mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

2011

Jan 2011 Feb 2011 Mar 2011 Apr 2011 Jun 2011 Jul 2011 Sep 2011 Oct 2011 Nov 2011 Dec 2011

Jan

anger born of grief

Maybe I should just make another Twitter and/or FriendFeed account to serve as an outlet for the random thoughts that come unbidden to my mind that are too tangential and decontextualized for anyone else to make sense of. I'm not really ready to coherently blog about everything that has happened. I was really only going to post three words that popped into my head as I listened to NPR and hearing about how the staff of Gabrielle Gifford's office is doing, three words that imperfectly describe what I've been feeling this entire week:

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it was only hunger

I was in a terrible mood this afternoon, but it turns out it was only because I had ended up skipping lunch. After getting something into my stomach, I'm feeling a lot better.

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random song lyrics

If only I had thought of the right words
I could have held on to your heart
If only I'd thought of the right words
I wouldn't be breaking apart…

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On these interminable commutes home, truly random thoughts will pop into my head, sometimes riffing off of something my iPod decided to play. I'm not even sure what song it was that prompted these ideas, but now I kind of want to write ti down and see if I can fit it into some story I might write some day:

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is it possible to see at that depth with such clarity?
to plumb the hidden recesses of the universe with just
the force of thought?
I no longer believe it, yet still I am drawn
to the lofty and the sublime
though still wary of deceit, of confusion
is there wisdom behind the knowledge?
not just comprehension but understanding?

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Feb

the utmost pessimism

Sometimes I get the feeling that the bad guys are going to win, and there's just absolutely nothing I can do about it, and I can't even just hang on and at least try to enjoy the ride to hell.

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Mar

how do you know we're not in a simulation?

I just came back from watching "The Adjustment Bureau" and was sufficiently entertained. It did have its slow parts, and the trailers did set me up to expect something subtly different, but I still liked it.

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why did don quixote cross the road?

The Western genre as treated by Hollywood is itself like a cultural palimpsest. Long before Hollywood was even a metonymic signifier for the entertainment industry, the westward expansion and the genocidal Indian Wars driven by Manifest Destiny were already the equivalent of America's Dark Ages, at the very least in the sense that mythology and legend could be easily inserted into that period without running too much afoul of history. (Like how Europe's Dark Ages are ornamented by King Arthur, and Roland and the paladins of Charlemagne, and the lost Ninth Roman Legion beyond Hadrian's Wall, to name a few that come easily to mind.)

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things i am not a fan of

being told that something that I know is good for me (or which I believe is good for people I care about) is actually evil and needs to be destroyed, especially when such a denunciation is devoid of any solid evidence, and most especially when I have spent a good amount of time pointing out counter-evidence, and that counter-evidence is completely ignored.

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if you don't have much soul left and you know it, you still got soul

A few weeks of headaches and listlessness, of palpitations and sleeplessness, of such unshakeable weariness
the painkillers and the antibiotics, the receptor blockers and the immune modulators
make you a little less achy, and little less sore, and the nights aren't as fraught
with tossing and turning, and the fluttery, nervous twirling in the pit of your gut
and that basic fear of worrying whether you even know what you're doing anymore
if the next morning will bring some horrific disaster that everyone is counting on you to fix
and you'll just end up standing there uselessly, hands trembling and nerveless
and the roar of triumphant chaos finally sweeps you away from the sandy shores
drowning you in the dark depths of that trackless sea of despair

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do as i say, not as i do

I procrastinated on working on my absentee ballot, and ended up forgetting to do it before the mail-in deadline, so I ended up working on it tonight, and just dropping it off at the polling place. It was a short two block walk, but I am monstrously out of shape, and my allergies are terrible right now. The walk back involves climbing a hill, and by the time I reached the top of it, I was gasping and wheezing, in the throes of an asthma attack.

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scattered thoughts about corporal punishment

What being hit by the belt or smacked in the ass for misbehaving taught me was that the best way to deal with frustration is with violence. This lesson is now something I constantly struggle with to suppress.

