PREFERENCE + PRIORITIES

Amidst all this ruin, maybe the looking was the good part. Should we ever find something we should be alarmed.

If I am the type to write poetry, I know this. But I have no friends or lovers to read me. And if no one is to read me, what is there to write? What good am I if not seen or consumed? Made to do things I wish not to? Made to withhold things I wish to express? Who am I without the burdens of living, the punishment of society, the relief of friendship?

I find poetry is rid of difficult words, old words. Poetry is made up of a thought, that continues into the next, a shorter story than a short story, An invitation to feel a feeling.

This is a poem I wrote instead of the review I've been trying to write since August 2022. It encompasses what I felt around the time I finished the book. I keep thinking, I'll actually perfect it, I'll shape it into something readable, but alas, that still hasn't happened as I am too busy living life. Yet I still feel that there's something to it, reading it as an unfinished piece, so here it goes:

Probably the most straightforward out of Sally Rooney’s books regarding the relevance of “non-important” stuff. I think she’s brilliant at looking at the contrast there is between our post-modern concern with the “state of the world” and how incessant our small lives actually are.

With Conversations with Friends and Normal People, this same theme is underlying, it is nearly subliminal. You could still describe either as a completely different book and get away with it (i.e., about cheating, or the latter a book about soulmates), but not this one.

It’s interesting to see a white female writer (who is clearly very aware of her whiteness and female-ness) tackle themes of mindfulness and the idea of sanctity. Religion is clearly the pivotal thing in this novel, and its comparability to celebrity culture or the deification of popular media characters seems to be fascinating to contemporary writers. Ted Chiang, who wrote Stories of Your Life and Others (what the movie Arrival was based on), wrote about it in his foreword to Everything Everywhere All At Once’s A24 book release, saying the archetypes of superheroes in media are equivalent to a modern religion. Both books and films cementing their importance in the discussion of time and meaning. And personally, I also felt compelled early in 2022 to write about why Euphoria seemed to hit a bone with its internet audience. All of these artpieces that seem to be worth talking about at all are concerned with this idea of “goodness,” just like Beautiful World, Where Are You?

(switch up?) I rarely sit down to talk about religion (and how it clearly coincides with depression), mostly because I’ve been through it. I’ve done the dirty work of confronting the mundanity of life, forgetting my self and concerning myself with others. I only feel like I may talk about it now because it is not with someone else on the other end that may misconstrue me. Most conversations I’ve had were of someone trying to convince me of a worldview that made life bearable, and the rest are of people looking for any answer that can make them happy. As someone who grew up in a religious country, I’d have to say I’m over it!

What makes Beautiful World intriguing to me is not the exploration of religion in isolation, but it is the way the characters look for what they think is God in other people.

Is religion solitude or company?

I wonder what it is to have someone be kind to you. Does this graciousness really not exist in everyone? Why is it so hard to find? What does it feel like to have someone want to bathe you without hesitation? With no hesitation? To help you go to the restroom when you’re sick.

I think this is the reason I avoid hospitals. There’s just no lying in hospitals There’s no sugarcoating anything. And everyone is there to help you. I used to love it growing up but the past three years hospitals have terrified me.

I almost feel like I wish I was sexually assaulted. I would have a reason to be sad, then. Now I just, I’m floating in a space where no one cares about me, if I died, people would be sad but no one would really miss me. Maybe that’s selfish, self-centered. But I would love to know if that would at least give some meaning to my life, to touch someone else. If I was assaulted everyone would call me strong, unbeatable.

Sally Rooney is one of those writers that I just trust will carry me on an insightful journey. It doesn’t matter so much the plot she uses as much as it matters what she says throughout.

The doctor came to me and kept repeating you are not okay. You are not okay. This isn’t normal. And I had to keep believing her. It feels nice knowing someone can see that.

Is kindness really rare? Is it God because it’s not there?

*

I wonder what it feels like, to share a smile in secret with someone Or to make someone smile to themselves, without me seeing I wonder what it feels like to feel someone sniff outwards fall on my cheek Someone happy to see me I wonder if I’ve ever given that to someone, or ever will

unedited, mid 2021

I think kindness is supposed to be hard. Very, very hard.

It's supposed to be unnatural -- it shouldn't be a tug at your heart, though it may start as one.

Disclaimer: this is subjective, this is my blog, yes I will be generalising a lot, but I take care to be factual about history.

There's a lot of talking about Israel on social media nowadays. I'm not talking about the issue, so much as the reasons why we only seem to empathize with people who we perceive as a part of "our" group.

