wow I'm starving again. Today feels like it's been going on for a long time.
At the same time, it feels too early to be 8:30. Go figure that one out.

I picked my car up today, it's been 5 months without it. I know this sounds ridiculous but I am fighting the urge to pick up all my friends and take them somewhere... just cuz I can. Hurray for the fear of parking tickets and the dread of spending my food money on feeding my car!

but you know what the line said after a night of experimentation.... "freedom is not an excuse for chaos". But how much fun, chaos can be.

Somebody come see me. There's freedom to abuse and chaos to unleash!

Showers are ideal for thinking.

topics of thought:

- forgiveness... I have learned how to give it, and when to give it, and when it is the only thing possible cuz after all, if I can be fortunate enough to get a second chance at friendship, how could I refuse anyone else?

- war... words... limitations of language, limitations of thought, undescribability of action... complete lack of reason... arbitrariness of life... atrocity, sympathy, empathy? Desire to find meaning within patterned arbitrariness.

war

-product of imagined communities?
-abstract but necessary for survival
-desire for self destruction
-limitation on self, creation of the other
-creation of the soldier, destruction of the civilian
-civil warring

is not all war decided by a preferencing of one child over another?
there is no real life, just a perception of information sorted and analyzed down into specific meaning... and the more specific the meaning is, the more likely that aspects are neglected, forgotten, or missed entirely.

arguments, self-realization, shame... embarrassment...emotion?
truth as tropes? is it all one man's perception against another?
what is it that binds us and is it destroyed through the creation of the other?

who will die for this girl?

if one dies, don't we all die?

This blog isn't fluid at all. but the thoughts come so rapidly. sigh.

This is a sunset by van Gogh, and it's currently my desktop background.  

I really recommend that you save this picture and even if just for a moment, make it the background on your desktop. You'll see this picture up close and get to delight in all the many different colors and brush strokes that (granted this isnt half a kool as seeing it in person) give it luminosity and dare I say it... expression.

Yeah, I'm really enjoying art history (now that I'm sure I'm not failing it) and am really glad that I took it. Although, to be honest, as energizing as art can be, it can also be exhausting. I'm not talking about creating art, but just being there and taking it in can be quite the job. So much beauty and creativity to get your mind around, so much delight for your senses to experience; that combined with the traumatic and gruesome literature I've been condensing and grappling with, this experience of art and emotion is changing how I handle what I see.

There is a play by Sarah Kane called Blasted. There is another play by another woman playwright called The Conduct of Life. These are the two most recent works of war literature that I've read for my Literature Across Borders class, and although I am fascinated by the discussion of war and how it deforms humanity, I can't help but suffer from the emotional pain of continual exposure.

Truly horrifying.

And all of this has been culminating and building up inside me until this past weekend when I was pushed past my very breaking point. I saw the movie Sin City, and I haven't been able to explain what it did to me, other than to say, I felt brutalized. I've seen movies like Man bites Dog, a french film about a deranged killer and his video crew, I've seen Requiem for a Dream, a film about a bunch of junkies and the lengths they go to in order to get a fix, and I've seen Trainspotting, a lesser traumatic movie with just a few scenes to chill your bones. Sin City somehow managed to do what all of these movies has managed to do in the past, but with all the weight of emotion already on my mind, I just couldn't handle this film.

I'm afraid I'm tired. I'm tired of internalizing all this brutality. I can't help feeling witness to a bloody crime. As I revel in the majesty of art history, I also tremble with the haunting picture of child rape, eye balls being sucked out of a living persons face and eaten, skin melted off by an atomic bomb, families crushed under burning buildings, eating a dead baby, raping a mentally retarded girl, in addition to the atrocities in Sin City.

I just want to run away sometimes. It's all just too heartbreaking- I havent been very good at describing what I mean, other than to just say; I feel brutalized.