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Random myosa and notes #2

Today at the groceries I looked at some pickled cucumbers. They were arranged horizontally in a deep white dish with the pickle juice. They were stacked in somewhat of a rectangular pyramid, numbering about twenty or so. When I looked at them, I noticed that one half of the cucumbers were quite yellow while the other half was dark green. I pointed this out to my mother and she said that normal cucumbers are like that. Somehow I had never noticed this. When she said that I thought back and realized that she’s right. When I peeled cucumbers, when I ate cucumbers, when I ate cucumbers, I returned my thoughts to them and recalled that indeed that the cucumbers were divided in color.

As I was in the grocery store, music played. From the overhead speakers. This is pretty much common and standard nowadays, to go to a store, a cafe, or even everywhere: we have earbuds. We’ve grown up in an era where music plays in the background. Even from when we are babies music played from the car radio, from rides at the amusement park, even kindergartens. However, this is such a common invention. Fifty years back, hundred years back, music was a luxury to hear so freely. The only music you could hear was from singing, tapping on rhythms, or somebody playing an instrument at a festival. Somehow, I don’t think that means that people walked in silence if they walked alone though. They probably heard so much more than us. They probably heard the sweet songs of the birds, and ruffles of leaves against the wind, or the soft puffy sounds snow makes when it falls. What we might call noise now, may have been music to them then. 

Somehow it makes me think that music was probably more well appreciated in the past, exactly because it was such a commodity. Listening to music had to be such an intent action; you had to go to listen to music, or you had to be the one singing back and forth in the field as you pulled out weeds. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps due to our more widespread exposure of music, we appreciate the nooks and crannies of music more. I’ll have to think about this more, read about this more. I did see a book called “How music works” by this guy named David Bryne (at Urban Outfitters...I think?) in San Diego during May and I found it interesting. I didn’t buy it, but I liked the book. It talked about how commercialization has made music a more “sacrosanct” entity and how in the past it was very common for people (in Europe) to play instruments, because people couldn’t listen to music unless somebody close to them played it!

Buddhism says that all agony derives from greed. The basic tenet of Buddhism (at least early Buddhism) is to give up desire. However, isn’t the desire to give up desire a desire of its own? I’m sure there are theological and philosophical answers well studied to this question. All religions inherently have oxymorons. 

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Everyday myosa #1 (and stream of consciousness musings)

Everyday myosa #1 (and stream of consciousness musings)

묘사(描寫) [묘ː사]: description, portrayal, portrait, depiction; delineation, describe, portray, depict; delineate

 I transferred onto the subway line 3 from line 6. Despite it being lunchtime, the train was more packed than I anticipated, and I got squeezed next to two Japanese women. I didn’t know they were Japanese at first though. They were facing away from me (although not intentionally, at least I hope). I only found out that they were Japanese because they started speaking to one another. I looked over to one of the girl’s iPhone. Perhaps I have a bad habit of looking at stranger’s phones on the subway, but I do it anyways. I tend not to look at my own screen, and in turn somehow end up looking at others’ screens… whether it be messages, facebook, mobile games, etc.

           Tangents aside, I looked at the woman’s screen. (I said tangents aside but here arises another aside from my stream of consciousness: whether to call this person a woman or a girl. She was probably of my age. Is it sex related? That is, would I say guy or man? I would probably say guy. Are the binary opposites guy and girl? Definitely wouldn’t call them a boy if it was a person of my age. But boy and girl are used as binary opposites. Does this mean that the more grown-up version of the word, “girl,” is a diminutive and sexist term in some kind of notion?) She was looking at what I assumed to be an app showing her the subway times. I couldn’t read anything, surprisingly, though; usually I know the station names in Chinese and I thought they would use the same characters in Japanese but perhaps they simplify it. In any case I couldn’t read it, although maybe I was just too far away. But the orange color on the screen matched that of the orange of the line 3 color. She flipped through some other apps, one of which was Line – the predominant messenger app for the Japanese. She flipped through another app that I didn’t recognize.

