Catharisis

I have decided not to publish my entry about the cruise yet. It reeks of ignorance and dishonesty. I will have to work on it some more.

Alex told me once that he never got over me until he stopped running away from the facts of my leaving him and confronted them. I keep trying to do that with Chris. And it helps. Sometimes. But other times it makes me throw up, and at 7 a.m. before leaving for work I cannot afford to have my makeup running down my face, and my breakfast gone.

I knew from the moment that I had that conversation with him over the phone Sunday night that something was going to change. I knew it was going to be hard as hell. I said: I’m done. And he did not say, what?! or cry or protest or in any way freak out. He just seemed faintly sad, resigned. So I added, Unless something significant changes. He just kept saying sorry, and then he had to go back into the bar.

So I knew.

I’m sure if he read this it would be a lovely thing for his ego. A pitch perfect performance of one of his own characters.

Sometimes things happen that remind us that we are younger than ever.

I knew the Friday before my first week at work that things between us needed to end. That a sustained relationship between us was going to get in the way of my work. But he assured me that he loved me more than anything, and that he was willing to make it work. And I did not want to hurt him. I thought maybe, maybe it can wait.

I knew before, during, and after the cruise that I did want to be with him anymore. But I still did not want to hurt him and a part of me held onto the hope that he would become somebody else.

It is honestly the fault of that night we went to see Splice. We had incredible sex, cuddled during the movie and just had a generally drama-free time together. It made me think: this is comfortable.

I had a nightmare my first week at work. I was laying on my side on a thick mossy tree branch, clutching it to my heart. I knew I looked beautiful and at peace and the light broke through the treetops like warm golden tears and Chris was on his way to see me. When he arrived I knew he was wrong for me because I knew he did not in any way appreciate the scene of which I was a part. But I pushed the thought aside and said, “I asked you here to tell you that although I was uncertain before, I am certain now: I love you and I want to make things work.” And then he looked at me in a sad, resigned way. And I panicked, because I suddenly realized with shock that he had not come to the same conclusion, and my heart tore apart as the alarm clock went off.

I asked Chris to meet me for a serious conversation. I don’t know if he thought I was going to break up with him – if he didn’t think that, then he knows me better than I thought. I was just hoping that he would meet me with a bouquet of flowers and tell me he was going to change, because work was more stressful than I ever imagined and I knew that handling a breakup was not something I wanted to worry about. But I knew.

I asked him to meet me in the rose garden. I got there early and meditated for an hour. It made me calm, the colors glowed, and I felt the soul of the world pulsing through my pores and lifting me. It said, Let me handle this. And I let it expand and contract my lungs for me, and I laid down and I had a déja vu from my dream because I was lying in precisely the same way, clutching the earth to my chest under the sun, and I knew what was going to happen but I remained guided by grace. Chris arrived and I (I in the broadest sense) said: “We’ve talked a lot about my feelings and not much about yours. What are you thinking?”

And then he proceeded: I don’t think things are going to work, I can’t be the person you want me to be, I don’t think what you’re asking of me (to be there for you in times of stress) is unreasonable but I just don’t want to start seeing you as a chore or annoyance, It’s not that you tied me down but I just want to be free, I love you but the most important thing to me right now is hanging out and drinking with my friends (I: Yes, we are different people, you’re doing the right thing I just wish it weren’t now when I need you the most, but I am glad you are being honest with me), we are going in different directions, I love you and it has nothing to do with you (I: you don’t have to feed me lines), (anger) don’t tell me I’m feeding you lines because I mean it, (I: it’s funny that i’ve always been so proud of doing the breaking up, and now that I’m on the other end i realize those things don’t matter), yes it’s harder to be the one doing the breaking up, i didn’t cry when hilary broke up with me, I hated her, (I: I don’t hate you), yes that’s why it’s so hard (I: it’s funny that people are breaking up all the time, everywhere, and when it’s happening to you it always seems like the most tragic thing in the world), it IS tragic.

I was flowing and glowing the whole time and only cried a little bit, when I admitted there were going to be times in the future when I would miss him like hell. When he cried it seemed un-genuine. I don’t know if it’s because it was insincere or if because he was inexperienced. I know he believed he wasn’t playing a role. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t.

Either way I know we aren’t right for each other but it has been agony trying to come to terms with the fact that this person I spent a majority of my time with for almost a year decided to leave me during the only period in my life that I needed him.

I don’t hate him, I’m not even bitter against him. Jervey and my mother say he couldn’t handle the fact that I was making something of myself, and that I was obviously destined for great things, because it diminished him. I’m working for one of the greatest newspapers in the world, and he’s living with his parents in the OC drinking with a bunch of high school drop-outs. They say he ended things with me to escape that feeling of diminishment. I do think that’s a part of it but I don’t hold it against him. When he got into TC Boyle’s class and I didn’t, I almost broke things off between us because I couldn’t handle the idea of being with someone who thought they were better than me.

Others say maybe he broke up with me because he thought I was going to break up with him. I do think thats a part of it too, but not all of it because I made it clear that I was willing to keep working if he was willing to promise a change of approach, and yet he went through with it anyway. But maybe deep down he knew I did not want him. Only days before he did it, he seemed near tears and said: I feel unwanted. Because I did not want to make love, because we had been fighting, and I really did feel that I did not want him.

Either way, it was not all of it.

It’s ironic that the first time I saw him cry – which is what I was really after the whole time, if I’m honest – was when he was leaving me.

I think part of the reason confronting this thing is so hard is because I would have to face something about myself: the fact that my first impression of him was right, and strong, and yet I ignored it.

