And I have no resolutions / For self-assigned penance / For problems with easy solutions
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The closing of the holiday season and all its retail fervor, and a supposed new beginning primarily marked by having to replace the calendar. New years may claim to mark an astronomical phenomenon, but the real power is in the cultural way that they seem to signify a substantial change. In the Land of Opportunity (TM), the opportunity to _change_ manifests itself, as if one needs occasion to better oneself.
The tone of these statements betrays my personal (more accurately, cynical) feelings about new year's resolutions. Nonetheless, I have one for this year: to write and start a podcast recording my writings, all in an attempt to express myself outwardly again. I've prided myself on maintaining some sort of "record" of myself through LiveJournal or other means, but in actuality that hasn't happened. Huge gaps emerge between posts, and even more troubling is the content that emerges in the bookends to those gaps. The internet's amazing at becoming a circular medium, always pointing back inward on itself, creating a funnel of links all leading back down to the same material. Inane links make their way to my posts, eventually gobbling up and digesting any original content. So I need to crawl back out of the internet meme funnel and start writing, start creating in some way, no matter how trivial. This seems overly dramatic, but there's the feeling that I'm slowly sealing myself off, and maybe with this newfound resolve, my most familiar mode of expression can act as a crutch to help me start to search for myself again.
I started writing bad poetry in seventh grade. We had the classic middle-school assignment: write two poems. I plagiarized them both from Aerosmith songs, transcribing the lyrics to each, cutting out lines which didn't make sense and editing it all down into poem format. They weren't read aloud, but somehow a pale girl in my class, with glasses and dark curly hair, read mine. I thought I was busted, as surely anyone was able to see through my blatant lyrical theft, even this girl I didn't particularly like. Then she complimented me on one of them, clearly impressed that I could bare my emotion so lucidly through words. The feeling that came over me must be the same that comes over any cheater who has cleanly gotten away with their crime--a puzzling mix of faux pride and complete fraud. And it's odd that such a moment spurred me to try my hand at writing more poetry, only maybe mine wouldn't be as shitty as sub-par, disemboweled Aerosmith lyrics. I would instead pilfer from the Smashing Pumpkins over the next two years, only it would be petty theft and not grand larceny, as I had done in seventh grade.
The song titles and lyrical vocabulary were certainly lifted from the Pumpkins catalog, even if my selections were more obscure tracks. "Cherub," "Blue," "Eye," "Sweet," "She," "Sun," "Bleed." There was no end to one-word titles that I could squeeze an adolescent emotion out of for two to four stanzas. In eighth grade the same assignment emerged, only now it was one poem, and it would be read out loud, albeit anonymously. I had a few poems written by then, but I chose my first, "Cherub," to hand in. Many a stolen line in the eight stanzas, but enough of it was myself at the time to set aside any sense of fraud, the lines instead warranting pride and fear at having it read out loud.
I cringe a lot at the past. Nothing can make me cringe like terrible adolescent poetry, especially my own. Almost every line I read evokes disgust and shock and incredulity, but the first verse of that poem is so etched into my brain that it doesn't spark that visceral mind-melting humilation: "I looked so hard / I forgot to see / The calming voice / Of simplicity." Typing it again reinforces the unsettling fact that I was once the person who wrote that. A few forced rhymes and a blatant lack of meter later, my eighth grade class was in awe. My best friend was shocked by the fact that the word "suicide" was in it, awkwardly asking later "So, are you okay?," a girl I liked at the time immediately blurted out, "Who wrote that?" and my teacher gave me a comforting pat on the arm. The class's somewhat stunned attention similarly comforted me during one of the few moments in middle school that I was happy I wasn't invisible.
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Spending New Year's in Germany this year was different. The Germans don't do anything half-assed, so come five minutes till midnight, the neighbors across the street let out the loudest pair of fireworks I've ever heard in my life. I was prepared for fireworks come midnight, but this was more than I expected. This was the sound of a shotgun being fired out of a cannon, and the sound came from just over twenty feet away. My Dad walked in with champagne and we stood outside for about half an hour watching the entire town light up their small backyards with firework after firework even though there was a light drizzle just barely dampening the pyrotechnics (or preventing an enormous blaze from occuring). The horizon sporadically lit up with fireworks from the two towns to the south, and the noise went on and on as I sipped champagne barefoot on the front porch. Maybe the new year is arbirtrary, but that doesn't mean there can't be a change. The most insignificant moments can be laden with significance with simple will, the unimportant becoming important with the right mix of emotion and desire. Happy New Year.
Trier, Christmas Market
Originally uploaded by buntz.
took a few pictures with my new camera in Trier, visiting the christmas market there.
