February 2012
7 posts
That awkward moment when a college acceptance feels less exciting because your mother just told you that you’re a crappy daughter.
Meh. 200 miles and a dozen oranges later, I'm...
“Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest...”
– Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer (via word-collector)
I get so angry. I get so upset and tense and frustrated when people use God as a scapegoat to their own ignorance, when people are so shallow and judgemental and hypocritical that they’d rather make misinformed assertions than open their mind to a changing world, an evolving world, a broadening world.
Prop 8 went through the 9th Circuit today. The courts held the decision that the Prop...
January 2012
11 posts
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all...”
– Jorge Luis Borges (via philphys)
I used to imagine terrain, harsh and rocky, that you would climb over, oceans and mountains that spanned the miles between us. I used to wish you’d come barreling in the front door, panting and exhausted, fighting to be here. I remember closing my eyes, trying to remember a man that was strong, stable, dedicated.
Now, I wonder if you ever think of the birthdays you’ve missed or...
I dropped it. All of it. It splattered across the floor in a delusion of self-preservation and then crawled into the man at my right. It leaked out my eyes and left stains on the palms of my hands. It tripped up my feet and bruised my knees. When I called out, it hung in the air between my gasps, flying and floating up, up, and up.
I think I'm going to go puke now.
It’s passed midnight. The phone connects, tangled through street corners and freeway on-ramps, from three hundred miles of string to the end of a styrofoam cup. You press against the other side, but most of my words get stuck at the bottom, warped and ripped apart in all the footsteps they’ve already traveled. My exhales are lost in my inhales and the ends of my eyelashes pull with...
For generations, my family has been moving, from China to Singapore, from Singapore to the United States. The destination has changed, but the intent, motivation, and desire has continued. It remains to be a means of spreading and expanding, growing and advancing. Now, as a teenager in the States, my aspirations mirror that. I don’t have my own family to protect or a freedom that’s been...
Cry, she told me, it hurts less.
Pulling the tears
from my eyes and filling
her own. A transparent masking of makeshift.
Fight, she told me, it hurts less.
A tickle in my toes, aggressive
and violent against the beating
of my footsteps. I run.
Love, she told me, it hurts less.
She told me with her fist
around my heart, pumping and bleeding,
spreading myself in the spaces
...
“The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.”
– Charles Bukowski (via nevver)
December 2011
2 posts
One day, we’ll just drive. We won’t know where we’re going, and if there’s any destination at all, we’ll never know if we get there. Every thing we pass will be a notch on the bedpost, a stepping stone, a friendly, traveler’s greeting. And then, maybe we’ll just stop. Park. Decide this is where we’re supposed to be.
Maybe it’ll be in the middle of the country with a field on one side and...
November 2011
10 posts
“Excuse me,” he said. Excuse me, as though he’s done something wrong. It’s polite, of course. But it’s more than that. It’s a mask, an insecurity, a safety. ”Excuse me,” I need you to repeat that. I watched as he took steps back, forward, to the side. They each had a purpose, not all belonging to his own. One for him, one for Justin, one for...
I just submitted my UC application. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I think I’m going to be sick.
“I like your pants,” she told me.
They were red. Bright red and corduroy. They didn’t fit me like they should have and, from the side, could almost resemble a clown costume. These pants were loud. Coupled with the floral top I was wearing, they were pretty far off from anything dubbed “fashion” in the latest magazines. But that didn’t matter much. They were 75 cents at the local thrift...
I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m running around all these people in my life. They’re all standing in the middle, waiting for me to make a straight line and I can’t do anything but circle.
I have issues. Real, honest committment issues. I don’t get it. I don’t want it. I don’t need it. It’s horrifyingly awful that I don’t...
October 2011
5 posts
I’m falling into the hole in the ground, diving, jumping. It doesn’t have a depth. There is no bottom, but the walls fit perfectly around me, cementing me in this place so that I never slip. I am an edition onto its very being. I am meant to be here. It was built so that I am here. When it breathes, I feel it. I feel the shudder, the contraction. It grows, shrinks, constructs,...
Clovis East High School. A classmate in AP Lit speaks up on the other side of the room. He makes a comment and the scope of his vocabulary credits him in the ears of the class. With the teacher’s nod of approval, he continues. She is grateful only that someone has taken the “risk” of speaking aloud. Here, in Clovis, California, we are traditional, we are conservative, and we are suburbia....
Pathedy of Manners - Ellen Kay At twenty she was brilliant and adored, Phi Beta Kappa, sought for every dance; Captured symbolic logic and the glance Of men whose interest was their sole reward. She learned the cultured jargon of those bred To antique crystal and authentic pearls, Scorned Wagner, praised the Degas dancing girls, And when she might have thought, conversed instead. She hung up her...
“Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no examples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, everything with an end that exists outside that thing, i.e., I want to sell this, or I want this to make me famous and...
I am different. 365 sleeps, and I am so different. It’s October, again.
September 2011
3 posts
I just wanted to say that Saturday was the best day I’ve had in a really long time. It was simple, in a good way. Sometimes I get tired of things being difficult and complex. Everything always has to mean something, has to be interpreted, and analysed, and looked into. I love analysis, don’t get me wrong. But sometimes things get so picked apart and worked through that they stop being....
Sarcasm. Sexual Innuendos. Blah.: I hurt, I'm... →
I just wanted to tell you that I get it. I know what it’s like to be disconnected from people, to be alone, to be rejected and cynical and angsty. I even understand what it’s like to not understand. To not get it. To really, truly be confused. Because you know what? We’re good fucking people, right? We’re attractive and intelligent and funny and confident, so why the...
August 2011
6 posts
Letters are nonsense. Sound. The back static of a radio. And they mean nothing until they’re put together. There’s this sound on my tongue, and it means to tell you something, anything, a creation. It means to give you an idea, grab your own mind and insert it into mine. It’s sitting on my tongue, trying to be spoken, but I feel like it might slip off. I feel like the...
“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the...”
– J.D. Salinger (via nevver)
I have this hole in my head that only digs when I know I’ve done something wrong, something vulgar, something impure. I have this pain at the end of my toes that curls into my heels when I think about my oversight.
It hinders me from walking, setting my foot down, advancing to another state. It grips at the end of my legs and begins to burrow into the floor, cementing me in place. I...
There’s something to say about a place that changes your definition of comfort in just a month. COSMOS 2011 was not a summer program, a camp, or a school. It was a home, a sanctuary, and a confidant. COSMOS 2011 was an honest experience, one that will always be considered a turning point in the line of who I was to who I know I will be.
I walked onto the UC Santa Cruz campus with...
July 2011
2 posts
Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the...
word-collector:
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
(submitted by: http://paintedrosesinaloveletter.tumblr.com/)
June 2011
9 posts
“I thought about all the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how...”
– Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
God, I feel like shit today.
5 Days
I used to count the days after. Now I’m counting the days until.
We all leave.
