giving up the gun

it's all very easy really.




she's talking about something and you're listening nodding your head like yeah, i totally agree
when in fact she could be telling you that she has a third nipple and you wouldn't know
cause all you see is the glass bottom of your shotglass
please sir can i have another
grin and bear it
the liquid courage stirring the beast within again
now you have to pay attention have to focus up on her
was her name sarah? samantha? doesn't matter
just focus on making her feel special, the center of your universe for the moment
reach in your bag of tricks for that special quip, that wisecrack that always gets them engaged
get them laughing, happy, confident before nailing down the deal
she's not as cute as the last one but the parts are all the same
the need outweighs other desires
take her home getting down to business
it feels good doesn't it? the pressing together of skin
the intimacies of bodies rather than of the mind
and in that brief moment of sheer unbridled ecstasy
you are the king, the master, godlike
and look down at her, your conquered land
disgusted at what you've laid waste to
cover it up with whatever's handy
let her stay the night so she doesn't feel used
later she'll paint you as the bad boy in her lifestory
but that's okay
doesn't stop them from returning, try to change you, figure you out
uncrack the shell
as you roll over to her as she passes out, you whisper
"there's nothing."

the death of everything that's wild

It's funny. I used to be a pack rat back in the day- saved all the notes passed around class from high school, programs from shows I performed in, schedules from voice camp etc. I just stumbled upon the evaluations of my tennis game back in 2004 when I went to tennis camp at Stanford (I was so close to you yet so far right?).

They all say the same thing:
"Laura was patient and focused on the court."
"Focused and determined while in control of her game."
"Focus and concentration good. You are not rushed and are involved mentally in the match."

Yet the criticisms are all the same:
"You need to work on your preparation/footwork-back up to be more effective."
"Work on your preparation and holding your finish-you come too early." (that's what she said?)
etc. etc.

As trivial as these observations might be, after all they were criticisms of my tennis game back when I still played, of course being me that tries to see meaning in everything- I still think they are relevant. When I'm playing the game and into it, I am present. I am there. I am focused. Yet my fault is that I leap before I look, emotionally that is. When I get stuck on a notion, I'm like a pitbull on a stranger, I rarely let go unless given a compelling reason. I need to control my impulses, as easy of an assumption it may be able to jump to. I need to return to that overly empathetic 16 year old I used to be-where every devil had an advocate, where there was reasoning for people's actions. After all, making enemies has never been my strong strength.

My aunt's boyfriend has beaten her...repeatedly. This is a sadly long known in my family circle. Yet at Christmas Eve dinner, I am expected to break bread with the man and feign ignorance to events that had transpired without my presence but nonetheless were the truth. Shall I act kind to maintain status quo/not disturb the peace? Or do I speak up for risk of destroying the rare opportunity for the gathering of family? I am ashamed to say reader that I remained silent and avoidant if not cold. I focused on preparing myself for the encounter and although my knee-jerk reaction was to lambast the man, I realized that it wouldn't solve anything. If my aunt's choice is to stay with someone who destroys her physically as well as emotionally, no impassioned speech or extreme action upon my part is going to alter her choices. Any action would only serve to vindicate my conscience rather than help her.

I'm focused. I'm ready.

god is dead/post-collegiate blues

what do you do when you've reached your goals, when you've topped the summitt? This seems to be the affliction that is affecting those in my close circle- the abundance of choices and the lack of guidance. An article in the NY Times examined the effects of nihilism and I found it surprisingly applicable to this dilemma:

"On the positive end, when it is no longer clear in a culture what its most basic commitments are, when the structure of a worthwhile and well-lived life is no longer agreed upon and taken for granted, then a new sense of freedom may open up. Ways of living life that had earlier been marginalized or demonized may now achieve recognition or even be held up and celebrated. Social mobility ─ for African Americans, gays, women, workers, people with disabilities or others who had been held down by the traditional culture ─ may finally become a possibility. The exploration and articulation of these new possibilities for living a life was found in such great 20th-century figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Simone de Beauvoir, Studs Terkel, and many others.

But there is a downside to the freedom of nihilism as well, and the people living in the culture may experience this in a variety of ways. Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear in their lives before they can get on with living them; or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last. The threat of nihilism is the threat that freedom from the constraint of agreed upon norms opens up new possibilities in the culture only through its fundamentally destabilizing force."

The choices that are left to us are stymying at best. Do we attempt to give our lives fulfillment and meaning through religion? Do we absolve ourselves into hedonism? The conflict seems to me to be a vacillation between being trapped and being too free.

i am the conscience clear in pain or ecstasy

its hard watching this. its hard going back. it hurts to remember.
there's always the questions, that should be rhetorical because there's no easy answer.
what did i do to deserve what you did to me?

mars vs. venus

It always strikes me as a bit amusing when guys relate that familiar utterance.
"Girls are crazy, man".

