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.:[ 6.29.2009 ]:.
haven't seen any of you in a long time
I like reading these chapters of your lives, hope I get to make an appearance in the book eventually.
i talked at 10:55 (0) thoughts

reading comic books

Nine hours of sleep interrupted by another fire alarm. It’s 2 in the afternoon and I’m lying down from exhaustion, listening to mediocre amateur covers of an originally mediocre song on YouTube while Tetris Attack situations play themselves out in my head. Heated up some pasta with garlic cream sauce for lunch. Cooking is nice because it’s a connection to the real world, not this goddamn imitation of sentience while glued to a computer iPod Crackberry. But then some hack on the Food Network hears about Pad Thai and decides to “deconstruct” it, that exotic and enchanting mysterious dish. What’s happening to this country? What happened to coherence, the American Dream, leadership and vision? I am not the sum of these consumer relations and I cannot help you, sir, so get off the damn phone.

Anger is transient, ephemeral, it passes like a catchy beat of a 90s pop song, buried somewhere in our memories but its sharp edge is blunted by nostalgia. Can’t hate the world, have to embrace it. It’s alive, at least. Cool journalism was never my thing, but couldn’t take the flowery features of all the good things either. Needed cold hard facts, like mathematics, couldn’t sugarcoat everything like media has to do to protect us nowadays. Only 17 people died, many more were injured. Only. If one life is not the most valuable thing in the world, then what is? What measure of value can we universally respect if not life? Can currency take us where we want to go?

While I’m at it, where do we want to go? Where do I want to go? Adventure packages from your 9 to 5 job, or finally settling down from your wanderlusting ways? Release in the form of the latest Woody Allen movie, a director who never did but now proves he can pander to America’s neuroses. Simple adages and truisms stuck around over the century because they remain true—the grass is always greener on the other side. We’re always pushing, striving for more happiness, I was happy but I wanted to be more happy, and then found myself in a hole. The Las Vegas effect. Little things jolt us from the rat race outside the office, a sizzling onion, a fresh spring breeze, a call to Mom, will you be home soon darling? Poems. But like the anger, ephemeral. Like the goals, short-lived. Like our lives. Short-lived, that is.

So what’s left? It is not my responsibility to tear apart anyone’s life, only to build up my own. So what do I have left?

i talked at 10:55 (0) thoughts

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.:[ 6.10.2009 ]:.
How did I get here
Maybe I should write a book. I could be The Unfortunate Girl. My life hasn't been particularly miserable; plenty of people have it worse. Some have it better. I need to stop getting raped. That would be a good goal.
i talked at 22:27 (0) thoughts

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.:[ 4.14.2009 ]:.
aaack
It's been a hard hard semester adjusting back to life at Yale, and since my last semester here (sophomore year fall) was so miserable (unrequited love, three math classes including one absurdly hard one, a very busy schedule because of work and viet stuff), and the last one (freshman year spring) was also difficult (high school friend suddenly dies of cancer, two conferences in a row at the same time, unwilling leadership roles), I'm tempted to say it's just Yale that I'm not adjusted to, rather than being back here.  Like, I was never meant to fit in here, and I still feel as though I don't now.  I am not and never was ambitious except for in daydreams, because I'm so lazy.  But not lazy as in I won't do work, because I do enjoy doing work, lazy as in I won't put in the effort to make my dreams happen because I'm too lazy to really believe in them.  I'm too lazy to dream.  
i talked at 21:50 (0) thoughts

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.:[ 1.26.2009 ]:.
and another
I open my eyes. Big, blank, white. Wall. I am in a chair. Sturdy, wooden, solid. This is a normal sale what am I doing here the room is white. I have been here before? I want to rotate and inspect the rest of the room but I am, how do they say it, glued to my seat. The wall. My wall. Repainted recently, 14 inch roller, cheap matte cream, perhaps from Home Depot. He did not care about my wall, the painter. Dead spider, peeling tape. Crusted over with matte cream, pasted to the wall. L’enfer for the spider. Perhaps I am literally glued to my seat. An adhesive stronger than Elmer’s. That would be ironic.
My wall, my chair, my disease. In a few minutes, only the disease will be still mine. Before the incident I read an article. Ironic. They called him H.M. No new memories, no life. No home no family no wall no chair. I thought, “c’est horrible,” and turned to the world news. I write but when I read I read the words of a stranger. I would be better if I continued reading it. I could have learned how to live. Focus. A new problem. No paper, no signs, no notes signed by me. What if I didn’t have a plan? What if I sat here by chance? No, I am here for a reason. I am here. I close my eyes and try to think.
I open my eyes. Big, blank, white. Wall. A thud behind it. I am in a chair. Sturdy. Solid.
i talked at 19:25 (0) thoughts

