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[11 Aug 2008|03:30pm] |
I'm penthouse-sitting. Living the life of the rich and the [literary] famous. The head of the department went on vacation and I'm staying at her place for two weeks. A mini-vacation for me. In exchange, I take care of the myriad of pets that also inhabit this house with bookshelves for walls, a t.v. from the 60s, and a terrace from which you can see 40 blocks downtown.
Pete, the dog, and I have a nightly ritual now. The first night I was there, he and the cats all decided to get into bed with me and Pete, in a moment of affectionate camaraderie, decided to stick his tongue in my ear. This is when I realized that I needed to set down some rules.
We came upon a compromise of sorts; in the evening, after we've taken our walk and I've showered and changed into my pajamas, we all sit on the couch in the living room with only a handful of lamps on and some Verdi playing and Pete gets to cuddle up next to me and we sit together and doze off for a bit. After about half an hour, the cats join us, too, and there we sit; cozily with the hum of the air conditioner blasting behind us and the wind brushing through the trees on the terrace and nary another sound.
It's as if we are the only creatures left on this whole wide word, just us and 30,000 books. It feels dreamlike and surreal, yet comforting. And my heart taking in the warmth of the creatures all claiming my various body parts and it's as if I'm breathing again, after holding in my breath for the whole summer.
Our morning ritual is just as lovely, after feeding all the other inhabitants of the house, Pete and I sit on the terrace and I sip tea and read the Times while he munches on his morning food and brings me various unidentifiable objects as offerings that he has buried over the years in the terrace. The cats brought me a half-dead bird the other day, that wasn't so pleasing, however.
I wonder if Pete and Tex and Tiger (the cats) know of what comfort they have been to me recently.
Pete, dozing off while sulking -- I had just given him a bath.
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[15 Jul 2008|10:44am] |
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[28 Jun 2008|11:58pm] |
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music |
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Bessie Smith "Careless Love" |
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I feel like Jay Gatsby, driving from a party to another. Which is fine, except in the back of my mind, I know there is the green light and behind that, I know the green light is just Daisy, a superficial flimsy make-believe goal.
This whole month - partying and drinking - hedonism, while suiting me, also acts as a numbing agent on the mind; the razor sharp edges dull and become soft and powdery. Haven't written anything the whole month. Clever aphorisms are all the rage nowadays.
There must be something that one holds on to, while everything else falls apart and reconstructs in an endless cycle of being created and destroyed; a spinal cord of sorts. I feel as if I've lost mine, with school done and the un-desire for returning to the somewhat putrid, hollow halls of academia.
A backbone for Reality is being searched for. Wish me luck.
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| That is all. |
[28 May 2008|04:44am] |
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"We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all."
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| Our endless, numbered days |
[24 May 2008|04:08pm] |
The day is crawling by like moss on a sodden rock.
At work at the moment. Have been reading Robert Graves today - by accident - picked this book up in a rush and put it in my bag instead of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which is what I have been reading in my [non-existent] spare time.
Just some things catching my fancy:
i. She Is No Liar
She is no liar, yet she will wash away
Honey from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand,
And, dressed at dawn in clean white robes will say,
Trusting the ignorant world to understand:
'Such things no longer are; this is today.'
ii. The Three-Faced
Who calls her two-faced? Faces, she has three:
The first inscrutable, for the outer world;
The second shrouded in self-contemplation;
The third, her face of love,
Once for an endless moment turned on me.
iii. Bank Account
Never again remind me of it:
There are no debts between us.
Though silences, half-promises, evasions
Curb my impatient spirit
And freeze the regular currency of love,
They do not weaken credit. Must I demand
Sworn attestations of collateral,
Forgetting how you looked when first you opened
Our joint account at the Bank of Fate?
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| The [non]Taoist in me. |
[23 May 2008|05:56am] |
Self-discipline/control
Compassion
Pursuit of simplicity
It's the first one that's the hardest, what does one do with all those desires that she has? They will not be silenced. How then, might she be rid of them?
