Bloggage

Just something that comes along on the journey of life

[maywu]

Guess

Recently I reviewed old photos of N and I and I realized two things: that what was once an entire relationship with all of its particular idiosyncrasies was nothing more than a collection of two dimensional snapshots, and that there had always been hints of unhappiness that could be read between the lines of how few photos there were of the two of us over the span of three years.

I had predicted this end (see below).

[maywu]

When he spoke with sweet intent

I choked and tasted heartbreak in the back of my mouth,

Crashing waves, coldness coursing through me,

The chill of an electric shock,

And the absurd desire to impale myself with his affection

[maywu]

At the end I asked them what their biggest takeaways were and ____ rambled about how it helped break down the mess in her head into smaller chunks and how she was better able to understand certain things. She looked a bit dazed as she finished her self assessment and turned her head in _____’s direction, “Do you agree with me?”

I interrupted, “I don’t think this is about agreeing since that’s your opinion.”

_____ ignored me and looked intently at _____ who avoided her gaze, “so you agree with me? Do you understand me?” Met with no response and his gaze still firmly glued to his open palms, she repeated the questions again and I looked away. It sounded like “do you love me?”

[maywu]

Weirdly enough, I kind of relish heartbreak. It validates my humanity. It makes me kitsch in the best way possible. It’s an uncomfortable place to be in and discomfort breeds creativity.

[maywu]

mood

[maywu]

feelings are not about good or bad, it's just what is.

[maywu]

pessimism

and there are terrible people out there to get you, to try and catch you in the worst of times. The ones that don't care about your welfare, who only seek to benefit from your downfall

[maywu]

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

sylvia p., the bell jar

[maywu]

There's no such thing as bad weather, only sad people.

[maywu]

infatuation

Infatuation is painful. The word itself conjures images of hearts pumped to bursting point with spiritual glee, painfully pressing against the pressures of the earthly confines of one’s ribcage. The high it releases may just be the feeling of oxygen deprivation from holding your breath for too long in their presence. Side effects may include irrational thinking and beliefs in superhuman tendencies to make the impossible possible.

[maywu]

some excerpts from china

The oppressive heat, short leash on tempers, "that's the nine headed beast of Wuhan. They say the heat is so bad that everyone just wants to fight." A crowd was forming around the indignant shouts that came from a quickly escalating minor squabble.

Taciturn taxi driver who only answered half of my mothers faltering questions and responded to the rest with aggressive maneuvers.

A plastic marionette sat in the toll booth with fuschia lips permanently stretched into a thin smile and nostrils that flared pleasantly as she reached out an open hand. Cash exchanged, she recited a welcome phrase through her practiced mien.

The muggy heat that spread everywhere even in the luggage stuffed taxi with the ac blasting at full. It permeated the glass and was sucked into our widened pores.

Gradient skies that went from a dusty periwinkle and drained down to a fluffy light gray. The clouds that fleeced the skies merged and became indistinguishable from the blurry smog that lingered around the colorful buildings in contrast.

Greedy mosquitoes

The uneven path through the shrubbery led to a flat half moon plaza meant for exercising. Two boys halfway to becoming men dribbled a basketball between themselves, a thin layer of sweat slicked their skeletal chests. In the dim yellow lighting, outstretched hands reached upwards strobing the yellow lights as couples twirled and swayed in unison to the metallic tin of prerecorded calm chanting. A small class of 5/6 went through the steps while a seasoned couple waltzed through the steps hand in hand, theirs a true love, practiced and graceful. Always moving in sync to the fluctuations of the music up until the end where they lowered their raises arms and walked away hand in hand.

Jade green water still except for the ripples our skipping stones made.

The placid river's stillness hid the life underneath. Schools of baby fish crisscrossed right below the surface and the larger fish that dwell deep in the water were indistinguishable from the rocks they fed from except for when their scales caught the light and gave away their position with fleeting flashes of silver.

Humid air heavy with different scents: fragrant jasmine, heady incense, the light musk of evaporating perspiration, pungent bird droppings. "Xiao xing ah," my dad pointed at a fresh pile barely containing the chortle from his voice.

Narrow, cobbled alleyways that wove intricately between the high walls of the ancient town and my dad nimbly picking his way just like the young boy in his memories.

Sun-shrunken locals stared from the eaves of the shade, motionless except for the whites of their eyes not even bothering to swat away the flies that

"Open it," I said as Adam just stood their listlessly. Gelatinously, his arm made its way through the palpable heat and pulled the handle and—plop plop—two spindly legged insects similar to grasshoppers dropped out from under the door handle. Petrified with fright, they lay on the ground clumsily entangled in their own limbs as we stared back at them curiously.

