Rebirth

Off to Honduras. Will change layout and everything in a week.

Finis

Starting 8/1/2010 this blog will no longer be Heart & Crossbones.

I have decided to continue using this blog, but under a different title and url. There are multiple reasons I've decided to stay rather than switch to a different blog:

1) I have been writing on this blog for four years, and although many of my old posts make me cringe, they are still a testament to what I have gone through and how much I have changed.

2) Although it seems as if everybody now uses Tumblr, I do not plan to abandon Blogger. I confess that I actually have a Tumblr account, but after experimenting with it for a few weeks, I decided that Tumblr is much more picture-oriented and not catered towards people like me who tend to write sprawling posts.

3) Scrapping this blog would be essentially scrapping copyright evidence of my work. Let's suppose somebody has plagiarized and taken credit for writing one of my many vignettes or parodies or movie reviews. With this blog, I can prove that I wrote so-and-so vignette on this date. Once I erase all that evidence, I have nothing I can use to verify my work.

If everything runs smoothly, by August this blog will henceforth be at [sophelia-lee.blogspot.com]. I realize I've only given an advance notice of about two days, but this is for the best.

Thanks for everything.

-- Sophelia

Fuzz

Here's a confession:

i read manga.

shameful, i know.
such an inferior art form
you're probably thinking of some otaku girl
who calls herself by a pseudo-japanese name
dressed in cosplay frills and bows
gothic lolita

(i can feel my coolness credibility plunging in your eyes like the neckline of J.Lo's green Versace Grammy's dress.)

but it's too easy to forget -- it's still a version of storytelling.
perhaps the drawings can be crude
perhaps the story is overwrought and drenched in saccharine cliches
but when you find a diamond in that pile of coal
you can still learn a shitload of things.

take the Glass Mask for instance
i read that story about theater and acting a week ago.
the actress would do anything to perfect her role --
strapped her body to bamboo rods in order to play a motionless doll,
blindfolded and plugged her ears with clay in order to play Helen Keller,
isolated in the mountains behaving like a feral animal in order to play a girl raised by wolves --

it's the same, you know
acting a part and telling a story
you have to get into your character's head
sense the world through the same eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin
respond with the same mind and instinct

yep that's right
i'm actually not that cool.
you expect me to say my favorite books and biggest influences are the classics
like Jane Austen or Fahrenheit 451 or T.S. Eliot

i'm not supposed to say i read commercial lit or comic books.
sure, i love East of Eden and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
but just as francesca lia block changed my life
i've been reading manga since fourth grade --
that's easily over a hundred series in ten years.
and with how many volumes per series...
who knows?

true, my writing kinda sucks.
i use unnecessary words
obtuse language
and a tendency towards the melodramatic.
i read sylvia plath's poems and weep
at the inefficiency of my prose.

but i realized something during college
your dreams don't come to you on a silver platter
you grab your butterfly net and capture those damn things yourself

in truth, i don't really care if i ever find the One
so long as i can keep this one wish alive.

---------------------------------
Note: I know I've talked about this in the past, but this time I am seriously considering and almost certainly either changing the url of this blog (with a massive clean-up operation) or moving to a new blog. Once I make up my mind (most likely in 2-3 days), I will leave a post with details for the rest of July before I take any final actions.

It's been almost four years since I first created this blog, and I feel it's about time I make a clean break from my past. It's reached the point where I'm disgusted with my old miserable posts, and so I'm ready to start over. If you've been following me regularly, then I thank you for reading my rambling posts. I'm not sure how I've been able to hold your attention for this long, but thanks for making me feel like I'm actually an interesting and occasionally funny person.

