we live in a beautiful world...

"we live in a beautiful world, yeah we do, yeah we do…" — Coldplay, "Don't Panic"

Sometimes I forget that the world is a truly unimaginably beautiful, until a day like today. Today felt like my eyes had been opened for the first time since I was very young, and I saw beauty in the small things. The crack in the pavement like lightening. The scrawl of graffiti across a bathroom door. The way that boy who has the Mohawk shrugged his shoulders, as if water were running down his back. Sometimes I get so lost in the every day murmur that I forget about what's really important. The trees, the sky, the people. I get lost in myself, and I forget the landscape outside my own mind. I think that it is not odd for that to happen to people, especially in a suburban or an urban environment. To escape the dreariness of cookie-cutter houses and boxy skyscrapers we retreat inside, and we create a terrain where we can survive. I think the human ability to adapt to monotony is one of the most amazing things in the world: we survive by noticing the details, or drawing within and finding a garden in ourselves. I think that garden is what we use to protect ourselves from pain, from feeling too much. Because living in little cookie-cutter lives is numbing and at the same time excruciating. So we create a coping mechanism.

And I think that for some of us that coping mechanism doesn't work as well, so we end up sort of paralysed on drugs and what not. Sometimes I'm hate my meds so much I want to scream and scream and fucking scream my throat raw, and then I have to remind myself that they're keeping me alive (ironically enough) and there would be nothing worse than losing myself in that strange fluctuating mess between happy and sad all the time. Anyhow, I need to find my garden outside my mind, and today I was able to reach out and touch something I haven't touched in a long time. You know how when you've been holding your breath for what seems like forever, your lungs burn? That's what it felt like, and it was like I suddenly resurfaced and found sanity just above the water.

My college results shall be arriving from Cal on the fifteenth. And I was freaking out about it at dinner, but now that I've had a little time to think and distance myself, I realise that my self-worth and my journey is not dependent on where I go to school. Agreed, my sexual journey would probably be much more fulfilling and meaningful if I was living in the Bay Area and had all the resources I could ever imagine, but I could just stay here. I would feel stifled at first, but then I'd find the beauty in the ordinary things, and then I'd cope just fine.

hot damn.

Sorry for the neurotic posting, but I just figured something out.

I am a bisexual man trapped in a girl's body.

That's it. For the first time in my life I've been able to pinpoint exactly what is up with me. And it kind of sucks, because I really really really would prefer to be a guy

Slava Mogutin

I wanted to blog for a moment about one of my favourite photographers/artists, Slava Mogutin. Mogutin is famed for being exiled from Russia for his queer writing, and specifically for "malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence." Anyhow, I'm going to post a few of my favourite photos of his, and then I'm going to give you a link to his site, but I do have to warn you that many of the photos are particularly sexually explicit, and I'm sure that to some degree I am a voyeur for enjoying his work, but I like to convince myself that it's the artistic sensibilites that draw me to his work, and that's true definitely, but there is something insanely beautiful about all of it: the grunge, the BDSM.

Slava Mogutin

Proust Questionnaire.

Ah, Proust, you lovely boy, you. I dedicate this to you!
To see his actual answers, in French, follow this link →



Confessions.
An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c.

Your favourite virtue. – Kindness and patience.

Your favourite qualities in a man. – Intelligence.

Your favourite qualities in a woman. – Intelligence, wit.

Your favourite occupation. – Thinking, writing, dreaming.

Your chief characteristic. – Liberality.

Your idea of happiness. – A life spent in artistic pursuit.

Your idea of misery. – A life without love or purpose.

Your favourite colour and flower. – I love red and calla lilies.

If not yourself, who would you be? – I would be… Rufus Wainwright.

Where would you like to live? – Canada! Or Ireland.

Your favourite prose authors. – Jon McGregor, Alan Hollingshurst, Michael Cunningham.

Your favourite poets. – Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Yevegeny Yevtushenko, Anna Ahkmatova, Alan Ginsberg

Your favourite painters and composers. – Rachmaninoff, Mahler, John Singer-Sargent, Rufus Wainwright, Snow Patrol, Bob Dylan, the Doors.

Your favourite heroes in real life. – My friend Eli, Rufus Wainwright.

Your favourite heroines in real life. – Sylvia Plath.

Your favourite heroes in fiction. – John Grady from All the Pretty Horses.

Your favourite heroines in fiction. – Antigone.

Your favourite food and drink. – Food: pan friend noodle; drink: Irish breakfast tea.

Your favourite names. – Eli, Rian, Rafe, Inara, Mikael, Ecke.

