How to Fix Your Psychological Problems in 20 Minutes

Here Be Dragons: The Psychological Problem, Cause & Cure by Manuel J. Smith


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Total Read Time: 2 Minutes

Do you get defensive often and wish you didn't?

Are you afraid of being criticized?

Are you scared to death of people thinking less than perfect about you?

Do you hate it when you make a mistake?

Would you rather die than make a fool out of yourself in front of people?

Are you suffering from the loss of your loved ones? A painful breakup? A divorce?

Katou Miliyah

Just discovered Kato Miliyah (or Katou Miriya or 加藤ミリヤ or how-the-fuck-ever you want to write it). Post-Utada J-R&B with a dash of Koda Kumi would be the label I'd give to her style of music. I especially like the upbeat songs - Lover Forever, Love for You, and Sayonaraベイベー.

Yes, this probably shows how poor my music taste is.

Just like books, good songs you want to listen to over and over again are hard to come by.

Book Review: Lolita

The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
She was Lo, plain Lo without the annotations--

I came across the unannotated version of Lolita in summer 2004 when I was a raging philosophy maniac whose obsession was everything existentialism and thinking about The Meaning of Life - in general, I wasn't a very happy person to say the least.

Toward the end of a strenuous and almost cruel summer reading syllabus I had imposed on myself (Soren and Friedrich I could handle, but Martin and J.P. gave me the existential headache), came this brilliant gem of fiction, an oasis in the desert of angst and bad faith, a breather for my nothingness of a mind that craved being-not-in-the-world. Thanks to Vivian Darkbloom, I achieved veritable transcendence of my ego.

Onto my impressions of the novel. I remember the first part being tantalizingly erotic and second part average. So engrossed was I in poor Humbert Humbert's fantasies and seduction that, in a manner of speaking I had to repeatedly resort to the good old manuo-frictional means of extinguishing the fire of my loins. The second part, however, disappointed me and when I began my second fill of Lolita, I remembered nothing about the second part, save the scene where Humbert Humbert makes an advance at Dolores when she's studying and she says, "Oh not again."

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if you have had your fill of Lolita once without the benefit of the annotations, you can easily understand my plight when I decided to go through it again, especially when one is loath to have recourse to the all too conventional means of extinguishing the aforementioned fire. But my apprehensions came to naught.

The annotations, I must confess, are tremendously helpful. I did not recognize to what magnitude I missed the allusions, echoes, jokes, and delightful word plays our Hum engages in. It is staggering how much he is able to weave into the narrative. Frankly, I missed, without exaggeration, 100% of it. I was, as the diligent annotator notes in his recondite and illuminating 64-page introduction, Nabokov's ideal reader-puppet.

Not so, this time. Thanks to the annotations and two years of reading hard literature plus two years of French, I was able to see the cracks and holes in Lolita and enjoy it an artistic artifice that it is. Strangely, I experienced no tumescence - not one bit - and enjoyed it on a totally different aesthetic level.

In short, although the prolix and detailed annotations may have taken away from the reading experience, I still enjoyed Lolita very much. There are slow parts, however, I had a hard time getting through. For example, the first 20 pages of Part Deux where H.H. and Dolly travel across les etats unis boasts more than enough expositions to drive you to the edge of despair and tantrum.

My favorite scenes are, in order: 1)the last scene with Humbert and Quilty; 2) the Enchanted Hunters hotel scene; and 3) the interviews with the Beardsley School headmistress. Like any work of literature, there are more than its fair share of slow parts whose necessity is in big question at least from the humble reader's perspective.

Insofar as the novel manages to both engage on the gut emotional level (especially the first time without the annotations) and intellectual, literary, and artistic level, Lolita remains, and will remain, one of my absolute favorites.

The four stars for the second level of reading. Overall, I give it 5 stars.

Another must read.

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Food For Thought: Sunflower Poem

ひまわりは、いつでも君たちのそばに咲いている
君たち自身がまた、ひまわりのように咲くことができれば
やり直しのきかない人生などない
例えば老人になったとしてもだ

Sunflowers are always blossoming around you.
If you can blossom like sunflowers,
There is no life you can't start over
Even though you've become old and withered.

ひまわりは日差しを欲しがる
しかし、争うようにはしない
みないたわり合うように、太陽の出る東の空を向いている

Sunflowers crave the sun
But they don't fight over it.
As if caring for each other, they all face east.

僕は知っている
君たちは、友達というひまわりを求め
そして君たちもまた、ひまわりになれることを
ひまわりの花言葉を知ってるかい
いつも、そばにいる
そしてもう一つある
あなたは、素晴らしい
そばにいる人に言ってあげられるかい
そうしたら、君も言ってもらえるよ
あなたは、素晴らしいと

I know
You are seeking sunflowers called friends
And you, too, can be sunflowers.
Do you know the meaning of sunflowers?
"Always there for you."
And there is another:
"You are wonderful."
Can you say that to people around you?
Then, they'll say it to you, too.
That you are wonderful.

