Fear of failure?

Today I was looking at my old street on Google Maps. Ah, Google Maps. I couldn’t even picture that street a few moments ago, except for my parents’ restaurant and a 1-hr photo shop. One of my childhood friends goes to college across the street now, what did that building look like . . ? I remember skating on their stoops and railings all along the block. I remember my time living on that street as my childhood, but I was only there until I was 13. As I wondered whether the building on the corner is a church and whether I could pop in there one day, I realized that the whole of the world is available to me now in a way that it never had been: I’m officially an adult, I’m considered a real person now. Alcohol, justice system, etc. Yet I haven’t aged a bit, I’m just a child. With a child’s eyes I can explore. Looking into my past is like looking at a comic strip, and I see why people are always talking about their “golden childhoods” (or at least Chinese people say this), because your memories are always saturated with that pigmented nostalgia for something you can never get back. Even when you watch your own children grow up, you know you can never enjoy laying in the dewy grass by a river in the same way again. (At Giverny, I actually fled the grass because this guy kept trying to talk to me.)

That’s why I liked the movie Minuit à Paris (Midnight in Paris) so much. I actually saw it in Paris, too, so I had the privilege of laughing at the “American” jokes that would’ve otherwise left the room full of chirps (plus the privilege of watching it in a theater about as big as the waiting room for the toilettes at Bloomingdale’s). [Note to self: must put up some pictures of trip to Paris.] I talked to some of my Parisian friends and acquaintances about this film. One of them asked, Have you seen it already?
–Yes I loved it, have you?
–Complete piece of shit, that film!
What? Not so! Maybe you need to have a certain perspective to enjoy a film like this. It requires more than a bit of suspended disbelief.
–The Americans have no culture of their own, that is why they always have to romanticize ours.
*I berated him, the only reason he or anyone else would say that is that they cannot understand a culture that is more diverse and welcoming than it is old.*

Those who stand to benefit the most from the moral of Minuit à Paris are particularly those who consider themselves artists, whether they be photographers or dancers or mathematicians working on a beautiful theory. Putting aside the notions of pretention often associated with this self-identification, more than anything else, an artist is someone who draws from inside what they see and feel to produce that which will enhance the world with beauty and wonder or bring awareness to its audience, igniting tentacles of our consciousness that otherwise slither or thump about blindly, intermittently, in search of meaning through sparks of thought and emotion.

What is it that artists do? (No spoilers yet.) Like Owen Wilson’s character in the movie, they often look back on the works of other great artists, those who’ve died and whose great oeuvres are seen as complete. There’s no arguing with those people, their statements are as finite and infinite as they ever will be. But we, we’re still struggling, floating in the air looking for words that dissolve just as we alight upon them. In addition to that, artists all at some point have to consider the frightening possibility that all that is great, particularly anything we can possibly dream up, has already been said. That is why it’s tempting to look into the past and say, That was a different time, when ______ was so much easier. (Moral-of-the-story alert, not that it would really surprise you.) Like Owen Wilson’s character, the “artist”–or all sentimentalists–must realize at some point that there is no great period that embraces him. Every person is a sitting duck in history and you can’t look to the past to tell us what will be important in the era in which we’re living. And there’s definitely no point in letting that fear get in the way of anything you could do. Each person has so much potential, the only obstacle is finding what you’re meant to do, and failure in one area can’t stop you in another.

(I have a feeling I’ve written this all before.)

A somewhat drunken summary of this I gave to my Parisian acquaintance. If you’ve never seen the world with nostalgic and longing such that it seems your future and your entire person is somehow hinged on your relationship with these two elements, then you cannot enjoy the realization that Wilson’s character has at the end of the film, however “corny” it may be to some who are rather more pragmatic and cynical than Allen’s characters. For me, it’s sometimes rather relaxing to watch a film and sail through it with pleasure rather than great and violent waves of emotion.

* * *

I’ve been in a bad mood today because earlier in the year I’d decided to let go of some people I had been “friends” with but never really felt anything for, yet their constant reappearance has thrown me a bit. Why do I feel guilty for letting go when, in the case of one, I never liked them? I always thought that some affection of mine would grow towards this person, but it never did. Maybe I feel bad for giving up. Advice?

I’m really missing Paris. I can’t wait to graduate so that I can move there. Art, cheese and racism, ho !

trouvé

Ma coloc a trouvé mon blog. Ce n’est pas de bonnes nouvelles, donc, je vais probablement écrit des messages en français. Bravo à tous qui peuvent me comprendre !

