Love of Lights

I've developed quite an annoying cold recently, which makes the composition of this rather annoying. I thought, perhaps I should hold off and write this when I'm feeling better, fresher, but no: I want to write it before the year is out. This is my new year's post, my seeing off of 2014, my beckoning in of 2015. 2014 was a mixed bag for me. The first half of the year was marked by becoming sexually active and grappling with all the entailments of that. I still struggle largely with my thoughts on the kind of sexual relationship I have, which is a friends-with-benefits type situation. I'm not entirely comfortable with having that kind of intimacy with somebody I don't love romantically, but at the same time sex can be a lot of fun, so naturally I have vacillated between wanting to terminate the sexual aspect of my friendship, returning to a pure platonic gig, and simply continuing until there is sufficient external reason to stop. It seems as though the latter is w...

A  week ago, I went to Rome with a couple of friends that I have met here in Bologna. It was a good little journey, although I must say one needs more time in Rome to experience it more extensively. I did really like it however. It's the kind of city I admire: characteristic in its own right (i.e. emblematic of the country or itself), but still large enough to feel like a city, to have hustle and bustle, to have much variety and life. It's up there in my list of preferred cities. However, that's not the point of this post. My friends and I somehow found ourselves talking about societal expectations on the way back from Rome. It started with my friend disparaging women for feeling as though they need to wear make-up, and by me offering the defence that wearing make-up is a historico-cultural practice that holds its own value and that women either feel some sense of pressure to conform to or feel as though they truly enjoy doing. My defence may not have been great, but in a...

Recently I have been having difficulty converting thoughts into action. I've been having difficulty with moving from the understanding that I have to do certain things to feel better, to break my chain of anxiety and depression, to actually doing them. I just had a long think about it, about why this is the case for me, and provisionally I think I've provided myself with an answer. The reason that I've found it so difficult to move from the understanding of what I need to do to actually doing it is that I lost faith in the idea that acting on my thoughts might produce desired results. I came to realise that sometimes you act on thoughts and what you receive as a result is far from satisfactory, if not downright depressing. I sought to avoid pain and maintain as much pleasure as possible, and on some subconscious plane of reasoning, this resulted in my developing anxiety about taking action on thoughts I had. Lessons became scary, practising the language became scary, tryi...

I like taking note of patterns in my personal life. I've already noticed that I tend to fall in something like love with a girl almost every year (and this rarely works out in my favour, obviously, otherwise there would be one consistent girl by now). I have now noticed, also, that so far in each year of university, something personally devastating has happened to me. That's interesting, isn't it? That perhaps I can expect something personally devastating to happen for every year of university I do - or perhaps even just from here on out, until death? In the first year, what struck me (what still feels like) hardest was my falling out with the girl I've loved the most in my entire life. She has had a boyfriend for a while now and our lives are truly separated, but I do still miss her sometimes. I imagine perhaps I always will, insofar as her presence has left some serious background radiation in my heart. In second year, it was my short-term girlfriend breaking up w...

I think once upon a time, interesting and new thoughts used to be hashed out and discovered in letters between friends. Nowadays nobody writes letters, we send each other instant messages, or texts, or FB messages. It happens online. There are probably hundreds of interesting exchanges, some profound, some simply worthwhile, discovered through online conversations. I wonder what will be done with them; I wonder where they'll go. Anyway, after a brief online conversation with a friend yesterday, a realisation dawned upon me. This first requires a brief line of background, a bit of self-explanation. I need to improve the way I perceive and communicate with girls that I find attractive and vaguely interesting. I don't know what it is; there is something within me that longs manically for love. In every girl that is cute and shows potential interest in me, my mind searches for love in them. Every time, if I'm attracted to a girl and she is friendly, my mind jumps to the concl...

I have 9 days left in the UK for at least three months. I'm feeling weird about it, but mostly because I'm not feeling that much about it. So I thought I would use this space here to lay out my thoughts and perhaps in turn try to feel more about it. I begin my Italy placement in 9 days. I'll be going there alone; just me and a few essentials to begin a temporary new life in Italy for around 9 months. I suppose that's what it is, really, isn't it? A temporary new life. I'm trying to wrap my head around it, present it to myself in such a way that I can feel its magnitude, but I'm having difficulty. I fear that, with experience and my collection of emotional hurt, I'm losing my ability to feel as much as I once did. Before moving to Edinburgh, I had high-falutin ideas  about my own personal independence and growth and entrance into the world, but now all I can express in my heart is that this experience will probably change me in ways that I cannot yet fo...

