Because apparently, people still read my blog...
Honestly, guys, sorry for not updating. I've been horrible about this lately, but college is a whole new playing field for me. However, in honor of my birthday, I'm posting up another one of my poems. I was debating for a few days whether or not this should ever see the light of day, but I'm on such an emotional high right now that I feel nothing can crush me. Even your raw, ruthless criticism. I'm not giving any context, so take what you want from it.
Fleeting
The clouds move like a drunken New York biker.
Barely above ground level,
With no sense of a straight line or slowing down.
Fast like a subway train
Only it's the express one, so it skips a couple necessary stops.
Fast like the cigarette-infested October rainwater
Racing down battered concrete
into the Underworld.
Like a pencil gliding across a dead tree
To draw my skewed interpretation of Zooey Deschanel's nose
in 500 Days of Summer.
Why do we move so fast
Like braindead coke addicts?
I'm not on drugs.
I don't think.
I wonder if, when he wakes up,
He ever remembers how my eyelashes tickled his neck
As we drooled on his Ikea pillowcase
And pretended we didn't have class in twenty minutes,
Or that his roommate wasn't undressing in the bed next to us.
From the day we met,
We were as likely to last as the New York clouds could stay in place.
We raced through a fragile honey-colored plane of impossibilities.
When you speed the "in love" part,
It feels a lot more like falling.
And now
After the stale whiskey and screwdriver shots
And his lovely marks and my sleeping pills
And the uncontrollable, barely remembered hysteria,
After getting used to waking up without his warm elbow jabbing into my shoulder
After realizing his ability to ignore any emotion
After one week
I just keep thinking about the New York bikers,
Recklessly speeding and not caring who they hurt in the process
And leaving others to clean up the mess they've made.
Continue reading >>
Tuesday, October 13
Wednesday, August 12
First step to happiness
Trust is tricky because you can't really love without trust. Even after my mother catches me lying to her, the next day she still takes my word for where I'm going that night (though with more suspicion) because she loves me unconditionally. A love without trust is tainted, and an honest relationship of any kind is impossible.
I rarely believe in successful relationships after one of the partners has cheated. The other tries to overcome the past because "I'm still in love", but except in rare cases where the trust is fully regained after a certain period of time, there will always be a slight sense of discomfort regardless of how benevolent both people's intentions are. I'm not criticizing - I've been cheated on in the past, and though I broke it off, I always gave another chance. But I'm also not denying that it won't be the same. Every time I see him messaging a girl he's messed with in the past, I flinch. Every time he stays out past midnight, it takes a big effort to drive away the slight paranoia that won't let me fall asleep. Why bother, if it's such a big stress case? Because "I'm still in love". But after weeks of the same scenario I can honestly say that it sucks.
A relationship is successful if it continues to make you happy, and true happiness is a long-term sort of contentness. An emotional roller coaster of tears and ecstasy is all fun when you're, like, 15, but after a while you want something that brings you security. What I'm doing is about as antonymic of security as milk and Campari, and yet I stay. And here's a fun fact: I've been crying every night for the past week. Every damn night - about moving away, my parents' scandals, getting yelled at at the post office (yeah... seriously), being the emotional baggage girl in college, and how I'm losing this fight. I feel like I'm shooting myself in the foot when I tell him my insecurities, but that's wrong, because someone who truly cares about you won't love you less for your insecurities. Those nights, I feel helpless and can't think of a single step to take in the positive direction.
Then there are times like now, when I think I know what that step has to be. It is to trust, no matter how badly you want to keep your guard up. Either trust, or leave. I don't have much experience in love, but I think in the long term, it's better to be the person who puts themselves out there and gets hurt rather than the one who always lives in suspicion. Because pretending to be happy is about as helpful to you as knowing that tulips come from Turkey.
Continue reading >>
I rarely believe in successful relationships after one of the partners has cheated. The other tries to overcome the past because "I'm still in love", but except in rare cases where the trust is fully regained after a certain period of time, there will always be a slight sense of discomfort regardless of how benevolent both people's intentions are. I'm not criticizing - I've been cheated on in the past, and though I broke it off, I always gave another chance. But I'm also not denying that it won't be the same. Every time I see him messaging a girl he's messed with in the past, I flinch. Every time he stays out past midnight, it takes a big effort to drive away the slight paranoia that won't let me fall asleep. Why bother, if it's such a big stress case? Because "I'm still in love". But after weeks of the same scenario I can honestly say that it sucks.