Okay I get it-we're emotionally unstable, insecure beings who feel the need to psychoanalyze trivial moments, comments, or rather the lack of comments.

In my relatively short 23 years of life and through my male and female friendships, I feel like I've picked up on a few things and thought I should post it for the benefit of releasing this information into the wild of the Internet. Kidding, these aren't incredibly unique reflections but they are mine and I'm owning it.

Girls need to feel special. That's it. Plain and simple.

While men are locked in a transient aggressive power struggle with other men, women are going through something similar but much more passive aggressive which requires us to be much more cunning. Because women rarely come out in the open and candidly express feelings of resentment, jealousy or anger, we have to navigate the treacherous waters of maintaining our female friendships, which unless we see each other on an equal playing field, is riddled with subtle competition. Because being women and women love to talk, we are constantly measuring ourselves against our friends; our relationships, our careers, and when we embark on motherhood, our children, become the unwitting fodder for our asssessments of ourselves.

Our relationships with the opposite sex in particular fall especially victim to this grading scale. In lieu of the human desire to feel validated and loved, women especially want to be the "special one" to someone. The badboy complex is a particularly intense case of this. We want to be the earth shakers, the world changers, the ones that make him look at the millions of options and pick you. Like it or not we crave this validation in various doses. Fail to appease and you reap the consequences.

As irrational as it may be, I've always kind of appreciated this aspect of my sex. Although I love the dissociation, the stymying of emotions, and the clearheadedness of guys, I admit to being somewhat of a romantic when it comes to gender relations. I can't help but love the fact that we women long for this emotional validation.

Although it may seem weak that we need this kind of affirmation, I prefer to see it as a longing for someone else to recognize what we suspect we are capable of being. There's nothing wrong with a relationship or love helping you actualize into the self that you want to be. I think its in these relationships, platonic and otherwise, where we learn what we can tolerate, what we expect, and in the choices of our partners and friends, how we would like to establish ourselves. I learned a long time ago to let go of those who didn't recognize or contribute to my self and self-worth.

Jesus I sound like a poor man's Oprah. Good night.

the inward eye

As I drove up the familiar road, watching the miles tick off, I listened to my new favorite podcast, "Stuff You Should Know", where these two quasi-stoner buddies in the vein of Bill and Ted riff and discuss random various topics. Most of the podcast is them riffing off of one another which is pleasant to listen to because you can ascertain by their tone their genuine affection for one another. It gives this sense of voyeuristic pleasure listening to these conversations-especially since I can't conceive having these kind of introspective/learned conversations with very many.

I digress. The topic was "are there any really good ideas out in the world"-that's a summation but the basic gist was that the question if there was no more room for innovation to advance human history. As the two hosts playfully combatted each other on this topic, they kept coming back to subjectivism and how there's probably so much that could be achieved and learned but people are limited by the human brain/senses and furthermore by the subjective human experience. Our ways of understanding the universe is dependent and confined by the restrictions of how we are neurologically wired. This line of discussion eventually diverged into ruminations on solipsism- that our perceptions of reality are entirely subjective. We have no way of knowing what the world is truly like- we are slaves to our senses and our existence.

This also reminds me of another story I read about the other day. A man, through some genetic prank, became deprived of his testosterone and in essence, became God.

Not God in some omniscient and omnipotent sense, but as his testosterone levels depleted, his desires began to wane. He wasn't so dogged in the focus of possessing, controlling, conquering. He began to notice the beauty in the most trivial of items, kind of like the Wes Bentley character in American Beauty in overdrive. He became almost Buddhist-liberated and freed from the desires that kept him captive. His eventual dissociation from secular pleasures allowed him to feel somewhat numb from the outside world, yet strangely at peace. He no longer was the contentious, misogynistic person he had cultivated as he grew up. He changed, physically and fundamentally and though his testosterone levels have increased, his experiences marked him and his views for life.

We're all just a mess of hormones, chemicals, and neurotransmitters reacting, aren't we? There's no real truth, no real beauty, no real moral or ethical standards. It's all in our heads. What we perceive becomes our world.

on my tombstone they will carve "it never got fast enough for me"

"Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."

-Hunter S. Thompson

the absence of awe

"It's just really frustrating, you know, not being able to discuss art with anyone. No one I know really understands the upcoming artistic movements and what's happening in the world. I have this idea running through my head for my thesis and I have no one to bounce it off of."

"Give me a shot. I know jack shit about art but I might be able to offer some outside perspective."

