A Diary Entry from Nov 12, 01:26, Monday Midnight

Hi. I stumbled across a girl’s picture on my Facebook newsfeed and I commenced my stalking (standard) for the next God-knows-how-long. She’s just a girl I met in an art class in high school...we probably wouldn’t say hi if we saw each other on the street, but I guess that wouldn’t happen anytime remotely soon since she’s in Australia, babysitting, and is liking it there so much that she has extended her trip to 2 years (so it says on Facebook). 

Babysitting for fuck’s sake. And here I am, taking a “break”, which is more like my way of excusing myself from working (cramming) anymore for my essay due on Tuesday about pornography and condoms. Looking at her pictures—gorgeous person, gorgeous country, gorgeous weather—it writes youth all over her timeline. 

Somehow the first question that popped into my mind was, how long is my youth going to last? The second question that followed, just how important is post-secondary education? 

I know the latter is a question I already have a very decided and mature answer for, but why did I still ask myself then? 

Her photos made me think of the photos that were taken last year in Germany, either by me or of me. I looked probably just as youthful, if not even happier. When do I get to do that again? Why is it that I’m not doing it now? Why is it not something like a job, which we slave away but are only preparing for, that I can pursue 24-7? In a city, a country where I find beauty in its land, where the weather no longer even affects my mood, because physically being there is enough to form the foundation of my happiness. I think this might be how Hemingway, Stein, and all those American artists and intellects felt when they all decided to move to Paris in the 1920’s. 

Youth is too short. Youth is what forms and shapes life, because youth means mistakes and experiences, and youth must mean happiness, more or less. So what exactly am I doing here? When I read that she is being a nanny in Australia, I thought immediately of her future—a nanny as a career? But what the hell, why do I assume that because she is spending her beautiful years in Australia, taking care of more beautiful things, she’s only good enough to be doing the same thing twenty, thirty years down the road? Why are we wired to think so far ahead? What about now? We don’t ever make plans for life because “life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans” (pardon the cliché). Why don’t we make more proximal plans for life—proximal happiness, instant gratification, like having a photograph taken of me standing by the ocean, with the Sydney Opera House in the background under a clear, blue sky? Why is “life” always something in the future, where we are supposedly paving a way for? 

I know when I wake up in the morning tomorrow, I will continue working on my essay, and I’m going to continue university on Tuesday, with the logical and coherent answer of the importance of education and how it acts as an investment in what we call the space and time we live in as “life”. Are these current thoughts, then, a momentary weakness? Or a form of epiphanic realization, or some sort of revolution in my so-called plan, possibly changing my so-called future life? Maybe I can apply the same technique I use in determining if I should make a purchase or not on this dilemma: if I’m still thinking about that skirt after a few days of seeing it for the first time, then I will buy it. Similarly, if these thoughts about pursuing and holding onto youth, making use out of it in a way that deems to be the most youthful, the happiest, and the most satisfying persist after a few weeks (in this more serious case), then I’ll pack my bags and run and hide and giggle and live happily and no one will be able to tell me otherwise. What do you think? 

Why not question reality, actually?

The most vivid memories one has are usually remembered because they are the most vital experiences engorged with the “realest” feelings. However, memories fade with time—rotten, in fact, over time if not relived. Sometimes these blurred memories may even allow the thinker to doubt, if skeptical enough, the realness of these memories, moreover, the activities engaged in the memories. How can one persist to feel real about the memories when they become so abstract and dreamlike, which consequently brings in the following question of, how shall one remain faithful to these feelings and experiences that once felt real, in the forsaken form of decayed memories? 

What is the reason not to be so skeptical of the epistemology of the events that our memories carry? You could be dreaming this very moment and you wouldn’t even be able to know it. Something can easily be remembered as realistic events when it has never happened, and episodes of reality often occur without one’s awareness, thought-process, thus not to even expect it to make its way to the hippocampus. Reality happens in our everyday’s business and when we are asleep... or does it? Until time machine is invented, how is one able to prove the happening of something, realistically? You just can’t. 

Amnesia is a real thing. People lose memories; sometimes of proximal knowledge, sometimes—eventually for some—everything. Names, identities, moments, achievements, knowledge, meanings... How are those surrounding the forgetters supposed to define what’s real? What is real to the forgetters, then? Because for all they know, the achievements and families that they are informed to have built certainly don’t exist. “Nope, never even heard of it.”

So why is philosophy of epistemology regarded as silly and pointless by some people? Have they not once felt real and more sure than ever about something and then losing that grip of sureness? Does it actually mean anything to be certain about something? Maybe, at the moment. When people make vows, promises, oaths, and all these words to describe the gesture of guaranteeing something, either about the past or the future, they still swear by the moment. Forever perhaps only lives in the moment, when the very word is said, or when one is completely and entirely sure about what they are feeling—when they are feeling the realest feelings.  

Space

Space — liminal, imaginary, abandoned, abstract, locative, in-between, nominal, temporal...

Where do you want to be at this very moment? 

I want to go back to that morning when we stepped outside of the electro club at 8 30 in the morning. My hearing, as if shifted gear, as if I changed the radio station, was like separated from the sound of the open-air by something... maybe something like a pair of headphones, or a piece of plastic, that I could almost hear the sound of the space — the space on the streets of Berlin on a spring morning. 

I was not sure if I felt tired, though we stayed up the entire night dancing. I actually don’t remember the dancing part, specifically, but the memory of my self physically being there is clear in my mind. 

We walked in silence, and I pointed out that we were walking in silence, then you said, “it’s like what they say in that movie: that’s when you truly feel comfortable.”

Yes, “when you can just shut the fuck up and enjoy the silence together.”

Whenever I am up early in the morning and am in good company, I always feel like I have entire freedom to do whatever the hell I want, for the rest of the day. That feeling is so incredibly exciting and has so much anticipation to it. It’s like you have all the time in the world. 

I also want to linger in that moment when I imprinted the images into my memory. Images of you sitting in the train, looking out and in thoughts; or when you met me at the train station with your headphones on. You saw me and you smiled. 

I want to be in my small dormitory room again, not in the state when I moved out — blank, just blank — but when photographs of my friends are on the wall, my papers all over the table, light dimly lit, pile of clothes on the chair, bed undone. I would lean out the open window, and light a cigarette. I remember the time when I thought I was exhaling bits of my soul out the window along with the smoke into blue-blackness, because I thought the concept of love was completely and finally crushed for me. It was done. It was over; no more loving and I couldn’t physically imagine being so weak again. There was no more of me to afford. 

But where am I at the moment? 

I am in so many different places. So many. Every hour I feel like I am in at least two different types of space simultaneously. I am walking around in a multicultural city with a so-called “hybrid” identity, where there is a front of interstices, but it is just a front. So much energy poured out into fronting in this country.

I am in silence at home when words should be exchanged, but they just cannot be uttered out. There is just nothing to say, or is there? My mother said, “sometimes it just feels so pathetic eh? There’s nothing to say to each other in the family.” 

I am taking bits of my time out to live the past in the present. 

I am, however, also in a place where I am constantly looking for change. I don’t want changes to stop occurring, otherwise I’d feel stale. 

I am busy, but I don’t seem to be working all the time. I have no time, but I do. 

People often say, oh how I wish to be two places at a time right now. They probably are, just don’t realize how damn confusing it is.