But I should be glad, because it means I will be less likely to do it in the future. I knew when he was explaining to be the plot of Antichrist and how it excited him that he was ‘soulless.’ I do not think he is soulless, but I do think he wants to be. To an extent.

Few things excite him. Things that excite him: Movies with style, country music, cats, soulless books and stories, drinking/taking shots, sports games, gay jokes with his friends, theme parks. I guess I should have taken the “interests” section of his Facebook a little more seriously.

He never loved life the way I love it. He had a very narrow appreciation for it, whereas I am ready to take all of it with open arms; and that’s why I knew especially during the cruise that he was wrong for me. Sam told me to hold on tightly to two memories: one where I knew he really loved me, and one where I was really sure he was wrong for me. I haven’t set on one of each yet, but here are a few:

Memories where I knew without a doubt that he really loved me: When he changed his FB relationship status. When he told me he loved me for the first time. When he told me he felt unwanted by me and seemed very frightened and sincerely sad.

Memories where I knew without a doubt he was wrong for me: When he was telling me the plot of Antichrist. When I woke up in his room and truly felt the significance of the fact that every inch of his walls is covered in advertisements. When we first went to the beach at night, and he wouldn’t dance with me or go into the water. When I was zip-lining over treetops in the rainforest in Puerto Vallarta and knew that he would never enjoy this like I enjoy it, nor be excited for me when I told him the story.

I have written all this in hopes that it will help me be able to know myself better.

I was at a spelling bee yesterday to cover it for the paper and one of the kids had to spell the word stoic. He asked for the definition and the woman gave it to him and I realized she was describing Chris.

I want to expand, and he is very tightly resistant to expansion.

That is at the heart of all of this, of why we cannot be together. But I cannot be angry with myself for letting myself fall in love with him. It has only taught me a little bit more about what love is.

I never really loved Chris, until that moment on the grass.

Faith: I really do believe that dreams can prepare us for things

It’s funny that when major things happen to us, the realizations we come to are never novel or unique: it is always a remembrance of what we have always known and ignored.

The other day when I was driving home from work my hand picked up the CD he burnt for me “Some Music” and I turned to the song we used to listen to during our happiest moments I want to walk around with you and instead of feeling despair or agony or nostalgia, I merely enjoyed the song. Because all I remembered was that while listening to that song together, I was always aware that although I was enjoying myself, I could be enjoying myself much more with someone else.

Heartbeats

So, I graduated college. I figure now is a good time to update this thing.

President Steven Sample was a great speaker at the ceremony. I feel bad for dissing the school’s decision to let him be the speaker. He told a hilarious story about a Bruin in Heaven, which ends with the Bruin discovering that God is a Trojan. He told us to seriously consider how we feel about money, children and God.

I am after a feeling. Not an occupation or a person or a thing or even a situation. A feeling. This feeling can’t be acquired through money or materials or even any specific experience.

It is rootedness. The sensation of remembering or rediscovering something that has been there all along. Something that I often neglect and forget about and for some reason can’t keep my grip around. It is a feeling like everything is going to be okay. Not “okay” in the sense that tragedies are certainly not going to happen, or that I’m going to end up happy or successful. But simply that I will always, even if I lose everything and everyone, have myself. I will always have this relationship with this thing at my core to return to, this trust, this ability to breathe and be grateful for the ability to be.

I got that feeling today while talking with Alex. Graduation was pretty anti-climactic for me. It happened so quickly and it didn’t even feel like it was happening. My mother ended up bringing her boyfriend despite my pleas and our lunch at Benihana was uncomfortable and disappointing. But it was also enlightening – I realized that although I need to respect my family I do not need to like them. I do not need to be close with them. I do not need to let myself be hurt by them.

And then my conversation with Alex today helped me realized more. I don’t owe my mother anything, even though she likes to make me feel that I do. “You have become who you are IN SPITE OF your mother, not because of her.” She paid for college and high school and everything I have ever needed and without her I would not be graduating from this amazing university. But she has never been there for me in any real sense, nor has my father, despite my improving relations with him. (His behavior during lunch gave me a reality check that he still really is his cynical cruel self). Everybody in my family is incredibly selfish. The paradox with my mother is that she is selfish in her selflessness. She wants to be a martyr. A victim. I don’t want to be a part of that and I need to figure out a way to distance myself from it, I guess first by coming to grips with it.

I started realizing this when Chris told me his father was not coming to his graduation, but that he didn’t mind because it’s just a ceremony and his father has been there for him in a very real sense all his life. With my mother, it’s the opposite – she commits all these symbolic gestures to show me that she cares, but never actually is there for me.

I did not think I would be seeing Alex again, after an exchange of angry/awkward text messages. I saw him at graduation, while he walked and while his mother embraced him afterward. We did not acknowledge each other’s existences. But today we decided to meet for coffee and when he walked into Starbucks, Jose Gonzalez was playing and then we talked sincerely. I felt like I was tiptoeing because I did not want to ruin the dynamic that we had somehow managed between us. Vibrating at the same exact frequency like we used to and simply LISTENING to each other the way it’s so difficult to do with anybody else.

Then we walked around campus and eventually sat down on the Grassy Knoll just talking about the past and the present and the future, and about mistakes and our changing characters and our static natures and how everything is going to be okay.

