poppies in october

sometimes the easiest thing to post (when jump-starting one's blog) is nothing at all.

2010-08-10T00:23:00.010-04:00

or at least nothing of my own.

i haven't posted in quite some time, but rather than punctuate my blog with this same metronomic thesis, i might include that my (weak, summer-vacation style) return to the internet has filled my new life with lovely images and computer clicks and gasps. in the past few days, i've managed to stumble (oh thanks, google reader!) across various aesthetic means of conveying the impact of the written word, and immediately felt that such treasures could hardly remain trapped on my own internet island.

jonathan callan, for example, is a london based artist that often utilizes books and paper as sculptural mediums. some of his pieces combine books into large masses, while others rely on the paper to create singular forms -

meanwhile, joseph egan and hunter thomson are recent graduates of the chelsea school of art and design that created this marvel of typography and perspective -

i've been wondering, lately, at what it takes to elevate a piece of work from something that heartily satisfies the quotients of a great piece of art, to something that makes your heart beat a little faster and your breath a little more strained - something that makes you reexamine the components of whatever paradigm you've been happily subsisting in and wonder if maybe the world could be something entirely different. perhaps this delves exactly into our paradigms, exactly into those subjective inner levels that determine for us what has merit and what fills our bodies with longing and empathy for the human condition. but perhaps there's something else?

at the moment, i'm convinced the greatest of things probably just have grand mutual connections to something absolutely preposterous, like sprinkles of crocodile tears or dustings of fairy dust. at least that's what i tell my students when they need an extra boost of confidence, or when they don't understand how something works.

i drove through an industrial wasteland

2010-04-05T21:44:00.010-04:00

(to visit my sister in philly, with whom i shared a saturday afternoon propelling a mutual addiction to shopping, peeps, and the general enjoyment of all things bach, korean, and sweet.)

3, 2, 1...

2010-03-09T18:06:00.002-05:00

REMEMBER WHEN I USED TO BLOG?

sometimes. sort of?

the two (plus) week internet drought that has descended on my life has left me feeling faint. weak. lost in the world of things. and so, what better time to re-instigate my presence in the world of blogger than now, when i should be lesson planning?

i'm now going to proceed to read and comment on everything i can find -

xoxo

2010-01-02T18:49:00.001-05:00

alright, fairfield, it's about that time

2009-12-13T18:12:00.001-05:00

welcome to my new life.

attack of the first grade virus!

2009-12-02T00:37:00.005-05:00

i am secretly terribly clumsy. this translates sometimes to grates on my left front tire from tragic attempts at curbside parallel parking, or dents on my cell phone from daily suicide level drops, or bleach stains unfondly reminiscent of 70's era trends that creep into the elbow creases of my favorite hoodies. but mostly, it reveals itself quite omnipresently in the multitude of scars that waddle their way across my shins, knees, and left hand.
(somehow, my right hand has divorced itself from this catastrophe and remains unscathed.)
"did you get knee surgery?" a friend asked this summer, eyeing the rather nasty remnant of a gash on my right knee. no, i didn't, it's actually just a scar, and actually, i don't even remember where it came from. actually, i don't even think i know where 90% of these gatherings of collagen delight found their origins.

clumsiness may not (seemingly) logically translate to an immune system under belligerent viral occupation, not yet protected by the hague conventions of 1907 (and/or a few years of teaching), but (unseemingly), it has resulted in utter surrender from precisely october the fourth of the year of our lord two-thousand-and-nine, quite merrily to the present. i had bronchitis for five weeks. i have had the flu. i have coughed up two and a half lungs. i have had a fever. and now, it is 103am, my alarm will ring in precisely four and a half hours, and it (the military junta of viral concoctions) is at it again!
perhaps and probably it's the fact that i teach a classroom full of germy wormy squirmy six-year-old guppies, but really, it feels a bit like those mysterious gashes: where did you really come from, why are you here, and when will i learn to stop picking up used kleenexes from tables, planting little birdy kisses, and abandoning the safe ship of sanitizer and antiseptics.

backwards planning to achieve my ideals?

2009-10-05T05:58:00.002-04:00

It’s currently 11:37 PM. I’m sitting in bed in leggings and a green fleece zip-up, the one from Old Navy I purchased who-knows-how-many years ago because it looked and felt (and promised to smell) like skiing. There is a stain on the left sleeve where a piece of ceramic slurry from a March bronze cast landed and embedded.
Moot point.
My bed is currently suffering a coup d'état by swells of clothes I intended to iron, faintly emitting that self-satisfied odor of the recently laundered; a spiraled web of cords and pieces of electronic equipment (cell phone? video cam? slr? school lap top? personal lap top? stop listing, please?); and a large bowl of rice smothered in black bean sauce, better known to the culturally nuanced as ja jang myun*. I’m supposed to be a) asleep, or at least b) working tirelessly toward preparing for this week’s slough of lessons, but instead I accomplished absolutely nothing today. Actually, scratch that - I picked up a Jason Brown friend, drove to the middle of a Connecticut laden with leaves in metamorphosis, wandered about a farm regarding draft horses, antiquated weaving/cooking/plowing equipment, and contemplated the pungent nature of nostalgia. I watched the rain pour across a sunny, 70 degree sky and trace a line of refracted rainbow lights into the various parking lots of Suburbia. I consumed the pages of my newest issue of artforum in a drunken delirium, took exactly three naps, then awoke to rearrange the shirts in my second dresser drawer in piles of warms, cools, and whites.
Regardless, something must be done.

that one summer i taught in the bronx

2009-09-15T06:31:00.003-04:00

and so passed two months

2009-08-17T23:20:00.002-04:00

and at the moment, that is all i have to say about my summer of tfa.

(miss and love you all. hoping dearly to return to the internets soon.)

i haven't written in a long while! (PART TWO)

2009-06-19T04:41:00.010-04:00

it turns out that i am a terrible blogger. and so i'm sitting in a hotel room in san francisco at 1:42am pacific time (which means that somehow it's already friday, which means that somehow it will already be saturday tomorrow, which is the day that i leave this side of the country), trying my best to sound belatedly penitent, which might require a series of excuses, but for the moment will have to be justified as follows:

i spent this last month doing nothing, and it was wonderful.
by nothing, i mean the nothing between graduating and putting together a final show and then finishing another fifteen-ish paintings and putting together another show - between that and sitting here on my heels in a swivel chair, overlooking the lights shining bravely through the san francisco fog, adjusting my legs every now and then in a futile attempt to keep my left foot from creeping right back to that spot where it has begun to prickle in sleep.
by nothing, i mean the nothing of spending my evenings on a porch with dear friends, soaking in the milky bath of iron and wine on vinyl under the nectarine glow of japanese lanterns powered by halogen lights. by nothing, i mean the nothing of incense at noon and watermelon at dusk (and dawn and everything in between) and poetry in pajamas around dinner. by nothing, i mean the nothing of admiring threads of night rain connect ground to street light and back again.
in two days (or i suppose i must correct for the hour, and say tomorrow), i will wheel two large black suitcases (the old ones with the faded identifying tags reading LIA FARNSWORTH2901S KENWOOD STSLCUT 84106 in eight-year-old script) out of the hotel, into the airport, and board a plane to new york, where i am going to live for the rest of the summer while i train for teach for america.
tfa: that's the other part of my month of nothing. i did a lot of reading. i did a lot of attitude shifting. i decided to accept my acceptance into the 2009 connecticut corps. i did a lot more reading, and paperwork (oh, the masses of paperwork), and studying, and more reading (oh, the masses of pre-institute work), and writing, and now i'm sitting here trying to wake my left foot out of prickly slumber and succeeding only in procrastinating my last hours of work by resuscitating this dying blog.

i needed this last month. i needed it to fall back in love with provo, to fall back into the magical stupor of accidentally bumping into a friend under the tree-green light of the street, of walking through an open door just to say hello, of gathering around a guitar and a sofa on the lawn. i needed it to remember my gratitude for having so many people to love. i needed the crunched drive to california with my family to laugh and sing jumbled italian to our old pavarotti cd's (o, sole mio?) and engage jungle chants to my sister's disney mix (in the jungle?) to remember my gratitude for having such a family to love. i needed today to spend entirely alone in sweats in my hotel room with nothing but my teach for america prep books and masses of washington red apples (brought to you by this morning's continental breakfast) to remember that i need time alone. to love.
i jump-started this blog out of dying ashes about this time a year ago, ready to leave to korea, unsure of the entirety of my future. maybe i'm still pretty unsure, and maybe it'll swing yet a lot of de-LITE-ful surprises my way (actually, let's make that a definitely) - but of the three thousand significant changes this year has brought into my life, one i can back concretely: this august, i'm moving to new haven, connecticut for two years to teach first grade at amistad academy, an achievement first charter school. and i couldn't be more thrilled.

i haven't written for a long while!

2009-04-24T03:41:00.009-04:00

because i've been busy:

1. TWO shows going up next week! final show (installation and video art) and positive + negative (painting and mixed media show for the gallery stroll with morganne)

2. oh, you know. finals. and that whole graduation thing.

(3. also, if we haven't phone chatted in a bit, it's because my cell has taken crazy pills)

i am for the art of bread wet by rain.

2009-04-01T04:26:00.003-04:00

i am for the art of friends studying at borders. i am for the art of late night conversations on the telephone. i am for the art of front room discussions on women's issues. i am for the art of sleep-overs on blown up mattresses with grapes, yogurt, and tivo. i am for the art of mid-afternoon philosophizing. i am for the art of giving in to purchasing books. i am for the art of parking lot dance parties. i am for the art of poems left in packages. i am for the art of making last minute phone friends. i am for the art of waxing nostalgic over a million beautiful provo memories. and i am for the art of accepting my addiction to diet coke with lime, staying up too late at night, and joining a silly site called twitter.

thank you, claes oldenburg, for sponsoring this moment in time.

food food food: a performance art piece

2009-03-25T13:04:00.004-04:00

if you have just a moment,

click here to see a response to a group art opening in which patrons came and took reception food without looking at our art.

p.s. this was so. much. fun.

i am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

2009-03-18T01:23:00.005-04:00

painted acrylic on forged steel.
(a hopeful piece for the student show)

2009-03-18T01:20:00.000-04:00

Art is not about art. Art is about life… a way of recognizing oneself, which is why it will always be modern.
(Statements from an Interview with Louise Bourgeois)

This is the land where bees come to die. A hundred thousand of them falling to the earth, catching on the branches of the great trees and saturating the ground like a summer monsoon. We came here to eat crackers and sip tropical Capri Suns and study our books in the crisp coolness of shaded grass, but the stillness of death and of dying filled the air with a thick sadness we couldn’t ignore.
I am holding hands with the world, and suddenly it releases me, nonchalantly unlatches its grasp, or perhaps I’m the one that’s turned away, too weak to hold on, or too unfaithful. Maybe the distinction isn’t important. My fingers reach out like hopeful vines, only to grasp at emptiness, at the stale air that whispers the dusty perfume of decaying honey, like a secret.
The air is still here. Still, slow, and silent.
I wrap myself into a synthetic womb of blankets and heaviness and material things to mimic my birth, to anchor myself with skin flesh against earth flesh, to bury my feet like roots into dirt and declare that I am yet alive. I fill my belly with heaviness, wrap myself into the warmth and out of the land of the dying, and wait.
We gathered the bees in our palms and sanctified their passing with streams of moistness from our closed eyes before we packed away our things and walked, slowly, into the sun.

where i've been, what i've been up to

2009-02-23T11:52:00.010-05:00

1. new room
2. tchaikovsky and brahms and chopin in vinyl
3. figuring out what to do with the rest of my life
4. writing
5. orange jasmine tea
6. spending time with dear friends
7. sego art center and central utah art center
8. making videos/installation pieces/sculptures
9. PAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTINGPAINTING
10. (rarely going to class)

i've been so m.i.a./busy. but i'll say hello soon.

my life as of january 5

2009-01-31T04:01:00.005-05:00

around four this afternoon i replaced my ski clothes with sweats, drove to campus, dipped my wax mold for my bronze caste in a ceramic slurry, chiseled at a 23 pound block of alabaster by way of henry moore, burned recordings of lawnmower and leaky faucet noises onto cd's for a sound graffiti project, and climbed up and down a fifteen foot ladder to cut down my first installation piece.

somewhere, quite distinctly, all pretense at making school a thing of stoic practicality and masochistic marathoning fell into a lovely heap of massive self-indulgence. i hardly know whether to feel guilty about days spent philosophizing over greenburgian purity or ogling eva hesse or dreaming up performance pieces or transforming j.m.w. turner paintings into painted pixels, or to finally let myself bask in four months of that which i love. sometimes i worry, between euphoric readings of art theory (could this really be homework?!?) and sublime discoveries of contemporary artists (or research?!!), whether any such happiness could be either justifiable or sustainable. meanwhile, the full academic endorsement of my continuing obsession might transport (might be in the act of transporting) me into the esoteric land of the artistic deranged.

case in point:
because i like lights, and because i like things that hang in the air, and because i like record players, i put the following s-e-l-f-i-n-d-u-l-g-e-n-c-e up for display.

and then, today, i snipped it all away. and really, in the act of cutting the string, in the moment of layers falling down upon layers, i may have been the only one to bear witness to the real art taking place. i let the pieces fall slowly, like a dance, smiling softly as the installation i spent hours hanging with my classmate fell crumbling to the ground.
esoteric, deranged, and thoroughly unsustainable - but for that moment, i couldn't have been happier.

i made some line paintings

2008-12-19T19:21:00.012-05:00

i feel like it's so easy to ruin a painting by talking too much about it. so i won't say too much about these, except: they will be displayed left to right.

