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| Yes, cleaner than clean is the only real way to clean.
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| Environmental
Whenever I live in a room that is really clean like my old apartment it tends to stay clean since I clean it all the time. Back in the day I would sweep the floors thrice a week, I had it all choreographed, and the kitchen shone every night. But when I live in a room that is inherently messy I take a much more desultory attitude. I will try try to do a quota of things each day but can't even faithfully do that. By the way, am I weird because having locks on the door or a bunch of barricades instantly implicitly increases my sense of well being?
Amatory
At times I get an ego about this. I feel as if I am different from everyone or most everyone else. I was going to make a more specific point about this but for some reason my brain refuses to focus close enough. I feel that I haven't had to deal with some of the things others have, and I am special for this reason but also find it incumbent on me to make especially awesome or catastrophic gestures based on what I started with.
Ambition
I used to think that life would be categorically peachy, and then I felt flat-out betrayed, whereas of late I feel as if my initial hunch was right but I have to stop taking advice from a large bevy of fools who have been parts in my life. Even though I am by nature a shunner of some degree I have been bad about this and subtly imitated my inferiors. What good is it even to look at the people around me if I will not help them or myself, eh? Moreover, why would I cast people off if I would not in good faith reinvent myself?
Not that there is anything wrong with humoring them but it is tricky to not end up being like them. Not to mention that when you are young and weak you like to compare and contrast. I feel that the only real friends I have are one from high school, one from college, and one transcendent. I was never popular as a kid but neither was I exactly unpopular. I guess I have seldom felt, and never with naked honesty to myself, what it is to be invisible to another. Even when I have been trying as it were to fence up in dating-ish leagues I never felt one hundred percent ignored. Maybe no one feels this way really, and I am too much of a romantic to feel it sort of even. A philosopher once said that you need malice to see yourself honestly. Me right now I don't care to venture otherwise. But at any rate, I think I should try and reevaluate some of my life's relationships to bring them more in line with the few healthy friendships I do have; the only reason this goes under ambition instead of amatory is I guess that in the long run friendships are one of the only reliable compensations that you have for what you do, for trying.
Erotic
Ever since I read this thing with Martin Amis I have become curious about other people's attitudes toward sex. He said that one thing you learn by and by is that it matters to others than you, and I was bewildered by this. These days I have no idea what is ordinarily abnormal. I guess this is all a way of saying that I feel so ambivalent about using xanga to talk about sex as I do not have any friends that this is really cool with. I guess I just assumed that all of my friends and such were ahead of me and more mature, but now I am quite clueless, not to mention dismayed at the state of American college movies. How to get some perspective without embarrassing myself. My operating script is that it is good and can suppress other issues for a long but not interminable period. I am not sure what else there is. I think that my counselor has been Northrope Frye who talks of the confusion of procreation and creation. But all that does is make you realize why you might want to do it or not do it for quasi-professional reasons. Ettiquette? Not getting yourself in trouble? Who even understands this? Maybe it does not go anywhere in the end and is just a pastime. Still though, it is weird since you can't put your own experience in a public perspective. Haha I remember years ago thinking that there is such a thing as a "public dream" and "private dream," ones that you join people in and ones to which you alone lay claim, and for the latter to turn into the former is a very special happening. However with pubic dreams it seems that you just have to get laid a lot and analyze for yourself but this is just a far far flung chance for me. I want to say it is not even to my taste but I do not even know. Maybe I am only lying to myself. Vanity of vanities indeed is this subject.
