asas

I want to tell 16 year old me to chill the fuck out. Fondle some legs. Drink some beer.
Don't smoke weed though because all of your guilt and regret will hone in on the top of your brain with the pinpoint devastation of a laser, making all the more apparent your loneliness
as you sit stranded on stools, thinking about your life.

If I were to talk to 16 me I'd let him know what game to spit, what girls to talk to, what medusas who make him stone-cold to the core to avoid because he doesn't really believe in bros before hoes you know. If a girl has your tongue tripping over itself she's not the one you're looking for homes, I'd say as I'd pat his shoulder and flash him a smile. I'd talk to him with an irreverence reverberant of grandparents he never had.

I'd tell him to buy clothing with better material because he's going to go through a lot and shit rips easily, man.

aSas

On the topic of talking to her and deciding I could take on the entire world in that single instance:

WHAT UP HOMES I FEEL YOU ON HOW YOU FEEL BUT YOU GOTTA GET OVER IT YA KNOW

Whenever I hear a particular guitar strumming it tends to make the waves in my heart move a little bit stronger and recede a little bit slower, each time its coming and going uncovering more memories I wanted to bury in the sands of forgetfulness. A chord here, a smile there. A strum here, a laugh there. There I am were at my best; thinking back on it makes me feel worse. In a quiet melody I see traces of faint memories I would like to leave behind. Time capsules or disgraced mementos, buried treasure or hidden traumas: unearthing history brings out the best and worst in all of us.

(What the fuck, you're too young to be so sentimental at your age. You know this, right?)

I'm old enough to know the more pressing issues of life but still too young to be completely rooted in the process. Questions without answers without knowing who or what is testing you; it's a terrifying thing to be involved in. The consequential anxiety derived from this awkward point in my life drifts silently in my conscience mind, with whispers of the precariousness nature of life always shaking my soul, keeping me from sleep. Growing up means recognizing just how infinitesimally small our understanding of life is, how our so-called boundless imaginations cannot even scratch the surface of the underlying tapestry of this world we're bounded to. To be knowledgeable is to realize that essentially you know nothing of the circumstances you're thrown in.

You don't think that's a petty way of looking at things? And even if you were to think in this way then why would you care so much about finding more about this world?

Despite the fact that everything bound by this realization should be rendered small, inconsequential, and especially insignificant I cannot escape the strangle of certain memories of attempting to define the boundaries of my soul; their fingers clasp tightly around the neck of my subconscious. The white light of fires I don't want to revive smolder in the unlit corners of what I believe to be my mind. They are the now incorporeal refuse of a dream that will never substantiate itself, now simply ghosts that dance around the delineation of my nostalgia and regret. I grasp at their ethereal tails only to have them slip between the cracks of my fingers, mocking my very human attempts to confine something much bigger than me. And yet I still try to conquer them so, with the verve of Alexander the Great without realizing that his greatness is simply our own device and creation and in the greater scheme of the universe he is an atom like the rest of us.

So?

So what I'm attempting to get at is that there is something much bigger that seems to propel us through life, some synapse or function within the brain operating ourselves in a machine, a complex to which we as cogs will never be able to fully comprehend. We see our gears rotating, the gears rotating with us, but will we ever see what the heck we're propelling in our efforts? Nope, no, nunca, never. C'est la vie, such is life.

Okay then.

Okay then. Back to the point of this: our pursuits in life are simply attempts at understanding what is what, or deluding us into thinking so. Or maybe it really is a way of comprehending what all of it means. It's the processing of a metonym: using constituents to define the very structure it composes. It's a gigantic jigsaw puzzle where we're using the corner pieces to guess the whole picture, and who the heck knows we may be right. David took down Goliath. Maybe within the puny scopes of our understanding we can define the impossible, who's to say. There's been stranger things in life.

What was my attempt anyway? My alchemy was love, or the defining of, as a means to understand what life was about. It is the will of the youth defy life through transfigurations; it is the will of the old to defy life through acceptance. By attempting to define the question is the route I took; by accepting life as unstable is the act of defiance you took. But back to the topic at hand. I tried so hard to understand her, and I learned a lot about her, but I never really understood the depth of her. I never felt that I really knew the essence of her. What she was continued to elude me constantly.

What was worse still was what I thought would be an anchor to hoist myself down in the chaos of life ended up being unraveling my understanding of self even more. I'd see my reflection in her eyes and obsess over whether it was really "me" talking to her, or the "me" that was just accustomed to her personality. What in turn was supposed to be a process of understanding ended up throwing my perception further into chaos. Trying to soak in the reality of this world only eluded my senses further. I don't understand how someone can define life on such uncertain terms such as love and truth, virtue and meaning.