"Okay, so lately there's been this steering of artists to make their pieces transitory and temporary. Like they will have something set up in a gallery and unless you can go in and see it during its tenure, they then take it away."

"I think I read something the other day about that, this Brazilian artist has been using trash from the landfills in Brazil in his pieces."

"Yeah, yeah exactly. I just find it interesting that art today is transitioning from being a method of preservation to a transitory expression".

"Well let's think a lot about why art was created in the first place- not only that people wanted to preserve historical events or have portraits of themselves to last throughout history but also that most of the very beginning artwork was religious. For centuries, people would depict Bible scenes and weave tapestries not only to depict the majesty of a monotheistic omniscient, omnipotent God but the art itself was meant to last, just as Christian God is supposed to-forever.
"Nowadays although the evangelist fundamentalist movement has taken over certain geographical areas, there has been sort of a falling out with religion and Christianity in particular that has happened. People are now 'spiritual but not religious'. Our gods, the being that we worship now are celebrities which in and of themselves are disposable. Fifteen minutes of fame and all that. Maybe our growing realizations that our souls aren't eternal, that we worship human beings who are capable of flaws and falling off the face of the earth, has affected artist's work."

"Yeah...something like that."

-Laura Delahaye and Halie Taylor. Sunday, October 24th at 6:44 PM.

pixellatedimagesofwhowewanttobe

My name is Laura Christine Delahaye.

I was born on February 1, 1987. My hometown is Orinda, California.

My political views are moderate (or rather truthfully becoming rapidly apathetic).

I've omitted my religious views.

My interests include: Singing, Grafitti, Reading, Jazz, Green Tea, Anthropology, Cosmopolitans etc.

My favorite music: The White Wires, Best Coast, matt & kim, The Red Devils etc.

My AIM screenname is pixiepicara.

My websites include Jon's memorial website and this very blog that no one reads.

Reader, truly gauging from this information, what do you know about me? What archetypes, what images, what judgments have you assesed from my tastes, interests, personal views? This is what repells me yet fascinates me about Facebook. Our complexity as humans are reduced to a carefully selected and thought out pieces of information that transmit to our web "audience" the kind of person we want them to see. Let's be honest with ourselves: real life is entirely overrated or at least has become stiflingly stilted. We live our lives through the internet. Pictures or it didn't happen. We need evidence of our existence, evidence of our friendships and the good times. Memory and nostalgia alone doesn't cut it.

The most telling and most paramount choice is the profile picture.
After all, the profile picture is simply the image that we want others to see; the context and angle of the photo indicates our aesthetic, the mold that we most would like to be pegged as.
Party boy, indie girl, the artistic type, frat guy, girly girl.
Whether we like it or not, we naturally peg each other into these molds. Paradoxically, despite these stereotypes we attempt to fill, we still are hounddogs for authenticity. A profile picture that smells of being too posed, interests that seem too attentively chosen, a status that seems too painstankingly worded, it strikes me as hilarious that we deride each other for these telling signs when we are guilty parties ourselves.
And yet I can seem to stop myself from logging in...

sucker love/a box I choose

I never really write about it.
Mostly because I think it's trite.
Mostly because I hate how girls tend to parade around their relationships as if it's a prize to be won- "look at my boyfriend, look at my boyfriend".
As most people, in public, I am a hardened player of the games, independent and thoroughly educated in the blase, unaffected dating rituals of my generation.
In private, I revert to the most cliche of stereotypes for my gender. I am affectionate. I cook for him. I am girlish...vulnerable.

He's always brought out the best in me...challenged me intellectually. I've always thought that the most important aspect to a friendship/relationship is having someone who can teach you something. Every day I learn from him. Every day he helps me grow.

mutual assured destruction

Apathy. Anarchy. Nihilism.
These concepts and ideas (or rather lack thereof) have always fascinated me. They seduce with their promise of freedom from bondage both emotional and political. The abandonment of the pillars of society which constrain human nature and forces us to adhere to the path of responsibility, civility, and moral decency.

For some reason I'd always thought I would live a nonsensical kind of life- consciously refusing to adhere to the status quo of what was anticipated of me as a productive member of society. High School, College, Job, Settling down. I'd always held some romantized idea that I would liberate myself from these rigidity of these expectations and lead a life primed on adventure and adrenaline. Now looking at my life, I see I've adhered to the very path that as a teenager I'd grown to despise. Do I regret the steps I've taken to where I am at? No, not at all. I'm incredibly grateful and happy to be where I am at at this very moment. It just tickles me to see the disparity in how I pictured my future to what it actually became.

