.process.

I've finally woken up from a fever running at 104 and - mate, it was hellish. No pun intended, of course. I only joke about hell on the weekends.

Anyhow, amidst the dreary drifts and fitful fantasies spurred by continual doses of Advil, images and words struck me like I was panning for gold. These particular moments, dreamlike in quality and clarity, I tried to hold fast, almost against their will. The weak floral print protested under my insistence and whole ideas shredded into bits like ripped cloth. Some rags clasped tight in my fingers, others floated away.


When I awoke, not from the fitful fever, but from the sleep, the world seemed much less definable and I, in turn, much less loquacious. Mingled with a sense of drowsiness, was a feeling of being torn - proud that I had managed to finally achieve what seems to be so impossible these days, yet aggravated to realize just how easily I'd let these words slip away again.


I fervently tried to join the loose threads of what was floral rags. There was not much left to salvage, but at least I'll have tried.
________________________________________________________________

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still opened behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say, Stop,
don't do it -- she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

- Sharon Olds (from The Gold Cell)

Art Dump

Just an old art piece...had to post it somewhere. Nothing too much, really, its conceptual...But i enjoyed doing it. Speed painting is funn. more stuff to come.

Time: 1 hour (damn cosmo)

Wacom Intuos

PS CS3

In the Here. And Now.

These are not New Year's resolutions. Personally, I think new year's resolutions are silly and one dimensional and I'm simultaneously amused and aggravated by the need for a new year to come so that change can be spurred.


However, I'm not completely closed off to the infectious reborn spirit that tingles the air.

The past few weeks have been...tumultuous. I have sunk from one low to the next and have wrote such depressing posts that they are fit only to be unpublished and I hope they never surface and see the light of day. I think that was really important though. I surrounded myself with every single thing, thought, notion and aspect that would overwhelm me in mourning and grief. Music, places, feelings, thoughts, artifacts, plans, pro-con lists. I spread it all around me and devoured every last one.

There are two points in a mourning period. One, in which your grief overwhelms you; the more you think about lifting your head, the farther it drops. You want to grieve, you want to be depressed. And the other is when you completely shake off this feeling - not only of the grief, but also of that feeling of wanting to drown in its swell. People say that this is when you get over it. But that's not true. This point is when you meet the grief head to head. When you've sunk so low that you can finally meet that grief and come to terms with it.

In a manner of speaking, I was grieving. I was grieving for a good many things, good people. The loss seems like a death of sorts - death of a love, death of a dream - and the unknowing: not knowing, as I stand at this crossroads, which path I should take, how much I trust myself, where to turn and whom to turn to. How to pick what it is I want to do, or change or be when there's just so much to do and change and be.


I have finally reached a point in which I no longer want to grieve. I no longer want to sink and wallow and tread. I am still in the process of discussion with that grief; we're still setting out the terms. But there are certain things that we - I - have absolutely established beyond a modicum of doubt.


Firstly, what is past...truly is past. It is gone. It is neither touchable through memory nor through time. It is gone. What could have been will always be rosier than what is now. That is a given. Secondly, from what is gone, something can always be rebuilt. I think of this like the rebirth of a phoenix or the remains of a hurricane. A phoenix dies by erupting into flame and as a piece of matter that once was, it leaves behind other matter - ashes. The death is heartbreaking but it is organic. Because there is always matter left in the wake of the destruction with which to rebuild oneself, to be reborn. The baby phoenix rises from the ashes. A hurricane ravages and eats and completely consumes people's homes, their livelihoods and any ounce of sense they have been able to understand. But once it quietens down, the remains of wood and debris, of cables and clothes, are the symbols of destruction with which people's lives are rebuilt.


Matter begets matter. One is never left with absolutely nothing. One is never washed ashore with nothing. In the chasm between what once was and what is now, there is a vaccum for the birth of what will be.

I'm not yet sure what it will be. But I think that I've been putting way too much emphasis on what it should be and setting myself up for disappointment. There is nothing exploratory in an absolute projection of a future. Telling myself, internalizing, that things will be this way and that, that I will be this way and that, is silly. It makes no sense. I'm not getting out there and doing it, fulfilling it - whatever it may be. Instead, I'm moping that it's not happening and I'm not there. But I didn't know where exactly I wanted to be.