Backseat Muse

the illuminated windows of the passing neighborhood remind me of cemetery, rows and rows of orderly glowing rectangles, tombstones, each containing a story within its confines. meanwhile, the half-moon casts its forlorn gaze down onto the earth as if in search of its other half.

she asked me once, if i ever thought i would marry. we'd reached that point in our friendship where the questions ventured into vulnerable territory, where a single misstep could leave your raw flesh exposed. i told her it would be nice, but not a necessity. it was the kind of independent, free-willed answer that i'd been trained to say but still tasted like a lie in my mouth. it's not a necessity. because i know, after nineteen years of having seen it and heard it all around me but having never felt it in my own skin -- love is not water.

take that window, for instance. drive by at nine in the evening, and you'll see the girl who sits there in the evenings, her eyes cast downward and illuminated by the sickly glow of the computer screen. like a ghost. she doesn't read horoscopes -- she doesn't like the idea of her fate predestined by fiery balls of gas that have existed for billions of years, long before she'd ever breathed her first breath.

if i held the beast's mirror in my hand, what would i wish to see? if the moon asked to see her other half, would she find him entangled in the arms of another?

or perhaps she'd see her own reflection and realize that there's no water on the moon.

Sublimation

mirror, mirror, miryo

the smoke emerges from your lips, spindly grey arachnid legs prying their way out of your chiseled jaw, and all i can wonder is if you kissed me then if i'd find my own tongue covered in nicotine cobwebs.

in the dimming light you remind of those black-and-white photos of those old hollywood stars, like you're james dean with that rebel-without-a-cause look of jadedness, except you're only five years younger than james dean when he died, so i can't imagine why you're already stricken with that perpetual look of boredom on your face. i can smell the nauseating mix of cigarette smoke and alcohol in a haze around you, and i picture my own lungs clouding over like black fog condensing on a glass mirror. the illuminated television flickers reflected on your face in a sickening deficient glow, as if you haven't seen the light of the sun in weeks.

we haven't touched in months, you and i, though i wonder if your translucent skin will tear if we claw at each other the way we used to, as if we were prying through all those layers of skin to take hold of each other's shuddering hearts. you used to remind me of a god, with the starched white sheets draped across your naked form like grecian robes, and whenever i was with you it felt as if we'd be immortal forever with ambrosia flowing in our veins, but all that's left now are the marbled ruins and corroded statues that look more like amputated war veterans than gods and goddesses.

you never liked to use that one word with me. you called it chemistry instead, as if we were two particles in random motion that became bonded in a chance collision. all i can recall from those days was a fever of smoke and heat, tantric and exothermic and irreversible. the only warmth that's left now is from the smothered glow of your cigarettes, and all i can wonder is if you've already sublimated before my eyes in those trailing wisps of smoke.

Recurrence

I keep having the same dreams every night. The class is always different, but the premise is always the same: I waste my time and don't study for an upcoming exam. Right before I wake up, I check my exam score and recoil in horror when I see how badly I flunked.

I am not even joking when I say that I studied for organic chemistry 24/7 earlier this summer. Though I usually gave myself an hour or so to check e-mail and read my daily blogroll, pretty much every waking moment I was reading my textbook or doing problems or sitting in class or doing experiments in lab. In the end, my efforts paid off -- I received the best score I've ever received on a science final since I've been at Duke, which was nearly fifty points above the average and only six points below the highest score, bringing up both my grade and my GPA. Now that I'm at home with no obligation to study, I'm stricken with guilt for not busying myself to death.

... sigh.

//edit//

Not even joking. It happened AGAIN LAST NIGHT. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME??

And on top of that, at some point in my dream my parents forced me into an arranged marriage with a certain someone. I think these ridiculous dreams is my brain's way of entertaining itself in an attempt to balance out how incredibly boring my life is.

A Gross Story

Warning: This is a pointless anecdote with no deeper meaning. Don't waste your time reading this unless you are extremely bored. It's also kind of disgusting and further proves why I am weird.

So earlier this evening, I was in the kitchen petting my dog, when I felt this weird bump on his skin. Brushing his fur aside, I noticed a small hard bump surrounded by a ring of red, tender skin.

