It’s nothing too serious, only time
passing.
At night I lean on the kitchen sink
the window’s not a window;

a drink of water, maybe. Or some day’s reflection.
But it’s only the time passing.
I sit down,
I want to leave tomorrow.
But we
never do. Just imagine what life might
be like if we left in the
morning.
But we never do.

Darkness comes,
the most assured function
on Suydam Street. A window,
a mirror

a window. A mirror.

I find anything two-
dimensional to make a house out of.

Filed under: Getting With the TYMZ, Misc

Officially moved in,

After more than a few days without internet, or proper sanitary conditions… House has been completely revamped… and its looking great!

Classes begin tomorrow, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. P finally made her way to the 44 to move in, finally. Tonight’s mission: tape and edge kitchen. I am quite nervous for tomorrow. For this semester; it’s more of an anxious ecstasy.

The word cosmic comes to mind.

Courses:

Frenchy French

English Senior Sem: Sense and Sexuality

English Senior Sem: 20th cent Literature (comic novels)

Global Crisis (in conjunction with independent study)

Filed under: Academic, Ecstacy, Frenchy French, Getting With the TYMZ

A moment of pure ecstacy

I made one of those Madmen icons. I am regretting the decision more and more… I don’t like the images that they offered, nor the slogan in the beginning. The continual promise to “be yourself,” after using a different product, making yourself a new thing (from a selection of limited combinations, of course, you too can be unique in your clique).

God… what the hell is going on. It’s always been going on. And the one thing I realize is that–even in this horribly late stage in the game–you can’t discount people. You have to have faith in people.

Look at my actions: I made the icon, I drink coffee, I wear clothing made in Southeast Asia (hell, I travelled to Southeast Asia and painted on an orphanage wall during a “human rights” trip. I violated more basic human boundaries on that trip than I care to recount, right now). And the thing is, most people don’t agree with me on the big stuff: on the violating human rights by cosigning to NGO’s, most people don’t see the harm in tagging their identity into their Facebook profiles, most people don’t see what’s so wrong with having a top and a bottom. To be honest, if most people felt the way I did, I think we’d have a society in a coma from all of the inconsistencies we practice.

But I’ve started fighting the small fight. I’ve started reading more, not just blinding giving way to apathy. Apathy is what I would have done if I didn’t want to know; it would be a way to halt my progress down this river-thing I’m on. I’ve started convincing whatever friends I’ve got to quit their second, third job and live a little. I’ve convinced them to plant a garden. To give up on the mall. To fuck electrical engineering and practice music. As a sole career.

I’ve stopped arguing over Internet packages and cable (we’re not even getting cable). I’ve stopped watching TV. I’ve stopped email chains and instituted face-to-face rendez-vous. I even stopped working at my job and started reading and writing instead. When they find out, the summer will be over and I really don’t give a damn because I’m never going back to that.

But the thing that has really changed: I’ve stopped entertaining myself and I’ve gotten to studying. To thinking, to living.

Filed under: Getting With the TYMZ

It’s the Apocalypse! Cling tight to your… inside-out umbrella!

A reaction to Prince Mohammad VI’s tenth year in power.

Filed under: Academic, Frenchy French, Getting With the TYMZ

The phenomenal photography of E.V. Rogalsky

Check out E.V. Rogalsky’s photography from around the globe.

Filed under: Getting With the TYMZ

Today is sunny and I am not working

I am working my way through Foreign Affairs magazine. Reading this and Lukacs at the same time really help the material I am studying stew around; it’s great. Check Csothbeg144 for my comments and responses to some of its articles in the July/August issue.

Calico is going to the studio today (YAYZ). So good; can’t wait to hear their new stuff. (You should check out some of their rough tracks… it’s really good.) I am a little said that “5/4″ and “144″ won’t be on the EP, but what can you do. Wishing the boys well.

In other news, its happy birthday party to Emily Velma. I have to make an alternate soundtrack to hers in case of overflow; it is definitely going to include some heavy Euro-trash, as well as some Southern gangster rap (almost certainly headlined by T.I.).

Must drink some water;

signing off.

b

Filed under: Ecstacy, Getting With the TYMZ, In the Media, Misc, music, Readings, Reflections and Updates, Calico music

And so it is

Reading Lukacs has not been helping my sense of anguish and despair at Conference Services. But! It does sometimes allow me to read, which is quite ironic, to me.

