To begin the break…

-20 pages from Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy by Jacques Ranciére. 

-1 article from a peer reviewed scientific journal

I’ll keep posting everything I watch/read, because I think some of this stuff’s pretty rad and other people should pick it up too.

Winter Plans

- To explore as much of the city as possible. 

- To meet new random people whenever appropriate. 

- To read more.

- To watch more movies.

In order to highten my understanding of life, or to discover that such a task is silly.

I’ve looked at him in that way twice that I can remember thus far. Once, when I was utterly confused and making the decision to leave, citing exhaustion as the cause, and again long after I hadn’t gone anywhere, sincerely content. He responded with a series of lines broken up repeatedly at different points that were beautiful in their simplicity and highlighted life’s dual nature. Although the same answer was given on both occasions, each time a completely separate emotion that was somewhat linked to the other but could stand on its own was evoked.

“Against my better judgement, I feel certain that somewhere very near here — the first house down the road, maybe — there’s a good poet dying, but also somewhere very near here somebody’s having a hilarious pint of pus taken from her lovely young body, and I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.”

Today I thought about how often I think about how you really need to start eating, again.

Sitting around the mattress on the floor,

admiring fashionable bisexuals. Ears

hurt and teeth are shifting, signs

we’re all getting older.

I worked for hours

doing something that should’ve been started weeks ago,

but took a brief break to straighten my hair. Placing the hot iron near my scalp,

I thought about how my life would’ve been had I gone to school with everyone else. Like the mind preforming respiratory tasks, such fantasies come and quickly leave.

She’s painting on leopard spots and he’s wearing platform shoes.

Recycled Media:

“My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”

Society (and by society I mean American society, or maybe even Western society, as I can’t speak to the collectives of others) seems to need and thrive off of the juxtaposition of opposite, opposing values. Over the weekend, I had to read an excerpt from Giorgio Agamben’s book, and at one point, he examined this idea perfectly. “In the American Constitution one thus reads, without any distinction, ‘We the people of the United States.’ Yet when Lincoln invokes a ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ in the Gettysburg Address, the repetition implicity opposes the first ‘people’ to another ‘people.’” In other words, the use of the word has come to mean both “people,” or the common person, the poor and disenfranchised, and “People,” the “whole political body” that is all-inclusive. The term then encompasses everyone, while also mentioning a very specific sect of people.  It successfully demonstrates the existence of both inclusion and exclusion, upon which laws are based.

Along the same vein, religion is a haven for such co-existing polar opposites. Abraham had to believe that killing his son was the right thing to do, for God told him to, but he simultaneously had to believe that God is love. To Kierkegaard, such a belief in two opposing views defined faith.

Staring deeply into the pit of a flower (at a perceived 2x magnification) painted on the cotton comforter, I am aware of all of someone’s faults, yet I’m not bothered enough to leave. It is morning.

Exercise that will remind you of your infinite place in this city and the universe:

Stand in the middle of the chaos, while swarms of people travel around you, and trace a skyscraper from its base to its tip. Note how some may be angered by this, by the simple fact that you’re refusing to move. Stopping and taking time out to smell the carcinogens is an act of civil disobedience against fast-paced society. Find where the two planes meet, the angle at which the man-made structure collides with the sky.  At this conjuncture, you may discover a million secrets. 

Currently, my most pressing question is whether my problems, primarily this unhappiness that is seeded so deep that I am never sad in the classic sense, but instead suspended in a perpetual state of boredom, is my body’s way of responding to external pressures, or if something defective is internally ingrained. 

“…thought concerns what he terms ‘the lost symmetry of the blastosphere’ – the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes.” 

Because, as we grow into fully developed beings, we are never quite the same on both sides.

Experiments in unedited rants (part two).

So I was sitting here yesterday on the top bunk (my own little world) and trying to free-write about what’s been happening to me lately when my roommate started talking about how annoying it is when her friends ask her, “how’s the city?” because she doesn’t know what to say. Although I think it’s great here, she talks about how she doesn’t want to do anything but drop out of art school and join a circus. Everyone brainstorms about what she might be able to do, because it has to be something that doesn’t require too much physical activity or effort, since that would take all the fun out of being in a circus.

She goes, “I don’t want to be anything, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” I understand. “But, what’s the alternative?” 

“Doing nothing.”

I agree, because doing nothing is pretty fucking awesome. 

Now I’m learning all these things. This school makes me go through mental exercises. I can trace your synapses back to before your first introduction to light, but I still can’t seem to make unquantifiable things happen. This world is not propelled by will alone. On Friday it was good and, flustered, he looked and I looked and for some reason I nodded slowly, agreeing to something that can’t be understood. On Saturday, it was different and we talked forever, but came to no concrete conclusion, only that I am a coy distraction (a step below what I want to be, which is a persuasive deterrent) but I still got a kiss before I left. I’m untrustworthy because I know a lot of people, but desperate because I don’t want to hang out with all of them. These are among some of his complaints. And I am investing too much and he loves [ ] and I am small and childish and I started All the Kings Horses wondering if he gave it to me because I’m a silly jeune fille but we were talking about boredom at the time which he blames on this american garbage and I’m only halfway through the book at this point so we’ll see.

At the end of it all, or at some point through it, it all comes back to whether I’m worth knowing (because if I’m not, I should go elsewhere). The answer is always yes.