Mini-Meditation on Writing.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin to excuse yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
–Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

I read this the other day and immediately thought of it in terms of fiction writing. But then once I was done doing that, I thought about it in the context of this blog.

I tend to write about things that stir up questions inside me, and I think through the process of writing my questions and possible answers I am actively seeking truth, or a truth. I don’t know if I get any closer to it, but that’s what I’m going for: understanding of something that can be understood.

One of the most impossible things about writing is not writing for an audience. I know that few people read my blog, but I still shape my writing in a way that I think will be palatable to them, or will make them think I’m funny, etc. etc. According to Atwood, doesn’t that mean I’m lying? That I’m excusing myself? Which leads me to the question: What is the purpose of this blog?

It’s not for other people, even though I sometimes cater to their tastes. It’s not for memory’s sake, because I can remember what’s important without writing it down (and when I do write it down, it’s a flawed, selective picture: I write it as I want to remember it). In essence, it is a daily exercise in writing well, keeping my writer’s faculties sharp, so that when I acquire the nerve and confidence to write something that has hatched in my brain and wants to be told, I will not be completely rusty. It seems an impossible task, but I want to write the truth, as best I can. Without censoring myself, without fear, without consideration of anything but the words pouring out and blotting the white of my Word document.

It is often said that art is a lie that tells the truth, and I think that is a beautiful paradox. And one that I want to wield.

Mini-meditation on truth/lies/writing: complete.

Dreamworlds and the Mysteries of Sleeping.

I saw Inception on Friday night, and it was a mind trip, to say the least. It was a very smart film, I thought, and made some assertions about dreams and dreamworlds that I found very astute. It’s worth ten dollars to see it.

I’m not much of a dreamer, and when I do have dreams, I can rarely remember them once I wake up. After I saw Inception, I had the most dream-filled night of sleep I’ve ever experienced. Was my subconscious just kick-started by the themes of the movie, and that’s why my dreams were so complex and vivid that night? Or was it just a coincidence?

To me, dreams are like one of the most mysterious things about life. There may be some science to it, but science itself can’t give concrete explanations for what happens in dreams and why. Psychology attempts to assess dreams and explain them based on what’s going on in the subconscious, but even those explanations seem to be mostly conjecture. So, dreaming is this thing that our brain does when we’re sleeping, but why do dream in the first place? Are dreams an outlet for expression that can’t find a physical manifestation in the waking world? Are dreams just a skewed reflection of the waking world?

One of the most interesting things about the movie was the notion of the architecture of dreams. The architect in the film has to dream the entire landscape of the dreamworld, and do it with enough detail to convince the dreamer that it’s real and not just a dream. In thinking about my own dreams, I realize that a lot of the locations in my dreams (that I can remember) have been based on real places that I’ve seen, but even more locations are entirely unrecognizable to me. Like I’m dreaming and I know that the location I’m in is meant to be my childhood home, but in actuality it looks nothing like my childhood home. How is my brain able to make up the architecture of this location from scratch? It seems like a really incredible artistic feat to be able to do such a thing.

The ways in which the dreamworld can bleed into the waking world is really bizarre as well. Have you ever had a dream and woke up thinking that what transpired in the dream had actually happened in real life? I’ve had about a hundred dreams like that, about relationships ending or people dying, and I wake up with regret or anguish only to realize that it isn’t reality. But it felt so real in my dream, it’s hard to divorce it from reality; there’s such a thin line between being awake and being asleep, and likewise with what happens when awake and when asleep. But at the same time, just because you dream something doesn’t mean it’s something you really desire in the waking world. I may dream about boys wooing me or getting back to together with ex-boyfriends, but that doesn’t mean that’s what I want in real life. And yet, if it’s not something I want in real life, what is making me dream about it?

