New Market, VA

Main Street, as busy as ever.

There’s a certain intrinsic familiarity to a small town that makes you feel like you belong. As long as you know at least one person in the entire community, you can’t help but feel comfortable with your surroundings and the people around you. Like you’re a book slipped snugly into a spot.

Of course, there’s also an uncanny loneliness, like the reason you fit so easily is that there aren’t any other books on the shelf at all.

I’m spending the next eight weeks or so here in rural Virginia with my father, and my three best friends from high school are here for two. Coming from South Central LA, the culture shock is intense–even having been here every summer for years. It’s hard for me to get used to walking around late at night without worrying about being mugged. It’s even harder to see stars without the distracting blur of light pollution and the city’s incessant murmur. And police sirens. And smog.

I’m not sure how I feel about Los Angeles. I’m not sure how I feel about New Market. Both invoke inexplicable sensations of loneliness, each one unique, and both feel a bit like home. When all is said and done, it feels good to be in a place where I don’t constantly worry about getting lost or being hurt.

Johns Hopkins Visit / Infinite Jest

Between finals, moving out, and the week I’m spending with a friend at Johns Hopkins University, I’ve had trouble keeping up my good blogging habits.

Coming to different schools really helps me get a better understanding of my own. The students here at JHU seem much more studious and competitive than those at USC, which manifests itself both in schoolwork and in social interactions. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but it’s certainly different from my dorm in LA, where few of us even had classes in common to compete in. The atmosphere here is so radically different from USC or Berkeley (the other school I’ve stayed at for a while) that it’s really eye-opening. Makes me wonder how different I would be had I attended a different university.

With my friend studying for finals, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and I’m getting a bit obsessed. The guy is brilliant. Maybe I’ll write something about the work soon. Better yet, maybe I’ll start regularly reviewing books. That would give my blog some meat on its bones.

Buddy Wakefield – Convenience Stores

This is a cool video set to the first Buddy Wakefield poem I ever heard. The original actually had me in tears, if I remember right. Still one of my all-time favorites.

Fountain Run and Friends

USC Fountain Run; Photo by Clay Larsen

It’s the last real Thursday of the semester, and I’m sitting here at 5:05am writing a paper about Fight Club and Existentialism. All the seniors did their annual fountain run tonight, meaning that the quad was packed with several hundred hopelessly drunk, wet, smelly, screaming people. My roommate Dalton and I wandered around a bit outside but quickly felt like we were being attacked so we came back in.

I hate alcohol so much. My loathing for it is most likely unhealthy and undoubtedly unfair, but it’s there, all the same. It makes people say and do stupid things, and, worse, it gives them an excuse to fall back on afterward. I hate alcohol and its connections to fraternities, partying, violence, sexual assaults, superficiality, casual hook-ups, and basically all other aspects of college life that I don’t like. In the fact that I don’t drink or smoke, I often feel marginalized, and it’s frustrating to be a spectator on something I detest but can’t change. I think it reflects this positively nihilistic mentality that seems to permeate young adulthood, and while I’ve spent long, fruitless nights trying to come up with profound reasons why alcoholism and drug use are wrong, what I keep coming back to is that they hurt people. They hurt the users and they hurt those around them. I can’t stand them in the least.

Tonight, some of my friends came back from the Row drunk, and I was feeling pretty down. Lethargic and uncommunicative, to be honest. One of my closest friends kept trying to get me to talk, and when I did, she didn’t like what I had to say, so she got upset and left. As awful as it is, I feel bad for not feeling as bad as I feel like I should. I’ll talk to her and apologize tomorrow, but I really can’t help it if seeing all these drunk people make fools out of themselves and hurt each other puts me in a bad mood.

I feel like I’m taking myself too seriously, but at this point it’s so late that I’m just trying not to fall asleep. I’m done with classes for the semester, though. Feels like a dream.

Nutrigrain Commercial

Babies everywhere!

Childhood

Julie Andrews spoke to a crowd of hundreds outside my dorm today. The LA Festival of Books is just coming to a close–finally–so I won’t be woken up by children’s songs or crowd sounds anymore. I’m a little disappointed, as I was hoping to find more stuff there that I liked, but the whole production was so overwhelming that I had a hard time getting into it.

Hearing Julie Andrews’ prim, proper English voice got me thinking. Mary Poppins was probably the movie of my childhood. I have no idea how many times my brother and I watched it, and listening to some of the songs can get me as misty-eyed as anything in the world. What bothered me about hearing Ms. Andrews, though, was simply this: she isn’t Mary Poppins. No matter how wonderful, polite, and princess-like she was, she isn’t the character she portrayed. Mary Poppins doesn’t exist.