Mozart
requires that you take the risk of overstatement, right? You can't get it right by concentration alone. Maybe it is just the place that my mind is in right now but I feel as if WAM requires somehow more musical eloquence than is exactly kosher. Not that you have to risk affectation but maybe exquitism of a kind, or miniaturism. You either dispatch it as ambiance or you have to get a little too excited. Unlike other classical music where you have to concentrate but the music will more or less carry you, here it's more as if the notes have to be carried themselves while you supply the music. Maybe that is just how all of it is supposed to be. However, it is odd to have to arrogate musicality to yourself beforehand rather than be led by the score. It is much like opening your mouth with the explicit intent to flatter and charm. And you have to risk everything you do being too perfect to be presenting a quite plausible personality. This is how I think Mozart is. You have to like yourself a lot and feel that you are adored by others and can do no wrong, not as a privilege which you ironize but as one which you somehow do not impeach. Basically it is like a conversation where it feels so awesome that you think of surfing or high wire acts, in which the force of pure eloquence can be even diverting from the content of the music. I do not think Mozart really has shades in his stuff so much as mere segues and curly-cues; it's less like a voice than like writing which always returns to the point, as in old-fashioned letters where the final sentence somehow morphs into the valediction. The only exception to this rule are the adagio passages which are like the brief periods of sulking when you first start to suspect that even the love of your life is a somewhat impoverished affair. However it is still no more serious than sulky. The only tear-jerking is from the lack of happiness rather than it be a rant against injustice. In this it is the dead opposite of Beethoven where the slower passages are the only ones that hold out any possibility of peace or at least solace. The consolation in B is that the fast movements are sensationally violent and awesome. The consolation in M is that your petit ami finally gets off work and calls you. You realize what a fool you were not to expect that just this would take place. Mozart is a better stylist whereas Beethoven is more dramatic, but his drama is very pretentious and unnatural.
Pianistic
I keep wanting to quit every playing the pianoforte again but when I do I always get called back, so I figured I may as well just keep with it. It is not like the guitar you can take with you and noodle around in dorm rooms and hotels and yet it is surprisingly easy to find instruments that people will let you play. But at the same time I despair of ever getting really up to my own standards. It seems to take way too much work with this instrument, and work you are supposed to put in as a kid. My parents want me to give lessons now but I just don't think I'm up to it at all and I wonder if it would be possible or worthwhile for me to get there. I guess at some level it is just one of those childhood goals that you have to drop after a while, but with me it is really important since it is one of the few things that I concentrated on as a kid. Strange that I did better with singing in some respects. These days I could probably learn just about anything if you give me time but I doubt if I could dispatch it with confidence even if I practiced for ten years cause I just don't have the foundation. Hrm. When I was a kid I always thought that one day even if it is just for personal amusement I would get to a virtuoso level, and this would be my hobby. As-is I could just keep plugging away and I already know a fair number of pieces but what is the point if you don't get better? I feel as if some kind of pressure is needed to improve, but at the same time, this may be inimical or at least not directly relevant to music as such. In short, if your goal is sheerly to improve your musicianship you may as well quit because who cares? Shouldn't you care more what you would do with this skill? At least, they are equal. I am just so behind at this point that it seems better if I give it up and use the extra time to incubate life plans for things that I do not even know about, like how to deal with fantastical emergencies; or to meditate on my eventual death. Back in the day music was linked to the unforeseeable because I figured I would one day teach my kids but now I realize that this was just a silly metaphor for wanting to teach yourself.
On the other hand, though this might just be to distract from the inevitable giving up, I have a weird new interest in music composition and playing the oboe. One because it is just fun and surprisingly, incredibly gratifying. I woke up one day and for some reason felt like I should write this melody, so I wrote the solfege in a quasi-indication of rhythm (imagine phonetic lyrics transcription) and at the end of that I felt freakily awake, like more than I had in years. It was almost a feeling of terror. So I think that it could be fun just to make stuff up. At a selfish, evil sort of level also I like the thought of having my own little patterns in to which I put my own affective experience to store like the chemical energy in a battery.
Oboe just because. How hard can it be to learn? Everyone says hard, first you will get a sinus headache then you will have a burst lung and stroke from blowing so hard on the reed. Even as far back as medieval times it was known that the oboe requires "moche wynde" and can be good or bad for you for this reason. But I feel that I should have good abdominal control and omberture from the years I spent in school puffing through my lips, and besides this it has what like eight keys. It can't be that hard to learn. Better yet it is a great instrument for toting around, lighter even than a guitar or bowed instrument and also better for self defense I reckon.