I needed that. I’ve been having difficulty lately, especially during graduation as it became blatantly apparent that I do not have any real friends. Ana is all the way in Paris and the only way we can communicate is by videochat and email/Facebook. Everybody else I’ve been hanging out with is just so much closer to one another than to me and it’s really sad for me to realize this. Alex brought up a good point during our talk, even though I didn’t even tell him about all that. He said that he thinks I am into a culture/scene whose members do not vibrate at the same frequency as me – who do not have the same mentality, the same appreciation for knowledge just for knowledge’s sake (You know what I think you should do? This is just a suggestion, take it or leave it. I would love to take a class by Professor Guerrero some day).

But in my late 20s, early 30s when I am meeting lots of people in my same field and with my same ambitions, I will start to meet more people who do vibrate at this same frequency – people who, during college, just happened not to share my love for electronica and raves and the scene I chose to take part in. This is probably why I have such a hard time ever feeling rooted or satisfied with my interpersonal world: because I made the decision to immerse myself with a certain crowd that did not share my deeper mindset. (and because I have been going from boyfriend to boyfriend to boyfriend).

So that was an explicit reassurance that everything is going to be okay, without my even asking for it. I feel luckier to have met him than I can express. I don’t think anyone has had such a positive influence on my life, and it’s a shame that it’s so difficult for us to be friends.

But more than the explicit reassurance was the merging once again with this thing at my core, this trust/love/respect simply for being alive and doing my best and knowing just by breathing that everything is going to be okay, no matter what happens.

Like Steven Sample said at the ceremony: it’s character that matters, and if the last 22 years are any indication, my character is capable of transcendence.

Things always end up the way they should. And I am full of gratitude.

My Pre-Edited DT Column this Week

I was video-chatting with my friend the other day when she asked me, shyly, if I had ever tasted dirt. As a matter of fact, I had. When I was little, I dribbled a fistful of soil into my mouth out of curiosity about its flavor. “Doesn’t it taste wonderful? It’s so fresh and rich,” asked my friend. “Yeah, actually, with the exception of the crunch,” said I.

Our little exchange, to some, may seem absurd. But I’m sure there are others who have feasted upon the earth. The yearning to learn the characteristics of our world is widespread; to some, the compulsion manifests itself in odd ways, but seekers of truth are a common species, curious always about everything: the origins of the universe, the purpose of life, and the bigger meaning of it all.

Ironically, I’ve found that this species of people often loathes science more than those who prefer to enjoy the universal playground without contemplating abstractions. It is the feverish inquirers who are grudgingly signing up for the required science general education courses. Although the questions of life fascinate them, they think that science sucks the magic out of everything. They thrive off of that sense of awe that fills them when they contemplate what they don’t understand — the poetry inherent within the mysterious. To them, science is the enemy of this feeling.

I used to hate science. When my grade-school physics teacher explained that apples fall from trees because of this inevitable force called gravity, I thought with horror that he had killed my ability to be amazed by the experience of being rooted to the planet. “It may seem like this beautiful miracle to be alive, but it’s actually very explainable mathematically and scientifically and logically and you’re stupid if you aren’t motivated to memorize and embrace the boringness of it all,” my science teachers seemed to say.

But then USC professors like neuroscientist William McClure and science journalist K.C. Cole changed my perspective. The hypocrisy of it was elucidated: I claimed to be in love with something that I was too afraid to look at in the face, for fear that it might not actually be beautiful. I was seeking ‘the secret of life’ without taking the time to get to know what life was.

But the heart of each scientific discipline, I discovered, throbs with an un-killable magic. Sure, we can explain that a sperm meets an egg and triggers a cascade of cell growth and division that eventually becomes a baby human. We can talk about how this enormous explosion at the beginning of time caused the universe to come into existence. We can study how the stimulation of brain cells gives rise to behaviors and perceptions.

But the fact is that biology, physics and neuroscience are actually revealing the ultimate unknowability of the world — a familiar and breathtaking unknowability that, to the relief of religious people everywhere, resembles, if anything, God.

Scientists still have absolutely no idea why life or the universe or thoughts occur. We can explain how they happen and what they look like, but not what is behind them. For example, I can have the thought, ‘There is a unicorn beside me,’ and we can explain that the thought occurred because neurons in my brain fired in a very precise way. But why did they fire in the first place? It’s not like there’s actually a unicorn here. What is the initial push that caused this squiggle in my brain? It is inexplicable, just as the initial ‘push’ behind the Big Bang is inexplicable. We can describe how the cells in a fetus multiply, proliferating and migrating to certain locations to eventually create an organism, but this doesn’t reveal the ultimate question: why?

Science cannot strangle ‘the secret of life’ because it is by nature inscrutable. It cannot be gotten hold of. The ultimate question — why are we here? — seems outside of our capacity to answer. It is like trying to see the eye with the eye. You can only know, intuitively, that you are a part of it. That the answer is somehow you.

We are the universe looking at itself. In the language of the religious, we have been made in the image of God. Life is the only thing in the world capable of perceiving the world, of giving it meaning and trying to discover its nature. We can study and characterize the limbs, the body, of that from which we sprouted, but its ultimate secret is unknowable. It seems to be locked within what we are looking at it with –– consciousness itself.

The resultant elusiveness doesn’t mean that the pursuit of it is pointless. No, it is the greatest miracle of all: the butterfly that can never be caught, whose wings we can never turn to dust, and which will remain forever beautiful.

This, ladies and gents, is the realization that, unlike anything else, can make the spirits soar.

La Plage

Yesterday I became disproportionately upset about something superimposed onto other things and began to feel that sensation that is a frantic, skin-electrifying mix of despair and self-pity and rage that sucks me into myself like a black hole at the core of my being inhaling me into it and causing me to feel that the only way to escape is to expand, to take that knife and puncture myself so as to breathe some of the pressure out of me, and perhaps even simply to destroy myself.