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Apr

i still got soul

"if you don't have much soul left and you know it, you still got soul." — Charles Bukowski

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Jun

exactly the same in an entirely different way

Inspired by Facebook comments, I ended up reading through some of my old blog entries. A lot of it is in fact quite sad and pathetic, to the point where I started thinking to myself, "My God, the writer of this crap needs serious help!" (The part that isn't sad and pathetic is random and borderline incoherent, which leads me to the same conclusion.)

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i probably watch too much tv

I never end up writing down my dreams immediately after waking up. Usually, it's because I'm in a rush to get to work, but sometimes it's just because I'm lazy. Not that I think vivid dreams necessarily mean anything other than the fact that my sleep is fragmented enough that I wake up in time to remember my dreams, but it's always interesting to re-read the weird things my brain comes up with from the flotsam and jetsam of my mundane life.

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liberty and emergent behavior

This is from a Friendfeed thread from a little while ago that I wanted to preserve (with a little editing):

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a thousand folds

My current lack of introspection is starting to alarm me. When you've gotten to the point where you feel like you can't even be honest in your own blog that you treat like a secret diary because hardly anyone reads it anyway, this might be suggestive of a significant lack of openness.

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Jul

Tonight was fireworks night at Dodger Stadium, and as I watched bright colorful explosions in the sky from a distant hill, I remembered that it was around this time of year twelve years ago when I made a last-minute decision that would forever change my life in weird and sometimes quite traumatic ways.

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Sep

randomly reminiscing

The easiest thing to do is just to blame this aching sense of bleak desolation on myself. But there really isn't anyone to blame, no rationales, no reasons. What happens, happens. (Or more pertinently, what doesn't happen, doesn't happen.) I suppose I need to admit that I expected more. But nobody ever gets everything they want.

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Oct

The Fall of the Republic

The Republic is falling. Long live the republic!
Slow fall, was it only ten, maybe twenty years ago
the Dream long ago killed, sterilized, repackaged
and rebranded
absolute free, no money down
with the adjustable rate and the balloon payments
camoflauged under the fine print

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somehow shifted

Funny how the random function of my iPod can just make my thoughts go "that a way", to steal a turn of phrase. "I See the Light¹" from the "Tangled" soundtrack started playing, and I started thinking about fairy tales. There has been much ink spilled and many photons shed about how Disney ruins little girls, but maybe it's not really that gender-specific. While it might be argued that Hollywood in general peddles the pernicious idea of "happily ever after", none of the studios inculcates this idea so universally to people at such a young age.

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Trying to focus more on what I have, instead of what I don't.

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Nov

I just need a moment.

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not enough time

I've been wanting to write an actual blog post and not just Twitter-like sentence fragments, but I just haven't been able to gather my thoughts. As much as I think sleep is absolutely necessary, it sure would be great to have an extra eight hours a day.

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where the hell did that come from?

So I'm driving home and all of the sudden my iPod starts playing "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac, and the lyrics just hit me:

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Dec

generalized malaise

I'm feeling disconnected and unreal.

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them's the breaks

It is easy to feel rejected because of the fact that people weren't able to modify their schedules to accomodate me trying to drive up about 400 miles in order to see people I haven't seen literally in years, but, yeah, some people have farther to travel that day, and what's another few years more, I guess. People grow apart. It happens.

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It would be easy, just like falling asleep. But I never did like easy. I must endure.

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keeping the melancholy away with bright, bright lights

So I'm sitting here procrastinating over the millions of things I'm supposed to get done. Apparently I'm hosting my sister's birthday and my parents' anniversary party at my house on Tuesday, and the inside of my house still looks tore up, almost like I had left all the windows and doors open that day the winds blasted up to 80 mph. Basically boxes and papers all over the place. This is a direct consequence of the fact that I'm a single guy living in a three bedroom house, and I simply don't know how to sanely manage all this space.

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don't look back

So when I was a teenager and in my twenties, I used to be really into "Best of" lists and countdowns and reflecting on the last 365 days and all that crap, but lately, I just don't give a crap.

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