follow the leader

i just had a thought (just, as in within thirty seconds ago): sometimes i feel like life is one big game of follow the leader. or, like at school dances, when they start those trains and all the cool kids grab each others’ shoulders and start parading around the room like they’re the cat’s pyjamas because they darn well are and you’re too nakedly aware of your painful lack of self-esteem to do anything about it. (i believe that right there was a sizeable sentence fragment. my apologies.) it takes more than one person, so everyone jump on. i’ll miss you when you’re just like them. (jimmy eat world) i’m a big jimmy eat world fan. i guess they were out of style, then in style, then back out again, and whatever, man, they stayed true to themselves. they didn’t just follow the leader, be the leader blink-182 (though i quite like them as well) or the get up kids (okay, okay, i like them too) or fall out boy (can’t say i’m their biggest fan, though). their sound matured a little over time, i think, but it didn’t have far to go. i think it’s done more exploring, from clarity to chase this light. but they’re constant; maybe that’s why i like them so much. oh, music. i like to lose myself in it. well, i like to lose myself in the sense of losing all my fears and burdens. i think, sometimes i lose who i am as well. but maybe when i find it again at the end of the song, it’s something a little clearer, harder, stronger, wiser.

on the subject of music, i have some discoveries! (well, i call them discoveries. that’s a pretty highfalutin word for my puttering around looking for little acts with good music.)

1. peachcake. these guys are by far my favorite of the three bands i’ll list; i’ll say that right now. i cannot get enough of their upbeat, neo-synthpop sound. the sonic mayhem of “jeremiah, stop taking bukowski so seriously” somehow makes sense in spite of repeated noises that sound like bad feedback. furthermore, i can’t listen to “are we accidentally at a party?!” without bobbing at least my head. but it’s not just things like the spastic beat of “hundreds and hundreds of thousands” that put peachcake at least on level with the postal service (whose album give up is the second-best-seller on sub pop records, after nirvana’s début album, in case you were wondering) in my ears. their lyrics, advocating peace and a sustainable lifestyle, give serious value to their music. so yeah, check them out if you haven’t been listening since the beginning of this paragraph.
2. the kin. do i hear a darkwave undertone on “together”? it’s there during the chorus. you can hear the tiniest depeche mode influence, in the spinning violin and piano chording. chipper guitar and lyrics about apparent ends of the world combine in “see” to create a perfect song for any mood (“cats in the cradle” by ugly kid joe, anyone?). the soaring harmonies and build in the bridge make my pulse quicken, and puts this at the top of my list of their songs.
3. the evan anthem. here’s for something a little different, a little less exploratory on my part. however, they take my old style of music and twist it around with delicate harmonies and fresh rhythms, though i’ll admit the drumming does leave something to be desired. i’m no drummer; i can’t put my finger on it, but i think as a confirmed travis barker fan the cymbals are being underused. give them a listen in any case. the drumming is better on the newest songs.

i think my favorite song for the drumming would have to be “little death” by +44. it is beautiful.

isolation

i am a rock; i am an island. (simon and garfunkel) that’s where the word isolation comes from, anyway: the past participle isolated, from the italian “isolato” which means secluded, from the italian “isola” which means island, from the latin “insula”, also meaning island.

i’m looking out my window to a familiar dark scene which i will leave behind me in a week’s time. i can’t see much, some ghostly silhouettes of a house and some trees, and the stars poking through the night like tiny moth-holes in a black curtain. and four lit windows. the tinny buzz of television french is raw and soft in my ears. the kitchen is lit a dim, tired, incandescent yellow. a similar light glows from behind a curtain of ivy, from the frosted window of the next room. a floor above, a window flickers with the bright light of the television. but it is the dimmest window. another incandescent light still burns in the next window. it’s sad how we’re more connected than ever, and we’ve never felt more alone.

