Kaizen

It involves looking at everything one wants to describe long enough, and attentively enough, to find in it some aspect that no one else has yet seen or experienced. Everything contains some element of the unexplored because we are accustomed to using our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at. The least thing has a bit of the unknown in it. Let us find this. In order to describe a fire burning or a tree in a field, let us stand in front of that fire and that tree until they no longer look to us like any other fire or any other tree.

Guy de Maupassant

Byway
Cambridge, UK 2010

I Love This Ice Cream...

This is Swiss Movenpick ice cream. It is the greatest ice cream I have yet tasted and I so depressed I cannot eat it as it currently resides only in Europe. I chose caramel walnut on my birthday and I'm a chocolate kind of girl so that tells me something. I had every flavor at least twice in England and will never regret the two pounds per scoop. Oh the yearning.

Lo Que Se Siente

Once upon a few days ago, a girl found herself before a black and blue ocean in a romantic spec of a romantic land mighty for its green-clad Lady and car exhaust. She regarded the waves and the sand they rolled, back and forth, back and forth. No foam or seaweed but there was a dock and by that, a boat for four yet only two would sail. She drifted into ocean for the first time in her life and thought of the people she loved. Being at this stretched distance from them all brought meaning. There was no reconciliation, only acceptance.

Yet another love affair she had had with life.

She turned to her grandfather then and spoke in broken Spanish, attempting to express what she felt at that very moment. Fue imposible.

Exposure

About a year ago a 35mm film camera reached my faculties and, although I didn't know it at the time, this would eventually lead to elapsing sweeps of color-blindness in my vision. The doldrums, right? You guessed it--no. When you first look through a 35mm camera's viewfinder, the what-you-see-is-what-you-get mantra cinches to your expectations about photography without thinking because of how familiar that little world seems. That is, you don't think about the tonal gradation, pay attention to what the borders cut out or the excess that flows in. And of course, we never envisioned the way light could dance (or sit flat) in our scene. I know I didn't.

Needless to say, the first time I pressed the shutter release, my shot turned out perfect shit, but disheartening didn't have time to settle in because the following weekend I caught something on film that was simply magical and since, I have not wanted to do anything more than witness the world through the camera's eye, knowing no prior human has or will in times to come consummate the act the way I would.

I'll share work of my own and more on the subject this fall but for now, I leave you with this image which can be enlarged by clicking over it--

This photograph was shot on film by my none other than my greatest inspiration, the riveting, and boundlessly talented Ragnar Axelsson. He hails from mystical Iceland, a land I plan to visit one day, and when I need awakening , his work enlivens me without fail.

http://rax.is/

Night Afore Adulthood

In thirty minutes from beginning this post English time I'll no longer exist as a teenager. Two decades. Long time. I'm turning twenty in Cambridge, Cambridhshire, England, away from my friends, family, and everything linked to my life in my hometown but I'm not unsatisfied. Some might feel sorrow, but as alone as I am, I'm so happy. I've come to realizations (one including what 52 hours of no sleep+a chemical imbalance will cause one to write on their blog) I shan't forget, met wonderfully elaborate human beings in York, Spain, and in my very own Cambridge, and so, so much more. I'll embrace the coming of midnight with a heart swelling with love, integrity, and incitement.

A New Kind of Monster

If someone could hand me a piece of paper with the answer to this new befuddlement or, I mean, a small eye gesture toward enlightenment would be enough, I would...words fail me. In all naivete I believed a month and a half would age me and gift me something clarifying, solving but I couldn't be more removed from that state. Could it be the lack of nutrition? My caloric intake diminishing by half? If only it were that easy to blame this akward, abstract disingagement that's been crawling inside my body through ears, eyes, and pores. I read this once through and wonder if it even makes sense. I don't feel like myself. At all.

What IS this fuckery?

Infidel

It is despair how effortlessly one can become an infidel. I say this with acceptance and certainty that judgments will be cast but chasing a wanton-jackass’ golden line: “To thine own self be true,” and this being the most accessible haven, I’ll speak.

There’s an inherent dirtiness in lies and cheats, there’s no argument there, but there’s a different, more baffling flavor of filth that can writhe in the mouth. Don’t fret, nothing has been done. Yet, it’s no triumph I’ve been swapping taboo-ridden exchanges with a grown man. Freud called it transference—when the student so idols the mind and brilliance of his or her professor, it renovates as attraction in place of attaining said knowledge. I call it being a perverse cretin. This is no experimental, sexual adventure or lusty indulgence, it is worse than that—it’s foul play amid a sanctioned bond, a marriage of two adults and the very fantasy of acting makes my skin crawl, as they say. If it were only fantasy, however, I wouldn’t be writing this now. There is no sense in the oppression of fantasy but when the intent comes to life, when that silent, we both know this invitation to catch up over coffee isn’t simply that, fantastical skips out the door. And do you know how I know?

One: I’ve had those gatherings in the strictly platonic sense and these undertones didn’t exist and

Two: I caught the trepidation in your face—no, your entire body— the second you asked. It was as if your very conscience had slapped you in condemnation, but I accepted a split second after detecting this with no hesitation.

God, we were saints, not stepping a toe out of line but how filthy was it when we simply smiled and our eyes held a moment too long for the eighth time and I thought what I did. The nuances I need two hands to count are alone shameful. More troubling is why I condoned four of these meetings as if oblivious to it all! Where are my scruples? Do I even posses any having ignored the occasions?

There was a comment made in Thursday night’s class that I must deviate from. In response to Hamlet feigning insanity, one said something to the extent of: we are who people think we are, we are the mask we front to world, we are the lies we tell. I disagree. A query could be made of the kind of person I am and this situation and no one would believe it. I’m certain. But oh the thoughts that plague us in the night, in the quiet privacy of our minds. The lies, the lies, the lies. We are who no one sees. This is why I must cut all ties before I tarnish who I believe I am and loose all faith.

1

Eying Diego’s miniature blue hands and my indigo-dyed ones I thought, compromise—our hands are not twisting chemicals from these liquid-heavy shirts, they are wringing out compromise. If you are ever to befriend family, that is what it dwindles down to. That and, well, it also helps to read the notation about wearing gloves on tie-dying kits before you send your sister’s kid home with hands like Vishnu's or Smurf fingers, rather.