The trials, travails, and travels of a breeze

There lies a certain sort of reluctant finality in every vow made to grow. It’s a gradual, undefined process of blurred lines and vague steps, but the factor common to each little bit of headway made is a trade-off, relinquishing the ability to act a certain way, to voice certain thoughts; one must not say this, one must not reveal what is really going through one’s mind, one must smile outwardly and wince only inwardly and never let anyone know.

Of course, there is that suggestion to never grow up completely lest you lose a particular viewpoint on life.

I don’t think I will. But now is the time to learn to quash that almost completely on the outside save for around those I know I can implicitly trust.

Independence means, in part, self-dependence. And enough of the theatrical emotions; you know very well that you’re actually capable of standing well enough on your own!

—

One of my hallmates eyed me shrewdly, and asked, “Doesn’t it feel liberating?”

And with wide eyes and perhaps a slight shortness of breath, I laughed, and admitted that it did. In deciding my academic direction, I have encountered the kind of freedom that suddenly makes me enjoy being busy and productive because the tasks are not burdens.

—

On Saturday evenings, an on-campus cafe often hosts a very general do-it-yourself art event. This week was t-shirt painting; I grabbed the darkest color of the smallest size there, the greens and blues I could see, started with a vague mental image of a leaf, and let my imagination do the rest. “Oh, if I draw another curve this way…hmm. Shading? Aaack, that doesn’t work.”

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Spring is beginning to arrive on campus, my first true spring in years. I got a quick taste of it when I visited Washington D.C. in early 2005 but not since then have I seen so much a blip. I type that even as I hear the wind howling outside my window. But though the grass is brown and the weather is bipolar, among all of the bare, leafless trees on campus, one has suddenly burst into flower.

I gave a sigh, glared at my ever-malfunctioning camera, and swore that I would manage to take some pictures today, regardless.

When I turned it on, it flashed a distorted magenta screen at me balefully and I nearly gave up. I took a few distorted magenta pictures and futilely changed settings on the phone when it occurred oddly to me to use an outside method. I turned the lens of the camera directly to the full afternoon sun, and the image on the screen blanked under the light and resolved itself into something resembling normalcy.

Flowering tree is in the middle, flanked all around by bare trees. Notice the strange lines on the light background of the sky, though. My camera won’t give me flawless images anymore, but they’re close to perfect save for light backgrounds, upon which those lines are evident.

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Spring cleaning. It feels more final. And more like a cruel summer.The crystal horse in his tomb, the good-natured brown filly, the majestic plastic matriarch with sparkling mane and hidden keys that gave me hours of wide-eyed wonder each time I discovered a new gimmick. The lanyard octopi I told stories with, cities of clay animals, Tobias the falcon and gorgeous green-eyed Willow the swan, blue-eyed Selinah the duck with her tiny tiny daughter, why do I remember these names; long-forgotten cat figurines, a constant love, a Pontiac Firebird, tiny tiny tiny wooden mouse, bigger white felt mouse, the poor hornless swanicorn, the Golden Snitch from a fifth-grade birthday party; the bead animals coiled inside coiled pots, middle-school pride and joy, stories and cities through my thirteenth year even–

there are sagas and civilizations inside my walk-in closet, preteen eighth wonder of the world.

And then; anime convention fodder, cosplay scraps, fans and wraps and butterfly clips. Tiny treasures hidden lovingly, a mood ring inside a box of floss, an octopus lanyard inside a jewelry box, a quartz crystal inside of a plastic, metallic dark blue easter egg. Backpacks, one with Eiffel Towers and Arcs de Triomphe stamped all over it, the ‘travel bag’… Childhood.

In the box for Goodwill and the Salvation Army there is half a lifetime. Wide-eyed stuffed pony for Christmas, wicker basket home to many a stray plushie, Christmas dresses, raincoats, swimsuits, school uniform pants never worn, a Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirt that was a gift from a casual friend who didn’t know I’d never seen it; Chinese yo-yo. In the trash box, countless plastic beads, paper crafts, relics of a time when imagination was the norm and there weren’t limits on anything, no expectations when you were in your own mind.

Two full boxes and a large bag lugged down the stairs alone in the name of charity; outgrown in size and mind but perhaps not totally in spirit.

And seven years’ worth of dust making consciousness a living hell.

This morning, I sat down blearily off of my five hours of sleep (6:30 to 11:30 AM? what?) and realized that I could songwrite again.

Not poetry. Songs. I haven’t been able to write songs since the end of 2006 when I was sufficiently dizzy with mental confusion. And even now I can only come up with verses here and there for completely different things. But it’s a start.

