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My parents always worry about me staying up so late. I guess the toughest part about living at home for me (fortunately) is that it’s more apparent that I don’t sleep until maybe 3 or 4am. It’s a lot easier to hide that fact when I’m at school, and my roommates only wonder about me, rather than worry.
There’s something special about times like this.
The silence, the stillness, the thought that everyone that I care for is asleep, safe, dreaming.
The solitude seems to preserve time, and allow room for thoughts.
Usually, the solitude is nice. It preserves my individuality. It allows me to think entirely of my own.
But tonight, I realize…perhaps I have been spending too much time in this solitude.
Not that I want the company of other people either…
I need something else.
–
I’ve recently been reading my sister’s college friends’ blog: http://www.graceandrew.blogspot.com/
It hits close to home and heart.
Cancer is cruel, but God, somehow, is oddly good.
I’m still trying to get my head around that number.
When there’s too much to digest, and you can’t process any of it. It’s toxic, no doubt.
But you feel better afterwards.
Unlike other worldly–or wordy–endeavors.
On Solitude:
It is good to be alone. It’s hard to enjoy it. It’s hard to avoid crossing the fine line between quiet introspection and raving lunacy when you are left alone with your thoughts.
On Sadness:
This, I feel is different from sorrow or mourning. Sadness…it’s a light sensation, far more necessary to feel than sorrow or mourning. Sadness can exist healthily and constantly without really bothering me. I can be content but sad. Happy but feel the sadness. I’ve come to accept that it needs to be accepted as a part of my personality. Without the sadness, I lose much of my inspiration. Though my inspiration rarely results in much good. Nevertheless, without the sadness, I don’t think. I’d be to happy, and empty to do so. In my sadness, then, is my fullness. Not happiness, but fullness, and contentment. There is a certain clarity to sadness that happiness or any other emotion fails to deliver.
On Self-Awareness:
That sadness is necessary to my self-awareness. The sadness, however, is often a result of my frustration that I cannot ever fully possibly be self-aware. By self-awareness I refer to a certain fullness of understanding of oneself, of myself. I cannot know myself. This makes knowing others much more complicated, because others find the same difficulty of negotiating themselves. Therefore our otherness is hopelessly incommunicable because of our inability to know ourselves.
Temet nosce–I think this is essentially what we strive for.
And yet…
On God:
Simultaneous to our desire to understand ourselves and our subsequent inability, I feel that we strive for something beyond ourselves, the ultimate Other. This is the only key to understanding ourselves. We are innately selfish, so naturally, to create a design that causes us to look beyond ourselves for a selfish reason is ingenious. God. If we seek the one who has the answers, or rather The Answer, who created and modeled us after Himself, we will find, through Him, ourselves.
On Self-loathing:
And yet when we come to terms through Him about ourselves, we find ourselves still not fully self-aware, but aware enough to know that the self is something that must be detested. The old-self vs. new-self mentality. The old-self is that which we love, and hate. Something that we cling to. Rather, that I cling to. I love my old-self. I’m scared to let my old-self go. And yet it is something to despise, something that I feel guilty placing my affection upon. My old-self worships itself. I worship it. But it is wrong. But as long as I cling to it, I will have to hate myself, and hate the One who revealed this truth to me, the truth about myself. Not that self-loathing is suicidal. It desires to change the old-self but loves it too much to want to change. And the true-self, which is the negotiation between the old-self and new-self, must choose between the two, because there is no happy negotiation. There is always a give and more take than give. The change requires something the old-self is unwilling to give up. This is sin. This is habit, the habit of sin. It’s too hard to change. And yet because of this, the true-self will always loathe both selves.
On Solutions:
Si yo puedo. If I can. The big IF I will find it, IF I can do it. So hard to execute it. IF I will. IF I want.
Too hard to digest.
Perhaps my change requires something very ridiculous to happen that I have been wishing to happen.
Just last week, I took a walk through the muggy Los Angeles air. It was the kind of air that hangs thickly about you, and doesn’t quite suffocate more than it makes you forget to breathe.
That’s how I realized, I forgot how it feels to be alive.
Not that I am dead (“Are we the dining dead?”), just that I’ve forgotten how to live.
There’s that mechanical cycle. Work. Sleep. Eat. Bathe. Play. Sleep. Work. Write. Read. Simon says.
That all gets to you too. You forget so easily how to breathe. It gets to you. Los Angeles, the city, it wears down on you. And before you realize, you’re old. Your lungs are black. You’re tired, and on the verge of discovering nothing new except more ugly truths about how cruel and shallow people are.
