Once upon a time there were
Butterscotch and daffodils, peanut butter clouds
Sugar drops and dandelions and pink raspberry flavored stars.

blues mixed with yellows, a clean grassy lawn fresh with dew
a clear blue sea then a thunder crashing wave
a pinching claw emerging from under the sand-
the sand beneath my toes

forget about those woes,
dissipate them
evaporate them into nothingness, outer space
blackholed and disambiguated
forgotten blues

forget about those rues
let them vanish, banish them from that thought bubble hanging over your head
let them go
scatter them, squander them
release them into the wild
exonerated and pardoned me and you, the hatchet is buried deep.

Let's go back to the rose garden, for tea time and cookies.
let's go back to the old days, those gold days, those bold days.
let's go back to where we used to be home and lay in the sun
bathe in the light, that light breeze, warm on the skin
soothing to breathe and soothing to sleep and
let's go back to the beginning, let's start at the end
let's loop them together
let's string them along.

Once upon a time there was make-believe with fairies
there were witches and broom flights
there were ogres and fist fights
there were magical creatures that cast spells through the night

there were frolics and frenzies,
dancing and prancing
there were celebrations and carnivals and hoopla galore.

now we gallop now we canter
now lets see how fast we can go
accelerate, manipulate, exasperate
now we race to the finish
now we run far away
now we escape from reality
In this fantasy we will stay.
Once upon a time...

The more you learn, the more you realize the less you know....

God I know so little!

I'm totally clueless on how the world has not fallen to pieces already, or am I being naive to think that there are people smart enough out there that are magically keeping everything together. Well maybe not magically, but who knows at this point.

I am constantly struck with awe at all the different types of people living completely different types of lives side by side and completely unaware or maybe more like indifferent to each other. Maybe with some distance envy to each other, but really just a yearning to have something they don't have. Whether it's the social elite looking on the younger girl wishing for her youth and simplicity- whether it's the homeless on the street looking at the people pass by by the hundreds wishing for a place to sleep, a job, a cigarette- whether it's the postal worker looking at the shop girl wishing for a place to sit and rest. They all just want a taste of that which they don't have.

I'd make a remark about the grass on the other side of the fence but I'd kick myself for the banality of it- but i think we are just curious. We want to know how it is that other people living so easily when life is nothing but easy. We want to know that we are not alone in our struggles. We want to know that we are not as strange as we think we are. But we are all as strange as the stranger next to us because we are all so different.

So in my quest to find the perfect character for a novel, with the Seinfeldian philospohy of a book about nothing, I need to look at a personality in it's most honest form, in it's strangest exposure, because that is the truth about this world.

We know so little and want to know that everyone else knows just as little as us.

whalebone- tribeca

mid-night

My eyes refuse to stay closed. The exhaustion, the burn for rest, is defeated by the anxiety, the lack of purpose.

My bare legs kick off the blanket releasing the pocket of warmth from underneath. As the heat rises to the blank dark ceiling above, I press my back against the cool metal of my bed's headboard and wrap my arms around my legs, pulling my knees against my chest.

I close my eyes again but this time fully aware that sleep is not coming this night to time-travel me to morning. It is a journey I will have to make alone, trudging through the moonlit night, the city-lit bedroom until the dull shadowy greens of my tapestry brighten with the first rays of day.

My walls are covered with silly sketches- sketches of abstract designs, hearts and leaves. The lines drawn over and over, repeated, reiterated, until they are dark with the strokes. They bring me comfort without meaning and I look at them with absent pleasure and an ambivalent smile, well an almost smile, sweeps across my face. But it soon vanishes, the evanescent attempt of expression, gone before it could even be seen, forgotten before it could be remembered.

i'm not sad.

i'm numb.

i'm not depressed.

i'm disoriented.

what did i do today?

I primed a canvas black. That was nice.

what did i eat today?

I can't remember.

Am I being too hard on myself?

Why do I feel like I'm wasting time?

It's my time to do what I want with it...

what the hell do I want to be doing with it?

This insomnia is beyond the help of a glass of wine, a hot shower or a warm mug of milk, not that I can ever keep milk in my apartment.

This insomnia runs deep through my blood vessels, pumping questions through the ventricles of my heart.

This insomnia is giving me epic headaches and bags under my eyes that mock me each morning with eternal fatigue.

With the full moon always come tears, frustrating tears and pangs of anguish that give me no answers just full blown emotional catharsis. Only without the release. It ceases only with the daylight and the fresh breeze and the summer sun and the sound of waves crashing on a distant beach.

I push myself back down, so my head is on my pillow. I bring my legs high into the air and find the balance, the release of my lower back. I stay there for what seems like hours but was probably seconds until I let my knees bend and collapse and my legs fall back onto the pile of blankets below. My eyes are still open, staring into the black squares of my curtain. My window is cracked open and I can hear a faint conversation from somewhere else in the building through another open window.

Someone else is not asleep either.

That somehow consoles me enough to close my eyes-

I will fall asleep

I will fall asleep

I will fall asleep

and then I jolt with the sound of my first alarm.

I turn it off, fall asleep for eight minutes and get up with the second.

Life: Discovery Channel

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/life/

:)

On Intelligence

intelligence: noun. the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills;

smart: adj. having or showing a quick witted intelligence;

showing impertinence by making clever or sarcastic remarks

wit: noun. mental sharpness and inventiveness;

keen intelligence;

a natural aptitude for using words and ideas in a quick and inventive way to create humor.

