This is too much.

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google profile boring...

the rules are as such: flavors.me will keep me in touch with you forever. tumblr is for small ideas, and life happenings. (blogspot for big ones.) google profile for keeping my search rank high. trying to decide where to put creative writings. blogspot is just not pretty enough.

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I feel like

Every song I put up here will attain a significance more profound than I realize at this moment. I'm going to hear it again, and it's going to sound like today. I can almost hear it now, but in the future. Auditory fates.

Peace of mind

I met the mayor of a city once. He was a gallant, ambitious man. He was convicted in his views on urban welfare, interesting for his dramatic stories of political heroism, and just admirable overall. He fought things, like drugs and poverty and corruption. When you hear him speak there's no end of feeling, the kind that moves you to believing that cities are places where people are degraded and are revived, and that this is a man who cares for their fundamental human redemption. We all sat there and we were wowed.

He wasn't mayor when I heard him, actually, but our school practically had a love affair with him. My history teacher invited him to class after his first talk in the auditorium, just to have him tell us stories. So our tables in a circle around this leader among men, but boys really, we were rapt in attention. That's how I remember it. I sat on the lip of this curl, next to my teacher who giggled at every quip he made. The boys in the middle in front of him were tilting their chairs, but their mouths were agape. I sat there because my friend sat there with me, or I with him. We didn't tilt our chairs. We also kept our coats on and tied our ties tight, because there was little room to get comfortable when the trains were cold in the morning and they will be again when it's dark. But our teacher told us to take our coats off for the mayor.

He must have talked about serious things. I didn't pay much attention in history class then, because learning this stuff felt stifling. When he was done, a lot of kids had real questions about things that he might do to fix things in the future, but when they were done and we were unraveling, my friend asked what use were these political goods if the overpopulated human race could do with some depopulating. Oh, don't do that, I thought, I just want to leave. Our classmates pretended not to hear him and gathered their books.

This mayor courted him earnestly and privately, as if he had stepped up to share his thoughts. He entreated my friend not to be cynical, and to believe that every human being has a right to peace and happiness.

We remained friends for a while. I never saw him outside of school, and I heard publicly that he didn't make it back for the next semester. By then I had found belonging in my studies and my love for poetry. I made other friends, I dated, and I still talked to our counselor sometimes, as we misfits both once did.

In two years, he passed away. He had become depressed and took too many pills. Some of us went to his funeral, although his family didn't really know who we were. His mother cried so hard. We were asked eventually to leave, and on my way out I saw his face. In his note, he wrote that he was at peace. I know that and I know we all deserve that, but I wonder who thinks about it when we fix problems and fight fights and say things.

We find out there are more things than we can handle. Rest in peace, my friend. I know you live.

Sunset, Morningside

Au Revoir Simone - Shadows (Tanlines Remix)

I was here before, one late summer evening. On the roof of Teachers College, I looked south quizzically at the setting sun. To my right was Grant's Tomb, which I tried to find but it was too cold. In front of me were a lot of trees. I never found out how that tomb looked like. There were a lot of places in this city that I didn't care much about. Being here before made me impatient, obtuse, dull and boring. What was this river, these pacing students, those hallways and passageways. All toward places outside my scope of concern.

If I had made the right connections, I could have seen the windows of rooms where I'd sleep, where I'd meet people who changed me, other places where I would never show up. These places could have haunted me from a different time. I sat in a lawn chair on that roof, looking up at the skies and away from the architecture below me. I had convinced myself that three helicopters above midtown were stationary spaceships, waiting to descend. I was as absent then as I am now, sleeping days and fretting nights.

I walked along 116th, turned on Amsterdam, and smelled winter the way I did when I was fourteen. I can hear songs that make my heart beat the same way. When I close my eyes, I can see the spaces and moods I will inhabit in years that have yet to arrive. The details change, but the feelings will play themselves out exactly as I see them now. I know this, better than I know people now in their transient humors, their idle talk and their material projections. Better than I can see shapes whose contours will change. I can travel years and not move.

Jealousy

This is a bit overdue, but I was going to write something about jealousy and how I've been trying to grapple with these impulses. My process came at a good time, when I've been met with problems of distance and personal space, coinciding with moving back to school and a chance to free myself from some rigidities of summer.

I moved back in to facilitate consent discussions. We were given a reader to look at, and in between articles on dating violence and behavioral patterns of sexual harassment, I found this article about jealousy and how it's rooted in the things we grow up believing about relationships. I found it a bit out of place at first in the context of sexual assault (this advice is directed to people in polyamorous relationships), but of course these things are related.

I can't write it any better than the following...