Compassion, I am working on it and me thinks that at times, I am succeeding in being empathetic. This is good.
Pursuit of simplicity... this one is a bit ambiguous because I don't think one is supposed to make a fetish out of this... as I might be doing. And what exactly is "simplicity"? Ought I to throw all my material possessions away?
I have no use for money, it doesn't interest me much, so it can't be simply that.
Gah! I feel so stupid sometimes.
Speaking of desire, simplicity, compassion: E. and I have both fetishized Forrest Gump, his wisdom lies in his anti-intellectualism and therefore, he is able to understand things that some Mensa whores can't even intellectualize, let alone grasp.
In the meantime, little Jablonsky has dissected my fascination with A.B. --
"You're so into him because well...because he is very calm in a self-sufficient way. He gives off the impression that he is very happy with himself but it's not due to a lack of intelligence. And he is Midwestern. And shy and polite."
Hmm...
P.S. I'm rather fond of this poem. Dreamt about it last night, "the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead..."
The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter
-Li Po, translated [loosely] by the badass Ezra Pound
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse;
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden --
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.
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| Treading mediocrity. |
[22 May 2008|04:32pm] |
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La Boheme and Madame Butterfly |
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Why is everyone I know so damn afraid of that word: "mediocrity"? What is so scary about it??
So you're mediocre, big deal. Who isn't? In most aspects of one's life, she is mediocre at best.
Geez.
Fucking intellectuals. My disillusioned pathos regarding academia has a lot to do with this word, me thinks.
Mediocrity, mediocrity, mediocrity.
I shall be satisfied with being mediocre. In fact, I shall gallop and giggle in my mediocrity.
...I like feigning idiocy. and intellectual prowess. Often simultaneously. It makes me giddy.
What a strange week this has been!
O, ye who rule the heavens and the earth, deliver me from my non-mediocre visions of Reality!
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[15 May 2008|11:11am] |
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music |
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Jazzy women; Lata, Janis, Joni, Patsy, Billie, and Ella |
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"Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them." -Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Interesting insight.
But solitude can be - and is- enjoyable, too. Sometimes, it's the only cure for whatever malaise one is suffering from at the moment.
Hm...
------
On a different note: yesterday was my last day of school as an undergrad. I feel oddly disconnected.
And lately I find myself having memories of things that do not, could not, will not exist. My grip on objective Reality is slipping just another notch, it seems.
I am stardust. Billion year old carbon. I am golden. Oh, Joni.
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[08 May 2008|11:25pm] |
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music |
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Duke Ellington |
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*Sitting around listening to death metal in the office.
Ben: avoiding the big toad of a phone whenever it rings.
Me: sitting cross-legged and twirling in the chair*
Ben: I don't like the Japanese, yo.
Me: How come? *puffing on my viennese cream-filled wafer*
Ben: I'm still hung up over Pearl Harbor. *offering to light my pretend-cigar wafer*
Me: *nodding and taking a puff* I'm still hung up over the Spanish Civil War, Benjamin.
Ben: You too?! Shit! We need to go smoke a blunt together.
Me: Or drink some mushroom tea.
Ben: I've got some in my freezer.
Me: Let's do it.
Ben: Ok!
...This is what you do with a college degree, kiddies. Triple majors and all.
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[15 Mar 2008|07:05am] |
She liked her mornings long and lazy, languid and lonesome, laconic but lusty.
Mornings were made for intimacy and innocence.
Tea, light, and rustling newspapers, too.
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| The Flower Sermon |
[02 Mar 2008|01:30pm] |
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mood |
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 complacent |
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music |
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The Diamond Sutra, sung in English |
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Toward the end of his life, the Buddha took his disciples to a quiet pond for instruction. As they had done so many times before, the Buddha’s followers sat in a small circle around him, and waited for the teaching.
But this time the Buddha had no words. He reached into the muck and pulled up a lotus flower. And he held it silently before them, its roots dripping mud and water.
The disciples were greatly confused. Buddha quietly displayed the lotus to each of them. In turn, the disciples did their best to expound upon the meaning of the flower: what it symbollized, and how it fit into the body of Buddha’s teaching.
