31/01/2011

I was watching movies on TV last night, starting with Shrek 3. I remembered this one strikingly, just as I remember most of the movies that came out between 2005-07 while I worked in a cinema complex. I remember barging in at the end of that animation movie as the end credits kept going but all the customers had left, and together with my co-workers we'd start dancing in the dark to the music. We danced to Shrek, but my favorite one was always Snakes on a Plane's end tune. My... How much I danced in the dark to that music playing... Some of my co-workers were even clued up enough to warn me every time a showing of that movie was about to end, just so I could indulge in my crazy outbursts. Actually... I once started dancing to it while a few customers had remained seated (you always get the few who just won't leave till the thing is completely over) and only realised that when they started clapping their hands.

The way I got that little job was odd in terms of timing. I had just graduated from university with a law degree I had no idea what to do with, and I was still immersed deep in depression. I had spent the summer behaving mostly like a zombie when I wasn't out and about with a 'bad' friend who happened to be even more fucked up than I was at the time (we'd met in group therapy...)... This period of my life is such a blur in my head, but let's try to remember for a second. I had just turned 22, I was deeply depressed, I wasn't eating either. I started group therapy at the hospital, where this girl approached me. She kind of was my nemesis in terms of personality. She wasn't the zombie type of depression intent on quietly dying in her corner (ie: ME), she was more the borderline personality disorder type who would savagely go into full-blown self-destruction mode. And she approached me... I felt so listless at the time that her bursts of energy and endless streams of ideas to pass the time allured me.

I started hanging around in her flat more and more often during that summer... By the way, has anyone ever tried to have lunch with eating-disordered people? It's quite funny when I look back on it now. Though there's only a salad bowl of lettuce and chopped tomatoes in front of them, the way they look at the food is like facing the most evil of invisible foes. Then there is the unspoken 'rivalry' between people, meaning that even though you're already eating little more than wind, you would rather die than be seen eating one piece of lettuce more than the other person. Since I hated home life at the time, I was rather relieved to be able to go to this new friend's place all the time... Every night she would have a plan that involved pub crawls, meeting complete strangers and making up stories of all sorts. No matter how drunk I got, I remember always staying shyly in my corner while she went on flirting with guys, and on the way back to her flat I would go sleep off the hangover in the spare room while she 'entertained' her company in her bedroom. I became her quiet companion of debauchery who never took part in it but merely observed around me. Sometimes my lack of interest in pointless flirting and picking up strangers in bars frustrated her and she would lash out on me, reminding me how clueless I was in general, especially as far as sex was concerned. To be fair, I was way too depressed to care whatever anyone said at the time.

Our 'friendship' ended by the end of that summer, when she fell pregnant by a random guy she had met the night before. She went straight for an abortion, but I think when she learned she was actually pregnant with twins (she was a twin herself, so it ran in her family) that really messed with her mind further. Her parents convinced her to leave London for a while to try and sort herself out, and the last time I heard from her she was studying to become a... therapist. Oh, and she was going out with a guy who worked in a circus.

Anyway... right after that, I got that little job and it happened to be exactly what I needed. It wasn't the job itself (alone, it would have made me more depressed than anything) but the people who worked there at the time.

When I was done watching Shrek, I watched Ps: I love You. I'd never seen it, but that movie made me think about some things further... I don't know what it is, but for the past few weeks I've been watching far more movies than usual, but not just watching... My mind is literally analysing every word and scene I watch. I think it's trying to pick up on clues as to how to be a mainstream person within society.

It's all so stupid, really. I was not brought up in the same way as all these people out there. I was never taught social cues, let alone how one is supposed to do anything in this so-called world. Add to that the fact that I happen to be very abstract by nature and what you get is this shadow of a person (me) feeling like she just landed from Mars. Now, if my mother had been more clued up herself, she would have naturally passed on to me that ability to fit in (even just to pretend) and understand the dynamics of society as it stands and within which we must live, but that wasn't the case at all. And there was never anyone else to teach me these things. These things you people take for granted, by the way.

