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moana

:: 2010 28 November :: 11.17pm

If I had a cupcake for every time you used the word "me".

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moana

:: 2009 11 January :: 11.07pm

I will never be a musician.

I will never hold an instrument and have the ability to create something wonderful. I will never be able to compose anything truly moving, anything memorable or special. I will never close my eyes and hear the sounds of an imagined tune that could change the world. I will never strum a guitar and hear all the possible songs of the world in the sound. I will never put my fingers on a piano's keys and feelt them move of their own free will, creating, living, freeing the melodies just beneath the surface. I will never hear the infinite potential of every note and all the million ways it could be arranged to mean something.

Never ever.

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moana

:: 2009 4 January :: 9.13pm
:: Music: Metric - Dead Disco

Remodel; everything's been done.

List of Things I Want in 2009:

1. World peace (mandatory cliché goodwill).

2. The discovery of an alternate fuel source that will render oil and petroleum useless and lead to the collapse of the world as we know it.

3. A band of sycophants and followers that will hang on my every world and proclaim it dogma.

4. Twenty-five minutes with James St James in a K-hole.

5. To be in a conga line with Chuck Palahniuk, Erika Lopez, and Don DeLillo.

6. To finally find out what the man says at the end of the Radiohead video for “Just”.

7. Twenty-five minutes with Kim Deal. K-hole not mandatory.

8. A permanent end to Grey’s Anatomy.

9. The 13th book in Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series.

10. To see David Roxburgh fall flat on his face during his seminar tomorrow.

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moana

:: 2008 24 November :: 2.14am

Read more..

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moana

:: 2008 2 November :: 4.38pm

I can't do this anymore.

I want to go home.


moana

:: 2008 24 October :: 2.11am
:: Music: Interpol - Mammoth

My dad's buying me a Yaris hatchback sometime within the next week or two. It'll be really helpful for me if I get to finally drive myself back and forth between home and university. With my schedule being the ugly mess that it is, is it any wonder I find myself constantly exhausted, constantly waiting or constantly late?

In other news, I feel pretty good about being back in university. My saving graces are four classes in particular that I really enjoy. Four out of six is not bad, so I consider this semester a success so far. One of the four classes I've fallen in love with is a social behavioral science class called "Identity, Difference and Deviation in Society". I absolutely love it, because some of the biggest anthropological studies from about the 1960s and back seem obsessed with blaming social deviancy on repressed homosexual urges. I find it endlessly amusing on the one hand and pretty sick on the other, which means that all in all, I was made for this class, and this class was made for me.

So I guess the short version of this is, I'm tired and overloaded, but I'm relatively happy all things considered, and I'm doing ok. I miss Jay a lot, all the time, constantly, especially in the moments before I fall asleep, when in that haze between dreaming and being awake I reach out to the other side of the bed and am always surprised not to find him there, warm and peaceful and perfect in every way. I'm suffering by being away from him, and it causes a huge massive black hole in my life. In my heart, in my soul, in whatever you want to call it. I'm damaged and incomplete until I can be with him again.

But all things considered, I'm doing ok. How are you?

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moana

:: 2008 8 October :: 7.53pm

YOU CAN'T MASTURBATE WITH EMOTIONAL DEXTERITY.

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moana

:: 2008 25 September :: 2.09am

I'm a pathological writer.

I'm in first grade. I'm five. I remember this so clearly, because it was so unusual, but it rained on my way to school in the morning. So my first grade teacher, a spunky American blonde that used to tie my long long braid into a knot whenever I wasn't paying attention, asked the class to write about the weather. And me, I have no idea why I decide to do this, but I write a poem.

"Today oh the weather,
God is very clever
To make the trees so nice and green
Oh, it is a lovely scene!
The flowers blooming, pink and blue,
Mom is driving on and through."

Don't ask me how it's possible I still remember this poem, but I do, every word, every syllable. Apparently, I was destined to be some sort of artist. I remember talking to Ms. Jackie - the spunky blonde - about it, and how she used to tell me I should go for it. Her assistant, a kindly Filipina named Ms. Evangeline, whose favourite colour was blue, told me I was the best artist she ever met. So writing wasn't really a part of the plan. God knows it wasn't a part of my mother's plan for me. No, as far as she was concerned, I was going to be a doctor.

But back to the poem, right?

Well, it gets published in the elementary section of the school newspaper, "The Lion's Roar". Me, I take a copy home and show my mother. I'm very proud. Ms. Jackie and Ms. Evangeline made it sound like such a big deal, the youngest student to get published in the Roar, kudos for me! But my mother, she smiled and said I should concentrate on my work more. So I did.

