Your chance to step into my shoes... one post at a time.
September 26, 2011
September 12, 2011
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Missing someone
How do I put it? Missing someone is deeper than missing anything else… It’s not as urgent, nor as abrupt as missing things, like ‘SHIT I NEEDS MY AIRCONDITIONING & I NEEDS IT NOW. It’s a deeper, more fundamental piece of me that keeps going, ‘Oh that’s right, Janel’s gone, won’t be able to share this piece of $#@! news with her..’ and knowing that she’s having an awesome time in her university because her university is awesome & that’s SO GREAT but being at the same time semi-wistful because it means she’s that much less likely to be missing me…
Oh well. All (else) I can say is, Thank GOD (yep, hers) there’s Facebook Chat :)
- Missing missy
October 11, 2010
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Hell is others
…“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because…when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. … But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre on what his (in)famous quote “Hell is others” meant. (From the Imago Playbill)
Then why didn’t he just say so? Wasn’t he a writer or something? Now introverts are forever merrily bandying this (well, as merrily as introverts can be, anyway) adage around, kept sane by the delusion that someone understands them, that someone agrees that “every interaction… is invariably hellish,” that this person was and still is critically lauded.
Sad and happy are choices. If everyone were a little bit more rational they’d see the paths to happiness are awfully clear-cut and that all you REALLY have to do is CHOOSE (rationally).
On a related note, have recently had cause to ponder the following highly important question:
Are we purely products of our circumstances?
I’d hate to think so (and really, so would you) but I love-cream. And Barbra Streisand. Clearly this shows I have grown up in the great US of A in the front half of my life, followed by a lifetime in a small, cold East European monarchy with a penchant for frozen diary products.
January 26, 2010
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"I want to reconcile the violence in your heart/ I want to recognise your beauty’s not just a mask/ I want to exorcise the demons from your past/ I want to satisfy the undisclosed desires in your heart"
- Undisclosed Desires, The Resistance, Muse
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Time & again
I manage to redefine disappointment. I wonder why it is my life seems to be an endless series of me disappointing people: Frau Schraudolph, my mother, my friends & myself. Are their expectations too high or does the fault lie with me? Or maybe I should stop promising things to other people. Maybe I should be upfront about my capabilities & handicaps (myself & myself, respectively). Maybe that’s the way to go. But I could never live with that level of mediocrity, where nobody expected anything of me. (That’s right, not even I, Queen of Mediocrity.)
So tired of living with the knowledge that somewhere, someone is being disappointed by me. Not actively, please. I couldn’t bear it if my actions were actively triggering negative emotions in someone just because I happen to not have had time to cultivate a healthy respect for deadlines & the like. Much better if that disappointment could be passive, & fade out of their minds once they stop contemplating how a person could stand being so… blah. (Despite sounding altruistic, my desire to not upset someone undoubtedly has selfish roots in the thousands of years of evolution. I probably just don’t want to damage their impressions of me further than I already have, to ease my job of eliciting some improbable benefit from them in the distant future.)
Even the act of writing this post has siphoned off valuable time that could’ve been spent writing my Kursarbeit. My God, I hate teachers who inspire disappointment & shame & guilt instead of healthy eye-rolling.
Silver lining in this shitty little cloud: Maybe this was my special talent. Maybe I was born to disappoint.
Silver lining in above shitty little silver lining: Won’t have to invest time nor effort to hone this shitty little talent of mine; I seem to possess a god-given aptitude for it. (Let’s postpone the religious argument for another day.)
Exhausted. Back to actively disappointing people. (Enough of that passive slacker-shit.)
January 17, 2010
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Dark Blue
Yes, Mr. Jack’s Mannequin, I have been alone in a crowded room.
This feeling is not quite as unpleasant as I’d thought it’d be. I suppose it helps that the room is crowded with people whom I just don’t adore.
Just as long as this place has got a door.
December 23, 2009
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"Don’t you take chances/ Might feel the pain/ Don’t you love in vain/ Cause love won’t set you free
I can’t stand by the side/ And watch this life pass me by/ So unhappy/ But safe as could be"- Leona Lewis, Happy
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Pride in Performance
Is the Bangladeshi worker below my flat now, lugging his bike, bucket of soapy water and a washcloth around.
Painstakingly washing every car he’s been paid to. Polishing each & every car to its spotless state, restoring every single one of them to a level of cleanliness that the owner will gleefully take credit for in the morning, bragging to all his friends and their mothers about how his car positively gleams. (Just because by some miraculous injustice of birth he was born into our wonderful land of first-world-but-trying-hard-to-pretend-it’s-not. Just because, well, heck, he can.)