tonight is so clear. look at all those stars; look at how goddamned ugly the stars are. (alkaline trio) that’s how you knew it was a wonderful night to die. it’s so clear and still you can see next to nothing. starlight and solitude. the air tastes like night, too, a little stale, a little fresh, like the world is being renewed. i always like to pretend that the world is renewed at night. but i stay up all night and i see nothing new. i get up in the morning and i feel nothing new, just whatever yesterday forgot to wash away. something for today to take. i find the concepts of yesterday and tomorrow quite useless. if we contemplate those concepts, we spend today thinking about the good times we had yesterday and planning the good times we’ll have tomorrow. here’s a reality for you: tomorrow never comes. you are perpetually living today, living now.

i feel a little more alone than usual tonight. i finally got one response to a text message, planning tomorrow. no one’s responded to the message planning saturday, or the message planning some formless future.

i just wanted to immortalize the now though, with abrasive television french quiet in my ears and the sound of the autoroute in the background, the ugliest stars in the sky above casting shadows on a world that should be sleeping below. and the sweet, deceptive taste of night air. i shall catch cold.

an archaeology of sorts

do you ever get the feeling that the heat and your body fat content are in collaboration against you? or maybe it’s just hot and even though i’m half a kilo lighter than i was last summer, i am still similarly insulated.

so i’ve been cleaning my room. five years of mess, with lazy occasional cleanings, really does pile up. one of my new year’s resolutions was to clean my room at least four times this year (it was four, right? not three?). so now it’s a mandatory, go-through-all-the-junk-you’ve-accumulated, cleaning. i have found so much loose change lying around; no wonder i’m broke all the time. i think i have enough to get a frappucino or something in geneva at some point. and it hasn’t just been swiss change: it’s been in pounds, euros, and dollars as well. sometimes i worry. i have also found approximately a million pens that no longer work, an invitation to apply for the freshman science honors program at usc (three months after the deadline but i did the application anyway), and more chocolate than i thought i had. i’ll need some time to eat all that, and maybe some proper work too. i guess, since i’m working over the summer, it’ll disappear quickly enough. i’ve found installation cds and cables for several cameras. and, to top it all, i have found so much dust. maybe i shouldn’t say that i’ve “found” dust, because i don’t have to look very far. but nonetheless, more dust than i know what to do with.

it makes me feel like i should be wearing cargo shorts, a shirt with a collar and pockets, and one of those somewhat comical hats. i could be indiana jones, without the adventure, and without having to leave my room. it’s stiflingly hot upstairs, so now i’m in the living room with my computer (also too warm for comfort) on my lap, hoping it doesn’t burn my thighs.

digging these things up is weird for me. you can’t see the memories but sometimes you’ll pick up an object, a meaningless little thing like a keychain, and when you look at the keychain you remember the souvenir shop in which you bought it, you remember the other keychains around it and why you picked this one (you couldn’t afford the other ones, obviously.). you remember that day, when you were so young and you were in paris with the people you still called your family and the word didn’t trip on your tongue. so you dust off the keychain and put it back down to recollect the dust. and when you’ve done that enough, with enough things and enough memories, your life becomes a blur before your eyes and all you want is for the endless reruns in the theater of your mind to stop. silence. you stare out at the sky, which isn’t blue but more of a hazy gray because the sun got so hot that it burned the blue away. and it’s still hot, beating down on you through the window, illuminating everything you didn’t want to see. things build up and you have to take them down.

to live, forever

eternity has been in the balance, lately. or maybe it’s just been weighing on my mind. sometimes i wonder that it doesn’t collapse with all that weight. what is eternity? what does forever actually mean? did humanity invent time? why does time go increasingly quickly as you age, and before you know it, you’re dead?

there exists a space-time continuum; space and time are essentially inseparable. from what little i know of general relativity (taken off the ap physics syllabus and i’m too tired to shuffle through the wikipedia article again), the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time goes. be forewarned that whatever i write next is raw, unfiltered thought vomit. if velocity is displacement over time, and time is passing increasingly slowly while the physical distance traveled remains the same, then velocity does not increase linearly. i suppose one would have to consider velocity from the standpoint of a stationary observer, as opposed to from the standpoint of the moving party. i wonder if, measuring from the latter perspective, it would be possible to exceed the speed of light, and what impacts it would have. i wonder if, traveling at nearly the speed of light, it would be possible to live forever. forever would seem an awfully long time, if you had to live it. what is time, though? dictionary.com (perpetual companion of the days of vocabulary tests in english class) defines time as “the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future; indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another.” and i daresay that is a complicated definition of an awfully… fundamental? concept. it implies, to some extent, that time requires events, to exist. so, time requires events, but not necessarily an observer. time will still pass callously once we’ve blown ourselves away.

