January 10, 2018
comments 5

Language Barrier

I have fared the best out of the group
Although I went through the most
I got away with the least amount of scars
I remind myself of this every time I find it hard to connect
When I wonder why the majority of people I will know for years
I always feel new around
Not because I don’t care enough to ask
It seems I just don’t ask the right questions
In our culture it takes so long to get to the nitty gritty
And since that is most of what I know
There is not much else in me to ask

Some people get scared
some feel personally attacked
I feel personally attacked by those that feel that way
To them I am darkening the world they’ve worked so hard to keep protected
From the nitty gritty
But no matter how hard I’ve tried not to be, I always end up being me
The nitty gritty

I can fake myself to be less of what I am
but their fear of the things that make me who I am
Is personally offensive
So to protect their world and my being
I stay away

The majority of people I will know for years
Yet always feel new around
And not in the good and exciting way
In the unfamiliar
Uncomfortable
Out of the loop
Out of place
Misunderstood
Sort of way

I realize that I am not misunderstood
As much as I misunderstand others
But in an artist space
there I can connect
Only in the real ones of course
Not the ones that urge you to be different for the sake of being different not because you Just are
Different

I am at my most comfortable around people who have trouble connecting
with those I connect with the most
We speak the same language

The common every day for me is a language barrier
A language I’ve tried to learn for what seems like my entire life
But the culture is what blocks me
The small talk and facades
How people limit themselves
How they refuse to ask the right questions
The real ones
The scary ones
The ones that cater most to helping and understanding the other
Rather than shielding the self from feeling
Feelings that could be controlled
Not all feelings should be accepted at face value

I’ve come to accept that my native tongue has been molded
Carved out and laid out to dry
That I do not wish to be part of the ordinary anymore
I can fake it, but to make it
In that world
would be losing in mine
Why learn the language when I’m not planning on living the culture?

 

 

 

December 27, 2017
comments 9

It Didn’t Just Happen Overnight

It didn’t just happen overnight

It wasn’t all of a sudden that the word zernone lost its taste
Or that the sound of a deep E on the bass stopped looking like a purple sunset
Or that the number 33 lost its roundness in touch
Now the word zernone, the sound of a deep E and the number 33 are just that
On the occasions that I feel numbers and sounds give out a hue there is no one to tell
Adults cannot be bothered with imagination or synesthesia

We envy it in others who are in resemblance in age and shun their thoughts away
And when it is not envy, we congratulate their difference
Then follow through with imitation
And through this imitation we take away the purity of their perception of the world
We have allowed the world to take away our personal wonder by taking it for granted Then follow through by taking it away from others

Sitting is the new smoking
We sit all day then cannot be bothered to move
Our bodies don’t know what moving is after a while
Our brains can only be used to perceive after a while
Our hearts can only be reasonable after a while

Some of us take drugs, move to Brooklyn
And feel superior for attempting to hold on to our childhood
When trying to hold on is a surefire way to lose it
We must be able to walk away from it and walk back whenever we please
Learn where it is like we learned how to walk back home from school
For the very first time

Children don’t need to work so hard to remain
They just are
They just see, smell and feel things as the world is given to them
And they notice just to learn
They don’t notice to get ahead
And they don’t make friends in order to market themselves
They don’t question whether the purple hue is the best color for the deep E
It just is

It didn’t happen overnight
We slowly stopped paying attention to ourselves
We started drinking even though most of us didn’t like the taste
Because drinking “loosened,” us up
When the truth is that most of us drink to be ourselves
If more of us had the guts to be truthful I’m sure others would feel free to do it too
Truthful people are the everyday heroes of the world

It didn’t just happen overnight
We slowly kept walking with the times
Some of us never bothered to put breadcrumbs down by our path
Because our horrid past told us there was nothing there for us to go back to

Sitting is the new smoking
So on many occasions I get up and stumble back without the breadcrumbs to guide me
And when frustrated and lost, I remind myself that a child just is
They just are
Who cares how I get there?
But with this new knowledge of the world
I’ve been going back
Slowly

It doesn’t just happen overnight

 

Breadcrumbs
#quartervida

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Instagram: @quartervida 
Twitter: @quartervida

 

 

November 1, 2017
comments 13

The Luxury of the False Prophet

Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi, Rick and Morty, J Cole and Kanye. The story of the false prophet and the lost boy is a story that has been retold and relived for centuries. The notion that it is ok for young boys to follow the guidance of an unqualified older male in order to fulfill some great destiny is troubling.

The idolization of false prophets by boys in an attempt to become men makes me wonder if it is Art imitating life, life imitating art or a little bit of both. The examples above are not the first time that we see boys attempting to become men or men attempting to become gods. In fact this is a prevalent theme in western stories. Also, where do the girls stand in all this?

As a pre-teen I would watch Sailor Moon, the story of a young dumb girl in search of her destiny. As a girl this was one of the only shows where a girl actually had a destiny larger than herself. However, like many stories where girls attempt to become women or goddesses, they are not supplied with an older, wiser woman to guide them through it all. Why would they do that when all of the older women are being portrayed as witches? No, what they are supplied with is a man. This man becomes their help, their torture and their goal all at once.