I think the root of your disillusionment is that you guys didn't end on good terms.

...

...Maybe you shouldn't worry so much.

...

...And try to sleep more.

(notes on a therapy session between a self and his self 10 years into the future)

lol wuzzat

It seems like everyone's getting up while I'm still trying to sleep in. I don't get how everyone can wake up so early either! I keep hearing alarms in my head too, but I haven't felt a particular urgency to answer them until now. It makes me want to hit the snooze button on life. I know that it'll continually ring and I will inevitably wake up. I'll have to answer that ringing in my head eventually. Shuffle out of my bed and take responsibility and seize the day and all that. But dammit, come on. Let me sleep in a little longer. Have you been outside at all? The sun hasn't even risen yet!

Time is ticking, ti-time is ticking ticking, time is ticking, ti-time is ticking away! One year ago I was in fifth grade and committed to getting into Harvard, one month ago I was a junior in high school obsessing over my SATs and trying to get into Northwestern, and one week ago I was ditching all of my obligations to see some girl because I settled on going to UCI. Yesterday I was a starry-eyed freshman amazed at how huge the campus was. And today? I'm a second year stressed on some midterm I'll forget about as soon as I finish taking it.

What the heck happened to you Rante!? At some point in my life, when I listened to bands I loved in high school and realized how shitty they were now, when I decided to reread my favorite novels and realized how boring I found them, when I stopped seeing people from high school because I just didn't get them (and them me) anymore, I changed. I don't want to admit it but I did. I look at old xanga posts and think to myself, "woooow really man. You're such a tool." It seems like I'm lost in transit. Everyone woke up and went to college, everyone boarded the train on time, and everyone is speeding off to the next stage of their lives. And you? You're still trying to rub the drowsiness out of your eyes. Sheesh, get on the ball man.

People have either: A) pursued their subject of study with such a vivacity as meant to accomplish dreams or B) so indulged in the irresponsibility acquired in their high school that college is the catalyst for fucking your life up even more. I shouldn't say either, either. I mean, people don't necessarily fall in one category or the other; there are a bunch of people that fall in the cracks in between, doing a little of both, leaning one way or the other. It's just that category A) and category B) are the most apparent in my scope of vision.

To all those writers and poets and musicians and doctors and lawyers and veterinarians and teachers and all those others involving themselves in a profession that will both fulfill and substantiate their lives, aka those pursuant of a dream:

You bastards! Do you realize how lucky you are?! Be thankful!

I'm sorry. I'm just really jealous.

I figured that if I pursued my interests something would pop up eventually. Out of all the subjects in school, I enjoyed reading and writing the most, so I put two and two together and declared myself an English major. It's not like I have much else. I don't have the patience to commit science to memory, I get my numbers mixed up and can't do the math, and I don't think I'd be able to keep a straight face for social studies. How about a foreign language? Homie I haven't even mastered English yet; why go for a second language when you hardly know the intricacies of the first?

But anyway, with no real plan in my head, I hoped that by following the faint etchings of my major I'd stumble upon something that would bring some definition to my life. As if one day goals and dreams just drop into someone's head and they see their life plans in moments of brilliance. "You mean it's not that easy? Aw, shucks." Perpetual motion is non-existent. There is no such thing as a thing that substantiates itself. For every reaction there is an impetus behind it.

If anything, being an English major has managed to make me worse off. I mean, I still legitimately enjoy what I learn. I don't, however, like my peers. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely great English majors. Nice people. Decent folk. Basically, I'm not saying that every person is reprehensible; it's like life. There's good and bad people. It just seems that in every class I'm stuck with the bad portion of it.

English in UCI, despite the fact that it's nationally ranked, within the single digits, and has prestige in both its staff and its program, is the major within the school with the highest admission rate. It's something that confuses me. With a relatively high number of applicants and a great program, it makes sense that... it'd be less selective than lower ranked schools? But anyway, all of the negative archetypes of people associated with my major are here. There are the people that raise their hands in class to use their desks as podiums, expounding to the professor about their very wrong opinions to practice being the professors they aspire to be, the girls who want to write the next Twilight saga, the smug assholes who describe themselves as well-read and articulate, and of course, the aspiring writers who think themselves akin to Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Steinbeck as they bask in the glory of their latest, masterfully written Star Wars fiction. Watch out America. Your literary landscape is about to be broken with FANFICTION.


