Sixteen

Last three days of year 15 update

Currently...
Watching: Moonlight Mile
Reading: Galapagos & Art Forms
Listening to: Morrocan music
Thinking: of my Morrocan party tomorrow
Wanting: presents!
Drinking: organic tea
Eating: pistacios
Petting: Sydders the siamese cat

It Is Said That

4/30, 9:10
(pm) I became human
indepedent me

1991
(year of our Lord) screamed and breath
filled my lungs I gasped

9:25 now
three days before I'm rebirthed
how much have I changed

16 years fallen
the minutes whispering go
they tell me break through

QP

This past weekend I went on a trip to San Francisco! City of Art! Of Good Food! Of Good Music! Of Environmental Greenness!Of Perfection!

Yeah, it’s pretty ok.

And I would normally supplement this post with beautiful pictures of the city, and of Stanford (where I also went), but sadly, my camera is temporarily not working. I would have also liked to add to this post excerps from my journal. But I left it on the bus.

The pros and the cons of leaving your personal journal on the bus:

Cons:
-anybody can read it. ANYBODY!! Those are my inner most thoughts and desires
-ANYBODY CAN READ IT
-the journal you’ve meticulously written in four seven months could be laying in a gutter rotting away.
-it could be in a garbage can
-you may never see it again

Pros:
-some famous writer/publisher may find it and publish it under “anonymous”
-some famous singer/songwritier may find it and make an album out of it
-some sad/homeless/depressed/confused/fill in the blank person may find it and it may change their lives
-it could come back to me and from now on I’ll realize how much it meant to me

There’s nothing I can do at this point but wait until someone either turns it in to the bus depot, or publishes/produces said book/album.


But the good news is that on my trip to SF I found Quality! I found the silly rabbit in the MOMA, during their Picasso & American Artists. That Quality was playing hard to get with me, but I finally wooed it. It was pleased. But I think that it enjoyed its self more romping around the city, pigging out at local Italian places, and flirting with Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe and Matisse's Woman in the Blue Hat than it did chilling in HI with a silly sixteen year old. What a good for nothing cheat Quality is. I thought we had a relationship....

Ok sorry about that. Tangency alert!!

I thought that for my quality project, I could interpret various paintings that meant the most to me, and recreate them from my point of view. I was thinking about doing four paintings. The artists that I’m checking out are Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Mondrain, Georgia O’Keefe, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, Diego Rivera, Kiki Smith, and Sam Taylor-Wood.

I’m going to write about why each painting made me feel a certain way, and what the metaphorical aspects of the painting are. I’ll also talk about what I was trying to emulate in my painting, and what I added.


FYI: The Quality Project

The QP, as it’s my understanding, is basically your personal exemplification of what you think is “quality”. This ambiguous word is appropriately addressed with an ambiguous project. You can virtually do anything you want. You can draw a map (of the world, of a city, of Lalaland…), you can write a book, you can make art, you can make a film, you can learn karate, you can translate Sanskrit, you can write stories, you can make a dress, etc, etc. The only real qualification is that you have to write about it while your doing the project (like making posts about it), and you have to write a reflection.

You also have to read a book of your choice and give a quick presentation about it.

I had several ideas for my QP originally. I thought that I could write a book of short stories and poems (because I’ve been reading the Portable Dorothy Parker and Checkov’s short stories), make a philosophy documentary where I’d interview various people (i.e. college professors, holy people, atheists, agnostics, the likes), make a short film from the screen play that I wrote recently, or make a family tree with added stories. But I finally decided to do some art because I love it and it helps with my chronic insanity (haha that was a joke. I’m not insane I swear, only a little skewed).

Well I’m off to once again study the little that’s left of my butt off.


Peace

A Strange and Terrible Saga of Today

Peace at last. This depraved day has come to finally come to an end. Here is a brief outline...but I warn you, I may be bitter and utterly unsympathetic to the plight of human nature.

I had a 7:30 AP Psychology test so I had to take the early bus. This left me hunched over the massive textbook squished between two sweaty fat people. Thankfully, I had a steaming cut of black coffee, which I proceeded to pour down my throat at my fist convenience.

For some reason the bus windshield wipers had broken down, and so we had to stop and repair them. Once we got to Pun----, I was able to make a mad dash to the gates whilst the pouring rain drenched my back. And I had forgotten my jacket. Lovely. Inside my classroom, the air was Antarctic-like, typical feature of Pun----. Why don’t we just burn fossil fuel so kids can freeze their flesh off??

The test itself wasn’t bad, but it left me feeling sleep-deprived (which I was), with caffeine and adrenaline rushing to my head. A dizzying combination, and an extremely dangerous one. Seeing as my brain was not working (i.e. the neural synapse alternated between firing widely and a semi-catatonic state), I cannot be held accountable for what I did next: I fell in love. Yes, I admit I did. Much to the surprise of what little was left of my sanity (which believe me, was not much).

