Zīles ziņa

Kas sit pie vārtiem šorīt gulēt gribu.
Aizraudāta acs lec saule mākoņos lai mazais brālis jāj
lai kumeļam nav grūti.
Nē smejas kara kungs.
Un tik vien paliek: mētelis to auzu skara tā cepture to
zirņu ziedu paiet gadu daudz.

slouching to the east

Call it a spot of bad luck, a crisis of the corporeal body, an emergent clumsiness erstwhile concealed in the obscure depths of my personhood and being — I have been involved in far too many minor accidents, of late. I spilt Korean tea all over my desk, had my shaving razor slip to slice my fingertip, scalded my hands with near-boiling water, and soon I shall expect to trip over a small student-child while teaching in school. They are tiny but consequential. 

Running parallel to these incidents of maladroitness is the strangely foul mood I have been in for the entire month. Well maybe not foul, just a general grumpy feeling that I will shrug off as symptoms of dehydration and mercury poisoning. 

Also: I want to use this space to congratulate everyone who's currently in Europe making snowballs while I am being rained upon by truly half-assed monsoons that only last for one weekend.

Also: I know my parents love me and etc. but they are going to spend two vacations in a row (to faraway lands that make accessorising with scarves a necessary part of everyday life) without me and this reveals how they trivialise my separation anxiety issues + desire to be free + desire to get a billion more desires granted.

Also: It has dawned on me that I made my own birthday cake and finished it all by myself and then felt bad about hogging it which is a clear indication of the direction my life is going (alcoholism). Should I distract myself with other bad habits? e.g. feigning Tourette's?

I need to write better. If writing is a muscle then I am currently an airy cupcake with silly frosting/dense gluten-free muffin with quinoa flour and popped amaranth. 

self esteem: a new haiku

FML FM
L FML FML
FML FM

technology

I am 21 and my maid* is back with delicious Pinoy snacks, and I am** in the kitchen inhaling Vietnamese coffee (a vanilla spiciness, the sticky-sweet milk pooling at the bottom of the glass) and reading** Henry Miller's essays, and my friends are dispersed around the globe, and I am at home, and all is well.***

* I wanted to say "domestic helper" but it's not politically correct to discredit the dignity that being a maid entails. It is an honorable profession that only the brave take up, I guess.

** Obviously I should be using "was" but in using the present-continuous tense I am trying to achieve the effect of being "in the moment," of that immediacy of feeling that I have just undermined by calling into artifice the notion of writing about experience.

*** Is all well? Most are well. Not everything is "well" but it's not fruitful to discuss the well-ness of everything. 

northern

I want to sit cross-legged in a room with a carpet and a cat, with stucco walls, listening to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme in a wistful way not unlike a character in a Wes Anderson film — speaking of which, I remember forgetting to watch Moonrise Kingdom and this reminds me of every failure from the past ~8 months.

I want to be friends with Yoko Ono. I want to be like, "Hey Yoko could you get this for me" on Facebook chat, while sending her pictures of art.

I want to know how it feels like to have every dream come true, including the nightmares. 

I want to be, like, "blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" every day while making Vietnamese coffee. 

I want to feel holidays, not just have them.

we are cards

I haven't written here in a while because there hasn't been much to write about, or that there has been so much to write about that everything amounts to a thin veil of strictly diaphanous consistency, the albumin surrounding the yolk of an egg. The cumulative effect of experience has been thus so poorly conceived of by myself. I am also a lazier person, preferring to torrent a movie I already own on DVD than sift through piles of ephemera to get to the disc. I have also taken to boredly imbibing temperance beverages and pretending to be really interested in Downton Abbey if only to please myself, as if I can now only curate myself after having made fun of people who curate external objects in their lives. Days have become strange and artificial, dome-like, with the phrase "nothing suggesting architecture" floating now and then again in my mind, a tomb of dreams and syntax.

While time and space have become dimensions of reality that I can no longer accept as objective and true, I have been enjoying the thought of being able to gripe about college applications and the deluge of essays that I will treat as manifestations of my own tepid personality, words written on a page in a mysterious order known fully only to myself, and then again, concealing everything from myself. I will hide behind these apparitions of meaning in the hope that they become masks, and turn them into the physicality and particularity of my face. Humanity is begrudgingly knit together by our experience with materiality.

I am afraid of confronting the idea of internality, because there is nothing else in the body besides viscera and effluvia. I don't know how we contain multitudes or the sky. I don't know why we say "we don't know" so knowingly and charmingly. I am reading text without knowing why or how. You are reading this thinking you know why, but really you don't, and this matters to me. It is weird that we have holes in our faces and think them necessary and even beautiful. 

I want to believe that words belong to me, but it's us who belong to language, who come into being because of speech, who are made subjects because of the ability to translate an innateness of being into words that are hopefully coherent. Pronouns are that much insidious and invisible in ordering social reality. I can say "I aspire to become a person who lives with cats" while thinking nothing of grammar, accepting syntax as truth much like mathematics and numbers, social conventions notwithstanding. I have been buried in these thoughts and I want to be buried with them.

bad

"If I can't leave this God-forsaken town and go to college, no-one will!"

Emergency

Arm-in-arm, I forgot
               what the city looks like from a helicopter,

what the city looks like in the middle of winter during the middle of the night,
               do you remember

in the middle of the street and what I am saying,
               what shape is this, and you hold it up, prism—

what does the city look like
when the middle of the sky opens,
what is beyond that, tell me, what are we looking for, don’t die right now
               this view is worth every single

               and it is snowing and I forgot what the Earth’s axis says: Yes (at all times),
               Yes, whatever the circumstance, Yes, I forgot to tell you, Yes.

— Katie Jean Shinkle