Such a California girl

The only church I need is running along the beach on Sunday morning, then hearing this song on the radio. Fucking spiritual.

Things I Have to Remind Myself Constantly

• buying new clothes might make you happy but it doesn’t make you less lonely
• it’s okay to do things by yourself
• it’s okay to be sad
• it’s okay to see a movie alone and cry (at the movie, not because you are alone)
• (although it would be okay to cry because you are alone too)

Parallel universe

My favorite thing about New York was when two subway trains would run parallel underground and you could see into the other train. The speed gives the metal between the windows the fell of an old-time film, where the slides aren't fast enough and your brain can process the skips. It's like looking into another world: another car full of people, some reading, some talking, some with headphones, all going to the same place as you but on a track in another universe. Like a film projected on the tunnel walls to fill the tedious gaps in between stops. Lives running parallel to ours but never touching. I could see people talking, gesticulating wildly and could practical hear them. I wonder if anyone in the parallel universe looked over at me and thought the same thing.

Rain, rain

It was rainy all day, but the nice kind of rainy, the kind that reminds me of Berkeley. Didn't really need an umbrella but everything was overcast and seemed brighter. It was 50˚ which seems positively warm now. Didn't even wear tights with my dress.

Watched 2 Days in New York, which was wonderful. An awesome follow-up to 2 Days in Paris. Julie Deply just gets it. And by it I'm not really sure what I mean but I know it's something she gets. I want to be cool and beautiful and awesome like her and also I kinda wish I could date Chris Rock? And also be French and live in New York with adorable children? You know, normal desires for my indecisive, hopelessly lost 22-year-old ass.

I've been talking to a bunch of people about living arrangements for next year, when I will most definitely not be living with my current roommates. One of my roommates actually asked me earlier this week, in a rare moment when she was talking to me, about where I was thinking of living. I was like Uhhhhhh not with you fucking assholes that's for sure but only in my head; out loud I just hemmed and hawed and was like Oh I'm gonna try living on my own I think I've never done that maybe it'll be a good experience. Ugh. As long as I get out of this pinche apartment with these pinche people, I'll be happy. Being alone, like actually alone, is better than feeling lonely amongst passive-agressively hostile roommates.

Go to sleep

It was all unseasonably warm last week, like in the 50s˚F, but now it's in the 10-20˚F and I'm like Stop fucking with me, Midwest. I am a Californian not used to this bullshit. Fuck cold weather. I can't wait to get back to California and lay on the beach in 60˚ sunshine (but not go in the water because that shit is freezing).

I never thought I would be up past 10 p.m. telling myself I needed to go to bed because it's already late. Never. Go to bed, go to bed. You have to get up at 6 a.m. Go to bed. Go to bed.

I had plans but they just disappeared

Driving in the rain - IMG_0392, originally uploaded by Bahman Farzad.

I was supposed to go to someone’s (I say someone because saying ‘friend’ doesn’t seem quite right anymore since she hasn’t said a word to me in two months) birthday party tonight, but I couldn’t find a parking spot within a block of her house and it was raining and I didn’t want to walk in the rain and I just decided Maybe I’ll drive to Kansas and so I started driving west and I just kept thinking that if I kept driving west, eventually I would get to California, right?

Melancholy

Para dar un alivio a estas penas,

que me parten la frente y el alma,

me he quedado mirando a la luna,

a través de las finas acacias.

 

En la luna hay algo que sufre,

entre un nimbo divino de plata:

hay algo que besa los ojos

y que seca, llorando, las lágrimas.

 

Yo no se lo que tiene la luna,

que acaricia, que duerme y que calma,

y que mira en silencio al rendido,

con inmensas piedades de santa.

 

Y esta noche, que sufro y que pienso

libertar de esta carne a mi alma,

me he quedado mirando a la luna,

a través de las finas acacias.

 

Juan Ramón Jiménez

California dreamin' on such a winter's day

This whole winter break, the weather here in Los Angeles has been beautiful. Like, 75 degrees or warmer every day, sun is out, sky is blue, etc, etc. I've gone to the beach, like, five times. Well, I haven't gone swimming, because the water is still fucking freezing. But just hanging out in the sand, lying in the sun! Wonderful.

Just to think that last year, it was cold and raining in LA all winter break, and I was in southern Mexico, at a beach much hotter with water much warmer. Even though it's not that kind of beach weather, I'm glad it still feels like summer.

Summer's out of reach

Yesterday it was so hot. I had to walk up a huge hill to an engineering building far, far away for my last class, and I couldn't do it without sitting down several times to take a break to stop sweating. I brought this new wool sweater I bought at Target last Saturday with me to school that morning because I knew I'd be on campus until at least 7 p.m., but when I walked out of the library with my compañeros after working on our Spanish 113 midterm, it turned out I brought it vain. It felt like a perfect summer night: warm air, clear sky, and no tangible humidity. It would've been perfect to lay on the grass and watch the stars or walk up to the Big C and look at the lights of the San Francisco Bay.

