Ghosts

When people turn into ghosts, you can't help but get the feeling you are one too.

To quote my friend's song,

they'll seek me in the country
they'll find me in the woods
they know that i'll keep running while they're up to no good
they'll know my name
yes they will know my name

Ghosts.

Haha, I just wanted to quote her song. She doesn't know I'm doing this, I love the song and I'm playing it right now.

But the sentence at the top is mine, and it's what I'm thinking about right now. I just damn felt like a ghost... these past two days.

Forget it.

Square one.

A familiar place. Just not on Tuesday mornings.

That motherfucker wouldn't call me back or take the time to choose between confirming and denying my facebook friend request, so I pulled the friend request. I should probably block him too, which I had to do in order to drop the request anyway.

I forgot that good love relationships probably don't start with a drunk moment. Doesn't matter who was or wasn't drunk. Of course he wouldn't call me back. But whatever happened to at least giving me the light of day?

Whatever. I don't have the time to wait for myself to feel needier and needier. Shithead.

Maybe in the morning my abstract algebra will solve itself...

until then, another Friday where I hope to receive love. Wait, I've got the time in the wrong order. Unfortunately, so does my imagination.

Can't wait for love... but why is it so hard to meet people who really want it? everyone needs it...

Well well

So many various things to do. And no real pattern to them except the arbitrary direction, in a world of 10+ dimensions, known as forward. Choose grad schools. Write essay for NSF scholarship. Make resume. Transfer credit. Study for, and later take GRE subject test. Choose a field that I'd like to specialize in (it will probably be functional analysis or something along those lines--functions are very, very fun, even when they get complex). Grade homework for an applied calculus class - it's 1:26 AM and I have to figure out how to do this and grade all of it and sleep, literally, a half-decent amount before 9:30. Write a summary in Japanese of a reading passage. Attend three classes tomorrow, including Pilates - I really hope I don't cramp up. And, the newest thing in my life, date guys.

Today I went for a quick date with a guy over lunch in between classes, and I just felt no vibe. He was intelligent, but the conversation was boring (when he said he didn't have a sense of humor or something like that - I swear he did - I was like uh), and he was cute but it wasn't enough to overcome me not having anything in common with him. So when he asked me a few hours on Facebook if he wanted to do something later this week I basically replied telling him I wasn't interested, really carefully because he was a really nice guy and it was just a question of compatibility.

I met this guy (well, we weren't even introduced) through eye contact at a karaoke event and he facebook-found me. Luck of the people who wear Irish shirts even though they're not Irish? Maybe I should keep doing that.

I have a bad feeling this semester's schedule is unsustainable, though. I'm thinking of dropping my Nonlinear Dynamics/Chaos class (9:30 tues wednes and fri, ugh, and the class isn't completely easy) and replacing it with the C++ class that I'll need to take (ok, I could take something else but only if that's possible to find) for the math major. Or drop one of the PE classes. Dropping something is necessary (excepting wrangling with the dean to up my course load to 6 full classes, the two PE classes I'm taking count half) to get the C++ class in. If I don't, I have to take it next semester along with 2 other classes, which would prevent me from studying part-time (2 classes or less), which is much, much cheaper. But the question is - is that worth the stress? Or does that argument even make sense if I'd be dropping one of the classes?

I don't know. I'll find out I guess. I don't enjoy programming, though, so I can't imagine it being more fun than Chaos, but I have to do it eventually.

Shiiiit. So much variousness to contend with.

I want to sleep more, dammit. How, why does everyone act so superhuman here? I guess getting drunk a lot will help you overcome the embarrassment barrier. Maybe. I can't seem to drink on campus without getting depressed later and being unable to sleep, though. Alcohol is, after all, a depressant.

I guess I'm on fire in some ways, but I'm wary of my health becoming worse because of a schedule that would be unsustainable without me taking it out on my health, weight training, pilates and all. And the supposedly dangerous swine flu is supposedly going to strike.

