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I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

Harry Emerson Fosdick (via quotemadness)

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I’ve found that if I say what I’m really thinking and feeling, people are more likely to say what they really think and feel. The conversation becomes a real conversation.

Carol Gilligan (via quotemadness)

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Loving you was like going to war; I never came back the same.

Warsan Shire (via quotemadness)

Oh man, oh man.

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Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops.

Charles Bukowski (via quotemadness)

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Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it’s your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can.

Marisha Pessl (via quotemadness)

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How I wish I could hug everyone and tell them that it’s okay. It’s okay to be scared and angry and hurt and selfish. It’s part of being human.

Frank Warren (via quotemadness)

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Why are old lovers able to become friends? Two reasons. They never truly loved each other, or they love each other still.

Whitney Otto (via quotemadness)

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Short one. Job started unexpectedly three days early. My first day is Monday but at 3am this morning (Friday) I received my office email, along with two briefs, followed by another one at noon just as I was stretching after the gym. For brief #1: I need to conceptualise the video explaining a government scheme. For brief #2: I need to conceptualise, produce, direct and edit a promo video for a new foot spa. For brief #3: I need to produce, direct and edit a promo video for a jewellry store. I have different roles in each one and each one requires a different level of logical thinking and creativity. Brief one needs logic. Brief 2 needs a cool idea. Brief 3 needs great cinematography. I'm surprised by how long things take but still confident about meeting my deadlines. I've been working a few hours on my book in the evenings, filling up feverishly scribbled pencil pages sketching the plot. Even if I'm tired by the end of the day, it's still a pleasure to work on the book. It's my favourite thing to work on. After three days at the gym this week, I'm starting to sense that my period is finally about to arrive. I was hoping that would happen with exercise. It's been nearly half a year, the antipsychotics really messed up my hormones. I'm really enjoying The Goldfinch. We are celebrating Ivan's birthday this Sunday with brunch and cycling, though I may not be able to join them for cycling. They will be out all day on Coney Island and I need to get organised for my first day at the office. Mom and I went shopping at H&M yesterday and I bought a large bag of clothes to wear for work. Nothing too exciting - I'm wearing a sweater and black pants on most days. I like to dress simple and classic. I got a couple of more formal looking tops for client meetings, and on days where I need to be more rough and tumble I can wear jeans and a t-shirt. I don't believe in being very fashionable except for special occasions. It's nearly 1 and I'm planning to catch a decent sleep but I want to listen to my favourite Nina Simone song a couple times, drink a cup of milk and read over the notes I made today on the book.

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"We should really quit, this will kill us."

I’m just doing a little kundalini, the opening theme of House of Cards playing in my head from four hours of Netflix.

It was spectacular. At the end of season 4 it ended with a shot of them BOTH looking in the camera - it’s the first time Claire’s ever looked in the camera. It’s so godamn chilling!

Season 5 is amazing so far. The situation and the people continue to get more caricatureish but Claire and Frank remain utterly real. The Underwoods are smirking through the whole crisis because they waged war and the Conways behave like petulant teenagers.

Doug has creepily seduced the widow of the dead man whose liver he’s given to the president and Rachel, who nobody can remember because it was a year ago, is brought up as a threat to Doug. Yates is sorta gone, thank god. He was getting annoying and worse of all, a boring character.

I loved Claire’s outburst at Donald Blythe: it was shocking and also on point, because being a kindly grandfather will get you nowhere. I love that Claire cried at the funeral - what an unexpected moment - and she never explains.

What good writing this show is.

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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Loving someone should have been a beautiful thing. It’s not supposed to destroy people.

Ranata Suzuki (via quotemadness)

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I want so much that is not here and I do not know where to go.

Charles Bukowski (via quotemadness)

That's silly.