my idea (maybe it’s a sort of perceptual relativity) pertaining to the increasingly rapid passage of time is not that humanity is moving towards its ultimate self-destruction at an increasing pace (i’m not that misanthropic.). i think it has something to do with how long you’ve lived. when you’re four years old and you turn five, and you look back on that year between your fourth and fifth birthdays, you think, “dang! that was 25% of my life!” or maybe you think, “gimme more cake.” but a year is an awfully long span of time, at that age. i remember when i was six years old and my dad promised to give me $100 if i didn’t smoke before the age of 18. his dad suffered for smoking, and he didn’t want to see us in the same boat. firstly, at six years old, $100 seemed a fortune. i could go buy anything with $100 (not the case anymore. it would go towards funding college, now.). secondly, age 18 was a lifetime away. i couldn’t imagine myself at 8, let alone 18. kids live in the present and oh, how i wish i were still a kid. and recently, when i turned 17, that year since my sixteenth birthday seemed to have rocketed past. a year isn’t such a long span of time anymore. it’s a much smaller fraction of my short existence. thus, relatively, a year is a short time in my eyes. i can’t quite picture myself at 50; i struggle to see myself at 25 because i like to keep my future in a reasonable fog. i find that life is like a movie: if you already know what’s going to happen, it’s pretty darned boring. so i don’t know what’s going to happen; maybe curiosity keeps me alive. my desire to find out, my desire to answer the question, “what are you going to do with yourself when you grow up?” good heavens, if i had any clue, i’d be doing it. i kid you not. but i think, when i’m 50, when i’m celebrating my fifty-first birthday, i’ll look back on that past year and think, “that felt about as long as a month felt when i was four years old.” (do the math. fifty years of my life at age fifty, forty-eight months of my life at age four. it doesn’t line up too badly.) although, by then, i’ll probably be deaf from standing in front of the speakers at concerts to take photographs, suffering from alzheimer’s because i tried to remember too much for my ap exams in high school, and hideously obese from eating all that chocolate. at the end of the school year, i went to mr. mcguire and asked him to sign my yearbook, and we got into a good conversation, like last year’s history class. and he said, “every time i turn around, it’s thursday.” i guess it was a thursday when i went to get him to sign the yearbook; it was the day before graduation. “sometimes i catch a sunday and then i think about it and it’s damned thursday again. it’s like it’s always thursday, and i can’t recall what happened to the rest of the week.”

once upon a future time, i want to recall the rest of the week. i don’t know what eternity is. i don’t know if it ever started or if it always was, or if it’s something that we can grasp and record and cut down, box into a scientific box, a coffin for dreams (that’s ironic, coming from a kid who intends to major in physics and computer science.). but i want to recall the rest of the week, every moment. every sight in vivid technicolor, every sound in surround, every smell in its original chemical intensity. i don’t want to be a victim of perceptual relativity. i know i’ve got this great theory that everything important that ever happened in my life, happened on a thursday (except being born, that was on a tuesday), but i want to remember the mondays. i want to remember the fridays. i want to live the moments and not let them slip through the fingers of my existence like so much sand through the skinny neck of an hourglass.

every day is saturday

how strange it is to wake up to nothing. i daresay it is not inordinately conducive to getting out of bed. you wake up, and you think i’m not doing anything today. your life is one big nothing (but then again, it usually feels that way). so i got up and got dressed and painted on glittery eyeliner, for nothing. well, not nothing. i went downtown today, to see ten, take pictures, and say goodbye to robin.