I'm listening to a song from freshman year, back when life was simplest. It's not actually a song released that year, but I put it in my playlist that year for sure when a certain someone's younger brother gave me a compilation disc entitled "SONGS FOR WOMEN 2." Man, my back hasn't really felt right since about a week and a half before school started. Might wanna see someone about that. If time were there (er, thinking in Japanese).

That just gave me a thought in Japanese.
時間があると、時間が存在しないようになる人。そんな人を探しているかもしれない。
A person where, upon his having time, "time" seems to no longer exist. That's the kind of person I'm looking for, maybe.

It's too late for me to be having these thoughts, though. But only tonight is it too late.

The break of dawn

I guess there is a reason that I'm back to where I was a year ago at this time, scratch that, a year and a month ago. I was waiting for the next thing to happen, sitting up at my computer searching for my soul. But not really. Now I feel closer to it. After not listening to it in December I've learned the hard way that sometimes you really need to just listen to your heart. Heart and soul, heart or soul, whatever. That's why I started a whole new blog called "heart freewrites" [/plug]; to address the subject. And to really get closer to what I'm feeling inside, so that the artist in me can recover and fill me up with spirit again. Not just any spirit. Not spirit absorbed from elsewhere. Not spirit absorbed from doing many various things. In Paris people just did what was there and they were like do whatever and you'll be happy because you're in Paris. It's not about the spirit of the city. It's about your spirit deep inside. And mine wasn't feeling the city landscape and lifescape of Paris.

Sometimes when I listen to music I hear more when it's at a lower volume. Why is that? Because I'm hearing partially what I want to hear. And that leads me to a deeper concentration. There's a big problem nowadays in that "hearing what you want to hear" has a negative connotation. Sometimes you need to hear yourself out. In fact always you need to hear yourself out. It's probably said that the news media only tells people what they want to hear. Well, no, I think people want to hear a lot more and then get muted by the media. The media claims (I claim the right to think of "media" as a singular noun) an authority over knowledge and derives an authority over speech. It's this claim I can't stand and it's why I really can't stand listening to Fox News blaring from the TVs (wish it weren't plural) in the combined kitchen and living room area. It's just too much. Or it's been too much ever since, what, high school? Usually I could get along with all that noise. That's because I was really tuned into myself, I guess. But I never really spoke out what was on my mind.

I fear for the day when I really feel the need to speak out what's in my heart at a time where it doesn't fit to speak out. Or do I fear that day? Maybe not anymore. High school was such a scarier time. Then again, many things were scary when I was abroad. Even in Japan I was constantly in action, which is probably why I couldn't ever find the time to relax and completely contemplate what I should do whether to go back for another semester or go to Paris.

At least I have the time to relax now. Time to end the stress of the previous semesters and to prepare for the oncoming onslaught of the ones that'll follow. Even if the courses aren't too hard I know I'll make them hard for myself, so I've gotta prepare. Luckily I've put two phys-ed classes on the table, and those will force my brain to take a backseat and beg for attention. My brain probably has too many useless nerve cells that have all been firing, it's like the parts of your immune system that overfire and cause allergic reactions. An internal firestorm. Not cool.

And I'm learning ways to have fun again. Or having fun again, rather, on my own. That's an important step I'm finally taking. Letting my hair down. When your hair's been fired up from the electric shock that's conducted by the magnetic field created by the exciting environments around you plus your own excitement, you need to work really hard to get it down or reduce the field. And I have completely lessened the field now, though it probably required going to the hospital and experiencing a fair amount of pain for nearly a week now to do that. But yeah, looking forward to a summer of video games and some homework and classes. Right now I can't stop myself from trying to study Japanese and make good DDR steps. But the key to studying Japanese and making DDR steps that are actually good is to enjoy it, unleash your imagination and let it out to run free. And do ridiculous shit.

About three years ago when I had to memorize the verb "oriru" which means "to get off" as in "to get off a train or a bus," I memorized it by telling myself that "rire" means "laugh" in French and that this verb is funny because it makes me think of the sexual sense of "getting off" and that wouldn't be good on a train either, and that thought makes me laugh. So I remembered the verb, and when I forgot it, I remembered the trick. Awesome.