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Dave

I slept at 5am this morning tossing and turning, suddenly intensely thinking about Dave and Kai. This was brought on by discovering a whole file of voice memos I'd kept over the last three years. It made me realise how I'd definitively lost my mind and regained it. I was such a mess. I was talking such nonsense, incoherent shit that centred around the themes of a lack of identity, nonexistence of self, the absurdity of life, love, love and love. What the hell was love to me then? Some kind of infatuation and dependency. Did I really see these two boys I claimed to love? Did I really understand them and their needs? I concluded that I was selfish, and had my head up my arse. I was too messed up and scrambled in the head to have a coherent experience of reality. I thought that Dave was telepathic and he was communication secretly to me while I lived in his house. I hallucinated that he arranged and orchestrated my entire hospital admission and stay, declaring his love for me and his wish to marry me. I was scared and overwhelmed and I ran away, back to Singapore. Later, not being able to make sense of him suddenly becoming cold and cutting me off, I started having delusions that he was still in love with me and was stalking me while I was in Melbourne. I left graffiti on the walls of bathrooms for him to read, I left presents and cards on the street for him to pick up, I arranged things in my bedroom and left the window open, convinced that he would come in whenever I was out, and understand my secret messages. At the student's union in Monash, I was playing the piano and found a simple Casio watch. Later, I found a ring. I was convinced he had left them both for me. I went shopping for jeans and the next day, I was sure that the rips on the jeans weren't there when I bought them and that he'd snuck into the apartment to replace them with a different pair. When I met various people on the streets, I was convinced he'd sent them to talk to me and was communicating with me through them. This may all sound out of the blue, but it all started on the day of my first hospital admission. His roommates showed me a video of his brother marrying a Chinese girl right before him and Louis walked me to the hospital. I thought he was trying to tell me that we were getting married. At the hospital, I heard the receptionist call out "Anna Kendrick" instead of my name, and I thought Dave had planted that too, because I recently told him I'd seen the movie Pitch Perfect 2, which starred as its lead Anna Kendrick. In the first examining room, Dave and Louis were with me. The nurse said, looking between Dave and me, "I can see why you want to marry her." Later, as I was transported to John George hospital in Oakland, I heard in the ambulance the Superman song come on. It was spliced: "It's not easy to be CHEESY me." In the second hospital, a man named Ricardo kept telling me to keep an eye on an old woman with one prosthetic foot, saying that something was about to happen at any moment. She was then attacked by 7 security guards for wanting to go to the bathroom. I was convinced this entire experience was orchestrated by Dave, as a test of my character, to see if I had the leadership to lead a team with him on a mission to escape purgatory. Before the hospital, I had yelled for Dave from his backyard. He had come down and, calm and amused, asked if I wanted to see him. I immediately asked, "When did I die?" To which he answered, "We are in a kind of purgatory. There will be monsters coming after us and we have to stick close to our friends." That convinced me that I really was dead and in a different reality, and started this whole belief that the entire hospital experience was a test set up by Dave to train me for something even tougher. When I called Dave from the hospital, he didn't answer. Now, two years after all that, I'm sure that I must have hallucinated most of that. I'm still in slight disbelief - that my eyes and ears could betray and trick me so thoroughly, creating an entire reality that was unreliable. I'm no longer in love with Dave, but his figure still carries this sense of mystery that would make me pale and scared at the sight of him. For months I thought he was stalking me in Melbourne and there were so many moments I was afraid he was going to appear. Every time I came back home, I was relieved when I didn't find him in my bedroom. I was attracted to him but also freaked out that he was intensely stalking me. My mind didn't create a purely innocent fantasy, it created something of a horror too. I stuck to Kai even more closely, treating him as a shield against Dave. I felt that if Kai was around, Dave would not appear. Now, it is all embarrassing and slightly funny. Dave is just an ordinary guy who liked me but did not love me. He never did all the strange things I experienced; my mind created those. He was never in Melbourne. For months I was behaving irrationally, running away from no one. I'm not sure if it was the antipsychotics or that enough time had passed to convince me that he did not care about me and was not going to reappear in my life. I'd always thought of him as a magician, but now I see him as an ordinary guy, just leading his life far far away, mostly ignorant of my psychosis. I spent many months after my second hospital stay piecing together what had happened, examining all the clues obsessively, analysing every word and expression Dave and his housemates had whenever they said something strange. My world split into two realities: the reality where Dave was going to marry me and appear some day soon, and the reality where I had hallucinated everything that suggested the first reality. Now, I'm certain it was the latter: I had hallucinated and also Dave and his housemates were factually odd people who said odd things, feeding into my delusions. The main reason for that conclusion is that if Dave loved me, there would be no reason for such an elaborate orchestration of events. He would simply show up and look for me, or he wouldn't have cut me off to begin with. He must not love me. I know that now. The reason I fell in love with Dave was not because of who he is inherently. I don't think I even really knew who he was. It's because I was perpetually stoned and becoming schizophrenic, interpreting secret codes and messages in ordinary things. Finding his instagram recently really helped me disperse any remnants of the delusion. In the month I thought he was in Melbourne, he was still in America, working on his passion project, updating his instagram regularly with his progress. Having that proof before my eyes was the final confirmation that he was not a magician but an ordinary guy. All the mysticism fell away from him. I had attributed superpowers to him: telepathy, mind control, genius intelligence, Machiavellian leadership. I even remember at one point I was convinced he was a sociopath who ran the world through mind control, and I was scared. Looking at his Instagram, I was somewhat relieved and embarrassed. He's just an ordinary harmless guy, a little odd but not magical. I have a very open mind, too much for my own good. I believe that telepathy, mind control, hive minds could exist. I believe that the universe could be a simulation which is why we see so much coincidence or signs. But when I got very sick, those things weren't just an open-minded belief. They became certainties, and I acted logically according to those premises, resulting in bizarre behaviour. I know now, without a doubt that I had lost my mind. That knowledge means I've somewhat regained it. There's still some confusion about certain events, real or imagined, but I no longer have firm beliefs of big conspiracies of the fight for world domination, the fight against evil, the quest to kill everyone's egos. I'm okay now, but I'm still scared. I'm scared because I took the blue pill thinking it was the red pill. I'm scared that I can't tell the blue and red pill apart. Maybe there is no blue or red pill. It's just one reality, subjectively interpreted, not black and white, blue and red. Madness is not what you think. It's not confusion. It's certainty about a very different set of premises. One day I'll find the words to describe it all, but now I'm just unscrambling the experience. Dave and I will never be friends again, even if my delusions are gone. Too much has happened between us, even in the absence of him. He will be too wary to ever be in contact with me, maybe unless like 30 years have passed or something. That would be an interesting meeting to have 30 years from now. I wonder how he feels about me. Does he pity me? Does he worry about me? Does he feel scared of me? I will probably never know. And it matters less and less as he fades into a distant memory. He's just a guy.

