August Blabbers

Holy dolphin was August eventful or what? If there was one word I could describe the past month with, it would be "Hurtling", (grammar, structure, and whatnots aside) cause it really did feel like I was hurtling/hurtled past the days, through the weeks, into the mornings, and out of bed. Rinse, repeat, thank you very much.

Frankly I can't even recall half of what happened in the 3 weeks that were; it was a vague mosaic picture of (in no particular order) cuddles, good food, mosquitos, chatime, literal fast breaking, weekend debaucheries, hours away from home and self, weekday stowaways, electro-esque earish fantasies, and finally possibly finding someone whom I think could very much help me from my self and state. His name is Anwar and mom doesn't have to know.

It's really back to that phase of busyness that has yet to be defined; the one where you don't exactly know what you're doing and why you're doing so, nor where you're going with what you're doing. All you know is that you're indulging and having genuine fun, and that's all you think about, sort of all that really matters.

I'm strictly refusing to think of it all as a bad thing though. Instead it shall be acknowledged as a process; a transition point, if you may. The positive wagon hasn't come back since the last time I fell off, so I'm guessing this is what I do as I grapple and while the time away till it comes round the mountain again. Perhaps what I'm really doing is building my own wagon...can't fully rely on the volatility that is the Schedule and Times of the Positive Wagon now can we?

Enough time passes

You'd lose the whole of July. Which is funny cause moments ago I was standing in the shower looking back at the events in July and thinking "damn can't July go any faster?" And here's this blog, still at its last post sometime in June when spirits were still high.

Spirits were high, post said post. A good part of it had good things coming aplenty. The crash and burn part only happened last week. Oddly enough, I got to watch Incubus live last week, along with Brandon Boyd uttering a meager "Hi" to me. Come weekend, I spiraled out of control - into answering them little voices in my head, heeding their beckoning of doing whatever the fuck I want. Guess the voices didn't ask me to be prepared for the amount of shame and guilt that come lumbering along after. Oh wait, that's another voice - conscience - perhaps absent from it all as it couldn't go along well with them other voices.

The time has come for me to sink into the murky waters of deep depressing rumination...maybe more so now after the weekend led me on to fall quite ill. Took a day off today and stayed in bed for the most part, mainly due to the numbing effect from the medications. Gave me time to think hard, think deep. Lo and behold, I still have not found my purpose in life. Passion for my job? Zero. Passion for my friends? I struggle. Passion for anything at all? Dare I say I couldn't be arsed?

It's odd how people tell me that I come off as a person quite intelligent, yet I don't know what existentialism means. It's odd how I landed my job, doing it day in day out, yet it still feels unwelcoming. It's odd, it really is. How am I not supposed to doubt things and myself when things are this odd?

Is everyone like this? If it's just me, then why is my mind so messed up? I need stability, or so they tell me. But do I really want stability? When chaos strikes, regardless of the booming voice of conscience that entails, that's when I truly have fun, when I truly feel. Only during chaos. Some call it living in the moment. I like the idea of chaos. If my life could be chaos, spinning into nothingness, no conscience nor normality after, then perhaps I could then freely be me.

Serengeti

They do say that it's all about the momentum. Well, they don't. But whatever. Most often times than not, the trick is to get started and once you do slide off that cliff, all that's left is a momentum, that of a grassy downhill tumble.

Which is where I am at this point, tumbling...you could say that I'm on a roll. Not in acing, but rather in living. Getting busy living, because the meaning to life is to give life a meaning. Doesn't really matter if the goals haven't been achieved, I know they will come. No asking, begging or borrowing, the first step is to BE.

BEING caught up with living - getting up, getting dressed, getting to work, eating, drinking, greeting "good morning, good evening, good night", writing, reading, smiling, laughing - may seem trivial but it is all that matters. I've always been intrigued by idle thoughts, but I've also learned that idle thoughts from an already idle life is septic.

Idle thoughts of idle living vs idle thoughts of busy living. There's the difference right there. Put it simply, it is alright to stop and think, but never alright to dwell. Looking back I wonder how I did it, but with a smirk I tell myself that I'm STILL at it. And I do not plan to stop. With ample snooze time, and a healthy mind to take me anywhere, why not?

In Practice

I am 23, but they say age is just a number.

And at 23, I'm ashamed to admit that writing has become insanely alien to me. Try as I might, summoning up a coherent sentence is no longer as easy.

Also at 23, it has dawned upon me that I am H-O-L-L-O-W. I thought I had rediscovered myself back in Bali in the Friday that was, but being back here to the same old routine has once again driven me into ... senseless ennui.