I'm not complaining here... But it'a shame. Why? Because I find myself unable to 'use' whatever things I know or happen to be good at in a way that society would understand or value.
Another thing that's quite sad: I had a beautiful upbringing and there never was anything wrong or flawed with me (even the depression and disorder were an exploration more than genuine illness, which is why I snapped out of it overnight) but the way society works... is to break everything that starts out pure and good to suck it all in as part of the machine.

That's all, really. No more trips back in time. Good day, good night,

Bye.

30/01/2011

A flurry of dreams invaded my head throughout the night... One of them was a beautiful one.
In that dream, I found myself in a gondola gliding slowly in the Venician canals... Everything was there - the old architecture, row after row of houses half-immersed in water, monuments of all sorts made of ancient white stone... And there I sat in that little boat, paddling along in awe, surrounded by calm waters. I remember thinking: "Wow, I'm in Venice... How did I get there? It's so beautiful..."

I stopped the gondola next to a large, ancient building with crumbling walls inside which a crowd of tourists was already gathered to watch people in white togas make a speech that I couldn't understand, but I somehow 'knew' that they were pretending to be ancient Roman politicians throwing powerful rhetoric at one another. I got out of the boat and took a stroll around the place, looking at the intricate patterns and carvings on the old stone. I remember stopping by a stall where women wearing flowing dresses were giving away some cake topped with whipped cream. I took a piece, my eyes drawn to the beautiful sight all around me. Then I picked up my camera and began trying to capture the beauty of the place, and as I kept taking pictures suddenly I realised it was already night time and the whole building was flooded with the light of lanterns hanging from the walls.

Back in my little boat, I went further down the canal, and just as I was about to turn at a corner where yet another ancient building stood half immersed in water, I caught a glimpse of the most bizzarre sight of all: There in the distance stood the Tower of Pisa.
"That can't be right," I thought, "That tower isn't supposed to be in Venice..."

Yet there it stood in the distance, its unmistakable leaning structure rearing above the water against the backdrop of night.

And that's when I woke up from the dream... and when I did, it was morning again in my reality. I laid still in my bed for a long while, eyes to the white ceiling with a dreamy smile on my lips.

29/01/2011

I was moving the furniture around in my room earlier and found an old audio tape that really did look ancient. I recognised it, though. It was an old cassette with a recording of cartoon songs I used to watch when I was little, together with a recording of me singing and talking when I was around 4 years old.

I popped the tape inside the hi-fi system's cassette reader and my mother's younger-sounding voice filled the room, saying things like 'so what are you going to sing now?' and then came my own voice... I'd forgotten that when I was little I was having trouble pronoucing the 'sh' sound, so instead I would pronounce it 'zzz', and I think my mother must have found it too cute not to have it recorded for 'posterity'... haha. I remember very vaguely the day she recorded all those cartoon songs and myself singing, but listening to them feels like a trip back in time. I'd forgotten all these cartoons they used to have on TV at the time - that was in the mid to late 80's. Back then, childrens' TV was the hype. Each channel (there were only 5 channels in France back in the days) had a schedule for kids that included an early cartoon programme in the morning before school on weekdays, followed by another scheduled right after classes ended, and then weekends filled with things that targetted mainly kids at the weekend.

The cartoons themselves, mostly Japanese, were varied to cater for almost all tastes. Most of them had at least one thing in common: there was some sort of storyline to them that meant each episode was linked to the previous one in a developing plot that made the children never want to miss 'what happens next', so to speak. Those were the kind I naturally prefered over the ones that can be watched at random like a Simpsons' episode (where stories are resolved withing each episode) because it built up a strong sense of anticipation while allowing for the imagination to come up with possible scenarios as to what would happen next.