But skip a couple of years to the future, and really, I don't get along with anyone at home. My brother grows up in middle school and becomes the popular kid. He has fashionable haircuts, and he does Michael Jackson for the Talent Show. Girls love him. He gets me to call their houses and ask for them, in case their parents or their brothers pick up, so the girl doesn't get in trouble for talking to a boy.

My parents, they're getting busier and busier. Divorces take a lot of time and energy, I hear, but me, I'm suddenly eight years old in the fourth grade, and I sit in my room with the door closed and read all the time. At first I read little things. I read Betsy Byars and Beverly Cleary. But then my teacher starts to notice, and in fourth grade it's Mr. Robinson, who always writes on my progress reports that I'm a good student but that I have an unfortunate tendency to daydream. At home I sit in my room while my mother and father scream at one another at the top of their lungs, and sometimes things break, and my mother gets hurt or one of them storms out, slams the door loudly behind them and doesn't come home for the rest of the night. Who can blame me for always pretending to be somewhere else?

So in the fourth grade, Mr. Robinson asks me if I've ever heard of Moby Dick. Then he gives me this big fat book, and tells me to take as much time as I need reading it. I finish it in a month, and then he gives me Shakespeare.

I'm nine, ten, eleven, and all I do is sit in my room with the door closed and read. The house is quieter now. My parents are divorced, my brother goes out a lot - with girls, I bet - and no one really notices me. My mother, she laughs at how easy it is to forget I'm even there. My brother, he tells me I should go out there and get a life. Really, he says, it's too fucking weird that I spend so much time staring at books.

I'm thirteen, and I wear glasses. I cut off the long long braid at last, but I have bad teeth and I'm skinny as hell. I'm much darker than my mother or my brother, and my hair always looks like the product of a bad combination of fork and toaster. Also, my father's wife had a baby girl, and is about to have a baby boy. At this point, though, I'm so ugly being invisible is a blessing. I'm reading Jane Austen and thinking she's not all that great. I finish Pride and Prejudice and I'm so unimpressed, I sit down at the big clanky desktop computer in my brother's room and start writing my own story. In less than three months, I have over two hundred pages full of some action thriller crime stuff with a sharp, powerful heroine that no one ever takes seriously. This is complete trash, and when the computer ends up dying and the book disappears into the magical ether of computer memory hell, the computer has unknowingly done the world a favor. Still, this is something. I realize I can write.

I'm fifteen, and my mother is married and my brother's in Sharjah, failing university. I write a one thousand word essay on Romeo and Juliet. My teacher accuses me of plagiarism. "This," he says, "is college-level work. I won't report you to the principal, I'll just give you a zero for this assignment." Then he smiles and winks, like this will just be our secret. What a bastard.

I'm seventeen and I'm a senior in high school. My brother's moved back home and I'm sending college applications everywhere but Kuwait. I get accused of plagiarism again, but this is no big deal. I'm reading Herman Hesse and Ernest Hemmingway. I have a big crush on the International Baccalaureate English teacher, and I want to impress him. I read Jane Eyre and 1984. I read Wuthering Heights, and I ask him to marry me. He says no, but can he keep the ring? Apparently, he still has it. After I graduate and leave, I start writing another book. I think if I can just manage to become this big famous writer, big and famous enough that he'll come across my book, he'll finally notice me. It's so stupid, I laugh at myself before any of my friends laugh at me, but I write the book anyway.

So I'm walking around AUD asking anyone if they know a way I can reach a publisher. I'm asking everyone, and the English department points me to this guy sitting in an office that looks more like a Simpsons shrine than any sort of professional workplace. I give him my book, and I ask him to read it, and I bug him twice a week asking if he has until he does. Tenacity, I'm told, is an admirable quality.

On my eighteenth birthday, the Simpsons guy says I have a great 'voice'.

I don't really know why I'm surprised at how little I've accomplished, running around looking for someone to read it and then dogging them until they do. I realize suddenly that after all, the biggest difference is that now the grand total of people who have read my work is two. One of my friends gets a poem published in a book of poetry, and me, I'm still wondering why it was so important to me that someone else read it. Maybe I just wanted someone else to tell me I was a good writer.

So I write and I write and I write. By now, I'm living on the praise I got from my first grade teachers for that poem. I'm nineteen, and I'm in China, and I email this woman and ask her if she'll put me in her anthology. And she does.

There's a book on my shelf, an anthology called "The Wonderful World of Worders". I've read Haruki Murakami and Chuck Palahniuk and Erika Lopez and Don DeLillo and Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut and I'm still writing. I have had exactly 150 words published. I am a failure as a writer. No one reads what I write, because it's too intimidating. Somehow, without having ever read what I write, they know what kind of writer I am. They know how important it is to me. They know how long I've been writing. The truth is, writing is the only thing I've ever been good at without trying, just writing and reading. My parents, they're William Shakespeare and Mercedes Lackey. I'm twenty years old and I've read more books than most people I know combined. I read the great classics of literature, and I mock them because I can write better. And I do write, I just keep on writing, one book done, discarded and another book started all over again. Every once in a while, I browse the internet for ways to contact a publisher, but I never follow through. No one reads my writing but me. When I write short stories or thought-pieces, people will comment and say, "I like your style, but you use too many commas." "Your sentences are too long." "You have tons of fragments." "You really shouldn't end your sentences with a preposition." "You're very repetitive."

