typewriter thoughts

infinite skills create miracles

An essay I’ve been working on and off for the past two months that I need to get rid of to finally move on from all of this.

britticisms:

Early last fall, I began taking a meditation class focusing on our chakras. Four years ago, Marion, my therapist, suggested I meditate to relieve the anxiety of my work day. She said I needed to let go. She said my mind was deceitful, manifesting in thought patterns that spiraled and spiraled into days.

Letting go is vital. Your present deserves you entirely. Your future too. But in the midst of the past, reality disintegrates. The present and future gripped me; reality was furious. I could not waffle in the recesses of the past. The here was too strong.

But the chance to meditate came back this year and I took it, intent on living with purpose. If I can give you advice it would be this: live with the intention of yourself. If you cannot, you will not.

Our class took place in the music room at Soho House. Each meditation aligned with a different focus chakra. And the room was full of people who had jobs I didn’t understand. It took them more than a sentence to describe their work, which made me think their work didn’t exist at all. I never felt comfortable calling myself a writer until I made money doing it. I don’t think they felt similarly about anything in their life. I crave that brazenness.

Other students leaned in to the meditations too, sitting on the floor and crossing their legs. They’d change into more comfortable clothes even though this wasn’t required and they’d make public intentions of what they wanted to accomplish and how they would accomplish it.

At the end of our sessions, we would discuss what we saw. What we saw? All I saw was blankness, maybe colors if I tried hard enough. Maybe white from the glare of the lights. Maybe purple because that is my favorite color. I could feel myself in other places, usually the desert (my idea of tranquility), but I couldn’t see a thing, only the memory of myself in that place. Most often I thought about the days ahead.

“As thoughts come to you, acknowledge them and let them go,” our instructor used to say. The longer I took the class, the less thoughts came to me, but they never truly went away. I thought about my work and my frustrations and my anger. I thought about my future and whether or not it would be as I wanted for myself at 16, at even 26. I thought about my family, my friends, my desire for completeness always and the lack that pulls at my everyday. I did not think of love. I did not think of him. I did not think of us.

But other people saw childlike versions of themselves taking them on long road trips through galaxies unlike our own. They saw colors that don’t exist. They had conversations with people they know and didn’t know, long ones, in-depth ones that covered everything from their early morning minutia to friend trouble to politics. They saw recreations of traumatic incidents from childhood played out with strangers. They floated above. They were witness to their own history. They went on a trip. I went nowhere.

One week in class, we circled back to the manipura (a secondary chakra located at the solar plexus). I couldn’t make it work. Instead, I felt a lump so thick in my throat, I could not breathe. It felt both real and like a closing.

Two years ago when I struggled like this, I felt it too: literally allergic but also spiritually crippled. My throat would close up every night after dinner with my ex-boyfriend. First the throat would swell shut, then my lips, then my eyes and nose until I was completely incapacitated. But most times, I could stop the swelling before it grew out of control. I ended that relationship, and yet I still needed three more months to understand what was happening. I kept that closing, that lump, that metaphorical hump I could not overcome.

I asked our instructor about it at the end of our meditation session and she told me this: that I am blocking my truth; that I have lost a part of myself; that I am not doing what I’ve always done to consider my problems (writing); that to deny reality is to let these things build in mental blockage and later, now, the physical too.

“I want you to go home and do nothing and go to sleep,” she said.

“I have insomnia,” I said.

“I want you to go home and do nothing and go to sleep,” she repeated. “And the next morning, I want you to wake up and write down everything that comes to you. I want you to do it until you can’t write anymore. I want you to not think about everything else and instead focus on what you’re forgetting. I need you to start,” she said.

A SECRET:

I feel so betrayed by my body. I hate it. Or not hate it, but I’m wrestling with what it all means. I can recognize that my depression manifests in my limbs more than in my mind. I can’t sleep. At night I ponder nothing, knowing quietly in the parts of my heart that are difficult to muster that this is happening because I can’t face myself. When you are unable to face yourself, you become unable to face the other normal parts of the self: sleep is out of reach. The work day is a new obstacle. My insomnia is a chance to face myself, but I can’t.

I give my love to myself, to my body, only at night. Alone, I am able to cradle my arms, feel the heft of my thighs as they rest one on top of the other. My hips dip deep into my bed, indenting slowly the deeply packed foam. Every couple of months, I move the mattress around, making sure the permanence of my weight is balanced. At night, I curl into myself, become small, almost child-like as my limbs come not to a place of rest, but to their only true home.

This time is precious even if it is not rare. I am thinking about those nights when I can’t sleep, when the insomnia grips me. It’s during the weeks before my flow, the moments when my body fails me with regularity. It’s when I cry, but it is a cry that takes me by surprise, at least until it doesn’t.

