This year I realized that life was long and wide and most of all unfinished.
I realized that knowing something is wrong with you and loudly talking about it does not make it go away, or somehow discount it.
Karma may be real.
Talent and inclination is not enough. You have to work for what you love. You have to fight, every day, for what you love, for what you want.
I learned that being a good friend is complicated, and a sacrifice, and worth living through.
I learned that people loving you is not something to take lightly, ever.
I learned that I really must get over fear of hurting people's feelings, shocking them, being unlovable or doing something wrong.
I learned that I, too, judge people.
I am not always in love. Love is not always the same.
I am changing, as I type.
I can be angry and sullen. I should let myself be angry and sullen.
Complaining is a useless exercise.
I learned that it's time to start figuring out what I want to do and make and think and be.
I want my next relationship to interrupt me. I really do want that. And I want instant spark over muted accumulated fondness.
I want everyone I love and respect to know I love and respect them. Vice versa.
I love validation. Learned I don't need it externally all the time, but it's hard to live without.
I made a list of the kind of work I want to make.
I worried about money.
I acted like a baby with you. I assumed with you. I did not work as hard as I could have for you. I did not always know what to say to you.
I did not, as planned, go to yoga every day.
I did drugs I thought I would never do.
I listened to new music.
I played guitar.
I sang.
I had a few sparkling adventures.
I made a few good stories. Told them again, later, exaggerated.
I wrote.
I watched Arrested Development and Skins, all the way through, each.
I made new friends.
I was in shows!
I was busy.
I walked like a zombie through some things.
I talked a lot. I learned to be more articulate.
I wished for things to change and erupt.
I realized I actually got a lot of what I wanted before. What's changed is what I want now.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Have you heard "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes?
Things I've Learned Today/in 2010:
Home, let me come home
Home is where I'm alone with you
Home, let me come home
Home, let me come home
Home is where I'm alone with you
Home, let me come home
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
45 Minutes Left in Existentialism
Typing quietly so as not to attract attttteennnnntttttioooonnnn
Sometimes I am distraught by how useless this whole subject is. In one way (excuse me while I kiss the sky), this is religion: elevating opinions to fact, and revering fiction with the austere severity called to mind by men in tassel-toed shoes. Curious that Sartre and De Beauvoir could discuss for hundreds of pages man's universal blight, curious that it should be studied in lecture halls, curious it could me a "major" a "discipline" a "subject" to be considered expert in. Philosophy is more conjecture than even the most theoretical science: there is no proof, and no potential for proof, anywhere. That shouldn't really mean the whole subject is useless (obviously Heidegger was smarter than me, so I should respect him, right?) but when discussions are conducted not as forums for volleying questions around but rather lectures devoted to committing vocab to memory, I step outside myself and let the thought fly by that we are all silly to be studying this inside. A real application of these theories (THEORIES THEORIES THEORIES) would better be served eating ice cream, while we talk. In the park. Living.
Loads of excuses this week for why I refuse to plunge unquestioningly into fields. I like to ask questions. Am I becoming sassy, am I cutting myself slack, or is my personal bullshit barometer gaining street cred?
Kid-I-once-thought-was-foreign who frequently sits cuddled over a laptop is dominating today's discussion (inane. About the value of explaining heady philosophy in layman's terms). That's kinda funny. I like him. He just pulled off the word 'presuppose' very elegantly.
As the future approaches, as I seem to become more hostile and defensive regarding life choices,I keep thinking about irreversible mistakes. Wrote this for spectrum:
Brittany Allen
Scene II: A Spectrum of Essays
I try to keep track of the things that make me cry these days. The actor in me wants to distill little tragedies, dissect them chemically and perfunctorily, follow droplets of moisture from where they sometimes well in the corner of my eyes up through their emotional nougat center and back through their microscopic physical properties with the unsentimental scrutiny of a scientist separated as much as BI-focally from a distant subject. On stage, it is to be seen as a skill, crying. It is a thing to strive towards being able to replicate on command, and with convincing, authentic ease.
Things that make me cry: Lost Pet signs, especially those with desperate monetary rewards promised in runny felt marker. A cold smattering of 70s power ballads. An embarrassing smattering of large-scale show-biz 90s musicals. These two documentaries: Imagine: The John Lennon Story and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. My best friends being sad. Lonely nights. Wakes. One particular 70s power ballad is Elvis Costello’s “Brilliant Mistake”. Often, Lonely nights involve a certain rotation of predictable laments, some coulda-woulda-shoulda’s, some whiny wishing that either myself or the recent past had somehow unfolded dramatically differently. Both gestures are impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things. Come to think of it, “impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things” are tears. Themselves.