           As I write this, I wonder if this is too stream of consciousness or pointless to the degree that it is hard for people to understand. This kind of writing lacks any organization. And it has no point. I am just writing about everyday things, pinpointing a very mundane and nearly useless tidbit that I saw and write it here. Why am I writing this? I’m not sure. I told somebody that I had nothing interesting in my life, and they replied that I should just say mundane things. Somehow I thought that was a good idea, and I’ve been doing it. Selfishly, practicing writing out very specific details will probably make me a better creative writer.

Still, these micro-observations I still consider for the most part just “noise.” It actually reminds me of Baroque music, like Bach. Musical instruments like the harpsichord of the time could not sustain notes for a long time; they just “plucked.” So, in order to “fill the sound,” composers often included many ornaments and trills. I wonder if these everyday mundane details are something that could fill the sound amongst the rather long silences between any blogs I write, not that I should write any to begin with or that I should have them on a regular pace. It’s an entertaining prospect at least.

However, somehow at the same time feel wrong writing this at all and posting this at all at a time where shit is going down in the world and people are suffering and people I know are suffering and instead of trying to help more I’m just cozy in my room just writing about two random Japanese women and one of their phones I saw in the subway. I know I’m privileged, and I feel like I’m not doing anything with it. Just enjoying it and being comfortable and worrying about my own old musings.

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Anticipation

Anticipation

                 Tonight, after dinner, my mom asked me to play some songs she used to listen to when she was in high school. I found them on youtube, and played them for her. I suddenly began to think, how did she listen to music then, before even the era of cassette tapes? My mom told me that since her family didn’t have a record player that she had to listen to the radio for hours to hear a song the song she wanted to listen to.

               Just wait until hopefully the song pops up! I felt a little appalled. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to just a few touches on some glass screen and voilà, songs play so smoothly, but it took so much effort for my mom. But, my mom went on to tell me about the anticipation she felt when she was listening to a show that she thought would play the song. Turning the radio dial to the right frequency …waiting, waiting, waiting….and when the song came on, pure happiness.

               I took her words as nostalgic. However, I began to think of my own nostalgia. Were they any different? I sure felt a lot of anticipation about things that take mere seconds these days. Taking a photo on a disposable camera was a thrill; you wouldn’t know what you’d get until you went to the photo studio and asked them to develop the photos. When I called my friends’ home phones, I often tried to guess who’d pick up the phone. His mom? His dad? His sister? Would my friend actually pick up? Even as recent as four years ago, I remember my college acceptance. The acceptance letter came as mail, not as a portal decision, and I waited anxiously for the decision, whether good or bad, to come. I remember when I opened my mailbox one day, and when I saw a fat package inside my mailbox. Ripping the package open to the words “Congratulations” was one of the sharpest moments of ecstasy I’d ever had. I don’t think I had ever jumped up and down in happiness before then.

               As the world becomes an increasingly more informational and personalized world, I wonder if the sense of anticipation disappears from our society more and more. We don’t need to wait for mail from family and friends anymore. We can just video chat them at our convenience, maybe sometimes day by day. Back then, each letter was special, a part of us, and something to look forward to. But now, we don’t look forward to our messages as something hallow. That’s not to say that online messages are necessarily anything less valuable than letters, but it doesn’t seem too outrageous to think that we’d put more of our souls into a letter sailing across an ocean versus an instant facebook message.  

               I begin to wonder if nostalgia is remembering the little anticipations we used to feel. We always have little inconveniences around our lives, small struggles, that we often take for granted until something “fixes them.” These little inconveniences, however, could often build up excitement. Finally listening to a song you’d been waiting for hours. The gleeful resolution upon seeing a great photo come out of a black room. Finally receiving a package that you didn’t know when it’d come. The anticipations were inconvenient, but they made the results that much sweeter. Small things, small everyday things were all so much more triumphant, because you had to struggle for them.  And these small moments of victory are branded into our hearts as nostalgic, because they are our victories never to come again.

