when I am happy I stop looking at myself from a distance
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Tag Archives: reflection
02/12/18, 12:21am
I have asked for three days of space, and in the aftermath of the request — an unfussy affair, a quick text and only a few minutes of heart pounding, conceived of and solidified during my evening shower, Nujabes echoing on the tile — a strange combination of blithe, anxious, dreading, and then nothing at all.
Here’s what he said: I’m not jazzed about it.
Here’s what I responded: You’re the best.
And I suppose really I mean that. But I’ve been thinking a lot about something a poet I saw said, that they were a needy person, and that they would keep being needy and would surround themself with equally needy people, and they would all be needy together.
I think I have denied myself that neediness for a while now. I think I was raised and convinced through whatever cool-girl portrayals I saw that being needy was uniformly negative, and that there was some invisible inverse relationship between neediness and quality of person. I think I’m tired of that. I think I’ve been craving neediness — receiving, giving, the works — and I know, I know, that I need neediness, and I shall have neediness, and I shall be needy. I want the cool gals and the cool guys to leave, be scared away by my whirlwind of neediness, until I have no one but the real ones left as the dust settles.
That’s not true, of course. I want people, I want quantity. Really, I am terrified. I am terrified of pruning, because I have also been pruning quite recently, and of course: what if there is no one left? There is almost no one left. I am scared of being alone. I am scared of being alone.
For three days, I will be alone. I will read, and think about everything but the one thing, and I will live, perhaps hollowly, better hollowly than anxiously, better nothing than that. For three days. It will be good for me.
02/24/17, 4:17pm
13 reasons why: the author said that he left out modern technology, and had the characters acknowledge the outdatedness of old technology present. I think this instilled in me a need to be timeless; I never wanted to regret something I did.
At the same time, a part of me felt the need to be completely temporal. My journals were — and are — still ‘snapshots’: reflections of me at a specific moment of time. I knew I was ever-changing, and always wanted to grasp, in some small way, that me that was present at that moment, knowing that that me would be gone in a year, a week, an hour.
Josh, traditional vs. experimental; he was everything that I had been growing up, to the extreme, and I recoiled strongly against that. Looking back, I think I see: he was a catalyst for me; he was a springboard from which I launched forward; he was the stable contrast against which I formed my new identity against — not around. I had the opposite problem: I didn’t morph myself to fit him; I morphed myself to clash.
Or did I just grow by myself and happen to clash? Causation or coincidence? Both?
I am in college. We are young. We are forever changing. Relationships are fleeting, but perhaps they should be.
Do I regret it? Is anything good or bad? No — rather, things just *are*. It’s not our job to judge, but to note.
06/23/17, 1:10pm
Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga — these women have *won*. They are so crazy, so odd, that no one can sexualize them but themselves. “What are you wearing?” is always the female celebrity trap, and so Lady Gaga wears meat dresses and bubble dresses and makes the whole thing so insanely performative that there is no hope of making thing pseudonatural.
And drag: drag is so beautiful. It gender performance at its most pure form. What is everyone else ever doing, pretending we’re normal like it’s natural?
miley – more wielding than automatically fulfilling the wholesome girl persona, and yet she caricaturizes it. it’s ridiculous, and she seems to be playing a joke on the world
I think now about how Miley Chrus was the default character to make fun of for teachers in high school — and now, thinking back on it, it is so harmful. It perpetrates a form of misogyny. And yet at the time, it was so normalized, so obvious. And so I worry now about thinking about trying to condemn certain things; I don’t ever want to perpetuate something that may limit someone’s development. And so perhaps HB’s approach is correct: positive only, and mute on that which the individual may dislike.
Lady Gaga brought attention to performativity; Miley builds on that by performing those very ridiculous standards she and all women are subjected to: hyper-sexuality, then hyper-pure-ness. But of course, she must perform a caricature in her self-awareness.
This over performativity seems to me to be the only pure way of living, and yet — this seems a hopeless, disheartening path to trod.
Gaga empowers her fans to be what they want, because she understands that none of it truly exists anyway. But she empowers them on the level of personal happiness and not on that of self-awareness.
06/23/17, 12:30pm
Has anyone attempted to recreate a complex person in their entirety via media?
06/23/17, 11:41am
What would we discover if we automatically took pop music seriously? If we didn’t need disclaimers?
I an reactionary; I know what is wrong. But I am not strong enough or secure enough to then defend what I think is right. Is that cowardice?
06/22/17, 10:47pm
And suddenly I feel that art is no longer mine to appreciate, to love, and it frustrates me that art has betrayed me in this way, and yet it is still beautiful and meaningful to me; I pass statue after statue and it pains me that they are still meaningful to me, that they may be one of the few things that are meaningful to me, and that perhaps this reaction I have to art is nothing but preconditioned notions quietly inculcated in me by another entity; I feel that my solace has revealed itself to be nothing but manipulation and I hate that which I cannot contol and yet that which I cannot control what I need in order to let go, process, change —
The bike wheels are eerily smooth against the metal floor. The city is tinted in the soft blue and pink roses of my jacket. I pedal slowly, slowly, so that each push exerts no effort, each push is a glide through lukewarm, thick air. A woman begs for a man carrying a suitcase to stay. She follows him into the middle of the street and pleads in the blue and pink light. She tucks a wet curl behind her ear from behind the window of a cab.