I keep thinking about a scene from the movie Waking Life, where the protagonist is talking to a fellow with a biker vest on, and the biker is talking about lucid dreaming and recommends that, if you aren’t sure if you’re dreaming or not, that you should try to adjust light levels, ie. flip a light switch and see if the light changes or not. Lucid dreaming seems like a simple enough concept, but when I find myself dreaming and know that I’m dreaming, I’m unable to take advantage of that. It’s like, I am 100% positive I’m dreaming because I know there’s no possible way I could be executing an Evel Kneivel-style jump on a motorcycle in real life, but I still can’t make the motorcycle keep flying through the air; it always lands.

This post is kind of all over the place, but the movie kind of blew my mind and then all of these questions about dreams surfaced, and I just wanted to get it all down. What’s your take on dreams and their significance?

Gripe, Gripe, Gripe.

I’m sure my five faithful readers remember all too well when I was complaining about being unemployed a few weeks back, but now that I’ve been employed for three weeks, allow me to gripe for a moment about having a job.

So I’m currently working in a print shop, manning the front desk and helping to keep the office organized and the internal processes flowing smoothly. There are a lot of things that I really enjoy about this job, namely the mostly chill environment and co-workers and meeting lots of really interesting people that have us print things for them. A lot of my job is answering the phone, which if anyone knows me well, they know that I don’t enjoy talking on the phone in my personal life let alone my professional life, and that I definitely struggle to represent myself accurately on the phone. In other words, when I talk to strangers on the phone, I feel that I sound a lot dumber and less competent than I actually am. But surprisingly, I’ve fallen into the groove of things, and now I don’t feel nearly so anxiety-riddled to call someone up and tell them that their print job is done and ready to be picked up. As much as I hate talking on the phone, it’s challenging me in a good way to broaden my comfort zone and improve a skill that can serve me well in other jobs in the future.

Those are the good things. One of the most difficult things about this job is that it requires me, a natural introvert, to be very outgoing and bubbly. Not really my style unless I’m slightly intoxicated, sorry to say. Apparently the girl who had my job before was really friendly and perky, and several of the customers have told me how sad they are that she doesn’t work there anymore. Which makes me feel really great, obviously. I’ve never been a person to act any other way than how I’m feeling or how I am naturally (within the bounds of politeness, of course), and I’ve also never been a person who can roll with anything and be confident and cool when I have no idea what I’m talking about (as I so often do at this job), so I’m having a hard time adopting this Susie-Talks-A-Lot persona that’s expected of me. Is it better to be competent and professional, or friendly and outgoing? I would almost always say the former, but I think that just isn’t the case in customer service-oriented jobs like this one. I welcome any tips on how to dissociate my real personality from my fake work personality, ie. someone please teach me how to be schizophrenic.

The worst thing about this job is the inconsistency of work hours. I was told I would be working about five hours each day, Monday through Friday; some days I work from 9 until 12:30, some days I work until 4:30. My work hours are entirely dependent on the amount of incoming work to be done; if it’s slow, which apparently it is in the summer months, and I run out of things to do, they send me home. If it’s busy, I work a full day. There is zero uniformity. I can’t plan my life around something with so little structure. And, I’m only getting paid $10 an hour, which means my paychecks for each two-week pay period my paycheck is $400 or less. And it would be one thing if I were living at home with my parents, or if it was just a summer job that I was only going to be at for a couple months, but seriously, I have a college degree! And I’ve worn out my welcome in my current rent-free living situation, which means I’m going to have to start paying rent again soon! And I have to start paying on my student loans in September! I’ve got bills and expenses, man. And to paraphrase Notorious B.I.G.: no money, mo’ problems. Kendall need steady hours and steady income. She need it now.

Okay, venting complete. I hate to sound ungrateful for the job I have, because I could certainly still be unemployed, and a lot of people are unemployed and are a lot worse off than I am. But, I guess I’m just now starting to see that having a job doesn’t solve all of my problems. It’s a good start, but there’s a lot more puzzle pieces that need to fall into place before I can characterize my feelings about my life as okay and stable. Until then, I just need to persevere and be grateful.

