25 of May, I could not sleep

I was in a sleeping bag, my last night in Berlin. For two hours, my mind leapt around many things. I sat up, stared at the clock with a still restlessness that I couldn't really understand, grabbed my notebook from my bag and went to the bathroom. I'm reading what I wrote then right now.

I wrote: What does it mean that, in pursuit of ideas, I can only travel from one continent to another on this water-bearing planet when the edges of the universe have not even been conceived of yet? When we still don't have the means to understand fully what creates, entraps, defines and captures us, as captivating, ethereal, and wholly coincidental as it is? Obviously being on another continent does things to my strange sense of place.

I also wrote about superhero fantasies, adoption, connections, a letter to a lover... and things I need to do this summer.

I'm not sure what was going on then. Above the margins I drew a little diagram with arrows that went... thought > anxiety > more thoughts + no sleep > more anxiety. A few lines below that, I wrote: I'm approaching the limits of cognitive function. Enough said?

Nostalgia by consumption

It was the birthday of the girl I was dating. We made a huge dinner together, and I took her to a surprise birthday party an hour or so late. That weekend, we broke up. The next week, I bought a box of bagged teas that I used to drink in her room. I finished half of it before beginning to see her again.

I'm drinking this tea right now. Ordinarily, I only drink loose leaf teas. It's flavored "lemon ginger", but only contains "natural lemon and licorice flavors" and citric acid. It smells like pepper and cinnamon. I don't know why I drink this.

I'm the angriest I've been in weeks.

I cannot find a single recipe for scallion pancakes online that I trust.

I'm not asking for much! Neither Epicurious and Allrecipes.com (my go-to sources) have a single recipe of straight up scallion pancakes. Not one. And I'm not touching things that people have copied off About.com or the Food Network. These Asian food staples tend to be put online by people like, ergh... I don't have a blender or fucking cake flour, can't understand rolling dough in three different ways, and don't want to produce the fried crackers that I grew up eating. What the fuck?!? This should not be so difficult!

Almost tempted to attack Ollie's. ARGH.

Retrospect via Gmail

I keep running into things I've written in the past to friends and confidants. Often they come in the form of old GChat conversations, buried within my email, congruent hits for search terms more emotionally pertinent in my memory.

Man, everything bothered me back then.

The way we love

I grew up in more or less a prude, sans-romance family setting. The kind where mothers cover their kids' eyes when kissy scenes are on television. This was never lost on my sister and me. Even though out loud we said "ewww" to a lot of these things, we always wanted have crushes, kiss people, all those good things we'd been hearing about.

I think my first relationships were a little dangerously conducted as a result. (This is also where I stop being able to speak to my sister's experience.) The only thing to do was to carry out the motions rehearsed to us and set ourselves up for a crisis each time. So people came and went, with varying levels of acceptance from the parents. We never heard their story, how they met, how they grew close, how they came to love one another. (We know now.) We just knew to find people by ourselves, to be attentive and devoted, to give unconditionally, until personal neuroses were revealed and pain takes hold, and then quit and start over.

A few months ago, my mother found out about both of our relationships at the time. We were both about to steal away with our romantic counterparts somewhere far from home. She didn't disapprove this time, but didn't understand why we would do things like this to ourselves. It's not like you're going to marry this person, she said. Why trouble yourselves? Why put so much effort into improbabilities of sentiment and emotion? Sitting next to her, I felt silly for having grown up at all without her wisdom. Kind of sheepishly, I told her that this is how we love.

We love as if there is only one soul out there for us. We look for people as if the world is so small and so cold that it'd be wiser to hook onto the nearest body and hope mutual fascination occurs. And we risk everything for this. We love as if it's a limited resource based on functions of population, time and age. What we really can do now is to unlearn everything.

This makes me so happy.

via the Lost ROFL blog...

Dualisms stun me

... because they're sooo true. The enlightened folks who have tried to teach us this... they were probably correct all along. To know how intimately this applies, to deep thinkers and non-spirituals alike, in every facet of experience is so real, powerful, and awesome.

When the duality of fear and love presents itself, you know which one to choose. Both are true, proud and inpenetrable. Both must exist, but you're allowed to choose one to be happy.

I could've put this more tangibly. I really could have.

In unrelated news, first comment! Aww. :)

Bodymarks

Lately, I had a conversation with my sister. It went like this:

Juliana just WON a game of ssb brawl. <3ing> 2:07am

David at 2:08am

sick game. always gives me a blister on my left thumb.

Juliana at 2:09am

ME TOO!
also, you always made me play until i blistered my left thumb. thanks.

David at 2:10am

that can only be attributed to noobdom.

Juliana at 2:10am

we're not on speaking terms anymore.

Obviously, these marks don't just leave a physical memory. Let me give a list of the ones I have.

- blister scar on the first segment of my left thumb. only nintendo controllers do this.
- real knee scars, still red. it's been almost three years since biking in the dolomites.
- surgery scars. i had a surgery done in third grade that should've come much earlier.
- acne scars. i had no help through puberty.
- writer's callous on my right ring finger. like my writing, it developed early, but never got very strong.
- left tibia that sticks out a little. when i was playing soccer in middle school, my knee got swollen. it was diagnosed as osgood-schlatter disease, but the inflammation has stopped. there's still a little pointy bone there.

Edit: I forgot a few, I'm sure. Perfect bite? You pay a price in having had braces. Tooth fillings? As a boy, I drank apple juice before bedtime. Terribly dry skin? I generally take bad care of myself.

Just have to say...

The economy probably never got so bad until people started saying it was bad.

I know it's probably going to be heavily analyzed in the future, and all sorts of things are going to be said about it. I'll write this just for the (my, I guess) record. People probably stopped spending when they started hearing about how bad things were. Doesn't mean it wasn't going to get as bad eventually, but talking about it probably changed a lot of people's decisions.

Forgetting

Ms. Williamson wrote in the book I mentioned previously that the mantra we should really be following is to let go. Okay. But letting go is a strategy that starts to smell. Isn't it relinquishing the urgency of now? Won't I lose what little I've grasped from the situation at hand? Letting go is awfully hard right now.

Letting go will feel like forgetting. I'm afraid that to relax is to not learn how I may better conduct myself. Will I suffer less in the future? Will I make the same mistakes? How long will I have to keep trying?

And ultimately, won't we all forget?