Dolor

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

-- Theodore Roethke

this, basically sums up how i feel about njc, and the uninspiring system of education here on a whole. i am not one who simply says, 'school sucks' with all the contempt of an angsty teenager, but i feel that sometimes school is slowly destroying us and i'm getting buried by the fine dust from the wall without enough paint to cover its cracks. yes, i feel like the grey is rubbing off on me. the living dead, the living dead. there is, the ever over-rated non-conformity which soon becomes a commercial trend [humans are good at this]. but even then, that girl with the streaked hair who claims to break all the rules chooses to go to this grey jc, because it is one of the finest, because it will help her graduate, because it will help her get a job and finally, because it will help her become 'successful' like the rest of this forsaken population.

on to better things. i have added a new obsession to the already long list - oh, there is pablo neruda! his poems are so rich with feelings i see them dancing atop the pages as i flipped through a copy at borders. though, i don't really like reading translated works because the original flavour has been diluted and i'm reading it through the eyes of the one that translated it. it fills me with a sense of uneasiness that what a writer wants to say may soften with the different versions, and it is soon a whisper, and then it might be lost forever. yes, that frightens me.

i wish i could write poems these days but inspiration is running short; very short. and even then it is a mixed up jumble of words i cannot put to paper. class life is getting better, but i feel little [or no] attachment - the days pass and i consider VJC more and more. how joyous it would be to drop math for TSD. however, my classmates really are quite funny. the boy who sits next to me likes hilary duff and went clubbing at chinablack. this eludes me as he looks so extremely quiet, sad and demure. sad eyes, i thought, when i first saw him but now i am not so sure.

i picked up a humorous piece my brother wrote on Chinese New Year for school. i enjoyed it very much, as i always enjoy his writing. there is a sardonic wit to it that you would not expect, looking at him. and that's what i like very much, the way writing reveals characteristics you'd never seen before and never expected. he observes, oh he observes and he stores every little event in his memory that has made him think - especially the ridiculous theories we work upon sometimes. i will try to post it up here if i can. my brother is a closet writer. he doesn't write leisurely, like i do, but it's something i hope he grows to love.

+ posted by M @ 5:24 PM