Oh snap out of it Jo Ann you know you're better than this if you could just STOP trying so hard. Always remember that it's all a matter of perspective so strive to look at it from another angle. Yes I am talking to myself but this is completely fine, seeing that self-reflection is as healthy as it gets...unless of course, if it leaves your life stagnant and unchanged. *shudders*

Before I sign myself off from a totally pointless blog post (they all are all the time, I know) I have a confession: I love, hence am addicted to travelling. There's that dream, still waiting to be realised. Which leads to a pressing - possibly pivotal - notion: Could I possibly work something out where I can maintain a certain balance between doing what I love and not dying from it out of sheer inability to sustain doing what I love?

Meh. I'm 23. About time, baby.

It's MAY

I'm turning 23

Damn straight it's scary

How'd you get to be

Fascinated.

Sucks to feel left out although you're right in.

Headfirst

Stop being so hard on yourself and trying with all might to rectify things within.

Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.

No more picking. The world is your oyster.

However far away...

Reading, reading, back to doing a lot of reading nowadays; alternating between Pamuk & Rhinehart, taking as much time as I wish. Too much time I'm afraid. Sometimes I wished I should have sped up the reading process but during those times, something's always telling me to take my time with a book - take in every word, phrase, and paragraph like wine.

I remember the days when I use to gobble up pages with furor and spit the book up back into the bookshelf, insatiable. There's the read section, and the yet-to-be's, including a silent mental section for the favourites and never-again's. Mom used to get so angry every time I come home with a new book, incensed by my money management. I wonder why myself at times; why books, why not dresses?

Well, I suspect those days of eager avid gobble-reading have long been muzzled. With barely any time and the fact that I rarely ever buy anymore, I guess this is why I chose to go at my books like a tortoise on a snail now. Not that it's a bad thing. My average daily word consumption remains at a favourable level I shall say...

I just need to write more. And play the piano more.

And perhaps one day muster enough courage to unhinge the case and take a peek at my cello...ol buddy ol pal. Bet the strings have all rusted, and I wonder what I'd do if I find it housing a family of termites.

Shucks.

Don't sleep so much

The Monday after Chinese New Year. Back to work. Semi-amazed at how I drifted through my tasks in the morning. It's always easier to go equipped with a good amount of headlines right from whence the clock stroke 12. Which, is precisely what I'm supposed to be doing at this very moment but I opted for free-writing simply because it's been quite some time.

Hi.

Is it me or does Chinese New Year get more and more heartbreaking by the year? The gash just gets deeper and more septic as I return every time. I admit it will be a while before I bother to meddle in matters over on that side of the family really. Some of us too weary, some...just wary.

Not like anyone cared to try anyway, save two: One whom I deem the most important person to me in this world, one whom I am bound to shed my ego and love, hopefully before it's too late.

Inferno

I hear voices through the wall. The next room vibrates with a distant sound, a mist of sound which scarcely comes through the wall.

I shall not be able to listen any more, or look into the room, or hear anything distinctly. And I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have embraced.

Here they will pass again, day after day, year after year, all the prisoners of rooms will pass with their kind of eternity. In the twilight when everything fades, they will sit down near the light, in the room full of haloes. They will drag themselves to the window's void. Their mouths will join and they will grow tender. They will exchange a first or a last useless glance. They will open their arms, they will caress each other. They will love life and be afraid to disappear. Here below they will seek a perfect union of hearts. Up above they will seek everlastingness among the shades and a god in the clouds.

The monotonous murmur of voices comes through the wall steadily, but I do not catch what is being said. I am like anybody else in a room.

I am lost, just as I was the evening I came here when I took possession of this room used by people who had disappeared and died - before this great change of light took place in my destiny.

Perhaps because of my fever, perhaps because of my lofty pain, I imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one is speaking of Prometheus. He had stolen light from the gods. In his entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh, gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus because of desire, but there is neither vulture not gods.

There is no paradise except that which we create in the great tomb of the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living.

There is no mysterious fire.

I have stolen the truth. I have stolen the whole truth. I have seen sacred things, tragic things, pure things, and I was right. I have seen shameful things, and I was right. And so I have entered the kingdom of truth, if, while preserving respect to truth and without soiling it, we can use the expression that deceit and religious blasphemy employ.

--- Henri Barbusse

How apt

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.
Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters – whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents’ house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened.

You can tell yourself you won’t take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that. But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister.
Everyone is finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away.

That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home.

Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts – and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.
Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them.

Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.

Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.

Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the “ideal moment.”

Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back.
Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person – nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need.
This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.

Closing cycles. Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life.

Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust.

Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

--- Paulo Coelho