mental: crazy or intelligent?

last year on valentine's day, i wrote a long impassioned rant about how much i hate the holiday, and why it's terrible, hallmarky, and causes people loads of unnecessary grief.
i must confess i still feel basically the same way, even though romantically speaking, i am definitely on the up side of things. however, i suppose an opportunity to be kind to one another is not to be missed, and i will take that for what it is, essentially unimportant, but possibly fun. not worth a lot of mental preoccupation.

so what have i been thinking about lately? art and politics.
i study english literature, and i love it. i really do. and my specialty is the renaissance. in other words, dead white guys.
i admire the classics from the depths of my heart, and i believe that survival over centuries is a fairly good sign of great art. although i don't think art is necessarily limited to the survivers, for example think of Christopher Marlowe and his plays. Barely anyone reads him anymore, and yet his plays were possibly even greater than Shakespeare's...but i digress.

anyway, i thought i'd spice up my semester some by taking a class on James Baldwin, Gwendolen Brooks, and Amiri Baraka....Gotta get out of the rennaisance some time, I suppose...and it's been hitting me with even greater force these days. What am I doing?

politics might not inspire great art always, but great art cannot exist independently of it. we are people, and we live in world that needs reform and constant improvement. it needs the contributions of everybody, and we can't afford to throw that away, can we?

i'm mainly studying things that have no significance. i don't really feel i'm making a contribution. i'm not saying that i think i should ditch it all, and devote my life to the socialist movement (that's already been done by one of my very dearest friends, and we don't want to get repetitious, now do we?) but i really feel that i must do something.
something important.

i'm not going to give my dusty academia...at least not till i find something better to replace it. and i couldn't give it up anyway, it means too much to me personally. but i've got to do something....

anyway the wind blows...

the chimes played Bohemian Rhapsody a few days ago.
i thought i was hearing things at first, but no, they really did.
i was late to one of my classes because i was just standing there singing along.
i remember when i discovered freddie mercury, in 6th grade...by the good offices of the lovely ladies
sykii and prosicated


remembering the lyrics of the song, i realised how much the song seems to be about getting AIDS. ::sigh::
i wonder if i still would have liked Queen if i had known that freddie was a)indian like me and b) a total bigot.

question: does anyone know if the wind is named after the direction it blows from, or the direction it blows to? like does the west wind originate in the east or the west?

certain not-so-truths

i was just thinking how much i hate the fact that when you're young people tell you certain things that they say are true. without any exceptions. and usually you believe them, because you're young, and they sound so definite, and why would they lie anyway? especially for what seems like no reason at all.

for example, like the way they tell you in math class that you cannot, under no circumstances divide by zero. in fact if you're solving a problem, and it turns out that you're dividing by zero, you're supposed to know that you got the damn thing completely wrong. and then you get older, and if you're real lucky, you end up in calculus...where it turns out that the whole damn class is just about what happens when you divide by zero. what the hell? couldn't they just have told you that it was a special circumstance, and that you'd learn about it later? do they really think we're that dumb? not to mention how much harder it is to adjust your thinking later in life.

what brought this on? i was thinking about orange juice, and fruits, and how they're supposed to be all good for you and stuff. and how betrayed i felt when i found out that they are both fattening, and not always healthy. in fact if i've got a hangover OJ always makes me puke.

it just seems unfair. how come no one told me?

where were you when...

i wish every day that i could have been with my city when it was broken. i wished i could have been at union square, when the peace vigils took place, when new york was at its most wounded, and at its greatest. i wish this selfishly, because i know that i couldn't have done anything to help. but also because i feel foolish feeling that it was an important, earth shaking event in my life since i wasn't even there.

and also because i always have this fear, each time i lie awake next to someone i love, letting my hands play gently over the patterns in their skin. i am always afraid that this will be the last time. that the moment will never live again, and the memory will be a paltry painful shade.

i read this, and i didn't know what to say. i can imagine it only too well.
http://salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/02/14/wtc_valentine/index.html