re: entanglement of feelings

dearest S,

what about the possibility of augmented happinesses? extended entanglement of feel-good connections? additional memories of new faces and new places that widen and enrich your web of Happy Happy Things? has the world been so cruel to us already that we should be clenching our teeth against all tomorrows, afraid of their rains and sunshines alike? if we're constantly living in fear of unwanted feelings, unwelcome memories, we'd better be prepared to avoid a lot of extremes -- the bad along with all the good, too. pitiful, shell-bound turtles, afraid to stretch out what little neck we've got to expose to the fresh air, tethering ourselves to home spaces that so easily become the most effective kind of prison cells, where we feel safe. comfortable. complacent. forever.

I don't think it's that you're selfish, or that you're foolish, or too sensitive, no. we all have tender beating hearts we wanna protect. and it's certainly not that I think it's easy to take these word prescriptions and pop 'em like so many sunshine vitamins for myself, either. (notice the "we"!) I'm just taking the opportunity to be a lighthouse-voice in a good friend's life, sending you leetle guiding signals of truths that might have gotten fuzzy along the way of our scrapes and splashes, cause it's easier, it seems, to dispense advice than to take it. even especially my own. I'm counting on you to be that voice of light for me, too, when I'm in need of heart sutures -- probably with words so idealistic, you might have trouble believing in them yourself. but I'll listen. I'll believe. let's be that for each other: reflecting pools of un-belief, reverberating back and forth in echoes of truth-words when we most need them. what is it about excellent advice that only seems to apply to the rest of the world? what foolishness.

even taking the plunge to have The Talk has its possibility of augmented happiness, I learned that just today. fresh off the press. you open your mouth along with your heart sometimes, and people seem to respond to that with a little more understanding than before; a lot more understanding than you had ever given them possible credit for. and thus, I feel, trust, know -- that yeah, it's worth it to share precious songs that remind you of precious places. talk aloud about childhood scents and what pink olfactory images they draw for you. try our best to expand the [inside] boundaries of our [inside jokes], though those can definitely be tough. hopefully we'll be prudent and wise in our audience choices; only share with those who will hold the pieces of our heart with the care they deserve, but hopefully also realize that we're a lot less fragile than we think.

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.” ― William S. Burroughs

I love you, dear friend. in all the headachingly, throat-clenchily intense and embarrassingly self-revealing ways that true love is, I think.

to all the songs, all the movies, all the beers and beyond.

love,
m

what did we do right this time?

was it all that "active listening"?
was it the extra eye in the room?
was it the topic of interest, our shared hope amid the failure?
was it the hand gestures? the meta knowledge-sharing?
was it the sunshine in my face? [did I look stupid?]

did I let go? were you holding fast?

I dunno! but it worked this time; we got it right this time.

I want us to keep getting it right.

comme c'est joli! c'est tout fleuri

[thəp]/dear first year ladison

what is the definition of art?
must it serve a purpose?
how do you define that purpose? (can art be an end in itself? can beauty? can pleasure?)
what about goodness?
what if the purpose is evil, but it's really beautiful, but it's really evil [masochistic beauty? thorny rose?]

There are (still) many things that make me feel like a nobody, a noob. It's hard to strike the perfect balance, and trying to tackle a problem by formulating the hypothesis with the word "perfect" in it probably doesn't help.

But hey, freshest source of conflict: art & utility.

I've been learning a lot about the value of [utility], as counter-posed against [art]. Yes, blah blah art is purposeful; sometimes art is all we can do to render meaning and beauty; are you saying you are a utilitarian blah blah STOP. I know it's a crude and contentious distinction, but simmer down, self, cause I'm just trying to figure things out, like most of the rest of the time(s).

So I've been learning, taking in, feeling, thinking about this art-utility thing, and mostly, it's illumination upon all the things I am clearly not illuminated about - which makes me feel hopeful that I'm at least facing the right direction. As a fourth year English major, having to read and write and say a lot of words in general, I'm realizing that a lot of my time these two semester is being taken up in the Defense of Myself/My Major/My Murky Vocational Future. And I get this. It doesn't even annoy me anymore.

