without you, i'm nothing: six people who make me, every day

not to my best friends, because they are obvious and anything i would say to them i hope they already know. anything i haven't expressed i could never admit.
this may sound sarcastic at times, but every word is sans cere.

****

1. you inspire me. conversing with you, i sit up straighter, shoot the shit sharper, and snark snider. i hope one day you'll realize how far you outstrip me, gather up your stardust and expand. i hope you never do.
i like to sift through your photographs and note how cohesive your composition never fails to be. i like to then look at my own photos and struggle with whether or not to throw them all out and pretend i never tried to overstep my point-and-shoot kodak limits in the first place.
nothing is healthier for a self-absorbed pseudo-artiste than to realize she's actually quite shit, and should go sacrifice her soul to a cubicle.

2. you bring out everything i fear about myself and make me love it. i am always at my most self-destructive around you, and i never am happier. you keep me honest; keep me aware that i am not a 'good' person and that Antihero is the archetype i am because Antiheroes don't want redemption.
i suspect one day you'll thinspirate yourself out of existence but the ride there will be exquisite [as will that trip from the Eiffel Tower].

3. you vindicate me. if i had been alone and overpowered by that incessant pressure, i may have cracked. i may have given up. i may have relinquished everything i stand for, and been led docile as they could have ever hoped.
but you finally, finally, came into my life, and regardless of my jokes, i would never have sought a replacement. you are my calvary, my confirmation, my compatriot.
i pray for you under onslaught of every word i cannot twist, every opinion i cannot reconstrue, every mark i cannot shape. but you are vibrant, and you are powerful; you have my dusty footprints to guide you if so you need them.

4. you are all the parts of me i left behind. you are that which curves my feet and directs my path. in no kind way, but all the necessary ones, you are what jolted awake my ambition, and the snark that fueled my flight away from you.
i wonder if you have found your own reasons to grow, or if you are still content in the squalor of your personality. many days, i do not care, but every day i inhale deeply the air that does not reek of our rotting.

5. you polarize me. with each callous phrase you utter, blundering your way to success with a carefully intuitive grasp of networking policies and a vast reserve of dumb luck, i burn colder and bluer. you are my moral south. in any situation, i recall you, the shadow in the mirror. always your black memory affirms the shades in which i must logically myself be cloaked, and i navigate accordingly.
i blush for the cruel mantle i fasten on your shoulders, but you forever bear it with little affect. one day, i would like to strip you of your many superciliious folds, and examine the creature that conceived of them. i expect, however, that it would resemble too greatly myself.

6. you dented my first fingerprints. an ever-warping kiln, you melted the very muscle from my bones, hoping to leave even them brittle and malleable. but clay hardens with pressure, and though your smudges disfigured me, i retained the shape with which i was born. in some ways, you gave me focus; by setting me up to swerve, you ensured i would never sway, and i thank you with all vindication for creating the very same black sheep that you shun.
i would say more, like that my gratitude extends to debt, but my continued willingness to pretend that i yearn to appease you makes us even. my capacity to respect a creature that refuses to acknowledge upon me any such similar courtesy is too limited for anything else.

consider this like those short answer paragraphs you had to fill out on exams

there was a meme going around livejournal, involving a series of questions to write on. i decided to snag it and answer a few of them as a reminder to myself that i have investments here. maybe.

~

3) What is the difference between a dork and a nerd?
i always define nerd as someone connected with academic achievement or interest. loves books, etc. like Stephen Fry. dorks are people who like WoW and playing D&D and other such games. or reading/writing fanfiction. geeks, in turn, are those who like science, as opposed to just academics. science fiction, and robots, and technology, etc.


6) Do you think that sex addiction is real?
suppose that depends on how one defines 'addiction'. if you treat sexual desire/intercourse/etc as something one can crave and develop a psychological need for, then of course, like many other things, one can be addicted to sex. i doubt that is something people disagree on.

however, there is a far different stigma attached to being a 'sex addict' as opposed to someone who just 'fucks around' or is a 'slut'. maybe that's what people object to? because if celebrities in sexually scandalous situations can be spun as needing help, as having some sort of compulsion, then it can be said that he wasn't entirely in control of themselves, and therefore deserve less scorn that people who simply don't want to keep their junk in their pants. because of the high-profile nature of sex scandals, there is always a possibility that someone might say he/she is addicted to sex, but not actually be so?

then, of course that idea trickles down and re-erects (pun accidental, but rolled with) the stigma associated with sex scandals that aren't based in addiction or psychological dysfunction. and then those who actually do have some serious problem may not be able to get help.