What issues in the world do we choose to care about? This one, because coincidentally "I" am muslim and those oppressed in Palestine are also muslim?

Kindness is hard! I'm not saying we shouldn't care about things, but we should wonder why we care about things. Is it just because these things relate to our own egos?

Kindness is caring about things intentionally. Things that don't affect us.

Why do you care about that homeless guy on the street? Because he's homeless? Because "I could've ended up just like him"? Because he's from your city?

This conditional caring, only caring about stuff that's relevant to us personally, is okay but far from perfect. Just because it has the same basis as targeted discrimination.

Remember the pandemic? Are we still in it? Is it time to remember it or are we still feeling it?

Harry Styles came out with an album he says was largely influenced by the pandemic. It slowed everyone down. I think it's time for me to appreciate my own experience with it as well, or else I might not ever write about it.

I think there were less people to impress. Where was I? Post 2019, the start of 2020, I was crazy and at the height of my university alcoholism. I had sex for the first time the year before and then had a horrible sexual experience and then after the lockdown started I snuck in another one night thing. But there was no one to tell about it.

I talk about it candidly because I feel that most of my sex life was for show. I felt that being accepted by a straight guy meant I was in 'the club,' whatever that was. I had achieved this thing that all of my friends were chasing. I had skipped to the end of the story.

Most of my friends were religious and directed their sexual interests elsewhere, and the others said they weren't religious but seemed to attach a lot of meaning to sexual intercourse. I used to pride myself on not taking it seriously.

One of the things about the pandemic was it cut off everything that wasn't necessary. What that made me realize was how I wasn't necessary to a lot of people, too. Which is okay? But also, sad.

I'm going to skip over the death and shit, too, because let's just assume we're all over existentialism and have just accepted the pain that comes with life. What about the day to day of life once we've accepted everything? There's still hours left in the day. Days left in the years, and so many years ahead!

How much of our identities were attached to the things we did? The performance. Our actions.

I had lost myself in university, but I was tired of drowning in myself in school. That's what I realized. In uni I saw change as growth when maybe it was just simply me not being true to myself. I saw sacrifice as wisdom. I saw selflessness as adulthood.

I never fit anywhere in school. I was depressed. I would have killed to worry about boys. So that's what I did in university. I made up for the youth I felt I lost. But at some point we all have to accept ourselves.

The Car by Arctic Monkeys

people we promised ourselves we would be

Abstain from responsibility of our life - the people, the cities we live in

retired spy theme

Where were you? When I was bleeding between my thighs and naked, the policemen at the doorway

Where were you? Lying in puddles of blood, a horror scene

Where were you? I was passed out on the ground, silhouettes of men in uniform wondering what’s happened

The old guy looking but not asking

The young ones trying to be sensitive, they wanted to know what to write down on a piece of paper

I was throwing up grey matter into the bowl

Then I fell over and couldn't speak and my mouth wouldn't move

Where were you? They asked if I was assaulted and I wasn’t, no worries, only left for dead

But I didn't die, I just could've

But I guess that's not the same

Where were you? I have no one to blame

They didn't care enough to hurt me but I was still in pain

Where were you? I was scared.

Where were you? I don’t know who to call

Where were you? The blood is smeared all over me like I’d been running in mud

Where were you? I said stop and they still went on

and I thought that was okay

Where were you the first time,

Or the second time? when I told them to keep going so they would finally listen

And the sweetest boy I'd been with didn’t want me

Where were you? They loved me for an hour and then asked me to leave

My jacket bloodied, running from a crime scene

Where nothing happened yet it was written all over me

Where were you? I didn’t believe them but they're the only one who pretends to like me

Where were you? I was lying on the bathroom floor waiting for you

The doctor asked me who would pick me up

So where were you?

We haven’t met but I needed you

My grandmother was a Christian, but she taught me to suffer on purpose, the way my Muslim teachers didn't let me eat anything in school every year for a month (fasting babes). I came home crying the first day but the next days I'd eat something by 1 PM as my mom smuggled in M&Ms for me. I'd run out to meet her as soon as the bell rang. (Damn they starved children. Fucked up lowkey)

Two years ago, I would've been speaking about my grandmother in the present tense. She is loud, takes up space, often makes others uncomfortable with her comfort in doing all the above. It was admirable and sad. I saw that maybe the cost of being unapologetic was that nobody would love you except for those who were obligated to.

In life, she puzzled me, but in death I may see her clearer. The end defines the story. I think fear of death is just fear of clarity. But enough of that for now.

