some say our life is insane but it isn’t insane on paper
February 25, 2009
At about 10 p.m. on the 18th of February, a group of about fifty students, members, and supporters of the activist group Take Back NYU! began a three-day sit-in at the Kimmel Center on Washington Square. The demonstration was meant to be a peaceful protest of the university’s lack of financial transparency and refusal to make public the yearly budget, among other demands. The event got the campus community talking and brought outside attention to the university for several days as students, residents of the community, activists, and the media all gathered around the protesters. The situation, meant to be a nonviolent student protest of university policy, soon became a mish-mosh of different ideals and different ideas about the students’ actions, demands, and manner of execution. Read the rest of this entry »
i love this place, but i hate the people here.
but i know this is just a microcosm for the rest of the world, a metaphor; living in manhattan, trying to see the stars is so hard because of all the obnoxious light. trying to hear someone playing a guitar across the street is so difficult because of all the tires on asphalt and truck motors and squeaking breaks and sirens and wailing and and
here, it is never about what you leave behind, it’s what others leave behind for you. where does it come from? i don’t know. it’s here. get fucked up, sleep, wake up, repeat. you live, and then you die. you are no more, no less. why try? “i want i want i want i want”
how self-important you are to think that you will matter to others, because all that matters to the others you want to impress is themselves. we are all alone in this. the people, they love you because in you they see themselves. they love you because they want to be loved, to rise up, to feel better than everyone else, for just a split second; for a lifetime.
how dare you think that you are any better than anyone else, when time only can judge.
“What could he do, live/with one hand tied/behind his back?”
January 2, 2009
a few years ago for whatever reason i thought it would be a good idea to rip a page out of a french textbook, except i guess i’m not so good at ripping, more so at pulling things apart, and it came apart in a crooked fashion showing the fibers of the paper reaching across to the separated piece. strangely enough, the piece i took from the page had only full words on it, nothing cut off by my oafish desire for the french language. the scattered words, while not part of the same sentences, were probably part of instructions, in english, for a practice exercise. they spelled out, “who is in the things that you do?”
let me digress for a minute just to say that as foolish as it may sound i absolutely believe in fate and karma. so many proven laws of the physics state that nothing is created and nothing disappears; it is just passed on, given and taken, as if we are throwing the same ball around for all of eternity. this doesn’t mean i think that we have no free will–we absolutely have a choice in almost everything we do–but i feel that sometimes things appear in our lives like puzzle pieces or sign posts, that it is up to us to decide what to do with them.
eliot weinberger believes that the act of writing is a reincarnation of past writers or persons in history. in writing, we make other writers immortal because they will continue to show themselves in the text by way of their influence. they are then on the page forever, in a concrete context. it stops time, puts each person or instance in a specific moment, brings the reader back to that moment temporarily halting the present moment of that person’s life in favor of a return to the past. in writing, we cannot help but display those who have influenced us and continue to influence us, and i believe this can be extended to life in general–we are a sum our influences and more, a theory of these things applied to the present. sometimes we don’t stop to think how they influence our morals, actions, goals, way of life, what we say, what we think about, how we perceive the world. this is why you can never understand just one person fully, you have to understand everything that stands behind that person, everything that person is drawn to, has seen, who is reincarnated in that person each day. what stands between the present and understanding ourselves is the gap that holds the collection of souls that we run on.
who is in the things that you do?