A relationship is successful if it continues to make you happy, and true happiness is a long-term sort of contentness. An emotional roller coaster of tears and ecstasy is all fun when you're, like, 15, but after a while you want something that brings you security. What I'm doing is about as antonymic of security as milk and Campari, and yet I stay. And here's a fun fact: I've been crying every night for the past week. Every damn night - about moving away, my parents' scandals, getting yelled at at the post office (yeah... seriously), being the emotional baggage girl in college, and how I'm losing this fight. I feel like I'm shooting myself in the foot when I tell him my insecurities, but that's wrong, because someone who truly cares about you won't love you less for your insecurities. Those nights, I feel helpless and can't think of a single step to take in the positive direction.
Then there are times like now, when I think I know what that step has to be. It is to trust, no matter how badly you want to keep your guard up. Either trust, or leave. I don't have much experience in love, but I think in the long term, it's better to be the person who puts themselves out there and gets hurt rather than the one who always lives in suspicion. Because pretending to be happy is about as helpful to you as knowing that tulips come from Turkey.
Continue reading >>
Monday, August 10
The greatest lie ever told
I don't like talking to self-assured adults. They complain about their dull, banal problems and like to point out how much life experience they have to back up their arguments. What I saw back in Turkmenistan this summer was especially bad. The men took up the role of stoic-diplomat-on-vacation, walking around the pool with four cell phones allotted to their four different businesses while wearing very form-fitting underwear, and the women, when they weren't busy gossiping with each each other about what shade of beige is in this year (I'm dead serious), took precious minutes teaching their kids inverted morals to ensure that they grow up to be just like their parents. They all look hard for cliches and punchlines and idioms to appear intelligent to their aristocrat friends, whose brains just as equally epitomize degradation.
The greatest lie ever told is that life has meaning and adults know what it is. The problem is that by the time you realize this, it's too late: you've already spent your best years setting materialistic goals and slaving away toward a sugary future outlined by your parents (work hard in school -> work harder in college -> land a six-digit job -> success), and now you're thirty-something and no closer to enlightenment than you were ten years ago. Then you either end up with a special type of depression known as a mid-life crisis and desperately try to gain back lost time, or you can take your frustration out on your kids by letting the lie live on.
Does life have meaning, and does anyone know what it is? A popular opinion seems to be that we're brought into the world to find happiness. The problem with that theory is that it doesn't bring you any closer to being happy or to figuring out that which will make you happy. And if there are any adults worth talking to about this business, I haven't had the pleasure of meeting them.
Continue reading >>
The greatest lie ever told is that life has meaning and adults know what it is. The problem is that by the time you realize this, it's too late: you've already spent your best years setting materialistic goals and slaving away toward a sugary future outlined by your parents (work hard in school -> work harder in college -> land a six-digit job -> success), and now you're thirty-something and no closer to enlightenment than you were ten years ago. Then you either end up with a special type of depression known as a mid-life crisis and desperately try to gain back lost time, or you can take your frustration out on your kids by letting the lie live on.
Does life have meaning, and does anyone know what it is? A popular opinion seems to be that we're brought into the world to find happiness. The problem with that theory is that it doesn't bring you any closer to being happy or to figuring out that which will make you happy. And if there are any adults worth talking to about this business, I haven't had the pleasure of meeting them.
Continue reading >>
On art
Warning: do not attempt to read this post if you are excessively tired, sleepy, busy, impatient, or intoxicated.
This is from a book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, and I will probably be mentioning it a lot in the near future. Besides being hands-down the best book I've ever read, there are so many thoughts and ideas to take away from it. It continues to teach long after the last page was turned. I thought this was the perfect passage to start things off as it introduces the very reason I choose art - and I mean all kinds of art - as my career choice and lifelong path. I'm going into a political science major, but all for the sake of reporting on it using words that can influence, sentences that are crafted in a way that hits all the right buttons. That's art. Why is it that we are happy to read something really good, and we marvel at the writer's talent for so effortlessly lightening our mood?
Continue reading >>
Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight, does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where - even though tomorrow we will die - we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring...
This is from a book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, and I will probably be mentioning it a lot in the near future. Besides being hands-down the best book I've ever read, there are so many thoughts and ideas to take away from it. It continues to teach long after the last page was turned. I thought this was the perfect passage to start things off as it introduces the very reason I choose art - and I mean all kinds of art - as my career choice and lifelong path. I'm going into a political science major, but all for the sake of reporting on it using words that can influence, sentences that are crafted in a way that hits all the right buttons. That's art. Why is it that we are happy to read something really good, and we marvel at the writer's talent for so effortlessly lightening our mood?
