between concentration and reflection

It is hard not to take writing to a completely identifiable place, potentially closing off any conversational gestures to be fully interpreted by me and only me.  I know where I stand and where others stand in conjunction with me, but I am not sure that it is necessarily easy to translate where I want to from where I am, how I am, what my voice is.  I find that inside jokes aren’t only made with friends around; read a piece of your writing, and I’m sure you’ll find a fragment or run-on that only means something to you.

With that said, this day warrants a day of buffoonery.  I need to sit back and let the mind put itself together on my computer and then completely abandon it for a few weeks.  It’s weird to hear how a voice has changed in such a short amount of time.

There are just some ideas that like to follow you around.  The neurons all blink with wave after wave of evolutionary progression, each burst building onto the idea before.  A compounded leap of transcendentalism finds a pattern in the chaos, forces the thoughts to develop and manifest themselves through the neurons in the fingers, in the feet, in the genitals.

I think that I’m really starting to get this.  

I constantly find myself in a bind when I attempt to go through certain systems and attributes that I like to think are qualified under the category of ‘hopelessness’.  I often like to think that the very nature of hopelessness is that of a neutral (if not completely ‘Other’) tone, though I know tons of people that like to shape it against the positive ideal of hopefulness.  This is where the definitions will come in handy:

hopeless - having no expectation of good or success

hopeful - having qualities that inspire hope

Now, I’ll ask that these definitions be put in a corner of your mind.  Try not to let your understanding of the words cloud what my understanding of the words seem to be, and we’ll get along just fine.  Of course, my understanding of the terms could have come differently as I have been surrounding by people with varying degrees of bipolar disorder my whole life.  To be quite honest, I like to think that my understanding of terms comes from an attempt at reinvention.

I used to think that the meanings of words were thrown around by anyone, each person assigning definitions to each word from a subjective perspective every time.  When my friends used to say the word “ice cream,” it was a different understanding of my word “ice cream” - often this held true, as my growing up experiences overseas have really helped to separate who I am from many people that I interact with.  I might have a relative conception of what someone might be talking about, but the definition is still going to be different for me than what it is going to be for you (or any other person).  While I have grown up since that notion was the only thing on my mind, I still believe that there are is some truth to that in that we have a constant stream of definitions that some people only seem to have partials of.  I could never say that I know the exact definition of the term “transgender,” despite the fact that I consider myself a trans-activist and I do a lot of work that focuses around gender identity.  

Does that make me stupid?  Perhaps.  I like to think of it still in a different way.

Our understanding of words is still wrapped up within abstractions.  In order to relate to a word, you want to try to gain a level of familiarity with it, but when someone doesn’t necessarily have the experience to relate to that word, they draw upon whatever they can to do so.  That is where things can get complicated, thanks to the wide-spread delirium that is known as telecommunication.  Too many types of thoughts and ideas are being streamed from documentary to commercial, tying us to this understanding of their words, their abstractions.  It’s dehumanizing to have to get my information from television and be left with a definition that doesn’t seem to really grip me in any way that is descriptive to everything; at best, there are only attempts to get across popular narratives.  How many times have you seen a show about how nervous someone was to ask another person to the prom?  Or what about the obviously hectic, extremely challenging transition between engagement to married life?  Can you think of any other clichés?

Even through the seemingly “practical” application of definitions found within sitcoms or dramas don’t do us justice because the scenarios that are positioned around those definitions become just one of a multitude of situations that we can wrap our head around.  Comedy is still a field that I think needs to be further developed, as there is no need within certain kinds of comedy to justify what you are saying.  A large focus of comedy is just the same shit being said to the same LCDs.  If you ask a writer to write a television show talking about what it means to be gay, you could have the story being told in multiple ways (and often very creatively too).

However, another fault in telecommunications comes into play:  strategy.  Writers have the ability (just like everyone else) to have multiple ideas, but how many of those are truly shown on television?  Not only are people being able to tell one narrative and have it be representative of them all, but writers are also faced with a tremendous burden to make television that will sell.  You have to appeal to certain demographics and be regulated in a certain kind of way.  Doesn’t that sound like a restriction on a kind of creativity?  For me, it does.  Even when writers get the chance to tell their story in a different way, do they not still have to work within a system that must appeal to certain people?