Gene Weingarten is typically a humor writer for The Washington Post. He also wrote an article that won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing I think this morning: “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car is a Horrifying Mistake. Is it a crime?”. How could I call it ‘HORROR’ and not somehow be cheapening the adjectives, the verbs…Big men shaking. Sad-faced women, who will never be able to procreate or clear adoption records again, testifying that the day they left a baby in a sweltering car seat for hours (by MISTAKE) was really the most mundane, the most innocent of days. People who loved being parents, were good at being parents, but forgot one task one day. In the scheme of a life, the singular-ness, the mere seconds of omission involved in a massive error are so…dissolvable. Unsolvable. Mystic and terrible, not unlike a first tear, really, poetically-speaking.
Crying, read the article: Gene Weingarten will argue that a fatal distraction is not a crime at all. It is rather that which few among us would ever willingly concede to: it’s defeat, failure, unabashed human error of the worst kind. “Humans,” a source of his notes in the article, “have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible”. Not so, if these case studies (HORROR) of devastated parents can be considered. Despite any potential higher power. Despite the best efforts by the best people. There is such a thing as Luck, and it would seem that it lives across the street from Blunder but appears manically and intermittently and inconveniently as a neighbor, like an oft-away businessman or a wealthy family with other properties in other states. In this way, there is no justice with a ‘mistake’, just a lack of blessing. I listen to my music, I try to remember what in specific first made me cry.
Some of the parents have been judged before juries and judges, but most just by the heaviness of existing legally “innocent” of the kind of implacable crime that can only be paid for in debts of unfathomable, unending, unimaginable guilt. How do you move on from there, I wonder? What does the world become when ‘mistake’ is HORROR is unfair is forever unresolved? These terrible things that happen to nice people at random, the blinking time it takes for these events to be put in motion. I put them next to Lonely nights and Elvis Costello. I read. I leak a little and try to forget to study the chemical composition of my oozing tears. I want to believe that the next time I cry on stage it will be a conducted kind-of accident. A surprise. Unpredicted.
Petty. Pittances, in comparison, all the mistakes I have ever made. Will ever make? On a Lonely night, I make flow charts. On a Lonely night (reading a humor writer’s tragedy, lamenting the recent past, a Lost Dog sign, a day in class worrying that I am wasting my life) I knock on wood for Luck. For more Luck.
I listen to Elvis Costello, I look for rhyme. Reason. In the words I put on paper. In many different trajectories at once.
A divine ending: 35 minutes of this dismal pink and grey Martha Stewart in the 90s vomit space. There's no time, in life, to bounce back from horrific mistakes. I suppose attempt to make as few dramatic ones as possible? but it's becoming, melancholily enough, rather "Sartreian": say you do it all right. Say you mess up, miss some time. Say you're sitting in the back and are afraid and are not the sort of person who would walk out of a recitation straight into a love affair or maritime adventure.
What -- or more optimistically, WHERE -- is the point?
Sometimes I am distraught by how useless this whole subject is. In one way (excuse me while I kiss the sky), this is religion: elevating opinions to fact, and revering fiction with the austere severity called to mind by men in tassel-toed shoes. Curious that Sartre and De Beauvoir could discuss for hundreds of pages man's universal blight, curious that it should be studied in lecture halls, curious it could me a "major" a "discipline" a "subject" to be considered expert in. Philosophy is more conjecture than even the most theoretical science: there is no proof, and no potential for proof, anywhere. That shouldn't really mean the whole subject is useless (obviously Heidegger was smarter than me, so I should respect him, right?) but when discussions are conducted not as forums for volleying questions around but rather lectures devoted to committing vocab to memory, I step outside myself and let the thought fly by that we are all silly to be studying this inside. A real application of these theories (THEORIES THEORIES THEORIES) would better be served eating ice cream, while we talk. In the park. Living.
Loads of excuses this week for why I refuse to plunge unquestioningly into fields. I like to ask questions. Am I becoming sassy, am I cutting myself slack, or is my personal bullshit barometer gaining street cred?
Kid-I-once-thought-was-foreign who frequently sits cuddled over a laptop is dominating today's discussion (inane. About the value of explaining heady philosophy in layman's terms). That's kinda funny. I like him. He just pulled off the word 'presuppose' very elegantly.
