this is the last song you will hear

Though I shouldn't be procrastinating, there were some things on my mind that I felt the need to jot down for a bit.

Halloween is around the corner. I don't normally dress up (and haven't really made much an effort in years), but in New Orleans it seems Halloween is a big deal. My friends have come up with all sorts of elaborate costume ideas. Mine is a bit more nebulous.

You see, I've always had a fascination with identity. And one of the fantasies I've always had is being able to walk around in a different skin, so to speak. To appear so unrecognizable that you are no longer shackled to your "identity" or what people expect from you. As long as you wear this "separate skin" you can do whatever want, be anything you want.

Sound familiar? Yeah, because it's the whole principle behind Charlotte and the mask of the Ecstasian Phantom.

In an impulsive move, I bought a wig. I made sure I found one that didn't look too cheap but didn't make me feel guilty about the price. Long, curly blonde hair. I'd always wondered how I'd look with blonde hair, but for practical reasons I'd never dyed my hair. I haven't decided what I'll wear with the wig, but all I really care about is being unrecognizable.

The first time I put on that wig, I was sort of appalled. What was this weird hair color doing around my face? It looked awful. But after some adjusting, including adding a cap, the weird thing is that I started getting used to the look. Not only that, the vibe I give off with curly blonde hair is completely different from my normal appearance. Sassy, wild, fun-loving... things NOT typically ascribed to me.

We'll see what happens on Friday.

The other thing I wanted to mull over...

For a good chunk of my life, I wondered why most of my friends were girls. It sounds like a strange question, but given my personality, it seemed a bit odd. The stereotypical adjectives people use to describe dudes -- chill, no drama, cool -- have often been ascribed to me. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I naturally gravitated towards girls, because my self-defense mechanism didn't want to deal with the potential pitfalls of navigating the romantic aspect with boys I had no interest in.

Interestingly enough, my anatomy lab group here turned out to be a majority of boys. There are six of us, four boys and two girls. Funnily enough, all four boys have blonde hair and blue eyes. What surprised me the most -- just how well we all get along together. We behave very much like a pack of siblings with very different personalities. And to support my earlier theory, it probably also helps that three of the four guys have long-distance long-term girlfriends and the fourth guy is gay. I adore my group much in the way that I imagine Blue Sargent loves her Raven Boys. (Though, unlike Blue, I have the added benefit of having another girl in my group who can stand in female solidarity.)

It got me thinking, though, about the core of friendship I'd been trying to sketch out in detail for the past year. Yes, I'm going to ramble about EP again, so close the window if you're done here.

I'd always had some problems characterizing the central male friendships in EP, namely because I didn't have much experience in my own life I could draw from. There's three aspects to the dynamic that I had to consider: (1) how the boys (Rhys, Patrick, Leo) were before Rory ever joined the band; (2) how the dynamic changes once it became three boys + Rory (especially if Rory started dating Rhys); and (3) how the dynamic changes again post-Rory and Charlotte enters the picture, two years later.

I'm not necessarily going to base my characters off of my friends, but in my current writing drought, I've been doing a lot of real-life observation and fishing for material, and I've thought a lot about what kind of personalities can coexist so harmoniously together. The only other time in my life I can think of where a group of friends has gelled together so well was the summer after I graduated from high school, when I was teaching English in Taiwan. To this day, I'm still in touch with most of them.

Anyways, back to my anatomy group. I do have to say... one thing I didn't realize was just how raunchy slang I am oblivious to. You know, the kind of stuff you have to look up on Urban Dictionary to figure out... This is something you pick up on real fast when you hang out with a bunch of boys.

And on a final note... I had another morbid dream a few days ago. I dreamed that I was dying, and as my breaths were growing shallower, I had to pick the last song I would listen to in my life. I picked "Wading" by Jhene Aiko. I still don't know exactly why I picked that song.

hide

I love this video. Excited to see her perform in November.

revised

sometimes, you are such a brat that i really question my judgment.

Life After Life

I wrote about my grandmother's passing a couple of weeks ago. My mother sent me an e-mail describing what happened. I can't really do it much more justice, so I decided to copy the story in its entirety.

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"When Grandma was in critical condition, her eyes were open the whole time. It seemed that she still could sense what was happening in the room. But, with the oxygen mask tight on her face and the machine pumping hard constantly, it really looked painful.  

Four days later, the most difficult part was when your father's siblings had to decide whether to send her to ICU or not.  That was on Sunday.

Three days later, Grandma was moved to the hospice room.  Her lung infection got worse. She was slipping away. But, somehow her eyelids were still open, even though her eyesight was no longer focusing on anything.

Everyone had gradually accepted the reality, except Grandpa. He sat by her bedside and still kept telling her, 'Be brave, hold on...'

Finally around 5:30 pm, your uncles and aunt all had arrived the hospital room and surround the bed.  Your father's two older cousins consulted with Grandpa outside the room for quite a while. Grandpa came in, sat by the bedside, and he started saying the same phrase : '你要堅強. (Be brave, be strong.)'  One of the cousins touched his back to remind him...  

Suddenly, Grandpa said: 'I really don't want to let you go, but now I have to. Let's get together again in our next life.' After he was saying these words, Grandma closed her eyes and the heart beat stopped.  

Even though we all have seen their quarrels over the years, at the end, the last scene made it a love story."

until we bleed

So we're bound to linger on 

We drink the fatal drop 

Then love until we bleed 

Then fall apart in parts 

it took us 3 hours yesterday. 1 hour to cut open her skull. 1 hour to open up her spinal column. 1 hour just to remove the brain from her head, spinal cord swishing from the back like a ponytail.

i've held a heart in my hands. but only literally speaking, that is. we talk of romantic hyperboles and make references to the Aztecs and their ritual sacrifices, but cupped inside my hands, the heart doesn't feel so monumental. a hollowed mass of muscle fibers and vessels, it weighs lighter than a tennis ball.

there are no hackneyed honeyed words, no dramatic tales of historical intrigue that describe the feel of a brain in one's hands. it sinks into your palms, heavy as a locked chest; you feel the weight and heft of its contents but you can only speculate what is hidden inside. who was this person, what kind of life did she live, what memories were mapped into the ridges and crevices. it's the closest i've ever felt to her--this cadaver whose body we've cut open and examined for weeks.

some of these days, i don't know who i am anymore. my last two exam grades were average, and when your whole life has been revolving around exams, it's hard not to place your value on numbers. i feel painfully ordinary, especially when i don't write. i want to stand out but i want to hide. they gossip here like buzzards, circling for a carcass to scavenge. i am the girl with the bow in her short cropped hair, the girl in black boots. i don't want to be known as the girl who kept dancing at the block party with that one guy who was maybe drunk and oh look what do you think is happening here ho ho ho (what a ho).

i've been thinking about the heart a lot these days. well, literally too, but i mean that in the figurative sense. i think about how long it takes for a person to fall and wonder if i've somehow shut down the part of my brain that surrenders itself to the heart's stupidity. i can see the mental pro/con bullet points under the boy's name and wonder why my gut is silent now. i felt nothing when his hands were at my waist and his fingers were laced in mine. i think of all the avoided gazes and prickling blushes and unsent digital love letters from those forsaken teenage years and wonder if, at age 23, i've lost the ability to let myself bleed.

Now we're bound to linger on

We drink the fatal drop

Then love until we bleed

Then fall apart in parts 

-- "Until We Bleed" by Kleerup ft. Lykke Li