But knowing that the last time I succumbed to my survival methods I experienced hell on earth, I decided instead to go to the beach. The beach is a decent antidote for that blood-boiling poison I described. The sound of the waves breathing, the sand under my feet, the wideness of the ocean – it reminds me that I am still in it. I am still in the world despite the enormity of the internal, imploding whirlwind at my core.

I was 100% sure that no matter how cold the water was, I was going to go swimming in it. I did not have a bathing suit, only my dress and my fur coat, but I did not care. But then I realized that nobody else was in the water and perhaps this meant it was polluted or filled with sharks. Plus the sunset was beautiful on its own and the sand under my feet felt incredible as I listened to Efterklang on my iPod, so instead I sat down near the shore and simply breathed.

The clouds, as the sun approached the water, seemed to mimic the flying birds over the ocean. Wispy and whimsically winged, like white seagulls flapping and soaring and dancing in the sky. I thought, this must be the universe appreciating itself, imitating itself amusedly.

I realized as I stared at the view that no photographer, however skilled, could capture it precisely as I saw it. The ocean was of a color that cannot be reproduced by cameras – a combination of both purple and silver and black and blue.

I imagined to myself a little boy frantically trying to cover himself with sand. Sitting on the shore like me – grabbing fistfuls of damp sand and dropping it carefully but insistently onto his skin, and patting it down – but gravity keeps pulling it off of him in the places where it is not perfectly balanced by flesh and bone. He is trying, with all of his might, seemingly in vain, to create for himself a prison of sand.

And somehow, by some miracle, he defies gravity. He finds a way to cover himself from head to toe in damp beach sand from the shore, and to walk around in this shield.

And then he spends the rest of his life having forgotten why he ever built it, and trying to get it off.

An endless cyclical struggle; the exploding and collapsing of the world.

Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree was a fatiguing though fun trip, both adjectives with a capital F.

On the first night, we arrived barely in time to set up the tents before the sun went down. Then our firewood ran out at around 10 p.m., and Sam had not yet come with our sleeping bags/pillows. We thought we were going to die. Literally, a couple of us I think were pretty certain that we were facing imminent deaths from freezing. We cuddled in our tents, and just as we were about to die (I was quoting Rose from “Titanic” in her final scenes with Jack) when Sam showed up at around 1:30 a.m. Turns out her car had been continually overheating and she had had to make many stops throughout her journey.

The tent I bought for myself and for Chris, allegedly a 2-person one, which I obtained at Walmart for $20, turned out to be the tiniest tent I have ever seen in existence. Fuck Walmart man. But we slept in it, and it was fine. Freezing as hell (???) and I could not stretch my legs out (nor, obviously, could Chris, who is a foot taller), and my queen-sized inflatable mattress bulging against the tent and bending upward at the ends, but we survived.

Even with the little kangaroo rats hopping and scurrying to and fro, digging their teeth into the splattered splotches of ketchup that had somehow ended up on the side of our tent, blood-like.

Okay, the next day we went on a hike. We were searching for the Short Loop Trail (4.5 miles there and back or so, dubbed thusly to make lazies like us feel lazy) and we ended up going to Warren’s Peak instead because we got lost. But it was totally lovely (7.5 miles there and back), with cacti and quail-like creatures everywhere that we kept mistaking for bunnies. That is, it was totally lovely until I realized about 3 miles into the trip that my tampon had exceeded its capacity, and I had forgotten to bring another, and I had to announce to the group my predicament, and everyone gave me death stares because they feared we would have to turn back or be trailed by a chick with blood running down her legs, but instead I realized promptly that I was holding a piece of paper, which I could use as temporary stoppage. Afterward however I realized how ineffectual this method was, and how very likely it was that it would not be sufficient for the rest of our journey. Sam came to the rescue by suggesting that I use a sock, which I did, and later found out that Matt believed I had stuffed it into my private area, literally, rather than used it like a rag in my underwear, and I was appalled, and asked him if he really thought I was that gnarly, and he said he knew some gnarly people, and proceeded to describe a friend who had gonorrhea and who whipped his dick out at a party and smacked it repeatedly with a ruler until green stuff would come out. Disgusting.

After our hike, which ended at a gorgeous peak with a panoramic view of snow-capped mountains and the vast reaches of the Joshua-Tree-spotted desert, we drove to the center of Joshua Tree (our campsite was not in the main part of the park) and did some boulder scrambling and climbing. I was not very good at it, so I wandered off into the desert (first running, then walking as I realized there might have been rattlesnakes) and then I sat down, cross-legged, and took in the majestic, sprawling view around me, with brush and trees and dirt never-ending in all directions. Chris eventually came to sit across from me, even though he had not originally wanted to come wandering into the treacherous rattlesnake-infested lands.

That night was much more comfortable than the previous one, because we had ample firewood and we listened to my campfire making skills instead of Matt’s (who was very resourceful for making the tents, etc. but was not very good at campfires) and we drank lots of Charles Shaw (a bottle or more each) and listened to Radiohead and Andrew Bird and then went to sleep in our sleeping bags, which this time were waiting for us.

Also we ate at Applebee’s, all classy, instead of roasting hot dogs over the fire (which made me sick the previous night, that or the fact that I was sitting in the fumes of the fire, causing me to puke my brains out).