This childrens' TV hype only lasted about a decade, though. I remember vaguely the media complaining that Japanese cartoons were 'too violent' for kids, and by the time I was around 15, kids programmes no longer took up as much air time as they used to when I was younger. And then I noticed that all the Japanese cartoons had disappeared from the small screen, replaced by more 'European' looking ones like the Ruggrats or whatever else. One thing I also noticed, most cartoons now no longer had this component of having a plot that unfolds from one episode to the next. The only thought I had then was: "Lucky I got to watch the old cartoons rather than those..." Mind you, all the old school cartoons may now be found on cable channels for all I know.

Loved that one when I was 10/12 yrs old: Dragon Ball 'saga'

This one, called Candy, apparenty,
I used to watch a lot when I was 4/5 yrs old

Same for the Robinson family

Oh, and I liked this one too, Princess Sarah

There were many more, I just can't think of them all now.

I actually used to watch a lot of television while growing up... I mean, there was never any strict rule imposed on me, which really means I could often do as I pleased. If I was curious about something - anything - then chances were that I would be able to check things for myself. Usually though, I was curious about all the things that were supposed to be 'wrong' or 'dangerous'. I remember being very little and wanting to play with my mother's matches... of course she said to me not to touch them because I could hurt myself, but what did I end up doing? I took the matchbox when she wasn't looking and ran to my room where I proceeded to strike a few matches. Then I wanted to see what would happen if I lit up a piece of paper, and when I did, of course I panicked because the piece of paper caught fire at once. My mother came storming into the room and took care of the little incident... then she looked at me and asked me if I believe her now, and that was the end of it.

When I was around 5 years old, she got me my first pet - a hamster. I was terrible with that poor creature... but at least this one used to bite me whenever I tried too many things with him (like... trying to put him inside the washing machine because it just looked too much like a giant hamster wheel...). One morning I remember wanting to re-enact the Great Flood in his cage.... I remember strikingly filling the bottom with water and of course the poor creature started to panic - which was alright, since his helpless, panic-striken condition was part of the plot. I was then supposed to be the hand that saved him from certain death, but when I tried to 'save him' he bit me. I remember running into the corridor crying as I held my bleeding finger, which was when my mother stepped in and shook her head in disbelief at what I'd been up to.

One would have thought that after such 'incidents' I would not have been allowed anywhere near animals. Well, that would be wrong. By the time I was 8, I had another hamster, and I managed to convince my mother that it would be a very interesting experience to buy another one to make them reproduce. And so it was that we ended up with around 15 hamsters at some point. What was truly fascinating, though, was the opportunity to watch the process of Life from start to finish.

I was such a strange kid... I used to take one of the hamsters for a stroll with me outside, especially to the park. People would see that little girl walking around in the street with a hamster in her hands... And when I wasn't doing that, I was trying to tame pigeons, imagining that I somehow had a secret power to communicate with them and just needed to unlock it.
I guess I was already living in my own little universe... I lived on an estate, so a lot of kids of all ages were always playing outside, and I remember them making fun of me because I was sitting on the ground next to a bench with pigeons all around me as I tried to tame them.

The way I see it, I used to be one of those children who are cruel to animals... I really was cruel, but only because in my head, I was playing out different scenarios and wanted to see what happened in reality. I often wonder if that's not the case for all children (being perceived as cruel around small animals) as they push boundaries and discover their own limits. In the end, far from developing a cruel streak in me, it seems that all the 'bad' things I did served to nurture a much deeper sense of empathy and a strong dislike for unecessary pain. So it kind of worries me when I see all these parents out there trying to make their children so perfect and 'proper' when truly, childhood is the age of blunt honesty and the only time in life when there is time to discover our own boundaries before being forced to follow rules to the letter... I guess it must be different when children have a chance to grow up outside a city's settings... The issue seems to be that kids who are made to develop in cities lose out on the crutial need to explore boundaries which is brought about by the ability to roam free and, yes, do what adults look down on or would call stupid, senseless things.

27/01/2011

I dabbled in something new these past few weeks called internet dating sites. I had a lot of free time on my hands, and I was isolated enough to bother reading all the replies that would come through.

