bye michael.

i have become really terrible at blogging on a regular basis. it doesn’t help that my laptop had to go the computer hospital due to a broken optical drive (which, ironically, coincided with my recent netflix subscription). it’s infinitely difficult to find the motivation to write after an 8-hour (soon to be 10-hour) workday.

since everyone else in the world has blogged about michael jackson in the past few weeks, i have a subconscious urge to say something, at least, about his death. last weekend was mj-filled: there was a zombie crawl going on in fremont in which zombified seattle-ites were attempting to break the guinness world record for how many people could dance the “thriller” dance simultaneously. i didn’t dress up like a zombie, but it was really an amazing thing to see five thousand people all dancing this dance that michael jackson made so famous. and if that weren’t enough, i decided to watch the movie “13 going on 30” (i was having a really bad day and needed to watch something cutesy and light-hearted), in which there is also a “thriller” dance reenactment. and the scene was a party where no one was dancing, and then “thriller” comes on and one person starts doing the dance, and then everyone joins in and is loving life and thinking the party is great. i feel like michael jackson’s music often has that kind of effect on people, and the fact that it has permanently permeated american culture and will continue to be iconic (even more so now) is a testament to his talent, his ingenuity and his ability to entertain. i don’t want to valorize him, because he was just a singer; he didn’t find the cure for cancer and he wasn’t super-human. he was just a human being, who was talented and whose demons were more magnified than most people’s. the thing that makes me the most sad about his death is that, despite his fame, he was a deeply unhappy person who self-medicated just to be able to make it through each day. i’ve read reports that he was administered daily shots of demerol, one of the stronger painkillers; so sad that he felt he had to numb himself with prescription drugs on a daily basis just to be able to function. that’s sad no matter who it happens to, famous or otherwise. and really, the saddest part is that his kids have lost their dad at such young ages. that’s probably one of the worst things that could happen to a kid.

r.i.p. michael.

some happenings.

it has been a bizarre past couple of days. josh is still in georgia and i’m back in seattle, and we won’t see each other until mid-august. that in itself is weird, leaving him with my parents and returning home where i’m without family and my boyfriend; i never thought i’d be in this position, and it’s strange and sad. thank goodness for skype… it’s been helping a lot with the separation discomfort.

i started working on wednesday, both nannying and housekeeping; housekeeping is pretty wretched unless i’m just working on something alone and don’t have to talk to people, and nannying is a boundary-pushing experience. it’s weird because i am really bad at interacting with children. i love kids and i want to have tons of them someday, but i really don’t know how to talk to them. i get shy and self-conscious. and awkward. i know that the key to interacting with children is engaging them, but i feel like there’s only so many questions i can ask them or observations i can make before they get bored and i end up sounding stupid. is that an issue of pride or is it just poor conversation skills? hard to say. but i’m hoping that nannying will make me more kid-friendly and more at ease around the young ones.

cute story from nannying: so i’m like a mommy’s helper in the early early mornings for this family that has three girls; marlena (almost 5), tessabell (3), and elektra (7 months). aside from their names being a source of entertainment in themselves, the girls are really funny. the family is taking a trip to chicago to visit the grandparents, and apparently there is a public pool right across the street from where their grandparents live. marlena was asking her mom if she could ride down a waterslide by herself instead of with her parents, and her mom said that they would have to check the age limit and that it might be too scary. to which marlena replied: “well maybe i could ride down the slide by myself, and if it’s too scary, then i can ride down the slide with you or dad the next time. i could try that, but only if i’m old enough to ride by myself.” so rational! just like a little adult! i was thoroughly impressed.

i’ve been working eight hour days between the two jobs, and haven’t had much time to do anything except go to bed at 9pm. but now the weekend is here, and i have weekends off, so i’m looking for things to occupy my time. there are the obvious choices (being, read and watch movies), but i want to do something a little more creative with my free time. there’s a copy of w magazine on my dining room table that i’m assuming belongs to one of my roommates, and while i was leafing through it the other night whilst eating dinner, i can across an article about artist fred tomaselli. i was totally blown away by the ornate detail of his works, and it has inspired me to create art. i need to figure out where to procure wood slats and resin, and then i want to use everything i see to make some beautiful pieces of art.

i will stick with these artistic endeavors. i will stick with these artistic endeavors. i will stick with these artistic endeavors.

this is my new mantra.

time keeps on changing; you tell it stay still, but it won’t listen.

william faulkner once said “clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” it’s so easy to think of time as a machine, that keeps producing minutes and hours and days and years at peak efficiency. when we stop imposing this mechanistic model of time onto time, and just let it hang suspended, floating, within the short duration of our lives, doesn’t it serve us better? time, as interconnected with change, is something that people like to make their enemy because it can’t be controlled or contained, but time is often such a beautiful gift, is it not?

