He downloads this program that’s supposed to help him concentrate, eliminate all the distractions from his computer desktop, his Facebook messages and little instant message bleeps and bloops that pop up in the corner every now and then, everything. As he gives the cashier his brand new Bank of America credit card that, much to his girlfriend’s display, he cannot stop talking about and toying with, he wonders why the hell is he buying a second monitor.
I have to stop writing Roy and Riza fanfiction. I write nothing else. Its easy. All the hard work’s been done for you, the character development, the plot line. Everything. All I have to do is channel some of what used to be my pent up sexual frustration, loneliness and neediness into them and they come alive as puppets of my adolescent longings. Now what? I’m not exactly sexually frustrated anymore or lonely or needy. Okay, maybe I’m still needy, but at least I fixed the first two. In fact, now, I’m pummeled with more ‘real life’ stuff. Like, getting into law school. Like, what’s going to happen after I get into law school. How I’m going to survive three years grinding away at dense texts and competing like an animal against my much smarter peers, paying off a seemingly endless amount of debt just to get the damn degree, that maybe, maybe, I won’t even ever get to use because the economy is in a slump, there’s a recession going on and everyone’s getting fired and laid off and no one can find a goddamn job. Why does it have to be like this? I didn’t ask to be put here and I don’t see why I just have to shut up and live with it. Adapting is one thing but accepting this crap is another. I don’t want to master this crap either so don’t give me any of that, oh, just work harder and make something of yourself bullshit. I don’t understand that either. What the hell does it mean to make something of myself? In whose eyes am I something? In what way am I something? What qualifications, what degrees, what talents must I acquire to become this something? A Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? A Donald Trump or Rupert Murdoch? An Einstein or Oppenheimer? What? Do I need genius? Talent? Luck? I don’t know why I have to work so hard just to survive. What is surviving anyway? Why do I have this drive, why do we have this need? Why? Questions I’ll viagra have answers to, but doesn’t it mean something that I ask these questions? Does my curiosity not speak to some innate truth? Am I just copping out? Too lazy, too inept to deal with the harsh competition of life so I resort to midly fanciful, useless philosophical panderings in order to have some sense of self left to face the world with? Are these truly meaningless questions that we will never have answers to so we should just stop asking? Why do I feel so empty sometimes when I think about the world I am about to be swallowed by. This behemouth of tragedy, greed and evil, a perverted reflection of human nature that I am thrust upon to face and accept. The daily grind of work, of lethargy, boredome, dealing with people who are equally sickened by their situation, half-assed bullshit lives that no one wants to lead.
Maybe this is too depressing. A little too depressing. It used to be like this when I had no one and nothing in my, and I mean nothing, seemed good. I’d pine for days and weeks and months for boys who would never like me because I am fat. I would despair for days and weeks and months at my falling grades and lack of initiative in classes that will determine my future. But when you get past it all, looking back at it, how much of any of this really mattered? Very little, I guess. When white people had their social ups and downs in high school, I think most of us suffered from some kind of mental trauma of going to Stuy. Exhaustion is perhaps the best way of putting it and those with the drive and the fuel to make it past that succeed? Do they? Then again, what does it mean to succeed in the first place.
Say what you will about anime, but I’ll defend it to death. Honestly, there’s something about a good series that just stays with you and I mean, really stays with you. You hear the theme song, you think back to a certain a scene, a certain moment and it just gets you, deep down somwhere. Its like thinking about middle school and all of the days that you spent doing something meaningless and stupid with your friends but it was the best thing you could have ever done and maybe its generic, trashy and not as amazing as something more legitimate like science or whatever, and maybe it is a little bit creepy and the fandom is generally populated by fat people who like to dress up and fail at being their favorite characters, but deep down in there somewhere, there’s this feeling, this feeling that’s irreplaceable and doesn’t come from anything, anything else. It makes me want to run and keep running till I can’t run anymore and leap from a cliff into the invite world and embrace everything and hug everything and welcome anything and everything. I just had an ephiphany. Perhaps, this is joy. This very feeling. But its amazing and I can’t put it into words no matter how hard I try. It just makes me want to through myself from something large and tall and epic and feel the wind in my hair and ground fall away from me and let it all go.
There’s something about summer and the way the sky looks, the crisp blue with smidges of hazy white clouds flowing above a sea of green grass. Holding your friend’s hand and walking home in the half empty streets. Summers in anime are different from what they are here. You don’t feel the humid heat, you only see the colors and it looks amazing.
I can’t think of anything to write. I babbled a lot yesterday. Mm, we’ll see. Sometimes I’m inspired and sometimes I’m not.
I am jealous of people who draw better than I do and who study science, because it feels like I will never be that talented and I will never have what it takes to be a pre-med student. I wonder if they are good at any of the things I am or, at least that I feel I am good at. Like, Jeffrey. That last conversation about my switching majors and how I didn’t have what it takes to be in science? It pisses me that he so easily wrote off all the things I’m good at by taking one class. One class? Are you kidding me? I’m not daunted by the sciences, I simply don’t want to try anymore. I’d rather spend my mental energy on something I like and want to spend it on.
