The SLC kid playlist

There's this one astrology blog that is my favorite because the writer (Elsa Panizzon) is an amazing/unique woman with a crazy past and present and she tells great stories about her life. I'm waiting for the book she's going to publish if she ever publishes it. Plus the fact that she gives free, amazingly on point astrology advice and teaches you about astrology doesn't hurt either. I'm not into the stories about her new lover that much because I get the sense that she's hiding talking about her past life and her present. I don't really care to read the astrology advice that much so I'm glad it's diminished in favor of posts about the general astrological situation in the present. She likes to ask questions at the end of some of her posts for her readers to answer and there was this one about what kind of movies we like and how that's reflected astrologically in our chart (the second part I couldn't answer). Most of the people that comment on her blog are women and some I get the sense are flower children that have been through a lot in their lives. Because of this, they tended to respond with movie topics because they already don't give a fuck about classics or movies they "should" watch. I responded:
I notice that a lot of people mention movie topics that they like. (note: maybe they are just not really cultured as their Indigo Child single mother science fictiony pictures of wolves or little children and photographs of sunsets or lily pads seem to point out). I wonder if they've gotten over the whole "what you should like/watch" thing. I really want to see a lot of classic (Golden Age of Hollywood/silent) movies and other types of classics ( i.e. bone up on the Italian/French New Wave, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky..), basically I long to start auditing film history courses again. I want to swallow up/gain a solid footing in all of what I "should" see. And I mean EVERYTHING I should see or the complete history of any movie I research. Even old Bollywood films. Nonetheless, for some reason I procrastinate/balk at watching "serious" movies particularly those of Ingmar Bergman and feel like I have to be forced to. This is partly because when I contemplate seeing them, I feel so bad that I haven't started getting a background in them earlier and have only cracked a dent so I refrain from doing it. That's part of it anyway. I even had to force myself to see Annie Hall. In that case, the movie was sacred to me.

I've made some friends that are discriminating film snobs. It makes me embarrassed because I like some of the indie lite movies that are getting popularized now (basically everything in the indie theater is lite compared to the heavy weights and much of it, like the movies I mention and Y Tu Mama Tambien can be classed as misdirected romantic comedies without the recognizable plot) like Amelie, Cyclo, L'Auberge Espagnole, Chacun Cherche Son Chat (I am kind of addicted to Cedric Klapisch, even if I think that the movie is dumb when I watch it all over again). I also watch a lot of romantic comedies on tv from the very crappy to the decent. I worry that I will like anything dumb that has mass appeal (to women), especially series television like Sex and the City which I consider poorly done/written.

I am really sensitive to color scheme (particularly reds and greens) and cinematography, I like the movie's environment. Sometimes in the case of liking Amelie, Delicatessen..I worry that my sense of color is cheap. The movies I rewatch usually have an environment that opens up to a vision of the world that I like and have a color scheme that I like to immerse myself in. I also love movies with a beautiful sense of history/culture. Particularly ones that portray rock or youth culture and the seedy life. I am completely attracted to darkness/seediness: drugs, drag queens, suicide, sex crimes, crime in general (postsecret simultaneously repels and attracts me).. I loved seeing the drag queen's room in Kinky Boots even though it was a bad movie.


I think I have this dual attitude about pretty much all aspects of culture: literature, critical/philosophical writing, branches of history, and music. On the one hand, I want to assimilate EVERYTHING historical, critically noteworthy, important, the whole academic debate on any topic.. and get upset that I don't and therefore procrastinate on it sometimes. On the other hand, I have all these guilty pleasures that I turn to and so I worry that I, for example, don't actually enjoy reading great literature or philosophy because I procrastinate on it so much. I think that I'd rather pick up Bridget Jones or David Sedaris the Anna Maxted Getting Over It novel I swallowed in the library Starbucks or something and read it in one sitting.

Music is particularly a cultural obsession I have mixed feelings about. Sarah Lawrence students are huge music consumers and I was surprised coming in about how they listen to music everywhere. They listen while they study, take their ipod to the bathroom.. and I hated it. iTunes and mp3s make music tinny and not really something that you could only get a limited amount of and really savor (like records) or listen to live and occasionally as people once did. Plus the musical acquisitive urge is what drives a lot of people to listen. And the fact that they started listening to good music at such a young age intimidated me. In 5th grade I danced around to "A Hard Day's Night" while cleaning, but my parents aren't music consumers so I didn't grow up in a hippie commune where Bob Dylan/Jobim or Crosby, Stills, and Nash or Malicorn were played in the house. I had to discover that later. I was addicted to music history though and watched MTV and VH1 (Behind the Music). My parents come from a Communist country where there wasn't that much of an emphasis on music and my mom particularly doesn't really give a shit about it. Basically, my parents aren't now-affluent hippies like most Sarah Lawrence parents so I don't have a music tradition from since when I was a wee one. A lot of kids in school are the image of the nerdy record collector (Jesse B.) who discovered Joy Division, David Bowie, Kate Bush, the Boredoms in 6th grade and 7th. There are people who are more auditory/musical learners and those who are more visual. This is known. There is also evidence that boys are more auditory.
I think that the whole being in a band phase and doing guitar talk is particularly a boy thing. So is considering music particularly important or a force of life. Hah. Take that in on your ipod headphones. I can't think that music is particularly powerful with the canned sound and format of modern day mp3s. It's pecuniary. I can't describe it. I'd much rather hear it grandiose. I think that people use music when walking around to change their mood, not to listen to it on its own terms. That's right, music is a mood enhancer much like drugs. It conforms to you, not vice versa. I use that "great" form for that purpose in particular. I love to walk and listen to music to feel a certain way, but then I get tired of it and find that just walking and listening to the noise outside is much purer. Letting music be big, restricting your consumption of it makes it more serious than listening to it all the time. I think visual things are much more important than music, the humming noise in your ears. The visual world is large and pure, it sets your mood. I could do without music for a long time. My family has for a long time. My parents don't really listen to cds. I think the attitude that music makes the world go round is such bullshit. It's just stuff.

