Hitten no hikari matataku

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Tuesday June 30th 2009 06 23 pm

When all we want is to go To the Lighthouse...

"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself- struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance..."

(Woolf, 19.)

write the odds sing the evens.

Friday June 26th 2009 07 00 pm

When you punish a person for dreaming their dream and being themselves, don't expect them to thank or forgive you.

write the odds sing the evens.

Thursday May 28th 2009 06 50 pm

Let it all go.

write the odds sing the evens.

Monday May 25th 2009 07 08 pm

As much as you tell me you can't help but feel happiness and excitement, I have to remind you that I can't help but be a constant source of disappointment.

write the odds sing the evens.

Sunday May 17th 2009 08 16 pm

Tired of Living, but Scared of Dying

When you go a long time without losing anyone close to you, you start to get complacent. You fool yourself into believing they'll live forever, and that you'll never lose them.

Nothing lasts forever.

write the odds sing the evens.

Sunday May 17th 2009 12 10 am

Same old shit, different day.

write the odds sing the evens.

Monday May 4th 2009 05 50 pm

Heaven's not a place that you go when you die, its that moment in life when you finally feel alive.

write the odds sing the evens.

Wednesday April 29th 2009 07 07 pm

Excuse me, madam! Where is the roast beef for my toothbrush!?

write the odds sing the evens.

Wednesday April 15th 2009 09 18 pm

With all the thousands of miles of dick in this town, what makes you think I'm at all interested in your two inches!?!

Fuck! I am so sick of you. Take the hint.

write the odds sing the evens.

Monday April 13th 2009 10 30 am

Hey! Siege Weapons!
Leave my troops alone!

write the odds sing the evens.

Friday March 27th 2009 10 42 am

Let's go.

When the afternoon air currents mix, we can even touch the stars without fear.

write the odds sing the evens.

Wednesday March 11th 2009 09 21 pm

And I guess that's why they call it the blues.

write the odds sing the evens.

Saturday March 7th 2009 04 53 pm

Well, shit.

I won't go into much detail, save to say that anything that can happen, will happen to me.

My brand new iPod is no longer functioning properly, just like the first iPod I bought three years ago. My car was broken into, causing me to have to write up both a police report and an insurance claim, which will likely raise my insurance even higher than it already is. I almost cut off a foot this morning when a knife flew out of my hand. Severe pain ensues. I've lost a friend that I've had since I was 14 years old over something that was neither worth it nor meaningful.

I'm beginning to wonder if I was just born an unlucky person.

Oh well.

Alcohol solves everything.

Bottom's up.

write the odds sing the evens.

Thursday March 5th 2009 09 47 am

Plant Life

During the past season, the White family has been a regular weekend fixture at our house. The sound of cheers from a poker win and the rattle of the porcelain pieces clattering together with the smell of steamed lobster and minced garlic ubiquitous throughout our house. They're a perfect fit: the husband doesn't drink and reeks of corporate life and Chantal, his wife, is a big drinker. An almost mirror image of everything my mom tells me not to become.

My aunt loves to outdo herself as a host. I'm the same too. Always getting up to make sure everyone's drink is full, driving the conversation along, being too loud and outrageous. So it was only a matter of time before we were invited to the White residence. The house was slightly smaller but it was the backyard that drew my roots in.

Our backyard looks more like a junkyard of failed gardening. A tree there, weeds everywhere, and random brown spots littering the lawn. The White's backyard however looks like a rainforest, entire stocks of lettuces and tomatoes doused with the incense of dill and pepermint. There is an art to growing life, a certain talent involving attention and tenderness. My own experiences are limited to one sapling to tree I got for free at some long lost elementary school field trip that's drifted out of memory.

I placed it on the window sill that collected morning and afternoon light, I watered it with care everyday. A sapling did grow, this tiny thread of green growing out of dirt. Life. But it died. I watered it and made sure it got enough light, and it died. The box had an image of a happy prepubescent boy digging a hole for a burgeoning tree under a lush spring afternoon, and here I was near tears with a wilting brown sprout.