When at last the Buddha came to his follower Mahakasyapa, the disciple suddenly understood. He smiled and began to laugh. Buddha handed the lotus to Mahakasyapa and began to speak.
“What can be said I have said to you,” smiled the Buddha, “and what cannot be said, I have given to Mahakashyapa.”
Mahakashyapa became Buddha’s successor from that day forward.
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| Ek Jajabar |
[29 Feb 2008|02:10am] |
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music |
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Bhupen Hazarika |
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A dear friend with whom I am no longer as close as I once was and with whom I haven't had contact in about six months called me up to hang out last week and though thoroughly exhausted by work and school, I agreed to an outing. We went to our favorite haunt from ages ago and caught up nicely on our respective "busy-ness" over lunch. It was a lovely lunch; lots of late afternoon sunshine, and the quiet that comes when the lunch crowd has dispersed.
At one point, breaking into the susurrus of our conversation, he smiles and says to me, "But you know, you never were amorphous. You always were and will always will be, an intellectual feminist New Yorker with an occasional penchant for men you feel you need to save."
Hmph.
Needless to say, I scowled and stuttered [with righteous rage] over how he was pigeonholing me and making me into a caricature of myself and... as my defensive pitchy voice trailed off, he smiled, in an infuriatingly knowing way, and I gestured for the check with pursed lips.
...There you have it, I'm supposedly an egocentric narrow-minded liberal who sometime dons on her lame messianic cap and flies around in her narrow, suffocatingly small, pink bubble.
*hangs head a lá Charlie Brown*
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| I and Thou |
[08 Feb 2008|06:29pm] |
Friend: (casually, as we're about to say our goodbyes on the phone) Hey, just in case you almost missed it -- today is the 130th anniversary of Martin Buber's birthday.
Me: (without changing the tone of my voice) David m'dear, I sat in my party hat this afternoon and had matzah ball soup. I also patted my existential monkey on the back in honor of the venerable gentleman's birthday, how could I have missed it?
If I didn't have vague wispy egocentric dreams of being a philosopher-prophet-poetess, I'd use my razor sharp wit and general smartass-iness to run a modern day Tammany Hall... or at least be Macavity, mystery cat, in the flesh. Ah, I grow bored, I grow bored, I shall wear my stripped socks unrolled.
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| Bonne année 2008 |
[01 Jan 2008|04:24am] |
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mood |
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 mellow |
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Here's to another new year.
It promises to be an interesting year with watershed moments and meaningful relationships cultivated. Let's hope I survive it with some flair, some poetry, and some humor, too.
Happy new year to you all, my dear LJ friends. Keep well. =]
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| The Russians are coming |
[07 Nov 2007|10:23am] |
"Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."
-Ivan Turgenev
How I love the Russians; they've got it, that perfect blend of melancholy and sardonic wit that I simultaneously crave and dismiss.
Going to school is so passè, professors irritate me and the classmates all need a good satisfactory slap that'll sting my hands. Where does all these undercurrents of anger come from?? And this ennui? I am as a sloth, unable to do the simplest things that're required of me.
I love getting all dressed up in fine clothes and walking aimlessly through squalor and indifference. Instead of going to class or to work, I walk, for the sake of walking. Walking from the Lower East Side to the Bowery through Chinatown to Tribeca and then along Broadway up all the way to Central Park. It's a good satisfactory 3.5 hours but then ennui and restlessness all over again.
I'm something of a hot cocoa with coffee connoisseur, it's safer than gin and tonic but I miss that pleasant buzz that places a veil between me and the rest of the world. Just the way I like it.
I really am in Samsara.
Rereading Franny and Zooey I realize I've got no Zooey to my suffering Franny.
The only thing that I play anymore on my ipod is the Heart Sutra... Where is Avalokitesvara?
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha
Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha...
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[05 Nov 2007|07:17pm] |
"I should've been a pair of ragged claws,
scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
Looking at Grad school applications depresses me.
