exhibits: pleasures from the other

a. "but yeah, he knows that language is kind of a big deal to you, yes?"

b. "i completed the typescript while i was teaching a course on foucault at the new school for social research in new york. i want to express my gratitude to my students for the inspiring discussions, and for confirming by their enthusiasm how exciting reading foucault is."

c. "you know, in your little outfit... you look like a ragamuffin!"

on desire, I

i know i shouldn't spend the dollar on sugar
but i do anyway
the chocolate chips make me sigh with pleasure
i don't even mean to
my reheated lunch that i don't want to eat
tastes perfectly fine although it is a week old
and i cut mold off of the green peppers

it is not as easy as philosophers say
this poem is shit now that i've written it out and it
was perfectly fine in my head
my project is to discover
my desires, to unchoke their leaf-filled gutters but

i wanted to write this poem down
and i can't
i want to lose ten pounds and
forget everything i know about nutrition so i can
eat cookies without guilt
but i can't
i want to spend all my money on coke that we lick off
each others nipples before you
trace my contours with the razor blade
and i want to hear you say
that you want it too,
that you want me to hear you say
that you want it
but you wont, because you can't,
so i can't.

i can't.

new-yorkish cerebral funfetti concerning questionable behaviour

so a few weeks ago at duane reade something rather funny happened. as i was whipping out my club card from the change purse where i keep it, a roach flew out and fell onto the counter. (now, i don't mean a bug.)

and i blushed, and then laughed. the chick laughed too, but didn't say anything. i have three roaches in my change purse and i really don't know why; as a girl who does her hair in a lot of vintage styles you can be sure i always have a bobby pin on my person somewhere. this means that roaches get killed, so to speak. but i still don't feel right throwing them away. hmmm. [ ed. note: haven't been partying too much lately, trying to keep myself in tip-top shape for the thesis.]

the local DR (or the drizzle, as i like to call it [ed. note: do you find that everyone in new york has a personal nickname for duane reade? i do... except i can't remember any of the ones i've heard recently... good story, eh?]) is really one of the biggest loci of small-town culture in new york, strangely enough. (other places i would note would be the bodgea/deli, the bagel cart, local parks, etc.) this is easily explained by the fact that one usually goes to the same one (the one near work/home) at the same time (right after work, right after getting home) on the same days. this means you get to know the staff and they get to know you. depending on the kind of person you are this sometimes has interesting results.

once upon a time on a friday, several months back, i was at my usual DR (98th and broadway) while on my lunch. i had a $5.00 rewards coupon and was looking forward to using it to dull the cost of an "expensive" purchase i had to make. after shopping, i walked up to the couter and set my items down somewhat shame-facedly: one maruchan instant lunch, one giant monster energy drink, and one big box of coloured and flavored condoms. the person at the checkout was a young man who i had conversed with somewhat extensively on an earlier occasion as we had discovered that we lived not far from each other way out in the wilds of brooklyn. hence, i could hardly play stupid and ignore him.

after awkwardly handing him my coupon (while looking at the counter) and then commenting on how expensive some "things" are (while blushing) i tried to make a joke (unsuccessfully) about how the only thing really for myself was the $.99 ramen. of course, all of this only delayed the inevitable; as he handed me my receipt he smirked and yelled after me smarmily, "you have a good night tonight, okay!"

now as i type this i laugh at my embarrassment at buying condoms (forgiveable but childish). it's weird, that kind of duality that exists sometimes. i of course could have made fun of him and his "not-about-to-get-laid" status but that sort of thing never ever occurs to me.

a couple of weeks ago i was walking down 23rd street after a doctors appointment and not really attending to the world around me too closely as i had had a great deal of blood drawn and feeling what some might call "woozy." i, being me, get off on this sort of feeling and would, with the right musical accompaniment, even refer to it as "transcendental." so after having all of this blood drawn and while taking an arduous city hike and observing the world at large while listening to fantastic music, i suddenly had my mind snapped BANG right back into real reality. i had just walked past a doorway where one of two hobo-ish men had flicked a cigarette butt into the air that flew mere millimeters from my face. i stared behind me in shock, looking back into his equally shocked face as he stammered out an apology. i instantly forgave him because i felt as if, this one time only, it was as much my fault as his; like him, instead of attending to the world around me i also had been staring at what his buddy had been proffering up to him eagerly - something in a dull transparent orange pill container. "hmmm!!!" i had thought, as i looked at their intent and excited faces transfixed upon the bottle, "i wonder what that hobo has in that pill container!"

water drinks michael phelps

yeah, it's been a while.

yeah, i've got a list - two lists, actually - of shit i've been meaning to blog about. like twelve things. that's pretty pathetic, i admit, to have a fucking list - no, wait - TWO lists of things to blog about and still not be able to manage to do it.

oh well!

i've been happy lately, a shocking, delicious, and (most of all) new sensation to me. it's hard to figure out how to go about my life-as-usual now that i'm pretty consistently happy since a) happiness is so novel to me it mostly spawns nothing but anxiety and shit, let me tell you, being constantly anxious really shoots your schedule all to hell and b) as sadness was my motivation for a lot (read: most) of the creative things i did, it is quite challenging to figure out how to completely shift my ground for creativity.

again - oh well. this is why we are alive, this is the magic of the ego.