Je lutte avec un poème de Damas, « Bouclez-la ». C’est la dernière composition pour cette classe, donc, je dois le finir . . . Maintenant, une heure de blogging.

L’autre chose est que le week-end passé, je me suis rendu compte que je ne devrais pas, je ne peux plus . . . sortir avec les mecs. (Pour ceux que ne me connaissent bien, c’est pas de tout que je me couche à droit et à gauche, woah, c’est tout le contraire. Je crois que le sacrifice de soi–self-denial–ne m’aide pas dans ce cas.) Je devrais porter un panneau qui dit, « Ne faites jamais attention à moi ou je serais aux petits soin pour vous ». Ouais . . .  Je sais que beaucoup de gens (particulièrement des femmes) sont comme ça et ils survivent. Mais qui veut comme tous les autres ? Alors, une amie et moi, nous avons résolu d’être cool et de ne pas sortir avec les mecs l’année prochaine, sauf pour les rendez-vous tout à fait innocents. Donc, si je peux convaincre ma colocataire du semestre prochain de faire la même résolution, ce serait parfait.

Merde, elle vient, ma composition !

St. Paddy’s

This post has nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day.

Like most women, I’m pretty frustrated by men. Somehow men’s and women’s brains and bodies are wired differently, and that causes clashes. We try to figure each other out, it’s inevitable to wonder, yet any conclusion that comes along arrives at the very very end. The timing itself is inevitable: a conclusion is a conclusion.

In addition to talking to my professors and counselors about the purpose of being at college, I had a very real conversation with one of my best friends on this topic. (For the record, a professor that I previously had little respect for has given me the most compelling argument for the worthiness of this experience: you can’t know what’s original unless you’ve studied everything else that exists already. While not an immomentous task, it’s a perfectly logical one.) My friend and I, we weren’t completely unhampered by misunderstanding, since we’re both the type to love being correct, but I don’t think we’ve had such a good heated debate in a long time.

I agree that a good grade can show that you can keep up with deadlines, get work done, etc., and that perhaps people at our age need some sort of preparatory phase to understand ourselves, and college is a good environment for it, I don’t think that it’s for everyone. It necessarily can’t be for everyone–we’re all so different. Also, yes, a degree or two does make you more competitive in the job market, for most people it’s one of the only standardized signs of your competence. (See post for New Threats to Freedom Essay contest.) However, everyone has their own talents, and not all of those talents can be explored best in a college environment. Not only can class time be time wasted, but college is a stressful experience for people, and whatever values are reinforced by higher education, they can’t be some sort of objective truth about how humans work. Once you say, right, everyone learns differently and some people shouldn’t continue to be students, you get rid of this problem.

I’m not too sure what I’m trying to say. I’m playing devil’s advocate a tad, just to flush out two sides of an argument. At the same time, having a college degree is a concrete achievement, it’s something to fall back out so that you know whatever happens you won’t end up being “just” a waitress if acting doesn’t work out. But I don’t want to believe that that’s the best thing for me. I’m just that sick of academia.

My friends think that if I put any effort into studying at all, I would be able to learn things very easily. I believe them, but we all make choices. The hard part is understanding why we do things the way we do. Was it a juvenile lack of discipline, or ADD (I should be medicated), or depression, or laziness (I’ve been getting away with so little for so long)? I don’t feel like it’s any of those things, because sometimes things just seem right. When I’m having revealing conversations with people, and I have them a lot, I don’t feel guilty, like I’m supposed to be doing anything else. When I’m writing creatively, I never feel like I’m wasting time, I feel like other things are getting in the way of . . . just some crackling little voice in my throat that should be silky and powerful.

I’m writing a story in Chinese. Mother birds leave their eggs for longer stretches of time when their eggs are about to hatch. They can feel the chicks inside moving, and the warm air of the world is diffusing through that porcelain membrane. (You can’t see how something works by looking at it, sometimes you need to investigate it to know, don’t you?) Not sure where I’m heading with this.

comparisons

I keep getting fatter and fatter.

