a thousand lonely people rioted

pipedream

2008-11-21T15:59:07Z

to d, who will never read this:

what i meant to say was, i miss you too.

-

2008-10-29T16:13:01Z

i regret it so much.

and
how things have changed.

but i think,
this time is special; it is set-aside, meant for re-prioritization, reflection, change.
i have wandered too far and too long.
i'm going back to You.

Father help me to be patient, help me to understand, and if not so much, help me to trust.

sidetracking a little - ok this is really the last post

2008-05-21T16:11:18Z

d,
i'm not sure what else to say other than thank you.
you are really special to me.

i hope you have a great birthday this weekend.
love.

Last Post

2008-05-13T13:57:36Z

By golly, re-reading these entries is thoroughly embarrassing.

Note to self: do not publish things written in heat of moment (which incidentaly is pretty much everything). Steer clear of explosive, unpleasant, awfully trite, Poor Soul Entries (wow, also pretty much everything!).

Oh well. Now that everything has been said and done, I am feeling much better and to be honest, slightly relieved.

In the ever-elusive spirit of Moving On (elusive only because mulling over something has its secret, sometimes irresistible joys of inertia and bitchiness), this will be my last post, as I close this (turbulent, albeit... necessary, whatever that means) chapter of my life.

1st May 2008

2008-04-30T17:25:02Z

I've been here before; the landscape familiar, our language taking on that strangeness. How long will this last?

The days dissolve into each other, yesterday no different from today; a slow, sure fade. I am fading too. My thoughts: once clear, coherent, concise, are becoming wild and disconnected. Everyday I think up new excuses for you, each day more ludicrous than the last. Why do I put myself through this hell, this masochistic exercise, this endless, exhausting, torturous cycle? Why can't I just - as most others do - accept the fact and move on? You've said it clearly enough; there is no room for ambiguity in "I don't love you anymore", or is there?

What disgusts me the most is the way you did it: impulsively, thoughtlessly, mercilessly. There was no explanation, no apology, just an irritable, "let's call it quits" at 2:30am. An explanation, however contrive or insincere is an explanation nonetheless. Could you not afford me, your girlfriend of four years, that? Did our time together mean nothing, did our weekend dates and telephone calls and supper buffets not warrant a half-decent conversation?

And I, King of Fools, Idiot of the Universe, refused to believe it, sms-ing you shortly after with a feeble "you're still my best friend, thank you for everything" as if this display of courage would undo everything. And then, when there came no reply, I would email your JC friend asking her to call you, to make sure that you are alright, to take care of you on my behalf.

I ought to be shot.

What am I supposed to do about all this? Pick up the pieces, conjecture what I will about your sudden departure, bitch about you to my friends? Shall I spend hours forming hypotheses (was there someone else? was it because you wanted to be single in uni?), mull over the details and fall over weeping? None of this satisfies me.

I correct myself. What I find most disgusting, most unforgivable and most amazing is your uncanny ability to be totally and utterly disconnected from the whole thing, smiling and laughing heartily in church, telling people of the holidays you now enjoy without me. All this show, this spectacular parade while I was in tears, crumbling under the stress of the exams I had THE VERY NEXT DAY, but crumbling more from the hurt you caused, finding myself once again in the position I am no longer stranger to: grieving over the insane and inexplicable loss of somebody whom I loved more than I ever imaged I could.

Is there no reprieve?

zzz

2008-04-19T12:15:15Z

My new philosophy (which incidentaly is also my new excuse for not trying too hard): IF ITS YOURS, ITS YOURS.
I kind of like the fatalistic undertones. HAHAHA

So this is not a great position to be in: mediocre grades, no internship for the summer, etc, etc. BUT according to aforementioned philosophy, this is no reason to panic! No need to spend copious amounts of time filling in internship apps and re-writing resumes to banks which will probably send me thanks-but-no-thanks emails two and a half months down the road! No reason to enroll in summer school in a half-hearted attempt to push GPA to summa cum laude!

HA. So according to my terrible (mis)interpretation of this philosophy, i dont have to try too hard. HA.

tokens, unlovable pathos

2008-04-19T11:01:31Z

Tokens

The sheets have been laundered clean
of our joint essence - a compound,
not a mixture; but here are still

your forgotten pipe and tobacco,
your books open on my table,
your voice speaking in my poems.