I love hearing a song in a place/environment without knowing what it is and enjoying it on its own without obsessing about getting it or finding out what it is, yet at the same time it needles me because I want it for myself to listen to over and over again though it takes away the original savor. My acquisitive urge is boundless, though. I am greedy for music, yet I hate the way music is now and people's approach to it at the same time. I might download all the cds of the Velvet Underground even though I don't like them because I want to appreciate them/have heard them/know why they are so great and understand their influence on current music and download just one guilty pleasure song that I really want to hear. I have all this crap that I think I "should" listen to on my computer, but avoid it because I really have trouble listening to new music and have to push myself to do it. Everything I like to listen to over and over I worry is guilty pleasure music. Or simply exotic. Like the dead shit your language professor plays you to teach better (one of my Spanish teachers in high school was obsessed with Mana and Enrique Iglesias, Italian teachers play Jovanotti, a French teacher I heard plays Jordy Lemoine which is this 6 year old that had a dance hit in the 90s). Most of the music I listen to on my computer is in English, French, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic in that order. The genre I listen to the most is rap, in English mostly underground rap like MF DOOM who is my favorite, also I like the new trend of focusing on the hip hop producer in mainstream rap started by Timbaland (aka the only thing that makes Justin Timberlake's new albums good.. I can barely listen to the songs though because of the moronic lyrics). Next I listen to foreign language rap, mostly in French and Spanish. The other genres that I consider a guilty pleasure that are on constant rotation on my computer are Bhangra and rai. Plus I've really liked the crappiest post punk. Even Feist is kind of cheap because she can be counted as coffee shop music. I definitely felt cheap the week when I listened to Gnarls Barkley.
I feel like the stuff I listen to that is "legit" is somehow to prove something to people like other Sarah Lawrence students. I usually have to listen to the whole cd through while playing Freecell on my computer in order to get acclimated to it. If I like it, it starts to be on constant rotation on my computer. This is how I started to like the Modern Lovers and Joy Division. Usually I have to force myself to appreciate music that is sung badly on purpose like the Modern Lovers that stems from the Velvet Underground. That technique pisses me off. Sometimes I gather 6,000 files on my computer and try to burn them all so I won't lose them, sometimes I'm tempted to just erase them all. I didn't used to like/gather music as much as I did when coming to Sarah Lawrence. A lot of the stuff here is really new to me. There was a grindcore scene in my high school where I learned about Minus the Bear, Modest Mouse, The Mars Volta, ETID, At the Drive In, and heard about the Moldy Peaches from some kid back when I didn't know what antifolk was. Sarah Lawrence opened the world of indie and pretentious music collecting to me.
The Sarah Lawrence kids playlist is like a well built hamburger:

Bob Dylan/Bob Marley (more of one or the other, depending)
The Beatles or The Rolling Stones
old time/new jazz
standards (Billie Holiday vs. Ella Fitzgerald)
doo wop, soul (Otis Redding)
early rock (Chuck Berry up to classic rock)
Brazilian Tropicalia
Brian Eno/The Talking Heads
Krautrock maybe (that kind of 80s music)
perhaps folk (Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon)
70s punk and post punk

underground rap
The Velvet Underground

indie new and old
antifolk

Note the absence of 90s music and alternative rock/grunge other than guilty pleasures and Nirvana when these people were actually growing up. The alternative rock era and everything in between. It's like people are pretending that the 1980s other than guilty pleasures like Devo and foundational music like The Talking Heads or The Pixies and the 1990s never happened. It's the 1970s to the indie music of today. I think people are purposely turning a deaf ear to grunge and the terms I learned for music of the late 1990s: post-grunge, nu metal, alternative rock.. It's old enough to be classed as nostalgia (old Nickelodeon is for the history books and gangsta rap of 1995 is classic), but not old enough to talk about and place in the framework of music history. No one really reminisces about the Fastball, Marcy Playground, Chumbawamba, Smash Mouth, Barenaked Ladies, and unfortunately Goo Goo Dolls years. Aka 6th and 7th grade. Or about the shirts that once said Slayer, Slipknot, Superfly, Korn, Insane Clown Posse.
I was so weirded out by the new mod trend starting with the Hives and the Vines back when I only knew about pictures of the Strokes. The Hives, The Vines, The White Stripes, the black and white wearing bands. Plus even Radiohead is not really talked about or advertised on iTunes playlists like it apparently was years ago.

The, Um, Aesthetic of Essays

The thing I like most about the theories I read is the way they form a logical argument I can understand and open up assumptions behind assumptions in order to get at a complex picture that is closer to the truth. They are really aiming at being a world in themselves and bulletproof. Even this is an insight on my part. I feel like a lot of theorists are saying "Oh, you didn't know you do this, but look, I just uncovered this truth about you." I like how a theory makes sense insofar as you can understand it to be true. It doesn't aim to confuse you, but to make things clearer. To synthesize and separate to form the truest pattern. I tend to split hairs because I was taught to question and define my terms at every step. Therefore my writing is clunky. Theories tell me about what's most important on various levels. This is classed as a value judgment, I know. They show me what is most basic and fundamental. They don't want to cherrypick, though. They want to be the most cohesive and all encompassing. They want to say the most, but even in this I'm cherrypicking. They grasp at totality. This is something I'm assuming that I have to legitimate. And explain the concept of totality as opposed to difference. People bitch about imposed dualities but are splitting hairs more. They want to be right. Somehow they express things on various levels much clearer than I do. This is what makes their writing beautiful, the clarity, the amount of insights, the correctness, and the cohesiveness. I get overwhelmed and think splitting hairs to such an extent points to meaninglessness or my own lack of knowledge. I got to a whole new can of worms with mentioning unpleasant and pleasant, pleasure and pain. Academics want to be most right in debate. I always wonder if the complicated questions they explore and don't answer fully plague them in their daily lives. Thinking about these questions drives me to desperation. It's like a tragic play where as Aristotle argues one has to detach from a character at some point because you can't keep up the intensity of empathy and the character dies. I assume that being more emotionally calm the next day and going back to the daily grind means what I'm doing then is most fundamental. How do academics feed their kids? I can't help but be affected emotionally by the intellectual pursuit of knowledge, asking a question and hoping for an answer because meaning is tied up with value. If it's humorous or laughed at (as Mike P. said that Plato thought philosophy a big joke), if the knot is left tangled, isn't meaning or something necessary that I want on multiple levels lost? Can a construction worker live without considering these things or scoff at my emotional discomfort because I do? Even Zen monks are looking for the truth, even postmodernists who say it's manifold. They want to be faithful to the truth in saying that language is inadequate, so they find another truth to get to it. I think people are trying to find the roots of the present situation of all these complicated thoughts and feelings we have and interpret it "spacially" or in the present moment too. So history is useful because it is the study of everything in the past. Lots of things tangle my tongue. And make me flustered. Like the fact that I have to keep mentioning space and time or abstract and concrete if I want to make a general statement. Because people won't let me go or will disprove my argument without my providing context. Because they bitch that the Enlightenment invented basic abstract concepts. That are somehow inadequate. I'll feel better tomorrow. I always do.