Ahem. Excuse me though, that criticism is neither here nor there. I thought I'd find someone that would understand me but so far I haven't. Within a major that loses cultural/social relevance everyday, wouldn't you be more freaked out for your well-being? In a specialization that finds itself increasingly unimportant, wouldn't there be any one person in any of my classes who are as freaked out in life as me in finding a job to anchor some stability on? Apparently not. Everyone seems pretty satisfied with their lot; everyone seems pretty assured that their dreams will work out. I talked to a professor about this, about this mounting crisis of joblessness and futility and whatnot that buzzes incessantly in the back of my mind, and when I told her I was a sophomore, she simply said it was too soon for my to be worrying about all of that.

Is there a specific time when I'm supposed to worry? Am I not old enough to worry, is that it?

Haaaaaaaaah. Maybe I'm taking life too seriously.

Someone told me that as long as I keep my grades up and study hard opportunities will shine like diamonds to me. But will they be the opportunities I want? What the heck DO I want?

When I was 16 all I really wanted in life was to live quietly with a girl I liked in a cozy apartment in the city. After my shitty 9-5 job I'd spend the rest of the day with her cooking, talking, and reading. But that kind of thinking is both naive and foolish, I'd find out later. Later being now. A hah hah.

Hmm. Writing this made me feel better. I feel that it's losing a lot of momentum and I should just let it end early before it crashes. It's kind of aimless, but I hope it was written nicely. What I mean to say is, dreams are very nice things and I really should find one to pursue seriously. I think I'm going to try to invest myself more in English and pursue a master's at the very least. Maybe the stars will align and illuminate the way I'm supposed to go or something, who knows.

cathartic

Someone once told me that I was a poetic drunk and that I should blog whenever I'm inebriated. Hence, that's how this blog was born. Not to say that I ALWAYS blog drunk; the last time I drank was way back in September, a period of sobriety equivalent to eons considering that I'm a college student. No, when I'm drunk I always tend to expound on things I don't normally talk about, aka my personal problems.

I don't really talking about stuff that concerns me. I mean, I'll complain about work or school or whatever, but the bigger things, the things people would consider as crises in their lives, I tend to keep those to myself. It's more out of politeness and tact than anything else; I mean, no one wants to hear constantly about another person's problems considering that they have their own to deal with. On top of that, it's not like the problem magically goes away when we let it out into the air. If anything, when we talk about it with other people, we're simply letting off a little steam, which will come back eventually, and burdening our patient listener with another concern for us.

So anyway, I tend to keep things that deeply, truly concern me to myself. It sucks, and I definitely know that it's not healthy, which is why I only talk to people I deeply trust about certain things. If I were to put it on levels 1 to 10, I guess the extent that people know about my problems would be about... level 7? Stuff that's sad but not necessarily tragic, stuff that concerns but isn't life ruining. In essence, normal, everyday crises that everyone experiences deeply in their day to day.

Well actually, when I said that I don't want to burden people, that's a lie. I look at people and I suddenly want to stop everything, to try to get them to understand me. I want to let go of everything at once and just have a good conversation with someone. The thing is, I don't really get people. I know this sounds angsty and preteeny or whatever, but it's true. I realize I'm not necessarily someone that can get along with everyone, and I think others can sense that in me. Still though, on another level: I don't want people to know too much about me, because it scares me to know how much someone knows of my vulnerablity.

I tend to get my thoughts organized around writing. I never really wrote this way-memoir style-until I started this blog. Like, I never really committed myself and just myself into writing. You know, instead of trying to establish a narrative and a character and a story, I'm simply unfurling words to reveal me. It's a very cathartic feeling, and it's a lot less stressful than writing fiction. For one thing, I'm less concerned about diction and syntax; why would you care about organization when all you're doing is transferring your literal thoughts onto paper? For another thing, there's no finer details to concern myself with; I'm just writing. It's like talking to my screen: spontaneous and easy.

That's why I feel like more of me comes out when I write. It's like I'm talking to myself. I know that this blog is public, and that anyone can stumble upon it and see me vent me out without concern for anyone else. I even know that some of my friends may be following this because it's under my links on facebook (hi friends!). But at the same time, it still doesn't take away its appeal. It's like shouting your secrets from the top of a tall mountain: it echoes everywhere and you can't stop anyone from hearing it, but you still really want to do it anyway.