I just returned to my room after hearing a Holocaust survivor speak. Her name is Ethel, and she’s the grandmother of a student here. She spoke about her experiences from the ages of 7 to 13 at seven different concentration camps, beginning at Auschwitz, about being in her mother’s arms when she was killed and about finding her father, her last surviving family member, when the war ended. After her talk and some questions, many people left, understandably to do their work and whatnot. But I, not being a person with schoolwork as a main priority, felt like I couldn’t leave. I’m sure that other people felt the same way too. There was no real reason to stay, the talk was over, and ultimately Ethel and I won’t begin a lifelong friendship, but I felt that to leave would be to abandon her. She said a day doesn’t pass without bringing her memories of what happened, a night without nightmares. She was born when Hitler came to power; that’s a pretty long time.

Time becomes heavier, it’s hard to move yourself through it and go about things like you did just a little while ago, even though you know eventually after hearing about bad things you can banish them to some hidden corner in good time. But when you experience those things, you can never hide from them, you don’t control them.

How do we prevent dehumanizing experiences? I think about this often–and I hope that you do too–and even more so recently, or whenever I’m struggling with the purpose of my life, my education, whatever intellect and skill I have. I will write about this sometime soon.

brain-cation

I’ve been inside the last couple of days, just turning my brain off and digesting thousands of images and bits of information from the internet, as I sometimes do. I guess it isn’t normal behavior, here at least, to sleep through classes and stop caring about assignments, but I sometimes do this. I think the reason is that the mind sometimes needs a break. We’re thinking all the time, even when we’re entertaining ourselves with movies and books, we can’t help but process them and spawn millions of thoughts from them. So when my brain needs a break, it tells my body.

Something that I find strange is how my body needs food and grows, i.e. the hair, nails. These things require constant upkeep, keeping fit, eating, and I can tell what mood I’m in when I observe my attitude towards activities like doing my nails. Why isn’t the human body static? In the future maybe we’ll be able to control this. One day all that growth will grind to a halt. (Is that what worries people about apathetic behavior like mine, that it’s a conscious foreshadowing?)

Sleep takes so much time as well. One thing I know about myself that is also true of many other people, is that I have high mental inertia (and probably physical inertia too considering my diet lately). This means that once I’m doing something, it takes, I think, 20x more energy for me to stop doing that thing than any regular person. A lot of this must be health related, I think, like I’m not eating the right foods that would energize me. On the other hand, I’ve heard that willpower is like a muscle that has to be exercised. [Side note: I googled "mental inertia" to see if it's a real thing, and it's supposedly similar to a mindset, and there are all these tips on overcoming your mental inertia, including those below that I found here on this self-improvement blog.]

When I dance I want to dance forever, I don’t stop unless someone turns off the music or stabs me (or grinds up against me, in which case I punch those people. That’s the way I dance, guys!!). When I sleep, I’m gone: my dreams are so much more interesting than the reality of this college campus, I have adventures and hop across continents, every scene has a palpable and concentrated tone, scents, vibrant colors, textures. When I write I can’t stop editing.

I …… can’t remember what I was just saying. or what I wanted to write about in the first place. People keep coming in to talk to me. Dammit people!

{ ways to overcome Mental Inertia }

1. Mentally see the result of your action and picture the excellent result (this will motivate you into action),
2. Start moving physically, and the brain will follow suit,
3. Start small and pause to see actual result from this small step,
4. When the mode is up, do not stop till you are satisfied,
5. Rest when you feel tired ( otherwise you will feel stress up and anxiety will creep in),
6. Think positively,
7. Be aware that nothing is lost when you “actioned”; staying put causes more harm, and
8. Believe in yourself; “I can do it” mentality.

lame photography

You know what’s lame? When I take photos. Photography in general can be very revealing and vulnerable like nature in time. But what I do is worse than bad photography. When I walk around and see something gorgeous, a scene that is so beautiful I have to have it, so pure and bright, its color translucent and deep at the same, I have to have it, so I take a picture of it. On my crappy phone camera. and it makes me so so sad. Not only will I have this stupid shitty picture of a non-thing, high density pixels arranged by saturation and RGB number, but I actually felt I had to reach my hand into my pocket, take out this phone and frame a shot, like, Oh let me get this jussstt right . . .

I just did that about 15 minutes ago. I was crossing the lawn that had suddenly grown so lush and green, not just green, but in the way that nature imitates art, what we create, it was green, and I could feel the gentle rolling of the grass and its hidden sparse patches that are cold and bare with lowstrung strands of spidersilk, and I felt the sun pink and white gold sun filling the air with the color yellow, and that we were looking into this watery golden lens at the slow-wriggling photos of grass, and there was one of those moments when you know that trees are meant to be here, instead of whatever we built that ended up giving them context, and they are just so perfect because they don’t just grow out of the ground through a rough brown and grey clay-dusted mold but they play on it in patches and stripes of dark and light. I really wanted to stop, so, and I really wanted to keep that moment, so, I took a picture, and I think I kind of destroyed it.