               I’ve always been a person to have trouble letting go of the past, and getting older isn’t really helping it, either. Not that I’m really that old at all, but I’m teaching a student now eight years younger than me, and I feel like a grandpa talking about floppy disks or home phones. Today, she needed to work on some vocab and I told her to look up some words from a book that we’re reading. Upon searching up a few words on Merriam-Webster, I asked her, have you ever used a dictionary before? A paper dictionary. And she told me that no, she hadn’t. I asked her if she knew how to use one, and she didn’t. I had expected the reply, but even still I found myself taken aback a little bit at her reply. While I don’t find looking up words in a dictionary all that nostalgic, last year, when my family was moving, I couldn’t throw away a thick defunct dictionary that I had. It was yellow and worn from use, from all the sleepless nights of my childhood tugged with novels and a mountain of words I didn’t know. But now, high schoolers, let alone younger children, have never really opened up the pages of a dictionary before. Never sifted through the smell of the dense pulp until they find their elusive word and learn something new. Finally understand the sentence of their book that made no sense without knowing a word.

               The rest of the night finished with the nostalgic waves of my parents crashing against modernity. My dad and mom alternated asking me to play songs from youtube, and I connected my phone to our speakers to play the songs for them.  They never hear the songs of their youth around, except for 12-2pm when a radio show host plays some pop songs from the 70’s and 80’s. But thanks to modernity, somehow, they can relive their memories at home, thrown back into a time when playing music from a phone seemed like an alien story.

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Writing personal things

When I look at some of my friends’ blogs, it strikes me how personal sometimes they write. If you’ve read my blog, you’ll see that mostly my blogs are detached, impersonal, and abstract to the level of being theoretical. Ironic considering that my first post that I decided to write was about being vulnerable.

It makes me wonder if I just don’t have much emotion or if I’m bad at delivering them. I’ve never been good at telling stories; I’m not sure if this is because my dad likes to tell stories and I’ve grown up always only listening, because I used to be (and still) shy and awkward, etc. Does telling stories have anything to do with telling your personal story though?

I also write really formally, even in my blogs and letters to people. Is that because of academia? When I was young, I used to read a lot, and my mom tells me that she would laugh at me because I would talk in a way that that resembled written speech as opposed to spoken speech.

Maybe I just don’t want to go into the emotional effort of writing out my emotions, and my personal being. But there are certainly things that go in my life that are not necessarily that emotional, but I somehow feel hampered to write about them. The mundane, the everyday life, seem so obvious and natural to everybody that it doesn’t seem to merit anything for anybody to listen to. Thoughts on my future? My travels? Friends around me? All of these things seem like topics that everybody has… and I somehow find it unnecessary for other people to know.

I previously wrote that some people (person?) got upset at me for not sharing anything of my own. I think somehow I didn’t think anything that went on in my life was all that important or significant for anybody else to listen to. Perhaps it was self-deprecation, but in some part, I do think that I did really believe that I didn’t find any motivation to share things that happen in my life.  

TL;DR: confusion. Even as I write this, I feel like this garble is just a jumble of thoughts that takes up somebody else’s time.  

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Generational knowledge

A few days ago, my grandparents told my parents that they shouldn’t use credit cards so much, especially when travelling. They told my parents that they’ll get tracked and that it’s much better to use cash. My parents both looked at each other, but they said yeah, that they would try to use just cash.

My grandparents spent most of their adulthood under totalitarian military dictatorships, in the age where neighbors who protested would disappear never to be heard of again. Especially for my grandfather who worked as a political reporter, there was always somebody on his tail. It makes sense for him to always try to hide his tracks -- the government could do anything.

But the ages have changed and while the governments are generally shady entities that are watching you closer than ever (re: Edward Snowden) the kind of paranoia that my grandparents have might not be as practical anymore. It makes me wonder how much of “generational knowledge” that a generation goes through almost becomes sort of obsolete. Is this what causes generational gap? Knowledge and experience that become irrelevant after so much change? 

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lmao

Maybe all those 1UP’s aren’t good after all.

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as I end

My last classes of college were my piano lesson in the morning and a fiction workshop in the afternoon that discussed a chapter of my novel. Somehow the last day ended up being day of art.

