annathepanda123

Reality doesn’t give us all the answers. It leaves us with blanks that we still need to fill in. And in absence of certainty, we fill those blanks with fiction. And those fictions are necessary because human nature doesn’t allow us to leave spaces empty. Now suppose time was continuous, not just some convincing illusion of continuity—the real deal kind of continuous: past, present, and future, each in a little box, each an isolated incident. Meaning, to be in the present, one must not have any cognizance or recognition of the future or past. To be in the past, one must not have any cognizance or recognition of the present or future. Those rules are simple, clear-cut; if there are any deviations, then the rule no longer applies. Therefore, time's continuity is disproved by the human experience because everyone has some notion of the future and a vague knowledge of the past. Therefore, time is not isolated, and since time is interwoven through the fabric of everything, (and is the principle movement of all things) nothing is isolated. That may seem like a reach (because it is), but how could the principle movement of all things be inseparable yet everything else be separable? And that proves something very important: everything is related; because humans cannot accept this emptiness—this not knowing what lies between— we feel the need to understand how things are connected; we begin to tell stories. We write myths, sing songs, read poetry, make movies that grapple with what we define as real. The neorealist film movement approached this story-telling in a completely novel way. Neorealist films illustrate that a woman buying shoes is not solely the woman buying shoes in one moment. Rather, she is in that moment, a collection of moments—a grand sum of parts that not even she has the capacity to fully understand. There were people who made those shoes. Those people had families. Those families had Christmas dinner parties. The shoe seller had a dream of opening a French restaurant. The shoe seller’s wife was having an affair as the shoe seller haggled over the price of the shoes with the woman. And so on. The moment is in fact made up of an infinite number of microscopic moments. That is what neorealism tries to say, that the microscopic makes up the macroscopic and the macroscopic makes up the human condition. And in this way, it is false. Because the woman buying the shoes does not know any of these things. In that moment, she is a woman buying shoes. Excavating that moment does not produce something more real than who she is in that moment, it only produces fictions. If the woman were to imagine the people who made the shoes she would be wrong; she does not know the people who made the shoes and any assumptions that did would be her own projection of fiction onto the world because reality did not give her the answers, only the questions. It would be impossible for her to look at the shoes and know who made them, any assumptions on her part would be wrong. That is my problem with neorealism. It fails to take into account that people don’t know everything and that any premise otherwise is a projection of fiction. I was fascinated with the idea of neorealism after I read the article Some Ideas on Cinema, and for that reason I tried to find the magic in an everyday bowl of pasta. I imagined the pasta being made, I imagined the people making the pasta, I imagined the human being who made the pasta machines that allowed for the industrialization of the commercial production of pasta. But everything I imagined was fiction. None of it was real. It was magical, and it was fascinating but only in the way that daydreaming is fascinating because it is a break from the tediousness and order of reality. I do not doubt the everyday magic of things. But I do not think neorealism escapes the fictional romanticization that it claims to rebuke. Everyone has experienced the all-consuming, nauseating feeling of having a crush on someone. The object of his or her affection seems momentarily consummately perfect. Mostly because no one knows anything about their crushes. Crushes are half-portraits: shells that can be filled in with only the most desirable attributes. And if you think about it, everything you know is a sort of half-portrait: you don’t know anything completely. Not even yourself. Possibly, least of all, yourself.  Anyway, most of your reality is fabricated: it’s mostly fiction, a mad, desperate attempt to make sense of the unseen connections between every individual thing. My problem with neorealism is the way it hails the daily moment as real and complex when only the simple part of it is real. Perhaps, I am most put out by the idea of an inconclusive ending, in what Zavattini, a neorealist screenwriter, called an homage to reality because reality does not give “superficial,” concrete endings. Anytime anyone sets out to emulate reality, he or she is destined for failure. Emulating reality is taking a half step from it. And neorealism half opens the door to an inquiry of the state of things as they actually exist. It also provides a moral impetus to fully open the door, but there is no way to open the door because the door can only be opened in fractions: every push of the door opens it an almost immeasurably small amount. If you’ve taken calculus, you know that you can cut up the area of some bizarre shape into a series of other bizarre shapes and approach the total area, but you never actually quite get there. You are always just a smidgen off. The door opens to reality: to complete transparency, and its swinging wide involves too many fractions, isolations, exclusions, and approximations to ever fully open. If we were to open that door, we would find ourselves not within another room with another door to open but rather in the only room: the ultimate and final piece of art after which no other art would be necessary as art is needed only to share what is unknowable, to fill the empty spaces. After the final piece of art, all would be understood. Complete transparency. Reality would be intimately known in every capacity. Art expands a moment, makes that moment last forever: the other side of the door is infinitely real and infinitely unreachable. 

