66 posts tagged “life”

i had a whole post and it spontaneously disappeared. argh.

Union Square 62608

on the way to Williamsburg this morning, i really had to pee, so i took a detour at the Whole Foods in Union Square, only to be greeted with this when coming up from the train station. i'm not really sure what's going on here; is it a homeless woman sleeping at the foot of the Square while it rains? or maybe it was some street theater because there's a bed, a night stand with a fish bowl - goldfish present too - and a man crouching next to her with an umbrella texting on his blackberry. just thought it'd merit a picture from the Treo.

i've been out of commission from Vox for a while now, which kind of defeats the purpose of that whole new year's resolution to stick to something and write in it.

i was browsing through some older blog entries from a year ago, to note that i'd sometimes update several times a day. i remember writing about writing, and how most of us do it (well at that too) because there was some fundamental part of our lives that we were unsatisfied with.

a lot has happened in the past year. i've been having a lot of fun while out with friends, remembering what it was like to be young and wreckless and i get some reading when i'm alone. i may not be melancholy or contemplative today, tonight, but i'll still remember what it's like to be lonely (ha! counting crows' colorblind just came on my itunes' shuffle), to feel the nerve-endings of nostalgia upon hearing a red hot chili peppers song. but that's okay, because it keeps me grounded, appreciative.

teaching has been, to say the least, a pain in the ass. i think this is the first part of the "i hated my first year of teaching but now i love it" stage. hopefully i'll go through the truncated version. i know i'm doing it effectively and have no real qualms about public speaking, but it's just been difficult. i met with a professor and fellow grad student in Williamsburg today to discuss raising awareness and a project for us to work on, which itself it going to be a large undertaking. both unpaid, but that's not a huge concern for me at the moment.

we talked about how these are conservative times, because, really, they are. and how obama has done an amazing thing by engaging our country's youth and getting them to be vocal and participatory. and how if (or when) he fails to deliver on what he's promised, if we're going to stew around in cynicism or get radical. because "we" got radical when that happened with lbj.

i've been reading gabriel garcia marquez' one hundred years of solitude. the family and i are going to vancouver for a week at the end of august. it was supposed to be another west coast thing in the US like eight summers ago, but my mom picked vancouver. besides the 2010 winter olympics, what's in vancouver? below is a collage of sorts. coney island, augusten burroughs, union square, bars in brooklyn, etc.

how are you? 

I don't pray every night or morning, but I do make it a habit to floss my teeth (gums?). I am very grateful for the friends I have and my knack for the English language and pretentious punctuation. I am grateful that I can liken my mother to Wonder Woman - really, she helped me clean my room, the seven dimensions of which I wouldn't inflict on anyone - without sounding like a total kiss-ass. My denim genes (that's right) and my not-quite-but-almost-designer jeans, and my infallible ability to laugh at any given situation. But seriously, now. Remember that curve ball? The pendulum has been swinging lightly back and forth, well I need a huge swing in my favor. Kthxbai.

Respectfully submitted,
Kendra

P.S. A more sturdy alcohol-tolerance would be splendid, but I won't push it.

The apartment, the cupboards. I came out of the bathroom earlier and reached over to chuck my clothes in what would've been a makeshift hamper outside of my bathroom door. After cleaning around my desk, I reached over towards the right to what would've been a wastebasket. It's funny how your body is conditioned to certain habitual maneuvers. I'm tired beyond comprehension, but I'm sure some introspective post will be written about life as an undergrad. Some things don't change. :o)

GRACE: You know, Will has a theory about relationships. One person is the gardener who tends, and the other person is the flower who gets tended to.

which one are you?

Last year, I came home from Whole Foods after having purchased organic granny smith apples at $1.49 a pound, to which my mom responded with "that's kind of expensive." Today, conventional apples cost $1.69 at the local grocery stores.

Maybe it's prevalent and I'm only realizing it now, but I feel as if this week was emblematic of the current food crisis. JJ and I stopped by the Briarwood Family Residence to donate some bags of clothing for the families and the recreation specialist told us about how they are really in need of food. Yesterday, when I spontaneously decided to cut my Child & Adolescent Psychopathology class to go to AA and JJ's Sociology of Poverty with my old professor, a guest speaker from St. John's Bread & Life Soup Kitchen took over the class. Food shortage, New York City Council, donations, volunteers were among the gamut of words being used.

A few friends are having difficulties finding stable jobs post-college and "it's the economy" is no longer a deflection of personal responsibility. It's the economy. And as the value of the American dollar drops because the Federal Reserve is printing more money to pay for the War in Iraq, I receive an e-mail from a friend telling me that by the time I graduate with my MA, we'll all be facing another Depression. My heart and hands hurt when a small middle aged woman approached me, with my arms full of produce, asking me for fifty cents.