I want to remember this when I recall my primary school motto. This is Pride in Performance. The sweat and fatigue and tedium and forcing yourself to go through the mind-numbingly boring motions. Not the mass of eager, foolish, PSLE kids trying to prove themselves through… what? Their superior powers of memorization? Their astounding ability to sit down at a desk and be spoonfed knowledge?
It kills me that this stuff we learn now, Mr. Washer downstairs will never, ever be privy to. Or need. Or even give a soap-sud about.
Back to my romance novels to remind me there’s goodness out in the world. Even if that world is a fictional one.
Fucking bleeding heart of mine.
December 18, 2009
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Copenhagen
How can you all be so selfish? Don’t you see? How can you bear to be so indirectly cruel?
This entire situation is just so ridiculously tragic. This definitely ranks among the best tragecomedies I’ve ever watched in my life.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6960419.ece
The way they are all, each and every one of them, so unwilling to step up and shoulder the burden tears at my heart and makes my eyes bleed. So tired of this shit. As I can imagine every single one of them is. As I know every single of them has been.
Let me open my eyes another day, that I may offer what feeble assistance I might.
November 28, 2009
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Loneliness
I have recently had cause to think about this… monster that won’t get off everyone’s backs. Not just because of my crazy/ beautiful friend — she is, in fact, in possession of one of my favorite minds on the planet — who seems messed up with it, but because I myself am lugging this shit around with me, and who am I kidding, it’s not just the two of us, it’s everyone.
I don’t think anyone of us is well-adjusted enough to get past this shit yet, and that’s okay, we’re still growing. But, you know. It still surprises me every time it hurts. (Not sure if that’s indicative of a worrying ego problem. KIV.)
And all this time I’ve got a voice at the back of my head, whispering All this teenage angst is so… unnecessary. In 10 years’ time… well, you know. Or rather, you won’t know. Because we won’t remember.
None of thisI was going to say none of this will matter, but that’s bull, right? Because everything and anything we do in the here and now has repercussions — maybe full blown, shit-hits-fan ones— on there and then.There is no conclusion. Still gathering arguments and evidence. Any help/ advice is appreciated. Even — actually, make that especially— if you’re crazy/ beautiful.
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"Is there anyone who isn’t crazy with loneliness?"
- Karen Brichoux, Coffee & Kung Fu
September 21, 2009
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Metal and gloom
Pop-rock and laughter
I wanna spend my life with you
Unhappily ever after
p.s. These are part of the single set of lyrics I will set to 10 different tunes, which will together make up my album.
- lyrics
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"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’"
- American poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
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Regrets
Is the sum of all regrets in the world 0, do you think? Is it possible that each one could cancel out an equal and opposite regret?
- “I wish I’d loved him” vs. “I wish I hadn’t”
- “I could have done x” vs. “I could have done y” vs. “I could have not done x/y”
- “I should have told her” vs. “I really shouldn’t have”
- “I regret slacking a year of my life away, I regret being mediocre, I regret being left behind, I regret leaving myself behind” vs?
I want to find someone who can cancel out these regrets. I know they’re foolish and entirely pointless. I hate that I’ve put myself in a position where they actually don’t seem that way.
September 13, 2009
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Anywhere but here
Hilary Duff sings, “You’re burnin’ up my dreams/ Crazy as it seems/ I don’t wanna be/ Anywhere but here.”
I think that kind of exactly describes my feelings towards 504. A better alternative does not exist. Which in no way implies one couldn’t. Which is what’s getting my panties into a knot. Which I claim as a right.
For example, given half a chance, I’d will 305/405 into existence again, complete with the entire motley crew (whether or not they’d like it. Although preferably they would.)
And yet I am thankful I’m in this class where class outings are actually attended by more than half the class, where we have English lesson debates that actually do engage more than a handful of people, and of course where I’ve got my own little card club, however stupid that sounds.
The truth is, I miss the old class. I miss the nonsense, I miss the apathy, I miss the lousy mentor, I miss the people.
In CH2101, I created sentence with the Chinese equivalent of “depends on”: The meaning of one’s life partially depends on what one means to others. The teacher laughed it off as the model answer, but I stand by what I said, no matter that it seems rather anti-individualist. Humans were not made for solitude. Don’t even try to fight a million years of evolution. A. It won’t work, B. There’s no point and C. You sure you trust your cooking skills that much?
I don’t have a thesis. Musing aloud my disjointed thoughts in a half-hearted attempt to make sense of them. Anything to distract me from EC5209 Individual Assignment. Speaking of which, $#@!