Whether she was broke or not, I could never tell. She borrowed money from my father, and then lent that money to people around her who needed it. In that way, I understood to appreciate how well off I was even when I couldn't afford a new phone. We could afford it, but I don't know, just because you can buy a thing doesn't mean you have to. Her house was decorated with ancient relics, items from a grander past. Real swords, carved wooden statues, commissioned paintings, a grand piano, and a broken air conditioner.

Did she see the fine print? The grain in the ways of living, the camera used to capture life? She would much rather see the whole family in a little bakso shop then meet only two family members in a grand hotel. I wonder what she thought about class, and even when she was alive this part of her eluded me. You could tell underneath her brash exterior and her seemingly unpolished behaviour that a highly intellectual life was teeming inside. Or maybe you couldn't. But I could. And it was something left unsaid, or that you'd be better off pretending not to know about. Like, my grandmother would pretend to be bad at counting money because she wanted to overpay small shop owners whenever we vacationed somewhere.

I saw her clearest when she was watching her tennis matches on TV. She would be quiet. I don't know if it was because I was quiet, or if it was the fact that we were alone. It felt like she knew more about everyone then she let on. Maybe she knew I'd love silence. I think you'd only get to see it if you overestimated her emotional awareness.

You were 3 years old. You ask why someone is crying when they'd just won a prize. Your dad says crying isn't just for sadness, it can be for any emotion that's overwhelming. You've never felt that. Okay.

You are 5 years old and you ask why someone is peeing in the gutter. Your mom says they might not be able to afford a home and therefore a comfortable place to pee. Okay.

You are 7 years old, you ask why there are "developed" and "underdeveloped" countries instead of just countries on a spectrum? The teacher says countries are only considered developed when they are past a set standard of income. Okay.

Now you're 14 years old. You ask someone why they're crying and they tell you that they're fine. (This doesn't really answer the question).

Now you're 17 years old, and you ask why someone is peeing in the gutter, and a stranger tells you stop trying to be liberal, that's what happens when people don't work, they don't deserve decency.

And now that you're 22 years old, you ask why there are "developed" and "underdeveloped" countries, and they tell you to stop being contrarian.

When did your concern for others turn into opinions?

Was it something I did?

Are you like this normally?

Why do you have so many friends?

In your own room it's quiet,

the AC is murmuring, your phone just died

and your laptop is being serviced

When you’re alone, can you be pretty?

is old age just the rot of our youth

our youth over and over again

A spiral

Funny joke, you only get to find out what really mattered at the very end. I guess in a way life does promise an answer. You just don’t get to do anything with it

I knew we were different because we had two different futures in our head

Mine never ended in a house, on a bed,

getting my hair ran through with someone elses fingers

It always ended with a bang, a single comet hitting the earth, apocalypse

And I heard people whispering I love you's to each other, their hands held in a bomb shelter

because they’d be the only ones who knew

This never felt good when it first started

That’s how I knew it was right

We aged like wine

Good things are always an acquired taste

I know the world is built on loss. When a person is put in jail after murdering someone else, it doesn’t make the victim come back to life. What is dead stays dead, the balance has always been uneven.

You kill me, you really kill me!

The sea had my heart in its pull and pushed it into stone

I can’t be in both places. And sand is the part of my home that I hate the most,

Still I find it in my shoes years after I leave

I feel better without you when I get home but I enjoy the beach every now and again

I know too much about life. Walking forward feels like walking into the same footsteps someone else told me would be there, the same problems people tried to change, the same hurt. It was inevitable. I was playing right into the ghost of the future

Fascinating thing becoming a mom. It’s hard to be depressed when your life isnt yours anymore. But I guess, it never was mine, it was my mother's, my father's, my brother's. My friends whenever I had them around. It was even my neighbor's, who always crossed the road in front of my house at the same time as me every morning, expecting me to be there.

Was violence the language of creation? Did we get to decide who has to die in order to live?

What am I doing?

I know the sharks are circling me

They said don’t move and they’d let me be

But what’s a life if i’m not thrashing for air, what's

a life if I’m not dying

I’m trying to stop a midlife crisis before it happens.

Oh I can see you stretching to meet me, so far away,

and I’m breaking apart to meet you, we’re both barely halfway

Some love just doesn’t work

Why cross the seas when Made In China is at the corner shop

She does the same things as I do

I can see it so clearly

I know how it looks, almost how it feels

I can almost taste it because you love me,

It passes right by my shoulder, you love me adjacent

You love my friends

You love my family

You love the way I was brought up, the way I learned to keep my elbows off the table

You love the little things,

don’t you?

