Posts tagged with "life"

the tide you swim against will carry you back home

How quick­ly my world fell apart. How sud­den­ly things have changed, nev­er to be the same again. No one blames me for being unable to cope when so much has hap­pened all at once.

When diag­nos­ing the sever­i­ty of your mood, the pro­fes­sion­als always ask if you have a plan. Even the two cops who show up at your door at mid­night cause your friends fear the worst will pose the ques­tion. I guess a plan is the sign that you’re in imme­di­ate dan­ger, and I had three.

It means I get to be self­ish now. I get to do what I need to sur­vive. I get to think of myself for once in my life.

Even if my friends have nev­er been through this, even if they don’t under­stand, they still care, and they prove it to me with every lin­ger­ing hug, every meal they leave me, every call to ask how I’m feel­ing, every mes­sage left to let them know if there’s any­thing they can do, every reminder that they don’t want to lose me spo­ken through tears from those I’ve nev­er seen cry.

I used to have noth­ing but guilt for wor­ry­ing them, but now I under­stand that guilt is the last thing they want me to feel. They only want me to be okay. They’ve done so much to make me believe this, and that’s exact­ly what I need right now.

pharmaceutical intervention

Sanity is sup­posed to come from lit­tle por­tions of Cipralex, but I have to sur­vive long enough for the doc­tors to find the right dose. It may well be sev­er­al months before they dis­cov­er what works, and every day in between ter­ri­fies me.

Until then, I can’t sleep, I can’t come, I can’t eat more than half of what I used to before get­ting full, and I can’t go with­out Gravol to fight the nau­sea. The side-effects are sup­posed to be bet­ter than the alter­na­tive — and I sup­pose cot­ton­mouth is good way to get me to drink more liq­uids — but every wretched day makes me ques­tion whether this unique form of hell is worth it.

This used to be one of my great­est fears, and here I am faced with it cause I could­n’t han­dle life by myself any­more.

what fool hath added water to the sea?

O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain,
That shall dis­til from these two ancient urns,
Than youth­ful April shall with all his show­ers

—Titus Andronicus

I lost my life as I knew it, piece by piece, over days and weeks and months. Now things will nev­er be the same. In moments of cri­sis, every­thing has been dis­tilled; what’s gone is gone for­ev­er, and what remains is what I will car­ry for the rest of my life.

And as the threads unrav­eled, I tore myself from the world away, my face unable to bear the bur­den to oth­ers.

(499)

I know it’s late, but I’m in a jit­tery mood. I know I won’t be able to sleep until I get some­thing down, because there’s so much going through my mind. But first, take this. A gift. One that I was plan­ning on keep­ing to myself, but to do so would be an injus­tice to music and the artists.

Listen.

Just, lis­ten.

Mogwai is an extreme­ly influ­en­tial post-rock band, and like most bands in this genre they usu­al­ly pro­duce instru­men­tal music, so when Stuart sings, it demands atten­tion. And yet his voice evap­o­rates and becomes an instru­ment with which we hear our own sto­ries pulled apart with del­i­cate ten­der­ness, like boys pulling wings off flies.

There's so much happiness and sadness to be felt down the spine in seven brief minutes. The latter from the tone, the former from the beauty.

If only we could see life so sim­ply. If only we could sep­a­rate the good from the bad, the love from the heart­break. But we can’t. That’s why songs like this are com­posed, and that’s why words like bit­ter­sweet exist to help us define what can’t be explained.

It may feel like you’re con­stant­ly wait­ing for the next dawn to wash away the dust with sun­light, but at some point life ends, and life begins again.

All it takes is one day.

Version 10.3: The Lifestream

You may have noticed that I’ve adapt­ed my pop­u­lar ver­sion 10 lay­out into a lifestream1. I quite enjoy the con­cept of the lifestream, where you can see a per­son­’s lat­est activ­i­ty that’s up-to-date by the minute. A change like this means a bump up to a full sub-ver­sion num­ber, 10.3

The key to all of this is my new iPhone 3GS. The tech­nol­o­gy has rough­ly caught up to my needs, so I decid­ed to get one this year. Apple tends to announce new iPhone gen­er­a­tions every sum­mer, which means I’ve been plan­ning this design update for months now.

So with this fan­cy new iPhone I can write tweets on-the-go, stay up-to-date on the peo­ple I fol­low, and check my @replies, all with the Tweetie appli­ca­tion2. I once had my tweets inte­grat­ed into the blog, but decid­ed not to stick with this because the fre­quen­cy with which I use twit­ter meant that the sheer num­ber of tweets was flood­ing my RSS feed. Then one day, the real­iza­tion dawned on me to exclude that one cat­e­go­ry from my feed, et voila! A sim­ple workaround that lets peo­ple sub­scribe to my twit­ter stream if they so choose.

I can also take pic­tures with the built-in iPhone cam­era and e‑mail them to Flickr direct­ly from the phone, which will auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate a WordPress post and embed the pic­ture in the entry3. And coin­ci­den­tal­ly enough, the max­i­mum width for images post­ed to Flickr is 500 pix­els, which hap­pens to be exact­ly how wide the main col­umn of my blog is. It’s like it was meant to be.

So there are two new cat­e­gories: one for tweets, and one for snaps. Both of them dis­play with CSS styling unique to each cat­e­go­ry and an icon to denote the type of post. A note on the “snaps” icon; I tried to find some­thing that would rep­re­sent both a cam­era and an iPhone, because the iPhone isn’t a pure cam­era, nor is it just a phone. I decid­ed to use the cam­era app icon built into the iPhone, which says both. There are no com­ments allowed on these entries because I don’t care for dis­cus­sion on such fleet­ing things. If some­one real­ly want­ed to com­ment, they could post a reply through twit­ter, or a com­ment through Flickr.

So unlike most oth­er life streams, this blog is not exact­ly an aggre­ga­tor of var­i­ous ser­vice feeds because there’s a unique WordPress blog entry cre­at­ed for every one of my Flickr posts and tweets as well, each one retrieved from with­in the WordPress loop. I did this to retain a lit­tle inde­pen­dence from ser­vices like Flickr or twit­ter; if I ever chose not to use them any­more, my blog won’t explode into a ball of fire with all the miss­ing entries.

With all of this snazzy integration in place, I can post things quickly and on-the-fly, as long as I have internet access. Which is almost anywhere, now that I have a 3G data plan. Version 10.3 is a reflection of that.

With my ever increas­ing­ly busy life, the abil­i­ty to post snip­pets of things comes as a wel­come change to my reg­u­lar entries, which often take days to write.

  1. If you’re see­ing some strange ren­der­ing issues, they’ll prob­a­bly clear up if you refresh the page. []
  2. This also helps me avoid text mes­sag­ing charges, which is how I wrote tweets before, when I was out in the real world with no inter­net access, though my new data plan has unlim­it­ed texts any­way. []
  3. In an ide­al world, I could send the pic­ture to a WordPress e‑mail address or post it using the iPhone WordPress appli­ca­tion, but the post-by-email option of the for­mer does­n’t allow attach­ments, and the lat­ter has very crude image upload­ing options with only one set width avail­able for resiz­ing. []