(16"x16" panels with acrylic, oil, charcoal, and graphite. and galkyd, my newest obsession.)

the way we age now

2008-12-09T20:45:00.003-05:00

the first time i noticed (and loved) the softness of my grandmother's skin, i was five years old. i was running about the apartment, refusing to take a bath, hiding behind the lacy white curtains by the living room veranda that smelled like sticky dust. in the instantaneous moment when my grandmother reached for me and i reached out for her, my fingers met her arm - met the fragile epithelial layers coating her vessels and bones like a muslin coat - and i reeled in shock at the pale, sweet softness. in the bath, i rubbed at my skin, threw water over it, willed it to roll into the same smooth suppleness. it stared at me, yellow, rough, and young, scarred with the dirt of my exploits.
sometimes, at church, or beside her in the taxi cab, i would tug at her sleeve and creep in my fingers to get a stroke of the lush peach of her arms.

four years ago, my grandmother decided to stop dying her hair. my uncle, the cool car designer living in turin, had informed her it was all the rage, in europe, to look old and wisened, and her locks fell white and clean, sparkling like dusty christmas snow by her gucci glasses and ferragamo scarves.

once, i'd learned in a whisper from an adjacent room that my grandmother was four months pregnant with my mother on her wedding day. she had hid her belly with the folds of her gown, bandaged herself into thinness. my mother was born premature, tiny. my grandmother always blamed herself.
i think of this as i wish her goodbye, press my face into the plush rose of her smell.

i don't know why i am writing this now, except that i just read a beautiful and important essay by Atul Gawande called the way we age now, and i feel like i want to remember what it really means to grow old. not to decompose, to find our cells slowly pulling apart, but to more fully understand beauty, and wiseness, to collect experiences in our pocket like small pebbles we can rub with the deep flesh of our thumbs.

my two lives

2008-12-08T18:03:00.008-05:00

the other night, i looked around my studio (or rather, the upstairs closet that i consolidated and crammed myself and my ikea goods into) and realized that all of my paintings were black. eight black paintings. black black black.
i immediately pulled out the large red panel i've been holding in emergency reserve, mixed up some green paint, and threw on colors and galkyd and turpentine in a euphoric delirium. rigid conformity vs organic liberalism, to use some favorite convoluted art/philosophical terms -

it's certainly not finished, and i would love some suggestions, but the process was fun. the way art is supposed to be. right?

today i woke up to snow. not on the ground, really, or even very sticky, but snow - glorious december snow. i put on some ballet flats, no socks (because sometimes that feels tacky) and marched somberly to my developmental biology class. we were having a dissection. i was prepared for formaledehyde and gloves. we were given live mice and a scalpel.
i did the dirtiest, ugliest thing i have ever done. i sliced the poor mouse open, pulled out her amniotic sac, and cut out her embryos, one by one. i am so ashamed.

i don't really like living a double life.

there is too much in the world.

2008-12-03T14:28:00.004-05:00

I’m sitting in the bathroom, my hair saturated in a static knot of bottled cetearyl alcohol/propylene glycol/hydrogen peroxide that will magically reopen into a perfect shade of dark ash brown, transformed into its own naturally beautiful reflective tones and shines. Like a gleaming mushroom. I’m wearing a brown tank top with some bike shorts I put on last night in the half attempt to go running. I never made it out the door. Now it’s 5:07 PM on a Saturday in September and all I’m doing is laying here on the soft linoleum of the bathroom tiles wearing black and brown, when I hate black and brown, trying to ignore the fact that a million things were supposed to happen today, a million things that were supposed to spring up out of my to-do list and transform into clean laundry and finished chapters and sparkling, completed projects.
Every morning of my life for the past two years I’ve prayed to God to help me accomplish everything that needs to be accomplished. Every night I’ve fallen asleep prayerless, disappointed. I asked my roommate for advice on how to pile as much as possible into a single day. She responded that she thinks the words “productive” and “efficient” should be applied to machines, not people.
The problem is, I often think of myself as a machine.
I wonder about isolating myself. I imagine living in a white factory box, far away from the clatter and tangling roar that is Distraction. It is glowing inside. Work springs out from small holes littering the walls like a cascade of Christmas lights, slithering smoothly and rhythmically in beat to my working hands and brain and heart. Papers fly out into the sky, projects gather in neat, glistening heaps, and my box floats closer and closer towards future happiness, towards paradise, towards perfection.
In my life of twenty-two years, I have only had one day of perfect productivity. I was fifteen years old. It was Thanksgiving break. I shut myself in my bedroom, the closest I had to reigning over a Utopia, to controlling time, every element, even the percentage of oxygen in the air. My room was shining, yellow walls, warm, and I put on Rach 3. I had discovered classical music for the first time a few months before, and I had all faith in the idea that it could solve miracles. I pulled out my to-do list, type faced in the thick, linear hand-writing I had been obsessing at for months, and finished everything in consecutive order, putting a satisfying 45 degree check next to each item when I was through. At the end of the day, I felt like I had conquered the world. I was on top of everything, I controlled everything – no, I was everything. I suppose part of me wants to be everything?
“There's an excess in the universe, a much-ness, a too-much-ness,” says Li-Young Lee. I read that line this summer while lying on a cot on the floor, bathed in pools of sweat. My laptop breathed the words out in a steady stream of heat, warming my bed into a red-glowing ember that captured the swells of humidity radiating from the air of summer, of a pulsating Korean summer. The heat was comfortingly oppressive. I reached towards it.
There is an excess in the universe, there is an excess in the universe, there is an excess in the universe. I feel like I’ve carved those words into my arms, into my stomach, into the ticking beats of my heart, long before I knew to think them, long before I knew what they could even mean. There is an excess, and I am part of that excess, and I want all of that excess. I want to do everything and be everything and be a part of everything, and when it doesn’t happen I want to smash my poorly reconstructed body into a heap again, watch the porcelain pieces fly and flutter futilely to the ground, dare them to resurface. I know if I do, they will. It is a guarantee, one of the few guarantees I know, that if I break I will always recover.

I learned how to swim when I was six years old. My mother signed me up for lessons during our summer visit to Seoul, and I would smile up at her through blue-tinted goggles and blow chlorinated bubbles that tasted mysteriously sweet on my peering tongue. When we took our annual family trip to the grand hotel in Gyeounju, I put on my yellow and white polka dot swimsuit, the one that had a cut out in the front that revealed, when I bent over, my belly button. I was embarrassed of this. I wrapped myself in a towel, spun through the red-carpeted halls, flung myself free into the glorious outdoor pool that was flooded in green, red, and purple lights. My mother slipped in more quietly.
Swim to me, she commanded.
I kicked forward off the wall, undulating, nascent to the wondrous world of blue and wet. I reached longingly, hopefully toward the peach pillars of her faraway legs. She stepped slowly backward. I kicked harder, imagining myself a mermaid, feeling my hair wrap like gentle seaweed tendrils around my naked shoulders. She stepped back again. Ever further. Out of reach.

I never learned how to say no. I never learned how to say no in high school when my back began to fold with the weight of my books, supplies, music, bags. I never learned to say no when I began waking at five for swim practice, left half way for chamber orchestra practice, triple scheduled Korean school and youth symphony and lifeguarding on Saturdays, desperately reading chapters from my AP European History or Music Theory or Chemistry book at stoplights in the car. I never learned to say no when I signed up for three different orchestras and violin lessons and piano lessons and service clubs and varsity swim team. It was for college. It was necessary. I never learned how to say no as a freshman at BYU when I jumped into the premed track and signed up for 20 credits of science classes and chemistry research and symphony orchestra and volunteer tutoring and work.
If I said yes, I was in control. If I put my feet into everything, if I stomped them about here and there, I had a chance at perfection. If I poured so much into my hours that the minutes creaked with the pain of their load, I could declare myself the queen of the universe. The universe of excess, the universe of my reality, the universe where I did all this so that I could be in control, or praised, or hurt - I’m not sure which. Sometimes the hurting was the most comfortable thing. Sometimes the forced insomnia and the stressed warbling was so comfortingly aching that I clung to it, itching for the sting.

Of course, I broke. Of course, I broke so many times over that I fell into a pile of cracked china pieces every evening, patching them together with fraying pieces of scotch tape by morning, begging and praying to hold together again until night, at least, feeling the shards created by the collapses fall into me,
feeling my soul leak out through the holes.

My hair is glistening, shining, the minute half-shade darker I’ve ordered it to become. My laundry is folded into angular towers, my bed sheets have been smoothed, my books and papers have been laid out in parallel intersecting lines: a pile for my science life, a pile for my writing life, a pile for my art life, a pile for my spiritual life. I tap my fingers through my hair and smooth the curling strands into submission with a straightener that raises the coconut-scented moisture into clouds of steam around my face.
I ate a tomato for lunch. The viscous red strands journeyed toward the paper cut on my right ring finger, crawling into the crevice and resting nervously, waiting for me to react. I closed my eyes. I pictured the pieces drifting about in a pink-ish sea encased by porcelain white, pieces that had escaped from my throat after drinking the creamy tomato basil soup a few nights before, the red that had suddenly become foreign and strange and exciting as it swirled and diffused through a bath of lukewarm tap water. Physical or chemical reaction, I had wondered? I had received a 62% on a seventh grade exam because I hadn’t been able to mark the distinction. For months afterward I had quizzed myself, frantically embarrassed at my incompetence, forcing the universe into a dichotomy between the two.
Vomit: chemical. Tomato juice dripping down my arms and elbows and into my fingers: physical.

The warmth of the shower envelops me, soothing and nurturing, chiming its meditative caress in soft drumbeats all over my body. Soap drips from my chin like honey.
Love is all you need, shouts the stereo, singing from a mix made by a dear friend during a recent trip to Florida. We had listened to it in her car while driving down a lane lined with palm trees on our way to swim and splash and laugh for hours in the Atlantic Ocean. Sand still clung to the rubber casing on my ipod.
Love is all you need,
in the world to succeed.

I'm driving, having just dropped off and bid farewell to one of my most beloved friends, a person that always helps me remember that the world is, can be, should be, overwhelmingly, gaspingly beautiful. The lights of the city fall like braille across the black of the night. I feel the indentations with my eyes, glide over them with the skin of my pupils. I try to forget the way my mother looked at me this afternoon when she said those words, those words she didn’t mean, those words she apologized for the next day in phrases of I’m sorry and I didn’t mean to, those words that hurt so badly I forgot to breathe. Those words I’ve been telling myself, secretly, in the moments I forget that the world can be anything near beautiful.
When I get back home, it’s 7:23, but it feels like the end of time. My feet feel their way up the stairs, press their flesh against the maple of the floor, kick through the luggage I hadn’t even had the chance to unpack. I’d arrived that afternoon to the clattering roar of airborne plates and books meeting in angry tribal dances on the marble of the kitchen floor, and when I’d walked in, when I stood there and reacted and took my father’s side, she’d looked at me and said those words.
I crawl deep into my covers, my new womb, cocooned by the cradling hum of my portable space heater, and close my eyes into the safety of the pressing heaviness.