Not to say that I'm going to unveil everything, but just enough to make me a functioning member of society. You know, a normal person (ish...). I don't really know what I'm talking about. Do you? I'm just saying, when I get all of this out it feels nice.

today i made

Today I made a pulled pork burrito with roasted potatoes. The pork was seasoned with salt and paper, and stewed in the slow cooker with chipotle sauce and jalepenos for eight hours. After that, I shredded it and sat it in the slow cooker for another 15 minutes. I diced cilantro and onion and put them along with the shredded pork into two tortillas. I topped it off with a knockoff of the lava sauce from taco bell: nacho sauce made from sharp cheddar, flour, and milk, then stirred in cayenne pepper, Louisiana hot sauce, and siracha. I then heated up the frying pan to toast both sides of the burrito.

I also made roasted potatoes, which I seasoned with cajun seasoning, pepper, and garlic powder. I stuck it in the oven for 30 minutes at 440 degrees.

I fucked up the cheese though. I added too much milk so a lot of the bite and flavor were lost. It's not bad though, you can still taste a little heat on it. I really like cooking a lot; I hope to make people happy with it. I won't pursue a full-on professional job with it or whatever, but I'm living with a bunch of friends in Irvine next year, so if I can make them say "DANG THAT'S GOOD" I'll be happy. :D

I still have like a dozen articles I need to finish on this thing. Dang.

On another note I can eat cilantro raw. I wish there were cilantro chips OH WAIT YOU CAN MAKE THEM.

lack of sleep causes:

I can't sleep very well anymore. When one is derived of sleep the world tends to shift in interesting ways. Or maybe it's just my particular senses or something.

Colors tend to dull. The clouding around my eyes makes colors a shade or two less. It's like messing up the tint of a tv dial: everything looks a little bit more washed out, like it faded through a washing machine or something.

Light. Light is much, much sharper. The sun gleams like daggers and casts it's horrible, horrible rays across everything outside. I try to stay inside as much as I can when I don't get enough sleep. I think it might just be psychological though; like, the sun is a process that reminds me of my lack of sleep, therefore, it drives me to go inside and sleep.

Music is a lot richer, if for the sole fact that it distracts my mind from sleep and keeps me awake. Try listening to your favorite CDs sleep deprived, it's cool. The sounds tend to make themselves more apparent when you're on the brink of collapse.

My brain races wildly, constantly thinking, simply because if I cease to think I'll go to sleep. And I can't really sleep right now.

However, because my brain is so active, it tends to fuel my paranoia as well. All of my interactions become much more frantic as my mind analyzes everything in seconds. Every minuscule gesture is something to find meaning in.

My fingers move faster, so typing is a breeze.

My eyes dart faster, so I read faster. Processing, however, is the eventual pratfall; I can't maintain everything in my long-term memory.

I sit more awkwardly. I hunch up even more than I thought possible. Craaaazy.

ehh

I'm 19 tracks into the discography of Asian Kung-Fu generation, and I'm liking it a lot so far. It's been awhile since I've listened to this kind of sound. You know, instead of those gentle indie rockers or hip-hop artists or soft-spoken bands or whatever. You know, a real band. With traditional guitars and drums and that frantic sound achieved only when you're playing out of a garage or while you're in college struggling to make a band while attaining your communications degree.

It's a very rough sound. It reminds me of high school, when I'd spend hours in my room just listening to alt. rock and emo and stuff. I'd spend hours with Pinkerton on repeat, staring at the ceiling and wanting my homework to do itself. I'd play The Matches when I was waiting for the bus to come. It was all just noise, noise, noise. I'm pretty sure that I can attribute my lack of hearing to this particular genre.

During spring break I took my old cds and listened to them again. It was weird because I was using an old disc-player I haven't touched in years, and I was listening to cds, which I haven't used in years. It was an interesting experience, seeing some of my songs inspire a nostalgia in me, and others... well, I didn't have the best musical taste back then.

When I was younger all I wanted to do was write in my room and listen to music all the time. But the me now realizes that can't happen, or if it were, it'd be very hard. Attaining good grades, recommendations, internships, graduate schools, and the money for affording such ventures... it seems that I've been straddled with a lot of responsibility lately. Sometimes I miss being young, back when there wasn't any pressure, when you didn't have to look out at the horizon simply because every day was the same.

on another note I'm kind of addicted to bean paste nowadays.

I need to start listening to rock again.

letters

As of late I've been reading the letters of authors I like. I like it a lot. It shows the author in a more personal light, while allowing said light to be in the literary voice that I've come to know them for. I read excerpts of J.D. Salinger's letters and have thus become obsessed. I picked up a copy of multiple letters Steinbeck's written to people. When I have enough money I'm going to get Chekhov's book of letters as well.