You love me adjacent

I look down on you because you look down on me

It’s not the same

I hate you for hating me, just because

I don’t clean my dishes every morning

I hate you, because you keep reminding me how little you really think of me

I hate you because you keep telling me I’m all the things I’m not

And is it my fault? Have I been pretending to lose so you feel like you’re winning?

You don’t even see the thoughts behind my eyes

You think that the tears that fall when I say I’m fine tell you all you need to know, tell you that I’m lying

How smart.

I wonder if salt water makes reflections clearer

But people cry when they’re happy,

People cry when they’re happy sometimes

But i'm sure it makes you feel good to think you know

I hate you most of all because you made me want to die for you anyway

I’d take a bullet for you

people who grow up feeling like they’re opinion will never matter because there are people “more qualified” will typically only feel connected with their opinion when an idolized figure is expressing it, often forcing other people to listen to that person in place of themselves because if rejected it would hurt less

At the midpoint of Euphoria's new season, I realized that I didn't want to talk about it. (And yet here I am to talk about it, I know. But just read me out)

It reminded me of that feeling that certain works of art evoke in you, feeling alone with it. As if it were speaking to you, directly, without the limitations of words. Like some people find solace in their holy books, like a friend at church.

It was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely, Jane Austen wrote.

We need this stuff, because there is hard shit out there that no kind of love can fix. Ethan Hawke was right - art is sustenance.

I felt for Rue. She said to me, I see you, you aren't alone, and maybe there's a way out of this. But you definitely aren't looking for it alone. And that was enough. Feeling seen and being able to see someone else was a privilege. That felt enough.

So I didn't feel like discussing Euphoria. I don't care about the 'right' way Rue's mom should've handled her, how she 'should have' treated her sister, how so and so are enablers, who shouldn't have fucked who. I'm looking at real life around me, and it doesn't have Right characters. I see people do imperfect things, because they're just doing the best they can.

Don't masturbate to morality. The conviction that other people aren't doing the 'right' thing. I feel like that's a trap too easy to fall into.

In fact, doesn't it feel a little freeing that no one can really do the Right thing? No one exists just to hold your hand. And yet we try to do it for each other anyway. We show up in the wrong way some times and the right way other times. We show up imperfectly.

You're the only one holding your life in the end. No one else can do it for you.

*

Maybe if we stop forcing ourselves into structures of existing stories, we would be able to see more clearly the life that is in front of us, or around us. If we stop taking the "which Euphoria character are you?" quizzes, if we stop looking at ourselves in that postmodern sense. Maybe the sad part, the part we have to live with, is that we're not any character. We're just ourselves.

If Cassie stopped calling herself a 'villain' to feel better about herself, maybe she would have said sorry. Do we have to define ourselves through others' stories before we finish our own? Before we talk to other people?

Rue saw Lexi's play and let it show her the better parts of herself. Sometimes, it's the good parts of us that other people remember, and even if they're false, it's the simple hope that we could be our better parts. I'd like to think that's what we chase for, a feeling while we consume a work of art.

These shows don't exist to tell us what life is, because we already know what life is, we're living it. Art just exists as respite, a place to rest. It "(...) unlocks all kind of valves of sensations within me which returns me to life more violently," Francis Bacon says.

This is why our post modern society treats these shows and movies like they're modern religion. Back then, all the vague and ever-changing folktales and religious texts felt spiritual. Stories that told us of the stuff of life. The people then made Gods out of them.

The older a thing gets though, the more limiting, isn't it? The believers make a book out of life and think that's all there is.

Do we even criticize the bible? Should we criticize it? Maybe it's art.

*

Someone else's art often becomes religion to us. If some art out there is like us, and we can love that, then why can't we love ourselves in reality? Can't I forgive myself enough to move on from my sins, allow myself the humility to make amends?

Beyond all this talk about religion and beyond all the words I write, there's the real thing that I'm talking about.

Why are superhero movies still selling if we supposedly think they're not high art? Maybe in their ABC formula, we see the patterns of characters, some constant urgency toward kindness. To save other people. Maybe we find space to project, and we see our own kindness in these stories and it's why we love them. Because they allow us to see ourselves.

And yet there's a life that reflections just don't capture. It's the unseeable now. The present moment that's gone just as you see it. The superposition ends and it never was.

(a short story!)

I’ve met someone new yesterday. My friend asks me if I like her.

I don’t know whether or not I like her, I haven’t really thought about it at all.