Now, for some reason this summer, I've suddenly developed a morbid fascination for skin conditions. Whether out of boredom or relieving stress from 24/7 studying of organic chemistry, this summer I've performed topical surgery on myself -- namely removing two very tiny darkened spots from my own hands. One of them, you can barely tell where I removed part of my own skin; the other is still noticeable but healing decently. Though both were most likely caused by sun exposure, I doubt either were cancerous or life-threatening -- I was just bored.

In any case, I'll take it as a sign that medicine still might be the proper path for me.

So anyways. I showed my mother, who was distracted by Youtube, the weird skin condition on my dog, and she said she'd seen it before. She advised me to not remove the weird pustule-like thing, because the last time she tried to do that my dog started bleeding. But per usual, I paid no attention to her and started poking around at the pustule-like bump. After a while, I went upstairs, grabbed my eyebrow tweezers from the bathroom, washed my hands like a surgeon readying herself for an operation, and then head back downstairs to my dog, who was still lounging lackadaisically on half of my mother's chair.

For some reason, my dog didn't pay much attention to me while I was admittedly messing around with him. At first, I only picked off part of the weird bump very minimally because I didn't want to hurt him. After a while, I realized he wasn't feeling anything or he didn't care, and so I started applying pressure more liberally. Soon, the bump was no longer elevated -- merely reduced to the same level but still noticeably embedded in the skin.

That's when I tried a technique that is also a bad habit I have with my zits -- I started squeezing the outer skin.

So it's been more than an hour since this operation, and the following image is still replaying nonstop in my head and making me shiver in disgust. Because once I started doing the "zit treatment" on my dog, shit started coming out of that pustule. Crusty orange-yellow shit that I imagine dried-pus would look like -- though I have never seen pus, so I don't know how helpful that description is. AND IT WOULDN'T STOP COMING OUT. Considering the size of the hole, I was like, "Damn, how much crud has been plugged up here??" It was scary, it was fascinating, and in retrospect, it was also kind of nasty.

(I was about to make an analogy to popping a pimple, but I decided this is weird and gross enough already.)

ANYWAYS. So finally, the shit stopped coming out. Now my dog has a hole in his skin that looked like somebody shoved a push-pin in and out of. All the nasty crud was disposed onto the latest Time magazine (the closest paper-like thing available) for further examination under a magnifying glass. My mother administered Vaseline on my dog's wound. Meanwhile, I did some googling and did not come to any real conclusion about what had infected my dog.

So in conclusion? Maybe I should consider being a dermatologist. Also, as I was typing this nasty thing, a spider about the size of a Gatorade bottle cap dangled down from the ceiling right next to me, causing me to scream out of shock. I don't like killing bugs, and I didn't scream because it was a spider but because it took me by surprise. So for all I know, that spider is still lurking around somewhere in my room. But I don't have to worry about it dropping down onto my face from the ceiling when I'm sleeping, because guess what? I now have an awesome leaf canopy over my bed, courtesy of the children's section of Ikea! Yeah, that's right.

Lesson of the day: Sophelia isn't weird. She's really really really weird. And kind of disgusting. And morbid. But you already knew that.

Toy Story 3

I was four years old when the first Toy Story movie played in theaters. I had just entered kindergarten, my hair was constantly tied in pigtails or pleated into braids, and my brother was only a year old at the time. It wasn't my favorite movie at the time, mainly because I was going through my "pink" phase and Bo Peep wasn't interesting enough to appeal to my fondness for heroines. Nevertheless, I watched the first installation of the Toy Story series probably at least fifty times in my childhood, as my then-two-year-old brother insisted on watching the movie on our VCR every day for nearly a year.

Fifteen years later, I am nineteen years old and one year ahead of where Andy is in his life. I'm sure the film touched everyone of all ages, but I can't help but think that this last installment is especially poignant for those of us who grew up in the nineties. For me, this film was a gentle reminder that, like Andy, I've grown up. Not in the sense that our imaginations aren't allowed to run rampage anymore, but in the sense that once we reach that liminal state between high school and college, we're expected to assume the responsibilities that come with being an adult.