...

I worry that "You can't make a god out of someone when you watch them get dressed in the morning." ~R.S.

I met a man named X and walked him from Hill House, past the Mobil, up from the hill behind the library, to the Pub, and back to Hill House at 2:46 AM yesterday.

I saw Brian E. at Slave to the Grind and caught up with him about his life. He told me that after working in the library during the summer, where Janet didn't have much to do for him but still made him come at strict hours, he became so depressed that he couldn't get out of bed and is taking a year off to go to therapy and stuff. No surprise. I recommended that he get a job at a jet set magazine or a place that has interesting people/is as interesting as a job possibly can be. I think he needs more dynamism in his life and has stopped believing that that's possible. I also told him to try and switch his life to a 9 to 5 schedule and get up at 6 because being up in the daylight hours will make him happier.

I am looking at profiles of former Sarah Lawrence students, the beautiful, well read girls who are content to sit at home and read. That my friend Carl would admire on Sunday nights. They are more interesting than me.

Hank Williams

Lord I think I'll get to ramblin'
Got to leave this lonesome town
This old place is way too lonesome
Since my sweet love ain't around.

Why did I take this writing class? People have said things way more poignantly than me. Maybe I should write about something I don't know about completely. A kid in my class says that contemporary writers write as though modernism never happened because of their emphasis on the confessional and their lack of radical experimentation. I would say that they've developed the runoff of the Beat/confessional aesthetic that could only have happened with modernism. It now has its own parameters (not capitalizing shit, free verse, incomplete sentences, attempts at LANGUAGE poetry...) things that aren't said but clearly known in poetry classes. The ruts of the literary world like the freaky ruts of the academic world. "God is dead." Okay. Helene Cixous, deconstruction, postcolonial theory with its references devolving into meaninglessness, the idea that truth is not possible without social context which ultimately empties out language, fear and focus on language in philosophy, multiculturalism and the attempt to look at history from several perspectives at the same time, attempts to resurface the "suppressed narratives" of women's, black, and minority history, all of which are juxtaposed against the demonized imperialising 19th century dead white man Enlightenment rationality bourgeois point of view. Before vs. the now that is better. A simplification that aims at dualism, something that theories that absolute truth or parameters of human nature are impossible spit on. Balzac vs. modernism which is better and truer vs. postmodernism which is better and truer. There is a blanket term for what deconstruction and ideas of multiple truths are aiming for, an abstract term for various things that human reason can't apply itself to, chaos. But I'm ignorant of various philosophical arguments and the stuff I try to diss. But it freaks me out to my very core. The professors that teach literary theory and contemporary philosophy come home to kiss their children and eat breakfast, the kids who are into it will still talk about boys. I trust that the lives we lead and the thoughts we have while doing daily shit often diverge from our theories. Oh well. I bitch and moan about this all the time.

People sometimes write very beautiful blogs, stories, memoirs, based on their experience and a genre that seems to be about small, keen powers of observation and sensation. I always think it's in the style of William Carlos Williams' "This is Just To Say." Really, I just get the same feeling from them. They kind of chill my skin. And they make me see things, even a girl playing footsy with a boy in a diner (a short story someone wrote in my high school), differently than I did before. Plus, it makes me ashamed that I haven't experienced life in this way. My sense of reality is so permeable. I decided I'm living under a bell jar. But it's more like yellow goop. There are many things I could do to change it. Like do my work. When I sort of get down into the feeling, I get a yellow emptiness in which there is nothing to say. There are many things I could be doing right. Using my time wisely, aka organizing my daily life. Saturn in Virgo style. Instead I talk my head off about trivial things and new feelings. For instance, now I can identify the feeling of missing someone from the pit of your stomach and wanting to share all types of activities with them. I talk the things I feel into the ground until they are entirely divorced from reality. As usual, my mind, body, heart, which are all connected, are all freaking out. My mind is mad that I don't do my work, trying to prove its own intelligence, yet is ignorant/not book smart, my heart is doing various things, and my body needs exercise. My mind has various grievances like the stuff above, but I don't know about any of it so I can't argue. I really am sick, sick of my own perspective, I thought I was lovesick (a novelty that I'm now throwing around insincerely), and I'm physically sick. I'll sit down to read and go do something else. Many people don't understand what I'm up to or how I manage to waste all of my time. The seniors smell like business and are never around, studying, hanging out with friends, doing the right things, and somehow are in solidarity with each other though I don't know about it. Asking them what they've been doing and whining to them about what I've been doing doesn't help. I need to find a way to catch up. Otherwise I'll be swimming in my feelings like I do in my poetry all the time, searching for something that can be good. I can't turn to anything I don't know, either, or even make it look like the poem isn't about me (write something about a guy in New Mexico, a witty poem about an orange, read Du Fu and imitate him). Of course I could read more, good poetry, good fiction, but then it would change my perspective and as usual, shame me that I haven't seen a thing like that before. And then I'll start to imitate it. Maybe I need to go away for a while. But that won't help either.

I just read over some of my high school poetry. I was so much clearer then. So much more idealistic.

