i'm tired. 
crumpling into this chair.
hotel california by gypsy kings, such a beautiful song.
now the night plies in strings across my room and forms a vast black web with thin, supple cords that swallow me.
i am so tired.
i did the ncte impromptu today. i feel like i did well--i wrote something about israel, something intimate and weird and yet strangely something i had never contemplated before.
good night. off to the warm bed.
we're so lucky to be here.
the sun on this side of the ocean is red and it sizzles on every green leafy tree that it binds to. the way the city is black and the smoke as thick and old and suffocating as the ocean and yet it is forevermore beautiful.
sometimes
i wonder how life came to be.
i don't believe in the idea of soul. how each one of us has a "wavering flame" that burns inside that pulsating, copper-crusted organ that tries to rip through our chest's pulmonary muscle like moses through the red sea. the existence of death contradicts the "soul."
soul:
scientific ember of life, residue from the eruption of god.
our soul is nothing but cells multiplying inside. neurons transmitting an action potential that jolts us into being--breathes "life" into us--and blows up, spews little green spinach sparks all over the place and with this electricity gives us the ability to
be
alive.
when flecks of the universe collided in the black nowhere where nothing was and nobody existed, something ruptured like a split vein and somewhere life spilled out. 
burnt marshmallows that spray their pale pulp into the world like a mother giving birth. in spanish: dar a luz--bring, give to the light.
i'm scared. i'm frightened. there's nothing in me that burns and life is like a balloon that never stops swelling.
maybe i'll just burst one day.
it's like the universe that never stops expanding.
our universe.
have you ever thought where it could go?
where would all that empty space come from?
maybe,
we're just getting smaller
and smaller
and
freeing up some black space for the universe to edge into. 
once i wanted to be the greatest.
i woke up one morning and set out into a new life. this is the moment when the main character: springs out into the world like a freed fetus brought to life, with the inky blue sky pulsating like a great big heart that fills out the world and the sun streaming like rain down it.
i was trembling with the fearlessness of wanting to be the greatest. it wasn’t courage but rather a naive un-knowing, a greenness that opens up like a flower in your veins, squirting out venom. 
there i was: not knowing who i wanted to become, but knowing much, much more.
i had no vision of the future, only a vision of the present. i was the greatest, and still am to some degree; the only person whom i truly feel comfortable being, the only person whom i confide in incessantly, the only person whom i can totally, unapologetically relate to and rely on.
and the new life i set out into? it slowly weaved into the other lives i’ve led, and they had all become great.
great in the sense: complexity, so complex that they become simple.
and that’s life. that’s all life, yours and mine. 
greatest i did not become, i am not. there are many more great people out there—so many more that i have let my innermost pompous dreams corrode like a rock against an ocean of superiority.
but now i am here, the rain pumping furiously against the black outside, through it, a rough fusty coat pouring around me and with hair matted by cool shower water, the yellow light like a playful insect leaping around corners in my room, and i feel... great. 
i love sitting in the darkness.
it swallows you up. black and flowing, like a curtain that closes in all around you. but you can still run, still feel for miles all around you, as if you're standing blind in one of those midwestern great fields of grass that seems to expand every step you take. darkness is endless like that, and free.
infinite: you think your hand can reach its end, but it never will.
blue swirls of light slip into the darkness.
the light from the computer screen ebbs, licking wrinkled papers and the mugs and plates and the keyboard and my fingers typing endlessly.
outside the sky is purple, snowy purple like a liberal arts shirt tucked under someone's bed. wiry tree limbs seem to float upwards like balloons, almost rising towards the sky, roots like teeth flowing away from their gums. 
i'm encased in this darkness like a bug trapped by amber. darkness is an amber sun; it spreads, its rays flooding everywhere, ubiqutous and beautiful and dangerous.
i'm frightened that my life is becoming more futile than i would have ever imagined. we're all trapped in this life, going nowhere, and yet the entire world keeps telling us that we are going somewhere. we seek the prestige and comfort of big names when we can achieve happiness with the familiar. how long will it be until kids could sleep at night without worrying about the most insignificant of things?
some very melancholy nostalgia:
you rise in me like a sun. 
as night seeped into the crevices of the sidewalk, i stepped outside with my dog and traveled across meadows and concrete and long, black roads that blended into the infinite cavity of night. there was nothing to think about, nothing to know. music still wedged in time poured into my ears for the first time in a long time. i pulled on ginger and she resisted me and i pulled harder, and she finally gave. and i stumbled near a pole of light, stands on a yard in the corner of hampshire rd. and baker hill, that scaled across my eyes like a great big white sun floating in midair, and a huge white hole ripped open in my cornea and the blackness fell in and was trapped inside and all that was left was the writhing white bulb swelling all around me and then the night clasped in and.
how moving to new york changed my life?
"Am I angry about moving so much?