My aunt's luck with plant life has been more or less the same. A failed attempt at a front lawn garden bordered by stolen bricks from a construction site, her trial of lowering her blood pressure by experimenting on a backyard garden failed because it was too near the neighbours garden where competing roots copped all the water or the hill on the northwest corner where water slipped freely downward. She tried her best, did what she thought would work. But it didn't and now we're left these patches of small successes and glaring failures.

Mr. White takes special care when describing his techniques. The special soils needed and the many different watering schedules for each plant. Though he'd never admit it, it's his spices that he's most proud of. He tells me, it's especially easy. An innate skill within all of us, though really I think he's being humble or patronizing in that passive aggressive way. He brushes the tall stalks of lettuce as he begins picking the cherry tomatoes for the oncoming dinner. Afterwards he describes the nature of gardening in a pseudo-Shinto fashion.

By the next weekend, he offers to plant some mint for us. He scales our backyard and carresses the soil for moisture, for potential planting grounds. As we walk back into our house through the backdoor, he takes one last look at our backyard; shaking his head in silent disapproval. I try to read his face: is it the neglect? The half-measure efforts? Those times we really tried until it either got too hard, lost interest, or simply became too much work.

But still we try, this odd fusion of want and need. We'll fail because of our ignorance or our vices but still we try. And we'll concentrate on it because it's there and it depends on us. But life gets in the way of life.

write the odds sing the evens.

Saturday February 28th 2009 11 12 am

The Not-So-Sane

I've always found something demeaning about job interviews. In essence, you are just trying to convince someone to let you try to perform a job. A job which typically has nothing to do with the conversation you are having about why you want to work for the company, and your strengths, weaknesses, and little bits of personal odds and ends that are usually always lies anyway. And the interviewer knows that you are most likely lying through your teeth. So what's the point?

Today I was trying to convince someone to let me mop their floors as a second job to cover the furlough costs that plague me two Fridays out of the month. I don't know why I had to talk about myself, my home town, and on and on. I just want to mop some floors for cash, so I can keep myself from being homeless. Hand me a mop, give me fifteen minutes, and that's the interview. At least it should be. I already demonstrated that I can show up on time and dress myself. And I really, really, really want this job. I would actually have fun doing it and I wouldn't have to be around too many people. But I still sat there and talked about how I deal with stress and made bad small talk and told the handful of jokes I knew that I'd feel comfortable telling in front of my grandmother.

It's just so embarrassing to have to talk about how awesome you are and then have to go home and wait for someone to get back to you about whether or not you are awesome, when what I am trying to do is so bloody simple. I wish I could have just rolled up my sleeves and done the job I was applying for for just an hour or so.

Oh well. I think the interview went okay. I just hate the waiting. Every day I don't work is just another day I don't have a pay cheque, another day I continue to exist in limbo, basically homeless, penniless, relegated to a small room in someone else's house and expected to keep very quiet and to clean up other people's messes.

I've been reading a biography of Graham Chapman - I'm really obsessed with him after reading "A Liar's Autobiography", and owing to him being both my favorite member of Monty Python and a gay anarchist hero of mine - and so far (so far? I've read all but the last 10 pages or so, and I think we all already knows how it ends....) it's quite good. There are some bits that were of an uncomfortably personal nature (like the circle jerk bit), and there are yet more bits which should be uncomfortable but are really funny (like the many incidents in which Graham Chapman uses his penis to comical effect in pubs). I liked the passage where John Cleese explains how Graham Chapman just assumed everyone was gay, and was quite possibly on a personal crusade to get everyone to admit it and just relax. (It's on page 82 in the paperback. Check it out.)

I've managed to spill water on my keyboard. So none of the buttons work save the alphanumeric keys and punctuation marks. For the rest - up, down, left, right, tab, control, that sort of thing, I have to use the mouse, and I hate moving my hand a quarter of an inch. I hate not showing off my 1337 keyboard shortcut skillz to impress my dog, whom is the only person I hang out with these days.

Sadly, how mundane I am does not bore me one bit. I like cheese.

write the odds sing the evens.



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