Home

I thought about my parents' careful house, the stillness and the silence as the three of us crept along the dusted furniture and the vacuumed carpets - as though we did not so much occupy the space as move within it like stealthy lodgers. If you left a glass on the kitchen counter for more than five seconds my mother would whisk it away, wiping up the wet ring on the Formica with a furious sweep of her sponge. Covering out tracks, removing evidence of ourselves. It seemed to me we apologized for our very existence in the very way we lived, bowing and ducking as though to escape the notice of some vengeful god. It wasn't life that was lived there, but eternal penitence.

~Katherine Min, excerpt from Secondhand World

Beauty

I wondered what being beautiful had done for my mother other than give her no direction in which to gaze but into her own reflection. The state of being beautiful was indiscriminate; it was there for peasants and kings. You couldn't reclaim it for yourself. You could hide it under chador or veil, but it would be there still, more enticing for its secrecy.

The state of being unbeautiful was a more exacting affair. If a man found you attractive, you knew it must be so, that he must have looked hard and long to see something within you and was not just another wistful aesthete panting after loveliness.

I was suddenly glad I wasn't beautiful, that I didn't suffer my mother's misfortunes of vanity, her disappointment in how far beauty could get you, which was, in truth, not as far as one might imagine.

~Katherine Min, excerpt from Secondhand World

Limerick for the Narcissist

Scrupulous, the work of an arrogant loner.

He becomes vulnerable to all sorts of murmur,

Apprehensively seeking a crowd

To approve him being allowed

To be considered his own intellect's owner.

It's funny how much we can assume we are lonely
When all we are is undiscovered.

Someone called me a jerk today.

For deciding not to go party with them.
It got me thinking. What is a jerk?

(1) a contemptibly naive, fatuous, foolish, or inconsequential person.
(2) a quick, sharp pull, thrust, twist, throw, or the like; a sudden movement.
(3) any sudden, quick movement of the body, as in dodging something.

To sum up,
A naive fool who likes to suddenly thrust away from or dodge the current of the present world, pursuing its opposite direction.

It made me think...
Can you define someone by their movement? Or do you define them by their mass?
A feather in a vacuum falls at the same speed as a bowling ball in a vacuum.
Too bad we can't test all our theories in a perfect vacuum, to treat all mass equally.
At the speed of light, mass increases and becomes a relative mass.
As I move towards the speed of light, I don't even notice that I am becoming larger, otherworldly, and incomparable to stagnant masses. The light defines me.

It makes me realize that no matter what, I will be offensively large to some people who have decided to stay in the same place forever. And my movement might make someone uncomfortable.

Absently used

I am not my own
& I am not yours
I am but alone
But I am not yet one

Our hips align before
Our hearts even decide
There is nothing more
Nothing more resides

Did we hit the finish line
Before we even tried
You're laughing as I cry
You leave me out to dry