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subject as deep void, predicate as action x sentiment x time

Today: "traipsed" around Bugis/Little India nibbling things, followed by more nibbling in Isetan. Sank into Tempur mattress. Infinite, eternal bliss. Cleaned up room. Wondering where to proceed from specific point in time. 

Yesterday: re-read Geertz and the Balinese cockfight, read something by Mary Douglas, ran in the dark. Ate toasted walnut bread and cheap ice cream. Blood orange and springs of rosemary dancing in the water.

Tomorrow: a mysterious haze that smells like pizza and old pencils. First thing in the morning: will perhaps wish for the uninvention of time-stamped instant messaging systems, while sleepy-eyed and forgetful.

Thinking of material towards a paper titled (provisionally) Abject S[h]elves. Not quite knowing where line of thinking will bring me — to some "starlit conclusion" (Wong) or some kind of dead end fleshed with image of dead Rosenburgs (Plath). 

Can only think in fragments and in sentences without a clear subject. How pretentious can a person get/be/become?? 

Coherence is so overrated.

common burn

College is weird. Weird that I call whatever this is "college". It's not. How is it that every day —without fail — someone new jostles to challenge the limits of stupidity? How is it that every time he speaks an abyss opens up and fills the room with a profound vacuity that seems to pre-empt the apocalypse? I'm also tired of: being stuck in this position of global skepticism, losing time, the dumb sunshine. I am happy about: pretentious excursions, that material culture exists as a concept, sleeping well. 

undergraduating / notes towards a deterioration

I'm beginning to think of this blog as less of a safe space for writing, and more of a white elephant with an eight year burden on its back. I have my hunches that the death of this beautiful endless canvas will only occur alongside the birth of an alternative space, but this remains to be seen. Recently I have seen the graven images of a dead person's imagination being dismantled by the imagined needs of the living, haunted by exhumation notices around the old cemetery. Yet I am compelled to believe that time will surely render all things lifeless, that nature will bury the living under her accretions. I'm beginning to think of speech as unfounded incoherent babble, something vestigial that sprouted out of necessity. I am thinking of empty homes, fully furnished, peopled with faint vessels containing various levels of consciousness. I'm holding a cheap mug and standing by the kitchen doorway looking at you search the television for the exit worrying for the people who spend their days inside. You drag the walking frame behind you like hauling a dead dog to its grave.

Oh Mercy

Only the billionth person
to glance up at the moon tonight
which looks bald, high-browed and professorial
  to me,

the kind of face I always shook my fist at
when I was seventeen
and every stopsign was a figure of authority

that had it in for me
and every bottle of cold beer
had a little picture of my father on the label

for smashing down in parking lots
at 2 AM, when things devolved
into the dance of who was craziest.

That year, if we could have reached the moon,
if we could have shoplifted the paint and
  telescoping ladders,
we would have scribbled FUCK YOU

on its massive yellow cheek,
thrilled about the opportunity
to offend three billion people

in a single night.
But the moon stayed out of reach.
imperturbable, polite.

It kept on varnishing the seas,
overseeing the development of grapes in Italy,
putting the midwest to bed

in white pajamas.
It's seen my kind
a million times before

upon this parapet of loneliness and fear
and how we come around in time
to lifting our heads,

looking for the kindness
that would make revenge unnecessary.

— Tony Hoagland

"erroneous intellectual substructure"

Thoughts thought while scrolling through the Newsfeed:

Thought Catalog is like that friend who used to be smart and cool but something happened and now he just looks good on Instagram, end of story.

Amen to that screen grab from Fresh Prince of B-A.

I CAN read this because I know Chinese, but I am too lazy to go through the cognitive process of language-switching.

If you've only been appearing in group photos of more than 12 people, something isn't right.

My shorts are visible in that newspaper clipping.

Marina Abramovic peers through the screen to gaze into my being.

Blah blah blah writing

Someone wrote a long poem and posted it on a Confessions page; poem received 189 Likes.

I need a Weekend Getaway to another dimension where I am constrained by something other than space and time.

pictures of people at a hotel function room, because I have reached that age

pageants are an aberration to the dignity of any individual with a shred of self-respect, and maybe I'm just bitter about everything in general (including the new vegetarian burger at mcdonald's)

No, Kelly Clarkson did not write that line.

pictures of people running: they communicate something intensely private as well

more pictures of people at a hotel function room

something of vague interest to me happened in France

people expressing anger re: cat video

I could have been on a plane to NYU now

I need a larger workstation

I hope you never experience a freak human pyramid accident for as long as you cheerlead.

I do not want to cross paths with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

head bacon

I have no words to right the imbalance between hard, empirical facts and the insatiable thirst for a deeper metaphysical truth, so perhaps this might serve as an adequate placeholder for now. 

eighties music for a healthy work ethic

scholasticism

Is it sad that the only real highlight of the day was a piece of intelligence re: issue x (I cannot discuss this on public domain) that I received from someone I had only met for less than an hour? In any case, and I'm speaking generally here, it's not OK to sensationalise your own romance narrative and remove it from the context of its inherent destructiveness. But back to the original point: it is doubly sad because I want this destruction to persist and reach a dramatic conclusion, because I'm that much done with supporting the problematic choices of other people. 

In happier news, I'm in school again and it feels amazing to be sitting in a lecture and be asked to watch an hour-long video about Jackson Pollock, thinking about exciting events lined up until the end of August and new responsibilities that I will hopefully succeed in. (Though not in a chauvinistic way.) With more to come in September. And the following months. The act of living is weird and philosophically unsettling because we contrive a projection of our future without even being certain of our present reality in space and time.

Some premises that will anticipate a more coherent rant: 

(1) If it claims to be, at its heart, an interdisciplinary programme, let's just call it that. Carve out your own curriculum. Your own intellectual interests do not need to be validated by an annex to your degree certificate.

(2) It supports the thesis that epistemic communities are merely exclusive groups premised on the perceived superiority of its members' intellects.  

(3) It seems just to exert control over resources that have been acquired in exchange for money, but it's problematic to lay claim these resources while being blind to your own socioeconomic privilege. 

ideas re: channeling irritation into performance art projects

Title: The Douchebag Who Smokes In The Lift While Wearing Avant-Garde Fashion

Description: 20-something male with goatee, wearing Mickey Mouse-monogramed harem pants and gym shoes, is suspended in a vertiginous shaft with little light other than a matrix of LED numbers displaying numbers corresponding to the number of floors in the building. He slowly descends into a burning pyre to risk asphyxiation by tobacco fumes.

Title: You Need To Make That Decision Yourself

Description: This is a dramatised reenactment of a motivational talk. The artist, as Speaker, presents handwritten slides using an old overhead projector. Slides include questions such as "What should I get—from this ridiculous souvenir shop stocked with items made in another country—for my sister/soulmate/auntie/gardener/chinchilla?", "Should I order the same thing as you, and spend 10 minutes complaining about this dilemma?", "Do you think I should buy this hideous suit that I will never wear and will probably regret?", and "Which college should I go to, knowing full well that I am the only person who can make a meaningful decision?" The artist will talk, in an expressive medieval German tongue, about the topic before dousing the slide in lighter fluid and setting it on fire.

Title: You're Fucking Type A 

Description: The artist wilfully suspends initial skepticism of the Type A-Type B theory of personality in pop psychology and dons a pair of severe-looking glasses, while berating himself constantly about his poor life choices. He then produces a clipboard and places it on the floor. Meditatively but decisively, he stamps on it for ten minutes before sending an angry email to a random person in the audience.