Just a mirror for the sun

claustrophobia

Laksh.mi — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:02:01 +0000

I’ll be very sad if the last season I have is summer…

Sarah Kay and temporal ontology

Laksh.mi — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:44:11 +0000

…is pretty amazing.

But this is the most important bit:

“When I meet you, in that moment I am no longer a part of your future/I start quickly becoming a part of your past/but in that instant I get to share your present and you?/ You get to share mine/and that is the greatest Present of all.”

- Sarah Kay, “Hiroshima”

Bergson anyone?

This:

Memento Mori

Laksh.mi — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 02:50:07 +0000

I have a little note taped to the side of my bookshelf in my space that reads, “when work feels overwhelming, remember that you’re going to die”. It’s only amusing because… well, it isn’t. Anyway, I was browsing the interwebs as I am wont to do and came across this post. It’s surprising how vivid that post felt to me, particularly because I tend to be a little morbid so death doesn’t always have that dramatic finality; its usually just another plot point, or cliche. I think what was most striking was just his voice – as if he was providing a voice-over to his own life. I didn’t know this man at all, and clearly won’t, but I’d like to think that I could manage to sound that calm about the end of my life while I’m living it. Anyway, this was supposed to be an upbeat, or vaguely optimistic post so I’ll point to why this was uplifting for me. I’ve spent the last two weeks a little mopey because I have no job, and my life is a little up in the air right now, but its both chilling and comforting to know that things could be a lot worse. I think I’m a coward when it comes down to it; I don’t think I could let my life go, despite being so jaded about my middle-class, over-educated, elitist self. And yet, I did…

I watched Midnight in Paris yesterday and was surprised by how easily Owen Wilson’s character was willing to just abandon everything and move to Paris on a whim. Then I thought about how I’d been counting down the days to my big move for grad school from the eleventh grade. I didn’t even blink before saying bye to everyone I’d known. Of course, there were promises of communication, frequent trips scheduled, and Skype dates set up, but we all know that isn’t the same – and god knows its been shockingly different each time I’ve visited (‘visited’??!) Now, I’m saying bye to more friends from grad school; we’ve been in a flurry of goodbye lunches, coffees, and phone calls. There have been more promises of skype dates, more extravagant trips planned (Hong Kong, Qatar, Ghana, and Cyprus to name a few) and much discussion of the future. Graduation passed in the blur of a family visit and a blinding migraine; by the time I’d finished my third ceremonial walk and picked out my favorite PhD robes, we were leaving for lunch. The two weeks since then have mostly seemed like an alcoholic fever (but sobriety isn’t the most comfortable way to say bye, is it?) I’m finally breathing in deeply, cleaning my apartment and being grateful for life… and death. It is time to move on, but I’m eternally thankful.

Durations

Laksh.mi — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 05:22:48 +0000

It’s now summer and I hate everything about that fact. Time messes up with the increasing heat. I’m standing here, two weeks a graduate and it seems like the hours wear on, but the days fly past. Recently, my friend had a status message that asked, “If I eat myself will I completely disappear or double in size?” I think that is an important question. My answer is that you’d disappear completely, or rather, you’d diminish, and hence, qualitatively come closer to disappearing, than doubling. However, this is contingent on several axioms: a) your physical body’s demise equals your disappearance b) ‘disappearance’ is on a metaphorical continuum, i.e. opposite increase of which ‘doubling’ is the extreme c) your body could continue to ‘eat’ after it was, for all intents and purposes, dead and so on. Basically, one would begin from the extremities and work one’s way in, to the vital organs. One by one, you would first feed yourself, and then have someone else feed you all your parts. Finally, one would pick a metonymic part, such as the stomach, or mouth, to be the part into which all the others go to be counted as ‘eaten’. You could continue this metonymic replacement of bits of these organs to stand in for the whole, even to the molecular level. Thus leaving perhaps a single golgi apparatus as the sole remaining part of oneself. Of course, this is dependent on the body being able to process the food fast enough, and so on.

–

Now that I’m not associated with an educational institution, I don’t know how to begin introducing myself

Do I begin with, “Hello! I’m a recent Master’s graduate from blahblahblah”? That seems both obnoxious and pathetic.

Le sigh.

In better news, I’m alternating between JJ’s Kills mixtape and Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs (which is about the town that my friend grew up in, which is very cool). Both albums are brilliant, and are required listening. That is all.

Some overdue rants

Laksh.mi — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:18:05 +0000

I’ve been trying to post here for a while, and I’ve also been trying to figure out how to verbalize all my thoughts and feelings of the past two months…

Anyway, I’m sitting here waiting for a friend to call while I stew in my own anger and disappointment with the events of today – which I shall not go into in great detail – and I’m trying to rationalize why these things make me so mad. I shall attempt to talk about the smallest, and easiest thing first.

a) At a conversation we had at lunch, two of my friends tried to dismiss something that’s been a part of me for as long as I can remember. I realize that the following rant may not be completely understandable to some people, nor its importance, but it needs to be acknowledged for its own sake, so deal with it.