What about the people that aren’t part of the target demographics?  What about the people that are not being represented by more than one story?  It isn’t only writers either - when an actor is branded as being ‘type-cast,’ do they not get constrained to some popularized identity that they have managed to portray?  That’s dehumanizing, only allowing people to be seen or to be shown in one light.  Oh, but it is easy to do that to celebrities because their lives are so unbelievably different from mine.  Isn’t that what my magazines say?

But see, maybe that is where I am wrong.  Maybe my understanding of what dehumanization is happens to be different from what yours is and what researchers’ are and what advertisers’ are and what television writers’ are and what actors’ are.  Maybe the wiggle room that allows us to only relate to words through abstractions is the best possible adaptive quality that we could ever have.  I mean, it does take a lot for a human to watch a television show, be introduced to new themes or concepts, unconsciously decide to only apply that one narrative to those ideas, and carry on the rest of our lives having only this one scenario being descriptive of them all.

This is my perception of hopelessness:  the thought that we stick to the abstractions or popularized definitions of words and not take the time to develop and redevelop meanings for ourselves.  I am a hopeless individual that participates within hopelessness when I decide to not give a damn after I hear a word and don’t understand it.  I am a hopeless individual that participates within hopelessness when I decide that the few stories that I’ve read about what it means to be a good person are the only means of being a good person.  I am a hopeless individual that participates within hopelessness when I don’t take the time to make sense of my relationship to the words that I use.  I am a hopeless individual that participates within hopelessness when I forget that people are more than what they are in every regard.

Another facet of this ‘oh so’ hopeless identity of mine also happens to be this underlying layer of optimism.  I think that people can be less hopeless; I think that there are times when people actually show it too.  When you watch a show about a teen mom struggling, it is easy to criticize and belittle.  When you watch a show about a teen mom struggling and it turns out that your mother was in the same sort of position when she was younger, it is a little harder and a little fuzzier to comprehend or criticize.  I don’t have any definitive answers, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a shaky voice that sometimes cracks that is willing to bring things up and talk things out with others in hopes that what does come out of those discussions is something that can be useful to my understanding and relational distance to words and people.

I am a hopeless optimist.  With that said, I’m working on becoming a little more hopeful.

It should also be treated as such.

While discussing certain kinds of ideological frameworks today, I took a moment to fall to my knees and let it soak in.  I put my hands to my head, feeling out the space between my hair and mapping out where the bumps on my head have decided to spread themselves out today.  

My fingers find their way to my temples; I push inward for a circle and let go.

I could feel my lecture about research soak in, about how I am going to spend the next nine weeks looking at anxiety within public transportation from a psychological lens.  I need to remember that there is a scientific method that attempts to be objective, but it knows that there is no one way to actually accomplish that.  I need to be better versed in psychological practices, as well as research that can be compared from other disciplines.  I need to remember that research is where my hands want to be building something.  Pressure to make my appointments should never get in my way from taking a trip down one flight of stairs to catch up with an old friend.  I am not cut out to be a psychologist.

I push inward for a circle and let go.

My neurons were soaking up the discussion that I had today about how patients need to be treated more like humans and less like subjects; there needs to be more of a focus on what exists when a person leaves a hospital or a clinic.  I need to remember the limitations on qualifying individuals that have abnormalities; normative values are absolutely meaningless in the grand scheme of time and space.  Prevention can go a long way.  There are more things at work than I will ever be able to have power over, and the destruction of hierarchical models within social frameworks can help to better place people on a more level playing field.  My bias doesn’t go away; I need to be more aware.  There is an important sort of power allotted to the people that listen, and no one person should ever have to exist in such a passive role for long periods of time (especially with so many great voices that we could learn from if we heard them).  

I push inward for a circle and let go.

Paradigms and older men discussing sexual practices are on my mind next.  I have to remember that I have sex and am a sexual body; this difference needs to be remembered, and both partials need to be internalized.  This discussion around sex also doesn’t have to be dirty, despite the instinctual shame that has always been present since the first time I heard the word back in church when I was younger.  Intimacy is a goal of mine; trust is going to have to become a more comfortable medium for myself if I’m ever going to get to that intimate level.  I recall that I have very few values, and I denounce my ideals as a humanist in hopes to create a more suitable term for what I am at a future time.  Babies still have very little appeal to me.