hmm

I can’t remember it exactly; it’s been years since I visited.  She still keeps a big orange shag rug from when I was a kid, but now it’s mottled brown from 30 years of stains.  A few grainy once-white couches.  Last time I was there, they had just been clawed up by the new cats—guess she wanted someone to replace us.  She was born rich, you know.  Those were genuine M.C. Eschers and even a Dali on the walls.  Guess that’s what you care about, huh?  No?  Those are still there?  That’s weird.  Hmm… we had a crappy old TV that hasn’t worked in maybe ten years, crammed in the corner by the kitchen.  Can’t think of anything in that room that anyone would want, unless she was hiding something.  Why haven’t I visited?  Talk to her yourself and you’ll find out. 

           

The room’s a 20 by 10, standard height, standard doorways, three windows.  The middle one is covered by cardboard; they broke in through there.  I wonder if there’s still glass on the floor as I enter from the foyer.  I can see the doorway to the kitchen across the room, past the huge ugly rug that fills the space.  Around it are three scratched up grayish-creamy sofas, like they were white until someone sucked the hope out of them.  They make a big dusty U, facing a wall coated in art.  Some stuff looks unfinished, sloppy; other stuff is real complex but seems familiar somehow.  I walk toward the other door and look around.  Not much else in here besides the dust.  Dust everywhere.  Wait.  In the corner there’s a square foot without any dust.  Whatever they were looking for, they found it and took it, and it was here. 

i talked at 19:23 (0) thoughts

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.:[ 11.19.2008 ]:.
i have a journal now
but i guess i can type up something. that's what i do anyways.

I believe in faith. I believe in its transcendent power. Like all, I am something of a hypocrite, in that I entertain few notions of faith myself but I fervently wish it upon all others. I believe that it is faith, and faith alone, that can save us from the flames. Perhaps not the literal flames of eternal hell, nor of neverending existence, but the flames of darkness that flare up from our hearts, licking our faces with despair and threatening to burn us alive until we are no longer alive but walking bodies, dead on earth. Faith clears the soot from our faces, unchars our hearts, makes us whole and pure again, helps us walk straight and proud, as we are meant to, confident in our domain and rightful place in heaven as on earth.

I need to accept my inability to control everything I wish I could. The jump from Meursault to Gatsby is a difficult task, but I would much rather be our cool but sometimes choked-up Nick to the antiheroine Daisy. Careless, careless Daisy... Reconcile your insincerity, your cold as ice part of you that watches your life from an outsider's perspective and laughs at its meaninglessness, with your heart that dives in to Gatsby's shirts. I cannot continue to step out of my existence and scoff as if dead at this human drama, if I indeed want what Francie wants, a life full of life every minute of every day. I must immerse myself wholly here, on this world, in every day, but stay true to this mind, this heart.
i talked at 03:04 (0) thoughts

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.:[ 10.05.2008 ]:.
random writings during math class
i hate triteness. i hate my writing. but i'd rather keep it than not, and these scraps of math work are going to recycling.

"I am a writer, writer of fiction..."
I write fiction. I build a home, a box for you in my stories. I wrap my heart in a ribbon with a bow on top, package it up and stow it away so nothing can touch it anymore. But that means that you can't escape. I want you to leave, but you can't. I won't let you. If you leave, nothing will be left of me.

"Mi a kedvenc...?"
My favorite times of day: night with you in a cold silent room under warm blankets when everything glows with the blue white light that fills us with contentment. The midmorning alone, looking up at a tree through its green leaves pulsing with yellow life, so alive you can feel it in your bones, the tautness of life-giving sunlight breathing through your pores. Long lazy afternoons spent in sleepy hot contemplation, gazing out the window at cheerful energetic birds and wondering how they do it, how they live when they know they will die someday. And it turns in, and turns out, and my favorite time of day is every day, the day itself, life. Life.
Life how do we live with ourselves day in and day out; I want to scream can't you see, can't you feel this gift beating through your veins all the time, the need to be and exist in consciousness forever? But I stay silent and you continue sleeping peacefully in the blue white light.