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My Brother and Work

It's my birthday afternoon. I'm lying on the camel leather couch and reading with a cup of coffee, pleasantly stoned, as Mom and Dad go collect the car from the repair shop. I had a pretty intense day at work yesterday. My colleagues forced me to eat a rather stale red velvet cake with odious amounts of cream slathered in a thin block around it. I didn't get to the cream block, eating gingerly the insides of the cake. I signed the staff log. The yellow file contained the page with my name on it, with time stamps I logged in and out of the shop. I noticed with alarm the number of time stamps on my colleagues' sheets: working 6 days a week, 12 hour days for $4 an hour because they're from China, Malaysia and Vietnam. "What do you do when you're not working?" asked my China supervisor suddenly, this question just occurring to her. "Uh, filmmaking, I said," in broken Chinese. "I'm looking for filmmaking jobs," I added. She thought for a moment. "Easy to find?" "It's okay," I said, a little proudly, "I just got offered a job today but I don't know when I start." Before I left, she asked me, "Do you have a boyfriend?" "Nope," I said. She scoffed at me. "I'll grab one for you." Kai and I finally said goodbye without any promises to meet in the future. I wrote him a poem about our relationship and he wrote a poem about a cat with no tail, which he said was inspired by a girl with one leg that he fell in love with. Ivan just came home and sat at the foot of the sofa. "House of Cards was out last night." He announced. "Oh, I haven't watched it." I said. "Are you sure you're caught up?" He asked. "Yeah, she left him, right?" "No! You're missing one season!" He exclaimed, amused. After a pause, he said, "So what are your thoughts?" "On House of Cards?" I asked. "On your birthday!" "Oh. It feels okay. But I think I'll feel old next year." "I won't feel old until I'm forty," he says, pulling his spectacles up to his forehead and rubbing his eyes with neat concentric circles. "And then on the day you're forty you'll suddenly feel old?" I asked. "Damn old." he replied, "And I'll probably have a midlife crisis," he continues, still rubbing his eyes with absentminded precision, "and change careers." he finishes. "And what will you change to?" "My career you mean?" He asked. He thinks for a moment, disentangling his spectacles from his mop of wispy unruly hair. His eyes brighten as he puts his spectacles firmly down on the bridge of his nose. "I'll probably open up a cafe or something."

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It's my birthday

I'm sitting across from that rose painting my dad made. I'm wrapped in my owl fleece blanket, surrounded by a cushion Totoro, a snow leopard puppet named Card, a rather peculiar looking bear popular in Tokyo: Pickett Bear and a Jellybeans Silly Shark. I remember when Mei transported the Totoro exclusively in her suitcase one visit: she had arrived with two medium suitcases and one handcarry suitcase. I remember clearly because its red stood out boldly against the two black ones; London colours- the blacks of the gravelly city and the reds of their post boxes, telephone boxes, tube signs. We brought the heavy ones up. One of them was heaving with things for us in it. One of them had her clothes, books and other things in it. Mom and Dad had walked into their room and left the door open, and she quickly bent and unleashed this giant Totoro from it, its intended purposes I understood to be a cushion. She giggled. I burst out laughing. "I brought this for you!" she in a muffled squeal. I hugged her and immediately went into the room to show Mom and Dad. They made expressions showing their affectionate exasperation. "Haiyo!" said Mom.

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Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.

John Green (via quotemadness)

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Relax. You will become an adult. You will figure out your career. You will find someone who loves you. You have a whole lifetime; time takes time. The only way to fail at life is to abstain.

Johanna de Silentio (via quotemadness)

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Great honeymoon.

These breathtaking drone photos capture St. Ivan Rilski, a partially-submerged church near Bulgaria’s Zhrebchevo Dam. The church was part of a village that flooded to the point of disappearance when Bulgaria’s communist regime built the dam nearby in 1965.

When water levels are low enough, you’ll see remnants of the church cemetery, the Daily Mail reports. The hauntingly empty area is popular with photographers and artists, who set up tents to capture the landscape in all its lonesome glory. (Source)