I realize that despite my brother's obstinacy and difficulties with my parents-he is the true rebel of the family. Whereas I enjoy the game and have a thorough understanding of the rules, he refuses to even participate. I admire him for it. I wish I could be that brave.

Ambition is both a catalyst and a hindrance-repelling and fascintating. When it boils down to it, as appealing and emancipating as apathy and an anarchic nature may be, our human desires for connection and fulfillment overpower our longing for the liberation from those very desires. Buddha preached that clinging to our earthly desires stymies us from spirtiual fulfillment- keeps us in a state of suffering. Somewhat naively, I believe that the paradoxical feelings of pain and pleasure make me feel more alive, better helps me make the distinction.

It's raining outside.

I think that I'm going to take a walk outside in the rain to my boyfriend's house. I'm not going to take an umbrella. I'm going to play my favorite new song on repeat, walk outside, smell the sweet damp fragrance of the first rain of the season, let my hair get wet and feel the drops against my skin.

my weakness

I feel stupid. My focus and fixation has been permanently workworkwork that I've been failing to connect with anyone on any other topic of conversation. My life has become a blur of constant motion- to work, to drinks, to parties, a consistent motion of advancing towards a destination with no time to stop and smell the proverbial roses. I love the world that I've immersed myself in-my passion for what my work contributes to outweighs the demands of my commitment. Yet my mind is simultaenously existing in two places at once- the present requirements of my ambition, the ever perpetual state of motion battling with my internal need to travel, to learn, to withdraw and collect myself, to understand the world and the people in it. The latter is locked in a losing battle- my ambition currently outweight my curiousity.

Remember when we were little and were the masters of the universe? Our parents, in an effort to keep us occupied and give them some precious moments of peace, like agents of our youth kept us constantly booked or engaged in some activity. Drawing lessons, softball, horseback writing, voice lessons, soccer practice, I was always enroute to the next item on the itinerary, never there.

In some ways, I feel like those days prepared me for the current pace of my life. But I remember, my favorite moments, were when I sat in my room, all alone, reading books, making collages, and writing short stories and horribly trite poetry about feelings that I only saw in movies but had yet to really feel. When I last went home and looked on my old computer, all I saw was unfinished business- stories with a few introductory paragraphs, poems that lacked an editor's touch, songs that were stuck on the last verse. For once, I would love the time and the energy to see something to its completion. I possess the enthusiasm for its inception but neither the will nor the drive towards its culmination.


One last thought...our conversation piqued something to my attention. I feel like my hometown, over the years has been ridden with tragedy. Drug addled mothers abandoning children, classmates killing themselves, cataclysmic adolescent mishaps with alcohol...I can't distinguish if the seedy underbelly of my hometown has always existed and is now showing itself as I grow older or if this underlying layer of misery and catastrophe was hidden from me as a child and slowly is reeling its hideous face. In some ways, I feel deceived- at least Los Angeles bares its flaws unabashedly, not buried clandestinely behind a false facade.

it's not who you love; it's how

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Isolation

Where would you like to live?
A Tuscan villa or beachside in Malibu, CA or Phuket, Thailand

What is your idea of earthly happiness?
Moderate hedonism

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
Gluttony and arrogance

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Elizabeth Bennett

Who are your favorite characters in history?
Nelly Bly, Socrates, Elizabeth I, Lord Byron

Your favorite painter?
Pablo Picasso, Cezanne

Your favorite musician?
Beethoven

The quality you most admire in a man?
Wit

The quality you most admire in a woman?
Loyalty

Your favorite occupation?
Singing, reading, observing

Your most marked characteristic?
My preponderance towards laughter

What is your favorite occupation?
Battling of wits

What is your dream of happiness?
Satisfaction is realistically never to be had- just moments of pure unadalterated elation from time to time.

What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
For society to succumb to emotional decision-making rather than reason

What would you like to be?
Omnipotent and omniscient

In what country would you like to live?
France or Italy

What is it you most dislike?
Idiocy

What natural gift would you most like to possess?
Will power and irresistible charm

How would you like to die?
With a bang

What is your present state of mind?
Loving and full of gratitude

what's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?

There's this philosophic term, I can't for the life of me remember the name for it, but I think it's called the "confrontation of souls", where when two strangers walk on the same road towards one another, instead of ignoring or offering blase banter, they engage one another and have a genuine confrontation, a real recognition of the existence of another.

