I've lost my voice

I haven't updated this since before I've been home. I also haven't touched my writing journal thingie since I've been home either. I made one abortive attempt to write in it that didn't really go anywhere.
Rhode Island just swallowed me up this time. I managed to come here and escape during Thanksgiving break relatively unscathed, but I've just sort of been in a hole this entire break. No motivation to read or write. I just pace around, spend hours online, and sit on my bed. I keep taking longer and longer drives too. Last summer I would just take long routes home from friends' houses. Now I don't even find an excuse to leave the house. Last night I just hopped in the car at 1 in the morning and started driving. I put on "Taking Tiger Mountain" and went down Breakneck Hill, down rt. 123 to rt. 1A in North Attleboro Mass, and then followed 1A to rt...ok, this isn't important. How about this. I drove under countless spidery tree branches and past barren snow covered fields, past empty strip malls and shopping plazas. I followed winding roads through industrial backyards and urban three story houses huddled on dusty street corners. I drove down empty highways all the way to Norton, Mass, and then back again, through many more dark roads. And nothing happen.
I used to take these long drives hoping for some sort of serendipity, that somewhere on a dark road would be some profound insight or revelation that would lead to happiness, confidence, or self-realization. The closest I came was during Thanksgiving break, when I took a long drive like this. There was no grand epiphany during the drive; what made it such a nice drive was just a general feeling of well-being after I got out of the car. It was the first time I'd felt that good in a while. I guess that's how I felt last night/this morning too. But I realized that it was just sort of an urge to escape that got me in the car. I just go stir-crazy here at home, in this state, and in the absence of anything better I'll do whatever it takes to just get my mind in motion and prevent myself from becoming an emotional basket-case, even if it means driving around to nowhere.
I have a lot to say, and my thoughts are very fractured. I'm ending this post for now.

Great journalism on a horrid topic.

As a follow up to the last post, I'm putting up this link: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040830fa_fact1

It's a first hand account about Darfur written for the New Yorker by Samantha Power, the same woman who wrote the book A Problem from Hell: America in the age of Genocide. (I haven't read the book, but my father has.) It's very long and also pretty depressing at times, but it's pretty essential if you have any interest in the conflict.

Wow! They're people, just like you and me!

I finished my Peace and Conflict Resolution final this morning, handing it in about 10 minutes before 12:30. I also got my final journal assignment back, the one about “transformation.” There was an indecipherable note on the back, a couple of words I couldn’t make out, written by Professor Said. I have no idea what he thought about it, but I was very proud of that journal assignment.
I wish I felt more transformed by that class. I think it was just a perfect recipe for disappointment to expect that. That’s not to say that the class was bad: had it not been for that class, I probably would not have followed the crisis in Ukraine and the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo as closely as I am now, and I wouldn’t have heard of all of these names like Thomas Merton. The problem is that everything that I don’t like about SIS was embodied in that class: the air of self-importance that surrounded everyone in the class, the lack of personal contact or attention. That was the big sticking point for me: you can’t stand up there preaching all these high-minded concepts and expecting this wonderful little utopia to be created when you have a class with 72 students.
I guess I do feel sort of bitter, just about waving my hand in the air so many times and never being called on. I do acknowledge that. But at the same time, I’m just tired of the entire SIS vibe. I’m sick of everyone sitting through four years of classes and thinking that they’re such wonderful people because they have intellectual discussions about the roots of September 11th, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or development policies in Africa. Bullshit, that’s what it all is.
Seriously. I was talking about this with my roommate tonight. September 11th was a tragedy, a horrible even, no doubt about it. But it’s just so interesting to me how a few years earlier, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo came to an end. This was a war in which 3 million people died. 3,000,000. The fact that 3000 people died at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is awful, but how do people get away with calling that an attack on civilization, an attack on humanity, an attack on freedom, while the deaths of 3 million people don’t even knock O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky out of their consciousness? What about the Rwandan genocide? 800,000 people being hacked to death in a matter of weeks is less of a threat to humanity than what happened on September 11th? Maybe it is. After all, people in Central Africa don’t prance around with shopping bags full of clothes and put all of their creativity and energy into developing new ways of communicating with people without actually having to see or hear them like “we” do. Remember, civilization and freedom only exist in an air-conditioned SUV ride through a strip mall parking lot.
And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Everybody at AU, and indeed everyone in the country, and everyone all over the world is obsessed with this conflict. All the Americans are obsessed with this conflict and grieve over it. Why shouldn’t they be upset? It is terrible what’s going on there. But why is that so much worse than civil wars in Sri Lanka, or Kashmir, or Sierra Leone? Why is nationalist/religious strife so horrible there and not when it happens in Nigeria or India? Obviously there is a large Jewish population in the United States (the largest in the world, even more here than in Israel) and we have our fair share of Palestinian immigrants too, so our demographics would be able to relate more to that conflict than one in Sri Lanka. But that doesn’t mean it’s any more or less important. It’s ok to not be completely educated on every single horrible thing that happens in the world. The problem is when you start assuming that the most important or dramatic events are the ones that fall within the scope of your own tunnel vision.
I’m tired of it all. I’m tired of debating the War in Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with people, I’m tired of feeling incredible empathy for the thousands of people who are going to die in Darfur after the Sudanese government carries out their next planned slaughter, I’m tired of studying the important issues of development and peace and envisioning a better world. I want everybody to stop traveling to third world countries and snapping pictures of little children and then coming back and talking about what an incredible and life-changing experience it was. You know what? Don’t come back. Stay there. Seriously. Don’t tell me what an amazing experience you had, don’t tell me how you developed this empathy and awareness of the problems of the world, don’t tell me about how the orphans in South Africa or wherever are human beings with hopes and dreams just like you and me. I don’t care how wonderful and smart you’ve become just because you pranced around the third world for a week with your camera and your bleeding heart. Next time, don’t come back. Stay there and actually live with these people every day. Talk to them, ask them about their lives, dreams, and belief. Talk to them about some guy down the street who acts like an asshole, complain about the food, tell them dumb stories about your friends back home, and listen to them do the same. Realize that these people are the same selfish, impatient, funny, scatter-brained, lazy, flaky, goofy, thoughtful, contradictory creatures that mill around the concrete consumer wastelands here, except they mill around against a different backdrop. And then, when you here about their villages being burned, when you here about their little children being sliced up by daisy-cutters, when you see the people that you know and love being cut down by a disease that is literally wiping out the population of Africa, you’ll feel true pain, true empathy, true transformation, and maybe you’ll do more than tell people about your amazing trip and apply for another NGO internship.