As the future approaches, as I seem to become more hostile and defensive regarding life choices,I keep thinking about irreversible mistakes. Wrote this for spectrum:
Brittany Allen
Scene II: A Spectrum of Essays
I try to keep track of the things that make me cry these days. The actor in me wants to distill little tragedies, dissect them chemically and perfunctorily, follow droplets of moisture from where they sometimes well in the corner of my eyes up through their emotional nougat center and back through their microscopic physical properties with the unsentimental scrutiny of a scientist separated as much as BI-focally from a distant subject. On stage, it is to be seen as a skill, crying. It is a thing to strive towards being able to replicate on command, and with convincing, authentic ease.
Things that make me cry: Lost Pet signs, especially those with desperate monetary rewards promised in runny felt marker. A cold smattering of 70s power ballads. An embarrassing smattering of large-scale show-biz 90s musicals. These two documentaries: Imagine: The John Lennon Story and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. My best friends being sad. Lonely nights. Wakes. One particular 70s power ballad is Elvis Costello’s “Brilliant Mistake”. Often, Lonely nights involve a certain rotation of predictable laments, some coulda-woulda-shoulda’s, some whiny wishing that either myself or the recent past had somehow unfolded dramatically differently. Both gestures are impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things. Come to think of it, “impotent, evaluative stabs at making rhyme or reason out of patently unreasonable things” are tears. Themselves.
Gene Weingarten is typically a humor writer for The Washington Post. He also wrote an article that won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing I think this morning: “Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car is a Horrifying Mistake. Is it a crime?”. How could I call it ‘HORROR’ and not somehow be cheapening the adjectives, the verbs…Big men shaking. Sad-faced women, who will never be able to procreate or clear adoption records again, testifying that the day they left a baby in a sweltering car seat for hours (by MISTAKE) was really the most mundane, the most innocent of days. People who loved being parents, were good at being parents, but forgot one task one day. In the scheme of a life, the singular-ness, the mere seconds of omission involved in a massive error are so…dissolvable. Unsolvable. Mystic and terrible, not unlike a first tear, really, poetically-speaking.
Crying, read the article: Gene Weingarten will argue that a fatal distraction is not a crime at all. It is rather that which few among us would ever willingly concede to: it’s defeat, failure, unabashed human error of the worst kind. “Humans,” a source of his notes in the article, “have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible”. Not so, if these case studies (HORROR) of devastated parents can be considered. Despite any potential higher power. Despite the best efforts by the best people. There is such a thing as Luck, and it would seem that it lives across the street from Blunder but appears manically and intermittently and inconveniently as a neighbor, like an oft-away businessman or a wealthy family with other properties in other states. In this way, there is no justice with a ‘mistake’, just a lack of blessing. I listen to my music, I try to remember what in specific first made me cry.
Some of the parents have been judged before juries and judges, but most just by the heaviness of existing legally “innocent” of the kind of implacable crime that can only be paid for in debts of unfathomable, unending, unimaginable guilt. How do you move on from there, I wonder? What does the world become when ‘mistake’ is HORROR is unfair is forever unresolved? These terrible things that happen to nice people at random, the blinking time it takes for these events to be put in motion. I put them next to Lonely nights and Elvis Costello. I read. I leak a little and try to forget to study the chemical composition of my oozing tears. I want to believe that the next time I cry on stage it will be a conducted kind-of accident. A surprise. Unpredicted.
Petty. Pittances, in comparison, all the mistakes I have ever made. Will ever make? On a Lonely night, I make flow charts. On a Lonely night (reading a humor writer’s tragedy, lamenting the recent past, a Lost Dog sign, a day in class worrying that I am wasting my life) I knock on wood for Luck. For more Luck.
I listen to Elvis Costello, I look for rhyme. Reason. In the words I put on paper. In many different trajectories at once.
A divine ending: 35 minutes of this dismal pink and grey Martha Stewart in the 90s vomit space. There's no time, in life, to bounce back from horrific mistakes. I suppose attempt to make as few dramatic ones as possible? but it's becoming, melancholily enough, rather "Sartreian": say you do it all right. Say you mess up, miss some time. Say you're sitting in the back and are afraid and are not the sort of person who would walk out of a recitation straight into a love affair or maritime adventure.
What -- or more optimistically, WHERE -- is the point?
Sunday, April 4, 2010
easter: altered by one letter, 'easier' ...
Family is funny, especially distant family. Literally distant means you haven't necessarily grown up next to one another, but rather been privy to intermittent annual check-ins: you may need charts to remember last names and parents, but you'll be able to say with a truthful confidence "Girrrrrrrrrl, you've gotten TALLLLL!" We are black people. This is also important.
