As usual, I’ve left my reading for class till the nth hour (literally), so I’m attempting to read very fast. But Derrida, whose reputation for incomprehensibility is notorious, does not lend himself to speed-reading. Contrary to expectation, I’ve found him remarkably exciting, thus far. Reading theory seems to me to be the intellectual’s fix: it’s a way to read about the mundane world in abstract, even astonishing terms. It makes everything new, it peels the layers off, one by one, in a tantalising strip-tease of ideas but what you find underneath is nothing like you expected.

I’ve decided to reform my decadent ways. I’ve been sleeping too many hours a day, watching too much House, spending too much time on Facebook talking to people I really don’t care about except as sounding-boards for my boredom and neglecting the pursuit of potentially intellectual things. And of course, eating way too much junk.

No more of this, I say! Nose to the grindstone, back to the wall, nose in a book, and all the other cliched metaphors you can think of for serious study in response to the peril of being proven second-rate shall be the order of the day.

In other news, Ireland tickets have been bought. Now we just need to find places to stay, things to do and of course, a damn visa that allows us to enter!

—

Ah, I could have spent words uselessly on questioning my actions, recent and imminent, but I’ll save it for another rainy day.

:)

One of those moments when something you did, or said, or saw in the past comes back to you suddenly, crystal-clear, and makes you smile, right there in the street. A self-deprecating, self-indulgent, inward-looking, happily bittersweet smile.

Hands in your pockets against the cold, someone stops you on the street, makes the music stop for a moment:

“Can I borrow a cigarette please?” “Yes, of course”

And you walk on.

Thoughts, like people, whirl around your brain. You’re walking roads with people who don’t exist, whose existence is in your memory, who have never seen the streets you’re on. Alternate versions of events march past, one after the other, in an orderly chaos of might-have-beens. You don’t dare close your eyes, for fear of what you might see.

The breeze blows away the evidence, but the question, unasked and unanswered, lingers in the air.

Faint, fading.

—

We do strange things in the night that the morning makes us question. But which was more real, night or morning?

And you go dancing through doorways
Just to see what you will find
Leaving nothing to interfere
With the crazy balance of your mind
And when you finally reappear
At the place where you came in
You’ve thrown your love to all the strangers
And caution to the wind

It takes love over gold
And mind over matter
To do what you do that you must
When the things that you hold
Can fall and be shattered
Or run through your fingers like dust

‘Love over Gold’ – Dire Straits

—

People are confusing. Constantly calculating the effect of their words on you, on themselves, it’s hard to tell if they ever say what they really mean. Must we create these alternate-selves, these potentially perfect people in order to hide what we really are? And what is that? Small-minded, self-absorbed, cautious, fearful creatures whose lives are comprised of layers of fictions.

Words on the page are easier. They’re tangible, they’re there in front of you, they speak to you in ways only you will ever understand. They can never lie (unless you want them to), they don’t cheat (unless you make them). You read them, you control them, you tie them to you in ways only you and they will ever know.

Words, are whatever you want them to be. At least for the moment you read them in.

i rarely find songs that so perfectly encompass what i’ve thought about:

He drowns in his dreams
An exquisite extreme I know
He’s as damned as he seems
And more heaven than a heart could hold
And if I try to save him
My whole world could cave in
It just ain’t right
It just ain’t right

Oh and I don’t know
I don’t know what he’s after
But he’s so beautiful
Such a beautiful disaster
And if I could hold on
Through the tears and the laughter
Would it be beautiful?
Or just a beautiful disaster

He’s magic and myth
As strong as what I believe
A tragedy with
More damage than a soul should see
And do I try to change him?
So hard not to blame him
Hold on tight
Hold on tight

Oh ’cause I don’t know
I don’t know what he’s after
But he’s so beautiful
Such a beautiful disaster
And if I could hold on
Through the tears and the laughter
Would it be beautiful?
Or just a beautiful disaster

I’m longing for love and the logical
But he’s only happy hysterical
I’m waiting for some kind of miracle
Waited so long
So long

He’s soft to the touch
But frayed at the end he breaks
He’s never enough
And still he’s more than I can take

Oh ’cause I don’t know
I don’t know what he’s after
But he’s so beautiful
Such a beautiful disaster
And if I could hold on
Through the tears and the laughter
Would it be beautiful?
Or just a beautiful disaster

He’s beautiful
Such a beautiful disaster

* Thomas Gray, ‘The Progress of Poesy’

That line gives me shivers.

Stupidly, I forgot to bring my support system with me to Scotland.

My three beautiful, leather-bound, gold-embossed dvds of the Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings, along with my enormous grey-green, dog-eared, watermarked copy of the books.

And about a month into the madness, once the daze wore off, I missed them.

Possibly more than anyone or anything or anywhere else.

But now, thanks to the amazing internet, I have the extended versions of the movies on my computer.

And I kid you not, I cried a little with sheer happiness.

Some days (or nights) you just really want someone.

