Tomorrow night, for me, is a night that millions of Americans honestly spend years of their lives dreaming about. Especially American girls, who want lights and pretty things to dazzle them. We want to be dazzled, and we disappoint ourselves or throw away our lives for cheap thrills and false imitations of passion. Yeah, Prom, a tradition that spans who-knows how many generations, going back to Pagan spring festivals and the like. Leaves are budding, flowers and blossoming, and the urge to be needed and to need and to create becomes unbearably irresistible. Prom is the watering down of traditions older than humanity itself. It's the twenty-first century American's answer to the depth of lust and love: a glimmering dance floor and petty conversation simmering on the side lines.
I think, between fourteen and eighteen, the first acknowledgment of love is truly made. Maybe for a few years the opposite sex has been looking pretty attractive, but it's not until this point that attraction and friendship merge into something altogether foreign. The thought of one's future being the person next to you more than the events laid out before your feet consumes so many of us modern teenagers that few of us take the time to step back and differentiate between love and hope, devotion and lust. But, through trial and error, the lesson is eventually learned. Love is acknowledged, truly, and considered, for the first time, as the coexistence of complication and felicity, agony and joy, intolerance and forgiveness. But just because something is, for the first time, looked at beneath the sharp eye of a microscopic lens doesn't mean that it has not existed previously. Observation is not the core of being; being is the core of being. A four year old is as much in love with life as a ninety-four year old.
The problem is, I can't find the energy to complete this train of thought. It's started, but my mind becomes clouded with how much I want to say and how carefully I need to think it out in order to get the point across clearly. I've tried, and I've no doubt I'll pick up this train of thought again. I've been thinking about love and the nature of human relationships for awhile now. It started when my sister, Wolfy Grins, asked me to write a poem or form of prose regarding our relationship or... something of the sort. I feel like I'm going to miss a deadline or something, because I just haven't been able to write anything down. Mostly what I want to write has to do with the variation of love and its flavor in life.
But now my brother's insisting I make him a sandwich and my brain is completely fried. Damn it, I wish I knew how to write anymore. I used to, I really did, once upon a time, I knew how to sit down and write. But now I just can't do it anymore, and I regret more than anything letting the habit fade away into obscurity. I'm off to make a sandwich.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
I can't keep a straight topic to save my life...
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edit Witwell and Don marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older then the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
-Neal Gaiman, "American Gods" (emphasis mine)
The cat Miss Samantha Black Crow is referencing (in the bold print) is Schrodinger's Cat, a thought experiment I only vaguely understand because it's got to do with quantum mathematics and I'm a seventeen year old high school student whose most advanced course to date is Trig and Algebra-based Physics (yeah, we aren't even calculus-based... bah!). I digress. But you can't fault me for being intrigued, can you? Especially after reading "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" by Robert Heinlein, which explains the experiment in simpler terms and does not attempt to boggle your mind with, you know, all of what makes Schrodinger's Cat Schrodinger's Cat and not just some cat in a box that's alive and dead at the same time (which, of course, is just silly, but so is the fact that bumblebees have evolved to fly when they're aerodynamically impossible... Although according to my sister, who is a biology major, scientists have discovered how it is possible for such awkward little creatures to keep afloat... now they - the bees - are finally physically capable of flight and can go on back to their merry lives as if the question never grounded them at all... oh, wait...) which is sort of a metaphorical whore (back to the dead/alive cat before all the parenthetical crap). You know, the kind of thing that every creative mind out there finds out about and decides is the perfect, original, one-of-a-kind analogy to some deep, moving truth about life in general, blar har har.
I can't find the quote in my copy of "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" about Schrodinger's Cat, though I wish I could. I don't wish it enough, though, that I'll reread the entire book right this moment. I've got Tolkien to finish, an outline to bullshit, a rat to socialize with, and dreams to visit. All in one night, too! Imagine that. Granted I don't have the internet right now so I can't post this. I just felt that creating a blog that my sisters may, if they wish, read, would be nice. Besides, I'm constantly looking for a new place to record my thoughts, because with each layout, with each different pen, with each notebook, I find that I have a different style, a different voice, and so it's cool to hop from a private notebook to an anonymous blog and back again. I'm not at all like my sisters, I guess. When I blog, I do it neither for myself nor for others, but for the audience in my head that consists of the faces and voices of all those I hold dear. This is what I want to say to you those awkward moments we pass in the hallway, or when you ask me what's wrong and all I can answer is, "I'm tired," and you don't understand that by, "I'm tired," I mean so much more and so much less than "I would like to get some rest."