I’m taking my laptop out here to write and describe it to you, but it’s verry cold. I can’t get over how opaline the sky is in the west at this time, blue and pink gold grey. Words are s o–i n s u f f i c i e n t—

My fingers are purple. The cold feels kind of good. Extremely painful. I think that’s can calm people down when they start dying of hypothermia or get frostbite.

Anyway, I meant to write about how sleepy I am because I stayed up all night last night half-doing what I was supposed to be doing and half finalizing arrangement for my summer trip to Paris (I use the word finalize loosely here), and how blurry everything looks. I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to go with a study abroad program and fork over $5200, or take some sort of French language course on my own and meet up with tons of people through language exchange sites and just hang out and see the city. The more I think of it, the more I think I’ll be happier with the latter, not having a real schedule and being able to enjoy a new and complex place. I may have made a decision here. More details later.

P.S. Am buying a camera, a nice one.

{ health faux-pas I have committed this past week }
• pulling an all-nighter •
• walking home in near-freezing temperatures during a downpour •
• eating only carbs, fat, sugar and caffeine (bean form) for energy •
NEW ! • sitting in 50° (what?? it felt colder!) weather while hands slowly turn a crispy blue • NEW !

EXPLOSION IMMINENT

OK, so there is such a thing as too much caffeine. I knew that it was going to happen. As soon as I eyed that last bag of chocolate covered coffee beans on my desk I knew, If I open that bag, they’re all gonna go. But I did open it. And now I can feel myself being way too energized. I’m. so. angry, because of one of my “professors,” if such a person could be labeled as a professor. Words cannot express–

And also, yeah, there may be some lady hormones engaging today, and other things, but mainly I’m trying to get work done , and I know I’m not going to be able to meet my friend at 10 PM tonight to finish that movie (Art School Confidential) because I’m working but I’m typing so HARD right now because of the caffeine jitters, caffeine jitters, CAFFEINE JITTERS, PEOPLE. I’m a little bit concerned. Outside I scared a group of people as I screamed and hiyah!‘ed and punched the air to try to get this energy out of me. Now I’m in a computer lab surrounded by people doing math. Will life situations ever seem plausible? Media makes us think that the pieces fit together somehow, smoking gun and all that, but doesn’t a smoking gun necessarily have to fun fit [freudian slip??], I mean, by definition someone’s going to notice it? I guess in your life everything you notice is a smoking gun in that sense. (Guy just hilariously almost fell out of his chair. After trying too hard to avoid looking and grinning, just burst out laughing. Fail.)

Had a great night last night, my friend having forced me to go out. The last couple of weekends have been particularly great dance-times–the music, guys, the music. Dance is body-poetry, and I tried to translate it as such in a longlong poem I wrote last week, maybe I’ll post some of it up here, but it’s in French.

In any case, I think that this “professor” has taught me that you really can bullshit a living, even one in which your performance is so open to scrutiny.

I’m going to try to post here at least 3 times a week, and get this blog out there, and not post at 5 AM anymore. I keep saying that, but really I will. Thanks, friends, for really encouraging me about this crap.

wind

My room is the creepiest place right now. Hoping to settle into bed early, I had tucked in with Colbert playing next to my head, when my door opened, completely opened, and gently closed, the blinds rattling like a moth trying to find its way out, my roommate’s metal fan tinkling . . . then a loud, whistling wind blew in through the thin vent of open window and flew right through the room . . ! It reminds me of a picture book I read as a kid about a black man’s ghost that would make biscuits every Sunday midnight. The person who lived there and found the biscuits couldn’t take credit for them, or wanted to take credit for them, can’t remember. But after they were just made they were so light they would float up to the ceiling.

Dammit, I’m so hungry, where’s my popcorn order, Popcorn Pavilion!!

meeting my advisor

This post comes in three parts: this part, the boring part, and the last part.
{ Here are some thoughts I’ve been collecting for a few days }

I love the sound two or three nice chocolates make in their box.

I don’t often write about events in my life because I don’t see my life as a collection of events, but rather a jumble of thoughts and a time line of when they occurred. The thoughts define me. I told this to one of my friends this morning in a depressed, sleepless haze and she said, That’s how I feel too, I think that’s how everyone feels. Is this true?