And there's this scene in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN that I haven't be able to get out of my mind. Anton Chiggurh, the cold sociopathic murderer, gets into a verbal confrontation with the elderly gas station manager which ends up with a coin toss that determines the life or death of said attendant:

Anton Chigurh: [indicating bag of cashews] How much?
Gas Station Proprietor: Sixty-nine cent.
Anton Chigurh: This. And the gas.
Gas Station Proprietor: Y'all gettin' any rain up your way?
Anton Chigurh: What way would that be?
Gas Station Proprietor: I seen you was from Dallas.
Anton Chigurh: What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?
Gas Station Proprietor: I didn't mean nothin' by it.
Anton Chigurh: Didn't mean nothin'.
Gas Station Proprietor: I was just passin' the time. If you don't wanna accept that I don't know what else to do for you. Will there be something else?
Anton Chigurh: I don't know. Will there?
Gas Station Proprietor: Is somethin' wrong?
Anton Chigurh: With what?
Gas Station Proprietor: With anything?
Anton Chigurh: Is that what you're asking me? Is there something wrong with anything?
Gas Station Proprietor: Will there be anything else?
Anton Chigurh: You already asked me that.
Gas Station Proprietor: Well... I need to see about closin'.
Anton Chigurh: See about closing.
Gas Station Proprietor: Yessir.
Anton Chigurh: What time do you close?
Gas Station Proprietor: Now. We close now.
Anton Chigurh: Now is not a time. What time do you close?

I always loved this scene for it's progression- the cashier/manager getting noticeably more nervous and trying to extricate himself from a precarious situation as Anton deftly pierces through his bullshit excuses and confronts him. But now, I realize that its so much more then a narrative demonstration of Anton's malevolent character. It's more than a confrontation between two characters-it's the neverending negotiation of man with death. Anton is the cold, unfeeling, sporatic force of nature eliminating those surrounding him at random-there's no "God's plan" to it all. In fact, Anton's completely absolved of all direction or free will- his choices for his victims depend entirely on the command of a coin toss. The cashier, sensing his weakness and human fraility in the face of this force weakly attempts to disentangle himself struggling and fighting to keep his life.

This is the true confrontation of souls- Anton cuts through through the bullshit of societal pleasantries to the core of their interaction-the empty, unfeeling, black void of death interacting with the simplicty and fraility of man, struggling in vain to control his destiny and life. Which remains interesting because in the coin toss, the cashier makes the correct call, thus for a bleak moment, maintaining the appearance of control. People often lament the randomness of tragedy- a schoolbus full of children crashing, the beloved public figure meeting some unfortunate end. Yet they fail to realize that virtue does not determine longevity of life. When it comes down to it, life really can be just a coin toss.

who can tell the dancer from the dance?

Ode to a Nightengale
Forlon
The very word is like a bell tolling me back from thee to my sole self.
Adieu
The fancy cannot cheat so as she famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu, adieu
thy plaintive anthem fades past the near meadows,
over the still stream, up the hillside and now
tis buried deep in the next valley glades.
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?

-John Keats

The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice
the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end

of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds
of women—those you write poems about

and those you don't. It's true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction

lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast

as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don't have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power

never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,

as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed
antibodies for your smile. I don't know how long

regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don't know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light

of a candle being blown out travels faster
than the luminescence of one that's just been lit,
but I do know that all our huffing and puffing

into each other's ears—as if the brain was a trick
birthday candle—didn't make the silence
any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses

I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out

of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you'd press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I'm sorry this poem has taken thirteen years

to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade's precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we'd put our hands away like chocolate

to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other's eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn't be said.

-Jeffrey McDaniel


I remember when I was younger, one of my favorite secret pleasures was when as a class we would read aloud, pouring through the pages and chapters of the novel we were currently tackling. I was always transfixed at hearing the prose spoken aloud, the disjointed melody of the words trickling together, painting the world, scene, and characters in front of my mind's eye. Perhaps that is why I am so enamored of film and television- the spoken word never fails to entrance me.

Considering how crazy my life has become, I have taken solace in the little pleasures. Cooking myself a delicious meal while listening to music. Sitting alone in silence reading a book/script. Stepping away from a boisterous, raucous party to drink in the night. Solitude is neither here nor there in my current state but I seek it out desperately when my claustrophia kicks in.

pleasure little treasure

I've always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, leap-before-I-leap kinda girl.
I've always focused on the present-the pleasures of the here and now. I feel like most my age perceive their life as a constant climb, fixated on the possibilities of tomorrow, the light at the end of the tunnel. Recently, I've started to join the ranks.

It's tough because it's hard to discern if it's my youthful arrogance or if I'm actually ready to do more. Living in the here and now, I look at past transgressions and behavior and feel so removed from the person I was who committed them. I'ts hard to know whether or not I will have these same emotions in the years to come. All I know is I love the job that I am hopefully destined to do. I want it so bad I can taste it. It's an all-consuming passion of the most desirous kind-self-fulfillment combined with the ecstasy of success.