We wait for the concert to begin.
I glance down at the fresh stain three inches above the hem of my skirt. The dark purple silk gathers into a starburst of wrinkles around the oily melanoma mark where a farfalle noodle had landed during dinner. My mother had said something sharp and my right arm had shot suddenly forward in response, straight for the bowl of artichoke pasta at the center of our table draped in Christmas-themed tablecloth, even though it was barely November. My fist released the squealing noodles I'd grasped into an unforgiving explosion on my red dinner plate. One had slid off the plate and landed with a soft thump on my left thigh.
Later, ashamed, I attempted to wash out the evidence with a bit of hand soap in the upstairs bathroom sink. The silk smelled like wet dust.
I shift my coat to hide the mark before my mother can see it. She is all that is put-together, sparkling in her Lancome makeup, Theory blouse, Ralph Lauren cashmere cardigan, Juicy Couture diamonds. Her right leg crosses crisply over her left. She glances at the program, talks about the boy my sister likes, points at him unabashedly as he walks onto the stage. The concertmaster. Clean cut, smiling, such a cute boy. I've never told my mother about any of the boys I've liked, I've dated. She has never had the chance to embarrass me in this way.
I try to tuck my long, unruly hair behind my ears, sweep the bangs I had trimmed that afternoon into a perfect parabolic swoop on my forehead. My high school calculus teacher is seated a few rows above us. In May, I ran into him for the first time since I'd graduated when I'd offered to take my sister to audition for the orchestra, when I’d offered to drive her back to that same classroom I had lived in through high school and hadn’t revisited since. I had tiptoed into the room, like a mausoleum, wanting to whisper at the posters and the carpet and the chairs that were still exactly the same. Holy relics. My photograph at the back of the room smiled up like a young, sheepish ghost. Concerto Night 2004. Lia Farnsworth. Soloist.
He had looked at me perplexedly, sensing the familiarity, uncomfortably unable to place me.
I firmly thrust forward my hand. My name is Lia Farnsworth, I said. I took calculus from you four years ago. He stepped back, remembering filling his stance. I’ve been going to the Y. I’ll be graduating in a year with a double degree in physiology and visual arts.
You never really liked me.
This I didn’t say.
Jack walks onto the stage, and the concert begins. Jack, who had been my mentor through adolescence, coaxing me with my violin, crooning out popsicle-stick jokes during orchestra rehearsals. Jack, who still looks white-haired, rosy-cheeked – the same. The orchestra looks up at him with their glimmering, orthodontically-corrected smiles, their 15 year old wisdom, the infinite glowing potential of youth. The violinists press their instruments to their cheeks. I forget whether I am on stage or in the audience. I forget whether it’s 2002 or 2008. Nothing has changed.
I didn’t even know you played the violin, a friend said to me this spring. He’d come to visit me at my parent’s house from school, from college. In the two seconds I’d left the living room, my mother had mentioned this fact. I thought of my violin. It sat alone, dusty, encased in a black clothed coffin beneath my bed, pushed away by the mounds of homework and exams and projects and life I had to sort through.
Nothing has changed, but everything has changed. I am on the other side, the side that wishes on them the potential, the side that is now supposed to be doing everything in the world. Tomorrow I will get a letter from Teach For America, telling me I’ve been put on a waiting list, telling me I’ll be informed of either acceptance or rejection in two months’ time. Tomorrow I will sink into the floor, and wonder about my life, and wonder about the emptiness of this world of excess, of too much-ness. Tomorrow I will realize that I am not really in control.

And then I will pick up, breathe deeply, and continue.

what.the.waitlist?

2008-11-17T22:05:00.002-05:00

Dear Lia,

Thank you for applying to Teach For America and for the time you have invested in the interview process. Our Selection Committee is impressed by your record of past achievement, leadership potential, and commitment to expanding educational opportunity for children in low-income communities.

This year, we have seen unprecedented interest in Teach For America. Due to the number of applications we expect to receive over the course of the year, we have implemented a waitlist for the 2009 corps. While the Selection Committee has admitted some candidates and denied admission to others, the committee has recommended you for the waitlist. We are actively working to accommodate the number of promising candidates we expect to receive throughout the year.

We recognize that you were expecting a final decision today and apologize for any inconvenience this delayed notification may cause. At this time, we do not need any additional information about your candidacy.

We appreciate your commitment and continued interest and will update you on your waitlist status on January 20, 2009.

Sincerely,

Joshua Griggs
Vice President, Admissions

self-portraiting part two: recent art

2008-11-10T01:47:00.006-05:00

2008-11-04T10:05:00.002-05:00

I am an artist.
I am an artist.
I am an artist?

It is Monday. I have been repeating the above mantra to myself, licking the words about my lips, trying to understand the rhythm in their syntax, the rhythm in their meaning. I have oil paint stained in the crevices of my palms, in the matting of my hair, on my clothes, shoes, books, papers, carpets, sheets. This morning, I found a spot of alizarin crimson in the bristles of my toothbrush.

I spent the first twenty years of my life preparing to be a doctor. It always seemed natural and essential to me that I follow my duty as the eldest grandchild of my Korean doctor grandfather, trailing him to his hospital clinic in Seoul, laying out pink and blue pills in groups of perfect sevens that the nurse would slip into wax paper packages. I was five at the time. It felt like I was born to sort those pills, to don my plastic nurse cap from the toy hospital kit I’d received for Christmas. It felt like the most important thing in the world, to make my grandfather glow with unrepressed pride as he showed me off to his second-floor Noryang-jin clinic patients, dance about those rooms wallpapered with documents of his Fulbright studies in Germany and medical school achievements.
Eight years after my grandfather passed away, it still seemed like the most important thing in the world. I learned to laugh, I learned to let my friends laugh at the glaring Asian-ness of my med school dreams, my Suzuki-trained violin performances, my vestigial confusion of “l’s” with “r’s” in an attempt to camouflage my ever-increasing obsession. I packaged away my violin and writing and swimming and history dreams to sign up for a major in Biochemistry before I fully knew what the word meant. I trained my hands to reach robotically for my uniform of lab coats and goggles and practical close-toed shoes to replace my necklaces and noisy ballet flats and effect my metamorphosis. I learned to replace sleep with diet coke, music with chemical equations, and frustrations with exclamation points, because I was going to be a cardiovascular surgeon! I was going to do the most important thing in the world!

On the day I had signed up to take the MCAT, I sat in Borders with a stack of magazines on the table in front of me, staring at the cars driving by the window. I watched them, slowly, meditatively, tracing the pulsations of their peristalsis by the change of the traffic lights. When it grew dark, I pushed back the unopened magazines, and drove home.

Your gesture paintings are the truest reflection of your style, my figure painting professor says. We’re nearly a month into the semester, and he’s just called me out to the hall for our first critique. I lay out my pieces in a crisp line along the white tiles, letting each drop to the floor with a satisfying click. We step back. The sun filtering through the windows lining the hall bathes us with an afternoon lethargy, quiets the arbitrary greens shadowing my figure’s legs and the purples hugging my model’s hair, showers my pieces with a new objectivity. My professor points to a portrait of my grandmother. The painting is still saturated with the wetness of the night before, with the memory of squeezing oils from tubes like frosting that I’d buttered across my panel with a palette knife, blending greens and pinks with the tip of my left index finger.
This is your most successful piece, he says.
The painting is a mess. I pick up the panels from the floor, stack them into a neat pile, tuck them to rest in my locker incubating with the perfume of linseed oil and turpentine. The painting is a swirling confusion of color, my clothes are caked with oils, my fingers are lined with a sepia brown that clings to my nails like filth. This is my new uniform, these are the layers of my metamorphosis.
After the critique, I stare at the large figure painting I’ve been working on for weeks, painstakingly glazing colors over colors in an attempt at high-realism. Prokofiev beats in a dramatic wave of chord progressions through the headphone in my right ear, then through my left, repeating again, again: your gesture paintings are the truest reflection of your style. Your gesture paintings are the truest reflection of your style. I take the piece off the easel, walk it down the stairs, out the door, on the lawn, then rub off the layers with a piece of 40-grit extra coarse sandpaper, pausing only to see the white of the underlying canvas breathe its gratitude.

I found out I’d made it into BYU’s art program over a phone call during a physics course my junior year. I listened to my mother on the other side of the line, and when she hung up, I paused a moment in delirium before I burst into overjoyed tears.
We were studying electric potentials. My life had just changed.

I’m sitting on a bench outside a campus lab building, drinking in the warm milk of the mid-afternoon light. The sun clings to my dark tights, the purple ones I had thought to buy in a brilliant moment of fashion forecast on a Seoul sidewalk this summer. I let the warmth wrap around me, bury within the plumes of green pashmina wrapped about my neck.
My science book flutters open in front of me, glaring its GENES: IX title with a sneer of intimidation. I have a quiz on all tenets of chapters 16 through 18 within the next hour. I haven’t begun studying. I open the cover. I look up. I check my phone. I think about my paintings, begun this afternoon, drying quietly in the blueness of my studio closet. I try to read the opening sentence again: “Single copy plasmids have a partitioning system that ensure,” I look up, “that duplicate plasmids,” I check my phone, “are segregated…” I spot a stroke of orange paint I’d failed to remove from the underside of my wrist and juxtapose it with the brilliant green of my textbook cover. I try to read the sentence again.
It’s 1:23 PM, 37 minutes from the start of class, from the start of my final capstone course in advanced molecular biology that guarantees me a bachelor’s in science and then promises to leave me alone forever, absolve me from the chain that is my degree in physiology. I envision myself entering the classroom, attempting to appear incognito on row four of six, three seats in, trying to look placidly concerned about the answers I am randomly circling on our weekly quiz, attempting to disguise my blasé over the presentation on the differences between tRIM5a and PtERV1.
This much is clear: I am not, by choice, by passion, not a scientist.

I fell in love with Modigliani’s long necked and blank eyed portraits at seventeen, marveling at the elongated curves cradling his deep, sensuous reds, worshiping the longing in his women’s almond eyes and clenched fingertips. I traced and printed out his paintings on bits of leftover cardstock paper that I pasted into my books, locker, walls; holy relics I would bow silently to every afternoon on my way to the cafeteria.
In Italy a few years later, I make my mother travel back to Venice with me (back, because we had already been) to visit a Modigliani exhibit we had missed through massively frustrating doses of ill-planning. We board a train at six in the morning, eyes glazed and tired, bodies draped over the sticky plastic of our third-class Eurorail seats. It isn’t until we walked into the halls of the museum, it isn’t until I see the works across the hall lapsed in glorious light, ghostly artifacts, holy gods, that my fingers tingle and my eyes well and I remember that I am alive.
Layered oils. Almond eyes. Slender fingers.
I wander the gallery for hours while my mom waits impatiently outside, sketching the particulars of the paintings, closing my eyes and wishing desperately to engrain the images into the deepest recesses of my understanding, to reach out and learn the artist’s secret, to become him.
Modigliani died of tubercular meningitis at the age of thirty-five. He was survived by his lovers, his drugs, his alcoholism, and his Bohemian lifestyle.

It takes a lot of energy to fight a set-point. In an indulgent midnight tabloid session between the pretzels and Tostitos on aisle ten of the grocery store, I read an article in Elle magazine that claims that the style of our hair has a set-point. An important concept. No matter how we might style our hair, the article declares, no matter how many fashion makeovers we might subvert to in panicked reaches for trendy updates or au currant timelessness, our hair will always revert back to a set state. I think of my next-door neighbor in her pristine two-story town home, her maroon-dyed hair and perfectly coifed half-mullet managing to defy the passage of time. I sprawl my legs across the grocery store tiles, rest my arms against my soy-milk laden basket, and lapse into contemplation.
My hair is half-wavy, brown, fine, naturally frizzy, and often finds itself in a knot at the nape of my neck. My go-to outfit of choice since 2003 has been a cardigan with a skirt and patent-leather flats. And my life has always been clean, organized, filled with books lined in alphabetical order and appointments detailed in color-coded tabs in my pocket planner.
I rub at the coarseness of my hands, quiet the weeping of my skin against the cruel baths of lithotine and aspartame that my lithography class has forced upon them. My life has always been clean, organized – coerced to be so, set to be so. Not filled with these late nights painting, not filled with this dying skin, these stained clothes.

I sit in my car three days after I break up with my best friend, my boyfriend (the title is ambiguous), three days of kneeling on the floor and scrubbing the kitchen tiles with cloroxed sponges, three days of repeating Rachmaninoff’s cello sonata in g minor from the quivering living room speakers while my roommates avert their eyes and tiptoe past, softly, pityingly. I peeled at my skin, rubbed it raw, rubbed it new, and as I sit in the heavy quietness of my car after three days of trying to forget I finally begin to weep, the clear salt of my tears sanctifying the sadness from my eyes, carrying the messiness from my heart.
As a child I would iron the wrinkles in my bed sheets, straighten the books on my shelf, vacuum the peach softness of my bedroom carpet in parallel to my father mowing the front lawn. When the deep green scent of lawnmower would begin its drift through my open window, I folded my hands crisply inwards and perched near a wall, legs crossed in meditation, lips upturned in quiet satisfaction. Cleaning meant perfection, control. Holiness.

We gather around my oil painting professor’s computer, craning to see the rolling footage of Susan Rothenberg wandering the foothills of her solitary New Mexico ranch, sitting in her studio with a palette so thick with the history of oils that she cups her new formed colors into her hands and flings them nascent, free onto her skyscraping canvases with slingshots of cardboard.
I worship her art. I worship the carefree messiness of her line that transforms into horses, landscapes, houses, people, the flowing suggestions of vivid color that congregate into swaths of representation on her twelve foot canvases. I worship it, because I long for it, because I am terrified of it. I worship it because I know that I have to learn to let go, to let my gesture paintings act as the truest reflection of my style, to go forward into art and relinquish my vestigial hold on medical school and its guarantee of plans and my blueprinted lists and be okay with not knowing what it is that I’m doing, where it is that I am going, what mess it is that I may be making.
The video ends. Our class dismisses. I imprint Rothenberg’s name into my consciousness.

