absolutely obvious things that take forever to learn

Ok, so I have spent fall quarter taking writing courses and indulging my soul, both academic and creative. In both realms the wisdom acquired boils down to the same key point:
DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND DO IT AS BRILLIANTLY AS YOU CAN!!!!
Oh and don't get too bogged down with politics about what's the thing to do to get a certain kind of job or to please a certain kind of audience or to fit into a certain kind of category. Because that's all bullshit and it will slow down this incredible gift of life and opportunity.
With my creative work the message was...if it's good, ultimately it will get picked up by a publisher. With my academic work it was...if it's interesting and relevant someone will value it and you will find a job.
Does it sound like I'm high? I really don't think I am. I think hard work and using your talents to their fullest capacity can and does pay off and ultimately I'm a believer, baby.
If this sounds too American dreamy, I don't care. The best part about the American Dream is owning the damn thing. OWN IT.

Wow, world, wow.

Say I to you world. um. I have had an amazing first two weeks back in Chicago. My mother knocks on wood in my head, superstitiously as I say this and so do I. Why be so superstitious about the good things btw? Is it post-Soviet Jewish fear that everything nice will be taken away from you by Big Brother or some kind of looming omniscient totalitarian force? When a people have been terrorized the scars show even in the minds of their children. Fear is a contagious thing we can learn and learn to live with and breathe with...inhalation and exhalation laced with it. If there is no trace, you must be doing something wrong, indulging too much, they're about to take it away from you...knock on wood!

Ha. Happiness like a tap, tap, tap. I just discovered it inside of me, this ability to be happy. Is that weird? Yes. Better late than never? Absolutely.

Not that I've never been happy...of course I have, oh so many glorious times that I have poeticized about. But that was just the problem, there was languish and pain and emptiness between those spaces of goodness and it was as if I did not know how to sustain it. I do now, somehow.

Maybe all the pushing and pulling of myself like taffy across the crevices of the universe have finally paid off. I like to think so. I like to think that my open mouth finally found itself.
:) The lips closed and smiling, like the dog who finally stopped chasing her own tail.

languages of removal

Português brasileiro, Brazilian Portuguese is my latest language of distance. I am learning it and as it carries no emotional valence for me as of yet, my oral exams are like therapy sessions. Why? Because I get to rant about my life in a language whose signs trigger no emotional memory for me. I am just a neutral passenger, a lawyer cross-examining my consciousness through a vocabulary void of all personal significance.

I get to watch the strange sounds falling out of my mouth, as I "feel" whatever the initial language was telling me to feel. The two languages are temporally and emotionally disassociated. The two languages strip apart my feelings, partitions into the self, and I get to watch.

My brain absorbs new vocabularies quickly, but especially when I'm trying to express myself. Then suddenly whatever new language I'm learning starts to spill out of me imperfectly but forcefully like water. I can feel the meanings lining up like little train tracks, the cogs clicking a new outline of expression into place. A code on a code, a new alignment.

When pain feels language-less, when whatever distress you may feel is suddenly stripped of its vehicle in the strange liminal space of translation, the negative sensations themselves are somehow alienated from their associations. They sit in limbo, in an airport, at a train station, waiting, uncertain. It's a good way to leave your psychophysiological distress symptoms naked without any linguistic clothing to designate their identity.

Multilinguistic experiences demand a kind of clinical self-examination in which one can pick apart layers and interrogate them. Especially when one's thoughts spill out in someone else's sounds to talk about your life. Suddenly you can sit there and you're not even quite thinking about yourself in the first person any more. Just like here I am switching persons grammatically as I write this entry. I am switching between my selves.

**(These thoughts are based on both my own self experiences and my research; I often think that the most insightful thoughts should come from both.)

movement and stoppage

Hyde Park is stifling and liberating. Colorado is sunny. I will use simple, or somewhat simple adjectives to index my life here and now. Let's talk about deixis. Mine is free-flowing and ever marked by airplanes, tickets, airports, houses, apartments, locales, hermit holes, mountains, beaches. Languages, people, thoughts, moi.
I am cloudy, expanding, imploding, revolting.
Spaces are my hands, these walls, that doorway, the face with which I am speaking, the thoughts that I am segmenting into community-defined confinements a.k.a. words which you understand at least somewhat.
I pour my imperfect self into books, thoughts, attempts at metacognition, metalevel analysis of this ephemeral biological chance.
Happy holidays citizens of Abraham land. May you sleep well, eat well, think well. May your biology compliment your evolution as a self-aware entity. L'chaim.