Mental Constipation

"Writing is easy. You just have to stare at a piece of paper until your forehead bleeds." -Douglas Adams.

So far, my forehead hasn't bled enough. Application essays are still painful and my head is suffering a losing war.

Eh, I'll win eventually and I'll be very relieved when that time finally comes. (January 15!)

But yes, this post was out of sheer mental constipation. I can't write anything right now without promptly deleting it afterwards. T_T

In this room

Creative activity in English class:
Decor Decoding

The small white bottle was empty. Patricia Walker stared into its stark void, kneeling on the carpet of the bedroom in front of her bedside table, socks strewn around her haphazardly. "Hm, out again?" She closed the bottle, slipped it into its usual bag, and replaced it in the drawer. Then she slowly replaced the socks, neat rows of two by four.

Dinner was the routine affair. Lupe' had taken the 5 o'clock train home after finishing the laundry, and Lilabelle would return after dinner at a friend's house. Patricia wondered faintly what Lilabelle would eat there. The steak simmered noisily in the cold stillness of the kitchen, but Patricia heard it dimly within the withdrawing chaos of her mind.

"I'm back." Mark slipped off his BacoBucci loafers and lined them parallel to her SteveMadden heels. "The night's going to be cold. Hope Lilabelle wore enough." His voice is clipped, echoed back in angles and edges from their geometric living room. He walked over the kitchen and stood in the doorway. Patricia glanced at him; he usually enters his office room first and does not come out until dinner.
"Patricia..." Now she knew something was wrong. He had not called her by her name in months. Maybe it was years. She lowered the spatula and turned to face him.

*******

The red and blue flashing lights hurt Lilabelle's eyes as her friend's mother dropped her off at her apartment complex. She cautiously walked toward them. Suddenly the figure of her mother emerged from the front door, flanked by strange big men.
"Mom?" Lilabelle ran toward her mother, but her father swooped in and picked her up. Patricia turned at the sound of the familar voice. She saw Lilabelle's pink pigtails that caught the light of the police cars, and all of a sudden Patricia wanted nothing more in the world than to take them off and bury her face her sweet child's hair, to hold her closer than she had ever held her before. It was too late, however; she had spent too much time on her pills and now had to leave, eyes streaming with tears.

Feeding Ducks

It was probably because I'd finished reading Watchmen the other night.

Watching the ducks and Canadian geese squabble over the bits and pieces of bread I flung at them, I pondered their resemblence to our own selves. We are greedy; greedy for food, fortune, sometimes fame. We fight each other for territory and chase away the losers, victorious. A pitiful-looking goose gazed mournfully at my bread, and I tried throwing some to her/him, only to see another goose viciously twisting its back feathers, reprimanding it for attempting to eat the proffered food. A certain duck was even more pitiful. Her feathers were ruffled, grayed, and upon closer inspection, she was flightless. Her wingtips had been completely sheared off, perhaps by another duck vying for the same food.

I wondered, and threw down the morsels in silent resentment. Soon we will run out of resources and squabble between ourselves just as the ducks did. Scratch that. We already are. And when that happens, who will be the flightless ones?

Sakura = cherry blossom

They say a cherry blossom petal falls at a rate of 5 centimeters per second...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPCaAJ3BogE


It's pretty sad how unstable people are. We flit here and then there, forming bonds and breaking them, becoming close to those we come to know, and remaining distant from others. It almost seems as if the strength of people's friendships is inversely proportional to the distance between them. Distance in most cases are physical; it's difficult to maintain a long-distance relationship for example.

Why is it so? Why do we come to love those near to us when our true love may be halfway around the world? Are human hearts truly so easily swayed, our pack-animal instincts so firmly imbedded that we attach ourselves to those near us, forgetting the ones we met before because they are no longer "here"? Trapped in our bubbles and narrow viewpoints?

There are many charitable organizations and groups that promote saving the "starving children in Africa," but those who lounge in prosperity who had never been to those regions would not lift a finger. They might see an advertisement, feel sorry, and go back to that new quiz on Facebook or the latests political happening. Even now, I could be making more people aware of our distant-but-not-so-different neighbors on Planet Earth, but here I am, typing at my computer on my Blog, my conscious only slightly prickled.

My point is, it seems pathetic that we humans cannot feel for those who are also human but who live elsewhere and far away from us, who are complete strangers to us, and that we tend to lose our feelings for people we loved because of life's inevitable barriers: time, distance, people.