I sit at the kitchen table, fingering the last line of my journal, dated a week prior. How do I feel about perspectival lines, it reads, about dripping galkyd, about dripping galkyd on top of perspectival lines?
The light curving through the window rests heavily, spicily on my tongue, the redemptive amber glow of a 4:00 in October. I drink in the warmth, feel it coat my thirsty cells with its viscous and healing trickle. In this moment, I am satisfied, I am granted the wisdom of a late afternoon glow, and I understand that I can call myself an artist, or not call myself my artist, and worry about messiness, or not worry about messiness. My painting will still be waiting in the studio upstairs. My fingers will still be stained with color.
I close my journal, take a final sip of tea and put on my apron. Ready for work.

happy halloweeny

2008-10-31T15:03:00.009-04:00

at eight years of age, i simply could not understand why my dad refused to don the giant felt fluorescent-orange pumpkin costume my mom had purchased at a garage sale a few weeks prior and accompany me on a run about the neighborhood to knock on doors and meet and greet america for the most glamorously fabulous night of our lives.

"no, no, and no," he emphatically declared. after a time, my mom gave up insisting. we walked out into the dark streets, my princess layers of luxurious, flowing, sparkling yellow silk feeling suddenly less sensational and infinitely more lonely.

later halloweens became an exercise in my mother's desire to simultaneously up the creative ante and economize. much to the demise of my elementary school popularity.

"what are you," my best friend, heidi buehner, stated (more than asked) perplexedly before bursting into a stream of histrionic laughter. we were in sixth grade, and a small part of my little heart wondered if i shouldn't just try again at the making-new-friends thing. yes, i was strange and korean and still brought chopsticks and squids in tupperware for lunch, but couldn't i at least try?
that morning, my mother had wrapped me up in a few yards of dark green netting, ordered me to roll about the piles of gathering leaves in our front yard, and dusted me with fixative. as a finishing touch, she took a few of the leaves and weaved them through my hair, declaring her vision beautiful.
i couldn't help but feel sheepish confusion as i attempted to respond to a heidi that was now doubled over on the floor, sobbing with laughter.
"i'm a bundle of leaves... can't you tell?"

other years resulted in large star shaped pillows pinned to my anterior and posterior ends (as a starry night), a bright yellow body-bag with white gloves (as an m&m), and spandexed pants with ski poles (as a cross-country skier, my last attempt to try at cool).

at the moment i'm seated in the center of the noshhh! zone of the byu library, popping trident's tropical twist gum like candy between the occasional wrinkled grape i've smuggled in the left-pocket of my backpack. i'm dressed as myself, thankyouverymuch, with a jcrew jacket and zara pencil skirt, molecular biology book in hand, and i can't help but eye the fairy or aluminum man or renaissance maid in the row opposite with a bit of a quizzical brow.
i mean, seriously. what.the.hell.

what's happened to my unrealized visions of milk cartons and flappers and gypsies of halloweens past?
sadly, it appears i've refused to put on the pumpkin suit.

i've become my father.

and halloween and i have come to the fatal realization that despite our attempts, we may have to resign ourselves to mere acquaintance status.

(this won't, of course, keep me from throwing on a white sheet and floating about the house tonight, muttering the occasional "boooooo.")

why i stopped sleeping

2008-10-31T14:29:00.004-04:00

or: what i have been up to in the last week or so.

abstract painting midterm
figure painting midterm
self portrait studies
orca grant proposal
mmbio quizes, presentation, paper, proposal, and exam
pdbio paper, grant proposal, and exam
teach for america final interview (!)
creative non-fiction essays, readings, presentation

last night i slept on my bed (as opposed to the living room floor) for the first time in a week, for a full eight hours. it felt so indulgent.
and when my alarm went off at six:
i
hit
snooze.

october 2008

2008-10-28T08:50:00.003-04:00

oil paint stained hair, elbows, cheeks, pants, shirts, shoes, ipod, books - gesture drawings, paintings, green shadows and purple highlights - frantic writing scribbled in notebooks in disney world lines - 3 am developmental biology readings - eyes glazed over 2pm mmbio 441 lectures - kant, labels, understanding, fighting set-points - teach for america, orca grants, exhibitions - midnight painting and philosophizing with morganne - late night speakerphone calls with palette knifes and figure paintings - canyon drives and sigur ros - robert ryman and white having a tendency to make things beautiful - corn flakes with soy milk and bananas, coconut cream pie yogurt with stolen bookstore spoons - 25 minute swim workouts and yoga and cardio cinema running - autobiographical essays that say nothing autobiographical - falling into the atlantic ocean and embracing pure nakedness with patricia - roommate councils and dancing and laughing and walden at 6 am - thursday tofu dinners and vegetarianism and bean burritos from taco bell when i'm busy - curled up nights on the couch with my laptop - prokofiev and piano concertos and biking - three operas and two shopping sprees in five days - stream-of-consciousness lunches and walks and gatherings and fallings.

florida

2008-10-28T08:37:00.004-04:00

as the waves crashed against us and the salt saturated our pores, we fell alive, we spun into consciousness, we were born into being.
our bare bodies met the particles that had caressed the coldest and deepest recesses of the world and i drank, i relinquished, i submerged - i became more than the sum of my parts,
a single rocking particle in an infinity of particles.

i am so tired,

2008-09-29T20:51:00.003-04:00

and even my fingers feel like they're creaking. i haven't been writing because i haven't had any thoughts to write, or at least they haven't been able to climb out of my head and into my hands and find their way into formed words on this white screen. and so my blog is slowly slipping into a quiet slumber, resting under green tree shadows and wishing that life could continue indefiniately beneath this imagined cool summer skin.

sundays in september

2008-09-15T16:51:00.003-04:00

there was a time when i was really quite funny (or at least i thought so)

2008-08-30T17:11:00.004-04:00

once upon a time (or more accurately, when i was 9 years old) i thought it would be a brilliant idea to collect all the funny jokes i knew in a book i titled, appropriately and creatively, the joke book.

i even thought to write the answers upside down.

once upon a time (or more accurately, yesterday) i came across this very book on a forgotten, dusty shelf. a sampling:

what did the toothbrush say to the toothpaste?
please don't put your lips on me.

what's the best time to go to the dentist?
tooth o'clock

what did the soap say to the water?
i'm going to soak you up.

where do most ghosts live?
in a dead end

might it still be appropriate to throw these into conversation every now and again, just to show off my sparkling wit and delicious humor?

a small tribute to my friend, the subway

2008-08-21T04:29:00.008-04:00

after three months of several-hour commutes, i dare say i shall miss my new friend.

the secret to conquering 60% humidity, rising temperatures, and a summer without air conditioning:

2008-08-11T10:45:00.004-04:00

"isn't that a bit... old fashioned?" you say. "a little bit miss manners circa 1953?" i mean, where did you even get a hold of such a thing?"

"a handkerchief," i reply, "is the most useful thing to have ever inhabited my pocket. observe" (as i dab hopelessly at the torrential waterfalls pouring angrily down my forehead and into my capsizing eyelids, resurfacing again into spiralling curls on my was-straight-five-minutes-ago-hair, dripping like sparkling dew drops off my elbows) - "it's as if the heat doesn't even affect me at all."

the time the american ballet theatre came to seoul

2008-08-03T12:27:00.007-04:00

last night, i put up my hair, slipped on a skirt, pulled on some (₩5000) turquoise patent-leather pointy-toed kitten heels, and transferred three subway lines to meet some lovely friends for a ballet.

[the shape and design and cost of the shoes actually have nothing to do with this story, but. seriously.]

the evening
was
magical.

the moment the curtains were raised and the orchestra began its sticky sweet ascent, i surrendered weakly to the delicious fantasy within and let my years of repressed dreams trickle and tumble and flood their way back.
i was gloating. i was four. i was pastels and chiffon and renoir.
so, apparently, was the rest of the audience.

by the end of the third act, we were soaring. we had conquered the world. we jumped up and down in our seats.
the prima ballerina lifted her finger. we roared louder.

i forgot, for a moment, whether we were watching the world cup or don quixote -

only to be reminded, quite audaciously, when at the end of twenty minutes of encore applause and three separate curtain raises, the premier danseur leapt boldly through the curtains and onto the stage, confidence radiating in his taut white tights, hair billowing in his (self-created) triumphant wind.

the applause, at this point, was deafening.
if i had a rose, i would have thrown it. if someone had begun the wave, i would have joined in.

it reminded me a bit of the once upon a time three months ago when i watched the end of rudy. i was running on a treadmill in a dark and musty room filled with similar machines lit by a large cinema screen (which may or may not be known as gold gym's cardio cinema), when all of the sudden i had to hit the giant red pause button and feign breathless sweatiness to disguise the fact that i was gasping with sobs. okay, perhaps to disguise the fact that i was breathless and sweaty and choking with sobs.
to be completely honest, i don't care one whit for football films. and by one whit, i probably mean that i hate them. and yet - the roar of the crowd chanting a single name (rudy’s, by means of a spoiler), the enlargement of a single emotion throughout a group of people until that same idea was beating in a simultaneous rhythm through their hearts -
this moved me.

i’ve been a bit fanatical, lately, with the idea of becoming like a child again. i read my eight-year-old student’s english journal and sometimes copy down phrases when he isn’t looking, wishing i could uproot and replant them deep inside my bones:

Today in the morning I watched TV and played with my brother.
It was fun.
In the afternoon I went to Taekwondo.
I did skipping ropes and it was a bit fun.
At night I watched Jurassic Park and it was a scary movie but I wasn’t scared and I thought it was fun.

a friend wrote a post a few weeks ago that stirred up so much within me, and made me question, so fundamentally, what actually happens to each of us as time progresses.
i wonder if it's more than just growing older, or more than the conscientious and natural and sometimes painful realization that we are not peter pan carousing about an island on a star. i wonder if it might have something to do with our losing a certain charm for life, a certain light-hearted and irrational and maybe even overly sentimental belief that there is such a thing as magic.

perhaps we don't have to stop time or rewind our years to understand this. perhaps we don't have to fly to neverland to understand the magic in a moment when an entire stadium of people are cheering a single name (hello again, rudy), or crying with crazed and uninhibited jubilation at something as traditionally nonpareil as a classical ballet.

i suppose all i really want to say is this:
today in the evening i went to the ballet.
and it was fun.

relearning childishness. version 1

2008-07-30T13:04:00.003-04:00

i've spent an enormous amount of time this summer forgetting and remembering and trying to remember and reliving and forgetting all over again what it means to be a child. it's a funny thing, to move back to the same neighborhood you grew up in after nearly two decades of estrangement, only to find startlingly poignant pockets of familiarity here and there.

two of the students i've been tutoring are much less students and much more little kids, aged 8 and 6, forced to study english while july leaks slowly towards august. in the journal entries i assign them to write i find that i am remembering, more than through anything else, exactly what it was to be 7-years-old and living a stifling summer in seoul. and how it was that the playground could squeal its appeal to me with such delight, or the way the river could look so eternally magical with its queue of boats strung like christmas lights. in my land of reverie i was a golden princess trapped by a wicked spell, or an adventuring scientist looking for a medicinal cure in the local backyard jungle, or a girl with a lovely necklace, falling from a castle in the sky...

thanks to miyazaki for his unfailing artistry and his continuing ability to perfectly illustrate all of the grandest imaginations and excitements of being seven again.
(and, of course, the opening credits of castle in the sky.)

free ice cream with one hour purchase

2008-07-18T10:35:00.006-04:00

last night i went to a karaoke bar with my cousin and my sister. we took our shoes off. we sat on a grand leather canopied bed in a marbled room adorned with plaster corinthian columns. we ate melon ice cream. i sang drop it like it's hot.
this may or may not have been a mistake.

me: "snooooooooooop... snooooooooooop...??"
erin: "aren't you too white to be singing that?"

i love you, seoraksan

2008-07-08T08:39:00.003-04:00

lately, i’ve been a bit obsessed with the possibility of connecting all of the people on the planet together - of finding a way to reach out and grab for hands and let roots spring from our feet, of drawing an infinite dot-to-dot that would culminate in the eternal definition of us.
sometimes, though, your hands let go and float free and you find yourself staring at your reflection in the subway window – a lonely mirage interrupted by a blinking repetition of lights and sounds and faces. you find yourself folding your hands protectively into a geometric tangle inwards, pulling and twisting until you’ve become a fortress of impenetrable knots.

