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Lucinda Roy

For Namba Roy, 1910-1961

I often spin around with you and hear
the fragile music of a carousel;
I feel your black arms round me in a heavy sweep
of closeness, taking me up on notes which fall
like eggs through water.

I am older now
and you have fallen from the garish horse
a long time since, and I am holding on
with thin brown fingers. Do you know
it’s been a quarter century since you
(with your voice like the man who plays God in the movies)
kissed me? I don’t remember your kisses.
I remember you wearing striped pyjamas
and waving to me from the ward - your great hand
scooping a half-circle out of nothing;
how my brother almost choked on a Lifesaver
until a male nurse turned him upside down
and out came the white mint with the hole
that saved him.

I dreamed you died, and when I woke
my mother was by the bed. ‘How will I light
the fire?’ she said. I didn’t know.

It was cold in our house; our breath came out
round as balloons and dissolved till we breathed
again. We learned to accommodate spaces
as you must have learned to accommodate…
but no. Where there is no place to put things,
no place for your bones or your slippers or my words
there cannot be a place for spaces.
It must be fine to know only lack of substance -
the round emptiness in an angel’s trumpet -
and still hear music.

I have the things you made
and she has made us see you in them.
I have the ivory statues and the pictures
telling stories of African ancestors,
a birth, flights into Egypt. In your work
I find the stillness of your eyes and mouth
the stillness which is always at the centre
of the spinning ball we hurl high and long.

I often spin around with you and hear
the fragile music of a carousel.
My horse would gallop forward if I let him
but I prefer the swinging back to where
we were, slow undulations round and back
to identical place. I prefer to see
your black hands with mine on a crimson mane
which will never be swept back by the wind.

Next!

Sometimes I think Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities in the country- when it's sunny. Like it was yesterday! I spent all day yesterday at the ginormous Barnes & Noble in University Village finishing Snow Crash. There is a hilariously awkward sex scene in it between Y.T. and Raven. I mean, I don't think it was intended to be either hilarious or awkward, but damn, it was like reading about the conception of Hagrid the half-giant in Harry Potter.

Today, I will be embarking on my next reading adventure, Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. It's a fitting way to start off my 24th year. My twenties has been a time of self-discovery, and for a "long" time, I thought happiness was the ultimate aim of life. You know, life is short, do what makes you (and not some abstract dude called God) happy, as long as you don't hurt anyone. But now I'm beginning to think that purpose is just as important, if not more, than happiness. Happiness is short-lived. Moments of pleasure survive in your memories, but those memories quickly become like someone else's dreams. Did that really happen to me? I often find myself asking. And was it really only a few months ago? It seems like ages ago, another lifetime. After basking in your memories, you shake your head, waking yourself up to the present, and wonder what's next? Who's left? It's the fate of humankind to have brains built to comprehend time linearly, so no matter how amazing the present moment is, we're constantly asking ourselves, "so what's next?" only days later. Conversely, no matter how shitty the present moment is, we can look on into the future and hope for better times. Overall, it's a blessing to be able to have things over with, because that's what makes our lives dynamic and exciting. We can be filled with anticipation (or dread) precisely because of our inability to view time all at once like a typical dimension of space. But, it is interesting to think that there are other ways to view time, like the block universe theory. Many physicists are convinced that finding the theory of everything will only be possible with a better understanding of time. Trying to understand the true nature of time with the limitations of the human brain is sort of like Helen Keller learning to read and write in Chinese. When you think about it, Helen Keller was quite a lucky girl to be born blind and deaf into an English-speaking society. Imagine trying to learn 10,000 complicated Chinese characters and getting all the tones down, when you don't understand sound or sight.

Boys Are From Mars

I was telling May about how yesterday I was sprawled on my bedroom floor chatting with two male friends about our dream weddings and sharing a communal plate of late-night grubs. Just like a sleepover with my lady friends.

"Guys have dream weddings?" she asked.

"Yeahman!" I responded. "Except for them, it's more like "wooo, I wanna have the wildest craziest party of the century! With a donkey! Eating hash!" Pause. "See what I mean? Different."

"A donkey? Eating hash? So it's not at all like talking with your lady friends."

"No...I guess not."

And so much more that cannot be published on this public blog (Yeah, even I've got limits). God I miss that girl.

Stranger Than Fiction

Bull Shit.

Okay, I'm being unfair. I can sort of see why he'd write such things. I love reading about Arthurian lore- it's magical, grand, adventurous. Plus, I often look back to past blog posts and ask myself: What the hell was I thinking when I wrote that? But I know I had a reason for writing what I did; there was some angle from which it made sense.

