late July

Some changes: I’ve reverted several posts to drafts while I clean them up. In the meantime, I plan to continue to review music and books (I recently began reading A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes and recently finished reading Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; recently dug up old writing on Laura Marling’s Once I Was an Eagle and Epik High’s “Icarus Walks” —), and to write a little bit about my recent trip to Beijing and a few cities in Southern China. 

I keep applying for jobs. We’ll see what happens. I recently told some friends that if money was no issue, if getting the jobs I wanted was no issue, the life I envision for myself: I’d like to go to art/fashion school, study textile design or menswear design, work my way into the product acquisition/styling industry; at some point during this time I’d travel to Eastern Asia again to teach English for a year or two. I’d attend foreign language school in Seoul like I wanted. Write that paper on the link between portrayal of women in modern/contemporary South Korean literature and the disappearance of the homeless women during the IMF crisis. Then I’d like to go back to school for an MFA in Creative Writing and enter the literary professional world. 

I spent a long time thinking that writing was the only interest I had, and time with nothing to do has given me the understanding that I’d like to do other things, too. I’m realizing more and more that a single “calling” is another myth that we ingest and promulgate to keep our ideas of our own selves from going out. At a certain point myths don’t convince us anymore. 

From Robert Frost’s “On Looking Up By Chance at the Constellations” —

The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike our fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.