at this particular moment, i am staring, but not staring, at the girl standing across from me, learning, but not learning, the oddities of her outfit, as if this will let me know, without knowing, who she is, her name, and why she is standing there, wearing
• a satin turquoise blouse drowning in ruffles and buttons
• a silk pink and gray color-blocked shift dress
• a pair of white lacy patterned tights
• and some fake gucci tapestry flats.
in this inert bubble, i can gather the fragments of sound crashing from my ipod, the screeching train tracks, the automized intercom messages, and the giggling teens down the aisle into a neat heap i can curl and hide inside my clasping fists. i can shield myself from this bombardment of invigoration bordering on collapsing exhaustion.

i wonder, sometimes, at the inimitable mannerisms of an old couple who have lived with minimal societal intrusion for years. i wonder how they manage to not care so much about how they appear, how they’ve let such odd rituals normalize so concretely – the placement of a teaspoon, the schedule of a meal. i wonder how they can continue so obliviously, or why it is that i care, or why it is that the world would even bother to string up these gestural discrepancies on a scale of hypocritical comparisons. who makes up cultural rules, anyway? what is society but a series of inexplicable mannerisms?

i did a hard thing, this last week: i let go. i quelled my inner reservations and quieted the voice repeating, like a mechanical clone, the rules i thought i’d been dispelling the entirety of my life.
i found myself climbing a mountain in one of the most beautiful places on earth along a path lined with clouds so thick i could wrap my mouth around them. i untied my knots, i unfolded my hands, and reached out, hoping to grasp onto something.

and so it was that i stood on a quiet country highway with a dear friend when a tour bus came to a screeching halt to take us where we needed to go, the guide handing us freezer-cooled sodas and water bottles with a sympathetic smile. and that along a 15 kilometer climb straight up a mountain, we ended up with a random collection of rice cakes, crackers, and freeze-dried “pork in jam”, and that after a glorious dinner in a korean bakery i was handed a card scribbled with the owner's name and number, inviting me to stay at her house the next time i came to visit seoraksan.
because you speak korean so beautifully. signed, your bakery mom.
and so it was that a half hour before our bus departed i decided to assuage the convention threatening to strangle every canvas of my reason and jumped into the ocean, fully clothed, just to feel the salt in my hair.

perhaps this is why, from time to time, we must close our eyes, touch our hearts, and remember that they are still beating – remember that we are not just synthetic puppets driven about by a world of chaos –
but that maybe in that chaos lies an extreme balance of beauty, something we only understand because we’ve always known it.
perhaps this is how we sometimes realize that the only thing keeping us from beginning the dot-to-dot is not our koreanness, or our culture-ness, or our whatever-ness, but something quite terrifyingly familiar: just ourselves.

between tradition and contemporary

2008-07-05T08:20:00.006-04:00

"there is a spot called 'between', where tradition and contemporary coexist by overcoming the dichotomy between past and present. the 'between' represents the field where contemporary vocabularies and expressions are applied and interpreted to traditional subjects, materials, and techniques. a close inspection of the works relate the identity of the artists with korean aesthetics, an idea that could be continuous with the discourse relating to the concept of 'koreanness'."

note: any ambiguities apparent in this quote are probably due to (oh so endearing) engrish.

remember when

2008-06-22T12:12:00.003-04:00

remember when you were four and in a moment of ignorant exasperation annihilated your bangs with a pair of kitchen scissors?

remember when you were twenty-two and did it again?

the ultimate in asian tourism:

2008-06-20T06:48:00.002-04:00

impermanence as an eternalizing element

2008-06-16T13:45:00.003-04:00

i had a friend tell me once that the only art he really believes in is the kind you can't capture, the kind that happens and flickers and then moves forward. the oscillation of people through a subway car. a glimpse of sky through a tangled web of electric wires. the tint of your bedroom wall at sunset.

it makes me wonder a little about the importance of permanence in art, or whether the word permanent plays any link in art beyond the memory we have of it. it reminds me of the way tourists in a famous museum will go about excitedly from painting to painting, photographing every image they feel touched by (or have been told they should feel touched by). who looks at those pictures once they're taken? what does the image even mean once it's been isolated onto a 4x6 inch reprint?

while wandering about a contemporary korean art exhibit the other day, i came across a wall covered in mylar and black packaging tape by the burgeoning artist heeseop yoon:

i immediately cringed with sadness at the thought that all of the meticulous detailing would go to waste at the installation of the next exhibit, but just as suddenly wondered if its impermanence wasn't one of the greater factors in its magnificence. was it the actual piece that made it great? or the reaction it gauged in its audience? what was the eternalizing element?

on my way home, i walked through a puddle of origami papers that had fallen into a large swirling heap in the subway terminal. as i looked back, the wisps of color fluttering gently up here, congregating slowly down there in the breeze of passing footsteps filled me with a sudden and forceful -
oh!

without any sort of disrespect or disregard for the treasures of art that we keep in museums and study in books and pass about in our homes and in our hearts - if art acts as a metaphor for life, surely we can say: life is art.

*note: this post is a repeat from the transpacific sketch project, a collective effort by a divine group of people.

man vs. man

2008-06-11T22:14:00.005-04:00

i've been watching with a sort of disconnected fascination as protests have rocked seoul for the past month or so, the issue being, ostensibly, the importation of american beef.
i've watched as korean boys, nineteen, in navy blue uniforms and police badges have lined up nervously with barricades and guns, performing their mandatory civil service -
or as droves of impassioned college students have gathered in circles with banners and heated cries, decrying the four month tenure of the current korean party as authoritarian and anti-korean -
or as the korean president, lee myung-bak, has bowed in frightened humility as his entire cabinet threatens to resign.

perhaps this is an old story. protests aren't exactly rare in a country that has witnessed masses of political upheaval in the past half-century since the korean war (not to mention the japanese occupation for the half-century before, where my grandfather was given a japanese name and forbidden to speak korean in public). neither are protests or anti-american sentiment or political unrest in general rare in a world that is as consistently turbulent as ours. sure, hundreds of thousands of protesters gathering in the largest south korean demonstration in twenty years can make the cover of today's new york times, but the paper is littered with references to countless other occurences rooted in historical turmoil.
i remember my dad reading me an article in the economist about the sudan when i was nine or so. absolutely aghast, i finally responded, "that's so rude."
"rude?!" my dad laughed. "isn't that a bit of an understatement?"
yes, but isn't any response a bit of an understatement?

i suppose that i am asking, in this vague and wandering soliloquy, what is our connection to all of this? what is it that we can do when suddenly we feel so small, or are even blinded to the grossest injustices by our inevitable clouds of inner turmoil? so many of us are in that nebulous land called being twenty-something, trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives or even tomorrow. i waver between a constant bout of feeling too much and feeling too little. between throwing myself as fully into activism as i can (which often turns more into a cry for "awareness") and not being able to read the paper because it depresses me too much. i suppose it is in this time that we make the decision, as much as ever, for what kind of person we want to be. what kind of connection we want to make to the humanity that we belong to - whether that be with our next-door neighbor we still can't remember the name of or a milieu of "popular" causes.

for me, the korean protests are just part one of a thousand dealing with my current pursuit of identity. does being korean involve picking a side between nationalistic fervor and economic partisanship? does being human involve learning to separate yourself from your ingrown (read: familial) biases in order to entangle yourself with the world and sincerely and passionately dedicate yourself to your individually grown beliefs?

growing larger into a smaller space

2008-06-08T09:24:00.007-04:00

from a journal entry a few days ago:

right now the rain is spilling across the sky, cascading waterfalls of sound through the living room window. my grandmother sits hunched at the old dining room table, sculpting watermelon into perfect pink triangles that my sister and i devour in loud and satisfying slurps. the sugary sweet dissolves into a trail of stickiness down our chins. i feel as if i could be nine years old again.

the other day i realized that i’m yet again falling on the underside of the constant undulation of life – that inexorable state of unfeeling, the terrifying limbo of nothingness. i’ve questioned - how has korea been? i’ve answered - family and shopping and acting polite and walking for miles and eating my favorite foods. i’ve noticed - wanting to reach out and touch everything and everyone i pass, but confusedly keeping my eyes to myself. i’ve wondered - at the disconnect between my current life of chauffeurs and valets and security-guarded apartments with that of the old woman who squats by the metro station day after day, surrounded by her ocean of vegetables. i’ve marveled - at how the huge river that constituted the landscape of my childhood could be so much smaller, how the buildings don’t reach up into the clouds anymore, like beanstalks i could climb to the magical singing harp and the giant’s trove of treasures.
but really – how has korea been?
just like coming home. an instantaneous transfer of my routine reality. an unexcited process of being. simply: here i am.

i read a passage in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (my last reference to the novel, i promise) that made me feel fiercely and suddenly that i needed to break out of this pattern:

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

today, while running on the treadmill, i fell back to thinking about some of the beautiful times i’ve lived through with dear friends, and caught myself turning around the idea that i’ve lived so remarkably that it’s nearly impossible to expect an elevation. after such friends, after such delights and conversations and people and places and sights and sounds, how can i ever help but compare everything and have it come up as less?
and yet here i am – sitting cross-legged at my grandma’s old dining room table, listening to the rain splash across the window and on the street and onto the passing cars and people – and mixed with the drone of the korean news coming from the old television set and the occasional rumble of thunder, i wonder if i’ve ever heard anything more beautiful. it’s easy to turn the photos of my life upside down and to pretend that i am falling, like alice in the looking glass, growing larger into a smaller space. it’s easy to let life become tiny – to try and stuff it into your pocket and twist around the bits of fraying yarn that encompass your memories, believing that nothing could ever be so perfect again. and it’s true – nothing can ever be the same again, but isn’t that the beauty of living? isn’t that the beauty of always waking up ecstatic at the first snow, year after year, and never failing to want to dance barefoot in the spring rain, no matter the place and no matter your age? isn’t that the beauty of this moment, as opposed to all the billions of other seconds that have encompassed your life?

so why is it necessary? for me to go up onto the roof of our twenty-four story apartment in the middle of a thunderstorm, just to feel the wetness and take photos of passing cars below, like a bird up on a giant cement tree - or to skip from that level all the way down to five, letting the motion sensor lights flicker like a christmas cascade at the shuffle of my feet?
why is it necessary? for me to still get excited when it rains, to jump up when my grandmother calls out for dinner? because i’m afraid of the moment that i won’t care anymore – that i won’t get dizzy and giddy all at once at the prospect of shooting upside down and backwards down a rickety old roller coaster.

because there is a need or a desire to reach out of oneself in order to see who or what will reach back, grab your hand, and go a ways in any direction. and in the end maybe it doesn't matter so much as to why we want to dance in the rain or scream like kids when running around, but that we do it to begin with, so that we don't forget how to feel or how to see, read, make friends, mend hearts, or (wonderfully and tragically) to love who we are.

(or said my dear friend narwhal, in a beautiful e-mail that came as an answer to many hopes and prayers.)

i don’t know how it is that you can spend every day, an entire life learning to feel less. or how you can travel across the world and barely find the energy to lift the corners of your mouth into a feeble smile. i don’t know how it is to force excitement into yourself, to try and press buttons and make combinations and wish desperately that you could play out your life again, like a moving stereoscope. i don’t know – but i suppose here i am. and i’m trying.

omg, so hot watch right now!!!!!!!!!

2008-06-04T22:01:00.004-04:00

korea's newest boy band sensation. love it.

memo to friends

2008-06-01T10:15:00.010-04:00

what i've been up to in korea (thus far, and in no particular order):

1. do you rike mr. chickan? or: korean is so much more fun when it tries to be english.

2. we love contemporary art, or: how having the national gallery five minutes from your apartment is sort of like ecstasy (the state of being and maybe even the drug).

3. ten years too late, i find out about woody allen's salacious affair with his korean step-daughter, or: how i've become obsessed with reading random wikipedia articles late into the night, in the hopes of becoming like oskar schell (a protagonist in extremely loud and incredibly close, a book which all of you should probably get a hold of immediately).

4. 2 is the new size 10, or: how everyone in seoul is ridiculously skinny. welcome to the opposite of america? other miniscule things: cars, the width of streets, clothes, bananas, milk cartons.

5. don't talk to strangers, and don't, by any means, take candy from them, or: what life is like under the wing of an over-protective grandmother. similar titles might include: keep a constant distance of five meters from the subway, clutch your purse for dear life at all times, and if you take your own chopsticks to the restaurant you have a 0.0002% less chance of catching a rare bacterial disease.

6. lcd soundsystem is so summer 2008, or: my i-pod is a great friend on the subway. also, mozart's sinfonia concertante during breakfast and brahms' sonata for two pianos in the shower. yes, oh yes.

7. where can i get a hold of those hot circa 1970's frames? or: only on koreans can skinny jeans look this good. korean trends + unlimited shopping venues = a shop-addict's paradise and a student bank account's purgatory. help?

8. woah eighties hair! or: how high humidity can do wonders for your complexion and even more for frizzy locks.

9. "that's where the elders meet for their daily council." "really?! elders? what?" "um no, not really." or: how being in a foreign country lends itself to an extreme amount of naiveté.