8) Do you think that some people are not meant to be parents at all?
yes. parenting is a lifetime investment that involves not just birthing and feeding and teaching hygiene; a parent must prepare the child for 'normal' methods of social interaction, supporting oneself financially, making decisions based on rational principles in order to positively affect one's direction in life, etc. when you bring a life into the world, you take on the responsibility of setting it on solid ground and letting it run amok. there is no 'break it & buy it' policy on Life, but neither is there a reset button on the Soul. every idiosyncrasy a parent has is catalogued by the child for mimicking at a later date, until a severe introspective study provides the impetus to discard every terrible virtue imprinted on a person by a family member. assuming, of course, that the introspective study is something everyone undertakes (they don't).

a friend of mine answered it brilliantly, and so i shall simply steal an excerpt from her:

I think that parenthood is a calling, like becoming a member of the clergy, rather than something everyone ought to do to live a full life. Some children want to grow up to have a family and know it even when they're young; and even though it's much, much, much more encouraged and accepted in girls than it is in boys, I've known plenty of young men who strongly desired to have a family and are actively making plans to accommodate one in the future. I think that while many uncalled people thrust into that situation can adapt to it and become a passable or even great parent, people who don't feel called to start a family shouldn't feel any pressure to do so, or face any negative repercussion from friends, family, coworkers, strangers, or employers for choosing not to. We who don't want to be parents should never feel like we should.

[LiveJournal user laskuraska]

i don't answer the question under the belief that there's a parenting gene or anything, but there are people who just can seem to make responsible decisions, or who show concern only over their own well-being. and they should never be parents.

procrastination is a fairy godmother; enjoy her gifts

yes, it has been ages. yes, i forgot you. no, i am not at all concerned by this. mostly because i doubt you, my Nonexistent Readers, are either.

regardless, i was reading the Aeneid a month ago, and there was an assignment for one of those 'reader response' journals, and i think i made quite a point during one of the 'entries'. i will therefore offer it as good tidings, and come up with something more recent in a few weeks.
end of term exams are nigh, and i haven't yet figured out if i shall be dining on dashed dreams after they've finished with me.

=

Aeneas Needs To Chill Out

Aeneas is continuously referenced as pious and righteous and all manner of bleeding kittens from his rectum, but there is a scene wherein even he winds up losing his seemingly endless supply of control – the slaughter of all those Italians before he finally fells Turnus. Is that a What The Hell Hero moment, or is it justifiable in the face of everything that’s just happened in the last few books?

Everyone can understand the feeling of losing control when under duress, and by this point, Aeneas was definitely cracking. Virgil notes that Aeneas’ anger was “excited by the treachery of Turnus, / whose chariot and horses have been carried / far off, and having often pleaded with / Jove and the altars of the shattered treaty” (book XII, lines 666-669). Then, the typically pious soldier goes berserk and starts slaying Turnus’ men. Virgil doesn’t seem to have a problem with the brutal warfare that Aeneas wages – and it’s not like he’d been a gentle person before, either – and one could suggest that the Italians and Etruscans brought Aeneas’ Mars-assisted wrath on themselves when they broke the treaty. I feel like seeking bloody therapy for his anger issues is against Aeneas’ own promises to the people he intends to live among. Killing everyone’s relatives isn’t going to endear you to the locals, which could cause him trouble down the line, whenever Fate decides to stop backing him. Not that he should have avoided bloodshed if anyone was actively attacking him, but Aeneas should have just gone after Turnus and Juturna. If his devotion to that death he sought to give had remained single-minded, I feel like this whole affair would have been done with so much sooner.

oh hey, i totally forgot about this blog

The Fumes Of Sighs Sink Ships. original; prompt assignment; pg; 1073 words [written in like, 8 hours]
prompt: create tension or even contradiction between physical behaviour and dialogue.

=

The flock disperses, and you’re wresting free a notebook from your backpack when she’s suddenly glowing in front of you, dropping her book on your desk.

“Hi!” Her eyes are bright, her smile is downright luminescent, and she’s doing that tapping thing with her neon varnished nails like she’s nervous. Instead of responding, you cleverly gape at her, but you don’t seem to lose face; she’s not paying attention.