Open up your eyes and urethras.

I always enjoy perusing the graffiti on the stall walls while sitting in a men's room. AU is not really the best location to do this; the authors don't the creativity of those who scrawl on the stall walls at a place like RISD. Most of it here is your typical assortment of political slogans, slanders against rival fraternities, and crudely drawn parts of the male or female anatomy.
For the life of me, I don't know why they paint over it or scrub it off every so often. It makes sense that there's a major issue with, say, tattooing up the walls of a bathroom in someone's private home. But it's a public restroom for crying out loud. There really isn't even the question of aesthetics to consider when we're talking about a bathroom in the basement of a university building. If you're going to have hundreds of people sharing each other's germs and urinating and defecating within three feet of each other, is it really so bad to make them read each other's misogynist/racist/homophobic/boring anonymous banter?

Pardon me Madame, but I'll sleep when I'm dead.

The independent study is a go. I must admit I feel bad about burdening a obviously busy professor and talented poet with a flake such as myself. Of course he had the option of saying no, but I feel like I should've included a disclaimer when I waltzed into his office and started blabbing about an independent study. Although maybe the fact that I had no idea what I was talking about when I situated myself in his office yet again today was a fair warning. But I got the signature from him, and as long as I remember to return the form to the Registrar it's a go.
I don't know what the hell I was thinking, sitting one on one staring at this person week after week, both of us expecting some profound verse to find its way onto the desk. However, seeing as how I also have to find a way to make my Defense of Literature live up to the rather high expectations Professor Sha has for it before 2 p.m. tomorrow, I think I can worry about the independent study at a later time. Right now, it's time to throw myself into the fire. Again.

Music

My third paper for Senior Seminar in Literature is about The Glass Bead Game, which talks about music a lot. On that note, I need to share with you two CDs that you must listen to and cherish:
Brian Eno - "Another Green World"
The Flaming Lips - "The Soft Bulletin"
No doubt you've heard of these, and heard many people talk about them. "Another Green World will basically mold the shape of your eardrum and your brain. You will not listen to music the same way after this album. Turn out the lights, flop onto the bed, and experience the sensation of jumping into a painting and flying over the landscape. "The Soft Bulletin" is one of the most compulsively listenable and addictive albums I have heard, and maybe the most addictive for me since "London Calling," which is not a statement to be taken lightly. I feel like I'm lifted right off of this concrete planet when I listen to it. Every little feeling lying around inside of you that doesn't have a name somehow comes to life within this album. Just listen to it.

I heart (attack) processed foods

According to the back of this package of Starbursts, one pack has 50% of your daily Vitamin C requirements. So maybe if I eat two of them, that'll make up for me being out of orange juice and keep my immune system up. I mean, honestly, with the way I've been eating/sleeping lately, I have nowhere to go but up.

This post doesn't even qualify as pathetic melodrama because I'm so tired.