Your pet aversion. – Chewing with ones's mouth open.

What characters in history do you most dislike. – Hitler, for his avarice, his racism, and his nationalism.

The natural talent you'd like to be gifted with – Beauty and charisma.

How you wish to die – A painless drug overdoes. Euphoria and then silence.

What is your present state of mind. – Rather bored, kind of musing.

For what fault have you most toleration? – Sarcasm.

Your favourite motto. – "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end." – Ursula LeGuin

hey jack kerouac...

Who is Your Alter Poet?

Way to go, your alter poet is Jack Kerouac, who is by FAR the coolest! Take this quiz! Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

This amused me to no end. I'll be honest and admit that I am a rather large Kerouac fan, although I fucking hate the word beat and I will beat (haha) anyone over the head who happens to use the words "cats," "jive," "groovy," and or "hip," in my general vincinity. After I read On the Road I started smoking, so I can generally blame Kerouac for the descent of my health and my current addiction to Camel #9s. Or maybe it's just the pink and black box that's addicting. Well, anyway. Kerouac and I are apparently quite alike, and he's my "alter poet" ego or whatever.

I'm posting entirely too much today, but I really can't help but write a little. I guess it's just that I haven't written in a long time, and this is my one outlet of pretension. I haven't written poetry in like two months, and anything prose I've written has been bordering on psychotic, and I don't mean that in a "haha, I'm soooo crazy" kind of way, but more like it doesn't make any sense. I wrote short story around midnight about a month ago, and when I woke up the next morning and read it was pure gibberish. There were a few gems of sentences in there, so I extracted those and set them around in a sort of semblance of a story, but I'd be lying if I said it made any sense after that.

Anyhow, I just need to get some stuff off my chest.

And a question, what does everyone have against lesbians? All my gay guy friends disdain lesbians, and everyone seems to think there's something wrong with it. Why is that gay guys are more accepted? Well, relatively accepted by society. This has been giving me a bit of a pause lately. Not because of any recent revelations about my sexuality, I've known for a while that I'm at least bisexual, but I've been trying to get more involved in GLBTQ rights, and I've noticed that there's a lot of like prejudice within the movement itself. Like, for some reason everyone hates bisexuals. And a lot of gay guys have nothing but scorn for lesbians (and bisexuals). It's just making me pause and think about some stuff. I'd thought about coming out soon (and I did come out a couple close friends earlier this week) but now I'm not so sure. I don't want to be accused of being "a fake" or a "transitioner," although I'm sure that's always a possibility. I just want to be taken at face value, not like I’m trying to cheat someone just because I like boys and girls. It's very frustrating to lose faith in a group that I thought I could identify with, and a group I thought that would accept me. It's hard enough coming to terms with sexuality, and I thought that it'd be easier because there are more resources for GLBTQ kids now, then ever before. But I feel like I’m running up against a brick wall again and again, slamming my head in. I'm not straight, and I'm not entirely gay, so I have nowhere to go. Not to mention I'm half Asian and half white, so I have no ethnic identity either. I'm stuck in the middle of everything, and I just hate it.

Rufus! Rufus!

I got to see Rufus Wainwright last night, and pretty much all I have to say is that he is a GENIUS. As soon as he opened his mouth and started singing I started sobbing like a baby, just absolutely emotionally wasted because his voice just moves me to a place that I can't even begin to describe. He's like the most influential musician in my life… ever. I mean, seriously. He has amazing style, amazing lyrics, and his music is so lush and orchestral. He was performing solo, so it was even more amazing to see him play some stuff that I didn't think could be adapted for the piano or guitar. He makes me want to be a gay guy so I can have an excuse to wear tailored suits like he does. His boyfriend was there, and he made a really cute dedication to him. Of course, he made the obligatory jokes about California (which is fine, really) and I laughed a lot. The show was just… phoar. And of course, he was kind enough to do an enchore and he played my favourite song, Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk which was (is) my anthem. I'm serious, that song is so relatable to me. I just get it. It makes me life make so much more sense. I went out and bought chocolate milk this afternoon and sat around smoking and I felt like so cool, (which is incredibly lame) but I totally get what he means. Anyhow, he's amazing. See him live if you can. I just can't gush enough about how fucking brilliant his new album is, and of course Poses is his other best album.

Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk

a long time

I guess it's been a long time since I've posted. Well, I got a boyfriend (we'll call him Guitarboy) and I lost him. Well, more like I got rid of him because it wasn't working and it was long distance and we never saw each other... long story short it was a disaster and I'm not sorry I ended it. Even if it did end up hurting his feelings. Yeah, I'll start writing again soon.