“So, you’re real good with this literary s…theory…stuff, right? Since I made sure to beat out the competition for your services, think you’d be willing to partner with me - help a buddy out?” her expression is cute, that head tilt furthering the effect of her lopsided smile, and you are a dirty disgusting sap.

“Oh, uh-yeah, uh…I’m all about enriching other people…and…Shakespeare.” You have no idea what you’re saying, but maybe if you smile the whole time, she’ll just go along with it.

“Fantastic,” she declares, and when an unsuspecting fellow classmate gets up to sharpen his pencil, she drags his desk over beside yours and plops herself down. Chin on hand and wide-eyed, she turns her ‘I am a fascinated pupil’ look on you.

“All right: Romeo and Juliet. Tell me about it…what’s the tragedy?” You are aiming for an authoritative-yet-friendly tone, and you think you mostly succeed, because she’s rolling her eyes but still smiling at you.

“Aren’t you supposed to tell me?” She leans sideways, not breaking eye contact as her face gets closer, and then bats her eyelashes. You think you understand the joke.

Cautiously – because God, how embarrassing would being wrong be – you incline your head like you plan to impart something profound. Constructing something witty instead, you let your mouth hang open and try to remember to breathe through your nose; “What, have you never learnt by doing?”

She snorts, “Often.” Her chin takes flight from its perch on her palm, and she turns to squint at the potentially legible scribbles on the chalkboard.

You suspect there has been some miscalculation, on your part.

“So, why didn’t they just run away?” she randomly bursts, before enough awkward silence has passed for you to come up with something to break it.

As you have spent the last few moments silently self-berating for reasons you don’t quite understand, you have completely lost the thread. “…Who?”

This time, her smile slow burns like acid. “Romeo? Juliet? The people in the play? ”

You have long suspected that you live in a Woody Allen film. Therefore, you are privy to the reason why he only makes movies, and never TV shows; the sheer amount of social incompetence involved in such a concept is too exhausting for any actor to maintain on a weekly basis. “Uh…why should they have to?”

She fixes her ‘see me unimpressed’ look on you, but you warm to your subject; this terrain is well-traveled. “Well, I mean…if you had gotten a boyfriend – a husband – would you expect to need to flee the country and your family just to live? No, you would not. And that’s the point; the feud between families was so bad that they couldn’t even associate with the same people. It was ridiculous and pointless.”

She snorts again, but Shakespeare seems to warrant less derision than you apparently did. “Worst. Breakup. Ever.”

“Well Romeo and Juliet died at the end, yeah, but they technically didn’t break up –”

“No not them. Although they weren’t technically really together, so I guess they never broke up either.” Her eyes have closed, and the heel of her palm is now supporting her cheekbone.

Your eyes shift to the bulletin board on the right of their own accord. “Uh, did you read the book? Because they got married.”

“Did you?” She shot back, eyes still closed. “Because their entire relationship was shorter than Kevin Federline and Britney Spears’ marriage.”

You are proud to not really know who she’s talking about, but her tone – and the fact that the professor will think she’s sleeping and mark the both of you down for it – has begun to grate. “Well since you know so much about it, why did you need my help?”

“I was sleeping during the lecture; I have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing. You’re the one who answers like, every question.” With each sentence, she looks and sounds progressively more like she’s falling back asleep. Her hair is a bit knotty where she’d tangled her fingers near the beginning of class, and she seems strangely duller than you remember her being just five minutes ago.

You still kind of want to help her out. “We’re supposed to analyze the varying…ah… opinions, I guess, of the characters on marriage and love.”

She lifts her head to stare at you with bleary eyes. “What opinions? Juliet tricks Romeo into marrying her because he wants to do her.” She does that snorting thing again. “He would have been better off staying with that Rose Lee chick, even if she didn’t put out, or whatever.”

That’s…an unusual interpretation. “Well no, he…I mean he liked Rosaline, but Juliet caught his eye because…um,” you have no idea what drew him to Juliet. Something about how she’d been shining bright – which is a weird way to say she was beautiful; it’s not like she would have been glowing neon or anything. “Ok, marriage is a long way to go for sex.”

“Well, you know; the things guys’ll do to get laid,” she says, flippant. At least she looks awake again. “Wait, is that why it’s a tragedy? Because everyone in those families was an idiot?”

You stare at her. She, finger-combing those snarls out of her hair, raises her brows, waiting. “...Yes! See, there you go! Impulsiveness with infatuation or with quarreling is much frowned upon by Shakespeare. Well done.”