I just know that we both spend our lives jumping through hoops, and she’s jumping in her white woman hoops, and she thinks if she has a certain type of nose then her life will be better. Everything will make sense. But she’s genuinely insecure about it so I wouldn’t have the heart to bring it up. She thinks this nose will make people love her.

When she makes fun of herself for not looking like this oversexualized white actress with blonde hair and blue eyes, I don’t know what to say. I almost want to let her feel bad about it if that’s the biggest problem in her life.

And why should I say anything? She doesn’t realize people out there have different hoops to jump through. She’ll never see my hoops. I don’t understand why. She won’t? Can’t? Or is it because I don’t tell her?

But why do I know so much about her already that she hasn’t said anything about? And she knows so little of me.

If I were white she would see me as competition, but because I’m not she sees me as an onlooker. A benign presence, I-could-get-along-with-her, but-why-would-I type. In this way I look down on her because I don’t respect her lack of sensitivity. I wonder how she treats dark-skinned girls. I wonder if she has gradients in the way she treats people. Are some people more important than other people? Do some people fall into a blur in her eyesight?

Are some people's acceptance more important than others? If she’s going to live and die among people who look like her father, fall in love with someone who looks like her mother and have babies who look like her, why care about my hoops, actually?

Empathy serves her no purpose. White people have white dreams.

I wonder if I even have the right to tell her about my hoops. Care about my hoops, I’d say. If you cared about someone else you’d hate yourself less. You’d have less hoops to jump through. You’d realize making fun of your nose means making fun of someone else's nose.

And what are my hoops? I might have them but I never jump through them. I've kept my audience busy with my contrarian ways but now they’re bored and they want to see me play. Maybe we aren’t anything without our hoops. I don’t deserve love if I’m not performing. I don’t deserve love if I’m not begging for it.

I wonder if we have selfishness built into our marrow. Who am I to hate human nature?

(a constantly re-edited post on religion and regret)

Christmas Eve 2020: I walk into a church because I want to be reminded of my Christian grandmother. But it always feels like they believe I don't belong. Like they're waiting to burn me alive. Punish me for all the things I'll ever do. That's what I feel while I sit inside a church. Or a mosque.

Midnight Mass is a show on Netflix about people who can't do anything about their lives.

Sure, mass is terrifying. It's more often than not a room of people who believe other people deserve to be in hell. But the real horror doesn't escape me; it's something sinister about believing in what we can't see. It overlaps, religion and ghost stories.

Last week, someone told me to "just try everything while you're young even if it's wrong; when you get older like me you have so many things you want to do and no time to do it." A train at the end of the line. No time.

I know it'll come. A point where there's more years I've lived than I have left, and mortality stares at me in the face. I'll start to wonder: has my life been a good life? Has it been meaningful, whatever that means? If it has, then why do I feel like this? A lump in my stomach I can't do anything about.

You might choose to convince yourself that it's okay. You'll try again in the next life, and you start believing in reincarnation or some religious folklore that'll give you a chance after death. Because you don't want to come to terms with it; the sickening realisation that this was the one where you could have grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger. You didn't.

And you're running from the past, but you can't run away from it anymore because it's caught up with you, you have no future to run to because the future has already happened, and now you're running from that too. From death. From certainty.

Is that why we believe in ghosts? Because we're not sure they're there?

I think, often, we don't realise that we're running until it's too late. There is such a thing as being late. But if you want to live a good life at all, you gotta accept that. You can't keep making excuses about yourself to yourself. You can't keep blaming mom, dad, society even though you should. It probably is their fault, but then what?

No one can really be punished for anything, even if we believe that. Sinners sin and the sin is done, even if hell is waiting.

Horror, fear, running. Time is the real ghost.

Guys it happened again. Someone stole my thoughts I swear I had them before I read this. I promise I had this written as a draft but I've found someone else to better express my feelings about life in general, specifically the parts about worship. Sometimes it better to just be a consumer!

So I'm just going to put you on to this: http://metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf and an excerpt,

That after all these years, I still am the same, I still am in your corner, and I am glad you wrote all your feelings down in lots of places, because every now and then I get to remember. I know you.

It feels like the ultimate act of love -- I owe my life today to myself. I owe it to the person that got me here and I owe it to the person I will become.

Recently I've been reminded of a quote I had hanging on my door throughout my teenage years, written by Vincent Van Gogh, who died not knowing he was loved: for wheat is wheat, even if it looks like grass at first to townsfolk -- and the other way round too.