Opinions are like onions, because they are words with two Os in them. Speaking of the letter O, what's up with the O. Henry Award? Why is it now called the PEN/O. Henry prize? (I googled it and it's been happening since 2009, so I guess I am such a phony. Phony is a word with only one O.)
Anyway, here are some opinions that I will be dispensing throughout the course of the week.
The twitter account @viatumblr
For weeks I've tried to make sense of this, being very charitable and accommodating in my evaluation of this internet phenomenon, but kindness is elusive and sometimes it's unkind to be kind. @viatumblr is a repository of generally bad advice written by jaded teenagers obsessed with Sylvia Plath and Catcher In The Rye and believe The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is a singular elegy to their tormented and fragile sense of self.
A selection of gems:
A beautiful girl is a beautiful girl, but a beautiful girl with a brain is an absolutely lethal combination.
Maybe I'm over you. Maybe I've moved on. Maybe I like someone else. Maybe, I'm just a really good liar. #viatumblr
You're a whore and an incredibly horrible person. Go screw another life, you slut!
A girl's laughter is much more cheerful than a boy's. But a boy's cry is much more meaningful than a girl's. #viatumblr
I wouldn't deny that these things are inspirational to someone out there, but I wouldn't deny many other things, such as: the people who earnestly believe these things to be wisdom are also the people who say "this title looks punchier when you use wordart", making passive aggressive statements online is not a constructive way to deal with relationships, etc. etc.
What bugs me the most about @viatumblr is that most of it is written in the second person, which (falsely) imagines a second party. This is retarded, because there is no real discourse happening (or even being created) and the intended audience is usually framed as the much-hated victimizer, the object of naked pubescent wrath, whom the speaker doesn't really bother addressing in real life anyway.
Emma Yong passed away and I feel shitty
Mainly because she wasn't supposed to die, or that role models don't just die of cancer abruptly at the age of 36. Perhaps I'm not most upset about Emma Yong passing away because I'll miss her person, but I'm more upset (and rather ashamed about the reason why I feel this way) that people are getting cancer and dying, as if it's some absurd cliché that will grow to define my experience as a person.
I was sitting in the train somewhere between Khatib and Yishun when my friend told me, and my first thought was Oh my God I am so fucking sad and this then became I don't understand and there was also a tan, wrinkled man in his 70s? with snowy eyebrows folding beautiful deranged pleats of long lalang grass, sticking them into corners of the cabin, giving them to people, putting them back in an old shopping bag from a suburban mall. I want to be sad and young forever.
Whoopi Goldberg makes me really, you know, emotional, I don't know
... But, like, I dunno, like, if you're ever on the beach or something and you want to go for a walk or somewhere, just talk, like I'm always at the sea wall, like all you have to do is to kinda look me up, ok? ok?
And this: http://muumuuhouse.com/bsg.poetry2.html
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