Because I think I'm learning, taking in, feeling, thinking, that technical and hard-sciences knowledge is actually really appealing to me, sometimes embarrassingly so, as I flounder about in my non-knowledge and blind admiration of random Bio majors and pre-health people who seem to be doing things with their lives, but still realize that the world is utterly incomplete without its random beauty and seemingly coincidental creation of things and other Things That Seem to Have No Clear Purpose.

There is indeed a place and a time for every little thing, is gonna be allriiight.

Man. The more I learn, the less I seem to know.
So, eh-hem, dear postgrad Ladison, remember these things and try to blabber less foolishly.

whatwhatwhathowhow

what is righteousness?
what does it mean to live a righteous life?
what does the life of a righteous person look like?
how does God require righteousness of us, how does he make this possible for us?
how is it different from holiness?

Thank you for wonderings and questions and brothers and sisters with whom to seek for the answers. Let us continue to be satisfied in you, as in nothing else, but also never let us be complacent in the state of our knowledge, our experience of you. you are infinite! I cannot understand that. but I don't need to. I don't want to.

falling innnnnnnnnnnnnothing: penpals4ever

wonder what I would've thought of you if we had gone to the same school, been in the same group of friends throughout our college years. [I predict: love, or hate. or both.] or neither.

wonder how different my now-perception of you is from that alternate-reality perception of you, in which I hang out with you over at Peter's place occasionally [hookah smoke-filled afternoons], and watch you go through finals seasons and note how you react to the tyranny of your [our??] friends' alcohol-fueled belligerence nights.

wonder if the two are really that different - penpal-to-Madison you and uh...student-at-VT-normal-guy you. maybe I'm just overdramatizing it. repetition tends to make that happen. oops

wonder if you're gross, too, like so many boys, or really not. or gross in some different way (heh), and if I'll just be disappointed because penpal perfections can't ever last outside their bubble of postage stamps and slow-connection communication. [I really wonder if that's true.]

wonder if I'm ever gonna get the answer to these wonderings; wonder if I even wanna know.


do people even write letters anymore???

how to be a hippie misanthrope:

• have beautiful thoughts about nature's bigness and oneness; how it transcends cultures and humanity
• foster beautiful relations in communities, in concert with nature
• ask beautiful questions to babies about what they would like their ideal playground to look like; really listen
• build beautiful structures that help humanity to be more aligned with its nature
• give beautiful lectures about your work, inspiring college students and the young-at-heart to think a little more about this transcendental nature thing, too. that it's bigger than us, that we shouldn't even try to conceptualize it, just accept and be in it and observe and seek understanding some-way-how
• after it's all over, answer questions curtly and dismissively.

PS you know, as much as I like his work, I feel like he's not a very nice person.
But I wonder how that can be possible, if he's so in tune with nature& its goodness.
yeah haha I could tell...
he thinks nature and its goodness is better/greater than humans
and thinks humans are in the wrong.
Wow. Makes such perfect sense. You can be a hippie misanthrope that way, huh
What a waste of beautiful thinking. Blehg

Oh eunoia.

present-perfect

I am a present-person. As in past-present-future, present. Usually, people's first reaction to this fact about me is "That's good! You live in the moment."

This is true. Being in the moment is delightful to me. I love getting caught up in the swirl of now, getting out of my head and into the tangible atmosphere of the fleeting, precious moment. I mean, it's fleeting and precious! It should be savored and enjoyed.

But it's also kind of a trap. Sometimes, there's this sense of being in a (now)cloud - living in a bubble of the present, impenetrable. Whichever person happens to be texting me, whoever happens to be running into me (runningrunningrunning), whatever I'm daydreaming about always gets first priority, no matter how much I need to shut off thoughts and

Just do homework.

I don't really have a good grasp on the OFF switch, and this is irritating when the brain gets all caught up in presently-unsolvable-problems-of-the-day. I think think think think think about it (or maybe it's more appropriate to say it thinks me all out; no agency) even if I can't do anything to change the situation in the moment. It's always about The Moment, and sometimes this leaves me nakedly helpless in the face of The Next One, cause I just did't have enough time to think about that. Also I wonder if this has anything to do with my love of repeating songs over and over - there's probably a warp in my brainfolds.s.s.s.secretly craving repetition of EVERYTHING.

