Ithaca
16 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Dreams, Favorite Things Tags: Constantine P. Cavafy, poetry, travel
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)
Deep In It
29 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Dreams Tags: introspection
We process our crazy in different ways.
I process my crazy in little projects. I depend on systems and spreadsheets and tasks and responsibilities and checklists in order to keep me sane. And when I pine, this becomes a system in which I have to figure out how to exist.
When pressed. When pressed about my crazy. About the reins I’m pulling taught around the spiral of my thoughts. When pressed about all of that, the thin membrane I’m desperately trying to keep in tact degrades, erodes, decays and any semblance of control is deflated.
I’m not the type of crazy to set your car on fire.
I’m the worse kind. The kind that will sit in a bar, silently, mulling, over a glass of something brown. I’m the kind that you don’t want to touch. I’m the kind that won’t be fun in bed. I’m the kind that might just bum you out when you end up figuring out that there’s someone else on your mind after you’ve been with me for a few hours. But I’m a time filler. So what does it matter.
I’m a self-depricating kind of crazy that men love to say, “Awwwww,” to before planting false kisses on my forehead. Because they believe that the right one is out there for me. It’s just not them. I deserve someone better.
In the meantime. My crazy consumes me. These four walls close in. The eight corners cast shadows. My memories become more significant. I regret. I pine.
I would rather brood. Apparently, that makes me less attractive to the opposite sex. Well, I’ve tried everything else. So I’m just going to brood. Because I’m okay in this space. I don’t need to tell anyone anything about myself in this space. I can be quiet in this space. I don’t have to win anyone over in this space.
I will leave the country in a few days. I will run away. I will remove myself from the situation. I will go far, far away from everything here that makes me so comfortably uncomfortable, so lonely in a crowd of my nearest and dearest. I will know myself differently. I will be working.
Everything will be different.
Nonlinear
23 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Dreams Tags: introspection
My life is not linear. I experience my life in a montage of flashbacks and flashforwards. Memories and hopes drifting back and forth, pushing up against each other, influencing each other. I expect that I will remember my life differently with each new and important event.
Say, for example, in this moment, I am feeling completely and utterly alone. In the future I may have built a family and when I look back on my current loneliness, I will remember it differently. I will remember the adventures. I will remember the friendships. But tomorrow, I will look back on today and think, “My God, will this never end? Will I always feel so hopeless?”
Sometimes I believe that I haven’t evolved from a precocious sixteen year old. And other times I feel I’ve evolved so much that my brain can’t wrap its head around what has happened to me and what my purpose has now become. Sometimes I see myself as an 80 year old woman, looking out at her garden through thick spectacles, laughing at herself, holding onto her precious memories. Sometimes I feel that this is not real, this life I’m living, I’m a character in a story, unaware of the audience watching me who are enjoying my shortcomings, identifying with my hubris, waiting for catharsis, relieved at the denouement.
I don’t think life is linear. I think everything that has happened and will happen and is happening actually occurred when time and space were created all at once. There is no such thing as the past or the future and the present is just what our consciousness has created for us. Our life experiences are a fractal of mirrored images replicating themselves over and over. We will never know the end, our memories are sentimental, ethereal things, all we have is what we can see and touch and feel. The only kind of truth there is is the kind of truth we create for ourselves. Whether it’s the good kind of truth or the bad kind of truth might just be up to us.
I want to create some goodness. That’s the kind of truth that matters to me.
Heavy
09 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Dreams, Love Tags: ophelia, poetry, waterhouse
Heavy skirts
pulled at by the underneath
deep darkness
grasping out at the glimmer
of a friend long lost
aching, missing,
wondering why did she leave in the first place
no matter she has come back to us now
and she will never leave.
Deep darkness
holds onto what it lost
and won’t let go this time
no, never again
because it is too precious
didn’t realize what it had till it left
and now her heavy skirts
have brought her back
have brought her back for good.
Resilient
06 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Dreams Tags: beautiful, fighter, heroine, tough, zhang ziyi
I need to watch every Zhang Ziyi movie ever.
Annoyed
04 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Dreams, Los Angeles Tags: art, artist, bellflower, filmmaking
I listened to an interview with Evan Glodell on NPR the other day and it made me so annoyed. I’m entirely sure that he has every right to all the accolades he’s earned with his movie Bellflower, which I hear is innovative and beautiful. But he just sounded like some kid. Just a little boy without much insight at all, without any gravity to him. I wanted to admire him and I wanted to be proud of this super intelligent guy who made something new and great. But I was so thrown off by his lack of grace.
I’m a jerk to say it. I know. I should still see the movie and potentially fall in love with it. It’s art, after all. Pulsating, beautiful, angry, thoughtful art… So they say.
Self-Destroy
03 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Dreams Tags: anime, artists way, claymore, creativity, yoma
I have been challenged to find a visual representation of that voice in my head that tells me I’m no good and post it somewhere I can see it and every time I say something disparaging about the things I do or think or create or say, I’m supposed to look at it and tell it to back off… or something. The silly things I subject myself to in order to feel sane again.
Luckily, I’ve been watching a ton of anime, and some of my favorite shows and movies have really great monsters for me to choose from. The most recent show I’ve been getting into is Claymore, about a group of warrior women who are half human and half “Yoma,” a kind of monster. In the show there has been a plague of full Yomas devouring humans as they travel from town to town, disguising themselves as the people they consume. Claymores are hired to kill the Yomas, since they’re the only things that can sense when there is a Yoma disguised as a human. So when the Claymore are about to kill a Yoma, they let their Yoma-ness come out and suddenly they go from cold and beautiful to angry and horrible.
I’m going to post this picture of a Yoma right where I can see it so that whenever I start feeling like everything I do is stupid, I can flick it or insult it or put a voodoo pin in it or something.
30 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Dreams Tags: creativity, potential, someday
I know that somewhere inside of me there is a great mind looking to express itself. My work and my studies reflect only a small portion of this. I know that I have really great ideas and great things to contribute to the world. And someday I’ll be able to shine the way I think I should be shining. Someday.
Coriander
21 Aug 2011 3 Comments
in Dreams Tags: creativity, theater, writers block, writing
I started writing a play years ago, right after I came back from living abroad in London. I was going to write about a family of women who were living without the presence of a father figure. It would be set in some American country town somewhere and I was writing everything with this Twain-like drawl. Even though the teenagers were modern day adolescents, in this world, hand written letters were still the thing to do. For some reason, this family was absent of technology, just because it didn’t interest them at all. Reading it again, I wonder if in my mind, these characters just enjoyed the romance of a world that is less technical, less modern, where people build their own houses and grow their own food. I don’t know when that time exists or where this place is that I was creating.
I think I enjoyed that about being a playwright (before I wanted to set everything I wrote on fire). If I didn’t know where it was that I was writing about, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t necessarily writing about a place, I was writing about something I felt or believed about the world. The youngest child, to me represented a naive sense of loyalty to ones family or childhood values. The adolescent young woman maybe represented a reflection of who I thought I was: an angsty, lonely girl trying to make something of herself in a world full of rejection (she wants to be a writer). And the mother character perhaps represents an ideal womanhood. Strength, grace, simple elegance, manners.
I’m a horribly insecure writer. I want to write this again. I want to throw myself into it and write and play with that weird drawl I was constructing years ago. But damn it, I don’t want to show it to people and realize that I’m a really truly bad writer. Which is difficult because the wonder of writing a play is seeing it performed and read aloud. Is there a way that I can just do this in the comfort of my own bedroom with a few very well trusted friends? I would just like to enjoy the act of writing again. It meant… It means so much to me… present tense.
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