound energy for the remainder of the week. and most of all, i met people, really really cool people, and witnessed their amazing work.

some people want to know about how miami was as a city, as if i even saw the beach or went to a single nightclub. others want to know about the prestige: "what did you win, what famous people where there, etc?" others still want to know about the controversy: "was there anyone there that legitimately did not deserve to be there?" (answer: no). so a lot of people are surprised to hear that the best, and really the only important, part of the week was finding people that liked and understood the same sorts of things as myself, and who were able to speak of literature and writing in sublime and relatable terms. in short, the best part of the week was the almost instant creation of a community - a community of people with the same goals and methods for their lives - a community of, dare i say the word, writers, even artists.

i've been finding that sort of thing in a lot lately. the community idea.

what is it to discover that there are people out there, spinning around in the same world as you, that share your same quirky thought patterns, who think about things so esoteric and seemingly-bizarre that you're shocked to find out others think of them as well? to fall so casually but deeply into conversations about the feel of certain publishers' book jackets, embarrassing middle school technological mishaps, obscure unpublished stories, or dinosaur chicken nuggets, that somehow bare a bit of your soul to another person? to rediscover the warmth of humanity, day in and day out, and to spend your time with people that inspire you in the most menial of moments? to laugh? to cry? to touch? to converse? to smile?

it is to suddenly belong, and it is the most ephemeral and wonderful feeling in the universe.

because i've concluded that it's people that get you through things. not that this is a terribly insightful, or original, observation at all. but trust my sincerity when i say that no human is an island, and no human could live without others, or at least the thought of others. community. kindred spirits. amigos. family. it's how we get by.

always, always, always.

...

now i'm going to do a homage (or tribute, perhaps?) that is somewhat unrelated to anything, except for the fact that it's actually related to everything. it's just about some madman stuff that happened to me a couple of days ago, and how the literary community lost somebody important, and a couple of people that really mean something to me. i don't know how it'll turn out, because i've never tried something like it. it's cheesy, i realize, but it isn't too cheesy. i think you'll catch on pretty quickly. here goes...

Where I want to start telling is the day that the first semester of my senior year ended. My school is this place that's in Irvine, California. You've probably heard of it. Anyway, it was the last final of the semester. If there's one thing I hate, it's finals. Don't even mention them to me. For some reason, for the last final, they made everybody in the class watch this movie about these crazy drivers that went and got themselves killed in stupid accidents, and they made us watch the blood and guts and everything. It was supposed to make you a better driver, but to tell the truth it just made me want to puke. After that I wasn't feeling like doing much of anything, except that somebody leaned in and told me that this favorite author of mine died. I didn't know what to do, so I just sat there and thought about the guy. You'd have liked him. He was terrifically intelligent. I'm not just shooting the crap. He really was.

I don't remember who, but somebody said "RIP" about the whole thing. That's depressing, when someone says "RIP" about a person you liked. That depressed the hell out of me, to tell you the truth. It's just so goddamn obvious. Of course you're resting in peace, you're in the goddamn ground for crying out loud. That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a person that's alright about death, because there isn't any. You might think there is, but once you talk to them, when you're not paying too much attention, they'll sneak in a "RIP" right under your nose and ruin the whole thing. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery and I have a tombstone and all, even if I say I don't want "RIP" written on it, I bet somebody will come along and write in on there. I'm positive, in fact.

I had some plans for the night, so I went to go see this very affecting picture about a crazy little kid and a bunch of monsters. The kid just wanted to be friendly and all, but the monsters were mostly a bunch of phony slobs to him, which killed me. When it was over and I was all set to go, I stood for a while next to the stairs. I was sort of crying. I don't know why. It could have been because of that little kid, meeting all the monsters and just wanting to be friends, or something. Then I got the hell out.

After I came out from the movie theater, I went into this bookstore with everyone else. Anyway, I was feeling restless if you want to know the truth. It was about seven or eight, and so I went back and just stood there in the bookstore and read the last chapter of this crazy book out loud to these two girls, and it sort of made me feel better. It sounds really corny and all, but I swear it wasn't. I didn't even care that people were walking by and giving me this funny look for doing it. It was so nice and peaceful.

Then a funny thing happened. I went to go eat with a bunch of kids in this restaurant. It was all crowded, and the waiter was so lousy that I sort of felt sorry for him. I did some pretty funny things with my sandwich and I put on these crazy 3D glasses that were supposed to just be for kids, you know the ones where one eye is red and the other one is blue? Then I ran across the street with everyone else and spun around in a gazebo. I think we looked so damn nice, the way we kept going around and around in the gazebo. And the funny thing is, I sort of forgot about the whole thing with the author dying and all. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I really did.

All I know is, I sort of miss that old dead guy now. Even the books he never got around to writing, for instance. It's funny. Don't ever read anybody. If you do, you start loving everybody.

...and i am at peace.

complexity

2010-01-08T18:00:00.001-08:00

it seems to me that there is a feeling in art, and in human thought in general, that ideas are to be praised as to their simplicity or complexity, respectively. do we even have an intermediary between those two? a single word to describe an average amount of complexity? i don't think we do. so then, a book or song or equation or movie or philosophical idea is either 'wonderfully complex' or 'delightfully simple,' -these are both terms that people use. but they're opposites, aren't they? we like skinny, not fat people. beautiful, not ugly things. large, not small houses. a lot, not a little, money. so simplicity or complexity -which do we like? make up your mind, humanity!

but regardless of this societal linguistic hypocrisy, i'd like to transition this discussion directly to these very ideas themselves. first, i'd like to show you how simple the world sometimes appears to be.

everything you could ever hold in your hands (namely, everything physical) is composed somehow out of combinations of just 100-odd elements -and depending on what it is you've got, it probably contains a lot less than that. and everything physical you'll probably ever truly care about (namely, humans) is composed almost entirely (we're talking ~99%) of only six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. add in a few trace elements, like potassium and sulfur, and ladies and gentlemen, that's it! out of those six unique building blocks, you have: the human being. combinations of this limited number of elements are what are currently taking in visual information to give you the sight to read these words, the correct "wiring" to transmit that information throughout your brain, and the mental facility to process and understand this post i've written - which, by the way, is really just an fancy jumble of about fortysomething symbols: 26 letters, 10 numbers, and ~8 punctuation marks.

let's talk music; music, as you know it (in its western context), is made up of only twelve distinct notes. twelve. do re mi fa so la ti (do) for a single scale, plus five more for a chromatic consideration. these twelve notes are endlessly manipulated, combined, and re-imagined -but in the end they number only twelve.

i could go on; turn to any field of study, and you will see simplification and basic patterns. history, physics, linguistics, neuroscience.

and if all of that really isn't unnervingly reductionist enough for you, consider this: humanity is now encoding almost everything, almost all of its cumulative information, into computers. and computers operate on a very simple, boolean idea: zeros and ones. everything can be represented, in a computer at least, with zeros and ones. your essays, your music, your powerpoints, your picture of your brother on his first birthday eating a cupcake. government records, love letters, records of distant planets, historical footage: zero zero one one zero one zero zero etc.

but then...

apples to apples.

apples to apples is a good, good game. in fact, in my mind, it is everything a game should be, or should at least attempt to be: endlessly entertaining, wonderfully social, intriguingly strategic, and ultimately memorable yet easily dismissible upon losing. i realize i'm sort of sadly behind the times on this one (that game was so 2006) but anyway: the idea is that words are printed on cards and players choose words that relate to other words on other cards and everyone has fun. i don't know, read about it if you don't know what it is.