So Mark Bellhorn's batting about .284 in AAA. This is a sign that things are on the up, for me, for the baseball world, for the world. Go Bellhorn!

And I'm getting off. oriru

A little 'write to help me focus

Sometimes you just need to let things melt together.

The expression you could alternate with that is "blur together," but that isn't as encouraging of a story. Then everything is blurry. Here's what happened when I let things melt together today.

Actually, they didn't. They just melted without me. "They" being the butter cookies with a layer of chocolate on top of them that my host mother bought and left in the kitchen, and probably in some bag before that. They're just cheap supermarket cookies that I will probably be buying a whole lot of before I go back.

They melted together. And then at first I tried to separate each cookie with a knife, but it didn't really work. It was as though each section separated by plastic of 3 cookies were meant to be 1 big cookie. I ended up eating the big evolved (think Pokemon) version of the cookie after separating the 1st cookie awkwardly from the other 2, so I guess that's only ⅔ (don't you love how that's a character? I had to look it up on Wikipedia so I guess there's no numpad code for it, if there is one I've forgotten it). But it tasted... like heaven. It tasted like a s'more. Without the awkward marshmallow that disturbs your mouth with a sense of buoyancy. Incredible. I want more.

If life gives you a s'more, though, should you deconstruct it in your head and then figure out that you should just go out and buy butter cookies (or graham crackers) and a chocolate bar and voilà? No, not always... there's not always enough time for that. But it's cool to have the idea.

Hey, I was just listening to ABBA (not everything in life has to have a transition either) and it's a song that they recorded but ended up as one of their least known unreleased tracks because whoever wrote it in the group decided to take an idea out of it for a song that later became a single and that's quite different and more uptempo, "Under Attack," but with a message not really more upbeat. Anyway the track is called "Just Like That," and it goes like this:

Just like that
As though he'd only stopped awhile for a chat
But my secrets he learned
Leaving no stone unturned

Or you could write it as prose, like this:

Just like that, as though he'd only stopped awhile for a chat, but my secrets he learned, leaving no stone unturned

It sounds familiar. It sounds like I'm more willing to play with things now, though. If that's one thing I've learned from Paris it's a good thing. I mean if there's one good thing I've learned from Paris it's that. Look at me, playing around with freewrites again...

Well, someday the sun will dawn for me. You know, that expression. That one. I think freewriting needs a Filipino emphasis de-notation. Wow, I can't write. Berry good. Berry an ah ah ah

A freewrite at least doesn't really need a conclusion...

And it occurs to me...

And it occurs to me that high school might have given me a fear of being alone. Or maybe this is just how nature makes us, how things are. "Nobody wants to be alone" is a phrase I've often heard, and which I believe was repeated to me in sympathy for my recent situation. But I know, or at least it seems to me, that a lot of people operate very well for very long amounts of time being alone. I don't, and not even for short amounts of time. It's a Thursday night, the day before a national holiday, and part of me is complaining that my housemates didn't tell me they were going out, because I happened to have my door closed for 20 minutes or so because one of my housemates' tobacco scent was wafting down the hall from his room to mine and that was annoying so I closed the door. Wow, what a great sentence. But you see, I am also complaining in my mind that none of my (almost entirely female) friends are out doing something tonight. In Japan they almost always would be or at least I'd know why if they weren't. Communication isn't as fluid here; there's no real good central hang-out spot where everybody meets and talks, no great meeting place for a small community. Here it's very much unlike Japan; I think my Paris program's designed that way. And I think it backfired, because a lot of the people here aren't that happy with it or at least seem that way. That's what happens when you don't adequately prepare social events when you know there's going to be a massive strike that will last forever.