Fleur Adcock

edgesofprint @ 2008-04-17T00:14:00

2008-04-16T16:18:52Z

This reminds me of my secondary two days, the MGS brown benches, the long ride on 77 home:

Variations on the Word Love
Margaret Atwood

This is a word we use to plug holes with. It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart-shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. This word is not enough but it will have to do. It's a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go.

we're all sixes and sevens

2008-04-16T16:04:20Z

..."I have only 2 wishes for you, that you love and serve God all your life and that you have a happy family life. These are more important than any wordly achievements, and you know I am always proud of you, whatever you choose to do..

I wish you never had to read this letter, but if you do, just know that I have gone to a better place and one day we will meet again.

All my love,
Pa"

I love you papa. I'll always be your little girl.

Signal Fire

2008-04-14T15:35:30Z

Yes I am completely aware that in doing what I am doing, without hope or agenda, I appear to most to be:
1. irrational
2. idealistic; and
3. not very intelligent

It is difficult to justify anything without knowing the full story, which I assure you is long, drawn-out and complicated.

But whatever has transpired has transpired. I think back and realise, should the roles be reversed, you would have done exactly the same thing.

never quite making it

2008-04-14T13:34:55Z

Stupid STAT201 paper: probably the worst paper I've taken in my life. It was three hours long but it might as well have been fifteen; no amount of staring at numbers would have saved me. Particularly annoyed that all the questions set pertained to Newton-Raphson, Jackknife/Bootstrap, Taylor Series Expansion, MLE/MOM, Score/Indicator Function - which is all of 2 out of 8/9 topics we covered. Nothing on Multivariate Distributions, Distribution Functions, Jacobians, etc. Felt like giving up throughout; everyone was in a state of shock after the paper. Expecting a B minus or my C plus ever which will take about 3 A pluses or something ridiculous like that to bring my GPA back up to what it is now.

Argh. Feeling shitty and thoroughly stupid, but oh well, I did my best
thanks to everyone who helped me with R Program, computing has never been my forte
just have to keep telling myself that I did my best

but that's never quite enough is it?

these images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight

2008-04-13T16:49:50Z

on hindsight everything seems lighter, funnier, inconsequential
we make a mockery of heartbreaks and gloss over details

even your words seem palatable

edgesofprint @ 2008-04-13T22:20:00

2008-04-13T14:32:01Z

what would my father say if he were alive?
i imagine something like,

if its yours, its yours.

he'd tell me that God has a plan, and to trust Him.

he'd also give me a hug.

the city in which i loved you

2008-04-12T16:55:53Z

XX
That conversation we were always on the edge
of having, runs on in my head,
at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light
polluted water yet reflecting even
Sometimes the moon
and I discern a woman
I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat
and choking her like hair. And this is she
with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head
turning aside from pain, is dragging down deeper
where it cannot hear me,
and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

Adrienne Rich

edgesofprint @ 2008-04-09T22:58:00

2008-04-09T15:11:20Z

call me stubborn but this is what it is: i refuse to move on, unless you find someone else.
its ok if you're confused and need time. its ok if you don't love me.

you're the same boy who came over at 4am just to sit with me while i studied for last year's finals, who talked to me all night on your driveway, who eats chilli crab with me.
i don't know what happened after army, i don't know why you the sudden disconnect, but you're still the same person, the same boy from four years ago.
you're still my boy and i'll wait.

edgesofprint @ 2008-04-08T23:35:00

2008-04-08T15:46:07Z

oh dear god help me please

this is unnecessary, unnecessary

2008-04-08T10:02:17Z

let me die

edgesofprint @ 2008-04-08T03:10:00

2008-04-07T19:14:55Z

so wayne told me he doesnt love me and broke up with me.
happy fucking birthday debbie.
and good luck with your final exams next week.

don't say you didn't see it coming.

-

2008-04-07T17:01:31Z

what does it mean to "suck it up and move on"? i think i will always be in this torn state of wanting to love my dad and to remember him, but at the same time wanting to get on with life. i'm not sure if you can do either successfully, are they mutually exclusive, will there always be tension between these desires

i turned twenty-one last week: i guess that is as good a reason as any for some self-reflection. the brutal and honest truth is that i am not at all happy with myself. i am ambitious, driven, hard-working, but all for the wrong things. i want status, recognition, power. i have a horrible relationship with my mother (perhaps because we are too alike), which recently culminated in her telling me to move out. i have an almost non-existent, once-a-month-email relationship with my brother joshua in new zealand, and an okay but rocky one with daniel. i have some good friends who mean a lot to me, but at the end of the day i am hopelessly self-centered with a distinct propensity to feel sorry for myself. i am torn because i have no clue what i want to do with life, or want out of it. i spend a lot of time feeling that life is purposeless and futile - look at my dad, he took the high road, lived the Good Christian Life and see where that got him. you would think that God would at least take care of him for giving up EVERYTHING (and i really do mean everything: riches, status, power, a top-notch job) rather than give him up to prolonged sickness, pain and death. i am a lousy, lousy, lousy christian who is too cynical for her own good, too judgmental, too quick to find fault and has no qualms about criticizing people (necessarily or otherwise). i am good at pretending all of the above do not exist, or bother me. i am never content and always striving for Something More. i am angry at too many things to name, carry too many burdens from the past, hold too many grudges. i would like to be one of those Happy People who are Okay With Life, who are balanced and have perspective. i would like to be someone who cares deeply about others, who is okay with failure, who is understanding, who is excited about life and its possibilities.