That insomnia, it’s when the day has been too long and not just long enough. A long day is inevitable. A long day stays long, stays going. It doesn’t give up. It keeps its bearings until the night breaks and then, it goes further. The insomnia plays with my limbs, turns them into heavy anchors to my mind. I feel them more in this space than anywhere else and I hate them for it.

It is not like the daytime as I wrangle for control of myself. No, it is something else entirely.

But that night I slept. It wasn’t long or thorough, but my eyes were closed and I was somewhere else. And when I woke, I wrote this:

Written on my body is the truth I was afraid to own of myself. I never knew I wanted a child of my own until the one I had was gone. Marion said that I am in a state of mourning not yet manifest. Shock. In medical terms, this means a sudden drop of blood flow through the body. Oxygen and nutrients can’t get to vital organs. Quickly, nothing works as it should.

In my life, it was the end of life and the end of the intangible thing that created that life (our relationship) and the end of the possibility of what would come after that life (stability). Faced with a difficult choice, I had none in the end.

He broke up with me, a shell of myself, as life bled out of me, literally. I knew it immediately. Reality manifests in my limbs. My body closes chapters in lost breaths and tears and stomach pains. The end of things is the end of good health. My body is swelling, is dripping, is moving.

I looked down. “So this is it?”

A month or so before, we sat together in his bed on my birthday after a large meal and he said, “All of your friends are very good looking.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean they’re all beautiful and all of the men dress well. I felt strange.”

There would be other little things like that afterward. Like when I got sick and he said I was stupid, reckless for not taking care of myself.

“It’s because you dress like that,” he told me. He meant with my breasts out, my legs bare, my skin breathing.

Or like when he got sick, and he wanted me to take care of him, to tuck him in, to still make love as if nothing had changed.

“I just don’t think you’re a good person,” he said.

Or like when we drove to the far South Side to stand atop the ruins of South Works, a former U.S. Steel factory and he said, “This is a ridiculous trip,” but then later said, “I’m so glad I drove us out here,” and then later said, “You just don’t appreciate what I’ve done for you. No one will do this for you.”

Misogyny is not the hatred of women. No, I think in reality it is the fear of women. We don’t fear the things we hate; we hate the things we fear.

The things I hate are plentiful, multiply and mutate over time, adapt to the machinations of my current mind. But I don’t fear them. They don’t grip me, immobilize my body, make me mute. Instead, they inspire a fire that burns constant, bubbling under the surface and intoxicating those who find home above its unstable ground. The things I hate are just there, existing in contrast to the things and people and places I love.  

Misogyny is not just the hatred of women. It is the fear of what we can become and what we can do and how we think it is all of those things.

I wrote and wrote until my hands cramped, my wrists throbbed, my fingers drummed invisible piano keys. I wrote and then, for the first time, I really got out of bed and stretched my limbs. It was a long high stretch, the kind I perfected as a young dancer. The kind that alluded me as neck cramps from insomnia kept me immobile.

At meditation the following week, we controlled our breathing and we imagined colors and then we were someplace else. I was some place else. Finally that desert I felt but could not articulate was real. And across my line of site I could see the burnt red mountains that felt foreign to me at first glance. I felt like I could touch them in the way that vast things from a distance feel like they could rest in the palm of your hand. And down below I saw the dirt of the desert, the sand, the whatever, that covered my lungs but still I breathed cleaner and easier than anywhere else in the world for me. And up above the sky was dark, only littered with stars for as far as the eye could see. I wanted to count them. Finally, it seemed, I thought I could keep going.

looking for collaborators, flâneurs writers

fansylla:

One thing I’ve been working on by myself for quite some time is what I call “the Google Earth Project” and it’s basically screencapping all the places I have lived and writing a memoir/fiction/whatever piece inspired by the picture of my apartment, gated community, house - back to apartment. And I’m an obsessively curious person (a repressed stalker) so I kinda want to know about other people’s places. My friend Imani wrote a booklet (I don’t think it’s online) about strolling in her city and it is the type of things I am researching. I’m obsessed with the movie My Own Private Idaho. I’m just interested in how you occupied/still occupy your place (s), your environment (s). How do you remember them? It doesn’t have to be a huge piece, it can be memoir, it can be fictionalized. I’d like to say that there is not deep reason behind this project but there is, ever since I start reading this one Caribbean writer I’m not going to name because you guys are probably tired by now (EDOUARD GLISSANT) and the way he asks people to claim their environment, like their direct environment, their landscapes, their streets, neighborhoods instead of pathologically dreaming of an elsewhere. I’ve been doing it and realizing that I am so alienated and estranged from the places I have lived while still being full (too full) of memories of those places. Also, living in France, as the child of immigrants I am always told that I do not own anything in this country and black/brown people are always reduced to a single space (suburbs/housing projects) when I know, from personal experience and simple observations, that we live everywhere and we own places in this country just by existing and living in it. So I’m interested in this “everywhere”, how it looks and the stories that it produced/can produce, how we own it.