ma chère genève. tu me manqueras, dans les mois qui viennent. tes rues, tes bus, ta vielle ville… tu représentes mon enfance, les rêves d’une fille solitaire, d’une fille qui aimait rêver. tu as crée les rêves et tu les a détruits comme la fumée de tes cigarettes dans la bise. tu me manqueras.

and i will miss robin so much more. she has been a sister to me in humor, in adventures (of course ap physics and chem were adventures! geez!), and in existence. she got us grad shirts. it’s so beautifully generous and creative and something i will treasure forever-ish. and she got me headbands and earrings, two types of accessories of which i shall never have enough. i’m beginning to doubt if i shall ever have enough weird scarves but that is another story. i’m jealous of the kids who will have robin as their camp counselor this summer and i’m jealous of the kids who will go to uni with her next year. furthermore, i am jealous of her roommate, who is as yet unknown, because this roommate will get to spend the next year with, in kurt’s words, “the roflcopter that never runs out of fuel.” and robin is so much more than that. kid, i’m going to miss you. i just might crash your dorm at some point this year.

so soon, too soon, it will be my turn to pack up my room and say goodbye. maybe it’s good that the goodbyes aren’t coming at the same time as the packing. i can barely see my floor and i don’t think it’s going to get better. i think my room defines a fourth law of thermodynamics: “the contents of simca’s room shall eternally resist any forces towards order.”

thank you, good night.

endings

hello, and welcome to the fourth home of the chronicles of genevan suburbia. in early 2005, this blog began on xanga under the peculiar moniker of the songwriter’s curse. if you care to know what that meant, you may ask. it became what it is today in late 2005 when it migrated to an msn space. finally, in mid-2006, it underwent another transition to a myspace blog. since myspace is inaccessible, sketchy, and a real drag, the chronicles are finally moving to a proper blogging location. it’s about time, ’nuff said.

i find it ironic that i am starting a “new” blog with a post on endings.

i don’t particularly like endings. in a transient city like geneva, they come far too often. i’ve been watching this particular ending creep up on me, out of the corner of my eye, and i’ve been thinking, maybe if i ignore it, it’ll all just go away. this is my typical problem-solving (problem-avoiding?) strategy. it doesn’t work very well. let’s spit it out. high school ended today. graduation was last friday; my friends and i were the loser seniors who were too enamored with our campus, our teachers, our lounge to leave it all behind. so i went back, yesterday and today. every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. (lovedrug) it’s funny, how i spent the better part of four years just dying to be done with high school, and now i’m sitting here, still numb, thinking, it’s over. it’s all over. it hasn’t quite hit me, i think. last friday, in addition to being graduation, was the last fat friday at crossroads church in ferney. my last fat friday… i’m going to miss youth group. i’m not sure if i’m ready to grow up yet. the friday before that was horatio’s farewell show in the pays de gex. it was more emotional than i’d like to admit. i got some good photos, and it’s hard to think that those are the last photos.

perhaps my trouble with endings comes in contemplating their utter, complete finality.

peter left yesterday. that was another ending, in the sense of the end of a visit. the last few times he’s come and gone, it’s been easy to say, “there’ll be another visit.” i know there will still be more visits, but their finite nature weighs on me. maybe that was why i took it harder than usual, why i cried on the train home, why i was happy, in some twisted sense of the word, for the rain because i always like to pretend that it was the rain that smudged all that black eyeliner.

there is some comfort in that statement, “oh well, another time.” we deceive ourselves, we so deceive ourselves. because maybe there will be another time, but more than likely there will not. the important things only happen once. if it matters to you, then you only get one shot. a prime example of this, something we all have in common, is life. we all get one shot at life. we’re not mario; we only have one life. when this game is over, it’s over. we don’t have lives enough to start this level over; we don’t have checkpoints at parts in our lives to which we can return if we die. this is life; this is it. this is our one shot and we’d damn well better make it good because it’s all we’ve got. in the end, we’re all part of the ultimate statistic: 100% of humans die from the disease we classify as life.

we have a moment. it’s up to us whether we choose to live in it.