I have my own issues regarding emergency food charities and private charities in general; I'm not pro-privatization here, but you'll probably find AA and me volunteering at the soup kitchen this summer.

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.

When L and I confirmed to a guy at Bar None in the East Village, that we became friends via the Internet - Vox, no less - he and his buddy were shocked. When I told him I'd met X amount of people - and dated one - through the 'net, he was doubly surprised. But then again, he was from Boston. New Yorkers are steadfastly bold, anyway.

Technology has truncated the notion of six degree of separation - no doubt about that. So when I'm browsing through vox amid boredom, I come across a few New Yorkers and kind of feel something. Like reading about a restaurant that I was just at a few weeks ago, something like that, that we're breathing the same air. The world is too small, sometimes. A student from Rome e-mailed me in response to my dissection of a song, and funny how I may meet him, provided DM and I still go to Rome this summer.

Here's to random encounters!

There's nothing as disappointing as the moment of realization wherein the anticipation of something far, far outweighs the consumption. I just came back from food shopping and came to question the integrity of Turkey Hill ice cream due to its airy consistency. Then, because I ran out of hummus, I bought a large container of Sabra and tried it with an organic carrot and wanted to spit it out. But alas, knowing me, I gave Turkey Hill and Sabra a few more tries only to come to the conclusion that either I'm dead inside or each spoonful of ice cream and bit of hummus left this disgusting waxy feeling in my mouth. I'm gonna have to remind myself why I don't like things with preservatives: food, people, and life in general. Some things shouldn't be bathed in formaldehyde. Some things shouldn't be preserved past their expiration dates.

Addendum: This reminds me of my first blog post on vox, which was actually a quoted passage in a former muse's blog:

"We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. "

I was eating a Poptart when I realized it didn't taste as good as I remembered.

Then I thought of you.

Because somewhere in my distant memory, moving at eight frames per second in watered down colors, you were as sweet and fulfilling as my Poptart should've been.

But the more recent memory, vividly burned into my mind, accurately equated you with how the Poptart really tasted. In other words, never has one been more disappointed than at the moment of realization.

petite belette 9 (10:31:56 PM):	let's get buzzed on saturday
JLC (10:32:00 PM):	sute
JLC (10:32:01 PM):	sure
petite belette 9 (10:32:02 PM):	this upcoming week is going to be hell for me
petite belette 9 (10:32:04 PM):	hellllllllll
JLC (10:32:06 PM):
petite belette 9 (10:32:11 PM):	yeah
HLC (10:32:12 PM):	all nighters?
petite belette 9 (10:32:17 PM):	i have two midterms i think
petite belette 9 (10:32:19 PM):	and the meeting

are there certain criteria on the DSM-IV that characterize this den of loneliness i'm currently sitting in? it's funny - chasing that high - because i feel low for a variety of trivial reasons. that coveted independence that i'd once held - that preference to be alone - is tragically frayed at the ends and i'm not sure if i'm equipped to stitch it back together. i feel like i'm relapsing into a certain state of "broken." and i'm worried that this entire time i've been faking it all: independence, happiness, drive, confidence, to repeatedly paste band-aids on a hole - a void - that i'm trying not to pay attention to. how Sisyphean. 

Last night JR and I were talking and she alluded to the fact that she started thinking about her ex out of no where, despite having distanced herself from that mess. "You know what that means? It means you're going to hear from him soon." Lo and behold, I get a call while stepping off the N train today that he called her while she was sleeping last night after four months of no contact.

Life is funny sometimes. Have you ever woken up to think about a random person, only to bump into him or her on the way off from work? It's funny, because in those moments in which we're unencumbered by the psychic relics and vestiges of the past, we're confronted with them. Like receiving an e-mail from someone whom we'd given little thought to in high school asking how things are. Or watching TV in the living room of someone on whom we'd had a big crush on eight years ago - "ninth grade fantasy" - and rescinding on that past attraction for a mutual friendship. Like seeing the girl who'd dropped out of your high school in sophomore year to become a high class hooker plastered all over the billboards in the NYC subway stations for an ad campaign.

One day you're e-mailing a confrontational message to that "something new" and the next you're dating a guy who not only teaches in your middle school, but is friends with the English teacher who coached you on the debate team nine years ago - something old. And then you're with another friend at a bar and you nonchalantly kiss a "something borrowed" because let's be serious, many bar encounters carry that connotation of St. Elsewhere - Everyone here, knows everyone here is thinking about somebody else. And then forever after, each new encounter is never "something new." It's like browsing through consignment shops for the "somethings used," looking for those with tags first, and the outfits with the fewest frays.

It's disconcerting and comforting simultaneously, how small the world can be. You think the world is this vast and endless array of options and patterns, and then everything seems evermore connected. Hopping off the merry-go-round and going through the revolving doors, only to find that you're not looking for something - and someone - new and novel, but for that elusive connection that feels like the familiar route home you'd taken half your life.