In other news, I've found that I've been needing more and more solitary time. Time to unwind with my thoughts, listen to music, and experiment with recipes, spices, and food. I've come to the conviction that's there's no meditation, no religious practice more zen that mincing garlic. The satisfaction of the chop, the heady aroma it releases, the peace of focusing on one singular task...nothing greater. I've always said that if nothing else works out, I want to own my own Italian restaurant. Until the moment of truth, it's filed in the dreams for later bin. Time to focus up!

pull me out from inside

I am covered in skin. No one gets to come in.



There was this moment. When it happened, I had one of those out of self times, where I disconnected, looked at the scene, and tried to visually and mentally encapture every element about it.

Stutter shook and uptied.

There I was, sweaty and annoyed-having moved box after box,anxiously awaiting your aid yet receiving none, resolved to move everything myself. Furnitureless, I sat on the floor, looking at the bare bones of my new home, imagining the possibilities, the wiped clean slate of a new abode. Finally, there you were, but not just you but a bag chock full. My favorite wine, my favorite cheeses, a box of crackers that I had mentioned to you in passing that I liked. All was forgiven. We sat in the empty space of my new apartment and made a picnic of your plethora. As we sat there eating and talking, I thought to myself- this is good. He is here. He is now. I kissed you.


I am ready.
I am ready.
I am fine.

your hand in mine

The one thing that I love about the band Explosions in the Sky is their simplicity. So many bands infringe their
views on the listener, manipulates them to feel the emotion of the song.
While you can claim that music can be interpreted numerous ways depending on the listener
I somewhat disagree. With most music, you are at the mercy of the musician-the lyrics and delivery all deliberately
are meant to incite a particular reaction. Explosions in the Sky-they just are so pure and honest.
No lyrics, no flagrant frontrunner, no calculated image.
They just play and allow the listener to explore their own personal
journey through emotions, images, and dip into their cavern of memory.

los angeles i'm yours

this city suits my temperment right now.

Originally from my perch up north, I had regarded L.A. as representative of all I hate about American culture- materialism, vapidity, ignorance, and the agenda-seeking. But I don't know if it's a result of assimilation or perhaps my own personal transformation but I admit I've been seduced by this city. Although there are times I long for the wide open spaces and lush landscapes of Northern California, I've grown accoustomed to this concrete jungle. I understand this place now-I know how to navigate it. Because unlike the sleepy lethargic North of my childhood- this city is charged with happening. Movies are created and filmed here- our sports teams draw eyes from all over the country. Trends, deals, and movements begin here. Los Angeles is a boisterious, rude, manipulative bitch and I, against all my pretenses, have grown to love her.

That being said, being surrounded by creative people make me long for the spotlight. I miss performing. I miss being able to express myself in such a raw, primal form. Selfishly I miss the attention, the validation, the praise. I'm not foolish enough to try and make singing my primary source of finances- as much as I love it, I don't have the drive for it. Call it lazy, call it pragmatism but there are some visceral pleasures that I cannot live or forgo (a.k.a. delicious food and wine). I guess what I really want is once a month or every couple of weeks to go to some smoky dive bar and sing a jazz and blues set to a group of strangers. That to me, would be a little piece of heaven.

If there's one thing I've learned about people, it's not what you do or say that affects how people see you. It's how you make them feel.

teenage memories are made in cars

You. I miss you. Most of the times I forget you're gone. My mind plays tricks on me-it's as if you have been placed in the "Friends Who I've Lost Touch With/Are Out of the State" file and until the urge to speak with you arises...I get slapped in the face with it all over again. It's like the Kubler Ross model, this twisted, neverending cycle that I consistently find myself in. I force myself to replay our last interactions over again, try to remember the tenor of your voice, the subtle physical idiosyncracies like the way your eyes crinkled into tiny slits when you were laughing. Pictures have preserved your physical likeness but I wonder if without them...would the way you looked gradually fade from my memory? Pictures certainly couldn't capture the way you smelled. I remember panicking when the shirt your mother gave me eventually lost its telltale scent.



It hurts the most when I see you in my dreams. Being not a practicer of lucid dreaming, my dreams, when I have them ARE reality for me when I'm in them. Mostly we just sit and talk like we used to, sometimes while sitting in your old Jeep. Some of the best conversations I had in my life, I had in that car with you, sometimes stoned, sometimes listening to Death Cab for Cutie or Led Zeppelin, and almost always looking over Grizzly Peak.

