6 posts tagged “inspiration”

my sister told me she was proud of me this weekend. coming from a family with a deficit of properly socialized reactions to achievements and accomplishments, this means a lot to me.

oooh, i feel as if my creative side of the brain has become vestigial. :-(

The students in Beijing believe that the backdrop of our campus at St. John's in a travel piece is digitally manipulated. True, I suppose adjusting the contrast could work in our favor. The thing of it is, a blue sky is an anomaly in Beijing. Production and development are costly, costly in more ways than one. The Blue Sky project was launched about ten years ago to provide Beijing with about 100 days with a blue sky - smog is the norm there.

I am concerned. Concerned that this new generation of students - myself included - are among the most deflated of youths thus far. Why is it that inspiration is so fleeting? In Balzac and the Little Chiense Seamstress, the protagonists discover a trunk full of banned books that give them a glimpse outside of Communist China. My father lived it. He studied Marx & Engels before the Red Guards destroyed a generation of education along with over 7 million precious texts. Watched teachers and intellectuals being beaten and humiliated. He, as were the characters in Balzac, was sent to re-education camp where tilling the soil was the only objective and intellectualism was viewed as pathological.

The little seamstress is a run-of-the-mill country girl whose fate was intertwined with making clothing for villagers and probably marrying into another mundane livelihood dictated by the menial. She then learns to read and has her companions read from these Western texts - Balzac and Shakespeare among others - and has the cliched epiphany of life outside of her own. To their surprise, she packs a bag and leaves the village, only to disappear.

I'm at such an impasse right now that I'm not sure how to reconcile with this. Lately, I press the snooze button and allow myself maybe just forty minutes to get ready. I lie in bed, curled in the fetal position, half awake, prolonging the remnants of REM sleep for up to half an hour sometimes. It's a good day when I've packed most of my stuff the night before, disastrous when I haven't. I graduate in five weeks, and I haven't the faintest notion of where one thing ends and another begins. We're so preoccupied with text messages and to-do lists, that we leave so little premium on the oft-trivialized pursuits of self-definition, self-discovery, and social change. We've resigned to the prospects of McCain's victory in November; hell, I'm surprised the State's putting a fight up against congestion pricing here.

It's hard enough getting people to RSVP or return e-mails, how fathomable is a social movement? Disturbing, indeed. Maybe we're the ones here who have normalized the smog around us. Blue skies mean little if there's always so much shit up in the air.

What inspires you? I can't give you a concise answer, at the moment. I gather that, by this point in time, inspiration won't come in a trunk or within the auspices of a clear day. Prove me wrong; that is all I ever ask for before I go to bed.

you guys are awesome. thank you.

at 11:08 PM last night out of the blue.

:-)

what i really want right now is an epiphany - something by which to be inspired; not a religious rapture or a resurrection of something dead inside me.

in the interim, i have to go back to reading for class.

sorry, L; i veered off course :-(.