And yet I'm not sure whether this is me or what, the person who doesn't like to be alone at all. Who likes to stick out but doesn't want to be left out of the bunch, or left without a fellow comrade outcast. But just now I got cheery for a couple of seconds about being alone and said to myself, hey, they're all working on something, I'll work on something too, and enjoy it! Because when I work I generally never enjoy it. So I decided I'd work on a DDR file. Looked for graphics, then when the time came to pick one of the images, got tired. Went and did something else. Started doing Japanese, which I'm not afraid of doing and is generally a fast process (it was very much so in Japan, at least... haha)... got tired of that. Looked at an art history book, got tired of the thought of how boring reading books in French about old stuff is (no matter what level of "masterpiece" the said stuff is), stopped that. Thought about reading Nerval, got annoyed at the stricken nature of the class and how I'm way behind in it even though it's not really in session, didn't do that. In short, I got tired really quickly of the individual work in each case and stopped and started wanting to do something fun--with other people.

This might mean that whenever I do work, I overwork myself. In other words, my brain wants to do more work than, uh, my brain can take. So it starts and, uh, shorts. I think maybe there's something to that. My brain might be out of shape. In other words, fully capable, but only in short bursts. Short bursts are generally what's required in this world of soundbytes, though. So it wouldn't be any wonder if that's just how it turned out that way.

But that's why, when I go to museums like the museum of Gustave Moreau, I just don't feel in touch with it at all. By "it," I guess I mean the general spirit. Gustave Moreau was a painter who made a museum out of his house for his close to 500 paintings (I think 500) and even more drawings and sketches as the final project of his life. I definitely was down with Moreau for how he left the majority of what he did unfinished; I can understand that for sure (my DDR box is filled with unconstructed Legos, so to speak). But with the general nonstop focus, determination, and work ethic? No! Why didn't he ever go outside? (Well, I mean, more often.) Where was the fun in his life? The doubt? If there was doubt, why did he just work through it? That's a funny question, actually, but it's probably what the one my subconscious wants to ask. How can you just ignore doubt with things like, am I spending my life all right if I spend this much time doing what I'm doing?

Maybe he just really loved it. And still I wonder how I could become or whether I should ever be that impassioned. And I'm back to an earlier question again, an earlier doubt.

No wonder he worked on. Leave your doubts behind you, pave the way.

The sunday

The back of the room is passively lighted by a round globe lamp, supposedly Japanese style, hanging at the top of the room, too distant to illuminate anything important. The fingers on this laptop do the work of the unworked brain, tapping away as the small thing of Japanese perfumed hand cream does not sit flat on the table, slightly elevated by a piece of plastic with no apparent use. An umbrella hangs from the table, nothing to do. Another lamp, silver and this one perched on the ground, stares blankly into a blank wall with an invisible expression of blankness, nothing apparent of issue. Two sneakers that could be hugging the wall are instead positioned as though they were ready to run into the desk in front of it. Atop this desk sits the laptop.

It is a Sunday, very late. 10:15 PM. Any much later and it's bedtime, a time less silent than this, when the sound of the Paris subway train can be heard rumbling through the floorboards, onto the soundboard of the bed with no headboard. Nobody is around. If people are alive and nobody is there to see it, well, yeah. And how easy is it to trust other people's viewpoints?

Sound enters from somewhere. A door opens, another closes. In Germany arguments are in session, doubtless unfriendly ones. In Paris the city sleeps, dreaming about an end to all strikes and to all of Sarkozy and his enemies. Supposedly university students have done work on this day, the pre-ordained Sabbath. No evidence of this can be found on the Internet, although everything else displays itself in glittering charm or simplicity. It all claims to save time while it ticks precious moments away. Actually, sometimes it makes precious moments happen. Either way, the thought of the Internet being a time-saver is irrelevant now in this room.

A white box. Black hieroglyphics upon it. Illumination from half-white light. A scene of doubt. A scene of hidden trepidation, perhaps? From one eye, a scene of boredom. From another, a scene of the desperate unknown.

This is every Sunday in Paris.

(Luckily, there are 6 other days in the week.)