but i am pessemistic and suspect that i will always be dissatisfied with life and unhappy with myself

final notions

2008-04-07T16:29:40Z

what does it mean, really, to burn oneself out?
to be so consumed by one thing, and for everything else to lose meaning, colour

--
last night i had a bad dream, and like most dreams it was fragmented, inexplicable, absurd. it was of my father dying. i knew he was dying because of the way he had that same kind of tired-sadness in his eyes. i don't remember why but his body was severed as his illness grew worse and worse, until all that was left was his head. people around me were frightened of him as his body became more and more mutilated, and asked me why i wasn't scared. i said i could never be, he was my father and i could never be scared of him.

somehow all my dreams of my father are somewhat disconcerting, somewhat perplexing, always painful. most have to do with him dying. i guess in some sense the nature of death is such that this feeling of the unknown and of fear is unshakable. i miss him terribly.

KNIFE-PLAY

2008-04-06T16:24:27Z

All my scars are yours. We talk of pledges,
and holding out my hand I show
the faint burn on the palm and the hair-thin
razor-marks at wrist and elbow:

self-inflicted, yes; but your tokens---
made as distraction from a more
inaccessible pain than could have been
caused by cigarette or razor---

and these my slightest marks. In all our meetings
you were the man with the long knives,
piercing the living hopes, cutting connections,
carving and dissecting motives,

and with an expert eye for dagger-throwing:
a showman's aim. Oh, I could dance
and dodge, as often as not, the whistling blades,
turning on a brave performance

to empty stands. I leaned upon a hope
that this might prove to have been less
a gladiatorial show, contrived for murder,
than a formal test of fitness

(initiation rites are always painful)
to bring me ultimately to your
regard. Well, in a sense it was; for now
I have found some kind of favour:

you have learnt softness; I, by your example,
am well-schooled in contempt; and while
you speak of truce I laugh, and to your pleading
turn a cool and guarded profile.

I have now, you might say, the upper hand:
these knives that bristle in my flesh
increase my armoury and lessen yours.
I can pull out, whet and polish

your weapons, and return to the attack,
well-armed. It is a pretty trick,
but one that offers little consolation.
such a victory would be Pyrrhic,

occurring when my strength is almost spent.
No: I would make an end of fighting
and, bleeding as I am from old wounds,
die like the bee upon a sting.

Fleur Adcock

courage is a kind of salvation

2008-04-06T15:17:31Z

how can anything worth fighting for not entail a measure of sacrifice or pain? this is true not only of love but of life in general. it is stupid to think of love through rose-tinted glasses, to fall back on a romantized and altogether unrealistic notions and compare that to the unforgiving reality that is that love is never about a feeling so much as it is about hard work and compromise. what did you think - that it would be handed to you on a silver platter? i understand that we are what we are partly because we are too used to each other, it is too easy to take each other for granted but if we are sticking together only for fear of change then we are imbeciles. i don't believe in The One or Love At First Sight or anything to do with fatalism. i believe in hard work and commitment. i believe that everything comes at a cost. i believe that at the end of the day you love in spite of and not because.

i still want to try, i really do. this is painful.

Adrienne Rich - Living In Sin

2008-04-06T12:19:25Z

"She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf amoong the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--
envoy from some village in the moldings...
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs."

WE SUFFER EACH OTHER TO HAVE EACH OTHER A WHILE

edgesofprint @ 2008-04-06T20:04:00

2008-04-06T12:14:11Z

"Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate."

Adrienne Rich

edgesofprint @ 2008-04-06T18:15:00

2008-04-06T10:28:52Z

where do i start? you told me that you view relationships as something in the background, something that shouldn't be too difficult to maintain, too time-consuming. it should not involve making time for each other, too much planning or too many sacrifices. but i am not hassle-free, i don't want to be taken forgranted, i don't to be looked upon as an obligation, is that too much to ask

yes you are tired but so am i