but see, what interests me most about apples to apples is the amount of possibility it demonstrates. as the game's packaging tells us, "The card combinations in Apples to Apples® are virtually limitless." indeed, this is basically true. with the limited amount of combinatorial mathematics the public school system has given me, i've calculated, based upon the "party pack" edition of the game i own, that there are about 13502788770 (756 C 4) possibilities for a single round of play: namely, a single green card with four players each playing a red card. that's a lot of possibilities. if you want to take into consideration which person plays which card, which i believe is now a permutation, the number is ~324067194400. play two rounds, and there are now ~102810134600000000000000 (i apologize for the lack of precision - my calculator rounds off after ten meaningful digits). that's a freaking lot.

and consider this as well: there may well be more than four players, there are certainly more than two rounds, there are possibilities in which card is chosen by the 'judge,' possibilities in what is said about each card, possibilities in everything from the amount of time it takes to choose the card to the decimal level of the vociferous protest when one's card isn't chosen. now is unfortunately not the time for a discussion of the philosophy of probability, but in a single game i think we can safely say there are a nearly infinite number of unique outcomes. in short: considering a limited non-deterministic case-study of apples to apples, things are batshit crazy.

if one game of apples to apples can be so complex, can't the world be that much more so? can't what we've demonstrated in microcosm be extrapolated to the larger plane it inhabits?

sure they may only be 130 elements, but when they form bonds with one another they can form molecules that are very complicated in both form and arrangement. the same with language, music, and our brains. so i guess that in the end what apples to apples shows me best is that true complexity, true...reality, i would even argue, arises in connections. a human, a civilization, an atom, or a computer can create incredible, mind-boggling complexity through connection. it's simply exponential. there is synthesis in connection, enhanced experience in something like a new friendship. and there are many, many things out there in this world. the number of ways in which they can and do combine with one another truly goes beyond understanding.

the world is a big, booming, complex place. and i've got to say: it's really lovely to be there with you.

utility

2009-10-18T21:32:00.000-07:00

once a week, i babysit my neighbor's child.

he is an inventive little guy. this week, we kept ourselves amused for about half an hour with "meepmeep," which is a small red wooden mouse with a compass imbedded in its back and two gray felt ears super glued on its head. it goes like this: first he says, "oh, meepmeep go nightnight." he hids meepmeep. i pretend to see what meepmeep is up to, sleeping in the middle of the day and all, and in fact secretly pocket meepmeep. several seconds later, he checks back to see if meepmeep is living up to his promise to sleep -but meepmeep is gone! so the search for meepmeep is on. we look for meepmeep for a minute or two, and i secretly place it in an open area (for instance, on top of a television, a lego structure, a pumpkin.) i then say something to the effect of "well you know, meepmeep probably likes to live near a window..." and then meepmeep is found, and we laugh at the incredibility of it all: meepmeep! running away like that! being found in broad daylight! what a silly little mouse he is. then the cycle begins again. part of me hopes that he actual believes that the little wooden mouse is animated, but he is a very smart three-year-old, and definitely knows otherwise. it's still very funny though.

now i'm going to try to draw a really pained metaphor out of all that, which i apologize in advance for; because the real reason i told you that story was just because i found it amusing, and not because it illustrates a point especially well.

but play along for a second and substitute, will you, meepmeep with happiness or success, and my neighbor with humanity. no, not happiness? fulfillment, then? yes, that's the word: contentment.

do you see it?

because our society is obsessed with finding meepmeep, whatever that is. we declare it in our founding documents, we justify our education with it, we conclude our favorite literature with it.

but meepmeep always, freaking, escapes!

and it drives everyone crazy.

for instance, the recession, which is making a great deal of people a great deal of upset. i admit, the recession is unpleasant, and i'm not wholeheartedly opposed to the idea of economic growth. but come on...

economics is all about meepmeep. getting the most meepmeep for your buck. the best allocation of meepmeep. real national gross domestic meepmeep. it gets pretty annoying, after a while. (well ok. that same phrase also goes for school in general, but that's a story for a different time.) life isn't about squeaking out the most amount of use for everything.
more money ≠ more happiness.
efficiency ≠ joy.
utility ≠ truth.
life isn't about finding meepmeep, because, you fool, you will never get him! it's about what happens to get you there, or more importantly, the idea that one day you will hold him in your hands and be done. life is about what happens in between, and what you make of the time you have to play games and do nothing productive.

silly things keep us alive.

...

my sister and brother are dining together beneath a soft florescent light. they are seated across from each other, like two wonderful innocents in an vintage coca-cola advertisement, harmoniously quiet. the three of us are home alone, and i am in charge. (ha. ha.) my sister is gnawing on an apple and reading. my brother is finishing off his dumplings and completing his homework on lunar predictions. i am at my computer, a 90 degree turn from either, some feet away in the family room, writing to you...

my brother makes an excursion outside, and comes back in singing: ♫ i, can't, see, the moon! i, can't, see, the moon! i, can't, see, the moooOOOOOoooonnn ♫ his sillyboy song annoys my sister. she is trying to read a book and eat an apple. she asks me if she can throw the apple core at my brother's head. "ok," i say in the way that older brothers only can, "sure!" because these things are always jokes, and there's certainly no harm in joking.

my sister throws an apple core at my brother's head.

it makes a beautiful parabolic arc across the table. i watch it from where i sit. my brother's eyes move closer together, following the apple core as it draws closer to his face; he smiles in rapt amusement, too surprised or trapped in cognitive dissonance to move. the apple core smacks him just above his right eyebrow and throws apple sauce about his forehead.

thunksh, it says.

change

2009-09-27T16:40:00.000-07:00

i think the last few days of mine deserve recounting to you, even if that's something that i traditionally have avoided. i just have some anecdotes to tell, and i'm going to be very modernist about the whole thing (hope you don't mind). maybe i'll find a common theme of some sort, maybe i won't. either way, it's about time i post something! y'all have been strapped for some dying cat lately. let's fix that.

friday morning was a clumsy one. i dropped a bowl of oatmeal. glass and oatmeal exploded. oatmeal went on my socks. glass went on everywhere. allow me to simulate the noise for you.

*clumsy fumbling [wait, does that even make a noise?]
"shhhiiii......." [slow-motion swears]
KER-chak-a-chak-a-CHOW [this entire progression is about 1.32 seconds]
smppsssssssssss [glass sliding]
"oh." [slow realization that i just exploded a bowl of oatmeal over myself]
ssssssssssssssSSssss [more glass sliding to far-away spots in my house]
"oops." [just about sums the whole thing up]

then on my way to school, after the oatmeal ordeal, i stopped at a green light. i actually stopped my car at the intersection while the light was green. old people gave me strange looks. later, in econ, i forgot a graph on the previous page of a test, convinced myself that the question i had read was referring to a non-existent graph, informed the substitute, and had to endure the embarrasshilarityment of skulsky pointing out my own silliness to me. skulsky! silliness! senioritis! oheaseey. (oh eye es why?)

then i went to chicago.

and that was an adventure.

once in john wayne airport, i took a seat in the terminal across from a fat man and listened to my ipod, which was mainly broken, which was very disappointing. when it came time to board the plane, the TSA stopped me for a "random-check," which was very strange. a man patted me down and called me "pal." he checked my back, ribcage, middle, and legs for weapons, and i was definitely not his pal.

walking alone through an empty airport at 11:24 PM, flanked by dozens of signs proclaiming chicago to be an ideal city for the 2016 olympics, and devouring three cheeseburgers faster than i thought was possible, i knew joy.

"HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;"

the subway was under construction, and consequently ended two stops before where we needed it to.

"oops," said my father.

but it was no problem; thanks to some quick research on the iphone, we discovered we could walk the rest of the way. so we walked around chicago after midnight. it was amazingly serene. the city at night....at one point we rounded a corner and there was a giant sculpture.

