thoughtz

Feel that I will never be a wine person but am cursed to lead a life struggling to emulate that of a wine person though in a parodic way. 

Not sure if drunk or just sleepy or at the dangerous intersection of inebriation and lethargy. 

Feel as though I will never be a successful driver because of my inability to overtake others: I mean this spatially and figuratively.

Said to a friend "I do not know what I want to do" then stopped myself halfway because this has been said a thousand times, in wakefulness and in sleep. Talked about Taiwan/sandflies instead.

Feel glad to have read this line: "thick encrustations of interpretation" and this will be my life motto if the world doesn't end in 2012.

Quite certain that a playlist to accompany showers of fire and brimstone would come in SUPER handy because we will all die anyway, and I want to die listening to okay-to-good music.

Opened the refrigerator and found 3/4 eaten bottle of pesto covered in mould. Placed it back feeling a specific emotion (sadness and ~5% anger). Made a mental note to stop buying butter.

Meditating on questions like: is it better for a person to be explicit about his internal life or only say elliptical things very occasionally?

If you make life out to be a metaphor for something else, you should probably eat a sock or something, I don't know.

Kind of feel that if you afford to hold a garage sale here, you're not really doing it for the money.

I think we can successfully delineate young adulthood into phases grounded by relevance of/ironic appreciation of Thought Catalog articles. 

I can't even get through a magazine without being distracted by something. I am referring to a magazine with pictures.

The Sims can't even hold my attention for 20 minutes. Ended up googling "rosebud symbolism" last time I tried, which was ?13 months ago.

Feel that, besides the unequal distribution of the world's wealth, the most pressing issue that has been inadequately addressed is the unequal distribution of DSLRs. Sick of looking at the same images. Feel that the planet's collective image repertoire is impoverished.

André Leon Tally: "It's a famine of beauty — a famine of beauty, honey!" Aspire to remember this forever.

Had a talk with supervisor about the existence of primitives who can't grasp the concept of death. I was like, this isn't interesting to me because it probably isn't accurate/doesn't seem to arrive from a very credible source.

A chapter in a book that raises thematic questions about the trajectory of facts while undermining its own claims to the existence of a universally felt "truthiness."

I can hear someone in the neighbourhood vomit/cry.

The Gardener

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

— Rabindranath Tagore

adulthood II

The party will be structured like a bar mitzvah, and will be held in a crumbling secondhand bookshop. We will be talking through shelves. Chairs are not allowed but you may sit on the floor. 

The first hour will be spent in silence. You may write notes, but it is strongly recommended that you use eye contact as the primary means of communication. Tapas will be served. 

In the second hour, a slideshow of war photography will be projected against a bookshelf. A lottery will be held to decide who will read a passage from a random page from Gravity and Grace, a text written by Simone Weil. Music composed by Arvo Pärt will be played on old Creative speakers. There will be trays of sausages passed around. Spicy bloody mary cocktails will be served, in chilled mugs.

The final hour will be spent making zabaglione and dancing. 

dies irae

I was looking at google analytics for this blog. Why are my pageviews predominantly Russian?? (Silence, my computer nerd friends: this is a question I do not want the answer to.) In any case, it is 0039 and I am looking up "Farfalle" on Wikipedia because I miss Turin and I am filled with the anxiety of tomorrow's pasta not matching its sauce, and cooking a terrible lunch, and all my friends leaving me, writing terrible reviews on Facebook, etc. etc. 

Europa Cantat was great. Nothing in Singapore will ever come close to that level of national and regional support and community involvement that I witnessed in Turin. I am caught up between divergent strains of living — the laid-back, heritage town lifestyle that is so continental, so Torinese; and the convenience and comfort of the metropolis, nevermind that constant sense of alientation. Someone posited that the Italians, having reached the highest level of development, have the resources and ability to enjoy this quality of life. I do not agree fully with this economic argument because it is the complex matrix of culture, history, geography and economics that produces the conditions for "lifestyles", but whatever. It is what it is.

On another note, if Mitch Albom were to adapt my life to a direct-to-television telenovela on the Hallmark Channel, it would go something like: This is the story of S, who broke his voice at age 10 and has been trying to piece it back together ever since. The more I use my voice in debate speeches and choral pieces and spoken word things, the more I feel alienated from the familiarity of it. It does feel like I'm losing a part of myself. I feel less resonant and less convinced of that clarity I was so sure of 5 years ago, when, in bits and pieces, people began to partake in the undoing of this certainty and the confidence it entitled me to. It's less of an "adjusting one's sound to complement other voices and the music" thing than it is a complaint (and a futile manifesto) against the critique of the natural speaking voice, in its wonderful intonations — for, and in, what they are — that reflect interior states of being, of personhood.