You can pretend it doesn’t matter. You can tell yourself that it’s too ‘complicated’, that you don’t really care, that you don’t have the time or the energy to care about anyone but yourself; you can pat yourself on the back and say, wow, look at me, I’m doing it all alone and I’m happy.

And most days, it works. You believe you’re better than all those other people because you’re self-reliant.

But the truth is, you’re not.

—
Is it getting better?
Or do you feel the same?
Will it make it easier on you now?
You got someone to blame
You say
One love
One life
When it’s one need
In the night
One love
We get to share it
Leaves you baby if you
Don’t care for it

Did I disappoint you?
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it’s

Too late
Tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to
carry each other
carry each other
One

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus?
To the lepers in your head

Did I ask too much?
More than a lot.
You gave me nothing,
Now it’s all I got
We’re one
But we’re not the same
See we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
You say
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love is a higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can’t keep holding on
To what you got
When all you’ve got is hurt

One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters and Brothers
One life
But we’re not the same
We get to
Carry each other

[One - U2]

Weekends are a strange phenomenon. After a long week spent meandering through things we label ‘important’ and ‘necessary’ and ‘unavoidable’, we plunge into a debauched, mostly insensate period of pure self-indulgence. You push yourself to limits, both physical and psychological, and walk more, talk more, run more, and lose more in two nights and two days. And to go back to that ‘important’, that ‘unavoidable’, ‘necessary’ routine seems more bearable after, perhaps.

I’ve had a fairly dissolute weekend, so far. My legs hurt, I’ve been sitting in a bathrobe all day, watching tv on my laptop and eating junk food to recover from my hangover.

On a vaguely different note, it’s funny when you suddenly realise that you’re an entirely different person than you used to be. I don’t mean on a superficial level, like the clothes you wear, or the things you’ve done to yourself but when you change completely on the inside and you know you’re okay with being the antithesis of everything you used to be. Change is a strange compound of inert and active; you talk about your new self, you idealise what you used to be and in an odd way, both are false. You are who you are because that’s who you believe you ought to be, or what you want to be in order to escape from something?

I don’t know.

Midnight, Friday just ended 9 minutes ago.

I’m supposed to be reading Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’, but I was pulled away from reading about her virtuous resistance by my Chinese floormate who was very bored and needed to be entertained.

Just about a month in, I think Edinburgh is growing on me, cold, wind, et al. I’ve yet to go back and visit the graveyard nearby, to ‘do’ the Museum properly and to go shopping for warm winter things; instead I’ve been watching TV serials in a therapeutically obsessive manner.

It’s strange being alone most of the time, despite the fact that a lot of people on the streets are alone. I really have no idea what to do with myself when I have free time; after our carefully structured life at Stella, having to take this much responsibility for my time is just disorienting. Am I supposed to be at home reading a lot? Or ought I to be in the library researching something useful? The great mysteries of academic life.

I’ve been intermittently reading a biography of Shelley. Yes, I know I tell people he’s my favourite Romantic but I think that’s more because I believe I ought to have a favourite Romantic than any particularly intellectual choice made on the basis of poetic merit. Nonetheless, with my unerring instinct for picking obsessions that gratify my own self-love in some obscure way, Shelley is proving to be every bit as exciting as I could have imagined.

Sometimes, I feel less than literary. I feel like I ought to have a more mesmeric attitude towards words and writing; I ought to know more, read more, love more, quote more. Being around a large number of people whose aspirations are so identical to yours that they strip away your carefully-cultivated aura of bookish uniqueness is both humbling and disconcerting. Especially if your most important measurement of self-worth is derived from ridiculous comparisons with other people.

Nonetheless, Shelley:

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon,
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why does thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

from ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’

It’s a messy room that no one cleans but me.

Well, ok, a tiny old lady knocks my door every Tuesday, usually when I’m still asleep, and shoos me out before she does the bathroom, vacuums the floor and dusts the tabletops. The first time this happened, I thought it was a nice little poetic irony: the little old, white woman cleaning while I, the decadent young third-world student look on from my position of class-privilege. Later on I just felt bad for her having to work at an age when Indian old ladies go walking in parks, dress up and gossip at family dinners and generally make noisy nuisances of themselves.

I’m usually in here watching Prison Break, How I Met Your Mother or, of late, House. And eating breakfast/dinner, brunch, snacking, or the inevitable chocolate biscuits. I recently threw out all my empty dabbas and there were way too many for me to mention here. I’m addicted to them, I can’t help it! Whoever thought the idea of coating biscuits with milk chocolate was good was sadly mistaken: it is pure EVIL.

I also drink copious amounts of my favourite ginger and lemon tea, while reading incomprehensible theoretical essays that make me feel brain-dead after a page or two. In fact, that’s what I ought to be doing right now except a serious fit of self-pity hit me and I couldn’t stomach another word of discourse. Oh well, since Wednesday is usually my beering day, I will hang on.

No, I’m not turning into an alcoholic!

Sigh. If only things were as you wanted them to be, and people texted precisely when they were meant to!

:)