But the qualm I have with this article is the way he views revelations of modern science as stark and demystifying and cold. He clearly has no idea about string theory or relativity, which simultaneously demystify and mystify further, somehow...they are far from cold and unimaginative. Dare I say it? There is more imagination in physics today than in all the Harry Potter books put together, what with scientists waxing poetic about the quantum world, parallel universes, dark energy, different concepts of time.

Writer Muriel Rukeyser once said that "the universe is made up of stories, not of atoms". She was right (in more than one respect since the smallest components are now quarks and leptons, not atoms), but these stories are stories of a truth that is much stranger and more imaginative than any fiction. In my non-humble opinion.

Where is the "Ursa" in Ursa Major?

How is that a bear? It looks more like a muskrat. I must be lacking a penny or two in imagination.

Things you can do to angie-fy your days:

1) Read a book while sitting in the children's section of the bookstore, with one of their teddy bears perched on your knees. Pretend it belongs to you: give it a name, a pat or two on the head, change its position every few pages. Try not to think about the number of kids who lovingly slobbered all over it before MacArthur came to you.

2) Take a ride on the swings at the local playground. Once you get a good, high swing going, stick your legs out and lean your head way back until all you see is blue (or gray) sky. Make sure your hair does not touch the dirt at the lowest point of the swing trajectory.

3) Rock out to Red Hot Chili Peppers funk. All around the World, Californication, Snow, Tell Me Baby,...Do the whole head-nodding thing to the beat. There's this funny part in All around the World where they go "Ding-dang-dong-dong-ding-dang-dong-dongggg-ding-dang-dong" ...does not get any funkier than that man.

4) Blog about nothing. Like Seinfeld!

The Last Lecture

Wow, everyone should watch Randy Pausch's "Last Lecture." A computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, and founder of the Alice Project, he's dying of pancreatic cancer and delivered his very last lecture back in September.

An interesting tidbit is that he was given a teeny tiny role (an appearance- with dialogue!) in J.J. Abrams upcoming Star Trek movie, to be released this May.

Weather in WA: April 19

9:00 am: Snow!

11:30 am: Sun!!

12:30 pm: HAIL!!!

Can't wait to see what comes next. Frogs, like in Magnolia?

Wow, April 19 already! It is 10 days 'til my 24th birthday. Speaking of birthdays, I've consistently missed acknowledging all my friends' birthdays since September-ish. Is this because I've suddenly become forgetful? Or is it because I no longer care about my friends? No, the real reason is because I've stopped logging on to facebook every single day, so now there is no automatic message reminder. Hm...I guess that means that I've always been forgetful or a bad friend, if I need facebook to remind me of their birthdays. Yay, Crangie!

Happy Birthday to everyone for the next 10 years!

There, I think that solves that problem for a while, *dust off hands*.

Hillary the Angel

“You know, I have, ever since I’ve been a little girl, felt the presence of God in my life." ~HRC

Is that why she goes around telling her advisors to fuck off? I knew that was a divinely-inspired message.

"And it has been a gift of grace that has, for me, been incredibly sustaining." ~HRC

I'm sure it helped her through the various trials of her personal and political life. In fact, one could say she was "clinging to religion" in the face of hardships- perhaps not economic ones (scratch that- definitely not economic ones), but hardships nonetheless. So Obama was not wrong when he said people turned to religion as a source of comfort in the face of hardships?

Game No. 1

I just played my first Scrabble game ever! It lasted 3.5 hours. I lost to Sarah ~400 to 350. It got really interesting toward the end, when all seven of my tiles were vowels for the last 3 or 4 rounds.

UUUUU
EEEE
AIIIII
EUUUU

Scrabble is not a game for those who lack patience. I think I took like 20 minutes for one of my turns. Sorry Sarah! It's just that I really wanted to get that 10-point Z in a triplet-letter box. Eventually, I figured out that "letting go" is also a good virtue to have when playing Scrabble.

Invariance Cannot Vary...Right?

I've got this fear of becoming that workaholic parent or spouse, who invests too much time into her job, and not enough into family and friends.

These days, I find myself trying hard to finish my paper, and trying equally as hard not to build up a guilty conscience over spending so little time with family and friends.

The last couple days, however, what with Sarah visiting, I've finally caved in and set aside my paper. Now I'm back from happy hour at the waterfront, saying 'fuck you' to any sense of self-induced guilt or obligation that creeps my way, and determinedly working on this paper once again.

But I had to pause and share with my readers the sort of sentences that get typed by fingers whose veins are flowing with Chardonnay:

"...derive laws of nature from invariance* of invariance", plus countless typos...I'm a shitty typer even when I'm sober.

*That should say "laws of invariance" I think.