Everything I write gets discarded, and if some fragment of it remains it gets crushed and recycled and reused somewhere else, too strange to recognize. I reuse it and I recrush it and I reuse it again and again. I figure it can't make too much of a difference. After all, I'm the only one that reads what I write.

So I keep writing.

And I keep writing.

And I keep writing.

And I'm very, very good at it.

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moana

:: 2008 20 September :: 11.10pm
:: Music: Thelonious Monk - 'Round Midnight

Listen to this song, and think of all the people you know and what they must do in those lonely hours between being with their loved ones and being alone trying to sleep.

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moana

:: 2008 14 September :: 12.39am

We are all unique in our loneliness, but we are all connected by it.

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moana

:: 2008 10 September :: 12.13am
:: Mood: bored to tears
:: Music: The Raconteurs - Consoler of the Lonely

If you're looking for an accomplice...

The other day I was sitting there thinking about how it's almost January again, and how it'll be almost a year since I've come back home. January 4th, 2008, the day I left my heart behind in Manila. I was remembering how I was sitting there at the edge of the bed at the Traveller's Inn, all dressed and packed, and wondering what the hell I was doing, going back home. I remember Jay telling me do the right thing.

So now I'm back in school, and so's Jay. And he's got a great job at a great agency, earning a darling penny for his efforts. What's more, in January he's due for a raise. His family lives in peace. His brother's wife is pregnant again, and things seem to be going well.

I make do with where I am, too. I choose my fights, get my way most of the time, and have a lot of free time. I get to play video games, read books and make charmingly disturbing art. When I talk to my friends at AUD, and these are people I haven't seen in almost 2 years mind, they seem dull and lifeless now. They seem to be standing in the same places I left them standing when I left AUD back then, and I feel like I'm looking at them from way down the line.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, when I came back almost a year ago, I was expecting things to be different, but that all things considered, this isn't so bad either. I guess what I'm trying to say is I have my goals, and I have my life experiences, and I have tons of memories from my big crusade. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if it's almost January, then I have about a year to go before I can graduate and go back to where I left my heart.

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moana

:: 2008 11 August :: 2.12pm
:: Music: Bloc Party - Kreuzberg

I have decided at 25, that something must change.

I feel less and less like a human and more and more like a series of words on a white page as time goes on. Most of the people I truly care about are people I don't ever get to see. Instead, these are people I keep in touch with through emails, chat windows and the odd phone call now and then. So to them, that's exactly what I must be; a series of words on a white page. If that's how the people that matter the most see you, doesn't that define who you are at a certain point?

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moana

:: 2008 8 July :: 11.08am

Being back in university is nice, but I don't remember everyone around you being so stupid...

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moana

:: 2008 9 June :: 10.24pm
:: Music: Sarah Blasko - Queen of Apology

If you close your eyes and tilt your head all the way back and your neck is at a right angle to your shoulders, you'll be able to fill your head with dreams, like dipping a bottle into a stream. You'll find the dream world full of colours and shapes if you do this twice a week.

Or at least, that's the theory.

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moana

:: 2008 20 May :: 2.44pm
:: Mood: peaceful
:: Music: Radiohead - Jigsaw Fallin Into Place

I went to AUK this morning and took a placement exam. Then I registered for three summer courses. One of them I don't really want to take, but I registered for it in case the class I DO want to take won't accept. I am currently trying to kiss enough ass to overload into it.

I like the idea of going back to school. I've missed being a student while I was gone and I'm really looking forward to having something productive and stimulating to do. Besides, this'll force me to practice my graphic design stuff so I can have a bigger better portfolio for it at the end of these next two years.

I'm also thinking I'm gonna minor in English Lit. It'll give me an edge so that when I apply to agencies, I can apply as not only an Art Director, but an Art Director/Copywriter, a position coveted by many and desperately sought out. Or so I'm told.

I saw a third of my high school just walking around campus. Some of them said hi when they recognized who I was, others walked by me like they'd never seen me before, probably because they didn't recognize me at all. It's kind of depressing that it's the same faces again, but on the other hand, at least I know what I'm up against. Whenever they ask me where the hell I've been I just say I took a year and a half off and did some travelling. It seems to pass as a plausible explanation, and it's close enough to the truth that I don't have to watch out for my eye-twitch - or the contemptuous smile that comes with it.

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