She looks you up and down; only the one eyebrow still arched now, but doesn’t say anything. She just picks up her book and her bag, yawns, and meanders off. Around you, the classroom is a flurry of movement; the other students are packing away their books and laughing their way out the door. The class had ended at an unusually convenient time, allowing you to wrap up – sort of – your long, strange trip of a conversation before coming to a close.

this is a post of mildly-intellectual delirium.

i have a fantastic relationship with myself. there rarely is any cognitive dissonance in my mind or soul, and my body and brain generally harmonize beautifully.

i think that's how many people start out, as children. all aspects of them understand when they are hungry and when they are tired and when they need to run around, and when they need someone soft to hold them, and neither mind nor brain have any compunction with this. all is well.

then slowly, often only subconsciously, one's brain realizes that one's body does not always come through when needed. that clever mental organ registers obstacles in a path, and charts routes around them, but the feet plod along, too large or too ill-coordinated to change course at the right moment, or to configure the correct trajectory adjustments, and the body stumbles. bangs its knee into a coffee table that the brain swears was just a little left of where those confounded feet were supposed to be. and if the mind is healthy enough, the brain figures out how to adapt to this realization about the body's limitations, to regulate the responses of the body and tune the reflexes in accordance with the way the brain processes stimuli. the soul copes, and all aspects melodize in sync once again, dissonance resolved.

then other people come onto the scene.

for some reason, many children come to believe that the views of society trump all other data/stimuli. in terms of sexuality, in terms of propriety, in terms of acceptable 'white' lies, in terms of acceptable 'blackballing' discrimination, etc. so if the body wants sex with men, or the soul is repulsed by an unwanted acquaintance, etc, society informs the brain that these needs and desires must be repressed, and whichever particular collective reality of 'the times' be maintained.

i never showed up for that lesson in civilization-building.

when confronted with constraints on my behavior, handed down to my brain from an entity outside myself, i would analyze each order. for every entreaty that was, once stripped bare of marketing, discovered to be bare also of logical structure, i tallied up another disobedience. in short, my rationally motivated mind realized that, if my body is not infallable, neither can my brain be. to all internal sectors, a message is conveyed - regulate how much the brain relies on input from other persons when formulating a decision. and that was all i needed to do. inner harmony stabilized, and checks & balances in place, i could get on with my life sans the identity crises that so commonly plague teenagers.

so i did.

i am the seagull... no, that's not it. i'm an actress!

this is not a long post, but the quote is gargantuan, because the person who wrote the original is nearly as loquacious as i am.

****

once again Jacob, i love you, and your strangely philosophical recaps of a fucking tv show.

"Everything that rises must converge, and all that. Tending to one's own garden; being at peace. No, it sounds like settling when you say it that way. Living is not about complacency. But there comes a point when you realize some very important shit. I don't know all the things, I probably know very few of the things, but the things I know, which number exactly four, are as follows:

1) Nobody is watching you on secret cameras, so stop worrying about it. You'd be surprised how much pointless shame you can shed every day just by looking at the fucked-up thing you did and thinking about how fucked up it was for a few minutes. Then, drink a glass of water and get the fuck over yourself.

2) Your reputation is everything, but it's also totally recoverable. People are more worried about their shit than they will ever be about yours, and are looking for any opportunity to cut you a decent break, just so they don't have to think about you anymore. Your reputation is made up entirely of acts and behaviors, as perceived by other people (only the ones whose opinions are relevant). Do a thing enough times, and that's the person you are. Everything that happens to you from the direction of other people is entirely a reaction to this person. If you don't like those reactions, do a new thing instead, and after just a few times you will magically become a new person. Monitor the new responses.

3) Generally, we only look closely at the situation when it has become untenable. That's rough, because when the situation is untenable is precisely the point at which your best bet is to accept it as it is, and think about ways to change it. Instead, when things are bad is when we're most likely to wig out and act like idiots. You can't change what is until you're willing to look at what is, the ingredients and causes, and the ingredients it contains for the next thing. It changes every second, so you might as well be in charge of that and utilize your vast opportunities to choose the next what is.

4) Every minute that goes by, one of your futures dies. That's scary and it's sad, but it also means clarity. That sense of purpose S was talking about last week. Getting older means splitting less of your hope and energy into those million possible futures, and keeping more of it for yourself -- right now -- to keep moving forward toward what you really do want. And that's what Lily means. It's not about giving in, it's about giving up the maybes, one by one, until you become whole.*

*(This part will never actually happen, but you have to keep pretending it's going to, for your entire life. That's what Blair's Voltaire quote means: Hoe your own garden, for the rest of your life, because it is art, and it is very simple, and it is very hard to pull off correctly.)"

