Weeds

In a past conversation, I was telling my friend about how I was having a hard time trying to fix certain habits and she likened such bad habits to weeds.

We are constantly cultivating ourselves into the person we aspire to be.

We enter into periods of our lives where we plant (willfully or unintentionally) weeds. They're very obviously bad for you and they will continue to come back.

I have many many weeds.

Even if I've reduced them, I still have a long way to go.

I suppose I should be celebrating my progress, but it's still depressing knowing that there's a lot more to go and even more depressing when I realize that I've created so many weeds to begin with.

Ugh. I hate how incompetent I am as an adult.

Censorship

Even in writing, I have issues.

So often times, especially when I'm tired, stressed, or just in general distracted, I have a tendency not to contextualize and make very little sense.

*fly buzzes by*

"How annoying!"

(at this point, me and whoever I'm with could be doing anything: shopping, eating, walking around, watching a movie, etc.)

So I make no sense.

I realize I do that in writing too and it makes no sense whatsoever. -_-;;

Basically if people know me and know where I'm coming from, it's fine but if not, then it can be problematic.

I rarely have ill-intent behind what I'm saying. I just don't. But so often it can be perceived that way. It's not a good thing. X.x Well, I like to think that I've gotten a lot better and contextualizing myself to other people so that I pay at least a little more attention to what I'm saying/doing. ^^;; heh

A questionable paradox

My feet are cold but I hate wearing socks.

The seemingly paradoxical states of life really aren't all that paradoxical.

I just don't like how socks feel.

When one's feet are cold, the obvious solution is to wear socks, but another solution (though less energy-efficient) is to turn up the heat. Or turn on a space heater.

What I often do is wear longer pants that I can wrap my toes in.

It only seems paradoxical because of the implied single solution.

There are always other solutions, and with those solutions, other factors to weigh in.

So often, money is the largest determining factor but I would like to think that one of the bigger things I take into consideration is quality of life. And beyond quality, depth.

There is definitely something poignant about knowingly (and willingly (willfully?)) doing something that may not be the "right" or "best" choice. Or perhaps is the "right" or "best" choice, but is also the most difficult to do.

Ugh, I must say though, I don't like what Kerouac does to my writing. Or perhaps it's simply my thinking. As Kerouac's writing is muddled, so does my thinking become so. Ew.

The anticipation of the destination

it's the imagination that leads to the creation
of jubilation
at the place of termination
the manifestation of the speculation
hallucination?
are seldom of any adequation that meets expectation
this miscalculation leads to depression

Wordplay! Hehe.

Yes, yes, I know it's horrible, but it's fun nonetheless. Oh, thesaurus.com, you are a fun resource. :)

But what I want to get at is that sometimes (a lot of the times, for some people, it seems) is that in trying to imagine how something is or how something will turn out, they set themselves up for failure. They wanted X, Y, Z but only a derivation of X happens and there is disappointment.

However, rather than talk about expectations, false hopes, disappointments, and all that boring stuff (it's a hackneyed discussion for me), I want to talk about how interesting and awesome the imagination is.

To create a reality that has not happened to the point where a person derives some kind of truth from it; that is how powerful the imagination is. That's amazing.

In line with my candyland oasis blog entry (I do like that one), as long as one is aware that they are in the realm of the imagination, it's fine. It's when the imagination bleeds into reality without the person knowing that it becomes dangerous, if only because the person creates a false sense of happiness that does not exist in circumstances outside themselves.

Music

I like crisp notes and melodies that can be isolated from harmonies. But I also like how each sound meshes together to create a uniform whole.

I like music. :)

Academic Writing

So I like my voice. I don't mean my physical voice but my writing voice. It makes sense to me and I think it's pretty interesting.

However, I realized that my writing changes in an academic setting. I don't like it. I think I try too hard or something. When I read it, it feels kind of like constipation. Or rather, when I write, it feels like constipation. The words just don't come out and when it does, something still doesn't feel right.

I re-read an old research paper I did (I think the first one I ever wrote, which was sadly, pretty recently). It's actually pretty decent. It follows all the really boring conventions of how an essay should be (it's not that organic in flow, but it works pretty well, in my opinion - like the topic sentences and all that). But when I was trying to edit it after I wrote it (and after I more or less made it flow and edited the more glaring mistakes), I was at a loss as to where to start because I didn't like how I wrote it. I suppose I just didn't like my strategy behind it or something and I wanted to rewrite the whole thing. Reading it now, I don't think I need to.

Perhaps the reason I had such difficulty with that paper was that it didn't actually say exactly what I was thinking. The point I was trying to make and the way the paper kind of came out were two different things.

I suppose my point is that I want to somehow mesh the two types of writing together.

The type of writing I do for this blog is pretty free. I just kind of write whatever the heck comes to mind and I just go at it. I try to present my ideas in a logical way - at least what works in my logic, but there's some editing (though I go back and read some entries and cringe at my typos...) but for the most part, it's relatively coherent at the first or second draft and I usually keep it - especially because it conveys (for the most part) what I'm trying to get at.

I wonder if it has something to do with the actual freedom in the parameters of a blog. I can write whatever I want, however I want and there's really no consequence.

Academic papers, if they go to a larger community of scholars (e.g. the paper is publish in some kind of hoity-toity journal), have consequences. If you mess up, there's ridicule. In classes, if you don't do well, you get a bad grade. And so on and so forth.