So what are you telling me, mind? Have I finally come off the cusp of emotional mindscrewing once more long enough to reach a center? And as a matter of fact, I think I have.

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Absolut Quartet appears to be one of the products of a creativity campaign sponsored by Absolut Vodka. The other is called Absolut Choir, but I suspect the proverbial choir is asleep, as it’s in Stockholm. Dubious origins notwithstanding, the Quartet is one of the most interesting phenomena I’ve had the privilege to observe. It is a real-time video feed of a machine in New York City that produces a unique 2-3-minute long musical piece with wine glasses and ping pong balls on wooden musical planks based off of a short inputted melody. Both the impressive machine itself and the Internet interactivity are flooring. A YouTube video demonstrating its prowess is featured on the front page.

Having placed myself in the queue, I started at 16th place with a good 50-something minutes of waiting time but impatient people have been leaving the queue and I’m now 12th with 37 minutes to go. I have all the patience of an extremely bored university student at early hours of the morning, so I don’t see myself leaving soon.

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I don’t know if that’s a word. I’m not sure I care terribly much. I have a life-changing midterm exam in 45 minutes that I haven’t really studied anywhere near adequately for and instead of worrying about it, I’m listening to music, troubled by the possible symbolism that’s entirely in my head of a dream I woke from this morning with the kind of jolt only a malfunctioning Circadian rhythm can bring about. I am running fingers through my hair across my scalp, wondering at the way my ponytail has miraculously fallen into a wistful repose that belongs on the cover of an indie album. Or is it my mind that is wistful, and wishful? I am thinking about the necessity of self-reliance, of being my own anchor, of tossing aside my misconceptions about friendship and relationship here and now but not anywhere else because I trust myself anywhere but in this place at this time. I mentally shift a gold disc marked “importance” from one tower of Hanoi called People to another called Living. It is smaller than the disc it rests atop.

It is time I stopped imposing my thoughts and worries on others. It is time I grabbed my loose rope and stopped trying to tie it to another person. It is time I embraced the dearth of constants in life. It is time I stopped typing and saying and it is long past time to start doing.

Perhaps, however, I should have studied.

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[re: Eliot Spitzer: a friend of mine said it the best-- politics is Hollywood for uglier people.]

There is a little vertical line flashing at me from the screen and with each equally timed flicker, I fall further and further from sense.

Creative writing exercises. If I get the little mindworms and mindwords out, perhaps it’ll give me more room to think and concentrate.

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Right, enough of the fluffy personal posts. A dear friend and sister of mine and her inquisitive comment-ers have been raising an interesting debate about objective and subjective morality recently. We have an atheist or two, an undefined person or two, and a fairly devout Christian adding to the intellectual cake batter and the end result leaves an interesting taste.

As was noted, the distinction between objective and subjective morality is fairly clean-cut. The former assumes that there is a set moral or ethical truth in existence (which we may or may not be entirely conscious of; this raises one point of contention) completely transcendent of our own influence or personal experiences, and the latter assumes that morality is a product of what we ourselves think and believe. Or, as my friend puts it,

OBjective morality implies that ethical truths are independent of personal beliefs or situations, while SUBjective morality is dependent.

This is reasonable enough. It’s the support of one side or another that makes things messy. I am in no position to rehash what’s already been said and the many excellent arguments that have been made (I sincerely recommend reading the comments of the linked post) but I’ve found two cents of loose input change in the back of my mind. Pardon me while I take a deep breath to address my own position.

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-you shouldn’t seek that which wasn’t meant to be sought.

-you should be wary of trusting anyone you’ve known less than a year.

-journals are private.

-I am still naive.

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Solitary, excruciatingly boring duty post on work study shift at dining hall.

People-watching at its finest.

K, the girl who I spoke to the first week of school. Always wears a forced smile; no one notices. I do. She and I have talked a few times. She never remembers my name. I wish her the best because there’s no helping someone who doesn’t want to be helped. A and T (ha), the sophomore couple who I first met separately as I made the audition circles of the a cappella groups I didn’t, then, know were so notoriously elitist; she was in the group whose callback I accepted; he in the group whose callback I desired most and did not get. They are notoriously elitist. They are frosty. They are heartwarming to watch. I smile as they walk past, she half a head taller than him, alto and tenor, unlikely and amusing pair. They know each other better than the other does. S, the perpetually frazzled but always smiling one, gorgeous and tall for being who she is, too many responsibilities. My entire hallway, it seems, files past where I stand in a cliquey procession, calling greetings and joking about perpetually standing here.

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