My first assignment that I ever turned in college was my Linear Algebra homework for Professor Shahriari. Now my last assignment that I turned in for college was my final for Professor Shahriari’s Abstract Algebra II class. Somehow it’s come full circle. He’s been a very influential figure in my life and a person that I look up to. 

Time is ending for me here. I must go. 

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moving forward?

I think it’s really sometimes wild to think that people like Heather MacDonald actually probably truly believe in their work and that believe that they are trying to make the world a better place. She’s written books about her topic and given lectures, and I’m sure she thinks the way she frames the statistics is the right way to look at things. Obviously I don’t agree with her stance on things, but it’s hard to sometimes stomach the fact that on some level, she’s just doing what she believes in.

                                                             ***

Sometimes I wish that people would just criticize me upfront or tell me the fucked up shit I’m doing. I do think that a lot of times people do subtly mention it to me, but I’m too dull to catch on to it. Recently one of my friends did point out something I did directly and I think I am thankful for it because I don’t want to cause a nuisance to other people.

 Throughout the last year of high school and some parts of the beginning of college, I was in this mentality and theory where I believed that people like to talk about themselves and feel important. Which I still believe, mostly, but I think I had taken it to a level where I would avoid talking about myself and let other people talk. I think at some point in college it got to a point where people got frustrated with me for not talking about myself, and so I tried to change and talk more about myself. My therapist also suggested it, so I started to talk more about myself, my feelings, and allow myself to be more vulnerable. Now to me, I think it does make myself feel better.

 But then again I don’t want to stray away from my ideals. It’s possible to even take up too much space in a 1-1 conversation. Sometimes I feel like I try to talk too much. I definitely think that I try to explain too much, even though I don’t have the right to teach anybody anything. I think I have a problem trying to pretend that I know things, when I really don’t. It’s as if I forget that things that are obvious to me are obvious to other people as well. Not good. I could talk about my inferiority complex, the way I was raised, the environment I was raised in, bullying, etc. but in the end excuses are excuses.  

                                                             ***

 Jai wolf was quite amazing. I think watching and listening to him live was an experience of a lifetime.                                                             *** I don’t think I intended this blog to be so navel-gazing and morose, but alas it is. 

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Existentialism

These days I have a hard time getting existentialism out of my mind. I think it’s because I realize that this college thing is coming to a close, and realizing that everything comes to an end. I mean, going to college, let alone graduating from it seemed to be such a thing so far away. Now I’m so used to it, but its time is coming to an end, like all things. I hate thinking about death, and the loss of consciousness thereafter, and the fact that my existence will disappear from this universe ever again. That I will never be able to think again, to dream again. And that my mind that has given me thoughts will just be mere atoms crashing along the shore of some beach. When I was in middle school, I was horrified by this idea. When I told this to one of my friends (not really friend, I didn’t really have friends back then lmao) he told me just to stop thinking about it. And I’ve adopted that approach for the past ten years. (Ten years! Just realizing that it’s been an entire decade since that time makes me really feel existential again, that time passes -- somebody who was born during my middle school years is now ten years old). However, recently, as the thoughts of graduating and leaving have overwhelmed me too much not to think about existentialism, I feel like somehow I have come more in terms with it. That I’ll just live life. In my first tumblr blog post, I quoted a line of a poem “For example: A Flower” by poet Arkaye Kierulf. I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of this poem more in the past days. That somehow death can protect us from “the sun’s megalithic promise: Tomorrow, the same day. Tomorrow, the same day.” Here is the poem:  For Example: A Flower Arkaye Kierulf We are protected from so much pain. For example: graves. The earth’s roots and brown-black blood are busy

covering the soft, violated bodies of our loves. Death is a secret, and the rain with its many hands

washes off the streets to the gutters death’s thick surprise. The automatic shutter of the eye never fails,

the courtesies of the tongue. What goes on in the rooms of houses is guarded from us by the hardwood doors, 

the carefully closed windows. Whatever was said or done, night will come, eagerly, to clean up.

And death will shield us, in time, from the sun’s megalithic promise:

Tomorrow, the same day. Tomorrow, the same day. 

For example: A flower is the most beautiful lie.