The City of Angels, though, is not entirely bleak. There’s inspiration in that ugliness. It is cliche to say, but there is always beauty in violence. Beauty in death, art in crime.
Director Harry Kim followed L.A. local artist David Choe around for 7 years with a camera, documenting the ups and downs, the ins and outs of his artistic and personal experiences. Why David Choe? Why not. Choe struggles-and so openly, and candidly- with much of what we are usually too ashamed to speak of.
Choe’s art is not limited to his canvas, it is his very life. From a search for a dinosaur in the Congo to three months in a Japanese prison, Choe creates and experiences art, pain, love, sexual addiction, loneliness, insanity, depression, redemption, and God. The ups and downs, the falling away, the coming back, and the realization that maybe all of this is just because we don’t want to grow up.
Because when we were kids, we knew how to feel alive.
Never growing up is dangerous (Michael Jackson?), but there is that constant thrill, the irrelevance of time, the liberation, the discovery, and the lack of inhibition. The laughter.
“Dirty Hands” isn’t about crime, or art really. It’s not about the spray paint, the urine, and soy sauce that Choe uses on his canvases. It’s not about having sticky kleptomaniac hands.
“Dirty Hands” is about being a kid, fully capable of feeling pain, often subject to faulty logic, prone to injury and disillusionment, believing in the incredible. It is a film about growing old, but somehow through all the growing pains, staying young, and simply living.
Just saw the latest movie.
Films are very telling of our times.
In the past, Indiana Jones flicks were all about relics, religion, legends, and lots and lots of ancient rich cultural (possible) history, plenty of dusting off artifacts, and looking things up in books.
And now what culture (and Jones) has boiled down to is one thing:
Knowledge.
Knowledge is our new God.
Knowledge is our new Gold.
I just finished watching Death Note today.
It really reminded me of the Flaming Lips’ song, Yeah Yeah Yeah:
“If you could blow up the world with the flick of a switch, would you do it?…So we cannot know ourselves or what we’d really do”
I hadn’t made this connection earlier, but the “person” (more or less a group of people operating under a pseudonym) who posted the Edison Chen scandal photographs called themselves “Kira”.
This is most likely in reference to a popular cult anime called Death Note (what I finished watching–ah life imitates art!); the main character is dubbed Kira (romanji/engrish for Killer) by the news media in Japan. Kira, a very smart, successful, but bored high-school student, Yagami Light, discovers a celestial notebook from a Shinigami, Death God. The notebook has the power to kill when a person’s name is written in it, either by the hand of a shinigami, or by the human who possesses the notebook. Light realizes this ability to kill strategically can be used to reform the world (which he will rule over as God), and he sets out to cleanse the world of evil people. He begins by killing criminals whose names appear in the nightly news, newspapers, and on the internet.
I imagine that in some odd way, the Kira in real life felt it was justified to post the scandal photographs and to reveal the hypocrisy in Hong Kong media.
But this is where things get tremendously fascinating. Ah, the parallels!
What is most fascinating to me is the prominence of the media in both the fictional anime and the real life situation. The media, in Death Note, is both a tool that Kira uses to find victims, and eventually becomes a tool that Kira uses to announce his intentions to the fearful public (that proves to have a malleable, manipulatable opinion of Kira).
In the Edison Chen situation, Kira and the media fed off of each other. The media simply ate up everything Kira posted, and for an estimated 28 days, Edison Chen ran on the cover of at least 3 periodicals or newspapers each day. Newspapers, which have suffered from the same trend plaguing print news internationally, suddenly began making profits again (but unfortunately fell into the trap of tabloid exploitation).
In the words of Tupac Shakur (again, ladies and gentlemen), “The media’s full of dirty tricks”. I find it terribly intriguing that Death Note was able to predict a very realistic behavior of the media and news industry–the media will jump on the gory personal details if they will sell. I’m referring mostly to the media in Asia, but of course we see this in all the Britney Spears coverage in the U.S. too.
(Not to rag on the media industry; I hope one day, however far or near, I can work for print. I just pray to God that I won’t fall into the tabloid trap.)
“Netizens” also played a special role as well. Netizens would plead Kira to post more photos, Kira would make deals, announce that he would post more on certain days at certain times. He enjoyed the control, knowing that thousands would be waiting at their computers, searching forums to find the photos.
After a certain point, it wasn’t vigilante justice to show these photos. Kira became a sick sycophant, obsessed with the power to ruin lives and end careers. And people loved him.
Well, all of that is over now. In other news, Edison Chen has made the big conversion to Christianity. I hope that he’s genuine; it’s so hard to be genuine even when you aren’t rich and famous.
Read here.
