"She's a girl who's generous to a fault. Except to other people's faults."

He couldn't bring himself to ask.

We held hands to keep each other balanced.

I could see it coming for a week.

"She finds human imperfection unforgivable."

I couldn't bring myself to tell him what he wanted to know.

By the time we got to the car, we still couldn't let go of each other.

We went away where no one else could see us.

"When I discovered that my relationship to her was supposed to be not that of a loving husband and a good companion, but that of a kind of high priest to a virgin goddess."

He looked uncertain.

I was still tipsy and his hand felt as though it was melting into mine.

Everything happened in a rush.

"I suppose you'd still be attractive to any man of spirit, though. There's something engaging about it, this "'goddess"' business... something more challenging to the male than the more obvious charms."

I struggled to keep my eyes open; he couldn't get his off of me.

I ran towards the water the minute we hit the sand; his eyes followed me.

We moved together; our eyes were locked.

"We're very vain, you know. 'This citadel can and shall be taken, and I'm the boy to do it.' "

Even in the dark, I could see him watching me, as he held me.

Our hands glowed against the breaking dawn.

My vision was blurred against the light; his lips tasted salty.

"... I'm contemptuous of something inside you you either can't help or won't try to."

I was surprised he didn't try anything more.

I felt like time stopped while we laid on the sand.

There was no time to think.

"Your so-called 'strength"... Your prejudice against weakness, your blank intolerance."

It made me smile to come so close and to have nothing more happen.

I don't think I've ever felt anything as intimate as our hands touching.

My heart was racing and my face was flushed.

"... you'll never be a first-class human being or a first-class woman... until you've learned to have regard for human frailty."



"It's a pity your own foot can't slip a little sometime... but your sense of inner divinity wouldn't allow that."



"This goddess must and shall remain intact."

I shouldn't have done what I did.

I shouldn't have done what I did.

I shouldn't have done what I did.

"I don't even like to stereotype and say 'gang members.' I say they're disenfranchised youth," he told NPR. "They don't really have all the tools to make the right decisions that's necessary in today's society, and they don't fully understand the system."

-- Darren "Bo" Taylor (1966 - 2008)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/nyregion/13detain.html?_r=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

But most of everyday / Is full of tired excuses / But it's too hard to say

... While I have succeeded to some extent, there are still some things here that I can't seem to part with: the idea that the universe is designed, that there are a few simple rules, or laws, physical laws, from which all the manifold processes of life and nonlife can be derived...

-- E.L. Doctorow (City of God)

Now I remember watching that old tree burn down / I took a picture that I don't like to look at

Memories have been lingering.
Dreams have been vivid.
A lot has changed in a year. The last post I had before starting anew was documenting the break-up. I went back to find the entries that reminded me of when we started. Instead, I found awkward drunken memories from in between, with people completely unrelated, but totally relevant.
We had broken up just a month prior. I thought it was the moment to finally face what I thought I wanted. I made trips to San Diego and to Santa Cruz to test the boundaries, only to come back to LA even more confused.

The night has a surreal quality to it. Everything was a bit last minute, because I wasn't expecting to attend the meeting, but my presence was necessary and I booked my flight only a few days before. I wasn't drinking as much as the others, using my antibiotics as an excuse (but really, to keep me out of trouble). I am switching between interacting and watching, egging on the drinkers with more shots of tequila, then stepping back and watching the madness. (Yes, I am an instigator. I can't help it sometimes.)
I watch as they are embracing in the kitchen. They are talking to each other and you can see the looks from the others in the "party room." We all know one of them likes the other. The question is, will something happen? The lights go out, as an over-eager and very drunk friend decides to shake up the jar a bit (if you will allow me to use a metaphor here). They step out of the kitchen, looking a bit confused. He stumbles out and I follow after him. He takes my hand and leads me up the stairs to his room.
He collapses on the floor of his bedroom near the door. No one knows what just happened, but it's clear that he is very drunk. He pulls me in and I can smell the tequila on his breath. The smell makes me a little drunk too. I take him to the bathroom and leave him there as I go downstairs for a cup of water. I can feel the eyes on me, but I walk with my head up, determined to find a clean cup and some fresh water for him. I don't make eye contact with anyone downstairs as I march upstairs. I find him cleaning himself up and he pulls me close again. This time his breath is minty and fresh.
I walk to the window. Suddenly, people barge through the door and throw on the lights. There is yelling and laughing and then... collapse. More people on the bed. She giggles in her drunkeness. The first time she has been like this in front of us. People leave the room, leaving the three of us alone. He turns the light off again. Slyly, who knows when, he locks the door. We are on the bed... giggling. We know this is scandalous. Being in a dark room alone is enough to fuel gossip amongst our friends downstairs.
He's drunk. His hands are moving everywhere. On me. On her.
I'm confused.
Then it dawns on me.
He's drunk.
She and I giggle, knowing that the jokes are starting downstairs.
What do we say? What is our alibi? Nothing happened, right?
3:22am... we leave. He calls me a few minutes later. Where are you? Come back? Stay over here.
I laugh. He's drunk. I tell him to wait fifteen minutes... that if he isn't asleep, then I'll go back. What he doesn't know is that I would go back in an instant if I could, except, he wouldn't remember the next morning. Fifteen minutes will tell me if he will remember. He remembers the first five and ten minutes, but in the last fifteen, I can hear him falling asleep on the phone.
So ends my night in Santa Cruz.