No--because these hardships, these infinite and infinitesmal moments of loneliness and melancholy and reminiscing and adapting to new, uncomfortable settings have shaped me in so many ways."
but they haven't, really.
and it's been a struggle, and a test. and now it's on the verge of being destroyed.
my parquet floor is littered with open newspapers. i remember in san diego i wish i had a parquet floor, and now i wish for a carpeted one. funny... i would imagine that the carpeted floor belongs here and the parquet in san diego, because of the climate and whatnot.
the truth is...
i don't know. 
and now that phrase seems so cliche. so disgustingly overblown and pretentious.
but... i really don't know.
and by now i imagine you're already turned off by this post and i bet that it's the afternoon and you were bored and you were thinking, "oh let's just see if there's another post."
i feel lost. tremendously lost. glad, but lost. unknowing. energized. lost.
i remember six years ago, thanksgiving. the autumn leaves in san jose. the apple tree. how the metal twisting playground things were cold in the morning. funny how in israel my parents never drove me from school and how weird it seemed in san jose and now looking back it's as if i've always been driven home from school.
america--as an immigrant, as a tourist. how beautiful. how bizarre. i remember standing there in gym class and suddenly a flock of great white geeze starts whipping above us, chirping. i gaze at them and as i look down the gym teacher stands there alone, smiling at me, and the entire class is already halfway across the track. those gray clouds, the way the clouds twisted in the sky--it all felt so strange, so novel.
music classes, the frog in the aquarium, filing into the classroom in the morning, the overhead projector. walking into the school, drawings, posters on the walls--and those overhead projectors in every classroom. 
listening to carpenters in the car.
...in san francisco....
the hills swaying in the fog. "This Masquerade"-Carpenters. golden gate bridge in the distance. walking next to the blue houses. you feel swallowed, and yet san francisco gives you this feeling--as if you're walking all alone down the street at twilight, or in the morning when the sun is still on the other side of the earth and the light wavers across the sky. and you're walking alone, on a lonely street corner, and the beach is next to you, and there's fog all around you, and there are lights and people on one side of you... and you feel so lonesome, and yet so comforted by the city, by the huge pyramid, by the iron-red bridge that swings across the ocean and yet is so solid, so protective...
and karen carpenter's voice.
i remember in our first winter, stopping at denny's on the way back from skiing. i wonder how--what i felt. who i was.
when you think about it, it's kind of sad--how you are so different today than you were when you were a child. 
from my trip to israel:
Six years
in america.
astonishing. oh what a way to celebrate: a week in israel.
how wonderful.
the trees outside are beautiful. yellow-leaved branches tracking over the fading white red-brick wall that stands in my backyard. the grass is coated with brown yellow leaves that glow golden in the sun.
but the skies are white.
if only you could have heard me sigh.
i bet you i have seasonal affective disorder. first off, it runs in my family; second off, this is the second year in a row that i feel dejected in during autumn.
it's terrible--the work, the isolation, the resentments. i am envious of everyone--for their intelligence, for their reputation, for their wit, for their charm... chances are, i envy you for something.
and it's so horrible. i don't know what.
sometimes i just sit there and i feel like somethings been swallowed inside of me and i'm scared to find out what it is, just utterly petrified, and i don't know what to do about it and i'm too scared to tell anyone else, especially someone who i like and cherish but have some kind of concealed resentment towards, jealousy, someone who i'm afraid might overpower me, threatens me. and i wish that this big black swallowed void inside erupts and gushes out rivers of lava and then i'd be liberated from its burden.
it's so hard. multitasking. so many things, and i'm--i feel like all of this is just swallowing me whole, all of this work and these aggravations. i can't wait till the end of the play. i can't wait for freedom, for those few months where i'll just--just be free.
i just want to stop a stranger and tell them to comfort me and just embrace me and tell me that that i'm the best thing.
i want to watch a movie, or something. something good. sit down and put my feet up and just be swallowed by a movie and just watch something for once, not do anything but watch and think, and be mindlessly broiled.
if only people recognized my talent. if only--if only i wouldn't be so pig-assed and egocentrist. if only i wouldn't admit to my errors. if only i didn't have any errors to admit to.
when i wake up at 6 in the morning for swim i don't think. it's like i'm an engine, something that runs and does but never--never thinks, never achieves.
i'm paranoid. i think people are after me. teachers hate me because i'm better than someone else who they like more. or that's what i think. i hate it when i read my own essay and i read someone else's essay and realize that my essay is better but still recieved a lower score than the other person's essay. maybe after reading my essay, the teachers inaugurates a new set of criteria so as to reduce my grade into the shriveling mass of shit that it really doesn't deserve to be.
and sometimes, i think that i'm stupid. and that i know nothing. and that however hard i may try, i fail.
and sometimes, i don't even know why
why
...