Technic
I have none and in lieu of quitting I am going to just quit the playing of all pieces. I have to work on scales and such and it is quite embarrassing. More I guess just to get hands played in. I am awkward with how far to sit, how to get my arms out of the way and stuff. It is like a singer trying to use half their breath and a sandwich in your mouth to not work on these things, or just being unable to control. Very embarrassing. I still have to do do hitchy things and there is a sort of passagio in my finger crossing. I blame it on the imbalance on my finger size. The thumb is huge, gets in the way, and pinky much smaller than ring finger. Overall I think they are not bad hands to play this instrument as they are of OK spread and thin enough not to call for playing with the points of the nails or anything (apparently this gets to be an issue for some people?). I think they are basically inane though and do not show that much natural selection. Huge (and flexible) thumbs, vestigial pinkies. Good for gouging of eyes, bad for music. Claudio Arrau has shortish pinkies so perhaps I should analyze videos of him but then it sounds like some kind of athletic competition. I am not sure if it is really considered presentable width to have a twelfth. I think that the thirteenth must be the norm. I know lots of kids have much smaller hands but kids are kids. So many pieces have an octave plus a fifth chord and I have to roll it =( It is one more damn thing to worry about. I want just to park my hands over and move only the fingers.
I am only saying this on xanga to hold myself to it. I guess it was coming. At some point in my life I had to break down everything that I worked up to before so as to make it come back naturally or quasi-naturally
Touch
It is a lot of fuss but I think that I have to worry about this. When I was a kid I just wanted to play tunes and so forth but now I realize that you have to think about the style as such in which you feel the instrument. This is probably something I could stand to do in life too but classical music is all in all a more rewarding parcosm at least to take it for a spin. What separates music from video games is probably just this ability first to internalize (which is more or less a matter of the ear and brain) and then to recreate based on the DNA. I do not think I have any special talent but I know good from bad in this respect. Many musicians never know what they in fact heard, so they recreate an affectation based on a specter of style. I also think that quite a few talented pedants and second tier geniuses never get the music quite out of them in a communicative or actually valuable way (esp true of complex solo performances.....). Then you are left either snowing the air totally or creating your own mannerisms to plug in where you have excised the ones inherent in the score; lots of pianists feel to me to do this to get past hitches in memory or understanding because they are scared by or in some way else repressing the natural shape of the piece. Either flaw is a thing that some can get away with but it is bad when you pick up on this stuff and copy it just because others did not get in trouble. Whatever happened to having your own standards? We shall have to see. So that is my zen manifesto for hobby satisfaction.
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| I was thinking about the book Kokoro the other day and realized that it probably is less allusive than I was moved at first to read it. When I first read it in college I figured that it was a story about how you can manipulate friends by offing yourself. Or by extension, how in Japan you can influence politics via suicide. Now I think that it was just a story about man's inability to be loved. The stuff about the end of an era was just added gravitas that could have been left out, because the only era ending was the one in which Sensei felt himself to be nonexistent. It is weird to say that his passivity in life is due simply to the fact that one guy has been reigning for decades, but this is not such an uncommon thing in all truth. For a smart but smug, passive type it is kind of important to know who is in charge of the world - so that you can finger the cause of all that hubbub to which you are superior. You say these three things: 1) the powers that be, are; 2) they disallow change; 3) I'm degage from all this. After all, the symbol of an unlikeable leader is as potent as that of a likeable one, and under any administration there will be some discontents. But how soon your ideas lose their crucial images and you are back dealing with actual life. Maybe you think that you have achieved a detachment from present history, but all you've managed to do really is conceal historicity in a personal fatalism. It is impossible to do that once the symbolic order which reminded you of it starts to crack up behind that fatalism. And it can be quite upsetting when change begins to exist in spite of this system. Even more so is to find out that you have admirers in life, as this requires you to think of yourself as being something. In a way you realize that you may well merit their admiration, or rather, their admiration is merited. But you do not merit it; you just have these certain traits you were born with. They look up to you for simple reason that they do not have it. And you would want to just give it away because it has done you no evident good. It is upsetting not to deserve what you do have, emotionally or otherwise. In this respect what is said of having to live up to your commitment to another person is perversely true too of the love which others show you. It is no good just to bask. But when you have spent the better part of your life trying to dodge all the rays what is there to do? It is hard to be seen when you have nothing to show. But what would it mean to have something in this seminal respect?