In the morning Chris crushed a beetle outside of our half-midget-tent that was allegedly endeavoring to crawl into my boot. Ten or fifteen minutes later I realized it was still alive, its little legs waggling miserably as it attempted to move its mangled body. He stomped on it again, and still it remained alive, persistent, desperate. It wouldn’t die. I felt so bad for it. I stomped on it a few times and then we poured sand over it. I really hope it was put out of its misery. I still don’t know if it was fully dead by the time we forgot about it.

On our drive back after packing everything up, Sam and I got pulled over (Andrew and Matt and Chris were in the other car) for “speeding.” We swear we were not speeding. I have terrible luck with authorities, especially police officers, and they never ever let me off the hook for tickets, but Sam worked her magic and we were let off with a warning.

I am now re-reading Lolita.

The results of mixing coffee and wine.

Time is running out, and I am regressing in order to maintain the thread of ago.

I have this, like, illness. It’s seriously an illness: my desire always to be in the past. An addiction to nostalgia. And I call it an illness in spite of knowing that the only way to be cured of anything is to cease to regard it as an illness. I learned that recently: the only way to be happy is to accept everything about yourself and your life, all of the quirks and unfortunations and weirdnesses and weaknesses, embrace them and love them and once you stop wanting them to go away, they will leave. Illnesses remain only as long as you wish to be rid of them.

Back to the illness. It is a tautology: I love the illness so much, so narcissistically, so egotistically, that I continue to call it an illness, I continue to despise it, because I love it.

I learned that recently too. Love, real love, is violent, aggressive, and by nature exchangeable with hatred. At least it is for the Russians, and for people who have been brought up by mothers whose sounds of sexual ecstasy resemble the sounds of their insults. By fathers who left, and loved only after 21 years. By parents who loved each other so much they wanted to kill each other. By a mother who probably wanted to suffocate her selfish, wailing infants with a pillow.

Love, real love, is violent as hell in the families who have suffered. I think this can be explained logically. The root of it can be gotten at. Families who suffer cannot afford to love gently. Something about money, and death, and birth, and everything being at stake.

But who wants to live a life, or love a love, without everything on the line?

Ecstatic horror. I have been turning that concept around in my head lately. Trying to imagine, trying to see if I can imagine, an ecstasy so great, so unbearable, that it is frightening, horrifying, painful.

That is God, I think. That is the feeling in the head when one meditates thoroughly, and every cell begins to explode throughout the canvas of the skin, and the energy of the infinite seeps through the pores, rushing into the head, and just before you let yourself become it, you stop. Ecstatic horror is a very difficult thing to confront, and only the bravest of souls attempt it. Only the most generous, the most sincere, succeed.

Why is there something instead of nothing? This is a question that I have asked myself since I was like seven years old. I perceived it, once: nothingness. I used to be able to perceive it when I was little and it was like a high. I would concentrate, asking myself the question over and over and over again, and suddenly I would see the universe splitting in my head, and I would feel the ecstatic horror and I knew.

It’s got something to do with that: and if I try to explain it logically I will lose the thread, the feeling, because logic the eye of the thing, and you cannot see the thing when the eye is in the thing, it is like trying to see the eye with the eye, and this is making little sense but this is how things go in the afternoons with coffee and a hangover and having stayed up until 4 a.m. doing who knows what and waking up in bed wearing only a t-shirt, and finding my pajama pants on the floor, soaked through, dripping, the floor wet. As if it had rained into my room throughout the night.

But it has something to do with that: the ecstatic horror, splitting, or the splitting that led to the ecstatic horror, or their mating, the splitting with the EH and then the Big Bang and everything that ensued so as to quell.

I seriously go through my Facebook messages and my old emails and torture myself, reading old love letters and old hate messages and seeing that they are all the same, and remembering,

I am trying to fold myself back into myself. I am resisting the passage of time by reaching as far backward as I can.

Everybody is getting rejected from graduate school, from newspapers, etc. Everybody is having their dreams shoved up their asses. And it’s funny because in a recent fit of nostalgia bingeing I came upon this quote in my senior yearbook for high school, from Amores Perros: “My grandmother always said if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Well, he can laugh all he wants. I’ll still have my plans.”

And you know what? It’s kind of exciting, to get so fucked by an entity that you know loves as much as it hates you, and to be able to say: fuck you. I am going to love you and love you and love you, and that is it, I am not going to hate you, only love you, and you can go on hating and loving me, I will be better than you, and once everybody learns to do this, once everybody learns to love unconditionally, that is when God will realize that he is being an immature selfish crazy motherfucker and he will repent.

That is what the religions have wrong: they say God is good, God is noble, and humans are imperfect, he is great because he loves us in spite of all our imperfections, we must strive to be like God. But that is a dream.

The only way we are ever going to transcend ourselves is by setting an example for God.

Oh yeah and about the illness. Romanticism, I guess you can call it. Is it noble? Is it beautiful, to respect your past self better than your present self? To never ever be capable of self-assurance, or emotional self-sufficiency, because you are so caught up looking backward, backward…..

The universe is expanding, expanding, and expanding – what a futile and pathetic thing it is, to resist the universe. To say, do not go FORWARD, go BACKWARD. Do not EXPAND. Contract.

But maybe it is the only reaction that some of us can have. Opposites must always exist. There is simply being, and then on one side of it there is romanticism, and on the other side is the perpetual rushing forward. Maybe ecstatic horror is the relaxing of the self, until it is torn apart to go all ways, in all directions.