I feel like I’m going to spend the rest of my life justifying my choice to someone and I’m always going to be laughed at and looked down upon by scientists or mathematicians for what major I am, or what I study or studied. Hey, philosophy is the fucking foundation of your modern sciences. Without this shit, there isn’t any of your shit. Don’t forget it. It is as if they owe their superiority to what I am studying, yet they so easily forget this. And, it’s also kind of fun. I actually like logic.
The story of Kingston’s aunt is passed down to her out of her mother’s practical necessity, as a warning as for Kingston to heed, but Kingston’s own retelling of the story is written out of a different necessity. Kingston writes this story so her aunt can be remembered. “You must not tell anyone” (308), her mother warns her. For her betrayal and adultery, Kingston’s aunt is forsaken by everyone, her husband’s family, her own family and her village. She no longer has a name, a voice, she no longer exists. In her aunt’s native village, as envisioned by Kingston, everyone is related, connected by 115 relationship titles as brother or sister. One cannot both be family and an outsider at the same time.
“‘You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (308). No Name Woman begins with a secret, a secret now made public by Kingston’s story. It is passed down to her out of her mother’s practical necessity, as a warning for the teenage Kingston, not a story for her to repeat. The silence that surrounds her aunt
It is easy to keep quiet about the little things: eating the last piece of cake in the fridge, stealing a handful of those tiny pencils from a mini golf course, even a harmless lie about why you were late to work – was it really another train delay? But, it’s hard to keep quiet about the big things, the things that keep you up at night: the things you keep turning over and over again in your mind until its jagged confusions become smooth and understandable, maybe even acceptable. No Name Woman, a dark family secret finally made public, belongs in the latter kind of thing. The story is passed down to Kingston by her mother, who breaks the oath of malicious silence that surrounds the story of her husband’s forgotten sister. In her mother’s mind, the story, told out of necessity, is a warning to her daughter: do not shame your family by becoming your aunt. Once told and its purpose served, the story and her aunt are again forgotten. Where the story ends is not as clear to her as it is to her mother. Not only is her aunt shunned through silence, but she herself keeps silent, never accusing the man who wronged her, drowning herself in the well so that her ghost “waits silently by the water” (315), she never speaks up to vindicate herself. Guessing at the details of what kind of a woman her aunt was, Kingston looks to her for “ancestral help” (311) in reaching her own self-identity, trying to bridge the gap between what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be Chinese-American. The immigrants Kingston describes are loud, shouting to each other in America as they would back in their village fields, still connected through their kinship. Ironically, it is in America, where Kingston is embarrassed by her mother’s loudness and tries to emulate low, inaudible “American tones” (312), that her voice speaks the loudest. Often the things that one tries to bury the deepest are the things that most rises to the surface.
The characters in The Most Dangerous Beauty as real and so are the events that it details. David William, enamored with the beautiful pictures in Pernkopf’s Anatomy, goes in search of the last remaining artist of the book. Generally denounced for the heinous Nazi crimes that aided in the creation of the book, many do not deny the beauty of the 800 or so pictures spread throughout four volumes. The central theme in Paterniti’s piece is a sense of shame, forgetting, reconciliation with the events that took place during the creation of book. At the same, Williams is willing to seemingly forgiven all the past behind the book for the sake of its beauty that so captivated him in his youth. Similarly, Kingston is also fascinated by the story of her aunt and though she is unable to actively track down her past like Williams is able to do, she also gives life to something forgotten.
P: David Williams is a man who is confused and conflicted about his love for the Book. He is trying to remember something that most people condemn by its association with Nazi atrocities and crimes.
K: I am trying to remember a shameful aspect of my family’s history that I was told to never speak about.
P: In this way, you and David Williams are similar, trying to talk about, if not vindicate, those who can no longer speak for themselves.
K: And, we are also not similar because Williams is drawn to the Book because of its beauty, not because of a lack of self-identity.
P: Then again, the persons that fascinate you both are, in ways, what made you who you are today. The Book dramatically shaped Williams’ life and so did the story of your aunt. When Williams means Batke, he truly believes him to be a kind, old man.
K: Unlike, Williams, I will never be able to know the truth about my aunt. I can only guess.
P: Williams also encountered something like the silence your family keeps about your aunt in his research about the book. People are quick to forget the shameful and bury what they do not wish to remember.
K: But, no one curses the dead like my family does. Even though Pernkopf is condemned as a Nazi and his book the source of controversy, David Williams and others who admire the book will remember him, in a way.
P: That can also be true of your aunt. Your story is her vindication and though she may not be able to rest in peace, you have given her some measure of conclusion.
K: By chasing the ghosts of the dead, both of us may do more to harass them than console them.
Through this story, Kingston tries to “name the unspeakable” (309), filling in bits and pieces of the story that were left ou
The silence that surrounds her aunt, the forgetfulness of her Kingston’s family is deliberate and incriminating, even in death her aunt continues to be branded as a traitor.