Our society is addicted to three core beliefs about relationships that are almost guaranteed to create jealousy even in the most well-adjusted people. Most of us have absorbed these beliefs without even realizing it. Identifying and dismantling these beliefs in our "heart of hearts" is the single most effective way to short-circuit jealousy. Ask yourself how much of you believes each of these three statements. Is it 90% of yourself that believes them? 50%? Notice which belief is most entrenched in your subconscious mind and which one youíve made the most progress on:

Core Belief #1

If my partner really loved me, (s)he wouldn't have any desire for a sexual relationship with anyone else.

This belief sees any interest your partner has in anyone else as a direct reflection of how much (s)he loves you. It is a quantitative view of love which equates the amount of love with the ability to be interested in having another partner. When you break it down, this is as absurd as saying that a couple that gives birth to a second child must not love their first child or they couldn't possibly have any interest in having a second one.

Core Belief #2

If my partner were happy with me, and if I were a good partner/spouse/lover/etc., my partner would be so satisfied that (s)he wouldn't want to get involved with anyone else.

This belief is even more insidious. With the first belief you can at least blame it on your partner for not loving you enough. This belief says that if your partner is interested in someone else, it is your fault for not being the perfect lover or spouse and your relationship must be a failure. If you truly believe that your lover could only be interested in another partner because youíre inadequate, you can see how that will generate jealousy big time!

Core Belief #3

Itís just not possible to love more than one person at the same time.

This belief is built on the "scarcity economy of love", the belief that love is a finite resource, there is only so much to go around, and there is never enough. Therefore, if my partner gives any of her or his love to anyone else, that necessarily means that there is less for me. Because most people already feel there are some areas in their relationship where they are not getting enough of something (time, love, affection, sex, support, commitment) they are fearful that they will receive even less if their partner gets involved with additional partners.

Some of this I feel like I've known. Some of this, on the other hand, I really needed to hear, especially then. And this would be great to read and read again, even if I never choose to have more than one partner. What else could make as much sense? What else could keep us away from fear and sorrow?

But the worst thing to take away from this would be the idea that you were wrong all along, and you have to get back on track in order to do things right once and for all. It will always take serious mental work to truly believe that those you love deserve everyone else's as well. And maybe that love cannot involve you.

This is so incredibly difficult. To do this, I really think we're attempting to subvert our minds and our bodies together. Jealousy is biological. [Edit: Jealousy is learned, too.] To do this, we need to be better than human.

But all I've ever wanted to do is love a person in an eternal, transcendent, immaterial kind of way.

What am I doing

Reading an article about science, struck about this point about neuroscience in particular.

Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about "the bridging principle," the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.

But scientists don't talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain--we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry--these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.

I don't know... maybe the biggest miracle will be to prove that this is what we cannot find. It might be religious, even.

Pensive puppy

School has started. I'm taking six classes. Not much time for thoughts.

Trust

I've started these last two school years with training for discussions on consent culture. I find the actual discussions awkward and a little forced, because the first-years are never fully engaged and the material is so important, and also because as a society we're still not prepared to talk about intimacy and respect. Of course, you try to change this, but you have just one hour.

But the trainings for the workshops, to me, are among the most inspiring and visionary experiences I've had the fortune of being part of. I've just finished my second day of this year. I've reached a lot of conclusions before today or yesterday, I think. That socialization imprisons one's body, mind and soul. That we deter our own happiness when we don't treat others with humble, giving love. That battles aren't won by villianizing the people who aren't fighting with you.

The training this year is twice as large, at almost 160 people. There are only five people (two undergraduates) conducting all of it, and it is a testament to their skill, brilliance and power that they succeed as they do. Still, a little control is lost when a guy who just wanted free housing for a week with his girlfriend contends that women find reasons to accuse their lovers of assault even after consent has been achieved. Triggered members of the movement shout him down, and his damaged ego defends a falsehood he is still unsure of.

I spoke up. We like to believe that truly loving relationships are built on top of the most basic rocks of human ideals: trust, respect, the like. Trust your partner at least of fair dealings, and the rest need not be discussed. Trust...

Quickly my plea for honest dealings was dismantled by some more wary people. Love's logic doesn't, has never conformed to neat foundations. Assault, as it happens most with acquaintances, overwhelmingly depends on a trust that may not even be false. And you cannot blame these feelings over those who exploit these feelings. I should've known that before I even spoke.

Trust is loving. But trust is also violence.

I sat nervous and pensive. I felt terrible, it sucked, and I was not okay. Not because I was corrected (I really love learning), but because I realized we as humans can be abused even when we surrender to love and lovers with an open heart. There is no safety in trust, most nurturing of emotions. God, it can't be.

I struggle a lot with love. There's too much out there, everywhere and I just don't know what to do with all of it. I'm going to post later about an article I read in the consent reader about jealousy. Guess what my post will be called.

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the praires and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Edit: Wild geese... they fly south.