Our Deepest Fear

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be so beautiful, talented, gorgeous, fabulous?' Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small dos not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. This is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fears, our presence automatically liberates others."
-Nelson Mandela

Night

Night comes. Night, that dreadful hour when you're by yourself, that dreadful hour when you are forced to face the hollowness that's inside you.

It creeps up to you out of its hiding place, an ugly lair in the recesses of your heart, and strikes out when your guard is down. A gossamer of daily routines weaved out of threadbare material with you at its center, feeling safe and well protected.

But see, there goes one thread - SNAP! - and it sees an opportunity and snaps at you. Like a hermetic tank with one tiny crack, it floods out and drowns you, slowly, surely, and painfully.

The pyramid collapses with one little act of negligence. The whole magnificent architecture you spent an eternity to erect comes tumbling down.

Night comes, lighting the sky with small dots of stars, leaving you all by yourself to fend yourself from your own thoughts.

Jittery. Fidgety. Things aren't right.

Reflection: Creation in Silence and Solitude

When silence knocks at your door in your deep-sea solitude, will you answer it and let it enter and seep into the core of your being? Or will you thrash about and spurn the terrifying loneliness that it brings to your solitude? “For the memories themselves are not important,” writes Rilke, “Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

Memories. Do they not constitute the material with which we mold ourselves and create something out of ourselves? And is it not the breadth of experience that defines the scope of our lives and gives us that rich depth from which we draw our inspiration? Why, then, am I shut up in this small apartment, far from life and all its inexhaustible experiences, and dwelling among the dead, in the imaginary realities of poets and writers? Why are you not plunging yourself into the swift current of life? Why are you not— living? Or are you gazing down into yourself, probing what has just happened in your life, and trying to make sense of it all – all, that is, of a mere 22 years?

But listen to the wise man: “Present experience has,” Nietzsche writes, “always found us ‘absent-minded’: we cannot give our hearts to it – not even our ears! Rather, as one divinely preoccupied and immersed in himself into whose ear the bell has just boomed with all its strength the twelve beats of noon suddenly starts up and asks himself: ‘what really was that which just struck?’ so we sometimes rub our ears afterward and ask, utterly surprised and disconcerted, ‘what really was that which we have just experienced?’ and moreover: ‘who are we really?’ and, afterward as aforesaid, count the twelve trembling bell-strokes of our experience, our life, our being – and alas! miscount them. – So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not comprehend ourselves, we have to misunderstand ourselves, for us the law ‘Each is farthest from himself’ applies to all eternity – we are not ‘men of knowledge with respect to ourselves.”

Yes, so who am I really? Is that what am I asking and seeking? My “Self”? Let me reflect back to the time when I was still callous and immature, arrogant and clueless, and think – in retrospect – who I was. And who was I, other than what those four telling words reveal? No, self-search is not the point, not the point at all.

Rather, I am engaged in creating something out of all that past, setting aside for the moment if this act would “justify” that heap of memories, that pulp of experience. Creation requires attention and concentration; it requires, moreover, sacrifice, or more precisely the sacrifice of everything present and ordinary.

The budding and burgeoning of this little plant I am nourishing with my past requires my turning-in and turning-to the future (which amounts to my turning-away from the present) is known and understood by so many artists. What I impart in this plant whose flowers and fruit remain hidden from me, is the cry of loneliness, that species of human experience that echoes back throughout the history of art. And it is this cry that seeps out of the text and leaps up to the minds of the readers. An emptiness. Do I feel it? That whatever is permeating through your work and your life amounts to nothing? That your work is only – no, not even – a tiny molecule in the sea of creativity? I do feel it – or think I do – just underneath my soles, throbbing with menacing pulse. If someone were to push me ever gently, I’d fall into this abyss of nothingness. I stand on a fragile and dangerous ground – so thin, so tiny, so high.

Carve out that part of your experience that calls you to take it up in your hands. Carve it out and lay it in front of your eyes – can you do that? Comb through your past, sift it, shake it, and see if you can find any gems glittering in the dirt. Can you find them? Those diamonds of your experience, buried deep inside the mantle of your existence, exposed to the pressure of all that past. Can you find them, cut them, and polish them into round brilliant cut?

Death be not proud

Let me gut out all the feelings I have and see them splatter on the page in blotches of awkward sentences. My brush is ready to be dipped into the cans of roiling emotions; I pick the colors from the palette of my experience. Where is this going?

The first stroke sweeps across the canvass like an arc that could have been smooth with slightly more paint, with slightly more feeling. Nothing occurs on the canvass. The paint dribbles down in spidery lines - a thought lost and abandoned in an over-elaborate analogy.

Life is sometimes difficult even when it isn't. Even when everything is going well, we choose to interpret it otherwise based on pale comparisons. Akihabara happened because he couldn't see other unfortunate people on the brink of death. People commit suicide for insignificant events - when seen from a larger perspective.

We become too small to see things, to see the world in any other way but in the way dictated by our emotions. Life thus becomes difficult when it's not. This is our weakness, our fatal flaw.