10. the first thing that comes to mind is lovely, or:

and so i live in a city of twenty million

2008-05-29T05:13:00.002-04:00

When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that problem. “Which problem?” “The problem of how relatively insignificant we are.” He said, “Well, what would happen if a plane dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?” I said, “I’d probably die of dehydration.” He said, “I just mean right then, when you moved that single grain of sand. What would that mean?” I said, “I dunno, what?” He said, “Think about it.” I thought about it. “I guess I would have moved a grain of sand.” “Which would mean?” “Which would mean I moved a grain of sand?” “Which would mean you had changed the Sahara.” “So?” “So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!” “That’s true!” I said, sitting up. “I changed the Sahara!” “Which means?” he said. “What? Tell me.” “Well, I’m not talking about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I’m just talking about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter. If you hadn’t done it, human history would have been one way…” “Uh-huh?” “But you did do it, so…?” I stood up on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: “I changed the course of human history!” “That’s right.” “I changed the universe!” “You did.” “I’m God!” “You’re an atheist.” “I don’t exist!” I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.

from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

cleaning at the periphery

2008-05-19T02:58:00.004-04:00

it's currently 12:58 am. my bedroom window is slightly and gleefully open, clamoring to secure the entrance of the warming weather. i can hear a train horn in the distance, mixed with the slither of wind blowing through my curtains and the calming electric buzz of my laptop. and all i can think about is how much i'm craving a guacamole chip.

something happens when you're in between phases, when you take a plunge into the land of limbo. days and weeks suddenly, silently pass without distinction, and routine engraves itself in, even if it's a routine of nothingness. passions sit untouched in the corners of the room-- canvases blank, books unread, music unplayed, words unwritten-- and with nothing really to hallmark the time, the days stretch painfully onward. and yet it still manages to turn into 9:00 PM and all that you have is a guilty list of foods you told yourself you weren't going to eat but gave in to anyway (read: guacamole chips), followed closely by a list of things you supposedly wanted to do but somehow couldn't quite get around to doing.

most mornings i manage to throw on some gym shoes and check into a step class with my mom. amid rows of jumping jacks and step-kick-lunges and middle-aged women in too-tight biking shorts, i can't help but give myself a glaring (if somewhat pantingly wide-mouthed) stare in the 360 degrees of mirrors: stomach slightly chubby (i credit this entirely to Winter), face tired with deep-set circles beneath the eyes, long, ratty brown hair.
me?

i moved back to salt lake nearly a month ago. i entered my room, poured in the entirety of my belongings, and got to work.

cleaning = mindless = soothing. you can sort and make piles and throw out and accumulate and all the while keep all of your mental efforts focused at the periphery, a nice therapy for a few years of forced academic work. a sort of continuing agenda materializes quite without need for input: after you're done with this box, you move on to the next one. and after that, the next. slowly, but satisfyingly, my art supplies find their way into labeled tubs and my makeup gathers into a single heap and my clothes group into neat piles by color and type. and after putting wings of the dove on repeat, my room begins to emerge. i can't keep myself from working until every last compulsory detail has been met to my subjective satisfaction-- and only then do i sit on my bed, now arrayed with an odd assortment of white and yellow patterned cushions, and let myself bask in the semi-delirious satisfaction of conclusion.

i decided to divide my time in salt lake into a series of phases, beginning with the sorting of my material belongings. while rummaging through immense piles of old clothes i'd somehow managed to hold in historical preserve from the seventh grade onward, i recognized several key pieces that had occupied a core of my desires and efforts. the merino wool pale blue cardigan with ribbon trim from the GAP, for example, that i'd worn about with a sweaty sort of pride for months after the first heat waves of spring. or the wrinkled swimming medals and orchestral music all drenched with the formaldehyde of sentimentality, grasping desperately at my now high-in-demand closet space.
most of it went.
meanwhile, i still cling rather furiously to the value of keeping written words. they seem like the closest thing to capturing thoughts, to bottling memories, to stopping time that any enterprising time traveler might ever come across. open a note from a friend in the eighth grade, and the ferocity of that moment (consisting of a crush on the boy in the grade above that you'd nicknamed 'the carpet' and resolved to somehow trap and marry) sort of smacks at you with a sudden vivacity that is only quelled by the perspective time has forced you to gain. you remember your level of understanding and gasp at what was to come that you, the protagonist, was still unaware of, and smile glumly at the secret foreshadowing of your life.

weeks later, i can barely remember what self-described phase i’m actually in, or if i’m in any sort of anything at all. rather, today might have been pulled at random from the hat called the month of may, and i sit in wait for the change of location that will signal a stop to this land of lethargy and somewhat selfish introspection. perhaps then i’ll be able to look into the encircling of mirrors in the van winkle aerobics room, and as i reach for yet another cross-legged sit-up, will finally be able to answer to the question of who i am and where i'm going, and more importantly, what i can do with these things. but until then, perhaps it's time for a guacamole chip.

new york in march

2008-05-05T13:11:00.003-04:00

i'm sitting in a starbucks on the corner of 63rd and broadway. it's 11:37 pm.
outside the night is alive-- the remnants of a winter wind blowing through the vibrating warmth of electric lights, the well worn cement blanketed by a steady stream of cars. people getting up, going somewhere: an entire universe all of its own.

through the electric jungle, the hazy skyline, the altered landscape of skyscrapers and bundles of trash for morning pick-up and scattering people, i know one truth:
i
am
alive.

alive, breathing, feeling. anticipation curling in my fingers, understanding brewing in my heart.

alive.

the ides of february

2008-05-05T02:18:00.007-04:00

sometimes, when i narrow in on it, i realize i'm afraid of just one thing: that in pouring myself in, that by intertwining myself with it so completely, i will feel the rejections all the more. that i will believe their raucous lies and copy their cruel, mocking gestures, and ultimately reject myself.

i spent all week trying to create a more personal concept for my pieces. i researched new techniques and dug through old images, experimented with visualizing my memories and attempted to draw out my integral connection to my past. all the while i feebly reminded myself not to be disheartened by the process of making ugly art, of spending time in the journey of learning and discovery.
such repeated warnings offer little use to a mind so unwilling to listen. especially to itself.

my professor gave me the critique i asked and hoped for: thorough, sincere, helpful. without expression, he laid my pieces (the result of seven days of constant mental labor and one full night of focused efforts) in a smooth horizontal line across the table, then sank slowly back into his seat.
i closed my eyes. i tried to imagine the paintings through his.
suddenly, my beautiful, poetic, figurative memory-scapes became poorly crafted, failingly executed, and conceptually weak. three of the paintings i immediately discarded from the responsibility of my hands, an abortion of the physical embodiment of my efforts; the others i traitorously snubbed from recognition.
i braced myself for his reaction.

faultily crafted. choppy strokes. needs divisions. scattered focus on certain concepts. could redo this idea. don't present these paintings.

all criticisms were kindly said. sweetly given.
i looked at my art again, disgusted. all desire to make something new had effectively fled.

it's difficult, i told him later. it's hard not to equate such criticisms on my pieces with criticisms on myself. it's frustrating to spend so much time making paintings that look so ugly and please so little.

after class, i took a long stroll through the surrounding halls. i tried to understand what and how the creators of the other paintings already seemed to understand-- but they all stared back at me, smirking their giant secret.

with as menacing a glare as i could manage, i haughtily shoved my bag of supplies over my shoulder, squeezed my fingers into my pockets and gave a theatrical march out the door. i would not let this daunt me-- not for the moment, anyway.

a brief explanation of my blogging drought:

2007-05-22T00:36:00.000-04:00

i lost interest.

routine

2007-04-11T00:25:00.000-04:00

every night i pour myself a cup of orange juice (with pulp), turn on the heater, crawl into my pink flannel pajamas, and sink slowly into bed. i open a textbook, close my eyes,

and listen to a distant, annoying sound. it keeps growing louder. the clamor turns into a country singer, covered in tacky denim tassels and dripping with frizzy blond hair. she won't stop singing. i try running, screaming, but her voice follows me everywhere, filling my head with her siren's song. something twangs in my ear. it's a broken alarm clock. no matter what i try it, it continues to ring. everyone is waking up, angry, but even when i flush the roaring device down the toilet the music keeps growing more impatient, louder, shrieking, screaming.

i wake up with the corner of my textbook etched into my cheek. my alarm has been ringing for two hours.
i'm already late.

the end of an era.

2007-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

my best friend got married today.

my achilles’ heel

2007-03-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

there is nothing in the world that i love more than classical music.

hot dogs

2007-03-06T22:05:00.001-05:00

a woman stood immediately behind me in line at the costco food court this afternoon. at first glance she appeared to be in her twenties, but a fuller inspection revealed what the layers of caked-on makeup and bleached, matted blonde hair disguised.
i subconsciously decided her life story, what she was doing there, and where she would end up someday.
then i turned to the menu.

my thoughts of fruit shakes and pizza were interrupted by a sweet, rich voice drenched with years of tobacco and alcohol exclaiming behind me, "oh! what a beautiful ring you have! why, you are so beautiful!"

the matted blonde woman was smiling excitedly through her dense, mascara entangled eyelashes at someone beside her, and i suddenly recalled a little girl i had seen at a market the day before saying that very same thing. a darling, innocently childish young blonde dripping with life and the potential to go out into the world and accomplish amazing things.

and i don't know why, but my eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

in my embarrassment i walked away with two polish hot dogs i had no intention of eating.

my life as fiction

2007-03-06T01:26:00.000-05:00

i have a strange habit of becoming the characters in the novels i read.

i vaguely noticed this for the first time as a child. i wept bitterly when i read jane eyre, felt myself shivering in the cold, cruel red room and feeling her tragedy as if it were my own. i possessed unspeakable magical powers when i read through the chronicles of narnia, passing through wardrobes into uncharted lands and soaring on the lovely aslan. these strange transfigurations would only last as long as the books were open, however, and i was able to quickly transition back to my world of stuffed animals and coloring books.

i only really began living the stories as a senior in high school.
i was reading sylvia plath's the bell jar, a recommendation from a friend, when i first began noticing the largely subconscious changes.
for one, i hadn't been able to sleep properly in weeks.
i began staying up for nights on end, echoing esther's insomnia. i froze my emotions into an impenetrable bell jar and removed them from my friends and family. sometimes i struggled to breathe, sometimes i wondered quite simply when i might walk into an imaginary ocean and sink forever away.
i only snapped back into reality about a month later.

most recently i've been reading a bit of tolstoy. a little war and peace, some of anna karenina.

i flatter myself sometimes that i am like anna, with her firm, light step and dashing eyes, those eyes that contain that fire and life that have been suppressed for so long, but i am probably any arbitrary character, any one of thousands that tolstoy could have picked to fully characterize in his subtle, telling way. i see myself like this, my life described by an omniscient narrator that penetrates my soul, knows my past and my future, understands far more than my shallow character could ever have the foresight to see or comprehend, and i wonder.
is my character learning? is it growing? is it minor and one-dimensional, or has it enough depth to be almost contradictory? do i try too hard to plan life out beforehand, only to be met with chaos? what are my situation rhymes? what are the symbolic repercussions of the situations around me? what are the effects of my friends on my character's life? who are the prince vassilys, anatole kuragins, betsy tverskoys? the pierre bezukhovs, natasha rostovs, and konstantin levins?

taking myself out of my own life like this, separating my experience from my emotions, i feel like i'm watching a play in several acts. watching my character rise and fall, knowing and seeing perfectly clearly the mistakes she is making but understanding their unavoidable necessity in allowing her to arrive, perhaps a bit broken, but always a little wiser, at the next scene.

anna's affair was unavoidable, necessary. her death at the end of the novel feels tragic, but had she not ridden her passion out, made some attempt to feel alive and to experience the intense life force contained inside of her, her ensuing life would have been even more tragic.

"you are not alive until you know that you are living."

so what act am i in? how far into the novel have i come? have i learned enough, have i repented fully, or do i yet have mistakes to suffer through? will my end, like anna's, be unhappy but necessary?

for the moment i am poised as the entranced reader, greedily turning the pages, anticipating and knowing but still anxiously awaiting the final outcome.

my facebook status

2007-02-22T21:54:00.000-05:00

lia is feels like shit.

lent

2007-02-21T01:01:00.000-05:00

tomorrow
i'm giving up
crappy foods, like candy, cookies, doughnuts, chips, soda, cake, ice cream, and french fries
guilty pleasures, like facebook, tabloids, and instant messaging
weakly justified sins, like rationalized cheating, mild swearing, harmless gossiping, white lying

tomorrow
i'm going to
do the dishes right away, put away all of my clothes
read my scriptures faithfully, remember to say all of my prayers
wake up early, be on time, work efficiently
go swimming, go running
practice my chopins and my bachs
finish a pen and ink
finally prepare my presentation for the research conference
put in the necessary hours at work

tomorrow
i will
be more understanding, love others more fully
live life with a greater sense of awareness
grow beyond schedules and petty to-do lists
appreciate learning for the sake of learning
wonder at the prosaic beauty of simplicity

tomorrow
i'm going to
grow taller, skinnier, and maybe even thicker, shinier hair
pull off pointy-toed stilletos in the benson building
fly from place to place with grace and charm

oh right--
and tomorrow
i'm going to be suddenly perfect.

what's that you're doing?