For a long time (and this stands for the entirety of my relatively mentally mature life) I have felt so hopeless in the eyes of ‘reality.’ And please, let me tell you how wonderful it is to put language to those inconsistencies and everyday miseries; to understand their ghost-like presence. To spot them, question them, and gradually (dare I say it) fight against them.

In the office, the day has from the very start, a hole cut out of it. That time must be spent at work, on the clock, doing this and doing that. And so, I began to feel that I was counting down those holes in the days, wanting them to compress faster and faster, until they were over, gone… and finally I could live.

But then, I cannot live after that. Because it is so much more tiring. There is a pregnant woman in the housing office. I think she is due next month. And she is counting keys, placing work orders. Is this what an eight-months pregnant woman wants to do? Even in general, is this something anyone would want to do… five, ten, twenty years…?

And then I stop myself and say “how dare you put down the profession of another! If it weren’t for her, the whole.. THING would cease to exist.”

That’s it. The THING.

…[T]he hierarchic dependence of the works, the clerk, the technical assistant in an academic institute and the civil   soldier has a comparable basis: namely that the tools, supplies and economic survival are in the hands, in the one case, of the entrepreneur and, in the other case, of the political master.

Mm. Maybe I’m not so arogant, after all.

Signing off.

b

Filed under: Ecstacy, Getting With the TYMZ, Misc, Just For Fun, reading, Rutgers

New Post on C soth b.e.g. 144

And we’re going to drop off the rent/deposit tonight. I don’t know how I feel about dropping all that cash. I don’t really have a choice.

Do you ever have one of those strings of moments when you repeat a word over and over again to yourself? Until it has no meaning and you can hear it the way someone who doesn’t know English hears it? I did that with the word Land Lord today.

And as I came back into my English consciousness, I realized that we are not so far removed from history.

signing off.

b

Filed under: Ecstacy, Getting With the TYMZ

On dreams

In Cambodia last winter at the orphanage, there was a school teacher. He was five or six years older than the American students I travelled with. We sat in a line, over-looking the sand soccer pit. He knelt and faced us, rested his hand on someone’s bare knee, leaned in, smiled.

He wanted to be an accountant and was going to the night school in the heart of the city. He said he loved America and wanted to go there. He wore slacks and a clean white shirt each day we saw him. But on the last day I saw that it was soiled. And I wondered why the color white.

It has bothered me for a long time. Ever since it was first said to me. But I could not understand it; or rather, I understood it too well and could not say it properly. It was under the illusion of so many ‘cultural’ misunderstandings, but I will attempt to understand it now.

A woman who ran the orphanage later explained that the night school for accounting (as well as most other institutions of higher education) were draining students of their money. Those degrees obtained were not respected in the financial world, in the first world, she said. But what else could he do? What else, if that is his dream?

He is mistaken. He praises the thing that robs him and abandons the superiority of his position to strive toward an ideal that he has been barred from since birth. It is not individuality. It is not the case of the individual. But he and I and you are taught to believe that it is the individual: that living in America will benefit the Khmer people when in fact it is a reproduction of that dilemma. That selling drugs in the American inner-city will elevate a family, while it strengthens the forces of addictive self-annihilation for that family and all the others. That travelling to the third world with a “conscience” absolves me.

I am not absolved.

To them, their own social action, takes the form of the action of objects which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.

Filed under: Getting With the TYMZ, In the Media, Cambodia, Capitalism, False Consciousness, Marx

So I’m getting the feeling

That I was supposed to be at work at 7 and not 730. But you know… I definitely have overtime sooooo I will be 15 minutes late.  Emily kept talking about the MJ conspiracy to overshadow the mass panic caused by the coup in the ME, not to mention the threats from NK two weeks ago. Hrm. I’d like to read more into that, but highly doubt there is much available on it.

In other news… I received 5.5 hours sleep and will walk to College Avenue after another eight hours of work. Still working through Lukacs’ essay on Rosa Luxembourg. I would also do anything to not go to work right now.

Labyrinth Books in Princeton, tonight!

Filed under: Academic, Ecstacy, Getting With the TYMZ, In the Media, Readings, Reflections and Updates, conspiracy, coup, death, Labyrinth Books, Middle East, MJ, North Korea, Rutgers