Ending one's life has its appeal. I've felt it; it's strange. So strange that I'm baffled when it comes from nowhere and takes over me. It really does, this ghost of an emotion, this gaping hole that sucks everything out of you in slow bleeding.

What am I talking about?

The death wish.

I said it.

All of a sudden the world transforms itself. A veritable metamorphosis takes place. Now, obliterating your own being seems like the most natural thing to do. It just makes perfect sense.

Life loses its vitality; soul loses its brilliance. The world becomes GRAY.

There is no sense of vertigo or violent sea of emotions. There's just this calm, single nutshell of a feeling that sinks deeper and deeper. Deeper and deeper. Half falling, half sleeping, half listless, half everything.

Half-assed.

Liminality of being.

Imbalance of forces.

The ground is shifting underneath, ready to swallow you in.

And all you need to do seems to just end it, right there and then. Yet, despite this seemingly unhealthy, insane mode of being, you have before you-- a perfect calmness.

Tranquility.

Blue and gray.

More gray than anything else.

But it's there, sitting, sinking, falling, rising all at once, like a particle out of the quantum world.

Maybe it is so. Maybe it comes from that odd part of the universe. A particle of feeling escaped from it and wandered into my world, into consciousness without rhyme or reason.

Without meaning.

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

A Missing Piece

We're looking for missing pieces in our lives.

Usually, it takes the form of another human being: the ideal lover, the soul mate, the one, the love-at-first-sight.

Sometimes, though, you meet them in the middle of the night, in the folds of your dreams.

Fragments of a dream stayed in my mind like a familiar flagrance from long ago.

I remember: a girl waiting - for me.

I walk in with her into a store where her father owns and runs. He spreads open his arms to greet her but as soon as he sees me, he clamps his mouth shut. It’s obvious that he doesn’t like me. She tries to appease him. I’m with her and I’m her lover.

I disappear and come back to find her all alone sitting outside, waiting for me. A moment later, she is surrounded by her friends – her guy friends – who watch over her and make sure she’s OK. She’s wearing a white, fluffy woolen jacket, asleep with her head resting on the armrest of the wooden chair she’s sitting in.

I walk up to her slowly and stop next to her. Then I gently touch her neck. She stirs and look up at me.

She smiles. I smile. A moment of happiness.

When I woke up, I wanted to go back to the dream and live it and continue seeing her, whoever she was. I wanted to stay in my dream where I was comfortable and happy with this girl who was waiting for me until she fell asleep.

Everyone wants to be loved - by a great person.

Reflection: Death Comes Knocking at the Door of Loneliness

For some reason, I really like this post; it resonates with my mood in a way. This was when I said fuck you to the world and wrote and read in solitude for 11 straight months. Looking back, it was a fun time - I got to do what I really wanted to do, although the whole sedentary existence in seclusion got to me at times.
_____________________________________________________

I need to write something. Do you ever get that feeling? You don't want to do anything. You feel distracted. You can't focus. You feel agitated. What you've been doing all along looks pale and gray, dull and almost insignificant. It's not really boredom, but simple restlessness. And it sometimes helps to spell it out though I'm afraid when it's done, it comes out wrong.

Have you read Rilke? If you haven't, please do. Read this line for example: "We don't know our feelings' contour, only what shapes it from outside. Who hasn't sat anxiously before his heart's curtain?" It's just right. To me, right now, that is. You have to be in that particular mood to read poetry - those condensed constellations of words sparkling with feelings and moments.

What do I want to tell you? I want to tell you that I'm agitated, and nothing else. What can I say? I'm a lonely man. And when you're alone for a long, long time, it starts to get to you, and you start to bleed from your heart. Not many people know this, because they haven't been alone for that long, haven't steeped themselves deep in their own solitude. And what's the point? Nothing, when all's said and done. It's just an experience available to anyone - not special, just rare, because no one wants to be alone for a prolonged period of time. But all this is boring for you, isn't it? So I'll stop talking.

Like a puff of air, it comes out and dissipates into the vastness of nothingness. And like a sigh, it wafts away unheard by anyone.

But that's not what I wanted to say. No, not at all, really. Get to the point, will you? Okay.

It came knocking at the door, softly, very softly, inviting me to go over and open the door for it. Why should I? It invites me to go out with it, never to come back again. But why should I? It comes once in a while. Only once in a while in the loneliest loneliness, and whispers into my heart. It comes from nowhere, beckoning me, enticing me, wheedling me to break it, end it, shatter it. It's not a violent calling - no, by no means - but a gentle murmur almost inaudible, rippling through the emptiness I feel inside and I don't know what to do with it but to hear it, hear it and scream it out just to keep myself sane, knowing full well that it always comes out as a whimper no matter how hard I try to scratch and rip my throat with it. It comes at night, usually, and is gone by morning. The hardest part is to hold the restless emptiness in your arms and sleep with it.

What am I talking about? The unnameable: it shows everything in dull colors and beckons you to disappear.