I push inward for a circle and let go.

I think about the tiny boxes, the ones that I have to fill out on the census forms that mark whether I am this or that, this or that, this or that.  I am neither this or that; I am also this and that and more.  My body is always on display, for anyone to monitor and surveil.  My self-surveillance gets sticky when I get too far in; my embodiment of gender is problematic and has been for years.  I made a statement today:  ”I am not interested in male culture; it bores me.”  Despite the fact that I knew that I was talking about normative, Euro-American male culture, I made a general statement that led me to feel worse about how I relate to my fellow males in the universe.  Masculine critiques aside, I am gendered and have been for years.  I love where I am at now, and I am a contributor to male culture as a male.  I’m going to keep redefining that for myself until it becomes considerably less boring.

I push inward for a circle and let go.

Wasting time is just that: a waste.  My consciousness about what my body does and does not do in time is always apparent to me, but I need to get a better grasp on it.  I hate comedy today, and my exposure with it has just upset me.  Despite the fact that I don’t seem to care for it today doesn’t mean that it won’t change in the future.  I hope that I can find it in me to respect people that commit themselves to it; I hope to remember not to be dismissive of those that are really invested in their comedic stylings.  Not everyone that is funny is a problematic piece of shit that decides to reinforce stereotypes, support certain types of social criminalization, or fail to make me laugh on a daily basis because of how hilariously unfunny I find their actual comments can be.  Can any one person be this oblivious?

I push inward for a circle and let go.

I feel bad about where I am going and where I have gone with the last hour of my day.  I will feel better once my head has had time to rest on my pillow, a practice that I should be performing more during these essential years of my simplistic youthful existence.

I push inward for a circle and let go.

The head feels sick by this time.  I am going to take a shower in hopes that the water that floods down my skin is enough to clear away the dead cells that have sullied the second half of my day.

I need a break from American idealism.  It’s too hard to be optimistic within it.

I mean, it isn’t too hard to believe that a seed can turn itself into a tree, right?  With a little help from water and nutrients, it does a damn good job of growing up into this entity that is capable of embodying ethereal elegance.  The same can also be said of cells, I suppose.  How do they manage to properly conquer their forms, use their shapes as a basis for a continual sense of expansion, and build from their roots in no kind of hierarchical perspective?  Or are there systems and values that are implicitly part of the genetic make-up, bursting through prior understanding of what it means to be an object.

I feel myself spiraling onto an oddly cultured soil these days.

I woke up a few days ago to a Mark Ronson song.  I don’t remember what the lyrics were attempting to get across, but I could feel the music in my bones.  It started low with tiny beats that got my joints clicking out of their slumber.  There were toes curling, fists clenching, spine aligning through a series of extremely comfortable poses, finishing off with an elongated yawn of relief and absolute ease. The song shook and struck my cells, finding a grey space between the membranes to wiggle through and excite.  My eyes bolted open, and I had one of the best days of my life.

———————————————————————————-

I often get asked what I do when I want to try to be more creative.  Before these questions started marking my personality, I had absolutely no idea that there was any activity that I had ever done that could have translated into being something worth creative value.  I have sort of developed a short list of activities that I like to do to sort of keep my mind on edge and give myself a little bit more to think about than what I am exposed to from my university environment:

 - Symbol Association:  Can you spare twenty minutes out of your day to draw as many different variations of a word as you possibly can?  I certainly love to do this.  Pick any word in the world and use it as loosely or as firmly as you’d like to when you are drawing out what that word could [insert verb here] like.  I am not a very fine artist, but I do take pride in my tiny sketches of balloons that were supposed to represent the word ‘tyranny’ the other day.  

 - Narrative Fuckery:  Do you know about your grand narratives?  Take one from some section of your identity (sexuality, nationality, racial/ethnic identity, spirituality, etc.), and put that into good practice by telling an alternative to what exists in relation to that story.  Or take the time to break down and look up where the story comes from, what elements are crucial in reinforcing the structure’s system of beliefs, how those systems might be infecting/reinforcing other stories that exist, and what it means to be deviant from that kind of a story.  I usually go through about two or three of these a week; my doodles in class often just aren’t enough.