This lasted for about an hour and a half. During that fearfully long period of time, I had random giggling fits, and told one of my friends, who oddly supported my choice of paramour. She, of course, had had an interesting track record, which include a euro-trash drug addict from the movie Withnail, and I. But I don’t hold that against her.

Anyways, once this fit called love had ended, I thankfully only had a couple classes before my next break, where I hoped to gain back some sort of stable mental state. In one of these classes, I learned how the world was due for an ice age, and that by having global warming, we are only delaying the inevitable. And then my mom called and told me she had cut down the tree in our yard. My inner hippy was now pissed and a pissed hippy is not a pretty picture.

So then for English we discussed our quality project. This cheered me up. I like things like the QP, because it’s fun, and you do something productive at the same time. It’s a nice, happy, fuzzy, cheerful thing. Though I have to admit I was still feeling a little edgy from the whole we’re-all-gonna-die-and-my-tree-has-been-ruthlessly-slaughtered thing, it did calm me, and it gave me some ideas. I’m not certain what I’m going to do, yet, but I have a feeling that it’s going to be fun to do, and will help me do a little soul searching.

I’m home now, and feeling a little bit better. I did have a slight breakdown because of the stress of this last quarter/ the fact that my mom had painted our living room beige. I ended up slamming my finger in the window and falling onto the ground twitching and crying. I finally pulled myself together, and here I am, being soothed by the dulcet tones of the Distillers and Neutral Milk Hotel. Oh, and I also made myself a new wall paper for my computer. It’s composed up of pictures of my soul mate from afar, Jake Gyllenhaal. He spoke to me through Donnie Darko. I’m actually in love with him, and our relationship is sacred, not a half-crazed delirium of caffeine and adrenaline.

And by the way, "everything in this post could be lies". Paraphrase of Bokonon.

Also, I tried to upload the picture collage that's my wallpaper, but it doesn't work.
more later on the G-Haal

Quintessential Novel

The quintessential novel is a fat paper back with yellowed pages. It has a plain cover with some unidentifiable stains, and its two-inch spine has been taped together. Its pages are soft and delicate, thicker than the bible’s pages, but thinner than Dr. Seuss’. The pages smell musty, but you know that they have seen more places than you can even imagine: the glamorous mystery of the second hand book sale. You spend the dark star speckled hours holding up a flashlight to the orderly black text. They hold a story that can be read over and over, still igniting the imagination. This book has changed you. It has taught you words, taught you concepts, and taught you life in a way that you never thought was possible. You can never forget the times you’ve spent with it: sitting in the coffee shop, sipping your mocha; on a plane off being an exciting adventure; on a sandy beach with a crystal blue shore; hidden under the blankets in so many beds. It’s message will travel with you until you die, but the book itself will remain immortalized, and that comforts you.

It’s the has-been always-will connection to the past present future and it all fit’s perfectly into a jacket pocket.

Quantum Superpositioned To You

"It is going down into the abyss that you recover the treasures of life," wrote mythologist Joseph Campbell. "Where you stumble, there lies your treasure."

This quote was in my Free Will Astrology horoscope last week. It was also the week where something just flipped off (or on, maybe) in my soul and brain. It happened during Donnie Darko (not because, necessarily, but more aided by). From there on I had this feeling in my gut that I couldn't shake off. It just stayed with me the entire day and I felt extremely confused and in the "abyss" that Joseph Campbell might have been talking about. I didn't feel bad at all. I felt this emotion that I shouldn't even start trying to explain. I guess it was a mixture of melancholy, extreme love, extreme sadness and some unknown ingredient that I can't put my finger on. I was in the abyss, and I was waiting for myself to stumble.

It was about an hour and a half ago that I "stumbled". I was walking down middle field after my last class holding my PB&J and sprite in my hands, and I was thinking about the answers to the questions of life, the universe, and everything. I was thinking that the Answer must be here somewhere, because matter can not be created or destroyed. Everything connects, everything is one thing, and that one thing is the answer. This theory only works, though, if there's continuity in life. It's a phrase that's used in movies when describing how everything adds up, or makes sense. Not only is it talking about the logic of the plot, but it also means when Bob is wearing a white shirt in scene five, he needs to wear that same shirt in scene six. That sort of thing. So if everything has continuity, then my theory works.