Olivia's birthday

The Thursday before and Friday of Olivia's birthday were pretty sweet, all in all. I had only one day to shop for Olivia so I skipped my 12:30 and 3:35 class and went to New York on the 11:00 train. I decided to take her out for birthday lunch and she had Pad See Ew and I, beef teriyaki at cafetasia. Afterwards, we went for bubble tea and she took some time to do her work in her room while I went hunting for a present for her. I walked in the East Village and went into a store called something like Himalayan Visions. At first I couldn't see much and the Nepalese or Mongolian vendor was aggressive and I was getting a little freaked out. Then I found some delicate necklaces of sterling silver with gold plated chain, some with peridot beads, one blue topaz drop and one larger amethyst drop that were wired on to the somewhat thin and short corded necklaces. I wasn't sure whether to get Olivia the blue topaz which I thought caught the light better and would match with her coloring better or the amethyst from India that had a deep color and didn't think the simple cutting or gold plating was worth the price of $60, nonetheless I came out of there with an amethyst necklace and hoped she would like it. Then I went to Toy Tokyo which I have been procrastinating on going to for a while and found the amazing fun boxes of surprise mini food (some sets were sushi, rice balls, broiled eels, soba, seafood soup, apple pie, bread, collard greens in the vending basket. etc.). They also had surprise boxes of sneakers, small ones like SB Dunks and Bathing Apes, but those were a little too expensive. It was completely amazing though, and I got one special occasions fun box for Olivia and one for me. Luckily Olivia was done with her work and wanted me to accompany her to the cab so I came to her dorm and waited for her. When she came out, I knelt before her with the box with the necklace and said, "O Olivia, I wish you would have a good birthday and be happy and healthy and wealthy and long living," something along those lines. Her fun box was soba and mine was rice balls, she likes rice balls better and they look more interesting so we switched. She was a little hungry so we went to the Max Brenner's in the East Village that is at the end of her street for fondue. It was the first I've ever had and she had a pink strawberry drink with clear gummy bears on it and I, the Cookieshake. I took her into the cab and we talked for a while and she met Becky to watch Spring Awakening, the musical. Afterwards, Becky took her to a corny Italian restaurant. The next day I had to meet my mom and Garik, a man who she once thought she was in love with before she knew my dad who is visiting from Odessa and is an annoying, milk toasty man. We went to the Met and I went through the Flemish Primitives, the Rembrandt exhibit, and the Lehman collection rather fast. My dad refused to meet us in the Met and we had to come to 49th and meet him. On 56th or so we went to Wondee Siam for Thai food. I couldn't eat that much but I did order the Noodles Talay. My parents and Garik and I walked to the MoMA and it was 6:00 by the time that I made it to coat check so I had to leave. I had to meet Olivia at 6:30 at Ruby Foo's. It was raining and I did stop in Zara to look for a coat for Olivia. I also went to Swatch and found a watch whose strap was astroturf which I think would have amused Olivia if I wore it. Olivia and I met in Ruby Foo's though she was 6 minutes late. She bought mojitos for the both of us and still Becky didn't show so we sat down. Olivia was worried about her, worried that she might have been mad, and I was worried that it would spoil her meal. We found out after a while that Becky was in the hospital because her brother got into a car accident. We ordered a platter of dim sum, a sample platter of Ruby Foo's house rolls, the bento box of dessert, a lychee mist for Olivia, and ginger passion flower tea. The sushi was great, there was sushi with sirloin steak in it, Chilean sea bass, smoked salmon lollipop roll, and another fish. The plum sauce made all of them taste like eel. The bento box dessert was really creative because it had apple pie in the shape of sushi, basically dough curled around apple curled around dough curled around apple and there was a macaroon sushi that was chocolate on the outside, coconut in the middle, and chocolate on the inside like a salmon sushi. There was also an ice cream in the middle that you had to grab with a straw. All in all, we were very satisfied and slightly drunk. We took a cab to Spring Street and Employee's Only. It is a bar that serves absinthe, it has an Arabic or key as a title and only the word Psychic in red in the window. There is red light inside and art deco painting the shelves of the drink display are clear green tinted glass lighted by normal colored Christmas string lights. The public is trendy, post hipster 30 year olds, the men were for the most part good looking as older men go and the women were conventionally good looking. We started with two absinthe drips in which the waiters lit a cube of sugar on top of the drink held in place with a spoon on fire and dropped it in the drink. It tasted like licorice and extremely strong. I was very afraid of it so I only sipped it and got about one centimeter through the drink. Olivia had been drinking and drank both our absinthe drinks. She also had one of the fancy drinks they made at the bar, some were of elderflower, pink with champagne, she had the one where they mash ginger, dried cranberries, and sugar in a tall glass with a mortar, pour in some lemon colored alcohol, and mix it. It was very fresh tasting. Olivia tripped off the absinthe and said that colors blurred when she shook her head around, was mesmerized by candles and lights, and said the bathroom tiles changed from red to black. Olivia also got a Tarot card reading from the psychic advertised in red on the window, a girl with black hair and a big hat, about choosing the more intelligent of two lovers. She continued to trip when we went back in a cab to the East Village where we went to m2m and I bought her an alaska roll to sober her up and myself an alaska roll and radish kimchi which was not that good. She was still tripping, but was very tired and I was going to stay over until at the last minute I decided to take the second to last train, she went to her dorm, and I went on the 1:20 train.

Darjeeling Limited

“The best thing is to place another before you”

Which is rather loosely quoted William Blake. I just watched the 9:50 séance of Darjeeling Limited. I thought about a lot of things coming back from the movie, whimpered a little bit, and am now unable to express it/anything, not that this is any different than usual. At the end of the movie, I saw Alex Albers who seems to me so different (what a relief), in the bathroom and said to her that “here we go back to our own shitty movie.” My own movie, where God or whoever doesn’t push the color enough and moments are not cut to be epic or pleasurable. Friendship montages.. The reality I come back to is my own buzzing brain that creates drama, the walk home where there is weird Bronxville architecture, the vaguely romantic bridge, cars that stop slightly that I imagine are men, a faint smell I stopped to smell completely today, and the stench of baby poop on the stairwell of my apartment. Maybe the place I live in is gross. People enter bars for the ambiance which is code that a room with decoration and lighting can be a different world. Coffee shops that play Putumayo and have eclectic furniture, and movies have the combination of music and pictures which I can’t recreate just listening to music. When you enter somebody else’s room, you see the paraphernalia scattered that is them, it might seem foreign sometimes. It smells and looks different. This stale place with the prefurnished drawers, stupid ship painting, and the too small freaking desk is probably repulsive, where I scattered my sunglasses and my contacts around. I decided today that my stuff is foreign to me, yet connected. It’s not the same when you look at your own room as when you judge somebody else’s. The light is yellow, the window does not let in enough sun, and I pretend like it’s a Raskolnikov enclave to continue mythologizing the Dina personage I keep adding to for shits and giggles. And Sarah Lawrence, which is somehow supposed to open to the world, is a freaking wasteland with its poor combination of stone/sometimes cobblestone buildings and nobody out at 12:07 AM on a Friday night. It seems like I strike gold when I infiltrate other people’s lives, their furnished rooms like alternate universe pods. But if you set another before you, I figure after a while they won’t be different enough. This is depressing. I’ve done it so many times, talked to a lot of different people about my inability to talk to people. Maybe the best thing is some kind of intuitive connection, a fluidity of speech that goes back and forth, which is what I really want, yet after a while you know the person’s mind. My friend probably sees this in a girl he is going out with, much like a horse with blinders zeros in on the thing in front of it, yet the people around lovebirds generally don’t see as much that is special in either of the two. Any of the “we found each other.” I think people are less looking for a connection than to be continually refreshed with difference. Maybe I just want to fall in love. I think that’s it. I’m really tired of living without passion.