I feel like my brain cells are recreating on a small scale what my life is basically right now. I can just picture these poor little sleep-deprived critters, desperately clinging onto life. I just pulled another all-nighter so I could finish off a paper on conservation policies in Botswana, a topic which I don’t care about at all.
That last post sure was melodramatic. I don’t care. If I may revisit it, I think I’ve changed my mind somewhat. I talked about living an ordinary, unimpressive life like it was the worst thing in the world, and maybe its not. I think it’s a lot like death. I don’t mean that just as a rhetorical/metaphorical/philosophical statement. I think they’re both similar, in that we’re all terrified of both of them, yet once you’re in either state, you don’t feel anything and it doesn’t bother you. I always thought that living a go-nowhere life would be so painful because every day you’d be haunted by the knowledge of what you wanted to be, but I think that after all of the failures and missteps you would probably just be numb. I’m not sure that’s so bad. If there was absolutely nothing you could do about it, numb is better than being in great pain. The one thing about pain, though, is if you have the capacity to feel that, you have the capacity for great joy as well, right? Well, not really. I mean how many people have you heard of having terminal illnesses, or just having something terrible happen to them in general and never really recover from it.
I’m honestly too tired to think about stuff like that right now. Today, I met with the Professor I want to do the independent study with. He’s going to read my poetry and get back to me. I called “the woman” and I’m waiting for a call back. (Which probably won’t come anytime soon.) I’ve done what I can, and now it’s all out of my hands. It’s frightening. It’s maddening, really. The poetry thing will probably be resolved tomorrow, but the female situation has the potential to drag itself out for a long time. I’m just scared that it will slowly die, or that it will be resolved without me even getting a chance. I honestly want to have my heart broken if it doesn’t work out. I just don’t want to be left standing there with everything that I wanted to say to her dying inside of me before it ever got a chance to leave my mouth.
It sure has been an interesting semester, and one with a bit of drama. I feel like I’ve changed so much, and then sometimes I feel like nothing’s changed at all. I don’t want to walk around in a giant circle, I want to truly evolve and grow out of my skin.
This post is tired, just like me. I will eat and then work on my defense of literature. I have no desire to do any more work tonight, but based on my schedule the next few days I don’t really have much of a choice. I just hope there’s something to look forward to when it’s all over.

My ode to hope against hope (appropriately drenched with adolescent-style pathos).

Although I shy away from these types of posts, I think that it's fairly safe to be more open because I think my audience is much more limited than I give credit for.
A while ago, I predicted that this semester would probably end with a lot of personal drama, and I'm fairly confident that my prophecy will indeed fulfill itself. I can definitely feel this tension in the air both academically and emotionally.
To explain more about the emotional side of things, I'm going to refer to Middlemarch by George Eliot. Of course this is unbelievably pretentious, but this is my blog, and the three people that read this probably won't be too upset by it. Anyway. Among many other things, Middlemarch explores the silent drama of people who aspire to greatness and dream and big ways and will never be able to realize those great dreams because of circumstances beyond their control. Now, Eliot places a lot of emphasis on what society does to cut people off from their dreams in order to make the novel a subtle criticism of 19th century Victorian culture. So in that sense, it's hard to relate the novel to my life.
But the point is that right now, I'm in an incredibly emotionally claustrophobic situation because of the people and things that I am pursuing. There are many things like this that people are always pursuing, but for me right now, there are two lofty aims that I am stumbling after:
1.) I want to be a writer.
2.) There’s a girl I like.
The second one is no surprise to anyone who has been unfortunate enough to have close daily contact with me, so I won’t go too in depth about that. (Plus, you never know who actually reads this thing.) The first one I don’t really talk about a lot. It’s like I tell people, just the fact that I would seriously think about applying for an MFA program in Creative Writing means that I’m assuming quite a bit about my writing. Is my writing really that good? I mean, I’m reading at the Amlit release party on Sunday and I’ve hyped it up to everyone. I’ve been putting off work in order to try and brainstorm ideas for poems. Why? I mean, would anyone really look twice at my poetry as something worthwhile? And of course it’s the same thing with the person I have a crush on. Why am I apparently willing to create such a mess trying to pursue someone who I am 99% sure will not return my affections?
Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because of that 1%. The remote chance that I may actually write something substantial that generates interest, attention or praise, or the slim possibility that I could possibly mean something to someone that I admire from afar, is ultimately what fuels the insanity. I look all around me and I just see unhappiness, everywhere. Most people swim around in disappointment, mediocrity, fear, and regret. I will probably be one of them. It’s like Calvino says when he writes “You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.” We’re all surrounded by it, and I’m sure that after these dreams pass and graduation comes I will be dragged down into the warm, comfortable dirt where most people’s lives are lived out.
I think I would be fine with that, on one condition: that at least I know that I’ve tried. So many people never even make an attempt. Talk to anyone, and you’d find so many people whose heads are incubators for the starriest dreams that you’d ever heard and that they kept walled off from the thorns of the world. That’s what scares me, not failure. Failure will be painful, but in the end, I know I will have tried, and I can move on and dig out a reasonably satisfying existence.
That’s not to say it won’t be painful when I fail. It will, and all for one small reason. Among many evolutions I’ve had personally, I think the most significant is this: for the first time in my life, I feel like I have something of value inside of me. Meaning, I genuinely believe that I am an ok writer and that I have something significant to say. Or, I’m not just some lonely and desperate person pining after some girl, but I feel like I actually have something to offer her. I genuinely don’t think that this is delusional on my part, and this is what will make failure so painful.
It’s ok. I’m still going to try, and I’m still going to fail. Am I sure that I’m going to fail? Well, 99% sure. We all know how many people probably dreamed of being writers that never pulled it off, and we know how many people yearned after someone that doesn’t care. So realistically, the odds are against me.
But…there’s always that 1%.