[TWoP recap of a Gossip Girl (yes you read that right) episode]

the thing about never being whole is what really gets me, because i interpret it like this:
being whole is about the essence of a person. the every reaction to any scenario. we are those little artsy coffee/tea mugs from Portugal; from the moment we are thrown into a specified shape, that is how we define ourselves. putting a handle on it, sticking it in the kiln and painting it, swirling little white spiral designs on the side, firing it up again, drinking out of it, etc - that's all a reaction to a mug. a cup. which really is still just clay, even if we never think of it as such.

i could go into Aristotle vs Plato, and the object vs the idea, but metaphysics is less important to my point than sociology. we label people. we set them aflame with the belief that they are how we perceive them, when really the perception only comes in after someone has moved, has acted, has shed light on a behavior and given our eyes something to work with in the first place.

i guess my point is this: to Live, instead of merely Existing, one must take charge of one's own movement. one cannot control how one comes out of the kiln anymore than one can control how light hits another's retinas, but one can manipulate the way shapes appear. failing that, one can affect the interpretation of an object, by confronting a person with differing images. one day you're a scrawny chessgeek with 42 posters of Jean-Luc Picard on your ceiling, and the next, there are three pairs of panties hanging from your bedpost and a Nobel Peace Prize on your wall. are you any more or less you than the day before?

sane, well-adjusted people do not concern themselves with the innermost thoughts and feelings of everyone around them. they are refractions of their parents and their friends, and will only ever focus on you when you give them a reason to. so show them someone you like.

when they intend to unname

i am enraptured by the near-universal abhorrence of hipsters.

The problem with hipsters seems to me{sic} the way in which they reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how “cool” it is perceived to be....One must start with the premise that the hipster is defined by a lack of authenticity, by a sense of lateness to the scene, or by the fact that his arrival fashions the scene—transforms people who are doing their thing into a self-conscious scene, something others can scrutinize and exploit. The hipster is that person who shows up and seems to ruin things—then you can begin to ask why this person exists, whether he is inevitable, whether he can be stopped, and what it will take.

["The Death of the Hipster"; Rob Horning]

simply put, hipsters are the grandchildren conceived by postmodernist bitchfest orgies.

Hipsterdom is the first "counterculture" to be born under the advertising industry's microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it.

["Hipster: The Dead End Of Western Civilization"; Douglas Haddow]

as with all grandchildren who've been immersed in a culture vastly opposed to the oft-touted world from their ancestors hail, the hipster movement possibly began as a way for those attracted to the lifestyle to immerse themselves in the glories of the past they've only known vicariously. somewhere down the line though, the presumably honest attempt to embrace the riches of experiences past turned into a race to collect the most pop culture references. hence the constant condescending sneer of hipsters: they can rattle off the names of more 1970s musicians than any classic rock aficionado, even if they know nothing about band members, lyrics, or guitar tabs, and that dearth of pointless, contextually nullified information is what gives them power. or something.

He’s the one / Who likes all our pretty songs / And he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun / But he knows not what it means

["In Bloom"; Nirvana]

it certainly gives them something to say anytime someone asks a member of the tribe a question. if the answer neither makes sense nor has any tangential relation to the topic at hand, the technicalities don't phase a hipster; true Art is not dreamt of in philosophy, but an awkwardly-cropped rendering of Sofia Coppola dressed as a pack of Parliaments in converses, printed out from the internet and pinned or pasted onto a dingy pair of cutoff jeans stolen from a hobo in NYC.

That there exists somewhere in the past an item, ostensibly useless to humanity now, that could become a necessary accessory, is only a matter of creativity and originality...looking even farther into the past to find something that could be a mark of hipness in the present.

["Hipsters desperately seek new anachronism to claim as own"; The Enduring Vision (satire site)]

but let it never be said that hipsters aren't aware of their own tragedy.

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society....We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

["Hipster: The Dead End Of Western Civilization"; Douglas Haddow]

whatever, hipsters; i maintain that there is always something unique and interesting waiting to be discovered and appreciated. there may only be five original stories ever, but the eyes that observe and are moved by them have yet to find a doppelganger. i've sifted through your last, lost generation and remain bored; i demand my beatniks back.

otherwise, i'll see you at the bottom.