I just wonder sometimes what you would have become, the person who you would have grown into. Strangely I feel lightyears away from the person I was but simultaneously the core, the nugget of who I am remains the same. I just feel like there was so much for you to discover, so much more experiences to be had. Truthfully, sometimes I am envious of the devout with their creature comforts of prayer, "God's plan", and heaven. Rationally and logically, you are gone from this earth, nonexistent, not lingering in some manmade dimension that rewards good deeds and punishes the bad. But it's hard to disparage humans from longing for wish fulfillment, the hope that we are special and that the end of our earthly lives is not the end of our journey, I guess.

It will be good to go home. Go back to the familiar. It will be nice to have some solitude, to get away from my life down here. I'm feeling restless again...

you can use my skin to bury secrets in

I never get sick of that moment. When you feel it hit you, when everything bleeds away into the surrounding noise and you are just there. The slight burn in your throat, the blurring of your senses, and the dangerous knowledge that whatever trangression you were about to committ could have the slightest of excuses. Yes I am still living the collegiate dream despite college ending almost a year ago.

For so long when I was in college, partying was something I tried to hide from you, a mistress that no matter how hard I tried left her scent on my clothes and my eyes glazed and somewhere far away. Lord knows I wanted the freedom to stay out late, have long lingering conversations over jungle juice, enjoy the brief glorious victory of a drinking game won, but your persistent insistence and my obligation to our relationship cut those nights short as I stumbled home meekly to your bed. Love was the tradeoff for those lost nights but I never quite let you get the best of me. You wanted to control me and I refused, you wanted something stationary and solid when I am flighty and difficult to trap.
But no matter, that chapter of my life has closed now.

The more I learn the more I realize how little I know. Is that what scares people from reading/school/expanding their horizons? Certainly the limits of knowledge are frightening and seemingly unsurmountable. Sometimes I think we consume ourselves so fully with the petty trivalities of our lives, particularly sex and love, that when it comes to other matters, we relent for the easiest way, the less mentally taxing. Not for me thank you.
I love a challenge.


Contradicting myself now, I've been thinking about something you said the other day.
"You just want to be loved", you said it as if it was a bad thing. No I am not some affection-starved animal hungering for validation of my existence. You phrased it wrong. You should have said, I just want to love. As much as people can frustrate and exasperate, I always search for the good, the lovable in people. I can't let apathy creep into my entire worldview, although it's fun sometimes to try on for size.

That's enough for tonight. It's windy and blustery outside. Time for wine, a book, then bed.

with your feet on the air and your head on the ground

It was one of the most perfect pairings of music with film I had seen in a while. A man and woman from their perch on a skyscraper watching the buildings fall down amongst them, their gilded corporate cage crashing down and liberating them from the oppressive expectations of a society that they both rejected. What I remember most though was the music, the piercing guttural cry over soft guitar finally punctured by the strong drums-an explosion of sound to mirror the explosion seen on screen. The rush of anarchy that causes them to look at each other wondering "What's next?"

When I think about a perfect song, the song that completely encapsulates everything I have been thinking, feeling, wanting the past couple of years- "Where is My Mind" by The Pixies takes the cake.

"Try this trick and spin it"-if you look at the lyrics realistically, "Where is My Mind" is about a hallucinatory drug trip. Yet in my opinion, the nonsensical lyrics only add to the liberating power of the song. The song refuses characterization or prettiness-it doesn't rhyme or follow typical narrative structure. It just exists, disorienting and twisting and turning around itself which interestingly somewhat accomplishes the similar effect of drug trip.

The song is just brimming with tension and release. The softness of the "ooohhh" countered with the juxtaposing base guitar...the pregnant pauses between the first hit of the drum. The rush that I feel when the hesitation relents into the pounding drum and guitar, to me that's what music...what life is supposed to make you feel. It makes you pause, makes you focus on the present. The release the music brings is mainly the release of the problems of the past and the worries for the future. When you find a song that allows you to feel like that, it's one of the few times that you are ever truly free. You are the music while the music lasts so to speak.

Freud wrote at length about this concept called the death instinct-basically his thought was that all living matter desired to return to a nonliving state. Although this could be somewhat of an explanation for human depression and addiction to destructive substances like drugs and alcohol, I propose a counter theory. Human beings desire such substances and activities like drugs, sex, and rock and roll because it compels you to live in the moment. When you're high or having sex or listening to an intense song you are entirely there, entirely existing in the present. I can't stop listening to this song because it gives me that little moment, the moment when any pressures or worries crash and burn like the buildings in "Fight Club". My state of existence is singing along with crazy Frank Black and pounding along with the irrespressible drums.

Way in the water see it swimming...