I was like Andy once. I created ridiculous stories in my head and acted them out with an ensemble cast of dolls, Happy Meal toys, Beanie Babies, and stuffed animals. A select few were lucky enough to have the privilege of sharing my bed (or perhaps not so lucky, for many times they'd be crushed or flung off the bed during my slumber). As soon as I left for college, my mother jumped at the chance to clean up my room; though she knew I would have thrown a fit if she'd thrown out any of my beloved toys, she'd instead stored them in plastic boxes in my closet to make room on my bookshelf for SAT prep books. The few times I've been home since I've gone to college, I hadn't even bothered to look for the boxes.

Before I watched Toy Story 3 with my mother and cousin this afternoon, my mother (who had already seen it with my father and brother) told me that Toy Story 3 was probably the best of the three. I didn't believe her. I loved both Toy Story 1 and 2, so how on earth would it possible to top BOTH of them? After walking out of the movie theater, however, I had to agree. Not only did I laugh the hardest that I've laughed in a long time, one of the emotional sequences nearly put me to tears. Granted, I never cry for movies -- not The Notebook, not The Pianist, not even the tearjerker three-minute sequence in the beginning of Up; the only movie that has ever made me cry is Grave of the Fireflies, which has got to be one of the most depressing movies ever made. Period. But despite the fact that I don't cry easily when it comes to movies, I can definitely feel it. And I connected with Andy at the end of the movie in a way that I've never felt with any other movie character.

The humor was brilliant through and through. Not wanting to give away any spoilers, all I will say about my favorite humorous moments of the film were 1) Buzz Lightyear in Spanish mode (especially the seductive salsa), 2) Ken, decked out in safari print, short shorts, and an ascot, with insecurities about being a "girls' toy" and "accessory", and 3) Mr. Potato Head's multiple body transplants, including a tortilla and a cucumber.

Since the movie is still in theaters, I don't want to give away too much to anyone who hasn't seen the movie already. All I will say is that I could not have come up with a better ending for the trilogy. Sure, it was sentimental -- but in a way that struck a chord with me unlike anything I've watched in a long time. And once I returned home, I went through my closet and retrieved my beloved stuffed polar bear Cubby and snow leopard Momo and all my other childhood toys from the storage containers. I never said good-bye to my toys before I left for college, and Toy Story 3, despite its heartwarming messages, made me feel rather guilty for having forgotten a part of my past.

Jet Lag

The best part is rising naturally with the sun, when everyone else on the streets is sleeping still, and you're curled up with a book (Francesca Lia Block's Necklace of Kisses) with faint music lulling in the background. You're still flushed with the joy of your miraculous score on your final exam, and although the words don't seem to run like wine just yet, the pretty words seem to stir something inside of you that you thought was already dead.

The Extraordinary League of Kickassery

The idea of having a blogging platform never crossed my mind until this year. I'd always blogged narcisistically about myself, with interspersed moments of social commentary or artistic work here and there. But then I stumbled upon an article detailing how people have built entire careers and fortunes through blogging. BLOGGING! And all these years I've been doing it for nary a penny!

But then again, I have no idea what I could blog about exclusively that would be of any interest to others. My life? HAHAHA. I tried tagging my posts (and gave up after about one year's worth) and came to the conclusion that my posts can divided into three categories: confessional diary-like entries, vignettes/poetry, and attempts at being funny. Of the latter, topics are further narrowed down to three things: Disney, Twilight bashing, and of course, the honorable Badass One. All in all, I think I am too easily bored and far too easily distracted to be able to blog exclusively on one subject.

Speaking of the Badass One, it suddenly come to my attention that I never finished my analysis of his music video. Eh -- like I said, I'm too easily distracted and at this point, I have no desire to see jester-sluts pasting themselves over the Lord of All Things Badass. What I DID do yesterday, however, was spend nearly five hours watching the documentary on the formation of the Badass One's Extraordinary League of Kickassery, a.k.a. BIGBANG.