lately everyone's been all into this sports thing - let's see... i think they call it the... olympics. olympics, right! everyone's been all into the olympics! and hey, i don't have anything against that at all. i'm not, or rather, i'm trying not to be one of those academics who thinks shit like, "ugh, this shit has no real meaning, purpose, being, it's just mindless athleticism, trained apes, etc." because obviously that position is complete bullshit for several reasons. the first is that these olympians should be lauded not only for their extreme skill but for the fact that they celebrate, nourish and cherish their bodies, and most likely have a relationship with them that is quite foreign to most americans (who delight in torturing their bodies with processed food that their brain wants to eat but that their body fights in vain, and, who, even worse, spend most of their time ignoring the subtle language of their aches, drives, hungers and pains). secondly, anyone who can sit on a futon for hours at a time, usually intoxicated on some kind of substance, and think things like "hmmm.... it's like, when you consider death, it splits into notions of language and self, which are really the same thing, equivalent, in the eyes of death. hmm, fascinating..." cannot really be too critical of the purposeful utility of anything, especially something which results in a pure, physical action.

i haven't had access to cable in about two years now, and haven't actually owned a tv in almost a year. this means that my news of tv-related things is usually quite derivative and distorted, and that's perfectly fine with me, just the way i like it, actually. i am, of course, proud of michael phelps, proud of his historic contribution to sports and to america, but, being me, i am much more interested in seeing what people do with the facts of this situation, how they get digested by society at large, than actually watching him glide through the water, in a speedo, at superhuman speeds. (this, according to some, could be my loss.)

for instance, while i smiled at phelps' modest face in photographs after each medal and warmed to him when he declared that he missed his own bed, these things didn't really stick with me, they didn't penetrate, or rather, they only penetrated my mind so far. however, two other things i read, things that used his victories as a springboard to other ideas connected to but far beyond michael phelps, will stick with me for a long, long time. (the second one, especially.)

i offer them as documents, as testaments to the indefatigable human spirit (both intellectual and physical), below:

1.
2.

fresh blood

i've been mentally preparing for a weekend of strange, mind-bending fun; consequently i've been wandering around the vaults of erowid again for the first time in a long while. check them out if you've got an hour or two - there's something fun for everyone - promise!

reading the trip reports really brought me back - suddenly i became a strange, morbid teenage girl again, trapped in my parent's stuffy den. a boring box of a room decorated with bits and pieces of riffraff too out-of-fashion for the public rooms, the den was where the computer was. hence, the den was where, i suppose, a great deal of myself was born, strangely enough... born in that ugly box of a room looking out directly into the stucco of my neighbor's house, in with my dad's guitars and my ugly debate trophies and my grandmother's huge, pumpkin-coloured velveteen armchair.

i would spend hours late at night, straining to hear any movement from the direction of my parent's bedroom, reading trip reports written by unstable chemists who could only reference what they were taking by long chemical names dotted picturesquely with numbers and hyphens. i had friends who smoked pot, who drank, and these, at the time, held little interest for me. they frightened me somewhat, because they seemed to me to... muddy the mind. and this was frightening, unclear, nebulous.... muddying. exactly.

the hallucinogens, however - ahhh, the hallucinogens. from those early days i would read on and on, listening to that ugly clock tick into the dark, devoted like a lover, tingling and sweating with desire, with anticipation. DMT was always my favourite... the one drug i've always wanted to do and never gotten to do.... it held some aura for me, some potent, palpable mystery of initiation, brotherhood, transitivity and (subsequent) abandonment. i read, i researched, i bought the yage letters from the upstairs room of city lights, and when my favourite band (probably still, too) put out an album devoted to hallucinogens and time exploration i was beside myself; the original pressing came with six stickers and of course, the 5-meo-dmt sticker was the one i put on my c.d. player and prayed that someone would notice. no one did, of course, but that is more than likely for the best. i was, after all, seventeen. i was seventeen and i was looking forward to pulling my mind apart. still am, honestly. suppose that's why i'm a philosopher, an analyst, a proctologist of the soul, if you will.



today my therapist and i had an interesting discussion; we always do.

"maybe it's time for you and sorrow to... break up...?" she posited, hesitating, yet speaking with decision.

i laughed. i laugh a lot in therapy. then i sighed. i also sigh a lot in therapy. (i'd like to think i was an amusing analysand, but then everyone does i suppose.)

often going forward means going backwards and vice versa.

vice versa and vice. vice, indeed.

curious,


curious.

OMG! turns out M.I.A. and i have the same birthday! ROCK.

this makes me feel much less bad about a good section of my thesis being inspired by a lyric of hers from 20 dollar...

and it'll collapse/when there's nothing in it

(language, intentionality, etc.)




that is all.

haaaaappy birthday toooo meeeeeeeee! (or masturbatory celebratory post)

today (thurs) is my birthday. tomorrow (fri) is the full moon, and i'm taking the day off to go to the beach. i have a cupcake to eat for breakfast (cake for breakfast is a bday tradition in my world) and have leftovers from my favorite diner dinner to eat for lunch (and i didn't even have to pay for it!) today i got no less than ten - count 'em, ten - compliments on my shutter shades. (fav one - italian guy at eighth ave: "hey!!!! i like-a you glass!!!!!!)

happy birthday to you, kid...

another lap around the sun - run on your own terms.

(there is always a way to squint your eyes, warp your brain, so that you can see the positives. they're there, they're as real as shit... just as real as depression. true dat, yo!)

so maybe, if you have a second tomorrow, watch the clouds, pick up a leaf, scrutinize some graffiti art, think about what's important to you, or listen to the presets...

this is my life, darlings, and i'm happy to have it and happy to share it with you.