2007-01-31T10:21:00.000-05:00

how to put on a façade in four easy steps!

1. smile, nod, laugh!
2. spew a random expression from your prepared collection, where applicable!
3. provide vague responses to direct questions!
4. use lots of !!!!!!!!!

it's so easy to put on a front.

life is fantastic! your face seems to say, your laugh only supplementing your clever cover. no one could ever guess how rotten everything really is.

what's not so easy is to look inside yourself, pull the pieces out through your throat and string them up like christmas lights.

"what's that you're doing?" whispers the wind, pausing
in a heap just outside the window.

"what's that you're doing?" question my teachers, my professors, my friends.
"what's that you're doing?" shout my parents, my aunts, my uncles.
"what's that you're doing?" quiver my past ambitions, my forgotten dreams.

i want to do everything but nothing, all at the same time. i feel like i'm living life with my eyes half-glazed over under the tired, heavy, oppresive light of mid-afternoon, too frightened to look into the black abyss that is my future and too ashamed to look at the apparent failure that is my past.

now that i'm free to be myself, who am i?
can't fly, can't run, and see how slowly i walk.

now that i'm free to be myself, who am i?
now that i'm free from my pre-med chains, my medical school imprisonment, what am i to become?
all those ignored passions, where are they now? all of that suppressed life, everything that i wanted to be but couldn't dream about, where did it go?

i can do anything. i can determine the blueprint for the entirety of my existence, right here, right now. isn't that supposed to be empowering? aren't i supposed to be happy?

it doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know.

but it must. i haven't got the time. the clock keeps ticking, rushing madly and unforgivingly forward. my mother must give me those eyes, that disappointed and coldly unforgiving stare, telling me to put away my ridiculous paintings and get back into the real world.
"listen!" she shrieks. "you're throwing your life away! don't be so stupid!"

if i had an answer, if i had any confidence in my future at all it wouldn't matter what she said. but i don't.

i feel so lost, so confused. a shriveled-up shadow of my former self. a girl that almost wishes she could go back to living that comfortable, confident lie just to avoid facing the brutal honesty of reality.

blue iris

2007-01-30T02:53:00.000-05:00

now that i'm free to be myself, who am i?
can't fly, can't run, and see how slowly i walk.
well, i think, i can read books.
"what's that you're doing?"
the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.
i close the book.
well, i can write down words, like these, softly.
"what's that you're doing?" whispers the wind, pausing
in a heap just outside the window.
give me a little time, i say back to its staring, silver face.
it doesn't happen all of a sudden, you know.
"doesn't it?" says the wind, and breaks open, releasing
distillation of blue iris.
and my heart panics not to be, as i long to be,
the empty, waiting, pure, speechless receptacle.

mary oliver.

the meeting

2007-01-23T14:50:00.000-05:00

today was the day of the art professor meeting.

i've been dreading and anticipating this moment since maybe five minutes after i made my decision. this would be the test, the final indication of whether my life has any validation at all.

he flipped through the entire portfolio in about three minutes.
he was silent.
i was silent.

funny how you can pour all of yourself, hours and hours and days and weeks of frustrations, into whisps of paper that can be evaluated in little more than ten seconds.

"good," he finally said. "i wouldn't include this one," pointing to the watercolor i'd completed just that morning, "and maybe even this one," referring to the smoothly blended pastel portraiture of my sister, "but the rest is very good. you have a great sense of composition, a good eye for detail, and a firm handle on your technique and style. you've demonstrated just what we want."

we talked about how i had come to be sitting there. how after twenty years of preparation and 150 credit hours of college i had thrown medical school out the window.
"so why this?" he asked.

it's too complicated to say it just at once, just so. maybe because i felt like i had been lying to myself for years. maybe because i couldn't look my parents in the eye when they asked about my classes. maybe because i couldn't look myself in the eye when i thought about my future.
but art? why art? i don't know. it was something new, something i have never tried before. it felt like a gift, unopened, something i had been saving for the very end. the best for last.

he told me as i was leaving that he saw absolutely no reason why i should be rejected, that my works nearly guaranteed me a spot. he offered an encouraging smile and a concluding handshake.

i left a friend a voice message immediately after, relating the experience in a monotone voice.
she called me right back.
"do you even want this?" she asked.

maybe it's because i don't want to get my hopes up, or because i'm still afraid of rejection, or maybe it's because i'm secretly terrified of not fulfilling my potential in this direction, that this could turn out to be a cataclysmic dead end, but i only have one thought.

don't ask such hard questions.

mirror image

2007-01-21T21:21:00.000-05:00

"it is a curious fact, which anyone may notice, that a soldier wounded in action always thinks the affair is lost and imagines it to have been a very bloody fight."

sevastopol in december, tolstoy

about two months ago, after i'd finished my first pencil drawing, my art teacher requested that i complete a self-portrait.
"it'll be just fantastic for your portfolio," she said. "maybe even your best piece. and don't worry, after you get going you won't even think about the fact that you're drawing yourself."

i went home and leafed through all the pictures i own. my faces smiled up at me in various postures and places, crying out through squinted, asian eyes and warped, toothy smiles, "pick me! pick me!"
they all appeared so foolish.

after i finished the portrait, i found it rather difficult to show to anyone else. "it's beautiful," people would exclaim. "you're beautiful."
but that was hardly what i meant to portray. in fact, it made me feel like i had captured a fake, a hollow shell, and had thoughtlessly splattered her across a sheet of 80 lb paper.

there i was, seemingly staring up from the page.
a masterpiece?
hardly.
an accurate depiction of my physical characteristics?
questionable.
an accurate depiction
of what i think of myself?

certainly not.

captured in that way, forced into two-dimensional form, i suddenly realized how small i am. how trite my life must be. my story is not one in a million, but one of a million; a single microcosm of the same patterns that have been playing out since god placed man on the earth. i might be wounded, i might be bleeding and dying inside, but the world marches forward. the sun continues to rise.

i am not the first person to have switched her major. i am not the only person to have ever struggled, to have felt she is stumbling. i am not so important that my fate determines the final outcome of the world's events.
placed just so, i appear as ridiculous as the next person, my mannerisms suddenly shallow and cheap, my concerns and conversations so trivial. if you were to study me for a day or two, you could easily identify my favorite phrases and my repetitive concerns. time after time, you'd begin to wonder how i could be satisfied with so little, how i could be so cozy in my favorite sins and guilty pleasures, so easily and even eagerly tempted.

perhaps man is foolish. perhaps we are all ridiculous.

but somewhere, deeper, hiding, there exists something infinite. something so beautiful, so pure, something that chose to come to the earth, to suffer these horrible trials and make these terrible mistakes in the hope that it could be sanctified. that it could attain exaltation.

i know i'm ridiculous at times, i know i'm just like the next man, believing my wounds and failures to be the result of a desperate and bloody battle. but perhaps, just as my self-portrait acts as little more than a depiction of my face at a single point in time, carrying little depth or trace of the person inside, my worldly exterior hardly mirrors that inner spirit that knew so much and chose so wisely.
perhaps i can learn, slowly, to leave a bit of my ridiculousness behind, forget myself, and plunge into that greater work that is without beginning and without end, and finally
become.

finals

2006-12-19T16:26:00.001-05:00

tick
tick
tick

BOOM

wedding season

2006-11-23T01:19:00.000-05:00

marriage.

that word has been in the air lately, draping its musky, coco chanel scent through the shadows and leaking its visions of pink silk faille and ridiculously overpriced chrysanthemums into every conversation.
"haven't you heard?", the regular gossips clamor, smug with the fresh news. "sally, josie, and franklin from school just got married this past weekend. mary's engagement is around the corner, and alice is due next february! isn't that wonderful?!"
i give the requisite exclamations, ask the appropriate questions, smile and laugh politely, then wonder,
wait. what?
why?

i questioned what was wrong with me, at first. what it was that i was obviously doing wrong. why it was that i couldn't even find a boy that i wanted to date when all i heard was talk of caterers and floral arrangements, rings and dresses, temple dates and eternal love.

it wasn't until a few days ago that i realized how strange all of this is. i was on the phone with an old friend, catching up. i relayed the latest gossip to her, references to marriage slipping nonchalantly in and out of the conversation, when she mentioned her sudden state of culture shock.
we are all twenty-something years old. what's the hurry? why do we all want to grow up so quickly?

i've come to a realization: i don't need to feel bad or even guilty about being single. i am not in a state to be pitied. relationships and, eventually, marriage are rewarding and fulfilling in their own rites, but so is single life. i don't need to date anyone until i find someone that i actually want to date.
and when it comes time, i'll know it's time, and it'll be right. but until then i can live without hoping or looking for it desperately, wondering if i should have a better game plan or if i should be more willing to experiment.
until then i am going to enjoy and appreciate life. just as it is.

30 october, 2006: a brief redefinition of self

2006-11-20T03:02:00.001-05:00

i used to define myself by the consistency of my favorite things. it didn't matter that my cousin changed his mind about what he wanted to be every other week of his life (whether it be artist, firefighter or diplomat); i knew what i loved and i planned to continue loving it until the end of time.

let's backtrack.

i recently realized that, on top of heavily disliking my science courses and feeling completely indifferent about the chemistry research i have been conducting for the past year or so, i don't even want to be a doctor.

i am not going to go to medical school.

so what is to stop me from re-examining everything else? from finally tossing that outdated, yellowed and crumbling self-definition to the trash? i have been declaring that i prefer yellow to every other color since i discovered my first box of crayons at the tender age of three. well, actually,
1. yellow is no longer my favorite color. in fact, it hasn't been in years. it still holds its respective reign on the primary color wheel with its peers red and blue and surfaces in the form of daffodils every year or so, but i am finally going to abandon camp and join the ranks of the greens. greyish-green, specifically.

2. i don't even like giraffes. i used to say they were my favorite animal because they were exotic and yellow; i would look up all of the facts about them and think that knowing these useless parcels of information validated my rather indifferent decision to pick them in the first place. in actuality, i don't have a favorite animal because i don't like animals. not a one.

3. curry rice is great, but my favorite food vacillates from poulet toscana to cap'n crunch, depending on what happens to be in my mouth. usually the latter.

4. my favorite book is the bell jar, not jane eyre, not anne of green gables, and not little women. sometime in highschool i made the switch from swooning romantic era novels into the macabre world of esther greenwood, and the poignancy of despair has held me hostage ever since.

5. i don't have a clue about where i want to live in the future, so long as it's not provo or the equivalent. i'm not deadset on italia, but i've still got some criteria:1. thriving art and music community 2. liberal atmosphere 3. unique shopping districts 4. scenic locale
seattle had a good vibe, but our relationship is still very noncommittal

6. i am not really that ocd. i like to pretend that i must have everything visciously clean, with my sheets unrumpled and my books in alphabetical order, but i am actually a complete mess. i wash my dishes after the mold begins to grow. i throw my expensive clothes into dirty, wrinkled heaps on the floor. i throw books and papers into my backpack in a frantic hurry every morning, reducing some important documents to shreds and forgetting to pack others entirely. i eat many of my meals in bed.
actually, this is a change of character that i do not admire.

7. i am not really that korean anymore. i used to best identify with the culture of my childhood-- i even packed up a little lunch with chopsticks for school every day and carried my pencils around in a sanrio pencil case. i watched korean soaps on the weekends while eating choco pies and rice popcorn.
well, welcome to america.

8. i am no longer completely shy. remember that girl that used to hide from people she knew so that she wouldn't have to say hello? that used to hate being in big groups more than anything, never spoke out of line, and did everything she could to remain out of the spotlight? that girl was content to spend recesses indoors and alone, reading. that girl no longer exists.

but
some things will always be the same.
i still
1. make compulsive lists of things to do, things to improve, things to forget about, money i've spent, dates i've been on, boys i've fallen in love with...
2. love the violin, and the piano, and classical music, ridiculously much.
3. like spending time with just myself.
4. organize my clothes and shoes by color, and love getting more of these items continuously.
5. enjoy swimming and running, until it hurts to breathe.
6. cry when i am scared, or happy, or angry.
7. am late to everything.
8. take on far more than i can handle.

i've spent the past few weeks sorting through the more important parts of my life, pulling drawers and resorting files. i revised and combined old goal lists, set out new weekly plans and attempted to make some sort of blueprint for the next few years. i'll study harder for my classes, be more on time to things, eat less chocolate, and improve my posture. i'll take two art lessons a week, apply for art school, attempt to graduate with a physiology degree and get into graduate school somewhere.

really, though, none of this even matters.
it matters, but it doesn't matter. as long as i'm doing the right things, reading my scriptures, living righteously and working my hardest, things will settle into their proper places and life will flow smoothly. the problem is that i am not doing the right things at the moment, i am not praying regularly or even attending church, and thus can't expect a deus ex machina. but i will try. i will get up in the morning and give everything 110%. i will embrace my changes and work for more.
and someday, maybe someday, i will be able to wake up one morning and realize that, despite the complete alteration of my childhood plans, my life is fine.

just fine.