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Politics on campus

I feel like campus has become more politically divided in the recent years I’ve been here. The voice for Palestine against the Zionists have been a hotbed of sparks; the apartheid wall against the Israeli flag in front of McConnell hall sends palpable tension in all directions. Obviously yesterday protests erupted following CMC’s decision to bring in an anti-Black lives matter speaker to the Ath. The well-dressed white chaps tried to get through the protestors, but generally to no avail.

I myself had been involved with a personal altercation yesterday trying to stop this one guy from trying to intimidate and shout at some other protestors, but I definitely don’t think I would have expected that of me as a first year.

 I begin to try and think – had these conflicts and tensions been as visible as they are now?

 I’m not to say that these tensions didn’t exist, because they’ve always certainly existed. But perhaps the marginalized and oppressed communities have started to vocalize more and bring these issues more? It certainly is asphyxiating to try and swim against the currents of the institution, but perhaps as times change, our movement is better equipped to fight against the mainstream.

Perhaps this is a national movement, of more politicized tension and conflict arising. Which is not to say that I am against this kind of conflict; I actually think it’s the way we grow. But perhaps the campus is just a microcosm of the macro-level world.

 Or perhaps I’m just becoming more attuned to it. I went to high school in a highly privileged area with highly privileged people who mostly had the privilege of scantly discussing politics. So the first touch into politics was when I first came to Pomona. Two memories:

1)      When I visited the school after I was accepted, I thought the school was “too liberal.” I was scared of it.

2)      I remember beginning of sophomore year, the Black Lives Matter movement gained national traction. At that point in time, I did not understand the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and being confused at the explanations. I went to a talk by some BLM organizers and I felt even more confused afterwards. 

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About Vulnerability

Flower

 Being vulnerable is hard. Willing to write this in public itself is an act of vulnerability. To share things dear to you those you may not trust. Even to those who you trust, it’s not easy to tell them things.

 For a long time, I’d been a pretty closed off person in terms of my real self. I used to describe myself as a marshmallow within a brick wall. I think some of my friends now might call me sensitive, but I think that probably can’t be said for the people who knew me during high school necessarily.

 Last fall I read this psychology textbook called Intimate Relationships “for fun” (Really, I was going through some stuff and I thought maybe I could find the answers here. I think it’s foolish to try and look for answers of life in academia now though). It talked about how the more two people share their personal secrets and stories to one another, the more the two feel closer to each other.

 Maybe Who’s In the Room is an artificial way of making people “feel” closer by urging people to tell their stories. Typically you only tell your personal stories to those who you trust, and maybe it’s retroactive in the sense that since you told them your story, you must have trusted them, right?

 People say pain brings people together. That you’re closer to those that you go through shit together than the ones that you only just have good times with. Not to say that having good times is bad. But I have heard about how military veterans are the closest friends they have for the rest of their lives because they skim by the edge of death together and somehow that brings them together.

 I guess pain breaks people down. Most people can only handle so much until shit starts nibbling at their skin and they can’t handle it anymore. When you are both like that, you are seeing each other bare.

 Seems like a crude way of thinking about things.

 I do believe that pain can bloom a flower, though. And often that the most efforted flower is the most beautiful one. That something you pour your heart into, that has caused you so much pain, when it culminates, that fruit will return the emotion you have spent on it. Running a mile after struggling to do so and training for weeks to achieve it obviously will feel better than running a mile without any sentiment. I personally love watching the end of great sports matches actually, when athletes get so emotional and start crying. The 2016 NBA Finals where LeBron just starts bawling on court after getting so much shit not only in Miami but over his entire life… that was something truly beautiful to watch. Father’s Day.

 Healing from hurting can be one of the most cathartic feelings. To let out a stream of tears that have been drowning you from the inside.

 But I don’t think it’s “worth” having pain to create beauty. That seems to miss the point entirely. Many people would choose to not be hurt in the first place rather than to have a catharsis. If a flower is grown from pain, is it beautiful still? People may call that beautiful, but they can’t, or at least don’t see all the tears that went into water that flower.

 “For example: A flower

is the most beautiful lie.”

-Arkaye Kierulf.