novel terrain, perhaps

48

I’ve been struggling to write something, anything, the past few days. This blog is a writing exercise and perhaps it needs to take a different direction. It’s already extrapolation and though an integral part of its premise is honesty, brutal if it must be, I am not particularly devoted to its being a truthful representation (of what?). I say things as they come and sometimes the real world interferes and the odd friend who reads this might ask me something about it. Sometimes, there’s something concrete to say but often I’m a bit surprised at how literally things I say are taken. I’m surprised because sometimes I catch fleeting thoughts that would be soon forgotten if I didn’t note them. I do note them. But I make no claim as to ownership. I don’t even know if I’m the author of my thoughts let alone whether I own them.

But I’ve been living in silence lately. I don’t know how to explain this. I’ve been very comfrortable outsied language and I haven’t figured out how to take that and put it in language. Greater minds have tried, Wittgenstein, Lao Tze, and I guess poets also try all the time. Myself, I’m not sure even how to lay out the beginning and end of words and not even sure this is the proper terrain. Yet, this is what I’d like to be able to talk about.

flirt

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Great novelists start with banal premises such as: he touched her shoulder and she smiled, a little bit too quickly, and thought that maybe he was interested in her afterall. Then, they do interesting things with banality and I’m always amazed. People like Kingsley Amis and Charles Bukowski, to name two, who can take you through thought processes honestly and bluntly and there’s the rub, poetically. For me, thoughts fly by and I catch them sometimes and scrutinise them and I’ve been horny lately in a strange way and this has produced interesting thoughts. Not so much interested in sex, but rather in performing post-mortem examinations on attractions. I’ve always been good at telling who’s attracted to me though far from omniscient. I get confused when the attraction is reciprocal because I start doubting myself. At some point, I realise and then I examine. I realised maybe more than a year later that my friend __ was attracted to me. It hadn’t occurred to me. Probably because at the time I was depressed and beginning a dysfunctional relationship with someone else. And now, I find myself kind of attracted to some people and for the strangest reasons. I had a sex dream about one and it was quite nice and he was drunkenly talking to me last Sunday and I felt I called him to me because I did and I did give him my number when he asked for it but I thought: he has the guts to ask and this should be rewarded. Behind that thought was someone else that I should have the guts to approach but I’m cowardly about these things. When I don’t care too much I’m upfront and charming in my honesty. And thinking I must leave past commitments behind because I need to emotionally follow through with the current state of the universe, I’ve started attracting males again as single females tend to do eventually. So this ramble really is meant for me to tell myself to simply have the guts to flirt.

listen

46

Small things, slow building of relationships. The pace is patient. I’ve been cultivating one to one relationships and my goal in all of them is to give the other space to speak and express themselves with me actively listening. I’m trying to become a better person. Always. But I’m actively pursuing it this year whereas the year before that I was more actively involved in healing myself. I’ve learned that people are more important than ideas. (Thank you thank you depression.) Listening is a pleasure and I’m learning something that I never really believed in the past: everyone is interesting.

home iff routine (?)

45

Home might be a set of routines.
Getting somewhere via specific routes. A coffee shop you go to read. Shared experiences creating a sense of community.
Perhaps Dalian hadn’t felt like home because it took me longer to establish routines.
Or perhaps, and this is a different proposition, Dalian feels like more like home now because I’ve established some routines (which I’m already breaking, sometimes).
Swimming in the sea on Monday and Friday. (Today, we struck gold by way of a combination of favourable weather and a sensible swimming timeframe so we could actually feel our fingers and toes on exit.) Belly dancing. (Sway, dance and learn how to control your body.) Saturday night dinner with E. a sixty-something woman who decided to leave her husband behind a few years ago to travel the world, wow. (Routine firmly established and centred around the very female ways of talking and listening to each other.) Sunday lunch. Sunday night quiz. I’m making my world a familiar place again.

when lost, I pray

44

I believe in prayer. Not to a god of organised religion but to something, somehow, which works. After having physically experienced the otherworldly I’ve come to believe. I pray because somehow my thoughts affect matter. As your thoughts do too. Be it through subtle changes in your behaviour or mine, it works. Things get done. And so I pray for her and her family as they embark in new adventures. I pray for the best outcome possible because I’m not in a position to make it more specific. My thoughts are with them.

in bed, alone, with book

43

I woke up today and decided I wasn’t going to see anyone. I wasn’t going to go belly dancing. I wasn’t going to go swimming in the sea. I was going to be alone. I did this because I need days alone and they’re hard to come by lately. I stayed in bed and read my book for a couple of hours. Kingsley Amis’ “Lucky Jim”, because I need a break from SF and also because it’s an actual book and not a digital copy and much as I love and appreciate my Sony Reader and its great readable screen I’ve missed the experience of reading from a physical book. It smells like a second-hand book should and it has a history. Some student was studying this for English Literature A-level or something and it’s underlined, predictably. It took me back to school when I was underlining books looking for themes to delineate some line of argument the teacher already decided we should make. Or themes. Evidence. Characters. I turn to page 41 to find: “fair hair, straight and cut short, with brown eyes and no lipstick” moving on to: “The sight of her seemed an irresistable attack on his own habits, standards, and ambitions. Something designed to put him in his place for good.” And so on and so forth.
I decided to make my own mark on the book even though I’ve borrowed it and I didn’t ask for permission. I thought, and I think rightly I thought this, that the book’s owner would appreciate the thought. The book has a story so I wrote that the book found its way to Dalian, China adding the date. Horrible handwriting, predictably.

dog, boy, smile

42

I met a girl last week when I was covering a class for a colleague. On our way out we chatted and she told me, “you like a quiet life, don’t you?” and I said “yes” and I think it’s true. What makes my life exciting to me is not loud and so sometimes I find it hard to put in language (make noise). Sometimes I am ovewhelmed and I tell people about this amazing spider web I saw. And sometimes I wish I’d find the medium to express to others the joy of everyday events such as walking down the street, stopping to pet a dog and meeting the dog’s owner, a three year old boy who instantly smiled (pure) and started babbling on in Chinese. This incident filled me with joy and such things in my life always do and I don’t often need to tell but this time I did — I wanted to tell someone about this boy and his dog and the boy’s smile and his genuine and pure interaction so I’m telling you.