Usually, the thoughts I get stuck in aren't really of great consequence, and I just end up thinking about my schedule for the day/week/semester over and over, carefully etching out the course of a time-map in my mind, and again, and again, where will I be, at what time shall I leave, who else will be there, what will the conversations be like (hm this all sounds very future-oriented, doesn't it), each iteration a little deeper in the grooves - annoying but not life-threatening. But it gets kind of scary when I'm up against a thought-monster bigger than my agenda and I can't stop taking it in. Metaphorically standing there and actually stuck, unable to stop, unable to start cause it's a loop with the same exact information feeding in and back in. Nothing's happening, and nothing else can. It's paralyzing, literally, because the only way to stop is to sleep, and sometimes this doesn't even work (cause remember, no grasp of the OFF switch), or at other times the agenda says I can't afford to cause if I fall asleep now when will all this work be done/it wont/and then you'll be behind the present and you don't know how to deal with that/remember.

How to fix this? In this way the present isn't so perfect sometimes.

what is an English major

What's in a name? that which we call a rose 

By any other name would smell as sweet.

some more ideas:

There's love and computers and good old reading, writing, thinking,
Soulstuff.
Lines and connections and disparate things coming poetically (or not) together.

And people, too, trying to figure all of it out.

Kinda like life.

"Balanced and Harmonious Life" -- do you agree?

-"self control or temperance will be a condition of internal harmony, all the parts being content with their legitimate satisfactions. Justice finally appears, no longer only as a matter of external behaviour towards others, but as an internal order of the soul, from which right behaviour will necessarily follow. Injustice is the opposite state of internal discord and faction." (139)

-"And it will be the business of reason to rule with wisdom and forethought on behalf of the entire soul; while the spirited element ought to act as its subordinate and ally. The two will be brought into accord, as we said earlier, by that combination of mental and bodily training which will tune up one string of the instrument and relax the other, nourishing the reasoning part on the study of noble literature and allaying the other's wildness by harmony and rhythm." (140)
 

-"At the same time, those two together will be the best of guardians for the entire soul and for the body against all enemies from without: the one will take counsel, while the other will do battle, following its ruler's commands and by its own bravery giving effect to the ruler's designs." (140)
 

-"And again, temperate by reason of the unanimity and concord of all three, when there is no internal conflict between the ruling element and its two subjects, but all are agreed that reason should be ruler." (141)
 

-"In reality justice, though evidently analogous to this principle, is not a matter of external behaviour, but of the inward self and of attending to all that is, in the fullest sense, a man's proper concern. The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp one another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his house in order, by self-mastery and discipline coming to be at peace with himself, and bringing into tune those three parts, like the terms in the proportion of a musical scale..." (142)
 

-injustice - "This must surely be a sort of civil strife among the three elements, whereby they usurp and encroach upon one another's functions and some one part of the soul rises up in rebellion against the whole, claiming a supremacy to which it has no right because its nature fits it only to be the servant of the ruling principle. Such turmoil and aberration we shall, I think, identify with injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance, and in a word with all wickedness."

-Plato's Republic

 

There is a lot to think about here:
 

- is fragmentation such a bad thing? what about the extreme highs and the lows that justify and validate and real-ize each other?
 

- okay and what about God? is true happiness and harmony this kind of fragmented control over quivering entities, threatening to bust out, implosion-style, or do I talk about the oneness of being one can reach because there's that option to "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you."? It's like a oneness of mind, like focusing all your brain energies and heart energies into being aligned with the Creator of the Universe, and letting all the sub-decisions and sub-importances fall in place, because they will. but would Plato answer to that, that this is just assigning the Higher Power control over the "business of reason" within your entity of identities? or maybe this whole line of reasoning would just implode in his brain, Null Null Null, because there is no Jesus-God for Plato.
 

Okay so there actually wasn't too much to think about there. Or maybe my mind's one-sided ramblings just gave me the answer to its own question. On a side note, Plato is taking over my life.
 

Off to write the essay now.

#hashtag

Why do I not know smalltalk topics that everyone else knows? How is it that random trivia and interesting facts about the world and numbers about populations I should be interested and invested in just fall out of my head? What exactly does my brain actually hold? How does everyone else in the world know so much more pop culture than I? What is it I need to do -- listen to the radio? read [trashy] magazines? subscribe to cable tv? watch more movies? get facebook? be on youtube all the time? Probably all of those things. But then, another question -- where does everyone find the time to live life, and do all of these things too? Am I just living really slowly? (I do read slowly, and I do a lot of reading. But is this really the whole answer?) How do I catch up?