"i think that's a picasso," my father said.

we got closer and he was right: it was a giant picasso sculpture! in the dead of night in a giant metropolis, here was something i never expected to see. to the side, there was a fire burning by a group of construction workers.

"that is a fire," i said.

"i do not know what the fire is for," my father said.

we walked on.

"They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:"

the next day we went to the university of chicago. this time we took the train, which was above ground and much faster than the subway. on the way out of the subway station in hyde park there was a dent in the glass door.

"Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;"

through the neighborhood, with its street art. onward, to the university.

"Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,"

the buildings covered in ivy. the receptionist is a frat boy. he hands me my interview form and i fill out my extracurriculars.

"Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,"

i run out of the information session to go to the bathroom. people are arguing about intellectualism on the wall of the stall. "fuck the university and its faux intellectualism" it begins. "fuck all that hate on the university," it continues. i stop to read it.

"Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse.
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!"

the tour complete, the interview over, we walk the path to find a place to eat. my interviewer walks by and i wonder if she hears me telling my dad what the interview was like. i wonder if the girl who shouted to the tour guide about how the university should have a quidditch team will get in. i wonder what happened to the guys who built a nuclear reactor in their room. i wonder about the dad who flipped out when he saw a sign advertising hookah on the quad. i wonder if the tour guide was joking when he pointed to a gargoyle and said it represented an admissions officer. i decide that he was.

then a beautiful girl walks by and i am happy.

we eat at subway. i order a meatball sub, which is weird. a large man walks in and asks the employee how much refills are.

"freefills,"the employee says cleverly.

"huh? how much are refills?"

"freefills. they're free."

"oh." he chuckles.

as he redeems his "freefill," the man turns to face us and begins to speak.

"each generation brings good and bad."

huh?

"a memory is worth its weight in gold. memories worth their weight in gold."

now i understand: he is imparting his wisdom on us. i take a bite of my sub.

"the world is changing," he says importantly, waving his soda in the air to accent his point. "everyday!"

"Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation."

i nod my head in agreement.

privacy

2009-09-04T21:33:00.000-07:00

dearest reader, i am sorry.

the month of august seems to have slipped by without so much as a pronouncement of its departure or a gentle reminder to go on and blog. oh how the months go by! i haven't posted in many a fortnight, this is true. so i figure i'll owe you one, and hey, we'll call it even. deal?

i've been recently having a rather prolonged fight with my father over, of all things, facebook. yes, my father has a facebook. the problem is, so do i. he insisted that i add him, so i did. but of course i wasn't about to allow him to see what i was doing! so he got privacy settings placed on him. he found this out, got quite upset, and changed the password on my computer until i promised to take the privacy controls off him. it was unfortunate.

he simply could not understand that there are legitimate reasons to keep from him the things i do. but the truth is, there are things we keep from everyone. according to freud, there are things we even keep from ourselves! we carry so much inside of us that to spill over our pains and joys and deepest identities to everyone we meet would be to turn ourselves into inauthentic characters, overexpansions and ballooning cartoons of ourselves.

there are people to which this has happened, of course. look at the celebrities. look at elliot smith, river pheonix, michael jackson. they became famous and the world watched them for what must have seemed like every moment of every day. how terrible life is when there is no one with you, but how terrible life must be when there is everyone with you. conor oberst sang of elliott smith: "there were many talents you possessed/that I wished myself to have/but the way your eyes would gloss over/well, I never envied that." keanu reeves said of river phoenix: "he just couldn’t deal with having his private life on the front page all the time." michael jackson himself said "being an entertainer, you just can't tell who is your friend. and they see you so differently. a star instead of a next-door neighbor." they just couldn't deal with a world where everyone knew so much about them. so they did drugs, they withdrew, then they died. it's tragic; but it's inevitable that some people just can't deal with fame (which embodies the opposite of privacy).

i used to think that no one should be allowed to plead the fifth. if criminals were innocent, a younger me thought, they would have nothing to hide. and if they were guilty, well, they shouldn't be allowed to try to cover it up. but now i see it differently. pleading the fifth isn't lying, it's retaining the small bit of dignity and control a person has while on trial. similarly, the patriot act is wrong; not just because it gives some people too much power but also because it takes from some people away too much power. privacy is what we have, if nothing else.

speaking of facebook, should we be worrying today if we really have any privacy left? facebook seeks to take all our online actions and transmit them the world over. we have videos of ourselves on youtube. our thoughts are blogged and tweeted. our pictures are put on flickr. is privacy on the internet an illusion? it's something to wonder about, at least.

and then there's college applications. "tell me about all of your character-building and easily understandable secrets!" the common ap whispers to me. "under five hundred words."

what's your passion?
how would you contribute to campus life?
how did you solve a problem with a friend?
what's your autobiography of the future look like?

pssssshhhh.

not that these things are terribly private, but what if i don't want to tell them the answers? what if i wanted to tell you about them instead? what if i'm more comfortable posting these things online for everyone to see than writing an essay for a small committee of people in an office far away that i will never talk to again? because the truth is, blogees (is that the right word?), you are very easy to talk to.

precious stranger, i bare my soul to thee.

novelty

2009-07-31T20:48:00.000-07:00

it's the little moments of summer that get me.

let me share a few: talking to a newlywed about the dangers of drinking your uncle's newly-concocted carrot juice during a snow-shoe expedition through snowy hills and the inevitable hilarity that orange throw-up provides (his story, not mine), having a lengthy and unusual conversation with a random woman in the carls jr. drive-through about our futures as a result of a sticker on my car and a lack of people behind me waiting for their food (we'd be alright in the end, i assured her), laughing when my philosophy professor, after postulating that it was possible that a man could see "the queen of hearts at a bar after dropping acid" to prove that our realities contain elements of doubt to them, said, "hey, it happened to me! i almost tried to talk to her" (it explains a lot about him), spending an evening biking through a newly-constructed neighborhood admiring the bright houses and dusty streets (i'll come back to this), glancing out my window at 10:44 PM to see two crafty individuals hiding behind my trashcans with plans to jump out at me and ultimately ending up talking to them through a system of phone-delay and pool parking lot. see, the thing i love most about summer is that everything is so different and new.

so yes, i will talk about the biking some more. i can't pinpoint exactly why, but biking through a brand-new neighborhood is a deeply moving experience. maybe its the people. they go outside to eat their dinners with glasses of wine, running their eyes over brand-new landscapes and buildings, children darting to-and-fro about their legs. you can just see the friendships beginning between the neighbors. maybe its the houses themselves. tall and vivid, their identities in question -will it be an old man house? the childhood haunt? the grow-old-along-with-me home? what possibilities exist for a new house. or maybe it's the streets: so unblemished and smooth, fun to ride your bicycle tires over. whatever it is, it is, i have decided, because of the new.

we are a society that romanticizes firsts. beginnings, novelty, the new. and for good reason! babies are new, puppies are new, traveling is experiencing the new. although the first harry potter book was no where near as good as the others (admit it), we still hold it with extreme nostalgia and remembrance of greatness. and maybe this even explains why childhood is so fantastic! when we are children, everything - people, ideas, senses, even basic features of being a human (breathing, running, singing) is new. is this why growing up sucks so much, because things (literally) get old?

but do you think we might have a tendency, in the new, to see a projected version of reality?
for the most part, what we want to see; so do we see ourselves in the novel? maybe that is why we like it so. let me explain: have you ever met a person you were so sure were just like you? that great friendship and inseparability was inevitable? i mean, they were just so similar, right? when things are new and you can share a moment, a feeling, a sense of belonging, a late-night ride on the subway, a glance from a cab on a rainy day, anything at all really, well that's important, that's something, that's connection, right, right, right?