Dear Sookie: I Have A Crush On You. Love, Snoop Dogg.

Tomorrow, I will write a real post. But for today, all I have is this.

What a great tribute to America’s favorite telepathic vampire-loving Southern waitress. I’m glad someone else loves Sookie Stackhouse as much as me and my dad do.

The Dude Abides.

“Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” – The Dude, The Big Lebowski

I am absolutely overwhelmed by how amazing this is. I could only hope for such creativity, to be able to use such a unique medium to create art. And Erika Iris Simmons chose a great subject, I must say.

Arghh, I want to make something now!

So, This One Time, I Graduated From College. The End.

Summer Reading.

One of my favorite things about having extended breaks while I was in school was that I got to plan a reading list for whatever vacation from school I was heading into. As I am a now a college graduate (thank you, thank you), I won’t have any more winter breaks or spring breaks to necessitate a reading list. However, summer is summer whether you’re in school or not, and since today is the first official day of summer (though the weather in the Couve would suggest otherwise), I have compiled a summer reading list to share with my (four or so) faithful readers.

Right now I am reading:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

The agenda for the rest of the summer is as follows:
For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
A Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
‘Tis by Frank McCourt
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

Because I have about as many books on my to-read shelf as I do on my already-read shelf, I’ve made a vow to not buy anymore books until September so that I can focus on just reading the books that I already have. If I make it through my entire list before September though, I may have to cheat and buy The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because I’ve heard such good things about it and am itching to read a good mystery novel.

And heck, my endless summer started in March, so I managed to read eight books in the interim from when I was done with classes and actually participated in my graduation ceremony. There were some really good ones and some really bad ones:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (amazing)
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (average)
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (amazing)
People I Wanted To Be by Gina Ochsner (amazing)
The Help by Kathryn Stockett (slightly above average)
The Island by Victoria Hislop (awful)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (amazing)
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood (amazing)

Here’s to a summer of leisurely reading, lovely words and lively storytelling! Hip hip hooray!

Sculptures!

I finally got the rest of my photos that I took at the Olympic Sculpture Park developed! I love these beautiful and thoughtful structures.

The title of this sculpture was “Love and Loss,” but it was pretty large so I could only fit the “O” and “S” in my photo, obviously.

Being in the midst of this sculpture feels like being part of an ocean wave.

This one I always think of as a crazy pizza cutter.

This isn’t a sculpture per se but it was inside the Vivarium, which is a sculpture, and I thought it looked neat-o.

If you ever get the opportunity to visit the sculpture park, I highly recommend it. The sculptures look especially awesome on nice sunny days.

“The Best Day of Adrian Brody’s Life.”

I love Adrian Brody. I love his giant schnoz and his lanky bod, probably moreso after seeing this. And I love that someone spent the time making this… what a tender and danceable act of love.

My brothers and I have been singing Adrian Brody’s name in robot voices the whole week. I want to go on a BrodyQuest!

Introducing: Vision Curation.

I’ve been working on a new blog endeavor for the past couple weeks and now is the time to finally reveal it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Vision Curation.

Vision Curation is a photoblog. Not of my photos, but of photos by other photographers that are amazing and mind-blowing to me. There are photos pulled from the pages of Vogue and photos pulled from the humble pages of Flickr. There are photos by legends like Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz, and photos from relative unknowns. I hope it will be a good way to introduce people to classic photos they have never encountered before, as well as a platform for emerging photographers to get more exposure for their work.

I knew I wanted to start a photoblog of other photographer’s works because there is so much beauty to be found through the lens of a camera. And if I build a collection of beauty in photographic form that I can study and admire and learn from, then I feel I’ll have a better chance of finding and capturing beauty when I’m behind the lens. It is image inspiration that I plan to update daily, if not multiple times a day.

But enough of me explaining it away… go ahead and check it out yourself!