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| Scoober greed - idiom, n.
1. (ultimate frisbee) predilection to throw scoobers esp. when another type of throw is clearly called for
2. (pianism) tendency whereby underestimating a piece by Franz Schubert one believes one that one has mastered it when, in fact, one has only read through the score
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| New Order - Regret
I trust my own taste only so far. More and more I wonder if it is all that sophisticated as I used to think. Also, do I even care about art or music as long as it is stuff to distract, transport, instruct, delight? As a kid I did not seek out complex and inaccessible things in the least. I had to learn to like pop music because at heart I just liked songs you sing in school. But secretly, I believed that I appreciated these songs - as I do the literature, video games, and so forth which are all their successors - more than average people. But it may just be that I non-appreciated the rest of the world and humanity to an abnormal degree. There is a big and critical difference between imaginative enjoyment and neurosis. Say what you will. I still believe that there is such a thing as healthy and unhealthy culture and the tendency to make yourself in to a kind of rarefied fan is part of the second. It is just like with pedantry, priesthood, mystification, and other forms of elitism that say that the deformed sufferers are the only souls that truly get this or that thing. It is a form of possessiveness I guess. You can't accept that your appreciation of a thing is as per usual because then you would have to say you don't own it, and what then do your little reveries mean?
Anyway this is one of my favorite songs from the last few years (as in, I first heard it in this time frame). For some reason I lost the CD which was in my car. I have no clue how it happened. Before I last moved I lost two CDs. One was taken by the ex and was a more a reappropriation than any kind of heinous accidental loss. But this was just lost.
This year I have gone from the strongest I was as a person in life to the weakest but am on the way up again. I think I know now what thing it is in human beings that frustrates revolutions. When you gain a certain amount of control over your own life you realize that none of the institutions around you, and none of your own habits or preconceptions about how your future will be, actually support your present belief in yourself. You would have to have some revelation to know what to do next, and you end up daring the unknown because you comprehend that there is no valid reason to think that you would know what to do if you just keep a holding pattern. You do not know. But you can still do - whatever. There's a way in which it is always brightest before eclipse, or it seems to be because it's the edge of what you know, or at least what you can decide, that is closest to the reverse. I do not know. I think that I have a big fundamental problem with persisting in a certain attitude. It is incredibly easy to keep with a certain explicit decision in all the thin formal ways, while actually doing something else. It is like how when you're in a committed ("official") relationship it is somehow easier to see why you might go for someone else. When you get form and feeling clearly divorced, even if this is all just symbolism, you can see your own biases easily. This is not to say you get your priorities straight. But you come face to face with your gut preferences. However, even then it is so hard to do the right thing or know what that is. In my experience I can only say that the right move would be to tell the truth without hope of any outcome. I'm not someone who believes that the dearest things in life are, or should be, unspeakable. At times, you have to make a claim. Throw down as it were for what you believe and/or desire. Neither is it necessary or acceptable to wait till you know what to do. I guess then the scary thing is that you wouldn't be able to say anything unless, confidentially, you know already what you would want to do. But how fraught, and unconventional, and possibly self-destructive. You are in such new territory.
Why do I have to be here? I always find myself not that different from people near me. Maybe I just believe in my own specialness to the nth and have taken it on me to damage myself for the sake of authentic dents. However, I am not sure that I did this by anything other than natural stubbornness of self plus the natural stubbornness of external institutions. The only fallacy was to believe I could not change them which in a poetic way is the same as despairing that you couldn't change yourself. However, it is not as if I haven't worked to be a good person. Where change or revolution or regrowth comes into this has eluded me, though. I get scared now even of trying to build myself up into anything again for fear it will be wiped out. For some reason my life is a tragicomic and somewhat miserable one. I fear for my future self. What happens when really bad stuff starts to take place? I think to an extent even incidentals like my penmanship are tragic in their basic styling. Maybe this is how my soul has taken shape, out of all the possibilities of human stylishness. Always final catastrophe gets avoided so far, but the exchange is a permanent-seeming loss of vitality. If my life were a film it would be A Civil Action where the attorneys could have settled for more but then they settle for less and this is a victory. Something about comedy to me seems like the essence of a good enough deal - in marriage, in life - but I've so far been taking inferior bargains for fear of not getting any at all. Am I just a spoiled brat? I would say so, but the thing is that so many people have given back so much less for getting so much more. Haven't I tried to share my happiness with everyone? What more can I do to deserve what I have and have had?