I do not want to intellectualize this too much, it’s simple just write about the places (streets, lane, roads, intersections, towns, houses, cities etc.) that made you, how you see them, also show them to me! I just feel like it could a cool and fun collaborative, collective thing.

ok so if any of you want to collaborate with me on that project then hmu please fansylla@gmail.com

Please share?  😁

carly rae jepsen’s emotion, in facts and theories

katherinestasaph:

Fact: Criticland is a bubble, and often a suffocating one. To the general public, Carly Rae Jepsen is synonymous with “Call Me Maybe,” which is synonymous with flimsy pop, which is associated with Justin Bieber, who to the general public may as well be a walking Ed Hardy hat. To the music industry, she is a C-list rising pop artist with a whiff of Radio Disney, less Ariana Grande than Miranda Cosgrove.

And thus she’s been shackled to meme after meme, like all rising pop artists. “Take a Picture” was a Coca-Cola ad with crowdsourced lyrics. Emotion was promoted with an unholy Tinder/Instagram mashup, which was soon buried, presumably because everyone but its architects found it ridiculous. “I Really Like You” underperformed at radio, based in part on listener feedback, and its Tom Hanks Dramatic Hanksing video failed to meme even more embarrassingly than “Bitch I’m Madonna.” “Run Away With Me” is not performing substantially better. Scooter Braun – whose starmaking batting average is only about 50-50 – has all but admitted defeat; he told The New York Times they planned to “stop worrying about singles,” which for an artist coming off a No. 1 hit is the equivalent of “spending time with my family” or “creative differences.”

Plea: I am a copy editor and I will fight this fight alone (because copy editors are used to being alone, AMIRITE): The album title is Emotion without the syllable marks just as will.i.am’s album title was Willpower without the hashtag and the Andy Grammer single is “Honey, I’m Good” without the period. You can be a fan of an artist without breaking out the Unicode. It’s a perfect conceit, really: Carly Rae Jepsen, literally the dictionary definition of emotion! But it’s a cover-art conceit.

Fact: Emotion is Jepsen’s alt-pop cred. It’s a viable strategy, as Haim and Alessia Cara can attest. But it’s also a tough juggling act – and for an artist who’s in her late twenties yet seen as a teenybopper to most of the world, it’s the equivalent of tossing ten more balls at someone who’s already juggling.

And so while Emotion is much more cohesive as a creative statement than Kiss – no Bieber, no Owl City, in fact no features at all, which to the industry is probably a downgrade but to everyone else is an obvious plus – it still ends up as the sort of album where a track whose first line is “I remember being naked” co-exists with a slow jam designed for nothing past slow dancing, whose closest thing to a come-on is “I will be your friend.”

Fact: Assuming critics in 2030 aren’t all broke in a ditch somewhere, they’ll remember this decade as a groundswell of great pop production, right up there with Timbaland and David Frank. Emotion is a joy to listen to on a pure sonic level. “Warm Blood” is like a Magic School Bus ride through the bloodstream – here be art-pop arteries, there be throbbing hearts, those right there are the red wub cells. “Making the Most of the Night” begins moody – maybe I was primed by Julianne Escobedo Shepard but on the verses I swear I heard “Gravity of Love,” which if true would make Jepsen only the second person to remember this bit of the ‘90s. But then Jepsen talks about hijacking you, and everything goes rickety, like she’s literally hijacked the track and is re-enacting Speed through sheer force of crush.

Statement: Carly Rae Jepsen supposedly lacks personality. She wouldn’t be the only one accused of it. But for every Jessie J or Leona Lewis who struggles to shed the accusation, there’s a Katy Perry or Kim Kardashian who doesn’t need to. Like a lot of supposedly objective pop music writing, it’s self-reinforcing criticism; what happens is money is sluiced through pop stars’ careers, or not, and to the victors go the “personalities.”

Fact: But Carly Rae Jepsen does in fact have a creative presence.

Evidence: She wrote most of the toplines on Emotion, and as a lyricist she loves the sudden swerve into the grotesque or criminal: “be tormented by me, babe”; “who gave you eyes like that, said you could keep them”; not since Kesha have we had such a good pop game Shirley Jackson.

Evidence: Between “Boy Problems” and that, Carly Rae Jepsen may be the one singer on the planet who can sing a Sia-penned song and not sound exactly like Sia.

Evidence: “Your Type” is pretty transparently an attempt to fuse the Taylor Swift of “Style” to the Taylor Swift of “You Belong With Me.” Without Jepsen it wouldn’t work, the synths Morodering their way dully through a tinny track. But Jepsen is tremor and quaver and flutter and apology: “I love you – I’m sorry – I’m sorry – I love you.”