Probably by writing less blogposts looking inside of myself and looking out at all the colorful things in the world.

But ya know,

I don't really feel like it.

happy naturalization cake

congrats! congratulations!

What for? Without taking away from the happy, kindly congratulatory feelings of the congratulations -- I really didn't get it. Is it indeed something to be congratulated for, this change of nationality? I didn't pay any part of the application fee, pass any particularly difficult test, or indeed, choose to come to this country in the first place. I didn't do any of it. Choose any of it.

But maybe it's not really about me anyways; what I've done or haven't. It's more like "congratulations for this great piece of luck" kind of deal. You're in the group, now -- may you officially and freely partake in Social Security (contributions). Even if you didn't know what you were getting yourself into (the most momentous life decisions get made this way, I feel). And it's true that I'm so thankful to be here, honestly. Not because I fled from an oppressive political regime or because my home country is war-torn and tattery now, but because I was free to think and to dress and to study and to dream the way I got to here.

And to eat celebratory Kroger cake and homemade pho in the same meal, surrounded by a rowdy bunch of hyphenated-Americans singing the Star-Spangled Banner.

America the Beautiful indeed.

seemingly depressing things, franklys, and tattery endings

Is the best good you can do, ultimately, resignation to mediocrity?

^That seemingly depressing opening sentence was supposed to be the depressing opening to a thoroughly depressing post, and as it was being mentally laid out in the cloudy loops of my brain during the conversation that inspired it, had all the intention of being so. Exactly so.

I'm quietly proud of my parents - humbled, thankful, and awed, often, by my good relationship with them together and him and her as individuals. Though certainly not with everything, my dad is remarkably patient with us. It's admirable and impressive, how determinedly he holds onto his mind and cool as we play the appropriately immature parts of the stubborn little babies we are. Stubborn little babies who got progressively worse and worse at math as the classes changed from Algebra to Trig to Calculus, too, and math was really the least of his troubles with us. It's a terrible thing to abuse, this patience, but no matter how many times we turn our gaping mouths in that unsightly "...huh?" toward him, my dad can erase all the previously explained and start over. And over. And over.

My mom is a little less adept with the stuff regarding repetition - strict no-more-than-three-reps policy here, or you'll pay the price by listening to a(n ironically) repetitive lecture about how You Never Listen for anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 weeks - but her virtues shine through her actions. She's the most compassionate, and untiringly-, uncomplainingly-hardworking person I know. Sometimes when she shares tidbits of her life philosophy with me, it's in the form of offhand slips of verbal gems she just casually and spontaneously tosses about, like dustbunnies that get unearthed in search of something else in the attic-resident trunk. Makes them seem a lot less monumental than they are truly worth, so I sort of have to rub my eyes and stay alert when she does this, and pick up those pieces and tuck them away for further study later, quietly in my room or something.

The two plump paragraphs above deserve [much more than] a whole post of their own, really, but for today, they're just gonna serve as disproportionately-lengthy prefaces to the sentence that shall follow:

I can't really and completely share with them about my vision for the future. 

"Vision" being that mystical, vague haze also known as Postgrad Life Plans, and future being that equally unclear patch of mystery time that begins After May. My soon-to-come first-ever institutional void, all of which, thanks to the combination of ~40% my own lack of direction and ~60% lack of desire to communicate with my parents about it, isn't really a subject we have much to discuss about anyways. And which, I know, is a validly-timed and validly-directed sort of discussion for us to be having right about now... But the trouble is that I feel so fundamentally different about what I think I want for my future than they think they do that it's just defeating and deflating to even begin the conversation. A former nurse and current engineer - practical and sensible and realistic as their jobs - talking to an English major - and general Poster Child-result of the blessings and woes of a liberal arts education - who says she doesn't want to teach or go into academia. Yeah cue those womps. Three of them.

Today's, in particular, was disheartening to the point of embarrassed tears. To the point of one whole sigh-filled afternoon, leaving behind its funk long after the actual conversation was over. To the point of that seemingly depressing opening sentence up^ there.