I started my little experiment with a gentle-sounding, mainstream kind of profile that went along the lines of this:

I like meeting new, interesting people who like to have a laugh but also enjoy a deep conversation from time to time... about pretty much anything!

I'm very open-minded and have a terribly curious nature. A bit of a kid at heart, I strive on creativity and am quite a laid-back person...

I'm very keen on arts, expecially painting, music and writing.

I guess I'm looking for that special someone I haven't met yet :)

Although I didn't put a picture of myself to go along with it, I started getting a few replies... But what replies! Most of them were so empty and generic, truly telling me nothing about the other person except what one would like to hear at best... so I decided to change my approach (why not, I had the time after all) and created another profile when I happened to feel more frustrated by life in general and its complete lack of sense. But when I say life, i should really say its people, and their lack of meaning for themselves. Indeed, there is nothing 'wrong' with life or the world (as in planet) as such, it's just the way people impose a very limited vision and understanding of it that gets me - because I, too, have to live in those settings imposed, and I have to put up with their limited ways that end up ruling the world just because, well, they constitute the majority.

So here's roughly what I ended up writing in that new profile:

If you're one of them who like to list their interests, don't bother replying to me. Why? because I already know you.

If you're like all the losers out there who believe in the notion of a so-called career, or your dream is to earn lots of money so you can be 'happy', I hope you choke on your own vomit.
Why? Because you're a fake who not only fell for all the lies of this world, but contributes to its mess.

If you're one of those who think they are clever just because they manage to go through the motions of getting a high school diploma or a degree or whatever else that gets you a nice piece of paper in the end, and then see nothing wrong in being made to dress up like a pinguin (suit and tie) while getting stuck every single day of your life on a packed train to work, I hope someone poaches you some day.
Why? Because you're already dead inside.

Well, I thought such words would lead to even fewer responses, but I was wrong. I started getting way more messages than with the previous one even without a picture up. Did the quality of responses vary in any way? That's open for debate - which is why I'll soon be posting sample answers here for any analytical mind out there to assess for themselves.

At first, I was intent on replying to every single message that came through. The way I saw it, it was allowing me to flex my brain muscle a bit and I was getting to excercise my writing skills... It's by doing just that time and time again that a pattern began to emerge in the way people would reply or rather react, to my profile. Indeed, I can now safely categorise (yes, that's right, categorise) the type of reactions/replies I got based on the overall number of messages I received.

So what categories emerged exactly? Well, three main ones, which one is free to sub-categorise further, but in essence there is still a prevalent pattern of thoughts that people seem to belong to more than any other in particular.

1) The mainstream, brainwashed type that appears unable to see beyond today's majority views. That type of person usually reacted very badly or aggressively to the profile. They often feel personally 'attacked' and unable to see past the strong words I used to dwell further on the issues I'm hinting at. A closer look at their profiles, coupled with a further exchange of thoughts with them at times, showed that they belonged to one of the categories I criticised severly... in fact, they didn't just 'belong' to one of them, they saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.

2) The shallow, generic type: now that's a category that includes all the people who don't even bother to read profiles. Instead, they have picked up the habit of simply cutting and pasting the same message without even bothering to customise it according to the person they're writing to... Quite easy to spot after you start getting half a dozen of those a day... Or when they forget that they've already sent you their generic text, and send the same one again 2 weeks later.

3) The open-minded, more thoughtful type: all the people who actually take the time to respond to points raised in the profile. With them at least I got to exchange some interesting intelectual points, although the exchange often withered to nothingness due to a lack of interest in doing anything more than just... think?

Did anything come out of this? Not really so far, but since I set out to experiment without any precise expectations in mind, the opportunity to further explore how people tend to think was good enough for me.

Ah, of course I had to bear in mind that I was using a dating site, therefore I also had to remember that the main purpose for most of those who use it is to find love, or a one night stand, or just to meet new people, etc...

Now, the other interesting aspect of such sites is of course the way people choose to portray themselves, and how they describe what they're looking for... But I think I'll get into that a bit later.