So, back to lunch. Somehow, we came upon the topic of weight, and the term ‘fat’. Now, apparently, there’s a whole identity axis around being fat and fat positive – something I didn’t know growing up and would have loved to. More importantly, these people – whom I totally love, tried to tell me that I’m not fat – and, as much as I love hearing that, one of them insisted that me calling myself ‘fat’ is what makes fat girls want to punch me in the face. Now, this is problematic because apparently only these fat girls get to tell me I’m fat. However, having grown up being repeatedly de-valued for my weight, and repeatedly reminded how enormous I was, I can assure you that even if I’m apparently not allowed in the hallowed halls of the fat (sad day) I have still been told that all my life, and hence, it is how I see myself. So even if I don’t seem fat enough to whoever these people are, I assure you that I feel it, and all the discrimination, and problems that comes with it.

b) I have also been repeatedly hearing this discussion of ‘morals’ and people having a ‘moral compass’, or a conscience, or whatever. Apparently one loses ones moral compass when one decides to be a part of any sexual activity outside of a heteronormative long-term coupling. We now have enough academic discussions about gender, sexuality, and the de-pathologising of homosexuality, and so on, but it still surprises me when people who call themselves liberal, and progressive, and all those other good adjectives, see sex as immoral if its not occurring the way THEY do it. Sometimes, I’m just so fucking tired of having to explain myself, or anyone else’s sexual activities as if they are some lascivicious secret that I can only share with select individuals. And loathe even more, the people who encourage such behavior by agreeing that they have no moral compass and wear it as a badge of honour. I mean, great, if that’s how you identify – as an immoral wanton slut, and you enjoy those titles, good for you, but please, don’t make that true of everyone that behaves as you do, because my morals don’t get defined by who I sleep with, it gets defined by my own system of ethics as I exist in this world.

c) Today, I am seriously disappointed in the academy. I have spent nearly a year trying to put together this thesis, and making it as good as I can. I’ve put my heart and soul into this. And today, I watched something happen to someone else that just cheapened the entire system of grading, and knowledge production altogether. I have believed, somewhat naively, that if one did excellent work, recognition would follow. And as a corollary, if one did less that excellent work, that would be recognized as well. (sidenote: no, this isn’t about my grade – I haven’t received it yet, so I’m neither gloating nor hating) Having been through a week of presentations, and discussions, I’m coming to realize how arbitrary this whole thing is, and that there literally is no meaning to the system of grading we have. I guess this isn’t surprising, enough people have pointed that out over the years, but somehow, I believed that the more nuanced, mature, and interesting the argument, the better one’s work would be received but after being aware of how ridiculous some work is, and it still getting passed, I’m really coming to question the value of what I do.

Of course this comes back to me, and my problems. Having spent my whole life convinced that all I needed to do to get out of the horrible childhood I had was to be as smart as possible so I wouldn’t have to deal with all the trash that I was put through (partly influenced by rant a)) I thought the academy was my safe haven. Having to deal with its failures is like watching everything you ever believed in fall in one big sweep.

Anyway, I have resolved to throw money at my problems, and drown my sorrows in consumerism – Zara, H&M, here I come.

[Yes, this is ridiculously privileged. I am also filled with self-loathing about that.]

The Morning After

Laksh.mi — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 18:11:01 +0000

If you stare at someone for long enough, you can see the tattered ends of their flesh meeting spirit.
And while the honest thing is to point out these tatters, the kind thing to do is let it pass, I think.

all apologies

Laksh.mi — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 06:16:39 +0000

For all the women I have loved and lost
Unaware that I’d done either
For that one who shared and didn’t explain
All the possibilities that meant
For the one that glanced away when I looked
As if I knew too much (if only)
For the one that isn’t with me right now
And I didn’t know how to ask you to stay.

an epistemology of ontology

Laksh.mi — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:26:23 +0000

Just before bed. That’s when the ghosts sink in. I woke up in terror, as usual, repeated comforting nonsense to myself and went back to bed. I’m back now, the self-flagellation from recent memories of embarrassing encounters. Do you ever talk to yourself? I do.

And now some Derrida before bed. Tomorrow, I can loathe this post in bright sunlight.

Intervals

Laksh.mi — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:33:01 +0000

It appears that I don’t mark the highs enough and the lows too often.

The endless loops of anxiety, uncertainty, and sheer terror have left me an unproductive wreck. Memory is a tricky thing – it makes the past look a lot better or worse depending on what I want it to say, and right now, it has me longing for something that I know never existed. The possibility of the future in a past that never was haunts everything that I think about right now. Exhaustion is the only present. But this may not be true; this is only me making coherent a collection of sensations at 2.30 am – never a good time to try making sense of anything. Time.

Why are you wavering?

This kills me

Laksh.mi — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 02:59:42 +0000

Hari Kondabolu on racism and white guilt