I like the act of writing letters. I think it's very lovely.

Written correspondence is something I want to engage in but cannot, unfortunately. I mean, what's the point? There's emails and facebooks and phones that zip messages at the snap of a finger, so who wants to wait for weeks on end just to see how someone is doing? It's hard to correspond electronically though! I tried email but that died when facebook came out. My long long long emails were rendered useless with an "lol that's nice" response in return. It's disheartening. Facebook as well. It's not like you're going to write a three page essay on someone's wall. It's all about succinctness in this digital age.

There's a much deeper emotional connect to a letter I feel. Because when you write to someone on paper you get to see the way in which they wrote their words. The hand is affected by the words it writes, and it shows in their handwriting: scribbled in frustration, sloppily in sadness, frenetically in excitement. Handwriting allows one to see the emotional impact of a writer's creation through the ink they impart on the paper.

On top of that, it's a creative project, and as such, you're going to make sure it's not going to suck! You start to have fun with it. It's not a business memo or a formal email or whatever but something very personal. It's a mini art project involving yourself. I don't know it just seems to me to... allow someone to invest more of themselves in the art of writing than one would if they committed their correspondence to email. I don't know.

I want to write letters to people but I don't know who. :(

I need to

I need to do both start writing more, and finish the things I start writing. I'm looking through this blogger thing and there's like a billion drafts of stuff I started on random breaks in the library and never bothered to finish. My undeveloped creations! Crying for the nourishment of completion they sit in their digital tombs waiting to be published but they never will, due to my terrifying procrastination. If the end of the world were imminent I think I'd save my goodbyes for the very last second.

This is a resolution of sorts, I guess.

(You're two months late but whatever)

I think I'm going to start carrying a pocket notebook around with me. People think I'm joking when I say I have the mentality of an old man but I'm really not. I'll be reading something on the internet and suddenly want to google something else, but then I'll forget what I wanted to search for when I open a new tab and just sit there, thinking of what to do. I forget books at home constantly. There's a whole mess of stuff I've lost and I forgot that I've lost them.

It's bad. So the notebook would really help. That, and I'd have a nice little thing to write down ideas when I get them. Have I told you that I'm dreaming of stories? They're not particularly good but it's kind of cool.

Another thing, I'm thinking about jumping ship to tumblr. It's so pretty! I like the aesthetics of the site, but I feel that it'll be just as neglected as this little blog that I started up. I'm not even my own number one search if I type in "hello ghosts blogspot" on google. It's some band. I should fix that. Actually I'll stay here, it's cozy.

I need to read more. It's fun and very invigorating for my brain (durrr-hurrr state the obvious).

Schedules are a mess. Let's clean that up.

On an unrelated note, I'm pretty sure my mom doesn't like my taste in women as she keeps introducing random daughters of her friends in our talks together. I could be dating the Buddha and my mom would still find fault with her; probably because she isn't Pinoy.

(Oh well)

homie.

So my friend sent me this website because he knows I have a thing for Asian girls (He also mentioned something about Andi Long, assuming that since I go to UCI I should know her and thus should hook him up). But anyway, here's the website forum thread thing in question:

http://www.superfuture.com/supertalk/showthread.php?t=65493

Okay so it's a bunch of perverted lonely dudes posting pictures of something they call kags-which stands for cute asian girls- and using the usual bits of internet colloquialisms such as "OMG SO HOT," "POST MORE NOW," "SAUCE," "FAPFAPFAPFAPFAP," etc to describe these girls. Then, after the posting of the initial random j-pop starlets and whatever, it starts to gets weird. Skip ahead like 40 pages or something and the pictures of celebrities are replaced, and the users' facebook friends start popping up much more. Along with that, all of them are Asian chicks in dresses too short, drinking too much, and passing out on couches with their pictures taken only to be seen amongst these forum users who get their jollies from jacking off to them.

Well actually, the ones that they like the most tend to be those girls who find joys in partying. The ones that take facebook photos of their clubbing nights and make out with their girlfriends and then pass out. The forum users pass judgment on girls and if they don't fit their expectations, they deem them unworthy of their masturbatory fantasies. And I know that they're only doing this because they've given up on the world and chosen to satisfy themselves digitally. Something or another scorned them from social interactions and they decided to indulge themselves in the digital world.