I was thinking the other day about what it means to be smart or intelligent. Probably because I'm studying for the GRE and am terrified I will get to the issue essay portion and have nothing to say about the prompt given to me. It seems silly but when asked to give specific examples or reasons to support or argue against why it is dangerous to trust only intelligence or why the main purpose of science is to reassure while art is meant to upset, or why patriotic reverence for the history of a nation often does more to impede than to encourage progress, I get a little flustered. I mean it seems simple enough but a good essay should have a level of wit to it, and good sound examples, supporting conclusions, and I just don't seem to carry a lot of random facts around with me. The extemporaneousness of the it scares me.

While I like to write, and I think that I'm a fair enough writer by any standards, I also like to take my time, research, mull things over and to be blunt about it I'm a little uncomfortable with a first draft of anything, like shitting out an issue essay for the GRE to be kept on record for any school to see, about something I might not care about at all or have any interest in arguing for or against, and what if I can't think of a clever enough example to suggest that no matter what the situation , it is more harmful to compromise one's beliefs than to adhere to them?

Anyway, I'm just not good at that sort of thing and I'm absolutely shaking in my shoes just thinking about it. I will freeze, deer in head-light style, at the thought of producing evidence of how the arts reveal the otherwise hidden ideas and impulses of a society, or an example of how it would be impossible for an effective politician to tell the truth all the time.

I think these prompt are simultaneously too broad and too specific. Too broad in the sense that they are all covering four main topics, the arts, technology, history, politics which is fine with me if the prompts themselves weren't so irritatingly peculiar. I'm not thinking about how politics and morality are in the same realm? are they? should they be? Do I not understand either of these concepts if I differentiate the two?

As of right now, so currently, but not at this very moment, I'm reading Franny And Zooey. One of it's prominent themes is about intelligence and wit and the idea that these siblings who were taught at a very young age by their two older brothers before they were biased with the knowledge of conventional schooling have grown up to be a little freak-like and are incapable of tolerating the average Joes of the world because they are bored with the stupidity of simple conversation. They are damned to be too smart and witty for their own good. Incidentally it makes for interesting dialog in the short novel but brings on the thought that intelligence is lonely for those living among the less intelligent. There was an episode of House recently that said the same thing which I thought was interesting. In the episode, a man who was publishing essays on principles of physics at the age of 18 or something like that, a mathematical genius, all of a sudden dropped everything to work as a postal worker and a marry a pretty wife and settle down. Dr. House found out he'd been taking a drug to make him stupider, to drop his IQ down a little so that he could live a simple life, in peace, and be happy.

Happiness for this one prodigy was not having the burden of intelligence.

Of course in the end he decided it was better to balance the two out but the notion struck me as a bit unnerving.

If intelligence doesn't make you happy, but is often the key to humor, Is humor not the key to being happy either, or is the joke on us?

academy award winning movie trailer

rooftop view

On the train the other day I saw a man step in with a barns and noble bag. It was one of the white ones where you can read the titles through the plastic. I always find it amusing to see what other people are reading, especially what they are buying. It never seems to be what one might expect. Like me sitting on the train coming from work as a receptionist, I reading Oliver Sack's Musicophilia. Ok, so that's not so strange. At least I'm not carrying around Mary Roach's Bonk: The curious coupling of science and sex (not great train material).

But this man to my surprise had recently purchased two books; Bitches, and Why Men Love Bitches.

Now I can't help but wonder what terrible relationship this poor guy has gotten himself into...

But when I got home I started wondering, what is this book really about?

So I googled it.

It's actually a self-help book for women and how to take control in a relationship!

So why was this guy carrying it around? Maybe he has a man he's trying to pin down, or maybe he's just that whipped and was getting it for his girl friend.

Either way, I kind of wish I had the cajones to have asked him.

Through the Lens

women portrayed in the media

And so my gender discussion continues...

We are gender conditioned. We are raised to be women, or raised to be men which means we are raised to think and act differently.

Not only this but we learn how to act by imitating, mimicry. I just read a crazy statistic that showed the vast majority of people in creative positions, whether in the news, TV, films, literature and so on, are men. Which means we are watching a man's depiction of women, which means we are watching women characters act in ways a man wants them to act. They are shown to be likable and attractive if they have these qualities and unattractive and unlikable if they do not. And so we are conditioned to act and mimic the man's woman.

Unless a woman starts thinking of her life as separable from a man's she will unconsciously be striving for these attributes that are supposably attractive to men, and serving to man's need. But is it reversible? Not really. Man depicts himself as the man he strives to be, not the man a woman would want him to be. These masculine traits, are often not what seems logical for a woman to naturally find attractive; not representative of good "husband material", a good father, or sometimes even a decent person, men who take advantage of women, and expect the women to be at their beck and call.... And so women find themselves attracted to the assholes, the jerks, the bad boys. Is it no wonder when that is what is displayed on the media as masculine, strong, attractive, the guys all the attractive young women are chasing after?

Men should not be put on a pedestal, and women should not put a man's needs before her own. That's absurd.

And even knowing this, I fall victim to it. I say I am a strong independent women, but secretly I just want a stable relationship with a man- and then I fall for the irresponsible bad boy. I say I liberal and outgoing and yet I sometimes secretly wish I was still spoken to as a lady (what am i caught in the 1940s?)

I contradict myself constantly because I am confused. These social norms are ever evolving and maybe we are all trying to just keep up, and try to mold them in a direction that has a bit of a broader view on who we are and how we're different and what that really means. I'm tired of trying to deceive myself in order to come to terms with what I can respect and what respect I am getting in return.

Does that even make sense?

The thing is that these statements make it seem like I've been repressed or discouraged because I'm a woman and that really hasn't been the case at all. It all very deceiving because like most people most of these injustices are under the radar, they are the norm, they are what we expect. So it's not until further examination that one realizes something's a little off balance. And I don't expect that these little observations will make any change, its just that, an observation. That doesn't mean I wouldn't mind seeing some change around here though.