We talk about weather, un-ironically: "We even got snow here, boy!" "We were trapped inside for THREE DAYS!" We don't necessarily scramble or dig for juicy conversation. It's comfortable enough to guess about things ("You're a musician, right? Do you know ________? He was a musician, too!") and sometimes tell stories about the olden days; Old folks, or babies. Hilarious reckless teenager stories. Politics is glazed over like a good donut -- something could be bad or good or trifling but would surely murder dinner if dwelled upon.
I think it's the most morbid combination of self-ease and hyper-outsiderness. I can be myself, and weird, without fear of people judging me -- but at the same time, the barrier of distance and time makes intimacy almost a futile exercise. There always seem to be people you like the best mixed in with a wider swath of crazy country relatives, and that's so, but liking them just makes me sad I've missed out on large parts of important lives. There are unspoken, repeated, rules of conversation and cooing and even dialect. I say 'y'all' here, to fit in. Making people in large groups laugh feels like a victory, even though it's easy.
We eat crawfish. They arrive alive, and flail helplessly around in net bags. I don't let this make me sad: they are poured into a pot of boiling water and spaces and then we eat dozens and dozens of messy crustaceans. We realize silence or other people, closer people, having more familiar interactions near by. Keep eating. It's delicious.
Dad and Mom make me on edge here. My mom comes to Texas and refuses to have fun. Dad comes and wants to be back in college, but maybe his college friends here, still similar, make him sad. They fret together about an imminent unaddressed future of moving back to this neighborhood. My brother is taught how to fish, to shoot a gun, to drive a four-wheeler, and because he is fourteen this cannot be understood as a deep family betrayal. They simmer in old juice, like our dinner. If my heart and neuroses were not "millions" of miles away from here in NYC, I would be having a deep identity crisis. As is, I can't help peering into this glimpse of their inner married life with the same judgmental frustration my mother targets at her mother. I cannot see myself as them. I love them a lot.
There aren't a lot of exclamation points to be found here. The world is flat and stale. Texas has just passed a bill where the public school textbooks are now able to OMIT SLAVERY, and pick up somewhere around World War I. I wonder if you can feel the idea of this "essay" radiating towards you without working too hard intellectually.
We talk about weather, un-ironically: "We even got snow here, boy!" "We were trapped inside for THREE DAYS!" We don't necessarily scramble or dig for juicy conversation. It's comfortable enough to guess about things ("You're a musician, right? Do you know ________? He was a musician, too!") and sometimes tell stories about the olden days; Old folks, or babies. Hilarious reckless teenager stories. Politics is glazed over like a good donut -- something could be bad or good or trifling but would surely murder dinner if dwelled upon.
I think it's the most morbid combination of self-ease and hyper-outsiderness. I can be myself, and weird, without fear of people judging me -- but at the same time, the barrier of distance and time makes intimacy almost a futile exercise. There always seem to be people you like the best mixed in with a wider swath of crazy country relatives, and that's so, but liking them just makes me sad I've missed out on large parts of important lives. There are unspoken, repeated, rules of conversation and cooing and even dialect. I say 'y'all' here, to fit in. Making people in large groups laugh feels like a victory, even though it's easy.
We eat crawfish. They arrive alive, and flail helplessly around in net bags. I don't let this make me sad: they are poured into a pot of boiling water and spaces and then we eat dozens and dozens of messy crustaceans. We realize silence or other people, closer people, having more familiar interactions near by. Keep eating. It's delicious.
Dad and Mom make me on edge here. My mom comes to Texas and refuses to have fun. Dad comes and wants to be back in college, but maybe his college friends here, still similar, make him sad. They fret together about an imminent unaddressed future of moving back to this neighborhood. My brother is taught how to fish, to shoot a gun, to drive a four-wheeler, and because he is fourteen this cannot be understood as a deep family betrayal. They simmer in old juice, like our dinner. If my heart and neuroses were not "millions" of miles away from here in NYC, I would be having a deep identity crisis. As is, I can't help peering into this glimpse of their inner married life with the same judgmental frustration my mother targets at her mother. I cannot see myself as them. I love them a lot.
There aren't a lot of exclamation points to be found here. The world is flat and stale. Texas has just passed a bill where the public school textbooks are now able to OMIT SLAVERY, and pick up somewhere around World War I. I wonder if you can feel the idea of this "essay" radiating towards you without working too hard intellectually.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