I'm going to go really slow. Intrinsically, that is very hard for me - in fact, is goes against the very definition of me. I'm impulsive and emotional and heady (Aries, after all :D). I jump from one thing to the next. But I'm really going to take the time to take it all in. I'm not going to ride the constant adrenaline wave because, really, I can't anymore. I've lost all sense of direction and I need to regain it. Well, I need to gain it because who knows if I had it to begin with. Everything seems illusatory and dream-like these days.

Anyhow, these are some things that I have carefully thought in what seems like my time in exile. Not hasty, impulsive decisions, but real, actual actions.

I'm going to volunteer. One of my problems these past few months have been that I've been completely overwhelmed. I'm absolutely, mentally swamped with everything - the state of the world. There are just so many causes to take up, so many ways in which to advocate those causes and yet still many more places in which they plague. There's injustice everywhere. How do you tackle it all at once? How do you save the world from it's own catatonic self?

I'm going to write a letter to him. It will not be a silent one. It will not be a disasterous one like the rory-writes-dean-a-letter-and-he-gets-thrown-out. It will be an apology letter. It will be a letter not because I have no courage to face him but because somethings are better said in print. With such fragile memories as people have come to have (slight sarcastic undertone), a letter would seem to have greater longevity. And brevity. The boy I knew is done and gone now and there is nothing so relieving as that lingering note of finality. He is - in a manner of speaking - dead and this new person is a stranger to me. I have no intention that our lives should ever cross again but if it does, I want there to be no bitterness.

I'm going to take dl.

I'm going to create. I'm going to give life to all those ideas. I'm not going to leave them half-baked. I really do think creation is complete immortality and beauty intertwined and forgive me for my follies/vices but I do want to be part of such a beguiling thing.

I'm going to see the city.

I'm going to learn one new thing every single day. No matter its triviality.

I'm going to be wrapped up like this - cautious and deliberate - for a while, until I figure everything out. Most importantly, I'm going to be in the here and the now, Now.

Head-liner

There is something strange about this statement:

"Oil rises as Middle East fighting rages: Crude prices rose above $40 a barrel Monday as Israel and Palestinian militants exchanged rocket fire and the death toll mounted in the oil-rich region."

The Promised Land

So I was talking to a friend last night at this pre-new years reunion party thing. She goes to Berkeley in San Fran. San Fran, land of the Andreas fault line, Golden Gate Bridge, many gay people and Full House. Land of the no less than 20 degree weather, surfing and bleached blondes. Land of the - well, you get it.

The last time I spoke to her, she was thinking of switching into Linguistics but totally bailed on it when she realized that Linguistics had more to do with syntax and sound than with the socio-economic and anthropological backgrounds of the language, which is what she was looking to gain. So she decided to take Economics as her major, which sounds drab and commonplace , but of course it's not because she's at Berkeley.

So she's taking a course called Crisis Development, being taught by an actual memeber of faculty who's a UN ambassador. And the format of the class is as follows. This brilliant ambassador bloke will state an international crisis; for example, the president of a major country gets shot. Every person in the clas sthen gets assigned a role in the internation community. Thus, someone could be a CNN reporter, the vice president to the late President, a leader of neighbouring or trade relations country, head of the UN, etc. Then they have debates, convene at summits and UN headquarters and discuss a strategy to calm the masses, to implement on the country, and the social, economic and political consequences of their decisions.

I don't know about you, but I think that sounds absolutely amazing. See, this. This is what I pictured university would be like; full of amazing classes and dynamic faculties, with life-changing experience. I'm envious of her, I'll admit, because she gets to meet people like Simon Hurst and the Guy Who Invented the Laser .

I know that in the grand scheme of things, no one need pity me and that this complaining is rather ungrateful of me, yes? I have the chance to even attend university and for that I'm humbled and grateful, and the experience must and can only be what I make out of it what I will. In other words, I must take my learning in my own hands.

But there is more to university than that. It is a lifestyle; it seems to be a mindset. This physical place somehow molded into a train of thought in my mind and the minds of others. You cannot run away from it: the studying is tied in with the people. The lifestyle is varied; that is, you can make of it what you want. If you want to party, you party. If you want to study, you study and if you want to do a little bit of both then you rely heavily on coffee and sparks notes.