But this melancholy and bullshit, middle class guilt comes when you look at another perspective. Children dying in Darfur, world problems.. But isn’t death ultimately a private problem as well? I don’t understand it. I can barely understand that my parents are in Prague and separated enough from me for me to be worried. Political dialogue should be considered a sport.

It’s surreal, my day as opposed to those of Darjeeling Limited is surreal. Because there is so much back talk going on in my head while the moment is going on differently for other people. So much schmutz.

I had a paper due on Thursday but instead I never read the book, stayed up till 5:00 in the morning the day before, skipped class and then Danny’s class at 3:35, stayed in my room for the purpose of hiding out until the class was significantly over, but ended up sitting on my bed checking facebook over and over again and having OCD episodes. So much for using my time wisely. That day I stayed up till 5:00 again talking to people because I got out of my room at 10:00 and again woke up at 1:37 today. I schlepped around, came to campus, and as usual was depressed that nobody is out doing anything fun. Still I haven’t read the book, just that same vague feeling of restlessness.

I went to Bronxville and ate at Haiku, paying with plastic which is no surprise for me. It was pretty crowded and there were lines, plus overly solicitous waiters that hung around too long pouring water, asked me if I was okay too much, and told me not to hurry when they might as well have said the opposite. As usual I was pretending to be Byronic (a Byronic girl?) and weird with my sweatshirts and notebooks by my chair. I ate the duck appetizer which was good and pleasant but encased in some egg roll shell and with two lettuce leaves to put a westerner to shame. I ate it with my hands and tried not to give a fuck who was looking at me. The sushi, the Passion Roll arranged in corny/flashy hearts was mediocre as Haiku sushi is, but the atmosphere is rather sensuous. Green tea ice cream to finish! Aka I’m an idiot for splurging and having a weak will.

I decided to see Darjeeling Limited and went to the bar with all the candles in it that I’ve been curious about for a while. I thought it was a wine bar because there were adults in it drinking wine, but ends up it’s more about food because when I ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio, the bartender asked me if I wanted food. From what I can tell, the food is pretty good, in big bowls, I saw risotto, what looked like stewed tomatoes, and one big biscuit. The bartender had a shaved head and a big curled black mustache and the maitre d’ had a shaved head and some pencil beard design, looked pretty severe, so I figured that they were Georgian. The music sounded pretty Eastern European and they seemed to be talking in a different language. I chose and cowered in the worst corner spot that the maitre d’ kept coming back to, tapping his hands on the bar for whatever reason, and the bartender hung around, I kept thinking they were looking at me when they were bored, drinking a half glass of wine forever until 3 minutes before the movie. The men seemed pretty rough and misogynistic to me for some reason (why I thought they were Georgian) and the way they were hanging around was oppressive. The ambiance of course rules inside, lanterns with candles in them, candles everywhere, understated enough, “intimate,” but I realize that means that when you’re alone, you can’t enjoy the display, design, and atmosphere for long, stroking the bar top and looking around before the bar becomes a mini world with an uncomfortable mini drama where you’re just sitting like on the subway not knowing where to look. They did have My Fair Lady playing on the tv. Plus the Eastern European nature of the waiters and the fact that the bartender talked to the customers/regulars made it seem authentic and an obviously good restaurant. Ends up the bartender is from Afghanistan. I wonder where the maitre d’ is from. The atmosphere was creepy, I don’t think I’ll be coming back.

Our world and our homework. I think Danny and the professors, all their complexities of thought, the way he pigeonholes Emma Bovary’s world as one without values is suspect. I thought this and forgot why. I was thinking about consciousness. I don’t know, I forget all the things I’ve been thinking about, I don’t think I’ve adequately talked about them.

Oh yeah, and Adrien Brody was hot.

Poetry class..

It's so hard to express oneself. And sometimes so unnecessary. I.e., with blogs, people diss them endlessly and bloggers unconsciously or consciously pander to the entertainment needs of internet passersby. Basically, we have to entertain them with the products of our ranty subconscious. Because it's lonely and unnecessary for some to express themselves on public keyboard. I'm taking a poetry class with Thomas Sayers Ellis and also a class with Danny Kaiser and am in a tailspin. I have a poor grasp on what I want to say, know that I want to say something, but seriously doubt if it's important. Why should anyone read my poetry other than my having to write some? If it came from the heart, when I attempt it, the limits of verse leave me stymied and confused. Some of the core issues I had in my heart, I tried to write them out in a poem and of course it turned out pretty bad.

Cosmopolitanism, reality, boredom with my lifestyle, confusion about the way things actually are or how they feel, that's what I'm trying to talk about. The things I dream of and imagine as liberated, cosmopolitan versions of reality are a combination of foreign countries and what I picture the lives of other people to be like there, science videos that show these sweeping visions of progress, the beauty and subjectivity that strikes me in certain art as well as hints of deviant sexual possibility/darkness, my right to experience this loungey, nightly subjectivity, etc. And plus how with movies I get a refreshing break from my own boring perspective.

Kids in school gas my head. Dina, you're so unique, weird, awkward, this, some things they say, they don't realize I take them as complements. So I become obsessed with my own personality and how I understand what people project back on to me. Dina has to be a certain way. Perhaps this is limiting. I hate the kind of thoughts that turn back in on themselves. And I have no clue what's important, what I should be thinking about, and how I should be experiencing life. This personality that is partially an exaggerated version of one part of me permits itself to be offensive and direct for the sake of humor. So sometimes, I overstep the line with people in thinking of what I can do. They get offended, get brash, and say something mean to me. I'm really sensitive and forget that the things I say could bother other people just as much in different ways. I.e., though I maintain my liberty to make jokes about flexible gender identity and sometimes even black people, when people say mean things about Jews or use the word "gay" I can't really take it. In fact, my brother called me a wuss. Plus, people hate those who talk about themselves but right now I need to.