And perhaps none of what I have just written, or to be more fair, a lot of it, is bull shit and has no basis in reality. That is fine. Fine with me. As Dostoevsky writes in “Crime and Punishment,” talking nonsense is good. “You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me, and if it is your own, I will embrace you! It is almost better to tell your own lies than somebody else’s truth; in the first case you are a man, in the second you are no better than a parrot!” (Page 171).

That is why Dean in Kerouac’s “On the Road” is so likeable, or so annoying, depending no how you look at it. His unintelligible pseudo-intellectual babble is either a really courageous, sincere effort to say something original (Dean = so likeable) or a really pathetic, inaccurate, butchered parroting of what he has heard previously (Dean = so annoying).

You will not attain to one single truth until you have produced at least fourteen false theories.

Sticky Stuck Stickness

What is there to say.

Going on a road trip on Monday to Joshua Tree National Park with Chris, Andrew, Matt, Sam, and Jessica. Originally we were going to go to Yosemite but it’s too cold. It will still be much fun. I will blog about it, since it’s my last spring break. I don’t know why I’m updating this except to try to get into the habit again.

School is almost out. It’s horrifying. I’ve just been rejected from every major newspaper in the country that I wanted to work at.

I could panic, or I could just pretend it’s not happening…

I am going to the bookstore to read Alice Munro, and see if I want to buy her book, “Too Much Happiness,” which my professor recommended to me when I said I was looking for English-language writers who resemble the famous Russian novelists.

Particles.

The Wonderfully Fabulous Wonder of Fabulosity

I really need to get into the habit of updating this.

Anyway, I’m inspired to briefly jot down some thoughts after a lengthy conversation with my roommate’s girlfriend, Faith. I feel like every time I have a discussion with her, I grow and learn so much.

My favorite author of all time is Fyodor Dostoevsky. Most of his characters are tortured men who communicate some form of the famous Notes from Underground quote, “To be acutely conscious is a disease.” They are intellectually superior characters who cannot get along in society because they feel like nobody has the capacity to understand them or to see things as they do.

I used to really identify with these characters and one time I even wrote a story entitled “I see Gorillas, Everywhere” told from the perspective of someone inspired by these characters, except it was a woman. Pretty much it was myself. You can access the story here if you are curious (it’s not very good, but quite humorous):

http://web.mac.com/jeanguer/iWeb/Site/Gorillas.html

I really felt like I was a superior form of human – that I understood and perceived the world in ways that were far superior to everybody else’s – and yet this feeling of superiority kept me from being able to relate to or truly care about anybody. It really was a disease – I hated it. I go into the feeling in detail in the story.

But anyway the point is I finally got away from that mentality. A lot of things happened to help me in this journey and I won’t list them all here. There was a point in my life where the whole thing got so bad that I got it into my head that I was going to start a revolution to “cure apathy” and I really thought that all apathetic people should die. What exactly qualified as apathetic I still do not know. But basically I was like Raskolnikov, who murdered the pawnbroker lady because she was useless in society (except I never went so far as to want to murder anybody).

Somewhere along the way I realized that everybody has some worth and everybody deserves to be loved because everybody is a human being. Deep down we are all the same. I realized that if I were to have experienced the exact same things as somebody else, I would probably be acting the exact same way. There is no reason to hate or feel contemptuous toward anybody.

Any form of feeling that you are superior to somebody else is inherently self-destructive. Whether it’s that you think you’re prettier than others, or smarter, or nicer. Senses of superiority constrict you, make you smaller and less free. Humility is only way to be wholly free and blissful. And as Faith pointed out, humility does not mean saying you are ugly when you know you are beautiful. Humility is a certain type of forgetfulness. I find that meditating, or simply lying out in nature, helps me achieve this forgetfulness. As do certain mind-altering substances. You realize, thus, that you are one with everything. As hippie-like as it sounds, it’s true. If you are cruel to others, you are cruel to yourself. Only when you love others unconditionally can you love yourself unconditionally. Only when you respect others can you respect yourself.

Belief is by nature aggressive, one of my professors quoted from a book called “The Passion at Mind” the other day. When you are aggressive to others you are aggressive to yourself – you are lashing out in an attempt to keep something in you repressed. The only way to be kind to yourself is to be kind to others – to accept that others have had different experiences and thus have different beliefs.

And yet all of this knowledge can also be very dangerous. Sometimes when I meditate and start to reflect on all of these things, I begin to feel a sort of contempt and anger at people who haven’t had all the realizations I just described. I start to feel that I am superior because I am enlightened about the importance of not feeling superior. Being spiritually superior inevitably leads you to feel spiritually superior and therefore reverses the whole process.

But one of the most important parts of this lesson is the acceptance that you will never ARRIVE at a fully enlightened state. Enlightenment, perception and unity with the oneness of everything, loving everyone and everything unconditionally – they are fleeting states, just like anything else. You have to accept that you are human, you are imperfect, and the best you can do is continue to struggle, continue to try to be a better person, continue to treat others to the best of your abilities.

And the best part is that once you truly learn forgiveness, you will learn to forgive yourself of your inability to be all-forgiving all the time.

An additional thing I want to write here about my conversation with Faith is that we have realized you cannot change anybody – the very act of trying to change someone is aggressive and will lead to resistance or some sort of defense mechanism. The only way that anyone can ever change somebody else is by loving them unconditionally – which requires that you stop wanting to change them at all. You accept their shortcomings. Embrace them and love them. Only once you stop wanting to change somebody is there a chance they will actually change.

And it’s kind of funny because if you try to do it, it won’t work. The very attempt is self-defeating because you cannot love unconditionally with a motive. Motives are selfish.