...We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is art. When we gaze at a still life, when - even though we did not pursue it - we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. In this scene before our eyes - silent, without life or motion - a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed - pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.
For art is emotion without desire.
Continue reading >>
Sunday, August 9
The beginning of the end
And here I go again.
I'm definitely planning to continue the blog during college - how else will my old friends know the agonizing details of the big fat crazy booty-shaking adventure that is life at NYU - but I feel like those posts will belong to a world entirely different from this one. Before I take that last step, there are still some entries left to be written. They'll be succinct and probably random, just like my last thoughts about all the years spent in Palo Alto.
The reason I've been MIA for a month is that I've been vacationing in Russia, but that's not why I haven't posted in such a long time. The truth is that there are so many things to say that I can't even start talking. Hopefully they'll come out bit by bit over the next few weeks because as I've said before, writing helps me deal with whatever's wrong, and yes I KNOW I shouldn't be complaining because I'm going to a great school in one of the most exciting cities in the world and yada yada, but since I'm saying something's wrong I must have a reason, right?
All I ask of you readers is that you don't dismiss my reasons. "You'll forget about it in a few months" sounds dandy, but at least consider the possibility that there's more to it. There may be more to it than the routinely cold feet or my habitual overthinking or, as Mr. Daren liked to say, my "teenage angst" (how strange to think that I'll never have to answer to him again). Or there may be not. Mr. Pandich, my old history teacher, liked to remind us of the kiss principle - keep it simple, stupid - whenever we wrote anything, long or short. So I'm keeping it simple and unedited. This is me, this is the end of a huge chunk of my life and the beginning of another, and this is how I say goodbye.
After I get the obvious out of the way, it gets complicated.
Continue reading >>
I'm definitely planning to continue the blog during college - how else will my old friends know the agonizing details of the big fat crazy booty-shaking adventure that is life at NYU - but I feel like those posts will belong to a world entirely different from this one. Before I take that last step, there are still some entries left to be written. They'll be succinct and probably random, just like my last thoughts about all the years spent in Palo Alto.
The reason I've been MIA for a month is that I've been vacationing in Russia, but that's not why I haven't posted in such a long time. The truth is that there are so many things to say that I can't even start talking. Hopefully they'll come out bit by bit over the next few weeks because as I've said before, writing helps me deal with whatever's wrong, and yes I KNOW I shouldn't be complaining because I'm going to a great school in one of the most exciting cities in the world and yada yada, but since I'm saying something's wrong I must have a reason, right?
All I ask of you readers is that you don't dismiss my reasons. "You'll forget about it in a few months" sounds dandy, but at least consider the possibility that there's more to it. There may be more to it than the routinely cold feet or my habitual overthinking or, as Mr. Daren liked to say, my "teenage angst" (how strange to think that I'll never have to answer to him again). Or there may be not. Mr. Pandich, my old history teacher, liked to remind us of the kiss principle - keep it simple, stupid - whenever we wrote anything, long or short. So I'm keeping it simple and unedited. This is me, this is the end of a huge chunk of my life and the beginning of another, and this is how I say goodbye.
After I get the obvious out of the way, it gets complicated.
Continue reading >>
Monday, June 1
List of the Week aka Just Friends, v. 2
This week, the post features a list of things I will miss about this boy. I was thinking of writing it entry-style like I did at the end of last year, but figured this way I'll kill both birds. After all, what better theme for a list of the week than a run down memory lane full of uncomfortable, awkward, kinda-makes-you-cringe-every-time-you-think-about-them sweet old memories? This time there's a lot more to say anyway.
Things I'll miss
But dammit, I wish you'd forgive me for my choice. Now that the year is winding down and I'm getting ready to pack my bags for the Dominican, there's nothing I want more than to leave on a good note. You say you're over it, but you clearly haven't moved past it. Obviously, things will not go back to normal; but they sure as hell aren't gonna move anywhere if you keep them at this stalemate. You've gotta start somewhere. One word, some effort. What you're afraid of won't even matter now since we may never see each other again. There'll be no more glances, no more smiles -
There’ll be no more grabbing my hand to pat it as one of our many inside jokes and no more sharing the worst pickup lines that involve touching body parts of the opposite sex (in appropriate places, of course). No more yelling across the hall about how great my ass looks in those jeans because you knew that made me insanely uncomfortable, and you’ve always enjoyed my misery.