Fact: The proper response to this is “you’re sorry you love me?” I know this because I literally said it, and heard that, last Saturday.

Theory: The awkward female pop star is not a personality pop in 2015 can parse. Women are expected either to be den mother, empress, cyborg, and Courage Wolf in one; or self-loathing romantic who’s one drug away from sensuous, fetching collapse. Every pop star is either retrofitted to one of these models or discarded. Take Taylor Swift, once the closest we had to awkward, now forfeited that label upon moving to New York and taking up supermodels and gentrification. And is it any wonder? Women are told to scour their speech for every stray “sorry” or “I feel like” or “just,” to spend an amount of energy on regulating their speaking voice previously reserved for opera singers, all in the name of displaying mandatory hyperconfidence.

Fact: Pop in 2015, despite what anyone including me tells you, is not synonymous with the fans. Because the fans can parse this; of course they can. Britney was beloved for her dorkiness. Ariana Grande is a far more appealing personality when she’s spouting off about demons and donuts than when she’s a living David LaChappelle photoshoot. The No. 7 song in America, which I have heard approximately zero people discuss critically, is “Fight Song,” which is like “Roar” if sung by someone who has perhaps actually experienced self-doubt.

Theory: Women experiencing self-doubt are invisible. Women writing about their feelings are devalued. This theory is all but ascended to fact.

Fact: Carly Rae Jepsen albums have many uses: soundtracking bad decisions, flirting with people you really shouldn’t be flirting with, rummaging for mantras. The best lyric on this album is “I have a cavern of secrets; none of them are for you.”

stunning review of carly rae jepsen’s music & a skewering of others’ empty reviews of her personality

butchcommunist:

One important thing to remember in life: Do not coddle men. Do not do their work for them. Do not perform uncredited labor for them, including intellectual labor. Do not bend over backwards to help them. Do not tell them they are good at things they are bad at. Do not smile at them when you don’t want to. Do not laugh at their terrible jokes or stroke their egos or let them think they are better than you when odds are good that they are almost definitely not. Do not even deal with men whose presence bothers you when you can get away from them/when you aren’t regularly forced to be near them for things like work. Do not include men in your life who don’t deserve to be in it any time that you can avoid it at all.

my whole last relationship 😊😊😊

(via pushinghoopswithsticks)

pansies

the smudges beneath her eyes
bloomed
pressed pansies between pages of an old book
dead flowers, inked on
no soil, no disintegration
no.
her eyes kept slightest color beneath
indicating this passage,
time
she remained between pages
stolen stem
caught paper white
not in the story, but of–
braving the weight
pressed.

SRO Speakeasy Pizzeria 6/15/15

nycchomp:

image

Today is pay day which means I was already in a good mood. Of course, I also got to spend the whole day looking forward to a complimentary pizza dinner, so even the muggy grey weather couldn’t totally kill my spirit. I realized I had never invited Christina to come to an event with me, so I asked if she and Rob wanted to come. Dre was coming too. We got to SRO (Single Room Occupancy, named for the small 24 seat space I’m guessing) around 6:45 and got to sit down right away. It is really whimsical that this place is a “speakeasy”–AKA you have to walk through Gia Trattoria to get there. As in, you have to know it’s there. I love secrets and restaurants-within-restaurants and back rooms and hidden doors so I’m into this. However, it probably makes it hard and confusing for tourists or first-timers. Luckily for us, Flora was at the door so that made it easy to tell. After we walked in I snagged a glass of Pinot Gris but it was pretty sweet, so later I switched to the Chardonnay. Almost immediately some pizza came!

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(via annetdonahue)

Church Street Tavern 6/10/15

nycchomp:

image

I hadn’t been to Church Street Tavern before this event, but I’d certainly heard of it. It’s in Tribeca, and consequently, next to the La Colombe coffee shop I used to go to when I was a daydreamy intern at SPIN Magazine (2012 edition). Even then, I was too afraid to own my desire to be a writer, and interned in their Marketing department. But it was by denying myself the Editorial track that I realized how much I really wanted it, and I remember getting off the subway stop at Canal in the morning and hurrying to the old office on Broadway, repeating to myself over and over that I would be a music writer. One day, I would. That was a funny little memory to come upon as I walked into the event on Wednesday, even if it’s peripheral to the food.

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the day i saw the poet

i saw the poet and,
the poet saw me
i was still listening though the poem was over
tears escaping my chin 
almond corner
lashes–
he saw the quiver in my face
sine wave salt visible
‘can you sign it?’ i asked
and though that’s all he did,
he heard what i meant
which means he saw me, too