But I couldn't, because it's no longer summer, and I have shit to do.

I assumed the weather today would be more of the same. It wasn't. It was much chillier, and there I was on campus until 8 p.m., in a t-shirt and shorts, shivering slightly and trying not to let the cold get to me as I walked home as quickly as possible.

I feel it in my skin, warming up my mind

Today Laura and I went down to Point Fermin and walked down the cliff to the beach. The weather was absolutely beautiful and the sky was so blue and it just made me feel so peaceful and at ease with the world. It's nice to know that despite all the shit in the world, there are still things that are unequivocally gorgeous. And also goes a nice way to proving that Los Angeles is not all disgusting smog and cement. To give you an idea, this is what Point Fermin looks like, although these are definitely not my photos.

Yes, this is the house where they had the wedding in (500) Days of Summer.

Although Laura did take this photo of me trying to live up to my namesake*:

Out of the sea, wish I could be, part of your world, etc, etc

*I'm not actually named after Ariel from The Little Mermaid

Nuestro vino

"Crear es la palabra de pase de esta generación. El vino, de plátano; y si sale agrio, ¡es nuestro vino!" -José Martí

'Create' is the password of this generation. The wine, made of plantains; even if it turns bitter, it is our wine!

I know these words were written about Cuban nationalism at the end of the 19th century, but I read them and they resonate with me, even though I am not a cubano, much less a revolutionary.

I think every generation has their own struggles and thus, their own solutions. People who look back on the past as an ideal are fooling themselves. All those hippies and student protesters at Berkeley in the 60s and 70s, making speeches about throwing themselves upon the gears of the machine, they great up and became middle managers and investment bankers and live in the suburbs. What do their struggles mean to us anyway? They aren't ours; we have our own. We have our own problems, our own music, our own fashion, nuestro propio vino.

I realized this my freshman year of college, when I thought about Fight Club, and suddenly realized I was over that message, or more accurately, I had never gotten the message to begin with. You can't live your life ruled by someone else's ideas; they are not you. Tyler Durden doesn't speak for me, and he probably doesn't speak for you. I don't want to blow up the banks and start at zero. I like having banks and money. My priorities lie elsewhere.

What's important is not that I disregard everyone else's opinion, but that I recognize that it can be valid without organizing my whole cosmos around it.Create your own ideas, your own message, tu propio vino*.

What will your wine taste like?

*Okay, I'll stop with the vino thing.

Lie with me and just forget the world

See, this is proper May weather. Why have you been holding out on me, Berkeley?

Can you hear that?

It's a rare moment of silence amongst us, because we are never quiet. Not because we have something important to say, but because the meaningless things you say in life are usually the most fun. But for once, no one is saying anything.

We are lying on our towels at the beach, completely silent. I do my best to sear this moment into my brain, because I feel like it's possibly the only time it will ever happen. I listen to the waves crashing and feel the sun and wind and occasionally a seagull caws and I consider that they are rallying their battle formation to close in and attack our picnic, but not even that can make me open my eyes and let this moment go. Because for me, this is a moment of clarity, where everything is perfect and I'm not going to worry about seagulls or sunscreen or school.

We never shut the fuck up. But we're quiet right now, if just for now. At this very moment, we don't need to say anything. But just for a moment.

Can you hear that? Laura asks.

Yeah, Kimberly says, it was the sound of silence. But not anymore.

And she jumps up, energetic and rambunctious once again. And we resume talking, not saying anything important, but enjoying the hell out of it nonetheless.

On the other side of the universe

I've felt really distant this whole weekend. I worked Friday and today covering shifts for people in addition to my usual Saturday shift, so I didn't really have time to do much or talk to anyone other than Bernadette Samson. Probably didn't help that half my roommates weren't even here all weekend. But I was walking to a meeting this evening and my legs were carrying me but I couldn't even feel them; I was just gliding down the street, completely disconnected from the lower half of my body.


I just want to watch Dead Like Me and not go to class tomorrow.

It's late and I'm feeling poetic

XIII

La luz que de tus pies sube a tu cabellera,
la turgencia que envuelve tu forma delicada,
no es de nácar marino, nunca de plata fría:
eres de pan, de pan amado por el fuego.
La harina levantó su granero contigo
y creció incrementada por la edad venturosa,
cuando los cereales duplicaron tu pecho
mi amor era el carbón trabajando en la tierra.
Oh, pan tu frente, pan tus piernas, pan tu boca,
pan que devoro y nace con luz cada mañana,
bienamada, bandera de las panaderías,
una lección de sangre te dio el fuego,
de la harina aprendiste a ser sagrada,
y del pan el idioma y el aroma.

Pablo Neruda

A poet that loves food as much as I do.


Bernadette Samson, Hana and I just had an hour-long discussion about science, god, and the nature of the universe. And that one episode of Futurama. You know, the one where Bender has a civilisation on his ass.