Why is it that most of the time you’d rather read a stranger’s blog than the blog of someone you know? I find this is usually the case with me, though I try. (It’s easier if the blog is mostly photos.) Maybe you get so much of people as it is in real life that in written form, with the time and space to say it all without interruption, they become overwhelming. Most of the time I think people just sound strange online. They’re addressing themselves to people, potentially strangers, and something weird happens to them. I haven’t read an entire post of a friend’s blog in a long time, so I can’t really think how to describe it.
What’s worse is when you can’t stop following the life of someone who annoys you, or even who disgusts you. (I mean you, B.)

I think the thoughts vs. events problem is why I can’t write a real story. I’m too focused on what happens in a moment, or the feeling of an experience, that I can’t make anything happen to my characters. Though I feel like my characters are separate from myself, the protagonists are all somewhat based on me. It just gets boring.
{/}

{ boring }
Like I said, I’ve been thinking about these things for a few days now. In fact I’ve been really struggling with writing a paper on the Paul Éluard poem « La Fin du monde » for the past week. I’m not the kind of person who enjoys writing analytical papers, I mean, few people do. But then at least after you finish it you get to feel, Wow I really just put all that work into one thing, and then you get it back from your professor or whoever and you’re like, Yay, I got an A. Also like a lot of people, I’ve struggled to find the context in which formal education can seem important in my life. I’m still having a really hard time with that (can’t see into the future, remember?). So yesterday morning I was freaking out and sent my advisor (why wont Spell Check acknowledge this word?) an email. (I’m always sending him way too informal, lunatic-sounding emails.) I met with him this afternoon and I feel way better–you know when you can feel yourself pent up with stress and maybe sleep-deprivation? I realized this weekend that I haven’t cried in a loooong time, and that crying would probably feel really good. So I tried to cry. My attempts were thoroughly half-assed in hindsight, I wanted to watch a movie that would be really depressing, but I didn’t want to watch anything new, and then I thought it would be emotionally easier to watch a Romantic Drama. Stupid. Idea. [I ended up watching A Walk to Remember: was so sugar-coated I could barely believe her illness was a key plot point. Then I watched The Notebook, a movie I really like and find really sweet and sad, but it just didn't do it because in my state it was comparatively uplifting.]
{/}

To the point: My advisor and I had a really interesting conversation. It started  with me just bawling my eyes out. Archie Comics bawling. It felt so good, trembling, shivering, facially-aware sobbing. Usually, even when I don’t want to write a paper I can still do it because the thoughts and emotions are all there, I just need to rearrange them with one artificial focal point and then find evidence. (I’m beginning to think I’m against focal points in general.) This time, the ideas just wouldn’t materialize. Everything sounded like crap. I really feel like I know something about this poem, I can see how the whole thing unfolds, but I couldn’t write the stupid analytical essay. I started to tell him about this, and how I can’t assign too much value to something I find as arbitrary as grades in school, and how I can’t write real stories anymore, and things feel jumbled up, and how I feel bored most of the time in class because I rarely hear something that strikes me as new. He told me there are three types of “work”: work at a job, work in college (education), and work as an artist.

He said that it seems to him that I’m an artist. I was so embarrassed. What have I ever done to think that I can be an artist? To think that what I say is saying something to other people? He also asked who my main influences were, who I one day hoped to be . . .

We always have good, lofty, soul-skimming conversations. This one touched on existentialism, no-soul, Kuhn’s paradigm shifts and Roland Barthes’ theory that we need to re-read a text in order to experience the aspects unique to it, because on our first reading we see it as being comprised of what we’ve already read. (I realized later that he also authored the essay “Death of the Author”, which I think is important for every reader to . . . read.) It’s fun to think about these things, and I was going to write a bit more, (I always want to write 了解), but now I’m bored. Nighty-night.

brulée

Je n’ai rien plus à dire à propos de la littérature. Quel est le but ? Tous les arguments retournent au même point pour moi. C’est quelque chose comme les questions, Lequel est le plus réel, le monde ou l’écriture ? D’où vient le sens final ? Tous ces poètes ont lutté avec ces idées-ici, et moi, je dois en écrire (grammaire ?), encore et encore, pas créer, mais tirer. J’éloigne le « lecteur » (est-ce qu’il y en a ?) du vrai sens du texte avec un mise en abîme de plus. Merde. Vivre est plus important qu’analyser.