"Laura - I want to see you again. No games. Let me know if I'm wasting my time."

act now, think later

action, then regret-such a common constant thread throughout my life.
in truth i am too raw, too impulsive, too primitive to be tamed right now.
for so long, i felt trapped, over protected, constantly watched
have i now equated this with what love is?
i am such a mess of contradictions. i implore you to come closer, care, hold me, then sprint away at the slightest hint of reciprocation.

"laura, you constantly shoot yourself in the foot".

my id has consumed me. i don't understand it- my impulsivity has no root.
there is no vacuous dense void within me. for the most part, i feel filled, complete. perhaps i am an emotional masochist. my gratitude for my comparably easy lot in life comes with an angsty flowering face-my guilt? but enough rationalizing.

i care too much and show it too little. i'm not ready for what you offer although i wish i could be. i'm too young enough to value what you are and immature enough to constantly long for what i can't have.

All I know is what I don't want

Sometimes Dylan puts it best.


I ain't lookin' to compete with you,
Beat or cheat or mistreat you,
Simplify you, classify you,
Deny, defy or crucify you.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.

No, and I ain't lookin' to fight with you,
Frighten you or uptighten you,
Drag you down or drain you down,
Chain you down or bring you down.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.

I ain't lookin' to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up,
Analyze you, categorize you,
Finalize you or advertise you.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.

I don't want to straight-face you,
Race or chase you, track or trace you,
Or disgrace you or displace you,
Or define you or confine you.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.

I don't want to meet your kin,
Make you spin or do you in,
Or select you or dissect you,
Or inspect you or reject you.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.

I don't want to fake you out,
Take or shake or forsake you out,
I ain't lookin' for you to feel like me,
See like me or be like me.
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you

Morbid Thoughts

I've always had the feeling that mine was going to be a short life. People always look at me like I'm crazy when I reveal that...but I don't maintain this view for shock value. I don't necessarily WANT to die young, I guess that if I were...

Waking Life has this interesting dialouge where a man and a woman discuss her view of her life as though she is recalling memories as a old woman dying in her bed. I see my life as the opposite. I feel is that the way I view my life is that from a perspective of a child visualizing her dreams for the future, seeing her twenties, my current present, as events far into the future rather than undulating in the recesses of the past. Truthfully, from my vantage point, I feel old. I've loved and lost, what other noise is there in life? I suppose to repeat the cycle again. Perhaps, that's why I'm such an adrenaline junkie; I constantly crave new experiences to validate and enrich my existence.

I'll end this bit of enda downer post with some random thoughts:

-If I were to die in some unfortunate circumstances, I would never EVER want my family or friends to start a foundation or organization or even law that would attempt to prevent my death from happening to others. I would never want to have my name or life to be completely overshadowed by my gruesome or untimely end. It's like when musical artists die and because of their passing, they are heralded as visionaries.

-As technologically advanced and intellectually superior we feel to other animals, it's funny how when we go to sporting events, especially hockey games, all we really want to see is in all-out, no-holds barred brawl.

-After watching The Bachelor, it's no wonder guys find 99% of the female population crazy.

Ruminations

Inspired by Aaron Karo:

-Inevitably when going out to restaurants I find myself embroiled in a Catch-22. The waiter or waitress, judging by my young age assumes that I will a. neither rack up the bill significantly and resultingly b. not give them a good tip, so they choose to ignore or completely abandon all serviceable duties towards my table. Now I find myself in a predicament- do I unjustly reward bad service by giving him or her a good tip or do I reinforce her negative assessment of my demographic by tipping him or her what he/she deserves? Eh...I always tip 20% and end up hating myself afterwards but hopefully I've made a little difference in the world for 20-something diners.

-I've realized when it comes to dating, not caring is the new black. I've found myself converted when a guy friend recently confessed his undying love and devotion and instead of reciprocation on my behalf, I kindly told him that I was going to bed.

-Ever have that friend that you always mean to catch up with, but circumstances always prevent the actual conversation from happening, so that the more time that goes on the interminably longer the conversation is going to be so you just keep putting it off cause who has time for a three hour phone conversation? I do.

-I wonder if all the women Anthony Hopkins dates are secretly afraid that he's going to kill them and eat their livers with fava beans and nice Chianti.

-Wikipedia is like Target. You go in there thinking, oh I just need to figure out what the Fermi Paradox is and then thirty minutes later you're learning about the personhood of the Ape. You always end up with more than you bargained for.

-Delivery is almost always better than DiGorno.

-I am always mystified as to why car commercials ever show the test drive with the dummies. Is this supposed to comfort the public? Oh when you are in a head-on collison, your head will probably pop off and some limbs will be bending in the wrong direction, but don't worry about your car!

Aaaaannnd there you go.