I couldn't figure out which one made me more sad, the party girls or the forum users who post their pictures on the internet. I mean, I SHOULD feel sadder about the forum users. Rejected by the world, they can only live in fantasy, passing harsh invectives to digital replicas of the girls that pushed them to the brink of their isolation. But I mean, they aren't really isolated. People can make the world change around them, if only they attempt to find the change within themselves. Tired of people? You say no one understands you? Then you need to try to understand them first, and I mean REALLY understand them. Stop looking at people like sheep, or formless reflections of dominant ideologies, the thoughts that pseudo-intellectuals find comfort in. Just start treating people like individuals and you'll notice a marked change in your life.

So I should more sad for the girls then? I mean, they brought the cameras out with them, they got drunk off their asses and posted the pictures on facebook, and thus they should understand the implicit consequences of publishing incriminating evidence of yourself on a media easily accessible by the public. In short, understanding how the internet works. And then I saw this:



She looks like a 15 year old but hey she could be my age for all I know. She looks Filipino but then she could be any dark-skinned Asian, but yo when I see this girl parading herself like that I feel a certain responsiblity to say something.

Homie.
Brown-skinned beauty who I feel
I have a certain cultural connect with.
Or lack of, I don't know.
As the son of immigrant parents
I tried hard to forget I was Filipino,
and instead tried to be Filipino-American.

I would never white out my skin with bleach,
bathe myself in phosphorous to look a little
less brown. But I would turn down my mother's food
because it was too pungent, or acidic
to a tongue too used to hamburgers and pizza.
If someone asked me what my ethnicity was,
I'd say Asian.

Now I know that you're not doing this
to deny the weight of a heritage
you feel is burdened on your shoulders.
As the daughter or granddaughter or descendant
of a culture not rooted within America,
it is the duty of your blood to be aware
of every aspect of your culture.
Wearing it like a mask until
they forget which is your real face.

You're just doing this for fun, I get that.
And I used to do the same thing too until
I realized that it's not just a foreign culture,
not just a different set of practices
implicit in our blood. It's different.
Memories fill our veins as well.

Take a moment to take a breath,
to trace the roots of your family tree
still rooted across oceans in the home land.
Remember a grandfather who didn't pregame,
but drank. He drank to dull the razor edge
of an empty life of working from sunrise
to sunset, for a people who frankly
didn't give a damn.

Or your grandmother who wakes up
every morning at 4 AM, rises before the sun
to tread across 2miles and a river
in order to go to church. Every single day,
a 3 hour trek to and back-that's 6 hours-
a quarter of her day spent devoted
to the reverence of God.

There are still memories living with you.
When you're embraced by your mother, who
when you were little would hold you tight
and tell you that if you work hard your
dreams are possible. Remember too
that she would spend sleepless nights
by a candle studying human anatomy
so she could become a nurse.

Let memories sear into you
a certain kind of dignity
to carry yourself with day to day.
Because it hurts to see you
carry yourself in that that way. Because
as much as we like to joke about
"immigrant guilt," of Asian parents,
the silent cuts of their disappointment
are still the most palpable feeling
along the generation gap,
the cultural divide.

R.I.P. Nujabes

I was disenchanted with hip-hop as a whole when I met you. The most bombastic beats on the radio devolved life into this eternal chase for paper, and I generalized the whole genre as deteriorating into that singular message. It was a loveless corporate sound that I couldn't get behind. The first track I heard from you was "Counting Stars," and I wouldn't say so much that I fell in love with the genre again as I would that you completely revived my feelings for it. I swore off contemporary hip-hop, dropped it like something detrimental for my soul, so hearing your tracks was a panacea, a revitalizing water purging poison from my veins. Your tracks were my catharsis, and I became addicted to that feeling, that sound. I sought musicians that sounded like you, trying to discover what it was that hooked me so. I can say it now, that the feeling was simply love. I was addicted to you because you shook my heart like the very first girl one falls in love with. Behind every beat you made, every song you composed, was the irresistible tinge of enjoyment that someone imbues in a work they created with the utmost love and care. And just like that very first girl, that very first sound, they leave this indelible print on the heart that one carries throughout the rest of their lives, this feeling they want to impart upon everyone they meet, everyone they see, everyone they hold close and dear. It's a feeling of gratefulness, for having something shake you so soundly that even though songs may end, times may pass, relationships can fade to dust that indelible feeling still stays with the soul, carved into its deepest foundations.

I cannot thank you enough, and I hope you passed onto a happier place.

Don't sweat the small stuff I guess.

