hiroshima mon amour

in the coming weeks, i'm teaching both the screenplay (by marguerite duras) and the film (by alain resnais) - the film easily falls into my top-5 list. there's nothing quite beautifully filmed, written, and all interwoven in a haunting love story that finds its very force in its eventual unraveling. it had to unravel for it to ever be "an impossible love." but i'm horribly biased. about the film, resnais said, "what has to be filmed is the impossibility of filming it," that somehow you could only "suggest the horror" behind the atrocities of wwii and the hiroshima/nagasaki a-bombings as the moment its reality materialized on screen, it somehow lost its horror. echoing what okada's character says, "[il] me donne un grand désir d'aimer."

dreaming of dead babies...

...two nights in a row! the first, i killed by drowning it in a profound rain puddle from the night before...and the second i witnessed being killed by some enraged, faceless man who hurled it against a bathtub/or across the bathroom (i can't remember quite exactly).

what do dead babies in dreams signify? a google search suggested that they represent some part of me that's forever lost or in lieu of dying...another interpretation points to a personal regression - that somehow, in my abandonment of responsibilities and rationale and all those other r-words, i'm being infantilized. hm. the dweller of le treizieme etage believes both and neither.

surprises...

...a week full of them, actually. friends from england (whom i met while in peru) were in town: ellie + tom. and so, i spent most of the weekend in a drunken stupor. manuel munoz also entered my life - began reading his short story collection, "zigzagger," and it's just beautifully written. munoz certainly possesses that rare quality of moving his reader - i've been left breathless after a few stories, struck by the kind of painful pang that fills your body with a familiarity that you're not quite sure from where it originates. teaching - i've got 18 students and so far, they seem as a collective, quite lively, intelligent, and curious. i'm beyond excited to get to know them + see where they're headed with their respective research interests. it's just a bit intimidating, i must say, knowing that they're eating up your words, that there's a kind of responsbility i'm supposed to assume over their education.

architeuthis dux...

...otherwise known as the giant squid. i spent my saturday night watching a documentary on the discovery channel detailing the search for this ever-elusive octopod. perfectly content to do so, too - i've always had this freakish fascination with the underwater, alien world that's existed before us + continues to carry on as it always has, no matter how much we land inhabitants spin out further advances in science, technology, culture, and all like markers of a progressive society. i like the idea that the giant squid, the beluga whale, the great white, the portuguese man-of-war, the seahorse don't really care for us at all. all our years of impressive history shrink to trivial dimensions. to them it doesn't matter who we are or what we've done - just that we've come and gone without irreversibly disrupting the balance of their liquid universe that answers only to the magnetic affection of the moon. respect the giant squid - what a weird, weird creature with its oddly phallic shape, sprawling tentacles like medusa's hair and luminous round eyes shining as glowing saucers drifting in space.

took me a while...

...but i finally trudged through sartre's nausea. not that it was difficult to finish, just a bit on the depressing side. i guess my thoughts aren't as original as i hoped they would be. just mere reverberations of the questions that have plagued human existence from the inception of time. i exist but why? for what good? i see my hand. i feel it as it types upon these keys. brain and fingers are somehow intricately wired beyond the physical realm. yet my hand, my typing, these thoughts do not validate why my chest heaves with a fullness of breath that is transient, is lost in the moment between now. and then.

i heart seattle

i returned from the sexy city this morning after a red-eye flight. the past 4 days exuded rain-kissed bliss, seeing one of my dearest friends, zahra, whom i met/taught with during my short-lived stint as a college counselor in nyc. she's a rarity - after all, there aren't many people i can tolerate for extended stretches of time, nevertheless collectively exterminate any waking sense of time at some neighborhood coffeeshop, pen or book poised in hand. no, i didn't get to climb the space needle, probably as i didn't really have any burning desire to do so. but i did get to have a personal walk-through of 3 branches of the seattle public library (the downtown one's brilliantly posh and modern with shocks of red + neon green at various turns), meet genuinely friendly people that reflected back to me the own inner self-absorbed ice queen i've become, watch bonjour tristesse at a place marked outside by a sole sign reading "cinema," and in the pitch-black at some state park, carkeek i think, sip wine out of valentines-day paper cups on a walkway hovering above the train tracks right by the shoreline.

something unlocked inside of me...

...as i stood in the shower with the lights off, and the water was relentless. i couldn't remember where i was or why i felt the need to feel the water against my skin. it must have been that last date, where the crystallized weight of my delusions collapsed upon me all at once, and i could see what a basketcase i had become. i remember it so vaguely, which means i remember it not at all. certain details are always exaggerated, or tempered, or shall we say, tampered with. histories of that kind always tend to be subject to sabotage. so i have already claimed that something unlocked inside of me and it was this: the top row of my teeth had all of a sudden dropped to my tongue as a denture of sorts in perfect symmetry. i soon discovered, as i picked up my teeth, that they were attached to my upper gums and when i pulled them, making them level with my eyes, i could keep pulling. and so i pulled and pulled until everything pink and red and all shades on that end of the color spectrum lay piled at my feet in one bleeding mess. my entrails filled the tub up to my knees and the water could no longer drain but began climbing over the tub's edge and onto the tiles. i stewed in my own mess of insides, unsure of what to do. already i tried swallowing the furthest end of the trail. going the other way was an impossibility as my teeth were still attached. i waded my way out of the tub over to the clouded mirror, leaving a trail of scarlet footprints behind me, and when i looked at my reflection, clearing the steam with the back of my hand, i saw for once how old and ugly and empty i was. i looked like the spitting image of an aged salieri from amadeus. my skin had shriveled up, sucked into some invisible blackhole existing beneath the surface, and my scraggly hair writhed like worms over the many bald patches that afflicted my head. and i smiled gums. all gums. opened my mouth into darkness that cast an expanding shadow over the mirror, the bathroom, and all the rest of the house.

then i awoke, paralyzed in the firm grip of my dream. i felt like i hadn't used my muscles in years. i'm afraid to open my eyes, and forget these overnight images even though they exude horror from another world, in fact they are the horror.