The Two Things You Don’t Have to be Good At

I had a funny exchange that I would like to record for my future self. I was at the barn this morning, taking Rascal’s wraps off his legs in the crossties, when Caitlin mentioned she was going to go golfing later in the day and she said, “The two things you don’t have to be good at to enjoy: sex and golf.” I started laughing my ass off and she said, “That’s why I love golf; it’s all about that one shot and that one hole.” Then I was in hysterics and I said, “Is that your attitude toward sex as well?” She hit me, feigning offense. I was amused for long afterward.

My father has begun to act like a normal person. I spent the past two evenings eating dinner with him at my grandmother’s and having perfectly normal, father-to-daughter discussions. He no longer shakes uncontrollably or stutters when he and I disagree about something. In fact, he was telling me about how my cousin Mike (who I am actually very curious about, due to the things I have been hearing about him) and him used to get along, but Mike has become convinced that he knows the Truth and Secrets of Life, and “he gets so passionate when he speaks that he is actually shaking, yes actually shaking, as if he can hardly contain himself, and he gets so angry and worked up that it’s impossible to carry on an intellectual argument with him.” It reminded me of the way I used to be when I was dating Alex: the views I would express about the oneness, and curing the world of apathy. I told my dad I knew how Mike felt because I used to feel that way until I realized that it is impossible to know everything and even if you are convinced you know more than other people, it is impossible to live a decent life and have decent interactions with people until you accept that other people are entitled to their own opinions and if you were in their shoes you would probably disagree with you too.

But more importantly it was strange to hear my dad talking about Mike’s flaws, which were previously his own, in a manner proving that he no longer had them. This also occurred when he began telling me about how my evil aunt Aimee exploits Sochi, her maid, who is a lovely 30-year-old woman who has worked for her for almost 15 years, sending her meager $200/week paychecks to her starving family in Mexico, and about how Aimee never lets her go out or make friends because she is afraid she will meet a man or learn English and somehow become enlightened about how much my aunt is jipping her.

My grandmother had been constantly telling us to please speak Spanish, please speak Spanish (she cannot understand English) but it is hard for me to converse with my father in Spanish because I haven’t practiced in a while and the things we talk about typically require complicated terminology that I have forgotten. At this point she got out of her chair (she is normally quite calm and pleasant and reasonable) and began shouting with a panicked air:

(translated literally from the Spanish)

Abuela: “Stop it Marco, stop it! You are poisoning her blood with that talk!”
Marco: “…and I’ve told Sochi, you know, pulled her aside and tried to explain to her that Aimee is just using-”
Abuela: “Oh Marco, you and your terrible attitudes toward your own family; families are supposed to love each other; your sister loves you and you have always, you have always…stop! Stop! Be quiet! Jean don’t listen to him”
Marco: “but she just doesn’t KNOW she doesn’t SEE”
Abuela: “You are poisoning her blood! Stop stop, please, please”
Marco: “I am not poisoning her blood. It’s not like I’m shaking uncontrollably with anger and growing claws and spitting, I am merely stating the facts, objectively and calmly.”
Me: “Don’t worry abuelita. I don’t judge people based on what others say, only on what I experience.”
Abuela: “Oh of course, of course, girl. I’m sorry, I am just…I have an upset stomach, and you know how I get, and how he gets…”

Soo amusing. And then my father gave me some advice on my short story which I sent him and it was really incredible, it was like advice straight from a creative writing professor, about replacing certain redundancies and dull words with vibrant details. I was amazed and am having some trouble understanding how it is that my sick father and I can carry on a more intelligent conversation than my physician mother and I.

I ate sushi with Rachele today and it was absolutely lovely. I wish she lived in the same city as me; I share more in common with her than with any of the friends I have in Los Angeles or San Diego.

I am not much in a writing mood right now, I’m exhausted after a full day of physical activity. Will write soon.

The Escape from Disgusting Moaning

I do not mind hearing myself moan during the act of intercourse; thank goodness for this, otherwise I would be greatly distracted from the pleasurable side effects of sex.

I do not mind hearing my partner moan. I do not even mind hearing my roommates moan, so long as I am not doing homework.

But hearing my mother moan while being fucked by her weird-ass boyfriend who I swear gave me a sinister, evil look today – that is a whole different story. I mind that very much. In fact it is sheer traumatic agony.

This is why when I heard deafeningly loud groaning sounds coming from her bedroom (I was downstairs), I immediately started running in circles, frantic, at a loss for what to do; I looked about my surroundings wildly for some sort of escape, solution, something to make this disgusting horror stop, I paced to and fro, grasping at my ears, and finally I noticed my keys sitting on a table by the garage door – I snatched them and sprinted out to my Yaris, stepped on the gas and sped away from the house at precisely 67 mph.

I didn’t even have time to grab my coat.

There was nowhere to go that late at night – it was 11 p.m. – other than Borders, which was fine by me. I began studying Laughter in the Dark, which I just finished reading, and which I plan to re-read multiple times obsessively until I memorize and absorb precisely whatever it is that makes Nabokov so goddamn wonderful.

I also purchased “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” because it opens with a three-page-long sentence and there was some clause in there that amused and disturbed me about a penis curled up beneath the Speedo swimsuit of an academic man reading Newsweek. I have begun reading like a maniac, the way I used to in high school and middle school, and I plan to read a preconceived combination of writers that will lead me to acquire a style that is a melding and flowering of all of theirs. Stylistically I wish to combine Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote, Mary Karr, David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson. And of course all the classical Russian writers whose use of psychology, philosophy and strange little details merge to create insight that resonates and inspires.