Normally my posts are attempts to sort the mental baggage within my head. Thus, they take on a very serious nature, and when I reread some stuff I wrote I want to tell me to calm down! Sheesh, why you got to be so serious all the time. Life is as hard as you make it Rante!

So I'm glad to be writing about the Pokemon Gold remake I downloaded last weekend. The DS remake, Heart Gold, would normally be an instantly addicting game in itself, what with all of the crap you can do in it and whatnot. I don't want to go into detail, but the sheer scope of the game combines the simple and the complex in such a way that an RPG head like me finds oddly captivating. But to say that this is simply another game I'm playing would be a false observation.

Pokemon Gold was my childhood. When I received it nearly 10 years ago for my birthday I was ecstatic. I crammed that thing into my Gameboy Pocket and you'd assume that it was stuck in there, because that was the only game I played for a very long time. I beat the game with all three starters, I collected them all twice, I even went so far as to raise several teams based on types to imagine myself as a gym leader. All in all, I probably invested three to four times the amount of time that I had spent on Red. That number is so enormous, I'm embarrassed to say it out loud. I'll give you a hint. I remember raising a Charizard to level 99 and using it to beat the entire Elite Four on my first playthrough of Red, which took 60 hours. On my second playthrough, I decided to go back and do it right, and raise a balanced team of six pokemon. I remember being extremely excited when I hit 100 hours on that game when my family and I were eating at a Dennys. I played Red like, 5 times.

So take that number, and multiply it by three to four.

Yeah, I've always been a huge nerd.

Pokemon was my entry into the insidiously lonely world of RPGs. Before Pokemon, I had Mario and Wario on my Gameboy Pocket, and a bootleg copy of King of Fighters. I didn't know what gaming was, merely enjoying these little electronic distractions that my dad got me from K-mart. I didn't play compulsively, I didn't obsess over evolutions and stats and movesets, I didn't manage the strengths and weaknesses of a team with the preciseness of an architect. I heard about Pokemon from a friend in fourth grade, and before I knew it the game had exposed a side to me that I didn't know existed: an obsessive-compulsive addicted to micromanagement.

Pokemon got me addicted to the notion of story-telling in a video game, along with the notion of choosing how a game was to be played. I transitioned from that to Final Fantasies on Friday nights because I heard in sixth grade how the summons were like Pokemon on crack. I went from Final Fantasy to Dragon Quests, Squaresoft games, Front Missions and Fire Emblems and tactical RPGs, all the while the numbers and choices and attacks and defenses growing steadily across the expanse of my childhood, prepubescent, and teenage mind. Meanwhile, on the storytelling front, I pored over the details of elaborately designed universes, with its own histories and social systems, to the point where I invested myself in fiction because it reminded me of role-playing.

In short, I was a very lonely child who played RPGs all day because he didn't really know how to interact with people.

But Pokemon was great in its own way because it was one of a few RPGs that I could talk to other people about. Everyone played it, and if you ever ran out of things to say your little fourth-grade self could ask about Pokemon and talk his head off for hours and hours. There was a social side to it as well, but there was also a treacherous side to it. Battling was competitive. No, like serious business. And the trading cards... I learned about the dangers of capitalism from unfair trades and strong-arm tactics.

I look back very fondly at my little 10-year old self and his Pokemon addiction, so when I played the recent release my mind was blown. I'm continuing this post on the 24th of March and I've logged in about 30 hours overall during the two weeks I've had the game. An entire day and then some just playing Pokemon. It's a wonder where the time goes. I cannot stop playing this game compulsively and am entertaining the idea of giving it to my roommate to hide it for me.

It's fun though. It makes me calm down and not think about the future, and I just sit there enjoying myself like some little kid. I appreciate it not for the fact that I'm winning a game, but experiencing a feeling of nostalgia-tinged therapy.

Oh little Rante, if only you could see yourself now, playing in three dimensions.

Quick write practice 1

Sometimes I like to turn off all the nights
sit in my bed, stare at the void of my ceiling
like I'm looking over the tops of high cliffs
with my head dizzy, my ankles weak,
this weird feeling of falling
and an even weirder feeling
of wanting to fall safely.

I like to imagine that
I topple over crags and rocks
harmlessly, bouncing along
the walls like me and it
were two clearly different people
still trying work things out.
Polite and considerate,
but with the understanding
that this is still
shaky territory.

I do these little games in
the dark of my room alone
to distract me from my thoughts.
I clutch at my pillow and this
stray thought flutters in my mind
and I kind of just want someone
to be with me to scream at the night.
Which I think is kind of crazy
isn't it.

weird dream.

starting to dream in stories so I'm writing this down so I don;t forget.

