Tian Luu writes:

I"m not going to say it again and I don't want to fight with you on any of this anymore. But I don't know where you got the idea that and eleven pm bedtime is an ultimatum. We have four part time working students in the house and most of us are in bed by midnight. I work half of the week at an office that starts at 9 AM which is considerably late for the working world, it's not a difficult concept to understand. Also, I'm not your mother or your family, being a house mate that pays to live at the house I can set any "ultimatums" I want. It's a basic courtesy and common sense to not be banging cabinets and tinkering with things at eleven at night consider you have to turn on the lights to do it because everyone is already in bed. Please just don't do it again. It's finals coming up and I've got heavy work days this month--I don't want this to be a recurrent issue. Also I don't know if and when I'll be moving out early but I've got broken dishes and a toaster that are still unaccounted for. I'm assuming you aren't going to want to part with the nice new toaster you bought so just keep that in mind. My toaster wasn't nice but it was relatively new and I don't feel it fair for me to have to purchase a new one on my own considering I rarely used it and definitely didn't break it when it was at the house. If you want to talk more about any of this later I'll be home, otherwise just try and be respectful and I'll try to be civil.

Austin

But I can't find that calm, I feel this anxiety especially in my forearms.
and the history channel used to have this show called the universe, and sometimes in the midst of that show i would lose myself to eternity. but now I feel actively tethered to the pain of my humanity

and maybe there's solace in the existence of love, or there should be
but the very concept of love, for me, feels evacuated of meaning
like all of the hope and comfort and beauty that should fulfill and exceed the very word "love"; contained in it as in a box;
the cardboard got wet and all the meaning of the word dropped out the bottom, shattering in the dirt
or something

So now it's just a word that these people say and for brief moments it's as a salve but largely I feel the contours and emptiness of it.

And I think I need this act of dialogue, this articulation of my feelings in relation to the unadulterated positivity and beauty that I understand you to be. Because when you wrote back it was exciting and when I watched your video I felt better. And pausing from myself to write this, I think, has been sustaining.

a thread from my heart

I took a thread from my heart while you slept

and delicately stitched it to your leg-

it was the nearest part of you and it felt so important,

disquietly necessary

But then you put me on a plane,

set for two thousand miles to the west.

And I began unraveling at the edges as I flew;

by the time you found the vein from my heart

sewn into your leg

my arms had fallen off.

When you ripped apart the “seam”

you left me bleeding and armless

under a mountain.

headphones in the dark

My eyes are hurting. I was wearing my headphones in the dark. My eyes don't hurt anymore. They've adjusted to the brightness of the computer.

I tend to think before I write. Think and think. Wallow in my consciousness before I can say anything. Is it my "social anxiety" refusing every thought. Crushing inferiority. What is it crushing.

I read somewhere [source amnesia] that every cell in our body replaces [itself] every seven years. I'm repeating that wrong. Maybe. I can't be sure. Source amnesia. It could even apply to the phenomena! Everything, this whole paragraph is an example. Every word choice could be the wrong one. Is it even called source "amnesia"? Is it even considered a "phenomena" or simply a "concept". That we hear things, even if they say, "Your body doesn't replace itself every seven years, that's obscene and delusional", then, seven years later, I write in a blog, "every seven years I'm [brand new]".

Long chains of (cause and) effect with a source that doesn't exist. May have never existed. Recently I've been considering the viability of lists as a solution to this immateriality of being. But even that consideration is immaterial, mostly it's not there (here? in my head. Is my consciousness a place). Mostly I'm not making lists, mostly (eternally?) I'm in a dark room wallowing in my consciousness.

Am I real? Or does the real world hold nominal superiority; must I get a job in sales or manufacturing.

Should I spend some time dissecting intersecting class, race, and gender privileges that resulted in me even saying those two career possibilities?

Was that last bit "necessary"?