I also felt like stuff has been happening, coincidence stuff, that has been pushing me down this path. Well, maybe not pushing necessarily, but here's an example: today in English, I was reading an article about breast milk lacking vitamin D, and someone across the room just randomly said "vitamin D" in their conversation; I was looking at the word answer earlier in the blog, and it just looked like such an odd word, and someone in the movie in my mom's room (Being John Malkovich) said "answer"; in the Weekly, I read an article about a movie about Stanley Kubrick (directed A Clockwork Orange, 2001: Space Odyssey) called Color Me Kubrick has John Malkovich in it, which I rented on Tuesday night; I'd had a discussion with my mom about summer travels yesterday night (and how I'm to young to travel by myself), and I flipped my new Seventeen Magazine to a page that said "How to talk to your parents about summer travels". I think I need an existential detective...

Excerpt From New Science Magazine:

Why we are here
If retrocausality is real, it might even explain why life exists in the universe - exactly why the universe is so "finely tuned" for human habitation. Some physicists search for deeper laws to explain this fine-tuning, while others say there are millions of universes, each with different laws, so one universe could quite easily have the right laws by chance and, of course, that's the one we're in.

Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests another possibility: the universe might actually be able to fine-tune itself. If you assume the laws of physics do not reside outside the physical universe, but rather are part of it, they can only be as precise as can be calculated from the total information content of the universe. The universe's information content is limited by its size, so just after the big bang, while the universe was still infinitesimally small, there may have been wiggle room, or imprecision, in the laws of nature.

And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life. This may seem circular: life exists to make the universe suitable for life. If causality works both forwards and backwards, however, consistency between the past and the future is all that matters. "It offends our common-sense view of the world, but there's nothing to prevent causal influences from going both ways in time," Davies says. "If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the big bang, there must be some sort of two-way link." (I found this on the Donnie Darko fan site...you see what I mean about something pushing me down this path?)

That's what I believe. Riding my bike to the store today, I had the chance to think about all of this. This is basically my train of thought:

I threw my bike lock keys into my purse and I grabbed my bike and pushed off onto the street. The air was so cool against my warm face; inside our house today felt like a sauna. I started riding and the wind carried sweet scents of plumeria to my nose. The molecules in the plumeria are incredibly tiny compared to it, the plumeria itself is tiny compared to me, I am incredibly tiny compared to the Earth, and the Earth is incredibly tiny compared to the galaxy, and the galaxy is incredibly tiny compared to the universe. But maybe I was thinking about that in the wrong way. Should things like this be understood by size? I mentally zoom up and up and up, seeing further than religions, than countries, than borders, than worlds and shapes. The mind is amazing, and maybe there are things that we don't know about it, maybe the entire universe is in, or controlled by our minds? The paths that we take, each living organism (even the phytoplankton and the trees), are so invariably linked to each other. Six degrees of separation? What about none? Our realities are so interlinked that maybe we aren't billions of people living on the same crust of a planet. Maybe we are truly one. Maybe there are millions of universes staked on top of each other. Steven Hawking's view is that the string theory landscape is populated by the set of all possible histories. Rather than a branching set of individual universes, every possible version of a single universe exists simultaneously in a state of quantum superposition. When you choose to make a measurement, you select from this landscape a subset of histories that share the specific features measured. Not by distance. The history of the universe - for you the observer - is derived from that subset of histories. In other words, you choose your past.

I believe that all of our realities are quantum superpositioned, like the universes. That there is an infinite amount choices and paths simultaneously existing together as one. This is where the divine being comes into play for me. God is omnipotent, and we are all one, so a logical conclusion is that we are all "God" or we all are divine beings that are linked in a state of togetherness.

I jump off my bike--I am at Longs. The air is filled with smoke from the BBQ going on at the farmer's market in the parking lot. I chain my bike to the metal post, jump out and head for the automatic sliding doors. I've decided to dye my hair purple.

Have a nice day, quantum superpositioned God person.

Quality Project

In class today we talked about the end
of the year,
we took a test,
and we talked about quality projects.
I can't even think of what it is.
I only have inklings and wisps of thought.

I feel quality sometimes.
I feel it on the bus in the morning,
when caffine sprints down my veins.
My synapses fire and fire and fire and fire.
I gaze out the window, think.
This is when I think best,
I feel like a Philosopher.
When I write a novel
I will wake up at 4:00 am
everydayandcatchbuseswith
CAFFINE
griped tightly in my cold hands.
I will have a black notebook on my lap
and I will have a black sharpie.


This is the equation for quality:

CAFFINE + bus + morning + veins + black sharpie + notebook = quality

Typhoid Mary Had No Regrets

Today I'm typhoid mary and my head is foggy and my body is weak. Ok enough of the complaining. It's actually been a semi-nice experience just relaxing at home today. Something in the air smells distinctly like summer. Just the birds singing, the sunlight shinning, the landmowers mowing. So the air smells great and here I am sick on my 600 count bed sheets. Yes, they are very soft. Ahh the wind just distracted me for a second. I could really go on and on about today. It's gorgeous. It's good. It's Friday. The sky is so mellowly blue and the clouds are soft. The wind is filled with flowery scents mixed with vaguely with ocean. The wind is caressing my face as I write. My nails are a bright teal green and they just scream carefree. Everything just fits today! I love that feeling of total contentment.