but now we come to the difficult part: when the novelty wears off. when you've stayed a little too long, when you've eaten a little too much, when you run out of things to say a little too soon. have you ever seen a little kid after he's played one too many video games? it's like he's gone into a catatonic state: he is a little possum with thumbs frozen in place, mouth slightly open, mario's and pikachu's bouncing about in his eyes. ok, that wasn't a very good metaphor at all. (but it was funny, yes?) what i mean is this: i almost like it better when something drastic separates two people rather than their own means. maybe romeo and juliet would have just grown tired of each other had they not drank the poison and stabbed themselves, collectively. maybe little nemo's parents would have gotten a clown-fish-divorce had the barracuda not appeared when he did. maybe tom hanks would have just stashed wilson in his garage and forgotten about him had wilson not drifted off at sea. maybe...oh, there are too many maybe's.

it's inevitable.
...

so tell me summer,
what happens when school starts up once more?

well,
(deep breath)

we begin again.

utopia

2009-07-21T20:42:00.001-07:00

it was late, i was bored, and i picked up the giver. seven years had passed since I last picked up the book (in my view the best childrens' novel around) and so it was familiar enough to make it feel like meeting an old friend, but not too familiar to make it redundant. i polished through in less than twenty-four hours; it's that good (and also, that short). its these flashes of childhood, when you can find them, that give you such inspiration. but anyway, the novel focuses on, oh, i can't give it away! so go read it. but suffice to say, it explores heavily the theme of uptopia (or in its case dystopia) and what would make up such a thing. it says things i would like to say much better than i ever could.

i'm also taking these classes at ivc. one is philosophy, which you can imagine is filled with slightly-crazed men postulating this and that about the perfect this and that. if you desire to never in your life be confused, stay clear of philosophy. plato says aristocracy is utopia, then people say this is wrong, then people say those people are wrong, etc. etc. ad absurdem. i am also taking sociology, which as a discipline seems to have developed as a result of fairly dystopic situations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: factories, urban crowding, political strife. its almost as if humanity suddenly found out that people never could survive in a world drained of other people, and developed sociology as a response. which brings me back around to philosophy again; because it was some philosophers called the utilitarians who said that pain and pleasure should rule all, do rule all, and that's all there is. reduce pain, they said, increase pleasure (this is called the utility principle): if people are not happy, make them happy. once people were ripped from their communities, they were not happy. so we must fix them: sociology.

but i see a lot wrong with utilitarianism, and i don't think it will ever lead us to a utopia. for starters, there's more to life than pleasure and pain. oh, there is so much more. there are also many pragmatic issues that confront utilitarianism i won't get into. but more to the point, i am reminded of that great scene in the matrix, which is sort of hard to explain, but when the machines tell morpheus that human beings rejected a perfect world, and that the machines had to input pain into the matrix in order to get the humans to accept it. (it makes sense in context.) so we come across the startling thesis: do we need pain to define reality? would a utopia actually include....pain?

sometimes i give myself over to my day dreams and envision an entirely new world. in this world, everyone wins their homecoming games, goldfish never die, people say exactly what they mean to say, (except for the nasty ones, who don't say anything at all), toilet paper never runs out, and no one ever wakes you up for anything at all except on christmas morning itself. oh and no one ever doesn't know. that's the most important part of it all.

now i'm not a lyric-posting-man, but if i was, you would be reading the lyrics to 'brand new colony' right now. (it also would not make a bad soundtrack to this post.)

so instead i submit to the most transcendent of poets harking from the most beautiful of utopias: childhood.

yes, childhood is the utopia.

"there is a place where the sidewalk ends."

clarity

2009-07-12T23:08:00.000-07:00

yesterday i filmed a wedding. it was a beautiful thing, as weddings always are. i operated two small cameras and, despite a somewhat obnoxious photographer who stepped in front of the filming, things went smoothly and according to plan. the vows, the walking down the aisle, the quirkly little brother who, when asked if he had any advice for the new couple, said as a sort-of-joke-perhaps-satire-jeez-this-kid-really-knows-how-to-make-people-laugh way: "learn those words!" (that part was strange and hilarious).

now i don't claim to know anything about cinematography, but it seems to me that filming a wedding requires something specific, something a director of a music video or art film wouldn't care so much about, and that is clarity. we aim, when filming birthdays, weddings, sports, and concerts, to document. and that requires we are the most honest in our telling of events, even if this is a visual telling. the picture must be clear, the audio free of static, the events stable and accurately told.

but the thing i don't understand is that when we begin to talk about clarity outside of film or photography it seems to be a discussion full of contradiction. we want clarity in our writing, but celebrate those with murkiness and instability (finnegan's wake, anyone?). we want subtlety in our art, but are we willing to risk ambiguity as a result? or is that the point all along anyway? 'be clear,' say shrunk and white, 'but not obvious,' says our good taste. maybe this goes back to weddings: they are the most obvious and public of expressions, unhindered by any degree of indecisiveness (at least, we hope not). which leads only to the strange paradox that we in turn love clarity and subtlety, that we celebrate each on its own terms, yet simultaneously. how very strange.

as much as i like subtlety, i am starting to see the merits of a clear life. i suppose i am making the rash assumption that the two are opposed, which they may not need to be. but truthfully i'm a little weary of the digging through words, the re-examinations, the analysis. i like it when people say what they mean, i really do. it's also possible, i might add, that with the college admissions race looming (what else can it be called?...a circus? a fair? a lottery? a mad dash?) i am very anxious to dispell this great unknown before me.

in short, i want to know.

so just say it.

goodbye

2009-06-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

i had never felt so strange not being somewhere.

because there i was, standing off to the side of it all, the wave of roars rushing around me, the caps blocking out the lights from the ceiling, and smiles and laughter and crying everywhere, ready to rush forward for hugs and congratulations and professions of emotion and pictures and it all. but then, the tug on the arm, the call of the name, the inclining of the head towards the exit, and it was just over. that's it? that's the thanks i get for passing out these stupid, blank, meaningless diplomas for half an hour? to get on a bus to drive away from the one place in the universe i want to be at this moment in time? you cannot be serious.

oh, they were serious.

so after the bus dropped me off, i got into my car and drove home from the uni parking lot, blasting landlocked blues louder than ever before, all my windows and sun-roof rolled down, hands fumbling in the air currents, probably going too fast and definitely devoting more mental energy towards being pensive than being a good driver. i've found the best thinking manifests itself in the down-times; in the long drives and showers and nights spent waiting for the cool whisper of sleep. i've been thinking a lot about the wishing and washing in and out of people, lately. it's a very timely subject you know.

m. ward said it well, i think: "people come. people go. sometimes without goodbye, sometimes without hello." aside from being a brilliant line to a brilliant song, i see this as an undying truth. because sometimes, as you will see in a second, people will just appear; instant friendship! this an entirely lovely concept, but because everything is balanced out (or nearly everything) there must be a counterweight. so people go. and people are going, people i happen to really like.

so now you must forgive me as I embark upon the strangest of ideas and my most personal of exercises. i will attempt, with parts nostalgia and sentimentality, to address those departing seniors that i can say, with any degree of certainty, read this blog. it will be cryptic (remember subtlety?) and will revolve itself around a rather bizarre theme that emerged when i started trying to come up with these code names. you'll figure it out.

here goes.

green pepsi:
you were essentially the first person to believe in my writing, i'll have you know. ours was a strange meeting (facebook messages and snatches of emails and feigned creepiness -which we both know was no creepiness at all- and mutual friends and fake wayfarers) but an inevitable one, i think. i believe you have a talent for living; an intangible intuition for correct perspective. my, that sounded strange. i suppose what i am saying is that the people around here -too many cannot see the forests nor the trees, they are so caught up in strange mutterings and rubik's cubes. truthfully, they're a bunch of busy crickets, and when you've got yourself a dying gato swimming his way through a world like that, well, it really helps to have understanding souls like yourself along the way. truthfully, not gonna lie, honestly, in truth, i have to say: i'm honored to be your friend.