I just wish somebody would notice that the just and the unjust are one and the same. There's a quote of Plato's that I deeply like, that has been morphed and accredited to some author or another far too modern to apply to the context it originally comes from. Something along the lines of there being two ways good eyes can go blind, those two ways being either a transfer from bright light into darkness or from darkness into bright light. The soul, it can be said, is the same. ... Too much thought leads to too many words that can't be said, and so I end up writing this vague, almost haughty post with too many run-on sentences and a pretentious smirk to boot. It's OK, though, because I am being honest with myself in a way that I struggle with when I keep everything in my own head. It's so hard to admit something only to yourself, and even a blank notebook page, even a little HTML box in a Firefox window, even a white void and a little blinking curser are better audiences than your own twisted, spoiled, damaged mind.
I'm off to play games with and talk to Shaila, my darling lonely rat who is the most beautiful non-human creature I've seen since the last time I laid eyes on a ferret.
-Neal Gaiman, "American Gods" (emphasis mine)
The cat Miss Samantha Black Crow is referencing (in the bold print) is Schrodinger's Cat, a thought experiment I only vaguely understand because it's got to do with quantum mathematics and I'm a seventeen year old high school student whose most advanced course to date is Trig and Algebra-based Physics (yeah, we aren't even calculus-based... bah!). I digress. But you can't fault me for being intrigued, can you? Especially after reading "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" by Robert Heinlein, which explains the experiment in simpler terms and does not attempt to boggle your mind with, you know, all of what makes Schrodinger's Cat Schrodinger's Cat and not just some cat in a box that's alive and dead at the same time (which, of course, is just silly, but so is the fact that bumblebees have evolved to fly when they're aerodynamically impossible... Although according to my sister, who is a biology major, scientists have discovered how it is possible for such awkward little creatures to keep afloat... now they - the bees - are finally physically capable of flight and can go on back to their merry lives as if the question never grounded them at all... oh, wait...) which is sort of a metaphorical whore (back to the dead/alive cat before all the parenthetical crap). You know, the kind of thing that every creative mind out there finds out about and decides is the perfect, original, one-of-a-kind analogy to some deep, moving truth about life in general, blar har har.
I can't find the quote in my copy of "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" about Schrodinger's Cat, though I wish I could. I don't wish it enough, though, that I'll reread the entire book right this moment. I've got Tolkien to finish, an outline to bullshit, a rat to socialize with, and dreams to visit. All in one night, too! Imagine that. Granted I don't have the internet right now so I can't post this. I just felt that creating a blog that my sisters may, if they wish, read, would be nice. Besides, I'm constantly looking for a new place to record my thoughts, because with each layout, with each different pen, with each notebook, I find that I have a different style, a different voice, and so it's cool to hop from a private notebook to an anonymous blog and back again. I'm not at all like my sisters, I guess. When I blog, I do it neither for myself nor for others, but for the audience in my head that consists of the faces and voices of all those I hold dear. This is what I want to say to you those awkward moments we pass in the hallway, or when you ask me what's wrong and all I can answer is, "I'm tired," and you don't understand that by, "I'm tired," I mean so much more and so much less than "I would like to get some rest."
I just wish somebody would notice that the just and the unjust are one and the same. There's a quote of Plato's that I deeply like, that has been morphed and accredited to some author or another far too modern to apply to the context it originally comes from. Something along the lines of there being two ways good eyes can go blind, those two ways being either a transfer from bright light into darkness or from darkness into bright light. The soul, it can be said, is the same. ... Too much thought leads to too many words that can't be said, and so I end up writing this vague, almost haughty post with too many run-on sentences and a pretentious smirk to boot. It's OK, though, because I am being honest with myself in a way that I struggle with when I keep everything in my own head. It's so hard to admit something only to yourself, and even a blank notebook page, even a little HTML box in a Firefox window, even a white void and a little blinking curser are better audiences than your own twisted, spoiled, damaged mind.
I'm off to play games with and talk to Shaila, my darling lonely rat who is the most beautiful non-human creature I've seen since the last time I laid eyes on a ferret.
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