I was talking to Ter and we were just bitching about the stupid people on her residence floor. It reminded me of how I myself hated not only where I lived but the people whom I lived with. And compared to Western, Waterloo was fairly tame. Yet I was still aggravated. I think I would've been the psychotic shoots-everyone kid if I had to be at Western. It's so strange, she told me, because everyone had basically been lying to her all her life. I understood. How was she to blame for being coaxed into loving this place, this notion of university? This living breathing revolutionary thought it had become through no fault of her own. People like us, we saw it as a light at the end of our very very dark tunnel, almost like a salvage and not quite as the prize but not a stepping stone either. More like a place of quenching the thirst, the restlessness. They told her she would meet like-minded people but maybe the fine print was, like-minded people provided you attend university in with your brain off and not inspect too closely.

I feel bad marginalizing because not everyone's brain is off, by any means. But a majority of the people I've had the neutral experience (or thorough displeasure) of meeting have been either completely unremarkable or so remarkably ridiculous so as to blip on my radar for their intense stupidity. It is rather unnerving, I sometimes (I lie: often) think that these people will someday be running countries and making grand decisions for the so-called betterment of society. I only can feel thorough distaste and then I feel guilty for feeling that because, really, it is this society that has caused them to be such mind-numbing idiots.

Then someone such as myself thinks, well, these kids are idiots, the mainstreamers, the engineers, the healthsci or environment kids but maybe there's a small collective underground group that keep to themselves, scholars who'd rather not be marred by the reps of The Others. It's all very hush-hush and the dark, artsy, underground thought appeals to me. And I even find them. But of course, like everything in university, this too requires closer inspection and is a play on the original words. I see, really, that their underground is more the basement of someone's house and their dark artsyness gives way to misinformed, ill-opinionated pretentiousness. I'm rather shocked at their naievety and am somewhat offended at how ignorant they are. In the end I grieve that I ever leant them that much credit and think, well I'd rathr be with the numbskulls anyway: they might not have an opinion but then that means you don't have to put up with the close-minded pretentious crap either.

The Amish have this ritual for 19 and 20 year olds. It's like a coming out or something. Before they transition for adolesence to adulthood, the ducklings are released into the wild so they can have as much promiscuous sex and alcohol as they want, experiment with drugs and the like and basically havea kickass life for one year before they return back to the homestead. Upon their return, most renounce those years as Satanic and move on to their quiet furniture building existence (joke XD) but some - few mind you - decide to head back to what we big city folk call "real life". This is almost like that....except without the hope of these people ever withdrawing.

So what exactly am I trying to say? A good many things here. I'm trying to say...I feel a little cheated, no matter how childish that sounds. I feel different; I am not like these other people who worry about whether a boy likes them or whether he'll call them or who wore what or what club event is going on. I feel very tired and bothersome when friends try to tell me about what she said or he said and why that matters at all. I really cannot seem to connect on the same points as others around me and perhaps that is my own fault for being too uppity in my arse. Perhaps not. It just...shocks me a little and I feel like a...blind, lost soul, grappling for the next crevice of rock to hold on to, to take the next step. I'm sad not because this is a lonely existence but because the Soul of this World seems to be entrapped in something else entirely.

When my friend from San Fran tells me about all these wonderful things she has the opportunity to experience I'm in awe but I'm jealous too. She attends an American University and so she has a broader base, a wider spectrum with which to confer from. I'm bordering on attending three universities by now and I have to say that the experience is pretty much the same, with varying degrees of insanity. There is no depth, there is no importance; there is only frustration and anger at the atmosphere. There is a sense of loss and sense of detachment. I just felt like...this was supposed to be it. It was supposed to be the centre of my world, an overprivileged slice of real life. People looked forward to high school, I looked forward to second year university.

And besides Queens and Western, universities are pretty effing ugly.

One of These Things First

My days have been filled with an overwhelming desire to sink into a burgeoning abyss and stay there for a few years. Lethargic and depressed, I find myself at odds with my environment, which is otherwise happy and lively. I have sunk into bed and not been able to pick myself up for quite a while now. Mostly, I'm scared that if I don't stop the hermitage I might fall headlong, with no energy to climb back up again. It's a horrid little cycle. It sometimes comes to a halt and its progress is stopped when I go out or meet friends. But the battle is aceeding to meet these people. I put it off and withdraw when I should venture out. I really haven't a clue what is wrong with me.

I spent all of yesterday sloshing wearily around the house, completely numb but brain abuzz. Finally, as I was putting away a few DVDs I found Garden State and realize I hadn't watched it since last year. I don't think I have ever cried during Garden State; it was always too poignant and perfect for me. It's one of my epic movies...those that will always stay close to my heart, no matter what. It is one that, every time I watch, I find and realize and synthesize something new. And, sure enough, I completely broke down from the moment the answering machine turns on in Large's house and he's in a sterile white room, till the time Sam kisses the lights out of him at the airport. I don't think I've ever cried that long for a movie but I just couldn't stop.

