For the love of Beauvoir.

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself” 

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” 

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.” 

“Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.” 

“No one would take me just as I was, no one loved me; I shall love myself enough, I thought, to make up for this abandonment by everyone. Formerly, I had been quite satisfied with myself, but I had taken very little trouble to increase my self-knowledge; from now on, I would stand outside myself, watch over and observe myself; in my diary I had long conversations with myself. I was entering a world whose newness stunned me. I learned to distinguish between distress and melancholy, lack of emotion and serenity; I learned to recognize the hesitations of the heart, and its ecstasies, the splendor of great renunciations, and the subterranean murmurings of hope. I entered into exalted trances, as on those evenings when I used to gaze upon the sky full of moving clouds behind the distant blue of the hills; I was both the landscape and its beholder: I existed only through myself, and for myself… My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.” 

Painful/Pain-free.

Sitting in the shade of today's weather is perfect. It's too windy in a good way. My eyes are still half swollen shut after watching 'Earthlings' at 3am in the day. It's tiring how human we are.

"Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and brutal taking of life". That's what our lives are; appetite over suffering, fashion over pain, death over life. We don't own life, we are a part of it. Why have we forgotten? Why do we not care?

I still feel sadness, I still feel despair, I still feel a bone-trembling anger. I want you to feel it too, I want you to be skinned alive (fur), boiled alive (food), burned alive (medical investigation). I want you to hang from hooks upside down with your heart flooding in spills of blood from your throat. I want you to watch your child, your baby, die like this, and for all family and other friends. I want you to writhe, to scream, to shake and collapse because you are more suffering than anything else. I want to throw blunt spears into your flesh and neglect you of hygiene, of space, of shelter, of food and water. I want to inflict pain on you and foster for deformities and disease. I want you to become a cannibal in your own desperation and bite on the flesh that is as much yours as it is mine. I want you I want you I want you to only know death for as long as you have life. We are humans. We make connections to love but we also make war. But I trust the poison we feed them will be the same poison that kills us and in no manner that is soft, quiet and quick, but one of no anesthesia and complete suffering. That's when we can start talking about equality.


*Dick Gregory

The Issue of Being Serious.

Sometime at the end of last year I began to blog in a different voice. I slashed most of the tiresome metaphors and started to use efficient words (i.e. instead of saying "my insides are preparing for bloody baby making" I now say something more like "I have my period"). While my heart aches to continue my excessive syntax, I realised I started to concentrate more on the way I like to talk rather than what I would like to talk about. That's an important distinction. Now admittedly, my tone of voice sounds a lot more serious which to many, carries negative shadowings. Today I was told - "You look so serious, it makes me worry", to which I replied "Why is serious a bad thing?". (But anyway that could've just been cause I was reading about the psychology of suicidal notes Clicky Click if you happen to be curious too.) I get that being serious can relate to sadness and anger and other things that make the boots heavy but how can you extend upon conversations without a level of seriousness? It took me pretty long to realise I was overusing adjectives and metaphors in the same way people do with humour. 

I'm uncomfortable - Ha!
I don't know how to talk to you - Ha!
That was racist/sexist/ageist/offensive etc. - Ha!  
I'm unsure of what just happened/is happening - Ha!
I can't even describe my own thoughts, ideas or feelings - Ha!
I really have no idea who you are or for that matter, who I am - Ha! 

Basically, a lot of 'Let's talk about things without actually talking about them so that we remain sure of ourselves by being ambiguous and seemingly knowledgable! I realised it came down to vulnerability and that inevitable insecurity we wish wouldn't transcend our screens into the virtual public sphere. It was a subconscious decision to halt getting lost in translating my internal thought to external expression. While this new change understands the idea that [serious = boring], I think personally, being more serious has extended a whole new space for interest. I enjoy doing things seriously, from reading peer reviewed articles daily (not really a part of the nerd trend but plainly curious enough to get educated) to enjoying classical music to having serious conversations about serious issues that impact on a larger scale than me and/or my friends/family to listening to slam poems to of course, writing serious blogs. 

Oxford dictionary says:

Serious


1. Demanding or characterized by careful consideration or application  
2. Acting or speaking sincerely and in earnest, rather than in a joking or half-hearted manner
3. Significant or worrying because of possible danger or risk; not slight or negligible
4. Substantial in terms of size, number, or quality

To me, it seems most of the things I do that are serious entail a quietness, sometimes literally but mostly metaphorical (for the opportunity to think), and that's something I've really come to appreciate. 

Anyway, I am off to manufacture Z's. Night, y'all. 

Intruder, Intruder!

"The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvellous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one. This is only be expected. It is, after all, wholly man-made. And it does not have the confidence in its own various preachings even to allow coexistence between different faiths"

(Christopher Hitchens)

* "The Milky Way from the Uludag National Park in Turkey. The stunning natural spectacle hangs above manmade pockets of light from the towns and villages below." Tun Tezel/Royal Observatory

'I share therefore I am'

“Texting, emails, posting. All of these things let us present ourselves as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete. We get to retouch face, voice, flesh, body. Not too little, not too much, just right. Human-relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology.”

(Sherry Turkle)

For a long time, I have felt that this text of controlled spacing, backspace buttons and immediate thesauruses (sounds like a clever dinosaur) are like little islands that create lands made of only footpaths. It feels unauthentic. I feel unathentic. There is no doubt that when we are texting and typing we try so very hard to let ourselves show through. Perhaps choose a different font type, add an emoticon or punctuate with a little onomatopoeia. But spell checks remain reminders and immediacy is subject to ourselves and only ourselves. We control the time we can use to craft a sentence. Texting serves narrow purpose and should remain within such constraints but it's growing, has grown, and doesn't cease in fragmenting ideas and ourselves. We're untraining ourselves, we can no longer listen or talk, we can't bear silence, we don't understand how to be ourselves irrelative to other people. We need the opportunity to say the wrong thing, we need the opportunity to be unconsidered, we need to be real. I don't doubt that many a meaningful conversation has (for me), occurred over the space of a LCD screen, but my words feel borrowed and my thoughts, processed. There are times when this is great, of course. Like if your friend has an annoying voice, or if you're in the middle of an argument that calls for google support. I'll admit I've never felt the availability of education to be so wonderfully accessible but it still remains that this kind of interaction doesn't require communication. Lubricants might be a trusty invention for many but let's not lubricate all of our words and experience it all a little more naturally, and be a little rougher on ourselves (sexual innuendo intended).

Worry about how it works.

I do appreciate a quality vlog or fifty.

Jelly babies.

The wonderful thing about children is that they are yet to know how wonderful they are and will become, that they still have no clue how much wonderful is in this world. To them, there is so much that is dormant, quietly waiting to be woken, shaken, made alive. To children, the world is endless wonder. They question and chase, wide eyes filled with a skin of hunger adults have long ago shed. There is not an instant they are not learning and eager for such learning; repetition has not yet clung to them like the words in my sentences do. They carry hands with muscles readied for captures and never passive palms. Their miniature minds and bodies form new memory production lines, experience everything without a history that burdens. Instead it is new and vividly fresh, like waking to the smell of good baking permeated into your pillow. The worlds of children are made of possibility never permanency. To me, there is nothing more exciting than being a helping hand in their discovery, as they grow and grow and grow to become another near impossible coincidence of wonderful.