In Danny's class, I store up so many objections to what he's saying and can't get a chance to say them or anything. When I mention it outside of class, he keeps on rolling with his own opinion. Even my friends have no idea what I'm talking about or can't consent to a session of mental masturbation where we agree/expand on our own viewpoint. Maybe I don't even know what he's saying, Madame Bovary is a confused jumble in my mind. Maybe I just didn't read Henry James carefully enough. Danny keeps dropping extreme statements about modernism but before I can contest them, I have to pinpoint them! I have no clue where I ought to go with conference either. Shrug. This damming up of my thoughts is gonna lead to silence and confusion. I'll have nothing in my brain, let alone nothing orderly. Just a vague feeling of unease and that I'm not learning something I should be or that we're not getting deeply enough into things.

Essentially, my heart and mind's concerns seem to be so reified that they have no way of connecting and I have no way of finding out what's most important.

Saturn Return

I've been watching, shit, another sentence beginning with I've been watching, a lot of shows that deal with 30 year olds, like Sex and the City on the computer. Other than realizing how crappy the writing and characterization in that series is, I've kind of been observing that lifestyle and feeling 21 going on 30 in the magical way that you know it's safe since its not true. The same way I ask my dad "are you cheating" because I'm hoping it's not true. But I watch movies so I have to get the parallel advice from my parents about real, functioning relationships. 30 years old, in astrological jargon is the time of your Saturn Return. Saturn is a planet that deals in the harsh reality, so the years around this time are a reality check and usually difficult things happen. Basically, you've made your bed and now you consider whether you choose to lie in it. As you reflect on the things you did to get to this point, you grow up. This usually involves leaving or staying in relationships, reevaluating the way you deal with the people you know. It's a pretty scary time and often people you love die in it. Carrie and the rest of them have made their bed as single women and are considering whether to settle down, continue recycling relationships, as well as other dating problems. I've said it before, this and other stuff I've seen Sarah Jessica Parker in makes me cynical about relationships, particularly the fear of smooth sailing.
This idea seems to imply that we're babies at 21, or as a man I knew said "women are idiots until 26, men until 30." I read Joan Didion's essay, "Goodbye to All That," in which she talks about how she lived in New York for 8 years since she moved there in her early 20s and why she decided to leave. She calls it a city for the very young and the way she talks about appreciating so much more coming from Sacramento, California reminds me of the Midwest hipsters that move to Williamsburg. She can't imagine people from the East appreciating it as much as someone from far West bumblefuck who's never heard of it. I think she's wrong there, she's never met someone from Connecticut who would go there occasionally with parents whose idea of a New York outing meant getting up at 6:00, driving there at 9:00 for a museum, a theater production, dinner, and then leaving full of purpose. "Cultural" people like my parents. Or what it means when you can get up at 12:00, take a 15 minute van or 40 minute train that comes regularly and is at walking distance, and stay till fucking 6:00 in the morning the next day if you so desire. It is a city for the very young and the very not from there, I couldn't have said it better myself. When you're that close, you want to go every fucking weekend while you were far enough away before to come maybe once every month. I sympathize with a recently graduated senior I met on the last train to Fairfield who scored a job in an ad agency but still lives with her parents, except unlike her, I wouldn't have to be forced to come to happy hour.

Aanyway, she talked about how naive and happy she was, how she saw the world and New York as a new opportunity until at the ripe age of 28 every sight in New York began to seem the same to her.
Before Sunset, one of the most depressing movies to me, is a Saturn Return movie. It is our 30 year old selves looking back at our 23 year old selves and forecasting that the world full of opportunity is closed. Julie Delpy says that it makes her sad to think how much she believed in the possibility of romantic love on the night, she and Ethan Hawke review their past relationships and reflect how important a missed chance was and how their longterm lives turned out a mess. She slaps me, the viewer when she says, wake up, the world is a mess and doesn't even accept the possibility of good. It's weird to know that all the doors you think are open will close.

I hate how this mindset doesn't take 21 year olds seriously, yet my 23 year old friends comment that they feel old. What kind of Saturn Return is 21, when you're legally an adult? Me, I feel like I'm at the top of a downward rollercoaster, on the brink of sliding toward 30, when I'll feel like my days are numbered and start telling kids about how time flies.
Other than that, there's the open book of senior year. Even when a friend of mine that was a senior this year was drunk, she was telling me in the Malt House bathroom, "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life next year, I mean, I haven't heard from any of my grad schools, I don't have an apartment." I know everyone will be scared shitless. If they find a decent apartment and some job with hourly wage that has nothing to do with their background, they'll whine to me like my friend who sent out tons of job applications in the past two weeks that they miss college because they have so many responsibilities now.

I figure 21 is the age when you begin to make your bed. It's frightening because you may or may not find a (shitty) place to live with a roommate further away from Brooklyn, maybe in Astoria, maybe in Kensington or further, Brighton Beach. It will take you months to find a job even if you have a good GPA, likely in the storage section of a bookstore if you're lucky, with an hourly salary because the idea of getting $30,000 a year after your BA is a dream for someone with no major and "writing skills." As in research paper writing skills. Likely you're weekends will be spent with microwaveable burgers or going to free events around New York.

What makes the 21 year old so happy go lucky, so ready to travel to France with $500 and live in squatter settlements is like The Fool in the Tarot. You can choose to take the path of someone who goes with the flow and mysteriously ends up in foreign countries (teaching in South Korea, backpacking in Vietnam..) claiming to have no money. Most people do this throughout college and some in high school. Or you can pretend that this time doesn't present you with serious choices if you're like me and not quite done with being an undergraduate student. You can hope things will sort themselves out because you're a few years behind everyone else in development. The fool has their eyes to the skies and past some of the barriers that are actually in front of them, but I think the influence of the actually Saturnian age of 21 pulls you right down to graduate school or job, professor or editor, cupcake baker or cashier.