tea:
one day, i was holding my guitar, sitting on a wooden stool, and testing microphones, and suddenly i was your friend! and oh i am glad that we became friends. because your musical recommendations, your consoling concerning english grades, your brilliant impressions of a certain underclassman, your incredible skills with construction paper, sharpies, and inventive use of paper clips -these are qualities that brighten life and general existence. it's somewhat strange to realize that i've only known you for about a quarter of a year. to quote that incredible movie about snipes and balloons, "thanks for the adventure." so lace up those new shoes, put on someone's coat, and grab some sushi on your way out the door, because this is the day!

coffee:
i will remember the spills, the walking ahead and behind, and thaddeus rains (sorry that never got off the ground). oh and i haven't forgotten about the web site, which we will make great, of course. i'm very sorry that seating arrangements forced you, as it was, of the circle in these last months. that was very unfortunate. (speaking of seating arrangements, fill in the blank: "that's my ___ seat!") but thank you for teaching me about korean tofu restaurants and hidden indie goodness and existentialism. my advice? tattoo 'a' onto your palm, and never ever forget about your gift of words.

maté:
first you told you me you read this blog, then later you said the posts were too long and that you didn't. i've got this sneaking suspicion that you actually do read it after all, but i don't exactly know what to think. either way, i continue; i'm not sure you remember this, because you do seem to forget about things like this (these memory lapses, while being a tad irksome, have proved themselves a quality that creates the fantastic collage of a person that you are.) but those days in spanish class many days ago; oh, how those were the days! things were young and silly and arroz con pollo and LOST. and since then i think that things have become different, but different in a way that they should have. your life is an adventure: a roller coaster of change and airplanes and laughter. i'm quite glad to have got to spiral about for the bit that i have. (and don't forget: you still owe a.k. and i lunch!)

buttermilk(s?):
i would like to say that am sorry for the awkward. as i have told you, i was "socially a late bloomer," and any non-friendship was purely my fault. i think that you are very great, and that the work you have done is nothing sort of incredible. i can only hope to try on the shoes you've left me, as small as my feet may be in them.

blue gatorade:
it's nearly unfathomable that nine months ago i knew nothing of you and you nothing of me. single-handedly, you have given me mechanisms for high school survival, friends to bear it with, and introduced internet abbreviations into my everyday speech. your tsk-tsk's, lolz, and oisy's became a regular part of school mornings, which is why the past few days have been so bizarre in your absence. (today, we took a sexist quiz and watched a very stupid 90's movie, but it wasn't that enjoyable because an important element was missing.) because you are one of the most honest people i know, i owe you nothing if not the simple and honest truth that you have become a very close friend. eh oh, indeed.

so that's that.
...

i'd like to say that somewhere in there, the one two two one of the diploma dance, while looking out upon all the faces, fuzzy from the lights and the distance, that i realized something profound or emotional or important, that i became 'unstuck in time,' that i entertained a joycean epiphany. but i didn't. none of those things happened. instead, i handed off two-hundred-odd pieces of leather and cloth and tried not to look ridiculous in the blinding light.

but now i am sitting here listening to this iron & wine song "friends they are jewels" and browsing graduation pictures on facebook and writing these silly coded messages to these people, these deeply beautiful people. and although it's not altogether clear, or especially surprising, i think now i can see the form, the outline, of some sort of truth.

i want to leave you with something. it's another quote. i don't quote much, and suddenly here i am quoting all over the place. perhaps this is because this is a subject with such great emotion that maybe i find it difficult for me to form words around it, so i resort to using the words of others. maybe. either way, it's a snoopy quote. he's a very wise dog you know.

“why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? i guess that wouldn't work. someone would leave. someone always leaves. then we would have to say good-bye. i hate good-byes. i know what i need. i need more hellos.”

but to tell you the truth, i'm not sure i even believe in goodbyes anymore. because i have realized that, at its core, all a goodbye is is just a creation of a future hello.

so,
hello, my friends.

memory

2009-05-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

have you ever read the waste land? i did; but i've mostly forgotten it.
but that first line -now that's something people remember: "april is the cruelest month/lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire, stirring/dull roots with spring rain."
so this famous line discusses memory, and its the only line that's ever really remembered. (that, the ending, and "i will show you fear in a handful of dust," of course, are the most celebrated of the poem. this is probably due to, in part, the serial position effect, where we remember best the things that come at the beginning and the end.)

how curious.

but memory; memory is the great tease of all humanity. she whispers deceptions in our ears each day, she taunts us when we need her most and beg for her help, she only laughs when we call upon her in our greatest time of need. can you describe to me at great length the details of your 4th birthday party? what did you eat for lunch one week ago today? what did you dream last night?, for you surely dreamed something. when did you first understand the concept of love? can you think of your favorite book when you were ten? when did you last cut your fingernails?

so we can establish, then, that remembering is a very difficult thing.

but sometimes, forgetting is even more difficult.

because forgetting is a non-conscious process. let me demonstrate:

1. think of a white bear.
2. now forget about the white bear.
3. did it work?

no; it did not work. of course it did not work.

we cannot choose what to forget, and this is a problem. because i would like to forget a great many things. you would like to forget a great many things. humanity would like to forget a great many things.

and there are some to whom this wish has been granted. h. m., a famous example, could not, from the year of 1953 to his death a few months ago, create any new episodic or semantic memory (due to a botched neural surgery). everyday he would wake up thinking it was 1953, thinking he was a young man, thinking who knows what.

don't we all wish for that sometimes? tabula rasa is a beautiful idea.

but the truth is, we have to remember. our memories are one of the only things that give us each individual identities. we are not ourselves without our memories. but the memories of wrongdoing, of sadness and frustration, of anger and doubt. we don't like those. we don't want those. so what do we do about those memories?

maybe there is a link between forgiving and forgetting after all. time heals all wounds, right? but doesn't time obscure all memories as well? to forgive is to forget is to forgive?

maybe.

so how about it?
we're waiting, time.

friendship

2009-05-04T20:20:00.000-07:00

so i "met" the mythbusters.

i put that word in quotations because, with men like the mythbusters, the word "met" virtually loses its meaning. sure i was in the same room as them, i looked at them, i briefly talked with them, and all the rest. but truly, can i say i met them?

if we take in criteria for having met someone as having established friendship, the answer is certainly no. as much as i would like to believe it, i am not friends with the mythbusters. in a fascinating exercise in the tipping point that aims to show you the quantity of your social connections (a topic for another day, i promise), malcolm gladwell says of having known someone as necessating that that someone "knows you back." the mythbusters do not know me back. following conventional wisdom, to know someone the knowing must be mutual.

but i dispute this.

what is even the nature of friendship in the modern world? people think that they can establish "friendship" by purely online means of a "friend-request" (as if you can request a friendship), people think they can know a person from their online profile, people think typing out "happy birthday" once a year qualifies as a legitimate exercise in friendship. facebook has opened up a whole new world of interaction and freedom and strangeness and awkwardness. (to think, we will never lose connections with our high school peers, save facebook failing or our own voluntary withdrawal? that's a thrilling and scary thought indeed.)

i approach this a little differently.

as bizarre and middle-school as it sounds, i know fictional characters. i know holden caulfield. i know boo. i know owl eyes. i know the weasley twins. these people don't even exist! i've obviously never "met" them. and yet, i have "met" them. they inform me, they elucidate me, they trail me around. they are concepts, perhaps, but i when i imagine them i see them as people. this is weird, is it not. beyond mere imaginary friends, fictional characters stand as reflections of our own personalities, i think. the more we know them, the more we know...ourselves?

maybe.

so back to mythbusters: it is so, so strange. to have thought, that i watched these people for hours on television, to have known of them for years, to have unconsciously collected miscellaneous facts and mannerisms and personality traits from these two, and yet to be a complete stranger? no wonder people do crazy things to celebrities (i.e., the man who shouted "fuck science" in an auditorium of 1,000 people during the presentation. it would have been slightly amusing had my little siblings not been present. mostly it was stupid and annoying.)

