Latest Tweets:
where’s home?
I don’t know how I feel right now.
I’m home and everything’s so familiar and comfortable. And I don’t want it to be. I’d like to think that I’d found a different part of me at Harvard, but all of myself I can seem to muster right now is the same me I’ve been in the same hole I’ve dug.
Did I change? No shit that I want to believe I did. But now I’m sitting in front of my computer, as I am wont to do, once again wallowing in shit and self-pity and narcissism and feeling lonely. I’m the same as I was.
I was different during Harvard. Right? I’m not talking about some miraculous fucking turnaround in character—but I was somebody else. I didn’t spend my days in front of a fucking computer whining and pouring out whatever I kept bottled up. I was happy there. Happier and more free than I’ve ever been in my life. I was who I wanted to be. Mostly.
I still am who I make myself. I still am. Goddamn it I refuse to spend the next two years of my life continuing to build the same fucking brick wall around myself at home. I’m too used to being alone here in this empty room, with nothing around me but relics of the past and relics of other places. What memories have I had in this room?
Did I find myself? No. I found a little something and then lost that something when I set foot in that taxi. Finding myself is a wisp of a dream I’ll chase. Will I ever know myself by sitting here? Nah. But I’ll be as happy as I allow myself to be. C’mon. I can do it.
Angst from Harvard will likely set in sometime after I wake up tomorrow in my own room.
Ban
I wonder how long this self-imposed distraction ban will last until I crack.
Regardless, goodbye for now, Tumblr.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“Come Back from San Francisco” – The Magnetic Fields
(Words/music: Stephin Merritt, available on 69 Love Songs, Merge 1999)
As lovely as Shirley Simms sounds here (and good lord, does she have a beautiful voice), the electric guitar strikes me every time. Whether it’s the melody or the bass notes, the strings resonate with a rich tone and just enough reverb. I find guitar sounds incredibly fascinating – and sometimes more fascinating than technique (which probably explains why I’ve spent more time playing around with the knobs on my guitar than getting any better at playing it). When the sound and technique dovetail and complement each other, I tip my hat out of respect. In “Come Back from San Francisco,” the electric guitar acts as the song’s skeleton, holding together the different vocal lines and giving Simms’ lead vocal somewhere to rest. The melody, when coupled with the finger-picked bass notes and ringing just long enough, balancing the heartbreak and hope in Merritt’s lyrics.
Like Merritt’s finest lyrics, “Come Back to San Francisco” navigates through sweetness, humor, love, and heartbreak. A few lines always make me smirk, particularly the “kiss me, I quit smoking” declaration that only a non-smoker could love. I’m always fascinated by the first simile in the chorus: “You need me like the wind needs the trees to blow in.” I’m drawn into the elusiveness of the image; I read it different ways depending on my mood. It could be the recognition that the two need a little friction in their relationship to get by. At other times, it’s a statement of dependence – after all, one can’t tell if it’s windy outside unless the branches of a tree are moving around, giving the otherwise invisible wind visibility. Still, it might just be designed to evoke the simple, peaceful image of a breezy spring day. Either way, it’s the link that matters most, even if it means late night, transcontinental phone calls until the lease runs out.More on The Magnetic Fields: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
WHERE TO TWEET ABOUT TWITTER BEING DOWN
AAAAAH
ALSO I SHOULD NOT BE ON THE INTERNET BUT.. OKAY I DON’T HAVE A GOOD EXCUSE.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
New Goodbye - Hey Rosetta!
we do what we must because we can
What would life be like if you didn’t expect people to say thank you?
We’ve created rules of society, rules of social interaction, rules of who to care for, rules of who to hate, rules of etiquette, rules of what to want and what to expect—
Would we be happier without them? Could we exist without them? What is society?
Because individualism is dead. Because a man is not a man anymore but a pseudopod of the giant amoeba of human society, an extension of the hivemind. Because the mind is not a product of you, yourself—for you, yourself, do not exist, and you are a combination of many rules and nothings.
You are the sum and product of the interactions of other sums and products around you, and you are not your own, for society’s rules and society’s expectations shape you into who you are, for nobody formulates himself because he needs to exist to create.
But.
You are your own, because there is nobody like you, because there is nobody with the exact set of genetic and societal rules that you follow, because if you were inseparable with society society would be able to understand you.
For you are something, and you know this, because nobody else controls what you do, and if you flex your arm nobody but you told you to flex your arm, for you are the first to think certain thoughts, and your own thoughts are a different color and different shape and different texture than others’—
What is self?
reassuring words
“Don’t worry. Nobody cares.”
the island in the sea
Two thousand miles away from a mother fumbling with a small wooden clothespin with sodden articles of clothing draped on her arm, there is a man sitting on a rock overlooking a vast blue grindstone spinning against the great medallion in the sky, sparks flying across the expanse to blind him. A cigarette burns slowly between his fingers, its breath fading slowly into the air.
The man stands up and walks away from the sunset.
Where he was, there is now but air and the faint traces of sweet cigarette smoke. Does it watch the sunset too?
"And there’s to be no salvation until men realize that their mortal mind is impotent to solve their problems and go back to faith, faith in God, faith in a higher authority!"
Mystics in Atlas Shrugged
