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.