And today's, anyways, was different, too - advice against "all these documentaries I've been watching recently" and inappropriate allusions to the French Resistance movement during WWII all tossed in there like a bowl of discordant fruit salad. Like, with cabbage and mangoes trying to make it jive. All confusion about history and fruits aside, in essence, this is what they told me.

They told me to go with the flow. To just be a regularhumdrum person, with a regularhumdrum job. That things don't change. That I am such a small part of the equation, that power is so corrupting, that these social problems are inevitable. And pervasive. And so there. Just live your own life, resign yourself to mediocrity, and try not to get crushed by the forces out there, little one, cause going against the grain of society is a hard, hard thing. And please just get a stable job in a big corporation.

Yup, I am often bitter when I think of hypothetical Other Parents who support their children unconditionally, in anything and everything they are passionate about - especially when object of those passions seem so socially responsible and selflessly beneficial to the world and hopeful and good and objectively easy to root for. [Aside: Parenting, of all styles, must be so hard. It's terrifying. I think well-considered decisions to have children are some of the greatest acts of faith and hope we humans commit.]

But it must be a small sign of growing up that I didn't just shut down at that point in the conversation, cause I dunno - some short amount of time ago, I wouldn't have even stayed at the table for that to get finished. I mean what travesty, right? How could you be so unsupportive and doubtful of what I change I can effect in the world?! You two are the worst stomp stomp stomp etc. I am young and un-trodden upon by society, YOU JERKS, stop trying to nip my potential in the BUD stomp. Let me burn dat ephemeral flame of YOUTH, DANG IT. And why am I so afraid to mention the God aspect of all this to them? 

Thank goodness I didn't stomp on out of there like that. Cause the rest of this talk was indeed a healthy reminder of the fact that I am so undeniably a Romantic-Realist, and of my need for equal doses of both sides of that hyphen. That yeah - at least evidenced by the second half of that indecisive self-given identity-label, I am such a child of my parents.

They told me that it's important to be wary of the depressing, deflating effects of those social problems I feel so righteously angered and upset by. That anger - no matter how justified or righteous - is often counterproductive and always energy-inefficient. To remember the beautiful things. To be recharged by beauty and good, to maintain that balance within myself, cause frankly, the world is unbearable without that. It was a gentle, a revolutionary, reminder that I'm allowed to be personally happy in the midst of all this depressing stuff. That it actually helps, in a lot of subtle ways.

And though ultimately, we're still in clear disagreement about what we believe needs to be done - and possibly can be hoped to be done - about the sorry state of this world, and specifically, what I can do about it all (and more specifically...after that graduating business), they. are. right. Absolutely. My specific anger, at least at this particularly powerless point in my life and from this particularly influence-less place in society, burns furiously only against myself. If I don't keep this vague bitterness-against-all-the-ugly-stuff checked and specific and well-informed and most importantly, balanced with generous doses of Good and Beauty in the world, it will probably accomplish very little other than destroy my tiny life. Which, ultimately, is just accomplishing very little. I'm nothing to make a martyr out of. Not yet, anyways. I mean society's just getting finished educating me - and I still have a whole year to go. My time to give back is juuust peeping around the corner. Shy or something.

In more ways than this, so many, it is good to listen to my parents' [basically opposite-from-mine-] opinions and advice. If the fact that they've experienced me (in addition to their own lives, own societal problems, own political frustrations) through my terrible two's and awkward teenage years and all the jazz in between and really, to their fullest human knowledge and ability, want what they believe is the best for me isn't enough, then for the cool and reasoned answer that opposition is healthy in appropriate amounts. It critiques and challenges and sharpens and fosters a better-rounded growth.

Cause everything seemingly depressing, including mediocrity, is sort of a two-sided beast with its very own upside - just as anything seemingly good isn't ever completely, unconditionally Good. Simply put, the world is complicated, and the only control you have over its confusion is your reaction to it all. So I'm thinking, maybe I should alternate these documentary consumptions with Disney movies or something. Not that Disney movies necessarily deserve the label of capital-g Good, but frankly, neither do documentaries. And because, frankly, that's just the first thing that popped into my head and because, frankly, it's fine to not end on a warm, fuzzy note of enlightenment and conclusiveness. Sometimes it's just marking the progress of things, and that's that.

important:

What makes someone a Smart Person?