That frequency inside my head that says / I'm going at it the hard way

We spent an hour talking about the difference between being good and being virtuous.

We agreed that being virtuous had more to do with conforming to societal standards than falling on either side of good or evil. Virtuousness is what we assume to be good-- eloquent, kind, sympathetic. But, all the virtue in the world won't combat the evil in it. Eloquence won't stop people from killing each other and sympathy won't uncover the roots of inequity. They are qualities we want to see, that we assume are reflections of one's motives and purpose. Virtue requires an audience, to watch and to comment on the virtuous character.

Goodness, on the other hand, can be none of those things. Goodness can be clumsy, inarticulate, and seemingly cold. Goodness is driven by the desire to remove evil. A good person doesn't need an audience and is often times better suited to act without one. It is by nature dirty and violent. It is emphatic and painful, because being good often means being able to feel evil. It necessitates making that hard decision, being completely honest to the point of vulnerability, and taking responsibility for every action. It means being aware that a decision will hurt someone you love and still being able to do it and not turning your back on the pain you've caused, all because it had to be done.

He and I struggle with this constantly. Both of us had led pretty virtuous lives. We are, by our own nature, people-pleasers, and thus, easily fall into the trap of adhering to social mores. In recognition of this, we have been struggling to find ourselves and act as we are, rather than as we should be.

He spent the last year learning to be alone, because his fatal flaw is that he hasn't been. He's always had a companion, a cheerleader, a lover... we couldn't get along because he couldn't relate to my life, a life that had spent much of its time in solitary confinement while he was sleeping with a different girl every other day and building relationships now and again. I wanted him to find his own strength, a particular type of strength that would enable him to stand up against me, his Achille's heel.

"I learned to be happy without you."

My year has been spent doing the opposite. My fatal flaw is my blind dedication to independence and self-sufficiency. I could never share my life with him, because sharing it equated to losing it. It was a year of learning to be more open, to be more honest, to not hide myself behind clever words and a lot of hand gestures. It was a year of trying to learn how to love somebody and be happy with somebody who wasn't him.

All these growing pains, just so one day we can say to each other I love you. I choose you. All of this, to be able to know that with all of the potential configurations of people, relationships, and love, we still only want each other. This way, our relationship isn't by default, but by conscious choice; we don't see each other because we don't know how to be with anyone else, but because we know that we are the only ones we want to be with.

Whether a year is long enough to be apart is the golden question-- particularly if it's a year where half of it is spent talking everyday (twice, actually). I believe his growth, and mine, is still purely theoretical-- we've never been apart where the risk of really losing each other was real and tangible. We have to continue with the possibility without ever seeing each other again, because to do otherwise, to do as we have been doing, is cheating. It's a risk that makes my heart stop, because I have the potential of losing one of the most important things in my life.

So, we give each other another six months of being alone and being with others. Six months before we say a word to each other, because speaking to each other is dangerously euphoric and we fall back into old habits and unravel into each other. Six months, because he will leave and he has to say good-bye before he does.

We've both said it out loud now. We can't be in each other's lives until we are ready to only be with each other. Any other way and we endanger our goodness.

In case you didn't know, I'm famous:










Source: http://www.halfvalue.com/wiki.jsp?topic=Famous_Korean_people

Famous Korean People >> Politicians >> Tina Park: External Vice President

I get to confuse lazy scholars for years to come!

Thermo-dynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.

And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter...

... until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.

To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood.

The thermo-dynamic miracle.

But... if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anyone in the world!

Yes. Anybody in the world... But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget.

We gaze continually at the wrold and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.



- Watchmen (Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons)

You know theres no need to hide away / You know I tell the truth / We are just the same / I can feel everything you do

I'm squinting to see the screen, blind without my contacts. How terrible my eyes have become. It's getting harder and harder to see the things that are in front of me.

How metaphoric of life.


But, I set that thought aside. It is not the time to be waxing poetic... Updates are to be given, seeing that I cheated in my last post and only provided updates on my baking life and not my waking one.


Life continues to shift and unfold, while I sit, grow fatter, and contemplate my next move. The friends are back (finally), leaving me to enjoy their presence, their wisdom, and their laughter for a few weeks before we are separated by land and sea once again. Our dinners together feed my belly, while our conversations feed my heart and soul. I don't think I could ask for better friends, for who else can I talk about all unspeakables with at the dinner table? We jump from love life, to political life, passing ideas past each other as we try to re-examine and resolve not only our personal lives, but the world around us. Morning cups of coffee are had with discussions of politics and morality, while pancakes are shared between twitters of girlish giggles about the men we adore (or don't).



The weekend was a necessary break. My shoulders are heavy with contemplative thoughts, trying to figure out if what I am doing is right or wrong. I hate the idea of hurting others, despite my tendency to be accidentally cruel. I struggle to be honest and tactful at the same time... to be patient and not presumptuous.

But, I speak in abstractions and nonsense. I'll leave these thoughts, too, for another time.