exactly a year ago, i was in south africa. at the risk of sounding cliche, it really feels like yesterday that i was arriving in cape town, my first time off the continent, and experiencing an entirely new world. there was so much unknown at that point, so much that would happen in the following twelve months that i could never have guessed would happen: having trysts with two south africans and an american while studying abroad, returning home to an grotesquely unfamiliar life in georgia, getting over my first love that i thought i’d never be able to let go of, cultivating an entirely new circle of friends, living to see my twenty-first birthday, finding the balls to cut all of my hair off, deciding to graduate early, quitting smoking and taking up running again, finding the man i’m going to love for the rest of my life. so much has changed in the past year, and yet, i am still myself and there is so much time for me to experience that will bring even more changes that i can’t foresee. it’s frightening, but it’s also kind of freeing to not be a slave of time, but a friend of time; to let it pass unfettered and to look back on it in amazement, to appreciate what time does to people and places and ideas, and to be at peace with the fact that it is its own entity that is free of human control.

amazing.

gotta love ‘the onion.’

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

genius.
oh, kafka. everyone in the world truly is against you, even when you’re dead.

completion, transition, repeat.

i am so happy that my work with lingua is complete. i am so happy with the journal, and i think other people are too. and i get to sleep again, which is always a plus.

i got a beautiful piece of art in the mail from my friend tom the other day:

(the lighting in my hallway room is so scant. ugh.)

i hung the banner above my bulletin board so that it would be one of the first things i see in the morning (aside from the alarm function going off on my phone). such a wonderful gift. in sort of the same vein, i am so excited to switch rooms and not live in a hallway anymore. and my new room will have a half-staircase in it, no less. it will be a nice place to rise above (literally) all the bullshit, and probably a nice place to talk on the phone to my mom, too.

my mom asked if i thought i was really going to be married within the next year and half, because if i did, she was going to have to get a job to be able to pay for my wedding. it’s weird that the altar is actually in sight, because i don’t know if i ever thought i’d actually get married. i’d much prefer to be like brangelina and just love and live with someone and not have to bring the government into it to make it valid, especially when so many straight people take the sanctity of marriage for granted and when so many gay people don’t even get the chance to marry once. but the boy wants to be married, so for him, i’ll make the exception. probably.

this post is all over the place.

hellooooooo, lingua.

“it is finished.” — jesus

heaven.

i really enjoyed reading this essay about experiencing the divine through music.

i can certainly relate, as i hardly ever feel a divine presence inside the walls of a church, and almost always experience it in particular and fleeting atmospheres and isolated instances, and through people instead of the bible. i think that is the best part of humanity: the individuality and transience of experience, and the value that attaches itself to these moments.

and i would not mind at all if listening to sigur ros for all of eternity was what heaven was like.

15 books

1. age of iron, j.m. coetzee
2. satan says, sharon olds
3. beloved, toni morrison
4. out stealing horses, per petterson
5. franny and zooey, j.d. salinger
6. of mice and men, john steinbeck
7. middlesex, jeffrey eugenides
8. lord of the flies, william golding
9. jane eyre, charlotte bronte
10. the lovely bones, alice sebold
11. to kill a mockingbird, harper lee
12. on chesil beach, ian mcewan
13. the giving tree, shel silverstein
14. fear and loathing in las vegas, hunter s. thompson
15. the master and margarita, mikhail bulgakov

immortality through a pen.

while we were at the beach this past weekend, we had a moment. we turned off the lights, lit some candles, listened to sigur ros, and acknowledged the flickering flames that are our lives. grant talked about thumbing through the guestbook at their beach house, where so many people who are now gone wrote their names and their essence on lined pages.

since then, i’ve been thinking a lot about the immortality of handwriting. i think grant said it best: our handwriting will outlive us, and it will be the marker of something that used to be. i remember reading some of my grandmother’s letters to my mom or to me, and the way she wrote is permanently embedded in my mind and i can’t think of her without thinking of her very distinct penmanship, all of the slightly slanted whorls of cursive. her handwriting is as clear in my mind as her face is. and it’s strange to me that we have found ways to preserve letters and instances of a person’s handwriting so that they are a living record of the person whose life could not be preserved.

mikhail bakhtin wrote this essay on the nature of language, where he asserts that words always only half belong to the person saying them, because they interact with other people, and then the other people adopt them and make them their own (or at least half their own) by speaking them, and then other people hear it and adopt it, and so on. in this way, the word is more alive than humans are, because it is passed on from person to person, and continues to live even after the person speaking it is dead and gone. human beings are just kind of a vessel for the word, which is the real living thing. it’s bizarre to think about, but i feel like handwriting kind of functions in the same way: it is a live representation of something that will perish (if it hasn’t already) and it is passed on from living person to living person, so that everyone who views it can archive it in their memories. it will always outlive the person that wrote it, but it will also always outlive every person who views it; it is immortal.

it makes me wonder what people will think when they see my handwriting after i’m gone, what my handwriting will say about me. if it will give people a sense of who i am, even if they’ve never met me. i hope it does.

highlights from rockaway: