Posts Tagged ‘writing’

Back to the Beginning

Monday, September 14th, 2015

 I want to begin again.

I know I have been gone a long time now but I miss this. I miss the feeling of my fingertips pressed against keys or pushing my pencil to the barren page. I miss having a place to put my words, a place to rest my weary head stirring with mercilessly jumbled thoughts. I miss knowing that I am doing exactly what I was put on this world to do. I have found myself purposeless these last few months, maybe even the last few years of my life and I am the only one to blame.

Thousands of excuses, busy days, hectic life, reorganized priorities, and a ceaselessly transforming sense of self have created a convoluted conundrum that I have self-titled ME. Here I stand six years after I began this blog and I am ashamed of how little I have written. Over the last four years I have found many new titles for myself: UC Berkeley Student, English Major, Jew, Christian, Proud Nerd, Tutor, Employee, World Traveler, Rome Resident, Slackliner, Rugby Player, Slam Poet, Academic Honoree, and finally, UC Berkeley Graduate.

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There are two titles that once meant the world to me that seem to have dropped from this list: Writer and Photographer. While yes, I have done both of these things over the past four years, I set them aside to see what other molds I could occupy, other worlds I could be a part of and inhabit for even a short amount of time. Those two words, writer and photographer, were my entire world and I never thought I could do or be anything else.I have found out two things over these last four years: I was both very wrong and incredibly correct. I have been a so many different things, but I don’t want to be anything else.

My friends who also graduated have been asking themselves and people have been asking me How have I changed in the last four years in college? I have heard a variety of responses; most respond that they have changed radically in unbelievable and unpredictable ways.   Others mildly agree that they have changed, but not necessarily in a world shattering manner that leaves them aghast at how incredibly different they are now than the young freshmen walking under Sather Gate for the first time. I have pitted myself against this question several times and battled with the memories of who I was and who I am now. I have come up with a response that surprised myself: I have not changed at all.

This is not to say that I have not tried new things or had experiences that altered the way I view the world. What I mean by this is that I started at point A of myself, entered college and departed from point A into a million different directions and digressions that led me to very strange and unfamiliar places, which have radically affected me. However, in all of these different circles and loops off of the trajectory I had envisioned when I graduated high school, I have found that the root, the core of what made me me never changed. So, in saying that I have not changed at all, I am not declaring this a negative lack of progression or growth in character. Instead, in discovering this, I have also relearned how much those two titles meant to me because they were absent from my life for so long. I would never take back the things I tried, the hobbies I took up, and the adventures I had into the vast unknown world full of different opportunities, but I did lose an important part of myself as a result.

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I was lost in the craze of a thousand possibilities and the path that had always been so clear to me before was obscured. Like Dante, “Midway upon the journey of our life/ I found myself in a dark wood,/ For the straightforward pathway had been lost” (Canto 1, Inferno). Except I, unlike Dante, had no Virgil to guide me through the perils. But if there is one thing that I have discovered in my wanderings, it is that being lost is the best way to find yourself. Being lost is not necessarily a bad thing; for me, it did mean losing sight of the things that were most important to me, but if I had not put those pursuits on the shelf for as long as I did, I never would have known just how much I needed and loved them. It was only when I found myself lost and without my purpose that I was able to understand just how essential writing was to my entire existence. Writing and digital storytelling through my photography truly is my purpose above all else in the world, without it I am not really me. This is what I have found.

So here I stand, wholly changed, yet exactly the same and ready to begin again.

Welcome back to my strange little world; walk with me, talk with me, cry with me, and learn how to live again with me on this unexpected journey. I am ready to claw my way back to the roots of my being and strip away the atrophied muscles of my mind in order to find the words that have been buzzing in my brain, dormant but living, for the last four years. Join me.

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Ravenous Reading (A Tear for Poetry)

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

I always cry when I read poetry.
Oh, you must read very sad poems then.
No, I just forget to blink or maybe I am afraid-
In case a word slips away like a ship into the sunset
That can never be returned if lost at sea,
Or a love note burned so that it will never be seen.

You see poetry is elusive,
And we must keep a wary eye upon it at all times.
This watchful gaze cannot be pried from the page-
Just incase a word tries to escape,
Like a fox willing to bite off its foot for freedom
You see, I am diligent in my reading, like a hunter in wait.

My eyes water as they scan each new line,
Consuming each string of words
Like a wolf with a hunger that doesn’t die
Maw agape and body ready to be filled;
You see I have a mind that hungers
Like a wolf’s stomach that howls for more.

So those tears are not courted from sadness,
But ravenous hunger that twists my smile
Into a lip licking sneer of a grin
As the words on the page
Fill the spaces behind my retinas,
Like bones stuck in barred teeth.

Later they will come forth like a parade
Of parables to march before my mind;
This funeral procession of devoured words
Streams down my eyes like cold winter rain
After my eyes and mind have been full to the brim
And can hold them inside any more.

These tears roll down my cheeks like inevitably overflowing
Rain gutters, filled with words to heavy to remain confined
By the constrains of the brain I tried to devise;
So they drip from my eyes to the page again
These black inky puddles, the mistaken inkblots
Of a clumsy uncultured hand holding a calligraphy pen.

Taking from the stains of liquid reinvention,
This taint becomes the blood from which we begin again.
Dip the pen and scratch the etchings of new lines,
Stringing words along only to be re-devoured
By the next pair of ravenous eyes
Only to be written again by craving hands.

You see my eyes are burning again,
Starving for the page, striving for the game
The rumble of empty minds has shaken the foundation of me
These tears are not for the poetry, but the loss
Of who I used to be
Before the words on the page became all I could see.

Now the tears have blurred my vision,
And the poetry has become blindness to me
Now all the words escape and the cascade of poetry
From me has stained the page making an illegible craze;
My attempt at diligence has lost me the essence
Of the words I clung so desperately to.

Maybe I should read some sad poetry,
Have a good cry,
And cleanse the old from my body,
Not fear the final loss of words,
As the funeral procession proceeds without me
Maybe when I am left behind, I can finally begin.

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Poetry

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

I was trying to describe you to someone
But they couldn’t understand
They think you’re odd and strange at times
But I think you’re as close to perfect as god would allow
They don’t understand how I can love you
Because the melancholy print you leave behind
Is like a bruise a scar that has marred my mind
They tell me it is one sided
But they could never understand
I do not need to hear your words
Echoing off the back of my skull
I do not need to feel the touch of your fingers when I feel alone
There is a name for our love
And it is called
Poetry

The beat to the dance we have in our hearts
As each line is stamped into our minds
A beat is skipped but it never stops
This tug of war between our hearts
The feeling we get as the words rush forth
There is no spoken word to be found
That can capture this love and hold it down
We have a love that does not need to spoken
Does not need to be felt or else it will be broken
This symmetry, this geometry is the only thing
That god ever intended for me

So how can they understand this love we have
This odd relationship between a pen and a hand
You whisper to me as I sleep at night
I write to you with my heart in my pen
Though we will never meet in person
I will chase your shadow until the day I die
You are my muse, my inspiration
The light in the sky
I do not expect understanding or even recognition
I just need to feel the presence of your shadow
As long as I know this candle still burns
There will always be a note waiting in the morning
For your expected return

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Posted in Poetry |

Words Within

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Can you see me between the lines of this poem
Peaking out behind the imposing columns
Of the words that I have created
Yet which are slowly uncreating me.

Can you find me in the contours of every word
Molding my body to shape of the letters
That makes up my very essence, my very soul
They are my children that have one by one left me.

Can you search for me when I am lost in this forest of words
When they consume me and leave me for dead
Will you be there waiting to help pick up the ruin of who I have become
Or will I be left alone with the whispers of the words begging to be born.

Can you distinguish the person who I used to be
From the creature that the words have made into me
I am afraid of the darkness that hides within the words
Lurking in the shadows of every line I write. It is watching me.

Can you read the words imprinted on my heart
That left burning scores tattooed in my skin
As I tore the words from my body
And lay them down as a sacrifice to you.

Can you understand the agony I have suffered
From you merciless gods who pick at these words
That are pieces of my being and lay them to ruinous waste
Leaving me in tatters only to rise again to create.

Can you believe me when I say this is my purpose
This is the reason I live and breath
The words that I breathe life into
Breathe life back into me.

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NaNoWriMo

Monday, November 30th, 2009


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This year I found out about NaNoWriMo which is National Novel Writing Month, where writers try to hit a word goal for a novel they are trying to write in  month. Sadly I found this program halfway into the month so I wasn’t able to really truly do as well as I wanted but I still hit my word goal so technically I won but I definitely do not have a novel. So here it is, my award….. I guess.

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Posted in Uncategorized |

Double Spaced

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

I was just thinking about something, in school teachers always want students to have everything double spaced because it is MLA format. I don’t understand that. I mean maybe it makes it easier to look at and mark up but all it does is make it easier for students to have their work look twice as long as it actually is.

I think it is bad to do things double spaced because when will you ever really do that in life? I mean you don’t see books double spaced unless they are for two year olds. Your boss isn’t going to ask for a double spaced paper or resume.

So why? It really just feels like a shortcut for people who can’t write large quantities of work. For people like me it is actually a gigantic pain because I do write an appropriate amount, but when converted into double spaced format it makes it way too long.

Yes I understand that it is used as a universal format so everything is done the same way, but really can’t we make it reasonable. No double spaced, it is just a space filler. Give me real content, that is what people should really be looking for in papers, not length.

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