School starting

School is going to start. I decided to come to it with a healthy satisfaction with my own summer and a healthy refusal to be jealous of anybody else's. I decided to say, no matter whether they were in Paris or Africa, they must have been lonely or had lousy times occasionally as well. Because I remember the times I would finally go abroad on a trip and be completely dissatisfied. My trip to Paris when I was 14, I was depressed for the first two days and didn't really like the city, but liked Provence a whole lot better. I claim that I just didn't know to appreciate it back then to vindicate my Paris obsession. (For my birthday in senior year of high school, a friend got me a sign for my door that said I'm in Paris, come back later). Almost all the time, I would be upset about one thing or another when abroad, though. Lonely and embarrassed or uncomfortable because I've only ever traveled with my parents, unhappy in the knowledge that I should and ought to be happy but am not.. I imagined a map of the world with me as a before and after dot to compare how far away I was from the US when I travelled to Ukraine and to dramatize that I had never been there, but like I settle into losing things I really care about, I got blase about being in a place I never visited before. I got used to Thailand, Italy, Germany this way and then when I come back, I dream about going to Europe for months. My mom says this is because I'm never satisfied about where I am in the present moment and never will be (this is her cop out when I complained to her about Sarah Lawrence as if I'm trying to place responsibility on her), while I try to remind her that I have been happy before. When I told her that everybody complains about Sarah Lawrence, she says that it's our "artistic temperament" that makes us dissatisfied with everything. When I wanted to transfer, I would watch how people would say that they were much happier in other colleges. As far as whining about wanting to go abroad alone, my mom's first reaction is to cut responsibility from it with "We're not stopping you." Yeah, but fuck all are you helping.

But then I went on the facebook. The place I learn what normal people do or would like others to believe they do. And of course I'm jealous of the people that went to Africa and Buenos Aires and want to pretend that their parents funded it all or to ignore the friends that come back all transformed from abroad. I won't even bother asking them how it was. The American tradition is to either say 'fine' or to give a partial answer that I can't bother waiting to puzzle out in their later passing remarks and stories. I get overwhelmed enough when I think someone sincerely wants to know how I passed the time and am meanwhile trying to remember all the details myself. It's weird, the in between path is bad, the full revelation is exhausting even though I have to chronicle a trip I took for myself in full, and the 'fine' is a big fuck you. If they say fine, I am not going to juggle around for the appropriate questions to get them to spill it. Saying instead of how was your summer, 'What did you do this summer,' (every week of all three months, I mean), 'What things in consecutive order did you do every day of this summer,' I have no time to figure out how to rephrase these questions while they get annoyed. I'll probably just write them off for a while. I don't know how to seek an empathetic middle ground where I don't try to see their humanity by saying that they must have had tough times too or enviously make them out to be something more than human, a smiling, travelling, simple person, the kind that according to my mom don't go to my school. Plus ignoring them with an "I bet the change that took place in you your junior year abroad is so overwhelming that I don't even want to hear all or half of it, or to talk to your modest ass until you get in the depressed Sarah Lawrence rut and forget you were ever enviable" is pretty stupid anyway.

I'm reading The Bell Jar right now because I never have and I think I'm starting to sound like Sylvia Plath's main character. I thought it was supposed to be dark and kind of forbidden like Go Ask Alice. What strikes me is all the antiquated expressions (gosh!, I can't think of any, but so weird to think that Sylvia Plath thought or talked like this, you'd think her cosmopolitan and Bloomsbury) and ideas, the lack of options girls of the time had. The amount of miscommunications in the book could make it a tragic situation comedy. The things that the girl leaves off saying and explaining, shite psychiatrists that give her shock treatments for no apparent reason, a mother and other people that have no idea of what's going on in her head. Tragic dramatic irony. And the dumbass things that supposedly intelligent people or the misguided adults in the book say. I could never picture rich, college educated girls in wild New York waiting to be scooped up by a career man or someone who hates the idea of marriage to have a broodful of kids and a husband as a back up plan in the whole book, typists, shorthand...

overshare

Something I just realized, these are four of the songs that shaped my childhood sexuality:

"Cherish"
"Love Will Never Do Without You"
"If"
and "That's The Way Love Goes"

are by Madonna and Janet Jackson respectively, and there are probably others by them, I can think of "Like A Prayer," "Human Nature," and "Take A Bow" which always used to disturb and depress me, but those in particular. And the crazy thing is the resemblance between the first two that I knew subconsciously but did not think about until now due to the fact, as I just discovered, that they were both directed by Herb Ritts! Janet Jackson criticizes Madonna for her limited vocal range and use of scandals and yet uses her "preferred photographer" to produce a video to revamp her image as sexy and he churns out a video suspiciously like "Cherish." oneupmanship much? So it was Herb Ritts who made me doubt my sexuality because I thought I was supposed to be attracted to men who look like Chippendales and wasn't. (thank god for moving to a new middle school and the medium built to waifish trend that hit around that time and has apexed about now with the indie boys, seriously, plus my somewhat newfound appreciation for more aggressive male musculature since thanks to college I have an idea of what waify boys look like without their flattering shirts). And of course Herb Ritts is gay, which explains the butt exposure of muscular, naked men, because I believe that gay men have a butt obsession only equalled by the 40 year old, Fabio loving women who hire Chippendales at bachelorette parties. I think most of my peers dig their men slightly scrawnier (and paler?) and don't have as many preferences with regards to minor muscles, like how big a guy's latissimus dorsi ought to be. The Chippendale man rolling around under the sheets with Cindy Crawford is about the idea of sex I had in 4th and 5th grade even though I learned about it when I was 6 and friends with 13 year-old Olga who told me about menstruation and I responded "nah,"
aka I'm a spring chicken, when I first learned about sexual things:

penis: an elevator, the pale blond kid in preschool
before and after that, Greek statues. Boy was I surprised (and grossed out, actually) after my first experience with porn that they can be hard, or even big. I was particularly grossed out because I compared them to something I knew better, excrement. I had no idea what was so attractive about women mouthing long bloodshot poo or gargling white stuff in their mouths.

sex with women: One time my neighbor Stephanie and I covered our mouths and pretended to kiss under the covers of my bed. I was tortured by the idea that I had sex with a girl for a long time afterward.

hard on: a play called "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" about three men locked up together in a cell in the Middle East. One guy had a dream with another man in it, the man did something and he said, he/it "gave him a hard on." And I thought that meant a guy gripping your penis hard while you give him a piggy back ride for the longest time.

porn: in 6th grade my parents and I were invited to the house of Michael K., a good guitar-playing boy with no tv.