"Exponential Generating Functions"
She stops still before the coldly glittering Danube and screams, one long, desperate lamentation for her fate. But no unearthly voice shudders across the valley this time, no spirit answers her or tells her why she and she alone must bear this added weight upon her shoulders. That is, why the great cosmic joke wrote the punchline on a note and mailed her the love letter, but will keep mum about it for another five to nine years.
Five years, maybe. Nine if she's lucky. This must be how cancer patients feel, she thinks dimly. No, because they have hope of remission. I have no hope. He wasn't expecting to die from a cold, so he could keep living despite the evil gnawing at his lungs. But I know what my scene will look like. I know... I know...
"I know," she whispers hoarsely to the Chain Bridge. It stands silently, tacitly acknowledging the girl's newfound sense of mortality in stride. Its centuries of history mock her feeling of significance in this moment, explaining that she has been carrying this knowledge since the day she was born. Like everyone before her, she has held death in her bones since she left her mother's womb twenty years, five months, and three days ago.

"The Cauchy-Binet formula"
confined inside the lines i'm going out of my mind
tired of trying to define
the solution to a problem with no name doesn't matter
take a number just wait in line.
pen and ink I can't think outside the bounds of thin
scritch-scratch scratches
don't make a sound because
this is what I do
this is what I chose.

pick up the phone and call a friend
I've got this approach but can't get the right end
one is one is two right this makes no sense
I'd give up now but it's got a hold on me

Calm down now says the voice on the line
we've both spend all night we're gonna be fine
Math is a game, see, and we can't lose
all we do is gain because all we do is prove

what are you talking about
I'm losing my sleep
i'm losing my sanity people tell me I'm deep
we won't make any money, we won't have any time
no one reads our papers, they know we can't write

we'l sit in our rooms and stare at a board
detention forever but we chose it ourselves
it's empty you see, because we've got no words
to express our ideas of n-dimensional objects
bottles and strips with no bars, saddles with no horses
open closed sets and see what's inside
an interior? ha!
I have colors of graphs and words of abstraction
numbers of combining and functions in fractions
push me and push me you'll get no reaction
because I'm back in my room, back at the board
it hits me the lemma like a punch in the gut
I'm everywhere and nowhere frenetic action
After hours of toil I'll get a theorem, light of my life best thing ever!
In a room at a board alone in my thoughts
no money in this job, no glamour nor fame
alone alone just a paper and my name
a paper no one will read
a name the world doesn't need

"We'll use lemma 2 to prove lemma 1, which proves..."
Our lives aren't determined,
We aren't simple like that.
You don't add up the factors
and call that a man
Same for mathematicians
(even if you feel like you can)

If you believe it you can prove it
who else can say that, the jerks.
This is why we do math
We love it can't let go
It makes sense to us
Because we know what we know.
i talked at 08:19 (0) thoughts

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.:[ 9.23.2008 ]:.
all through the winter
I'm alive. I travel to find... what? I do it a lot. I do not care about you. I wrote this some time ago. I believe in myself. I am me myself and I am.

Victimized we all feel sorry for ourselves, so sorry for yourself. Even this empathy that drives us to be, that drives us in thinking that we are a 'we' and not too alone in this world, even this empathy cannot be sincere. It is too selfish, it is too self-centered and hurt already to see beyond itself. Before the age of reason we do not imagine others like ourselves, and after it we cannot imagine others unlike ourselves. Like death, our minds cannot grasp the 'other', try as we might to stress tolerance and a respect for others' beliefs. Deep down (or perhaps shallowly) I am right and you are wrong, but perhaps I feel pity for your silly mistake [in that it is pitiful] or remorse for my self-righteousness and you feel that I feel something for you. Artificial connections, artificiality reigns when we are all so self-centered but realize society cannot run without us.

Traveling puts me outside of my familiar context and forces me to reevaluate my beliefs. Yet talking with others, strangers or friends, simply reinforces my sneering contempt for emotional whiners. I do not care, but perhaps it is this distinct impression that makes people feel comfortable enough to tell me everything. You want to let me know how you feel because I will empathize and give good advice, because you look up to me or because you want me to understand something more about the world. But the only thing I will think is, yet another victim. Yes, shit happens to all of us. But

Well, I have to finish that sentence sometime. Now is not that time, and perhaps never. I don't want to lose all of my compassion now, do I?


I believe the answer to my question is never. I don't really believe this, I don't at all. I believe in human connections in love in life in awe and wonder and postponement (of death etc.) I believe in myself because I have no choice.
i talked at 15:19 (0) thoughts