I suppose what it comes down to is that I don't seem to do too well under pressure. Yet interestingly enough, I still get decent grades (I don't mean that in a braggy way as much as this fact surprises me most of the time - though I do want to clarify that it's not the "I-half-assed-this-paper-and-got-an-A" but the "I-wasn't-satisfied-with-how-this-paper-turned-out-but-I-got-a-good-grade" kind of thing). I mean don't get me wrong - I do try with these papers. It's just that the result is not the picture I have in my head.

I think that my sense of my own writing is kind of off-kilter. I don't know if I'm a good writer or not. I suppose if I'm good to me, that's all that matters (at least by this era's philosophy) but is it really? I'm trying to create a career out of not necessarily my writing, but out of the thoughts that my writing enables me to do, so I suppose I should care more and I still don't know where I stand exactly. I suppose I can keep plugging along and hope that I'm not doing so bad.

And I suppose with that I can go into this huge long discussion about pride and humility but we'll save that for another day.

Bubbles

I feel like I'm in my own world sometimes (and people outside of me have confirmed this) because sometimes, I'm still in the world of whatever I'm reading. Sometimes, it may be something as simple as a newspaper article or a blog. Other times, it's the world of the books I'm reading and yet other times, it's the anime that I'm watching.

Kind of like how I mentioned in a previous post that I'm influenced by the anime I watch, or by... well just about anything, I realize too that if I get pulled into a world and its way of thinking, I see the rest of my world as such. I think it happens to a lot of people but they're just better at contextualizing where they're coming from.

For me, sometimes, I'll be in the middle of thinking a thought relative to the lens of the world I'm in and I'll say something that only makes sense relative to that world.

I suppose it really isn't a world. A context, perhaps?

Anyway, it makes me highly misunderstood and quite unfortunately, my sister is often the one who has to decode what I'm trying to say (not because she understands me more than others, though this is true as well, but by mere proximity, she is forced to hear my random nonsensical musings and try to make meaning out of them).

For example, we'll be driving somewhere and we'll pass by a billboard that has something mildly amusing. We'll have just finished a conversation about coffee or food or something unrelated and suddenly, (as if she too is seeing and thinking the same thing I am), I'll say, "That's funny."

Which means absolutely nothing to her because we were talking about something that wasn't at all funny.

She'll look at me questioningly and I'll have to backtrack and explain to her what I saw and why I thought it was funny.

This happens quite often.

I feel like at large though, this is probably the source of most miscommunication. We understand things differently, and live in different worlds, or bubbles, I suppose you could call them. Contexts would be another word.

Because of this, we are constantly trying to translate what the other person says. I don't mean those moments when you're trying analyze what a person meant when they said that they were feeling fine when they clearly weren't. Even the day to day interactions with people, the "have a nice day!" and the "thank you!" may also have different weights and meanings.

I suppose because of all this, tone, inflection and accompanying actions are so important. Yet this too requires translation - there's the whole culture thing. America, with its nuances of culture, rather than homogeneity is why sometimes this translation becomes muddled.

So the conclusion is, dealing with people is a pain in the ass. Heh.

Is Shakespeare really who he said he is?

So there have been debates about Shakespeare's identity. That his name was a pen name and that he was really a Baron of sorts or the Queen or something and I don't mean to discount the scholarly work out there that has been found to support this.

But I think that William Shakespeare could have easily been who he said he was. That is, he came from a working-class family and made himself famous. I mean we have so many of those stories now, why couldn't those stories have existed then? I suppose the whole thing about upward mobility being more difficult, access to education and all that is a viable argument, but then again, isn't the argument simply showing that it's more difficult, but not impossible?

It makes the a lot of sense, actually, that Shakespeare was from a lower-class background because he was closer to human nature (I have this rose-colored vision that nobles masked their humanity in cloaks of manners and traditions). Or I would have assumed that he saw a lot more of how evil or bad people could be.

Not only that, he worked in entertainment. And speaking of his comedies, some of the most acute observations about society and its downfalls; some of the most jarring insights into human nature are done by comedians. I feel like comedians sometimes are the most aware of the world and its dirtiness, its problems and its barrenness. Instead of despair, they choose to laugh at it and to point out the follies of society and of human nature.

By that same token (though I'm using a reductio ad absurdum argument), by saying that Shakespeare, because his work is so brilliant, could have only been nobility is the same as saying that only nobility, or to translate to modern times, the rich, is capable of any kind of poignant and intellectual insight that is worth keeping over the decades.

I suppose at the time, it makes sense that they were more likely - they had the free time and the economic freedom to do so. Yet if one's occupation asks one to be creative and to appeal to a large audience that spans more than one class of people, wouldn't it make sense that with the education that he's been exposed to (Shakespeare had an elementary education, where he studied Chaucer and Homer among others), he would be able to utilize past knowledge and present experience to create what we now celebrate as masterpieces?

Well, regardless of who he really is, it doesn't change the fact that his stuff is pretty gosh-darn good.

A city is poetic

I mean there's the obvious - it's got nuances and moments of beauty that are only appreciated with one looks closely enough and chooses to focus on such moments or such nuances.

But E.B. White put it so well:

"A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines."

He's talking, of course, of New York City and to me, NYC is the epitome of American cities.

Yet all cities have their own poetry and it's beautiful to see.

The city, whose poetry is the most apparent for me, is Tokyo. It's got the fusion of nature and city - where the plants don't look like they're choked by the waste and smog of the city. Walking around Tokyo, listening to Nujabes and all of a sudden, I realize his music makes a lot more sense.

And it's beautiful.