It was a fun trip full of good food and peppered with good natured attempts from my relatives to get me drunk. We were seated around the rudimentary table, busy shoveling food into our mouths as Hong Hong yammered on, nosily asking children's questions as the adults tried to hush her to eat faster. Suddenly the crackling outside reached a breaking point and explosions began to sound in the air. Each resounding boom getting louder than the next and in unison the squabbling of the chickens rose in hysteria. "Haha, the chickens don't like the celebrations." "Wait, where's Nana*?" "She went to go drink beer at the festival!" Thirty minutes later, Nana swaggered in. "Did you eat?" "I got drunk."

Milky sky tinged with pastels ranging from burnt orange to dusty lilac, chalky periwinkle, rosy blush. The flamingo pink sun fought fiercely against the suffocation as it proudly left the sky but eventually was subdued by the haze. Low hanging red and white fireworks flickered above the roofs of houses in the distance.

There was an unbearable pressure from the collective humidity of 40 people exhaling in the bus. Every breath was a struggle, I could feel the hot breaths of the forty other passengers pushing mine back down my throat and stealing what oxygen could’ve been mine. Unable to sleep any longer I stirred uncomfortably, pulled back my hair from the sweat on my neck and searched for release from this muggy prison anxiously.

* grandma

[blushandbourbon]

Sometimes you fall off the wagon for months. Sometimes you tell yourself you’re gonna start fresh on Monday and by Wednesday you’ve already fallen back off. Sometimes you have to restart a 100 times and it’s frustrating. But it will be okay. You can do this. One day at a time

[maywu]

move out day

I wonder if writing is like riding. Riding a bicycle that is. With hands that ache to retrace past steps, shaking off the dreadful mental dust and gripping the worn yet rusted handlebars, I find myself struggling to get the gears going. Slowly, slowly, slipping my feet in place, figuring out the motions again. Crash. I find myself wobbling side to side too much and in no time the bike and I have lost balance.

All is well, it turns out that writing is not too different from riding a bike. After a few crashes, with a steadiness, the pattern of churning forward returns, reawakening forgotten muscle memory. It’s not too hard to ride it in a circle. Loop after loop I start to make, my sluggish speed riding constant. After a while I realize how ridiculous it is, going in circles with no direction to take and stop my pedaling. It’s not like I was going any faster, or heading anywhere. I don’t even know why I bothered trying again. I might as well go back inside and go back to my mindlessness or something.

I stuff the bike back into the shed, dust drifting angrily upwards in the air when I opened the door and slowly resettling back down giving the bike a slightly fuzzy coating.

[maywu]

In the gray dawn that puffed ghost-like about the windows of the theater and hugged its eaves I was sleeping with my head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their nights total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down—till they almost swept me away too. This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? 'Don't bother me, man, I'm happy where I am. You lost me one night in Detroit in August nineteen forty-nine. What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?'

Sal Paradise, Kerouac

[maywu]

'What do you want out of life?' I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. 'What [are you] aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?' She didn't know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

Sal Paradise, Kerouac

[maywu]

endless summer

Well, it happened. I graduated... The first hour of my big day I genuinely panicked that someone would stop me and tell me that I wasn't allowed to walk. It was so strange to be part of the celebrations, it felt so much bigger than just me--in the way an older sibling's oversized sweater feels. It felt like I was a bystander looking in who just happened to get lost looking for her seat and found herself in the midst of the chaos. I wonder how my parents felt. I don't think it has hit me yet that I have graduated. There is no next semester of school, no more putting off the real world. I am on the threshold, a ledge between college and the next step and time is slowly yet steadily pushing me closer to the edge, however ready or not I am to make the leap. With no job lined up, the next step is nothingness, a void, a purgatory of my endless summer. I can't see the bottom of this void and my terrible fear of heights has me paralyzed.

[maywu]

rant

It’s quite scary to realize how dependent on Google I am getting. Everything I need, any knowledge I want to know, I just need to tap away a few letters and hit the search button. It’s a reallocation of memory space and storage where I evacuate content from my brain and store it externally on the great Web instead.

What happens when I can’t access the Web? What if the server is down? Won’t I know nothing then because I have stored everything, my memory, my RAM on my computer. This storage space has been completely digitalized and there is no need to use my outdated hardware, my brain plainly speaking. Because instead my memories are broken down into thousands of pixels and trillions of bytes. Is this the process of the adoption of the digital age, where we become increasingly more dependent upon technology?