Community

I hung out with Ty and some people at his house yesterday watching Foxcatcher. It was a huge contrast from the dinner on Saturday (which I ultimately regretted going to but after talking to another friend I decided to forget about it) and it makes me wonder where the difference (from both nights) comes from. Well, I guess the difference is Ty. He is an anomaly. (And he was the one that also pointed out to me his boredom with the white-Christian people hailing from the mid-west.)

Anyways, I realized while hanging out with Ty that this is the community that I am the most comfortable in at this point. And whenever I'm hanging out with them, I'm smiling and laughing. Yesterday, we were laughing so hard about the split brain test. Jens pulled up diagrams from his phone and was passing them around. He totally reminds me of Paul. Hanging out with this group reminds me of the community I experienced when I was in AZ as a high school/college student.

So this dinner I promised peeps -- I might cook Korean.

I should invite:
Ty/Jens (Jens is Ty's brother and is pronounced /Yenz/ )
Megan
Sagar

And Lisa. So that's five people. Six including me.

Claire offered to tutor me French and I am wondering if I should take up this offer. If Claire becomes my French tutor and I don't have to spend an arm and a leg for French lessons, then I can start taking piano lessons again. Or maybe I should invite Claire to the dinner, too? The more the merrier? I don't want to cook for ten people, though. Need to figure this out.

Good-bye

This is really really random but when I was nineteen I fell in love with one of my closest friends. It lasted forever and it seemed like it would never go away-- that was about 1.5 to 2 years. But that time seemed to stretch on and on with no end. Probably one of the most intense and painful experiences I've had in my life. The love was unrequitted. I think the most difficult part was that this person did care for me very much just not in the way I cared for him (Rachel and Joey in Friends? But ten times more intense.)

After all these years, I just remember all the conversations we had. On the phone for hours, at cafes, walking down the streets of Seoul.. They were deep. A number of things he said changed the way I looked at the world (in a good way) and affected and still affects the way I live today. We really did understand each other in an uncanny way, and he was there for me during one of the most difficult times of my life with nothing but respect. The text messages he sent and the words he spoke into my life then gave me strength and hope. Nobody had that power over me during the time, but he did. Our connection really made me wonder why we (as humans in general) have these inexplicable, profound mutual bonds, but that bond - at the end - doesn't work out and trying to work it out is like fighting fate, banging your head against a dead end wall or something. No matter how hard I (we) tried it just did not work out. It was one of the most difficult lessons I learned: in life, you must (sometimes) let go of things. And it will not come back. No matter how much you love, it will not come back. You must say good-bye.

At the time, he told me that one day I would leave (Korea, and in extension him) and never look back. He said he just knew this about me and when that time came, he would just be someone in my life that would be standing in the way. I remember looking at him thinking, 'Why do you say that? How can you say that when I am sitting here across from you with my heart crushed and telling you that I care about you so much?' But he was right. He did know me. He knew me better than I knew myself.

I dont even know if he's dead or alive now. Nobody I know knows where he is or what he's doing. But out of so many ppl who have come and gone in my life, he is really someone I cannot forget. I hope wherever he is, he is at peace and well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UZlzNRwk1c

Do we need permission to love? Permission to hold what is most sacred in our hearts as sacred?

What is sacrilegious? How is that what I consider sacred in the deepest part of my heart is chastised and condemned as a sacrilege?

Love - the deepest most profound love - makes us sacrilegious because it defies all logic, all rules, all social conventions.

I realized something:

It's when I am sincerely challenged that I become defiant.

Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt's new novel is out. The novel is almost 800 pages.
I love her but it hurts.
What am I doing? :(

하나님이 내게 원하는것이 너무 어렵게 느껴질때.
매일매일 머리를 벽에 박는것 처럼 느껴질때...
어떻게 해야되는걸까....

Joyce Carol Oates?

I thought I only had respect for Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gaitskill, Donna Tartt and Marilynne Robinson among the female writers that are still alive and at work. Yesterday, after a three hour conversation in the cold outside of Pinkberry with Liz, I came home and cracked open a short story collection I had bought at a second-hand bookstore on my way home from Jane's wedding in February. Liz and I didn't even talk about books but our conversation in general made me exuberant and I was in the mood to devour something.

I read Chekhov and I finally understood. I finally understood what he was doing and what was so brilliant about him. There was a full page picture of him in the anthology and he had beautiful eyes. His eyes reminded me of Reed, the boy that I met in Iowa so many summers ago.

Then, I read two stories by Joyce Carol Oates and I was enthralled. I had read a couple of her stories years ago and they had fallen flat on my ears and had not reached me in any way, except leaving an impression that she was an old white lady that had lived in cloistered middle class neighborhoods most of her life. In fact, her name was synonymous to that. It was probably because of the combination of her three names. Joyce, Carol, and Oats. It really can't get more boring than that. 

The only impression I had of Joyce was that she was insane. I still remember sitting in the auditorium at Skidmore College at the NY Summer Writers' Institute. She was talking about running and someone trying to talk to her, and I sat there thinking, 'This woman is craycray...' 

But I suppose every artist is.

But yesterday, I was blown away. And the only reason I chose to read her, probably, was because Alice Munro had recently received the Nobel Prize in Literature and she is sometimes compared with Joyce Carol Oates. Made me want to read Oates again to re-assess.

Anyways, so I came to the Central Library to get a hold of a copy of The Wheel of Love, which is actually out of print. The librarian let me borrow the book even though there was only one copy of it in the library for reference. I felt very grateful.

After finding out just how unbelievably prolific Oates was, I thought to myself, 

'She must not have had any children,' and checking on Wikipedia, I was right.

The article also said she would be teaching her last semester at Princeton next fall. Her name and Princeton pictured together with a classroom, brought back that longing and tugging in my heart. The desperation of wanting to be there. Of wanting to have somebody to talk to and share these things with.

I never had that education, I never had that community.

I was standing in the middle of the Literature Department at the Los Angeles Public Library and reminded myself that I had access to all of the conversations I could have with anyone dead or alive. 

Anyways, I need to get up earlier. 

I wish the library opened earlier. But whatever.

Somehow, I have to make this work.