It has all been downhill for the better part of two years and now, on the brink of the next year, I feel like it's finally time for change, if only I could somehow drudge up my lost will, my lost motivation and moxy to do so. To change and change my circumstances.

Then, this morning, amidst the disturbed dreams and dark rain, I awoke for a glass of water and ended up having a two hour long conversation with the person I'd least imagined myself having this sort of conversation with - my mother. Everything. - or mostly everything - wound it's way out. I'm very wary of talking to her because she tends to oversimplify things and doesn't want to realize or take the time to understand the depth of which I speak about (though I know she has the capacity to) and so I end up being frustrated to add to the depression.

I went to sleep after the long talk, though, and when I woke up again...it wasn't so much that a weight had been lifted off my shoulders as it was that the pain had spread more evenly. At first, it was a sharp pierce in my heart. Post conversation, however, it had spread more evenly, rather like sleeping on a bed of nails rather than just one nail. It spread to a buzz rather than a jab.

At this point I am no less listless or lost than before. Nothing is solved. But...I have never spoken my mind like that, least of all to my mother. I think, for once, she actually understood. Even if she pulls out the carpet from undearneath my legs again as I'm scared that she may turn around and do eventually, I'll have known that, even if for two hours, she actually knew what I was talking about.

Despite the haze of depression and the lack of solution, I have decided to do a little more purging, in lieu of this morning. Popping music on my iPod, I found some old conversations between me and one of the major things plaguing me right now. I don't mind the redundancy - I'm using this to perhaps purge myself of the feelings before I move to take any action on them. I'm going to try something different: an on-the-spot-entry. A reaction recording, if you will.

I don't think I'll get through very many of the conversations before I completely break down or just can't take it anymore. Goodness knows I'm a masochist but the pain is too fresh. I imagine this like a gauge, full with...emotions about this. The more I think, the more I internalize and keep it within. But the more connections I form with an outside source....the more the gauge empties and I cleanse my mind of the cobwebs.

In any case, to spur the emotional intensity of the situation, I'm sitting with a clear head, warm tea in one hand and Such Great Heights on loop. Here I go. I'll see you on the other side.

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


- I'm smiling at the sweetness
- I'm trying to find the bitterness or understand inflection with the luxury that hindsight gives me.
- Oh man...there is Western talk. This is so strange...it's almost as if I'm there...I'm watching all this unfold with a sinking feeling in my stomach because I know how it's all going to end. Dramatic irony sure is a bitch sometimes.
- ...it is all so perfect. and i'm not even halfway yet.
- these are key words: "I am whitewashed/Ireject my culture/I don't want to be next to brown brown people" So it's not my fucking imagination. I hate sell-outs. gawd...it's happening already.
- this is epic. epic in its depth, i tell you.
- futhermuck...this is painful...so fucking painful...
- we watched dil chahta hai together. i completely forgot about that.

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

Well, I only got through one archive. It was the lovliest thing I have been through in a long time. Its sheer length meant that I couldn't go through any of the other ones but i suspect that the rest of them are marginally less wonderful. It was all downhill from there; I reckon I shall tackle those on another day...when I'm feeling more up to feeling sad.

It was a good purging because, though the process is not complete, it has made me more ready to face tomorrow. I don't know what I'm going to do or say or how it is all going to go down. What I have read and observed so far...it is a real insight on what once was. It's so strange....but possibly the biggest lesson I can take from this is the following: This person once was. This person is physically and mentally no more. They are two completely different people and the easiest thing for now is to consider them as such. This way, I have no expectations...because how can I have the same expectations from two completely and utterly polar opposite people. They are so different, in fact, that I could not even place them on the same level for comparison. That person is absolutely no more. And now there is this. And it is what it is. I'll remember the movies, the plans and look on them fondly and...stop the comparison, kill the regret (or one aspect of it) because it is incomparable.

I think I was under the vague impression that it was all just horrible; that it was all pain, pain and pain. But, no, I was wrong. There was lovely happiness too, the kind I wish that I could now share. These notions that occur to me now, occured to me back then too. So I didn't lose time...I just wasn't smart about retaining it. But it was there...and that gives me utmost solace.

For now.