Anyway, enough of my amateur intellectual talk.

When I awoke today, and descended the stairs pursuing the mouth-watering scent of my grandmother’s ham soup, my mother greeted me in the kitchen with a series of insults, accusations and curses at the top of her lungs, slamming things and stomping her foot, the jist and sum of which went something like this: you are an ungrateful, spiteful whore for taking your friend Evan upstairs last night and closing the door to your bedroom as you guys did god-knows-what in there, and you totally did it to embarrass me in front of all of my friends, and you are an alcoholic and smoker just like your father, you dumb, worthless prostitute who has inherited all of your father’s negative traits. She did not stop saying these things, in a variety of different and creative ways, even when I left the room, even when I left the house (according to my sister).

This is what happened yesterday. I watched Avatar – the most brilliant movie, which had me in convulsions and tears and which I swear was made just for me, and which I will write a review about tomorrow or sometime soon – with Evan, and then we came to our house for my mother’s holiday party. I had been expecting to have difficulties parking but there were no cars in our cul-de-sac. Evan and I parked and as we walked toward my pink McMansion I said, “I can’t believe how amazing that movie was!” And I was so happy to have seen it was Evan, despite his immaturity during the Avatar sex scene, so ecstatic that a friend with an appreciate for fantasy comparable to my own (we both read Sword of Truth together) had seen this masterpiece of a movie with me, that I leaped into the night sky, laughing, and Evan caught me and spun me around like a baton. Then we entered the house for the holiday party, for which my mother set out close to 50 chairs in the living room, but nobody was occupying them when I arrived, the bustling happening party I had envisioned was actually just a few awkward people staring at each other in the kitchen in silence as my mother nervously made exclamations about eating soon as she awaited more guests. The first thing I asked my mother was this: Where’s the alcohol? She said she didn’t have any. I was upset because she had said she was going to have alcohol. So Evan and I made a quick run to Trader Joe’s for some 2-buck-chuck (some random employee there saw me picking up the bottle and said, ‘Are you old enough? You look like you’re 14.’ Taken aback and offended I said, ‘I’m definitely 21.’ Evan told me later I should have said, ‘Keep workin at Trader Joe’s, lady’) and then we sped back home and poured ourselves glasses and we drank wine while my mother awkwardly caressed her strange boyfriend beside us, and Evan tried to engage him in conversation but to no avail; nevertheless, he hit it off with one of our neighbors and the husband of one of my mother’s coworkers as they discussed the public education system in America and the Chargers. I love Evan because Evan is smart and can get along with anybody. I don’t love my mother’s boyfriend because he doesn’t make any effort whatsoever.

At some point Evan decided he wanted to search the Internet for Avatar porn; he was convinced that even though the movie had just been released, someone somewhere had already uploaded Avatar porn onto the Internet. I led him upstairs and my mother attempted to stop us, in vain: “Where are you going? Your room is a mess! You can’t take mens up there.” And much to our surprise, there was no Avatar porn, anywhere, even when I removed all of the filters on my Google search.

Then we decided to watch “Public Enemies” on my laptop. We started to watch it but my mother came into my room and said: What are you doing? You can’t have mens in your room. Watch the movie downstairs. We ignored her and kept watching the movie on my laptop. She returned. Finally I sighed and we took the movie downstairs and endeavored futilely to hear the movie: my mother and my grandmother and her guests were chattering loudly in the kitchen and we could hear nothing.

So we decided to go to the hot tub. We had some cigarettes and wine and Evan imparted the wisdom and knowledge he acquired while studying martial arts in Asia, and explained to me in detail how I can defend myself against rapists by murdering them. It was a good, relaxing chat, with the steam rising up from the Jacuzzi and mixing with the cigarette smoke, dissipating into the cool night.

Then we went back inside and watched the rest of Public Enemies – everyone had gone, by that point. Then Evan left and I prepared myself for bed: my usual ritual involving brushing my teeth, washing my face, removing all of my makeup, putting on a loose T-shirt and grannie panties and warm socks, placing a glass of ice water on my nightstand, glossing my lips with Vaseline, and finally putting my sleeping mask round my head. I put Piojito into her cage in my bedroom and threw a blanket over it and then I curled up in bed with “Laughter in the Dark.” I was just about to put it away and fall asleep when I heard a faint knocking at my door. I assumed it was my sister so I ignored it. Then a key turning softly in the lock, and the door crawling open with a prolonged creaking. My mother’s creepy face poked in from the side and she surveyed my bed intensely.

“Where is that man?”
“Evan? He left, obviously.”
“He better not be here.”
“Go away.”
“Mens can’t spend the night with you.”
“Whatever dude, you’re being creepy, leave me alone – and lock my door.”
“No.”

She left and did not lock my door. I got up and locked it.

She has been acting like a crazy bitch ever since the other day when we were driving back from dinner and she said, “I am going to have Gino spend the night.” And my sister and I said okay, so? She said, I just want to make sure you don’t mind. I said, “I don’t mind. I’m going to have a man spend the night with me in my bedroom, too, soon.” I said it as a joke even though it wasn’t funny. My mother said, what? But you don’t have a boyfriend? I said, so? She said, “Only mens who you are serious with can spend the night. Like Gino, my little bird, I am serious about him.” I said, “I’m serious about my man too. Serious about gettin’ down.” I have no idea why my sense of humor was so vulgar that night. But my appalled mother has been torturing me ever since, to have her revenge.

Anyway, bonnuit.