I miss being just friends. I guess I never got used to it.
Continue reading >>
Things I'll miss
- Our ridiculous, at times completely inappropriate and at all times frustrating stubbornness.
- Catching a glimpse of your head in-between people I really don't care about
- (And you're not hard to spot, you have a total of like six shirts that you rotate every now and then)
- Walking - more realistically, shoving and pushing - through the crowd to where you're standing, making quick expressionless eye contact (I am so breezy) and continuing on my way, wondering what thought crossed your mind in that fraction of a second
- The jokes that didn't ever make much sense
- Comfortable laughs
- Simple, unspoken understanding
- How I could always count on a conversation whenever my day was crappy (and that was like 28 days out of each month)
- The long, long talks every night that were the reason homework wasn't finished and bedtime came at 1, sometimes 2
- How I told you absolutely everything (too much, apparently)
- Your sober, practical, slightly jealous point of view that I turned to when the girls' got overcliched and annoying
- Your taste in music that I rarely liked
- Your equally strange taste in movies that were usually overdone
- Except for When Harry Met Sally, that one was good. And I remember that's not where everything started with us but it just made things more complicated.
- Your hands, which were so rough from doing what you love to do (that's what she said (not really heheh (well kind of... but that's not what I mean)))
- Your endless search for a fitting compliment that just ended up making me laugh anyway
- How you could always notice the small things, but didn't always understand them
- Watching you stand all cute and shy at Starbucks
- How, no matter how amazing of a day I was having in New York, I couldn't wait to get to the hotel room to tell you all about it
- Which reminds me: I'll miss calling you in the airport to say goodbye, in case our plane crashed
- Directing my many AIM statuses at you
- Singing (and I think it's time to agree that I am loads better)
- Making faces when I should have been paying attention during a class with a teacher FROM THE DARKEST PITS OF HELL
- The couch, your laptop burning your thighs
- (I watched that show till the end, you know. The very last episode.)
- Your face when it got really, really serious. Which, honestly, scared me a little
- Your naive plans for us, for me. Didn't I tell you it was a one-way road I was on?
- How you were outside your house barefoot in December talking to me on the phone because you couldn't do it otherwise
- Most importantly, I'll miss how you forgave me. You forgave me for my little Christmas surprise, and you forgave me for what happened the day after.
But dammit, I wish you'd forgive me for my choice. Now that the year is winding down and I'm getting ready to pack my bags for the Dominican, there's nothing I want more than to leave on a good note. You say you're over it, but you clearly haven't moved past it. Obviously, things will not go back to normal; but they sure as hell aren't gonna move anywhere if you keep them at this stalemate. You've gotta start somewhere. One word, some effort. What you're afraid of won't even matter now since we may never see each other again. There'll be no more glances, no more smiles -
There’ll be no more grabbing my hand to pat it as one of our many inside jokes and no more sharing the worst pickup lines that involve touching body parts of the opposite sex (in appropriate places, of course). No more yelling across the hall about how great my ass looks in those jeans because you knew that made me insanely uncomfortable, and you’ve always enjoyed my misery.
I miss being just friends. I guess I never got used to it.
Continue reading >>
Friday, May 29
Changing face
When I looked at the home page of my blog this morning, instead of feeling a rush of excitement at all the writing possibilities, I felt a whopping bleeeeeeeeeh. It just screamed (or more likely whimpered, as it dried up, withering) dread and depression. So I changed the header to something more fitting to the next few months that are opening up ahead of me.
For some reason I have a newfound obsession with the color lime - it is bright without being obnoxious, and at the same time cooling without looking dreary. I've got a bit of New York in there, although I doubt this header will last far into the year. The funky font is actually the same one they use for the headings in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, which is what my life reminds me of sometimes - a giant cartoon. Only less funny.
Countdown to trip: 9 days. I'm still trying to figure out a way to blog in internetless Turkmenistan.
Continue reading >>
For some reason I have a newfound obsession with the color lime - it is bright without being obnoxious, and at the same time cooling without looking dreary. I've got a bit of New York in there, although I doubt this header will last far into the year. The funky font is actually the same one they use for the headings in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, which is what my life reminds me of sometimes - a giant cartoon. Only less funny.
Countdown to trip: 9 days. I'm still trying to figure out a way to blog in internetless Turkmenistan.
Continue reading >>
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