"Where is she, where is she," whispered the ghost as he leaned closer to the surface. The water was so still, but his breath stirred it gently. The trees behind the ghost grew taller and began to shake their limbs in the wind. The water grew still again, and the ghost leaned ever closer over its edge. "Where is she..."

This time his breath stirred the water deeply; waves formed and collapsed on themselves and the ghost watched them wane before his eyes till the water was silent again, and even the trees had stopped shaking.
"Show her to me," he pleaded once more, for he had made the request many times before, and always the water showed him. But that night... something had changed. Something was different... something was missing.
"Show her to me," pleaded the ghost again, breaking the water's stillness with the urgency of his breath.

"She's gone," said the water.

"Gone?"

"Yes, gone."

The ghost let out a deep sigh of distress and with one shaking hand hit the water as though it could be seized to be strangled in anger.

"She's gone," said the water again, and the voice echoed beyond the trees that had grown so tall behind the ghost. "And she won't be back."
But as the water spoke, an image formed on the surface, like a shadow. The ghost grew silent and still at once, one hand immersed in water. He watched his face disappear in the reflection and hers replace it.

"There you are," whispered the ghost, and his breath became the wind playing in her hair. "I was looking for you..."

"But you never found me," replied the reflection.

"Remain with me," pleaded the ghost, and with his hand tried to stroke her face. The water stirred and the reflection began to twist to nothingness. As the ghost cried, the swelling river hushed him to sleep, till only the wind could be heard playing in the trees behind him.

"Gone she is," sighed the ghost softly.

"And she won't be back," sung the wind.

26/01/2011

I woke up very late today, past midday actually... I've been feeling ill for the past few days, but the arm seems to be doing slighly better now.

Actually... I opened my eyes earlier than that, looked at the time on my phone: 10 am. I threw the phone away from me to the other side of the bed and closed my eyes to sleep some more. I hadn't finished a dream and I wanted to see how it ended. I fell deeply asleep again and my eyes opened at some point, so I clumsily reached for my phone to look at the time: 12pm. Since I'd overslept already, where was the rush anyway? I wondered how long I could carry on sleeping like some hibernating animal. I laid in bed with my eyes closed and finally decided to drag myself out of it...

It was lunch time at the primary school next door to where I live. Kids were running and shouting in the playground. Some were playing with a ball, others were clearly playing tag, or whatever the game is called in English where one kid runs after all the others till he can catch one and the latter becomes the one who has to catch the others. Some kids were gathered around a wooden construction you often find in parks for kids to climb and play in. Shouting, laughing, running about and panting... Most of them wearing thick coats to shield them from the cold weather, except for one little girl who was playing a ball game and who seemed completely oblivious to the fact that all she was wearing was a blouse and skirt, her long ponytail of red hair dancing in the wind.

I stood motionless by the window just watching the little kids for a while. Right now, I can see parents gathered in the playground to collect their children, and the crowd of people is slowly trickling out of the school to go home. The muffled sound of high-pitched voices is drowning in the music playing in my room. In about 20 minutes or so, all will be silent again.

While on the tube yesterday afternoon, I watched the diversity of people sitting or standing around me. There was a family with a very strong cockney accent talking about some football game; next to them was a pair of people in black suits and briefcase, their faces still and expressionless as statues; next to them was a lone old man reading a book, and next to me a woman who had fallen asleep, while the woman sitting on my other side was also reading some thick book. Three teenage girls who couldn't be older than 15 got in at some point and went to sit opposite me. They sat in the same careful fashion as adults do, talking in all seriousness about what they were going to do next. I looked around at all the faces around me one more time and then closed my eyes to listen only to the music in my ears.

As I came out from the tube station, I walked past a busy pub around the corner from where I live, and saw groups of young, trendy people standing at the bar with glasses in hand as they chatted and laughed away as if nothing was the matter ever. Suddenly, I felt exactly like the guy depicted in the movie Into the Wild... there is that one scene in the film where he watches young, trendy people in suits enjoying their time inside some bar and the thought of him ever being one of them throws him in a deep state of panic that leads him to flee the city at once.