Anyway, what I was trying to write before the whole beauty of nature distracted me was about this book I'm reading. It's called "Riding the Bus with my Sister". I believe they made a movie based on the real-life story. Rosie O'Donnell is the mentally retarded sister. The long and short of it is that a retarded girl and her sister ride the bus and it outlines their past problems that they've hand, their inner struggeles, their travels through self actualization, and the lessons they learn. It's a good sick-in-bed book; an easy read, nice moral content. But one theme I see the book going back to many times is the theory of "no regrets". In other words, don't pass any oppurtunity up because it could be the defining point of your entire life and if you don't take the chance and go for it, you will pay for it your entire life. Pretty intense stuff. I'm really glad that I've come to realize this early on in my life ( i.e. before adulthood). So far I've been pretty good with the no regrets thing, and I'm happy. I just have to remember to take every chance offered me.

This really relates to the other book that I'm reading, the Poisonwood Bible. In the PB, the "no regrets" theme comes up several times. Some of the "no regrets-take a chance" moments are when the father goes to the Congo, when the father doesn't leave the Congo, when the mother leaves Adah behind when the ants are swarming, when the mother leaves Leah behind, etc, etc. I could keep going on and on because in this book, you have to just take the chance because it's your life and usually the life of your family on the line. But the mother continues to have regrets about not leaving the Congo earlier, because one of her children dies. I don't think that the mother should blame herself, but how can she not? It was her youngest daughter. I think the book is also built upon the largest regrets in history of Christianity: Cain and Abel. The fact that the daughters are paying for the sins of their father (both Cain and their bio-father). The sins of cowardice, and hatred.

And relating to that is another book that I've just finished, East of Eden. This also deals with the Cain and Abel problem. Here is a quote that I like from E of E:

"No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt men have!" (268)

That sums it up well I think.

Ok off to sleep and watch Ab Fab.

Drug Dealing Your Way to Sunday

My cousin built himself a website. It's a really great site, and he added an arcade. In this arcade, there is a game where you role play a drug dealer. I just witnessed my cousin (a born again Christian) and my step dad (a very responsible/great father and Roman-Catholic) seriously, and with a straight face, talk about how much cocaine and acid currently cost in "the Ghetto"--one of the many locations amoung "Central Park", and "the Bronx". And my cousin has now successfully learned the phrase "pop a cap in yo' ass."

This world turned upside down. What would Jesus think?

More importantly, what would his parents think?!

You say inhumane Osama; his daughter says "I love you, Daddy"

“Fifteen British military personnel detained in Iran for nearly two weeks will leave the country in just a few hours, Iran says. ‘We'd been praying for their release,’ said the mother of one captive. Another added: ‘We really will celebrate once I actually see my son on English soil.’”—CNN.com

One thing I’ve learned from the Poisonwood Bible is that things aren’t always how they seem. In a imaginary conversation with Rachel, Leah says, “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place. Especially here…And then it comes to me suddenly, form childhood, my first stammering definition of communism to Anatole: They do not fear the Lord, and they think everybody should have the same kind of house.” Reading this passage (and this entire part of the book), and reading the excerpt from CNN where the people feel such hostility toward Iran, I wonder if the idea of Iran and the Middle East isn’t similar to our old perception of Africa—that the Africans are “baaad” and the whites are “goood” and that the Iraqis are “baaad” and the English are “goooood”. Rachel constantly says during Exodus how bad communists are, and how she’s glad she’s from the good old US of A. She also talks about how she has to keep good watch over her black servants because they steal things. To some, this idea is great and “right”, but to others, like Leah, this is completely wrong. Could Rachel’s point of view represent America’s present point of view of Iraq, of Islam, of the entire Middle East? Is it right to separate everything into such narrow slots of “good” and “bad”, like Leah was saying? Could Osama Bin Laden be a great father, or brother, or husband, but just have some violent ideals?

Maybe I’m going a bit far, but could the cause of war itself be simply the inability to see from another’s perspective and the need to have black/white good/bad (with no grey middle point)? To bring things back down to Earth, my mom and I just had a fight. Essentially, she had a problem, and I couldn’t see anything but my point of view, I couldn’t see what she meant. In the end, she explained to me exactly what was going on with her because of choice X. After that, things were settled and I understood what needed to be done, and did it. So after our little disagreement, I flopped into bed and read Poisonwood, then got up to eat soup and read CNN. This connection was made because I truly felt that sense of misunderstanding; how you can be so oblivious, and things can seem so “right” but really be the opposite from someone else view.