A bright palette
whose colours I cannot touch
so I make believe I am colourblind

(a robot claws itself)

the slant of light

misses me,
I never caught your eye.

Clouds engulf me in acceptance.
Dismember me; one hope at a time
and rain, yes
into crevices
fit me where I belong

- justification for weeds sprouting for concrete

***

Wrote that during gp
With eyes watering from ___
i know i am out of the equation (too mathetical an expression, really. I hate to admit it but I embody the stereotype of arts ppl sucking at maths; i put us to shame)

like it when she goes through essay qns
cos she doesn't expect any input from us
and i can stone (look at the sparkling leaves) and glance back only at the transparency only when she looks up.
minimal attention :)

The island's name was applied to gay women in acknowledgement of the female poet Sappho, of Lesbos, who wrote love poems about both women and men in about 600 BC. - "Lesbos locals lose lesbian appeal", BBC

***



The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.


This poem is so good, it made me tear up
personal significance, i guess
though i dno what it means to live in the layers

8. The “Golden Rule” is flawed

Everyone knows the golden rule, do to others what you would have done to you. While this obviously has good intentions, it doesn’t work in all situations. Particularly, in relationships. If you do to your partner what you would have done to you, you’ll probably annoy them, piss them off and leave them feeling neglected. Real meaningful relationships are built on trust and interdependency.

If you really care about someone, you’ll do everything you can to find out how they would like to be treated.- 10 Counterintuitive Ways to Improve Your Life

Love how this person materialised what was vaguely nagging at me, but hate how he/she got there before me.

***

the apparently anodyne numbers like Barney The Dinosaur singing I Love You and the Miaow Mix advert theme are chosen as "futility music" - noise which will rapidly become unbearable when looped...
the aim of these techniques is to "destabilise and disorient the suspect in a way that doesn't physically harm the organism. It's not like hearing a Bach symphony, where you can flow along with the music. The idea is to have no variation: the same sounds over and over again."...
"Music is used to make the detainee aware that he has no control over what's going on in any of his senses. Deprivation of normal sensory stimulation and lack of control over one's environment is a disempowerment that eventually dehumanises people."- Torture chamber music

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

by Denise Levertov, from Sands of the Well

love how i can relate to this, the privilege of others' trust

***

After three decades of painstaking research, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck believes that the answer to the puzzle lies in how people think about intelligence and talent. Those who believe they were born with all the smarts and gifts they’re ever going to have approach life with what she calls a “fixed mind-set.” Those who believe that their own abilities can expand over time, however, live with a “growth mind-set.”

***

To him is denied the soft bewilderment of dusk
- MAN IN A LIGHTED ROOM AT SUNDOWN by Jay Leeming

Since then, Death Cab has become one of those weird cultural fenceposts—people align their tastes on one side or the other. It’s weird when people come up to me, music people, snobby, critical kind of people. It’s almost like they’re confessing to me that they like my band: “I gotta tell ya, I really, really like that new record. I heard the first record, and I kinda thought that was OK, and I kinda tuned out. But your band is really a lot better than people give it credit for.”

Sean Nelson said it best: “No one likes what I like, that’s how I like it.” It’s as though people think, “I’m such an individual that I like things that nobody’s even heard of before. I went out of my way to find music and books and movies that are so obscure that I am an individual, and I am interesting because I like interesting things.” But that’s not true. Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.
(emphasis mine)
- an essay Ben Gibbard wrote

***

我脆弱得可憎
含羞草般敏感
猪笼草般阴险，
般饥饿。
我和猪笼草结伴
我们寂寞所以
将你吞没。

(q apt for a recent incident, but i'm only making a fuss out of nth)

Learnt a new word, that is, mondegreen.
It refers to mishearing spoken or sung words, such that for you the words acquire a new meaning.
Just like how I heard 'worthy for justice once' instead of 'wealthy for just this once' on the new year by death cab (yes, i pretty much don't listen to anything else)

Distilled emptiness
Frustration rushing up like steam from an angry kettle

Wine-red stage curtains swaying imperceptibly
like optical illusion
like vertical red blood cells
like still-life waterfalls,
trampling on emerald-green 'weeds'
becoming unseen like the flat grey sky.

Inadequacy
Wear it against your heart
Let it gnaw at your esteem

Rain will come
Into the soil
where my soul rests.

***

2nd verse marks my day-dreaming during econs lec and my walking over grass for maths after that. I deliberately walked into those thorny plants just to get my hand pricked by one of the branches (to feel alive?)
before maths started, i asked ain, what counts as weed, is it when it's unwanted?

***