My friend at Johns Hopkins had a chance to see Frankie Muniz’s new band open for Passion Pit the other day, but he decided not to go. The circumstances were strikingly similar; Malcolm in the Middle had a profound effect on both of our lives, so meeting the actor behind the title character seemed like it would rob some of Malcolm’s reality. (Which reality doesn’t exist, of course, but still took six or seven seasons to establish.)

What bothers me is that we base so much of our development and selves on fictional characters, but we forget that they don’t actually exist. And this is fine, as long as we can preserve them in our minds, but when something comes up to remind us of how we’re fooling ourselves–when Julie Andrews or Frankie Muniz makes an appearance–it can be disturbing.

Maybe that’s what it means to grow up: to realize the difference between what’s real and what’s pretend–and to not be saddened by it.

Take Chances Poster

Poor Laika

I think I’m allowed to do this, so here’s the beginning of a creative essay I wrote a few days ago for one of my classes:

            In 1957, in the middle of the great Space Race, the Soviet Union sent the first living creature into orbit on the spacecraft Sputnik 2. Laika, a stray dog, was ejected out through the earth’s atmosphere, into the thick, milky darkness above—an attempt to prove that an organism could survive outside the confines of gravity.

            The entire plan and shuttle were constructed in three weeks. As the technology to de-orbit was not yet invented, there was no hope of survival.

            Laika was sent into space to die.

            Sure enough, just hours after the launch, the poor creature died of stress and hyperthermia, floating weightlessly in the endless abyss. Five months later, Sputnik 2 fell back into earth’s atmosphere, incinerating on reentry. Thus, Laika’s remains were never recovered.

            I have lost many nights’ worth of sleep pondering this lonely stray dog. Laika is the closest thing I can think of to pure, perfect lonesomeness, dying in solitude with a full view of the earth and everything she ever knew or loved. I shiver when I consider what must have been going through her mind as she  realized she would die in her cramped little spacecraft, miles away from any help at all. Laika was a tool—a pioneer for science and humanity. She was trained and molded into the hero we now see her as, but when I think about poor, pitiful little Laika at the end, I don’t think she was concerned with heroism. I don’t even think she was bitter. The one thought Laika must have repeated over and over was this: “Why would you send me here if you only intended to abandon me?”

            Why would you create me if you only meant to leave me all alone?

            Laika might as well have asked why there’s supposedly no room in Heaven for everybody; I don’t think there is an answer. I don’t think there’s any response that can make things right.

Thinking about poor Laika makes me so sad. The rest of the paper is about God and religion, and this strange loneliness I’ve often felt. (It’s very self-pitying.) I’m also working on a painting that’s tentatively called “Please Send Help. Love, Laika.”

I hope she died still hopeful. I wish everybody could.

Hookup Culture

I just got back from the USC Writers Conference today, and one of the social media panelists made the point that having a half-heartedly maintained blog is almost worse than not having one at all. So I’ve resolved to post something every day, even if I deem it insignificant.

Last night I had a long discussion with some of my floormates about the college hookup culture–the omnipresent, casual kind of relationships people have here. I guess “relationship” isn’t the right word; people go to parties, dance with strangers, and often proceed to go back to one of their rooms to have sex. A lot of the time, it doesn’t actually go that far, and they’ll stop at making out or having oral sex, but the pattern is the same.

I hate everything to do with it.

As I tried to explain to my friends, I feel like this kind of thoughtless, hedonistic lifestyle robs sex of any significance it’s ever held, and it severs its connection to love. I feel like sex should be the culmination of a loving relationship–not a purely physical, pleasurable experience. In this regard, I’m sad to say that I usually feel like a minority. I’m a bit of a prude–I find even the grind-style dancing at fraternities and parties to be discomforting–but even so, I know my beliefs well enough to defend them against the onslaught of nihilists and people who simply don’t care.

I’ve written poem after poem about this, but I’ve always had a hard time explaining why I feel the way I do. Maybe it’s my religious upbringing, or maybe it’s my obsession with empathy. I don’t know. What I do know is that I often feel marginalized here at USC because of my naive, idealistic beliefs about relationships, and I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

I posted about this on Facebook and got quite a few responses. That was comforting, as it made me feel like at least I’m not the only one who’s thought of this.

I just wish it didn’t seem like such a stigma to openly bring it up.

New Poem/Haven’t Posted Lately

A second poem of mine was just posted to Stepping Stones Magazine: ALMIA the other day. Here’s the link:

http://ssmalmia.com/2012/radio-waves/

In other news, I’ve been too distracted and/or busy to post anything of worth lately–and it looks like it’ll remain that way for a while. But come the summer, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to ramble and complain.

Until then, it’s time to go kill myself studying.