People on subway train riding along subway. There's this weird phenomenon that's starting wherein at first teenagers went missing, but then the age bracket started lowering until it was 7 year olds missing. The subway train goes down an increasingly lengthy, darkening tunnel. Things change. Red lights flicker. See an entrance with a clown's mouth with the words:

"I bet you've seen something like this before."

Proceed across various signs with various messages until they enter a subway track with luminescent tubes. On the other side is s bright red liquid flowing, with what appears to be red blood cells flying around. They stop off at a station confused. It looks completely like their own station, except multiple people wander around in a daze with green skin. They respond to nothing, seemingly in their own daze.

Group is wandering around when idiot decides to open emergency door. Two teenagers pop out, one morbidly obese girl the other a very lanky boy. We rush to the bathroom stalls, lock in. They sprint like athlete runners, reach stalls, threaten to rip the doors off the hinges, and they do. They are shark-toothed, splotted with black dots. Approach, promise that they'll make us into mots, and if we eat the head of another mot, am promised big ramifications. They bite into me, at which point I woke up out of breath.

what

I don't think I interact enough with my generation, because whenever I talk to my peers about things I'm always astonished by certain stories they tell me.

"Wait, you can sleep in the same bed together even if you've only been dating for a month?"

"You kiss on the first date? With your tongue?"

"...You gave a handjob to what now?"

I'm especially naive for my age, I know that. Maybe I'm too routed in the roots of Catholic morality, or maybe I've been spending too much time with people much older than me, and have simply inherited their much older sensibilities. Maybe I'm a prude. Maybe I'm a recluse concerning physical contact. We're at an age where relationships are accelerated, that weird threshold of teenager and adult, where people age twenty trapeze around the thin boundaries of their sexuality to enjoy themselves.

I know that, but I still can't help but feel astonished at the whole thing.

In the back of my mind lies an epistemologist, pushing at the back of my brain and constantly reminding me of my mortality. I obsess day after day about meaning, of the word, the concept, the virtue. What the fuck does that mean? Where the hell am I supposed to invest my efforts in? What the hell am I doing with my life.

For God's sake, I'm only twenty.

I don't know the roots of my stringent moral foundation. I don't practice religion faithfully, employing God's name simply when its most convenient, when there's some cosmic phenomenon I can't reason out within the constraints of my mind. I understand that there are evil people in this world, that people as a whole are mostly a moral gray, acting mostly out of their self-interest than for the sake of other people. We're nice to others so they're nice to us. We give things in the hopes of getting something back, be it physically or mentally. I understand that. I definitely recognize that I do it myself. I cuss. I cuss a lot. I curse incessantly. I sound like a sailor. I say shit in front of my bosses, I shout fuck in front of females. I'm called out on it a lot. There's ladies present. Be a gentleman. But I understand that its not the things you say, or even the way you act, that defines your moral values.


I act a certain way because I know that the world isn't some pure virgin, she's some girl that been around the corner more than a few times. Yet, despite all of that, of knowing the world isn't some lovey-dovey puritan world, there's something about the oversexualization of our culture that just frustrates the fuck out of me.

I'm going to acknowledge the seeming hypocrisy first off. I definitely value physical attributes. If two girls were standing next to each other, I would notice the prettier one first. I definitely like a pretty face. I recognize the highlights of a good body. There is definitely a shallower side to me, and if that automatically invalidates this argument, so be it.

But still though, to hear someone talk about blowjobs and fingerings and one night stands and banging that ass and making some girl moan like you were talking about what you ate that day or how the weather was, to talk about sexual acts like it was fucking casual conversation is something that annoys me to my core.

I know where this frustration comes from, where all of this anger is welling up from: dignity. You guys can have your fun, I get that. I'm not going to tell someone to NOT engage in sexual acts. Hell, I'll probably do the same things too, but I'd do it with someone I know, someone I trust. I can't take the thought of someone selling their body to someone so else so easily. Giving a blowjob to someone on the third date might be something you enjoy, but if you're looking for fun go read a fucking book before you embarrass yourself. It's like the action of fucking has saturated itself into everything.

I don't know where I was going with this, or what I'm really mad about, and I'm definitely too tired to even continue writing like this, but I want to say one thing, and one thing only. If you have the slightest iota of self-respect for yourself, don't give in to those temporal pleasures so easily. Maybe I'm thinking of it in a weird way, but your body's a valuable thing, and seeing someone let someone else into it so easily disgusts me deeply.

Good night.