25 october, 2006: first snow

2006-11-20T03:01:00.002-05:00

driving through the snow, the flakes
tap
tap
tap
against the glass. swirl in flurries beneath the pale orange light,
flood the world and bathe it
just for a moment
in a blanket of pure happiness.

9 october, 2006: remember me?

2006-11-20T03:01:00.001-05:00

because i don't.

i am sitting in the periodicals section of the library. it is 11:16 pm, and i have yet to really begin my homework. i am listening to my i pod-- saint saen's danse macabre-- and surfing the internet. i have ballet flats on my feet and a messy bun in my hair.

all seems to be as it should be.

but then if you go a little deeper, look past my clothes and my laugh and that backpack i've been carrying since highschool
you'll be greeted by a total stranger.

a girl who has been pretending so diligently that her life is still the same
that she still wants to go to medical school
that she still likes the same kinds of boys
that she loves the church and reads her scriptures
that she is kind and loving to everyone
that she is in every way on top of her life
that she lives life with passion and purpose

that she doesn't even know herself anymore.

a girl that has been telling herself that she'll get around to fixing things for so long now
that fixing things don't even seem to be an option anymore.

24 january, 2006: week three

2006-11-20T02:56:00.001-05:00

coming out of the library, my head was bathed in my breath. i could feel the cold seeping through my clothes, layer by layer, into my skin, battling the warmth hovering inside my hooded sweatshirt. no use.
on the way home, my head started pounding again. somewhere in my forehead above the left ear. i tried to remember what that part of the brain was called, but stopped when i thought about the painful pulses marching across my head. instead i joined in on random phrases to some coldplay crooning on the radio, in another futile attempt to take my mind off the cold.
when you feel so tired but you can't sleeeeeep
no, no sleep,
especially not when i have mounds of developmental biology to memorize and countless other things to do.
so i piled some oranges on a plate and got to work.

1: neurulation.

26 december, 2005: united airlines

2006-11-20T02:55:00.001-05:00

remember as a child, all those stories about strangers from the past warping through time and finding themselves utterly lost in the present?
suddenly, you saw the world through different eyes. refrigerators, cars, televisions, computers,
frightening gadgets with power beyond the imagination.

as we drove my grandmother to the airport this morning, streaming through the dark along a complicated system of bridges and highways, i wondered just how much had changed since she had first left her mother's womb. so many things, so much history,
essentially, she and i were born into violently different worlds.
my life is so different from hers. at this point in her life, she was starving and very far away from home, hiding from the communists invading her country and coping with the deaths of thousands around her. she was to meet my grandfather a few years later, and to become pregnant with her first child. they say she was four months along at the wedding, trying to disguise her growing belly with the folds of her gown.

we sent my little grandmother off into the world today, to fly across the planet and find her way home again. i squeezed her hard as i hugged her goodbye, trying to capture the special scent of her hair and trying to remember how perfect she felt, holding her bags and drowning in her extravagant mink coat.
my dearest grandmother,
that i will miss very much.

and even though i fear it every time, i am going to try to believe, very firmly, that this was not adieu.

20 december, 2005: holiday lessons

2006-11-20T02:54:00.001-05:00

violinists are a funny breed.
"no, no, that four there just does not make sense musically,"
says my teacher.
"i'm sorry mr. herrmann, but i just don't know what you were thinking!"
he whips through every measure, making sure that every split second of music, whether this passage is played in second position or that slur should extend over to the next cadence, is absolutely perfect.
until such a thing as playing your intonation expressively not only comes into existence, but becomes of utmost importance.

15 november, 2005: dvorak

2006-11-20T02:52:00.001-05:00

and then, at its ugliest moment, the world arises
beautiful, perfect, and clear

softly rocking me like the gentle minor melody of a dvorak quartet.
the waters aren't so hard to pull at anymore; i can rush through them weightless, flying,
marvelling at the way the crisp droplets sparkle as they meet each other halfway

they react brilliantly, from microcosm to microcosm

and i can look up from my valley of momentary loneliness and confusion and helplessness and give a pale smile to the instantaneous miracle that is perfection.

2 november, 2005: morning

2006-11-20T02:50:00.001-05:00

i woke up to the soft pink glow of sunrise this morning.
the color seeped through my windows, tinting my curtains and walls and skin like an aquarell watercolor, transitioning my world from dream to reality
then back again.
i pulled the covers up to my chin, buttressing my body against the cold of the routine morning invasion, but the various books, pencils, and calculators protruding into my sides forced me to surrender and relinquish my spot in bed.
5:30 a.m.

nate called. he wanted to play switchy with our registrations.
6:00 a.m.

my preview to medicine class delivered its usual cynical, subjugating message. i systematically consumed the appropriate masochistic doses, waved hello to the guys that i know, then made my way to the fishbowl to meet my fellow o-chem sufferer. on the way i bumped into a pre-med i had crushed on earlier this year; he is now, appropriately, engaged. he, as well as his pre-dent friend, as well as every other guy i studied with this morning. i feel like i'm two years behind the draw, my left finger so very obviously naked.
catie finally came, lessoning my alien situation. catie graduated from orem high, is pre-pharmacy, and wears sparkly shoes with little cardigans.
i like catie.

but i don't particularly like o-chem. or studying.
so much to do, i'm not sure when i'll ever get it finished.

11 august, 2005: books

2006-11-20T02:36:00.000-05:00

i love the library.
the way the books are lined up so perfectly, row after row
each in its exact numbered place
the b's never fraternize with the r's;
the music anthologies don't associate with the science periodicals.
walking past the shelves is like drowning in knowledge
words and words and words of things i don't know, things i want to soak in and absorb and assimilate
i love the slightly musty smell,
the fragrance of crisp pages and learning

going through the music section, i feel like a young child in a candy shop (excuse the cliche)
staring dazed and amazed at the genius all around me,
arms full of manuscripts and pieces
the music of a lifetime

i wish my brain was more like that
organized and smart and full of references

i wish i could retain knowledge and understand the world and be on top of everything

instead, i'm sitting here in my pajamas, thoroughly unprepared for my last final, but not giving too much of a care either way.
i would rather work on my new lalo
or start a russian novel
or clean up and move out, for the third time
i need to train my brain to concentrate.

i've deleted several of my past entries
i don't want to bury myself in memories, hurt and revenge
i'd like to think i'm better than that.
this does not constitute that my feelings are shallow
i just don't want to get caught up in my sorrow, when the world is still growing so fitfully around me

i'm okay,
as a person.
i'm not the best thing to have traversed this planet
but i've realized i can accept myself, in my imperfection
i used to think i wasn't fully entitled to love the violin, because i wasn't good enough. loving my cheap inabilities would simply invalidate my character.
but that doesn't change things
i still love my violin, i still love music with everything inside of me
whether or not i'll ever be 'good enough'
and for what i have, i can play decently. considering that music is not my life, that i have only myself to keep me going now, i am alright.
i may not swim anymore, but i go running here and now. and though i'm not a 'runner' or hold great long distance records or anything at all, it's still something i do.
and though school has become a general compedium of misery for me over this past year, publishing me naked in my stupidity and holding me under a cloud of inescapable blemish
at least i try.

i may not be the prettiest or the funniest or the most talented, but i hold some claim to each of those titles, and i am happy with myself. i am happy that i am not a transparent projection, a questionable standard of perfection. i still cry sometimes, i still get caught up in my never-ending depression
sometimes i forget to say my prayers, sometimes i have other things to beg forgiveness for
other times i seem too loud, too boisterous, or even too removed, too conservative
out of place
but it's the small parts of me, even the strange ones
that give me my character
and overall,
i think it's all right.
even if a certain person hasn't found it in their hearts to truly love me for that

someday
somewhere
somehow
someone
will.

24 june, 2005: eating cherries

2006-11-20T02:28:00.000-05:00

red stickiness on my fingers, melting into a dripping current through the crisp whiteness of my notebook. the breeze lightly ruffles the hair thrown into a precarious knot above my head, breathing deeply as it passes quietly through my lungs
then out again over the sea of half-eaten cherry pits
my bare legs arms nakedness drink in the sun, intoxicated in the warmth rising like steam from the blanket
encircling my little spread and protecting it from all the world
i am all alone with my books
and the blood red cherries
and the perfect greenness of the lawn,
with only the twittering birds to pass judgment.

hello, beautiful summer day

just for now, everything is perfect.

7 may, 2005: la vie en rose

2006-11-20T02:26:00.000-05:00

the sentimental melody of la vie en rose
floats gently above the hum of the car
its chords catch the sweet evening breeze
rushing in playful splashes through the open window
and glide out into the lavendar sky
a flock of birds
liberated

the world is beginning to darken
the trees are cooling their deep green skin,
and preparing to sleep

to sleep, to dream
on this enchanting torino evening

30 april, 2005: driving

2006-11-20T02:25:00.001-05:00

driving here,
the hovering mountains looked so lovely shrouded in mist
the peaks gazing out of the wet like sugar-dusted chocolate cakes
the luminous green valleys were sparkling in the shadows, borrowing the drifting clouds on rooftops and in pine trees

but all that i felt
was emptiness

24 april, 2005: collision

2006-11-20T02:24:00.001-05:00

cool gray air everywhere, spilling in through the windows
the wind and the rain and the falling flowers
salt lake is lovely in the spring time.

familiarity permeates every breath of this place,
memories dripping down like rain from the tree branches
i feel like a grand intruder, disrupting the world that went on perfectly despite my absence. it stares at me blankly, coldly, questioning my sudden presence.
i had imagined that coming home would be like leaping through time,
everything quietly waiting for my return, unchanged and perfect
but my microcosm didn't hold still, it kept living, and suddenly it isn't even mine anymore.
strange, not belonging to anything or anyone.

at church i slipped through unnoticed and invisible,
as if i had neither left nor come back

with my friends i feel so out of place,
my humor, my laugh, my dreams clashing vibrantly with their world

even my room seems to reject me, scorning my invasion of clothes and books and music

but somehow i don't mind

i might not belong here anymore, but i do belong to myself. i can take the small bits and pieces of all my worlds and paste them together and become more than just the one, but the combination.

19 april, 2005: gray skies

2006-11-20T02:21:00.001-05:00

everything is cold and wet and green.
the gleaming gray skies are pouring out onto the streets, the cars, my hair. i feel like dressing in nautical blue and going sailing in the collecting puddles.
tomorrow the world will be fresh and beautiful, carrying no traces of today. the flowers will smile up into the sun and the grass will breathe with new green life. the worms will crawl back into the deep, warm earth and the parks will swell with running children.

but for me it will still be today. for me it is always raining, pouring, dark and cloudy and cold. tomorrow brings no hope of reinvigorated weather, of fresh new life. every day i wake up and i am still me, still lying on the floor surrounded by a thousand unread words while time marches unforgivingly forward.
i want to start all over, clean and white, wise and perfect.
but there is no hope
i have already screwed up
everything is dirty and stained and ruined and nothing can make it right again.

i am making my legacy
and there is no rewind button.

why is it the world can be so new and fresh and i don't even get a second chance?

18 april, 2005: rachmaninoff

2006-11-20T02:20:00.001-05:00

there is nothing quite like rachmaninoff.

grand and magnificent and captivating and wonderful, like the beauty and the glory of the world all captured in one chord progression. it stretches up into the brilliant summer night sky, so large and majestic, but then it reaches deep down inside of me and pulls everything out, bits of lia floating everywhere. the melodies smell like cool mountain air, feel like sweet creek water trickling inside my bones. they brush past my skin, past my thoughts and carry me up with them, far from my papers and my books and everything horrible. suddenly i feel weightless, suddenly i am flying.

i think
this is what heaven is like.

17 april, 2005: first entry

2006-11-20T02:18:00.000-05:00

it's like opening a fresh box of wooden colored pencils, or peeling back the cover of a brand-new book, or slipping on a pair of rubbery, unworn flip flops. no one knows me here; i can be anything. i can dive into my words and pull out the bits and pieces that i don't like and nonchalantly toss them into a rejection pile. i can paint myself tall and glamorous, far removed from the weary tedium of conventional life. i can pretend i am everything i am not, and no one would ever know.

but i am. i am, me. no matter where i go i seem to always patiently follow, aware that my illogical self will eventually accept me again. and so i start, only to end,

lia.