I miss my pre-2004 LJ friends, where have you all gone? *feels like breaking out into song a la` Eleanor Rigby*
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[02 Oct 2007|09:12pm] |
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I'm just really really really sick of [insert any facet of the human condition here].
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| Onward to the movies! |
[28 Jul 2007|06:54pm] |
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music |
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Blessed AC blasting Arctic chill into my room |
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Lately I've been going to the movies far too often and while conversing with a friend regarding "good" movies, I realized that I have no deifnitive list of "favorite movies." I've had a list of favorite books for as long as I can remember, however, not movies, how odd.
Well, immature it may be, but here goes (in no particular order):
1. Apocalypse Now
2. The Graduate
3. Forrest Gump
4. To Kill a Mockingbird
5. Casablanca
6. The Maltese Falcon
7. Rushmore
8. 8 1/2
9. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
10. Hiroshima, Mon Amour
11. Earth
12. Fire
13. Water
14. Farewell, My Concubine
15. The Nightmare Before Christmas
16. Jules Et Jim
17. Stranger Than Fiction
18. La Strada
19. Monty Python; Life of Brian
20. Baran
21. Gegen Die Wand
22. Il Gattopardo
23. I Heart Huckabees
24. Il Giardino Dei Finzi-Contini
25. Charulata
26. Raincoat
27. Shopgirl
28. Mr. and Mrs. Iyer
29. Annie Hall
30. Chameli
31. Cat on the Hot Tin Roof
32. Le Bataille D'alger
33. Chadni Bar
34. The Namesake
35. Paroma
36. 36 Chowringhee Lane
37. Meenaxi
38. Silsila
39. My Brother Nikhil
40. La Zuppa de Pesce
That's all I can think of right now. Also, 40 seems like a good number at which to stop.
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[09 Jul 2007|11:06pm] |
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death." -Anais Nin, Winter of Artifice
My silly heart refuses to understand this.
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| "TANSTAAFL" |
[13 Jun 2007|08:34pm] |
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mood |
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 silly |
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Latin is fun. Just memorized my first Martial epigram, it's cute.
The book we're using is cute and a half, it introduces you to sayings such as "semper ubi sub ubi!" It's no surprise that the 19th centurians (is that a word?) used to pass around the dirty jokes in Latin.
Also, I now know why it is "strongly recommended" that one takes it before doing ancient Greek. I had this duh moment regarding it yesterday in class.
Julia and I had a rather heated debate over which 20 we'd take with us if ever stranded on a desert island.
I firmly stand by my choices because ... because frankly, I happen to be the one with superior taste. *shrug*
What can I say, with Ezra Pound dead, I'm now the sole arbitrator of all things tasteful. (what's that you say? Mais non, je ne suis pas un égotiste!) ^_^
Well anyway, here's my 20.
If I were ever to get stranded on a desert island, these are the books I'd take with me:
1. Catch-22 -Joseph Heller
2. Philoctetes -Sophocles
3. Fear and Trembling -Søren Kierkagaard
4. The Norton critical edition of "The Waste Land" -T.S. Eliot
5. Housekeeping -Marilynne Robinson
6. Guns, Germs, and Steel -Jared Diamond
7. Grendel -John Gardner
8. The Giving Tree -Shel Silverstein
9. The Brothers Karamazov -Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10. The Lattimore translation of "The Iliad" -Homer
11. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter -Carson McCullers
12. Le Petit Prince -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
13. Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction -J.D. Salinger
14. the complete works of Emily Dickinson -Emily Dickinson
15. To Kill a Mockingbird -Harper Lee
16. Second Space -Czeslaw Milosz
17. A Grain of Sand - Rabindranath Tagore
18. N.P. -Banana Yoshimoto
19. Dandelion Wine -Ray Bradbury
20. Thurber Country -James Thurber
...Yes, I'm well aware that about 3/4s of those are by men. But it's been such a short time since a large percentage of women have had rooms of their own that it just can't match up. We need rooms with views too, and possibly room service as well.
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apocalyptic_ash's journal