...
a few days ago, a friend, nay, an acquaintance, posed me the question:
"how is life?"
it was casual, meant as small talk.
i answered:
"so, so strange. life is so strange." i then proceeded to explain my recent epiphany of sorts that since we have no other experience to compare life to, save the mini-episodes that compose it as whole, i can't really assume that life is strange at all. in fact, i said, it would be impossible to definitively answer such a question; "how is life?" because we have no basis of comparison: we've only lived one life, or rather a fraction of one life even. motion is only relative, not absolute. concepts like the experience of life or the idea of friendship (one and the same really) are impossible to define. i think i freaked him out a little, because he then walked away without saying goodbye (another facet of modern friendship i abhor.) then again, i don't blame him.

because i was wrong.
i was silly.

life is so strange.

sight

2009-04-18T20:19:00.001-07:00

last thursday, i flicked some toothpaste into my right eye by absolute accident. it was mint flavored. it hurt.
then, friday night, i poked the same eye with a peculiar combination of my index and middle finger when something scary happened on the television that made me jump. it was also an accident.

but let's rewind. (do you remember vhs? we had so much more creative control over our media in those days. do you remember the laughs from the rewind? i remember, maybe kindergarten, first grade?, the laughs when the theif handed the purse back to the victim in rewind. it was ridiculously hilarious.) i spent the larger part of my spring break in nashville, before the thursday toothbrush accident, visiting and talking with the homeless. i say these terms 'visiting' and 'talking' although there was much more to it: bingo, food, feet, children, moccasins, ketchup. can i tell you the funniest story about ketchup?

i found myself assigned in a soup kitchen to dish out the ketchup. i don't think the owners of the kitchen trusted the homeless with ketchup. so here i was, gladdly putting ketchup on the homeless' fries, hoping that now and again i might be able to talk or connect with a few of these deepy interesting people. and here is this older man, who stands in front of me, just looking. "ketchup?" i ask him. and there it is: he smiles and says "no -i'm not behind." i don't understand, partially because i don't expect a joke and partially because i just wanted to give him some ketchup. he repeats it, "i'm not behind" and adds "i don't need to ketchup!" and it is suddenly hilarious and everyone, even the stingy lady in charge of making sure they take only one mayonnaise packet, everyone is laughing. i think maybe he refused the ketchup just for the joke.

i played kickball with these people, beat one at chess (it was a good game), laughed, shook hands, talked of arnold schwarzenegger, smiled. sometimes it was hard to figure out which one of us was going back to a bed every night, and the bizarreness overtook me and i had to sit down to just to begin to understand their difficult lives.

i saw such sad things too.

do you know sometimes when you are walking somewhere, perhaps in los angeles, and you see one, maybe he has a sign, maybe he just looks at you. and you think that if you don't look at him in the eye, he won't ask you for money, or expect anything from you, so you just stare ahead. i learned that this is what the homeless hate the most. they just want to be looked at. they just want to be seen.

and this is the difficulty of life.

i often wonder what it would be like to be blind. sometimes i close my eyes for a couple of minutes in the middle of the day and try to function normally, but i soon open my eyes to make sure i don't trip or ignore something important. but i think all of us, whether we even know it or choose it, do this to one degree or another. we block out the unpleasent, we shield our eyes, we would rather just not know at all.

oh, the perils of opening one's eyes to the universe.

subtlety

2009-04-02T16:48:00.000-07:00

the other day, i viewed the facebook profile of a man i have not talked to nor seen in quite some time. you know, to see how he is. is that creepy? it's not creepy. i find it strange that people think that it is creepy to know about other people's lives.

the reason i am telling you this is because of his 'about me' section. it switched point of view three times. it began in first person singular, switched to third, diverged into first person plural, then back into first person singular. it was bizarre and it annoyed me. michael parishy-something did something similar in sixth grade in his (fictional) story about himself being abducted by aliens. his prose zoomed from "the aliens flew their ufo over michael" to "i was strapped into a chair and they performed weird experiments on me" back to "michael felt violated." it may have been a bold post-modern experiment in the dissociative and fragmented individual, i know, but truthfully it annoyed me then just like it annoyed me the other day.

but then, the hypocrisy of it all, is that i love bob dylan. and bob dylan did exactly the same disorienting point-of-view-switch-er-roo in his incredible song 'tangled up in blue,' and i love it, i love it, i love it. in short, with bob dylan it works. but why? michael's story wasn't brillance. perhaps it was because he didn't intend it, perhaps it was something else.

that's the problem with art, i think; it's impossible to tell whether the artist intended to do a thing or not. and usually we jump on things that may have been complete accidents and then ignore the small important things. we can't seem to tell the two apart.

i suppose the artist cannot just say what the artist intends to say, because then it would be banal and stupid. so how can the artist transmit a message while maintaining artistic integrity?

the key is subtlety.

subtlety peppers our lives: it is with subtlety that we make romantic advances and fall in love, it is with subtlety that we talk about ourselves, it is with subtlety that we dress, eat, make art, live. we find things lacking in subtlety to be lacking in beauty. in war, one group of people essentially says to another 'i want to kill you.' we find this hideous. we cringe when the small girl calls the emperor naked, (and for that matter we shade our eyes from nudity because it is certainly everything but subtle) . we want mystery and interpretation. we need it.

but sometimes, on that special occasion, the best course of action is to just throw it all out the window and YELL.

at the top of your lungs.

advice

2009-03-23T19:39:00.000-07:00

a short post today then, a short post for those with zooming lives and zooming minds. i promise next week will be crazy long and packed. i promise.

i have but one small piece to share this week, something that will certainly work its way into my writing:

scene: a suburban living room. two brothers sit; the older one on a couch and the younger beneath a table. the table contains a half-completed puzzle depicting the universe and the many facts that accompany a depicting of the universe.

older brother: "[younger brother], come and let me give you advice."
younger brother: "what. huh." (look of quizzical distrust)
older brother: "just, let me ask you something."
younger brother: "what?"
older brother: "are you going to do apaas* when you get to fourth grade? because you should." (*apaas is an accelerated learning program offered for exceptional young minds.)
younger brother: "no."
older brother: "why not."
younger brother: (incoherence)
older brother: "what about gate*? you should at least do gate."
(*gate is a similar program offered for elementary students)
younger brother: "no."
older brother: (in frustration): "well what then? you're smart. you're good at school. i mean, what do you want to do? what is it that you want to do when you grow up?"
younger brother: "to live."
...
older brother: (in great spiritual silence, works through the unbelievable insight and general revelation brought on by younger brother, and in turn is unable to say anything at all.)

and to think that we regard intelligence as being progressive with age.