 - Sole Sight-Seeing:  Are there any possible ways to get into deep psychological mindsets without having to work too hard to establish them within the actualized universe?  I like to think that there are, and I do think that it can be done almost anywhere.  Sit on the train and stare at people’s shoes; then, pull out one index card per pair of shoes that you see and describe the shoes as best as you possibly can on the card.  What your task becomes after that is to put the cards together and tell a story about how the people in the two kinds of shoes would interact with one another, running only on fucked up generalizations that your mind has inappropriately assigned to characteristics that are even more shallow than my morning cups of cinnamon tea.  It’s a very somber activity at the beginning of the day, but it shows promise when you start to confront those feelings and make better sense of your assumptions.

 - Poetic Justice:  Umm…read poetry?  That’s really all that there is to this one.  However, I do recommend finding something that you don’t like to read to start off with.  Once you read a few poets that are really rather uncouth, it makes you want to appreciate other words, if only to spite the person that had the temerity to publish some garble that couldn’t even potentially noted as zine-worthy.  Take the time to develop a style or at least have the agency to will your tastes from being numb to actually having something to contribute to a social environment when and if the subject arises.

 - Mindful Cynicism:  When you think that the self-interest of others is what is motivating their every action, you tend to get critical in a quick and exceptional way.  This perception can be limiting, as some people really are quite sincere in how they interact with one another.  Be that as it may, I still feel that the need to think outside of that surface values is still one that can be valued, as long as it is done with some sense of understanding that no one interpretation is the correct interpretation (because it is a completely different set of values that we’d have to address if that was considered to be the case).  One must note that this activity can be as simple as breaking down a conversation to actually mapping out what sorts of non-verbals that you’ve been getting from that guy across the room in your abnormal psychology class this quarter.  It is going to be such an interesting dynamic that I’ve mapped out at the end of the quarter; I seriously can’t wait to see where this acquaintanceship will lead.

 That is the end of that list.  Perhaps there will be a part two to my creative practices, but these are the easiest habits that I’ve managed to see and maintain as the constitution of time changes my thoughts and qualities.

Whoa, I am letting my performance seep into my other work.  I can safely say that it is okay because I know that there are only a few chances that I’ll ever be able to work with such a great group of people at one time.  

———————————————————————————-

A final treat before my hands stop their typing or decide that they’d like to be up for the next 14 hours getting work done that I am eventually going to have to complete by the end of the next 10 weeks.

learn about letters sequentially

then fuck it up

and spelling out words

is my new sequence.

I might have to blog about what I think about fuzzy logic or my thoughts on foreign alphabets sometime soon.  You can only attempt to reason with so many fundamentals before they decide to take their toll and leave you stuck with a system that leads you just as astray in the perceived importance of certain characters.

If I send out an S.O.S. alert, it only means that I am sinking and should be left to my keen sense of direction and noteworthy comedic timing.

Toodle-oo!

I woke up to an unexpected phone call this morning.  When I attempted to answer it, the call was dropped and I decided to lift myself out of my bed and let the day begin.  I did all of the usual stuff: 15 minutes of me picking out appropriate work attire, 10 minutes of me washing tired dirt my face and brushing my teeth, 5 minutes to go through what I had to accomplish by the end of the day.  I grabbed my bag, coat, keys, wallet; I closed the door to my room and knew that I wouldn’t be back anytime soon.  I am always pretty fine with that realization, despite my disgust for property entitlement.  I dismissed those thoughts when the lock clicked and my keys made their way into my pocket.

The day was relatively the same as any other: busy.  I had five meetings scheduled throughout the day; each of them with a different person from a different perspective and passion that I couldn’t imagine myself not having the pleasure of being around.  I also had a long day of work today:  filing, logistics, planning, coordinating, criticizing, reviewing, drawing, day-dreaming, drifting…  My wandering mind led my body from meeting to meeting, task to task, in a most enjoyable and enlightening way.  I had smiles from everyone; there was not one person that I didn’t enjoy being around today.  I had a series of emotional and unexpected conversations with family and friends that were much needed; before spring can make an appearance, all of that thick, cold city snow has to melt down and touch those seeds in the ground.  There might be an excess of concrete around, but the seeds still always manage to sneak through the cracks.

I got home.  I fell to my bed into a deep sleep for a few hours, and I am now awake.

I’m thankful today.