The notion of a girl having a destiny to begin with was so important to us that the fact that Sailor Moon was too young for Tuxedo Mask, the fact that he treated her horribly and did nothing to really help in battles but throw roses at her, and the fact that her ultimate destiny was to eventually become a wife and mother completely went over our little heads. What mattered to us most was that Sailor Moon had a destiny greater than herself. What mattered to us was that Sailor Moon had room to grow, that there was a difference between being a girl and a woman and it went beyond the changes our bodies go through at an age where we barely know what it means to be a person, much less a woman.

Boys and men have always had the luxury of having destinies to fulfill. Their bodies do not dictate whether they are boys or men, their actions do.  For us females it has always been different. Even now as we see a growing trend of strong female leads in the media, we still have a long way to go.

We have reached a point where females are being seen as tough and independent without the help of a man. This is great and exciting, however regardless of how ridiculous a false prophet may seem, females need to have this luxury. And not in the way that the fairy godmother helps Cinderella get pretty for a man. But in the way that we are able to see other women as worthy enough to follow. In order for a girl to be able to look up to a woman, that woman has to be beautiful, smart, wise and kind. In order for a boy to be able to look up to a man, all that man has to be is a male with similar interests.

The fact is that all prophets are false prophets. We are all following our own paths and when our paths do coincide, we arrive there by completely different means. But to grow up in a world where the older women are witches, while the older men are prophets says a lot about the way we perceive our reality as women.

As we unlock the chains set for us, we begin to see how many more restraints we are currently living with. Every human being is secretly fighting to control the world, regardless of whether we stay in it or die for it. We are fighting to mold the world closer to our vision of what it should be. Whether our intentions are pure or not is another story. It would be not an honor, but a right for women to be portrayed as having a destiny. To then give our gender the importance it deserves, we must understand that we are not just capable of being destined for greatness, but also of leading each other through womanhood.

We are born in one world, live in another and die in the one we’ve created. It is only fair that we have equal share in the creation of the world that we as a gender give birth to.

October 4, 2017
comments 13

Paying For Air

PBS wants you to donate. The FDNY wants you to honor them. Pepsi wants you to drink it. McDonalds wants you to eat it. Chipotle wants you to eat it, but it also wants you to know that it is not McDonalds. Dr. Zizmore wants you to look at yourself and see how much better you could be if you went to him. BMCC wants you to enroll, and bring your baby with you.

We are out here giving our time, energy and attention away to ideals that most likely do not apply to our personal life. Our attention span is not getting smaller, it’s just that there is only so much of it to go around.

When mentally exhausted from just our daily commute, we turn to our phones for a break, where we meet demands from literally everyone and their mothers. To know and interact with hundreds of acquaintances, from their daily life, the things they like, the way they feel and even the way people we don’t even know feel about these contacts, is a bit much. The fact that this is how we escape is preposterous. The fact that many of us have become so addicted to escaping the present that we do so by getting stuck in someone else’s past is even crazier.

When we look down at our phones, at least we choose what we see, who we are friends with and who we follow. With the exception of ads, of course (they choose you). If you gave your audio permissions away to the social media apps on your mobile tracking device then your phone is most likely listening in for key ad words. Even our escape is another version of the thing we are trying so desperately to get away from.

If you attend an event, and you take a picture and post it with the hashtag of the marketing campaign that designed the event, you get the free thing. This thing is often times more free advertising, such as a shirt, a cup, a pin, etc.

Welcome to the world of experimental marketing, where they make sure you fucking look at them. Where they take something that you love to do, make it their own, tell you it’s free and make sure that you know why. They know that our attention is limited, they know that we are becoming dull and tired so they offer us free experiences for the chance to be the only brand in our face for that period of time.

Try to think how many times during a day you are solely thinking about yourself. For what baby boomers call the most selfish generation, I’d say not much, with the exception of the occasional selfie. And even then, we have to question why we are posting what we post. Is it really our own? I admire artists who never go to galleries and musicians who aren’t music snobs for this very reason. It’s like when pregnant women put headphones on their stomachs. The baby doesn’t know what it’s listening to, but it will also never know that listening to Enya while in the womb is one of the reasons why it decided to become a monk.

Their trick is to either take things that you have become conditioned to not live without and make you pay for them or create a new need, offer it for free, and then charge you for it once you are hooked. Our new need is attention and experience. Our attention span isn’t small or limited, it is being taken without our consent. We are a generation of renaissance people. No other generation has been as sympathetic, strong, articulate, artistic and diverse as ours. And I hope that the generation that comes after is even stronger, more expressive, artistic and diverse than ours.

Maybe I’ll pay $100 for an hour of silence in a chamber of salts and water. That should clear my head. Peace and silence have become so rare that in the future none of us would mind paying for air.

“Your diet isn’t always what you eat, it’s what you watch it’s what you listen to, so I’m mindful of what I ingest, and so there was basically nothing there that was feeding me. I have a computer, that’s enough there I can pick and choose what’s feeding me. I didn’t have a TV because I wasn’t trying to be fed by that. The same way some people don’t eat meat. It’s about minding my diet.” – Saul Williams