The wise know that the point was never to change the world or its settings. It could never be done because the basis of life is random in itself. You could take any child from the start and bring him or her up in the most perfect way, with the best of ideologies or thoughts, and be trumped by life, or nature itself. No matter how the world happens to work, whether it worked in the most perfect or logical ways, or the opposite direction, it could never include everyone because you'd always get rogue elements working their own way. And why is that, I wondered for so long? Because the mere fact of being human, our faculty to think and reason to an extent, entails that we possess a certain degree of free will as to the direction we want take our existence. It was never about the 'world' as such, but about the journey, regardless of the settings we are randomly thrown in.

That journey, whether we like it or not, is what shapes us from the core of our being. It is what will ultimately lead us to think and act in certain ways and not others.
The point is to become aware in such a way that we no longer take random steps forward for ourselves just because others walked that path before us, or because it seems easier. Instead, we become aware of what makes more sense than not, and what works in a way that fulfills us...

People often like to say it's a good thing to be true to yourself. But what is 'being true to oneself' exactly? Such words remain meaningless until or unless a person goes through the process of defining for themselves what their own self is about... and once that's done, that's when it makes sense to say: be true to yourself.

And once one can be true to themselves, that is when the world's ways and settings no longer matter - because one can at least try their best to follow the direction that is in sync with their true self, and the only thing that can impede on that fulfillment are circumstances. Intrinsically, though, they remain faithful to their vision and understanding regardless of what they are able to achieve in reality, and that alone becomes a footprint in the sand for others to choose to follow or not. That's the point, you see. That we all get to choose. The only trick is to find the desire to use that ability to choose wisely rather than blindly.

Contrasts + Colours = Life

24/01/2011

Woke up with the worst pain in my arm. It'd actually started the night before and I thought nothing like a good night sleep to make it go away. I was wrong. When I woke up, I felt shooting pain whenever I moved it.

The pain didn't stop me from getting dressed, wincing and swearing under my breath. Isn't it one of the most frustrating things of all when your body is getting in the way of things you want to do? We take the easy, painless ways the body works for granted until pain strikes, I guess. Though we'd rather never experience pain, without it there would be no means for us to appreciate the opposite state of being. Contrasts and opposites, as always, make up the core of the living experience. Reaching a state of only 'happiness' or joy, without any more worries, fears or pains would be like a painting displaying only one single colour. You wouldn't even bother to know the name of that colour after a while, because that's all there would be, that single colour all over the canvas, and no contrasting one to bring it out. After a while longer, you wouldn't even notice that colour at all anymore.

That is why human existence precludes us from ever reaching perfection. We can only strive toward it as an ideal aim by bettering ourselves and our environment in general - but perfection itself is at best a single moment in time that cannot last for it would defeat the purpose of living by lasting. The paradox really is that by being able to reach perfection, we would instantly lose it because we would end up taking it for granted, meaning that it wouldn't be long before we start seeking beyond perfection itself. Or we would just stagnate in that 'perfection', which means we might as well be dead or frozen in time.

How does an abstract mind become concrete? Is it even possible?

If someone came to me tomorrow and said: "Aliska, you can leave real life behind and live through the realm of dreams only - as a mere floating current of thoughts," I would agree at once. I wouldn't even think about it, I would jump for joy and take it. Ultimately, that is what I always wanted since I was very, very little. That seems to be at the core of my contradiction within. I end up feeling like a caged lion cub who never got her wish granted to roam free, and with the years developed the defiance to prevent anything in this world from charming me.

I don't like human life. I don't like biological life on Earth. I don't like anything about this world, its natural laws, its clockwork mechanism. People try too hard to see 'beauty' in things, but the bottom line is that Life itself is mere flesh and blood moving around, getting eaten by predators or sickness, and making meanings up just to feel less pointless.