rebellion

2009-03-16T16:08:00.001-07:00

it was michigan, with its long summer nights and freezing blanket-clad sleeps, and it was my grandmother's house. it was television, it was precious precious cable, and it was the history channel. it was when i was into history; it was when i eagerly participated in national history day (ask me about the hilarity of my 7th grade documentary showing sometime) and school at large. it was a show about world war two; it was a show about secret weapons; it was when i still believed in war. it was winston churchhill commissioning an aircraft carrier constructed purely of ice, it was ridiculousness and brilliance and entertainment laying on my grandmother's distinctive leather sofa. or maybe it wasn't? memory is such a delicate thing. what i remember best was the aves-guided missile. it was a problem, then, in the second world war, for propelled bombs to hit their intended targets. it was before the computer, before the microchip, before a man could kill with precision and unholy swiftness. the problem was that the missiles were missing. the german and japanese boats were getting away. were they nimble and light on their feet? did they use trickery? i don't know. i do know it was a man who developed a system to solve this missile-missing problem. instead of inventing a brain, he harvested one: he took pigeons; many pigeons. he trained them, gingerly and lovingly, to peck a moving ship when projected onto a piece of glass. they did so because they were rewarded with bird seed. then, in real life, he placed the pigeons in missiles and shot them off at ships. the pigeons pecked the ships, the missiles guided themselves accordingly, and the pigeons were rewarded by being exploded when the missile hit. i am not making this up. ingenious? disturbing? both.

today my spanish teacher announced, before the entire class and in spanish, that she was going to get chains and tie my arms and legs to my desk. this was in response to my springing to my feet upon finding my most recent quiz score to be a 'c', the quiz i studied long nights for, sacrificed sleep for. my friend andrew informs me that what my spanish teacher said was highly illegal because it constituted a threat of unlawful and undue detainment. my friend andrew is a smart man.

today my psychology teacher was in a bad mood. he practiced what he commonly refers to as "displacement," meaning he directed his anger towards us - mostly in the form of a particularly devious pop quiz. we are his pillow he punches when he reads the stock charts. we are his dog he neglets when his boss is cruel to him. we have little left to do but smile and fill in bubbles.

can you feel it, do you know? school is destroying me, it is destroying us. it is an endless race. i am reminded of a particularly biting calvin and hobbes. i am reminded of a particularly insightful t. s. eliot poem. i am reminded of 1989 and purple governors. i am reminded of many things.

it doesn't have to be this way.

oh how i envy those, you perhaps, born but one year before me, living with but one more rotation around the sun. you will leave soon, and you will go on to great and wonderful things, and until then you have little invested in this school and you may do as you please. i will follow you; in a year i will escape. but until then! until then, i have but two options: submit or rebel.

and i can hear them now, everyday, whis-whispering in my ears: peck the ship, paul, peck the ship, peck the ship.

fragments

2009-03-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

for the past several months i've been enamored with this idea of pieces, of small parts of a larger picture, of splintered off fragments. not to mention that, thanks to one conor oberst, the line 'fractions of a whole' has been plaguing my thoughts for the past two years as clever lyrical lines are prone to do. i've also been thinking quite a bit about the gatsby drunk scene, (do you know it? it's the one at the end of chapter II that mrs. king (bless her heart) brushed aside with a sweep of her hands and a dismissive yet hilarious comment that everyone thought was funny, and did so because it was no use trying to explain the concept to a class of fifteen-year-olds who cared only if it would be on the test or not.) and how it ties in with this overall idea of splinters of ideas and information. throw into the mix the reiteration of modernism being discussed in english class, and the new concept of gestaltian psychology that has been discussed in psychology class, and you have a clearer, albeit fractioned, picture of what's going on here.

let's talk about dreams. in all ways, dreams are the most irrational and least coherent experiences any of us will ever have, aside from perhaps the experience of life itself, taken in its entirety. and yet, to defy all of this, dreams are the place where people find solace, meaning, refuge, and clarity! they just make sense. do we set our minds free and allow them to run wild when we dream? do we sort out the events of the day? do we fulfill suppressed desires and unconscious inclinations? do we formulate random images, sounds, and concepts upon essentially meaningless synaptic firing? perhaps none of these questions hold truth, perhaps all. coleridge supposedly wrote 'kubla khan' in his sleep, and mccartney claims to have composed 'yesterday' in a dream as well. i find these claims plausible, and if true, possessing far-reaching implications.

i see dreams as an incredible mirror of what essentially constitutes life: there is beauty, death, fear, laughter, food, people, the mundane, the profound. but perhaps most importantly in this analogy is that dreams, like life, seem to pass away in relative mindsets and differing movements of time. the human mind thrives on the dizzy, on the bokeh, on the confused beauty of the childhood memory. the past is relived everyday in everyone's mind, to one degree or another, but only in fragments do the memories remain for the absentminded parsing we constantly engage in.

here comes the personal experience. one month ago, i underwent surgery for the first time for the removal of my wisdom teeth. (on an aside, the surgeon that did so told me a fair number of wise things, which, besides the terrible pun that he 'removed my wisdom teeth yet gave me wisdom,' is actually quite strange and whimsical when you think about it.) my biggest concern regarding the situation was the application of the anesthesia. i expressed this concern before the surgery, and the nurse in turn put a mask on my face and told me to breath in deep, and of course i was knocked right out without hardly knowing what was going on. it was a deeply, deeply disconcerting experience: knowing that mere vapor can strip you of your very essence and control of your mind is a scary and unsettling thought. but the strangest thing about it, and something that i have only recently realized, is that when i did wake up it wasn't as if the world suddenly changed from darkness to light. i can remember staggering forward, and the nurse helping me to walk, and the incredible heaving to and fro like the earth itself was nauseous. but what boggles me is that, at that moment of waking up, i remembered having memories that proceeded it, but i had no idea what they were. it was almost as if i passed through the surgery fully cognizant and then somehow decided to forget about the whole thing after-the-fact.

finally, we have gestaltian psychology, which basically postulates that the human brain cannot stand emptiness and static devoid of pattern; that it treats the fragments that constantly come to it with disdain. consequently, the theory states, the brain will fill in the missing gaps with meaningful information. this idea has been extended to fill a number of roles, even outside of psychology. watch it go by:

i can dem_ns_rate th_s conc_pt v_ry eas_ly. se_? in ano_her in_ta_ce of bi_ar_e me_t_l f_nc ti_ni_g, in _h_s p_st al_n_ i h__e qu_t_d s_me o_ m_ f_vor_t_ t_ac_e_s. c__ y_u s__ t___?
_a__n_ __ o_ a __sc__e_, ___ __ __g_ _____ .

____ __ _t___ ____a __b___ r__s. ____ f___ ____ __ ___c ___? ____ __ _____ .

___ ___ _ ___ ____
____ ___ __ ___ __
___ __ _ __ ___ __
_ ____ __ ___ _ ___!

definitions

2009-03-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

before i get too into this thing, let's slow down for a moment and discuss exactly what we are doing. to be more clear, we are here mostly because of art. not visual art exactly, but literary art, which belongs to a world in it of its own. but what is art? i have heard many throw about the term nonchalantly, (images come to mind of elementary school art masters) but i reserve more caution in the use of the word, and this i think is partially due to a very specific definition i have created for it.

art - anything that impacts a person with a feeling, emotion, or intangible intuition that cannot otherwise be conveyed using conventional means of expression.

when i read catcher in the rye, i don't care too much about the symbolism of the red hat or the crisp dialogue or the literary allusions. i read it to get an indescribable feeling that is unique and that only comes straight from holden caulfield himself. sure, i care about the other stuff in there, for instance, the lessons it teaches us, or its societal implications. but that is not why i consider it art.

it's something simultaneously indescribable and illusive, and that's what makes it so incredible to experience: try as you might, use as much rational and deductive thought and you still cannot possibly fully understand an old jazz song, or an impressionist painting, or proust. sure logic and study can illuminate aspects of art and aid in our overall understanding of it, but it cannot get at the heart of the matter which is surely unrational and unexplanable with our current vocabulary.