Things tend to be harder the second time and in some ways more artificial, but you also are less clueless. Maybe I am clueless though. I have lots of self-knowledge as one who spent a considerable time by himself but since when is knowledge the same thing as wisdom?
This evening it smells of some woodsmoke like my old house. I am thinking of New Brunswick, where I lived for a year after college as well as of course during. It was never my plan as a kid to go to Rutgers and it was hard for me not to view it as a mistake. Arguably I did a fair job at accepting the good things in it anyway. Really I think that I distanced myself too much. I did not want to be defined by it. This choice OK on its face had the disadvantage of meaning that I spent four years of my life doing something that I did not take all that seriously. When you say you will edit something out of your whole experience what is the point of going?
I felt as if it were a mistake that I went there. Honestly I believed I could get in at better places. In the event only marginal evidence actually suggests that since the schools which were decidedly a cut above Rutgers only waitlisted me and those which were arguably above might not be since they were private schools which got much fewer applicants. But who the fuck cares anymore? But things could have been so different. I have yet to find out something that I couldn't have been taught by more orthodox, painless methods. I am willing to accept that being more motivated as a kid would have only created a more enthusiastic slacker; capable though I am at times of producing good work and smart insights I do wonder whether this brain is best suited to the kinds of career-long grinds which I find myself wishing I'd started it on. I get tired of certain subjects too quickly. Of course QED with motivation. Anyway, this is still a big question since if you do not like grinding it out with a task you'd better scramble to find something that you just like doing.
I need some new semblables. I can't just go buying new clothes. Maybe one or two things though. I need a new home, new life, new era of this life at least. The point at which this phase of my life began feels far away. This is a sign of being old in the heart. It is probably reversible.
I get sick of this screenname as well; maybe my real life name also. IT is all such silly stuff but when you think about it it is still sillier not to pay mind to what it stands for. How much will you blur your own vision to see the big picture? It is not that you can trick yourself into doing things with quasi-Pavlovian associations, like you could teach yourself medical terminology expeditedly by smelling different things while you work - but you have to be aware of what you are seeing in things. IT is frustrating and saddening to realize that had you gone with your intuition, or persisted with the one or two larks that you did go on, then you could have in fact systematically rebuild and refurbished everythign that could use the newness. Why would you not change these little things?
Why would you not? Otherwise is like a hand tied behind your back in life.
I think part of the reason is the person who is offering to untie your hand. Often the way out of a situation is to take what is offered you first of all, even though it sucks - or at any rate, the first good step is somehow cross-listed with a kind of acceding that it was the whole point of your troubles to avoid. It would seem that only hypocrites make a categorical demand then settle for less, like in the book Jonathan Wild where the prince of thieves decides to drown himself rather than starve slowly as his captors want. But of course his first step is to eat the few victuals they have left and then he decides to swim back home. He is a great man, the prince of thieves, but some people's self-regard is less picaresque. Thus the attitude is more than you would not even eat your last meal before doing whatever bombastic thing you have in mind to do, more Samson Agonistes than anything in later lit. It is to an extent the same thing with even publishing your desires. Why would you tell people who seem to be so unworthy? And yet, surely, what you desire is a form of togetherness and the intentions which you would see brought to fruition have an audience somewhere. It is rather awkward to be in such a lot in life for an extended period of time. AT times you've no clue what to do and at other times have nothing to say for those things which you would do. There are small steps, yet even these are half-steps without the wholeness of step plus a reciprocal declaration.
How am I to get these things straight?
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