also, i would just like to say that i am very tired of making the right choices.

(please read the following text in a british accent. thank you kindly)
 i don't quite know why i decided to write this journal. maybe it's because i've felt things slipping away from me.
i've felt myself waiting to be filled like i'm some sort of bucket in a kitchen. (that was an awful metaphor. no one keeps buckets in their kitchens.)
i miss the old me. or maybe i don't. i don't quite remember what i'm supposed to miss. 
you know what'd be nice? (you don't have to answer that, it's a rhetorical question)
a big grassy field in the middle of nowhere, filled with mist. and i'd be there, standing in a cream linen dress that went to my bare feet. the grass would be thick and springy and dewy and i'd run around and twirl through it with my arms extended just to watch my skirt dance around me. 
i wouldn't be missing anything there. everything would be perfect because that's how mysterious fields of grass work. you go in, dance around and *boom* *razzle dazzle* everything's fine. i'm not fine right now. i promise i'm not. and i don't know how to be. i miss missing things in ways i understood. 
i miss not feeling hurt. 
i hurt all the time lately. like i've left my ribs cracked open and people have poked and prodded until the inside of me is just bloody and leaky.
i miss not feeling like this.
i don't want to write this next sentence but here it goes anyways?
a boy hurt my feelings.
how cliche is that? how angst-ridden teenager is that? how positively icky is that?

there was a boy sitting in the headmaster’s office. he was knitting and his feet were perched on the coffee table. 
they found enough marijuana in his room to arrest him, but he’s just getting a suspension
he grinned and said good morning
as i grabbed my detention slip.

i smiled back.

and stole chocolate from the receptionist’s bowl of candy. 
we delinquent knitters are always fighting the system. 

i vaguely know the girl that lives in the room next door
her boyfriend thinks we’re best friends
so he’s nice to me 
and buys me ice cream
and lets me cry in his car when all the houses look pretty and i realize i don't have a house anymore
he probably wouldn't like me if i told him i don't know anything about the girl who lives next door 
other than the fact that she laughs really loudly
and watches too much gossip girl

my dad went to Norway when he was just out of college
and he tried a cheese that was so disgusting 
he left it on a fence post
and bicycled away 
i wish i could bicycle away 
from all the metaphorical norwegian cheese in my life
but i never learned how to ride a bicycle 
(every year i put in on my new year’s resolution list
because the boys back home ride around on their bikes shirtless in the summer
and they look so happy and free)

i realized i hate it when people nod 
while listening to someone else talk
they look like human bobble heads

i let a girl read one of my poems
she said the title was nice
and the poem was alright
but she wrote a poem about an old man dying in a lawn chair 
and it won an award

i’m not cut out for the literary world
that’s why i want to be a falcon trainer 

kay bye.

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”-Gilbert K. Chesterton

not today. today one brave (and extremely bored) poetess breaks the silence that has divided the world of literature and dairy products. Healing a cultural divide that has existed since the very first cheese was consumed.

definition of cheese: a food made from the pressed curds of milk.

Definition of life: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

i have this memory. i keep it close because good memories have a tendency fade when you let their metaphorical edges crinkle. 

i really liked spongebob mac&cheese and my brother made me a whole box, which we ate using spoons because none of the forks were clean. (we also ate it out of the pot. there was no reason for not eating it out of bowls. we were just heathens with absolutely no table etiquette)

i don’t think i knew what love was, i actually still don’t know what love is, but at seven years old I decided that I would love anyone who cooked me a whole box of spongebob mac&cheese. 

i’ll tell you another memory.

i got to the top of notre dame. i was there all by myself and i was looking over this beautiful city. it was so goddamn beautiful, everything just felt alright. i just wanted to stay there forever, looking down at those crowds of people i got these feeling, you know that one where you're in this place that's so wonderful you don't ever want to leave?