Watching that ten-episode documentary was something like watching a movie when you've already read the synopsis of Wikipedia. Kudos to the editor for trying to create some tension, but since the faces of the five are pasted all over Asia at this point, I found the dramatic voice-overs completely laughable. Who will the President cut from the group??? Gee, let me think real hard.

One thing that did surprise me was the rigor of the training the Five underwent. I don't know how the American entertainment industry works in this regard, but from what I've gathered about South Korea, raising and training stars is akin to a manufacturing business. They underwent daily training -- mainly vocal and dance lessons. Compliments were rare -- the head honchos and trainers were firm believers that criticism is the best fertilizer for greatness. Then there's JHS (I forget how to spell his name), who was the only member cut out of the six trainees.


I guess I should have felt sorry for him. I mean, he devoted all that time training to be a star, and then he was unceremoniously rejected TWICE. And yet my sympathy for this guy is barely existent. Just look at the picture -- I'm so used to seeing the Five in their glorious selves that JHS sticks out like a tumor. I never understood why they kept calling him the "pretty" one that the girls would go for. Okay, I will admit that I REALLY dislike that length of hair on guys (probably because my hair used to be that length). But I didn't understand why the head honchos would make so much hooplah about that guy's looks when freaking GODOT was in their midst. And I guess I should be able to relate to his problem with being unnatural with expressions -- I myself have problems being relaxed when I perform -- but while part of me is kind of like him, the other half of me is completely ps-s-s-sycho. When his dance trainer told him to make faces during the dance, he couldn't do it. I was like, DUDE JUST STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE OR SOMETHING. IT'S NOT THAT HARD! I was probably making more faces watching him struggle in that one scene than he made in the entire documentary.

In any case, I have a lot more respect for the Five now that I've seen what they've gone through. It's brutal. Seeing them fight that hard to make a dream come true only reminds me of how readily I distract myself so I don't have to sit down and actually write.

Ahem. And now, time to talk about the beloved Badass One.

The advantage of already knowing how the story ends is that I didn't blow a gasket when the documentary depicted just how close the Badass One came to being eliminated from the group. There's this one scene where the President sits down with his underlings; he tells them he has in mind the two that he wants to cut from the group, but he wants to hear which two they each would pick out of the four trainees (the other two were already on contract). Everybody wanted to keep Daesung, which I had nothing against. I have nothing against Seungri either. But you have no idea how miffed I was when only one person said they would take the glorious piece of flesh depicted in the picture above. ONE PERSON?? The other three had multiple backers, but only one person would have picked the Badass One to join the Extraordinary League of Kickassery. Really now -- WHY WOULD YOU PICK THAT EXPRESSIONLESS PUMPKIN OVER THIS PINNACLE OF HUMAN EVOLUTION? Thank goodness the President was smart enough to realize that his underlings were fools.

It's not even just about looks here. The Extraordinary League of Kickassery wouldn't even be a quarter Kickass if it weren't for T.O.P. Obviously I'm extremely biased here, but whereas you can probably take one of the singers (Daesung, Seungri, Taeyang) out of a song and it'll still have that BIGBANG flavor, if you take that deep, husky rapping voice out, you'll end up with any of the other dime-a-dozen Korean boy bands. Not only that, the ten episodes of their "inside story" made it more clear than anything else -- the Badass One has charisma. He is the trickster of the group and directs the mood and energy more than anyone else. He'll get in trouble with their chaperone and then charm his way over to her good side. He makes people laugh themselves silly as he raps freestyle in his Paul Frank pajama bottoms. Whereas DS and SR wins over fans with their "cuteness," the Badass One knocks them out with his bad boy looks AND his charming wit. Yeah, obviously a lot of girls prefer the pretty boys -- but don't neglect the girls who prefer guys that don't look like they pump estrogen every morning.

Ahem. Okay, I need to pack. Peace out.