while we are on this whole definitions idea, i want to float out an idea that has been churning in my brain for some time. in some of my lighter readings (namely "outliers" and "this is your brain on music") people much smarter than myself have presented the startlingly simple idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an true expert at something. essentially, 10,000 hours of practice at anything defines an expert, as it seems that the word "expert" is stubbornly difficult to define. this roughly translates to 3 hours a day for 10 years, or 6 hours a day for 5. i am not sure if this entirely accurate, but the data (bill gates, the beatles, other famous talented people) seems to support this. it seems that one needs to log 10,000 hours away to develop great recognizable talent. well, sure, but this doesn't mean genius can't show itself somewhere in hour 3165, for instance. essentially, practice makes perfect, and we really all knew this already. still, it's somewhat of a revolutionary idea for me.

and since i was feeling justifiably lousy about not achieving my 10,000 hours on anything useful like music or writing i have complied a list of activities, which, according to this theory, i am an expert in:

sleeping
eating
speaking english
breathing
wearing clothing
perspiring
looking at things
listening to things
walking
thinking
living.

not so sure about that last one.

lessons

2009-02-23T15:56:00.000-08:00

it was today in english class that my face turned the color of my jacket, which is bright red if you didn't know. this happened because of a rather unfortunate placement of words that were emitted from my mouth. i have found rather often that the words that swirl about in my head have a way of becoming tangled up and convoluted by the time they exit me. in this case, they became rather embarrassing en route.

we were reading araby, a classic tale of, my teacher incessantly reminds us, epiphany. after so brilliantly and deftly explaining the various nuances and subtleties so inherent in joycean literature, she asked us if we had notice aforementioned elements when we had first read it. i believe she did this, in part, to convince us that we had learned so so much from the short lesson (which, we probably had). everybody said, no we didn't realize all these things. she said, i know. then she said, what did you realize. what were you looking for. and everyone said, plot. i was going to say plot, except that it was too obvious and of course everyone else was saying it, and i wanted to speak with some impression of knowledge. and so, without truly thinking, i said the word explicit, in order to mean things that are present just by looking and things that, in literature, are easily recognized, and then i said content, which is a smart word i use in place of the word things. unfortunately, this came out as explicit content. this unfortunate word-play, combined with the fact that there had been several instances of coy sexual imagery in the story that had already been pointed out, made things all the more ridiculous and embarrassing. effect in full:

teacher: what were you looking for when you first read this story?

paul: explicit content.

rest of class: *great fits of whimsical and generally imposing laughter*

paul: no!, you don't understand, i meant, no, it's not like that, not at all, you see, i meant to say things that you could simply see, like plot, and...

case in point.

the good news is that, even though we are studying freud and his theories in that class (ironically, more in depth than in psychology, but that is a story for a different day) the teacher never brought up the concept of the freudian slip in relation to my selection of words. which saved me from further embarrassment, at least.

not that i believe in freud, though. or practically any psychology. which is why i have really brought us here today. i want to talk about psychology. first thing: psycology discounts individual discrepancies. where is the individual in psychology? he is reduced to nothing, to bits of neurons and metaphors of icebergs. how can you truly develope theories of normalcy and psychological health in relation to a human being without making implicit assumptions about what it means to be a human? humanistic theories have attempted to reconcile this question but, in my opinion, have done so at the sacrifice of true scientific reasoning. furthermore, it has been my experience that these assumptions about basic human behavior by the likes of freud, jung, and others are, many times, wrong. freud was mostly wrong. the things he postulated were just theories without much support, and mostly incorrect theories at that. and yet, schools and universities across the country go parading his ideas around like they possess significant meaning and truth to them, as if they explain every single facet of human variability and worth. they don't. humans don't work like freud postulated. to some degree, yes, the unconsious exists, but it isn't composed only of the eros and thanatos. the human being is so unbelievably complex! maybe this notion underscores my uneasiness with psychology in general, or maybe i am just channeling salinger.

i like psychology, nay, i love it. but we have to be careful. psychology has so much to tell us, but unlike chemistry or calculus, we must be careful in what we allow ourselves to believe in.

now without further ado i would like to present to you the goodrich theory of academic development, which manifests itself in 6 distinct stages, and is meant to mirrow similar conjectures by kohlberg.

pre-conventional (ages 1 to 10)
1. the student tries in school because that is what he is supposed to do.

2. the student tries in school because the teacher gives rewards to encourage effort, like candy or good grades.

conventional (ages 10 to ???)
3. the student tries in school because of vague and undefined ideas about "success", "getting ahead in the world", and "do you want to spend the rest of your life flipping burgers at mcdonalds?"

4. the student tries in school because of the enticement of college and subsequent consequences resulting from college. typically intellectual curiousity, if it springs up, is stunted at this stage by referrences to concepts found in stage 3.

post-conventional (may never be reached)

5. student reaches for intesting concepts at this stage and only does academically what he deems necessary to his overall intellectual illumination as a human being. this stage is also referred to as college.

6. the student, realizing that he is truly a student no matter what the circumstances, elects to quit school and spend a significant portion of time on a well-earned exotic and eclectic journey through such locales as mongolia and new zealand, all the while reaching for higher spiritual principles and self-improvement. this stage never ends as the student, free of all confines and terrors of school, is free to learn and explore whatever he pleases. also called, "truly living life". this stage is generally condemed by soceity.

i find myself somewhere between stages 4 and 5. at this point, stage 6 is only a far-off dream.

manifesto

2009-02-15T19:50:00.000-08:00

it was several months ago, in a fit of insight and rapid discernment, that i decided to become, nay, to be a writer. not as a career or lifestyle, per se, but rather as an approach to preserving and cataloging my thoughts, ideas, and soul; as well as a way to figure out what is happening to myself, the people around me, and the world at large. sometime in the late afternoon i was preparing to step into the shower, and after removing my clothes and turning on the water (with its incessant sizzle when striking the white tile) i glanced out of my window on a caprice. i was startled to see my neighbor and her boyfriend, with their tight pants and colored wayfarers, standing on the roof of her green house and looking down to her parents for a picture. horrified, as the two of them had a direct view into my bathroom, i covered my naked chest inadequately with my two hands and ducked out of sight. it was then that i knew. eureka?, epiphany? -perhaps. i have to write. i have to do it. somehow the neural synapses connected and in that instant it was over without a fight. there is no turning back, i will carry the weight until i die or lose cognitive functioning. it was a hopeless cause to begin with, and i have surrendered myself over to these literary shackles ever since.

so here we are.

if you stop by from time to time you may find fragments of ideas, poems, and stories (which are all ways to say the same thing, really). personal accounts will inevitably sneak their way in. ideas will be bounced off of you, or the thought of you. clarifications will be made, ambigouity will be introduced, complexity will be simplified and celebrated simultaneously. masks will be worn and in those moment vunerability will shine throught the most. but above all else, this blog will serve as a means to a very important ends, and it is this:

i want to know.

specifically, in this moment, i want to know the following things:

is it possible to cultivate synesthesia?
how many potential soul-mates does a person have in the world?
why do musicians talk like they have a speech impediment in interviews? they seem to be able to sing just fine. is it because they think it will make them sound more profound?
what makes childhood such a beautiful time in a person's life?
how can everyone be lonely? why can't lonely people befriend other lonely people and eliminate loneliness altogether?
biosopsis or thanatopsis? both?
why is the blogger spell-check so terrible?

so here's my proposition: let's figure out the answers to these and other questions, let's abolish capitalized letters, let's never get boring, let's be honest, let's dream lucid dreams, let's forget our sat scores, let's thank our second grade teachers, let's invent new emotions, let's outlaw monotony.

deal?