I was just standing there and strangely enough, i thought about the time when i ate so much strawberry cream cheese i threw up. 

which in turn got me thinking that life is sort of like eating cream cheese. 
just like you shouldn't eat cream cheese on its own, you shouldn't live life on your own.

i was on the top of this gothic-architual masterpiece and all i wanted was to turn around and tell someone how much the world scared me. that standing there and realizing how small and insignificant everything was scared the hell out of me.
but i was alone. i was there all by myself. i pushed everyone away thinking that's what i wanted.

the truth is cream cheese tastes good with bagels. and life is great with other people.
i tried so hard to make this world where i couldn't let anyone down. i locked people out, so no one could come in and tell me that i wasn't good enough.
but when you lock everyone else out, you lock yourself in.
you don't fail other people, but you fail yourself. everyday your expectations grow larger and your will to meet those expectations just gets smaller and smaller.
so cream cheese...and life.
don't make your life about being alone or about the sum of your achievements. share your life with other people and love what other people fail to love about themselves. let yourself love and be loved.
eat cream cheese on bagels. 
remind yourself that some things should never exist on their own. that you should never exist on your own.
you are cream cheese that deserves a marvelous bagel and a beautiful life.

We had this speaker at our school today. He told us to climb a mountain while thinking how far we’ve come not how much further we have to go. 

I’m so tired of mountains being used in metaphors, someone should come up with a new metaphor. It's not like everyone just climbs mountains in their free time.

My roommate is passive aggressively angry at me all the time. In fact if she wasn’t so moody I might appreciate her charisma, it must take a lot of energy to dislike me so much.

 Every time I ask to borrow her scissors I feel like I’m asking to borrow one of her vital organs. When I ask her questions she just ignores me. And she told someone that I have psychological problems.

I think it’s because I accidentally ate her fancy popcorn. 

At least it was good popcorn.

Do you ever wonder if we all have psychological problems we don’t know the names for? I think it’s better if we leave them nameless. If it doesn’t have a name it doesn’t have a prescription and if it doesn’t have a prescription it’s just part of our colorful personalities. My personality is purply-blueish-green. I bet your personality is wonderful color.
I sort of wonder what it’s like to be a washing machine. All those pretty colors bleeding and swirling in sudsy water. It’s goddamn beautiful is what it is. And it doesn’t even have a name. I’m not okay with that. Some things need names.

It’s finally cold out. I want to go roast corn for some reason, but I don’t have corn or a fire. 
So that sort of rules out that plan.

I just bought an Eeyore stuffed animal, when I was six I used to have one and I carried it everywhere. Then I left it on a bus or something. 
I’m good at that, loving things until they go missing. It’s why I shouldn’t have children, could you imagine accidentally leaving a kid on a bus? that’d be awkward. 

Also what if I was one of those parents who made their children eat wholewheat bread and organic cereal?

Someone once made me tea with fancy bottled water because they said they didn’t trust the tap water. I don’t get that, the whole “this water is better than that water” but I just nodded. When I don’t understand something I just nod slowly. 

I find myself nodding more and more these days and I don’t know whether it’s because I’m not listening or because I’m not caring. Are those the same things? There are so many times I decide not to question things out of convenience like when a random girl asked me for six quarters on Sunday. It was such a strange request that I just gave her the  money. I don’t know what she needed it for and I don’t know why I happened to have six quarters but I actively decided not to question it. I don’t need the answer to every question. That would hurt too much.

I’ve come to the realization that everything tastes better in soup form. I’ve had soup for lunch for a week and a half straight. Quite frankly I’m starting to scare myself. 

What if I forget how to eat solid food? 

Don’t answer that question. I don’t think I want to know.

The girl in the room across the hall gave me fancy chap stick today. It’s in a pretty little tin and it was made in Spain.
It smells like the dollar store.

Chap sticks, much like pretty girls and laundry machines, can be deceiving with their beauty.

 Love,
  Anna