semen: in 6th grade I was in the Westport YMCA after school program run in their upstairs daycare before it was transferred to Mahackeno, the Nilla Wafers and stale carrots snacks and "Sex and Candy," that Fastball song, and that Goo Goo Dolls song until I was about to puke.. are memories beside the point. Maureen was the caretaker who wore dowdy sweaters over turtlenecks and had huge hips over which she wore pleated slacks, played gin rummy with me, and lived in Seymour, CT as I recall, ironically. She had the habit of using the word seamen instead of sailors and the bitchy, advanced Westport kids used to laugh when she said it and I didn't know why. And I was similarly confused when Emily in 6th grade TAG laughed at the name Alan Cumming.
I know I must have learned something in middle school health other than Coach Simone's "Rearls of Wisdom" and coffee addiction, but the only time I fully understood or memorized the workings of the penis, the purpose of the testicles or that men even had them, sperm, and words like vas deferens was in high school health. I was asked the question "spit or swallow" way before I knew what it meant, maybe like in elementary school.

urinals: Fuck you, Marcel Duchamp. Though I've seen plenty of movies with guys peeing next to each other, I remember my surprise when I entered a men's bathroom by mistake (in Heimbold??) and realized that the urinals were backwards.

jacking off: thanks again, Michael K who went to Adventure Camp with me a while after our first meeting. Some boys ran out of their cabin and told us that they caught him jacking off with shampoo. Though I had no idea how this was done, I called him Jack for the rest of the summer.

cunnilingus:
my friend maxene's George Carlin poster

I just woke up to sounds of human wolf-crying and caterwhauling, maybe several people talking, maybe three youngsters homicidally drunk walking on the road arguing with each other, maybe people laughing, maybe, on closer inspection, it is the party advertised on the road across me by two signs near the road sign with a picture of a Ziggy looking man with a fedora opening his trenchcoat and a red arrow that said something like DSBB2 on it hiding his goods. When we walked by the house that was going to have it, there were a series of white round tables, some under a tent, and only one outside of the tent actually filled with four older men, one sitting on a cooler. They were blasting fifties music and it didn't look like we could come over and ask what party they were waiting for so my mom and I went on walking. Maybe it was a reunion of classmates in the fifties or people who like fifties music or a charity ball or a hobby convention. My house is on a main road and the house in question is on a road adjoining the main one that forms a loop.


This is what the road looks like, it appears between some trees. I come from the Ernest Shepard school of drawing.



This is what the loop as we call it would look like on a map.

I live in a small, very wooded suburb with two acre zoning (the "center" consists of several brick houses, a small market, a gas station, a post office, a gift shop, and a pharmacy) so the only noise I hear at night is typically cars rushing by, coyotes, other animals and I have no idea who my new "next-door" neighbors are who built a driveway separated from us by a large stone wall and live right in the woods, and who I am nervous can hear us arguing. And of course, though I walk around all the time, I have no idea who lives in any house I pass other than people who were once on my bus route (who I haven't seen since they were on my bus route) and get very excited to see someone my age or anyone walking at all because it happens so rarely.
So at night, I hear what I think is the barking laughter of men and a fifties song which isn't "In the Still of the Night." Maybe it was a reunion reel because the laughter was so measured? Maybe they were barking drunk? And my imagination, old and brittle as it is, went to the first movie media and pictured one of those giddy fifties outdoor parties with Christmas lights, bottles on the trees (Southern), and libidinal shy girls dancing with greasers. Why is it that I have these stereotypes about "when life was exciting?" Like cows fed on human growth hormone or the flesh of other cows, I am a girl fed on terrible commercial movies from the HBO2s, HBO familys, HBO cinemas, of the IO generation. Or maybe just some lonely person with no view past a failing academic life and shitty summer.

Theorists

Wow, on perusing the post below, I do go to college and ain't it obvious? The time when students are stimulated to put a padlock on their mouth and writing when realizing that someone's trying to help them climb up a giant. (In the sense that we suddenly realize that what we might write might be sophomoric, can't hope to be original, is merely us... the more we, as Faulkner says, "write write write, read read read"). Even that now I feel certain people, including myself, must shut up and not even make small chit chat about certain subjects (like personal philosophies, my pet peeve) unless they have a pHD. That's what it feels like. I have wanted to bone up on the greats, to devour them all, to "gird my loins," in my whole career at Sarah Lawrence College. I'm going to be a senior now.
The people in school, because it is such a crazy liberal one have been way against my 1950's history textbook reading, 101 mentality. Or at least, they have a different idea and I suspect think that my hungry ghost thing is stupid.
In college I also discovered academics with different opinions. Journal articles that sum up all the research that's been done before and variously dis it as stupid or inadequate or missing an avenue that the article will spend filling. Critics that denigrate maybe what I like or each other's work as vapid or missing something. At the core, I think, they think of themselves as people who make good judgment calls. And I've wanted to be that, to analytically piece something apart and realize why I'm the best judge. Or to be like Peter Abelard, the young academic whippersnapper who goes against all the other old opinions and proves they are right. Frequently these academics shift the perspective in a mind-boggling way. They make me realize something new, an alternative I've never seen before. And that's frightening. That's what a lot of revisionist historians, critics, theoreticians of race have done, pulled the ground from under us in a cocky, snobby way. A way that refuses to translate from ancient Greek and Latvian, sometimes (in the case of postcolonial theory) a way that fires off references we're supposed to know without explaining and simultaneously mind-fucking us, a way that sneers at the "undergraduate mentality" or "well, this is good enough for undergraduate students" in comparison to serious scholars. The word scholar, such a humbling one indicating continuing learning.
I'm afraid of these theorists who make the ground spin underneath me just when I thought I was getting it. Maybe they've been spoiled comparing too many greats or observing too much historical phenomena. But critics are mean. Telling us that, "No, you don't understand how things really are, they're much more complicated," and imply, "I understand, I'm right, let me show you, you dolt."
And us with our undergraduate papers, bumbling through various essays not quite at ease with casual academic talk and jargon. The best thing about honorable academic speak is at least it's trying to make things clear. Maybe underneath someone's reinterpretation of Henry James is a lot of heart.
But the thing is, I'm in no position to talk about this, I'm the worst procrastinator I know and barely read. Plus, the worst thing is to do some idiosyncrology (a term from the genius Hipster Handbook: http://www.foodcourtdruids.com/idio.html), or make fun defining generalizations about something you know nothing about. Something that less qualified Sarah Lawrence students than me do all the time.