I think there was a time in my late teenage years when I put too much emphasis on the notion of sex. Of course, I knew that was a bad idea intellectually, but because of its position in our culture, I still secretly craved for it. I've been sexually active for a while now, so I can finally put down some fuller thoughts on it. I think sex has taught me a somewhat valuable lesson about people. The thing about sex is, it's this thing that feels good for a few minutes but then ends. On its own, sex is rather uninteresting. It feels good, but it's only exciting if you're excited about the person. My sort of earlier, naive craving for it seems to me now misplaced. I should really crave the person first and foremost, crave some kind of rapport and relationship, so that the sex doesn't actually matter that much. The thing about sex is it can be great but it can also quite easily be just average or poor. You don't want the main thing about the relationship being the se...

The first thing I write doesn't have to be the thing that wins me prestige. I should try to create something good, not perfect. Perfect doesn't exist. Good is subjective, but the subjective and the objective are linked closely in art. People share subjective tastes and end up calling the taste that is most shared 'objectively' good, so I should aim to find what subjective taste I have and try to make what I do good within that subsection of art in general. I am 20! That's really young, just about not a teenager. 0 - 18 is formative; 18 - 30 is development; 30 - 50, then, is about execution, and 50 - death is about reaping the rewards of your execution. (N.B. I'm using development to mean strengthening what was discovered during the formative years). So really I'm still in my development years. It's fine if I don't achieve everything I want to by 30! I need  to reconfigure my mind to understand 30-50 to be the execution/achievement years. I'll...

My greatest problem is I need people too much. I derive my self-worth from how other people picture me. And this isn't just a physical thing -- many people remonstrate with the people who derive their self-worth from their physical appearance, because it's a much more obvious issue, but they don't realise that there's a whole sea of people who do the same but with their personalities and their ambitions. In fact, it's normal to derive your self-worth from whether people respect your personality and your ambitions. This is what social media is predicated on; this is how social media works so well in 2014. People used to wage war against magazines for preying upon the physical self-esteem issues of teenagers, but they don't see that now it's moved into our own hands; we now constitute the social media that preys upon the internal self-esteem issues of all people. I want people to think I'm intelligent; I want people to think I'm funny; I want people ...

Haven't posted a roaming session on here in a long while, even though I've done, I think, one since the last one I posted on here. But seeing as I have ~3 more days left in Edinburgh for a year (save perhaps a week for Fringe in August), I thought I should roam and post it on this here photodiary/memory-space. Although my itinerant nature has me itching to discover a new place, I have to admit, Edinburgh is very cool. Just look at the variety of land- and cityscapes you encounter on a few hours' walk.

I need to do some soul-scrubbing. The old badboy's gotten dirty. By which I mean since my exams have finished self-discipline has fallen drastically. Just because I'm not doing academia, it doesn't mean I don't have a life not to waste. So this post is going to spent soul-scrubbing, fixing myself up, in three parts. 1. Novel deadline. It's about time I got serious with the novel I'm working on. A part of me has decided that I want to do a postgraduate MA in Creative Writing, and if I want to do that, I need to submit some work as part of the application process. Now, I've just reached the end of the 2nd year of my undergraduate education, which means I've got 2 years left. I'm not entirely sure when MA applications begin, but I suppose it's fair to say that I should have something ready to submit before the second semester of my final year, which means before January 2016.  So in fact, I will just make that the deadline to have completed at l...

A few things have happened since  I lasted posted, so it's about time I caught myself up here. For organisation and expedience's sake, I'll go ahead and use section headings to order this. 1. Venice. I took my first trip abroad without parents in April. It was just me and my flatmate. I really wish I had written up a post of its own, so that I might have gotten into the nitty gritty of how I felt about it, but now it feels long gone and already fully part of me. I should briefly mention the highlights: (i) exercising my now "official" Europeanness -- the ease of travel that comes along with being officially recognised as a member of an international community, the realisation of the freedom and potential having a British passport now grants me, the feeling of my documents matching my inner affinities; (ii) using Italian to native Italians -- while I was clearly a foreigner with confused Italian, I managed to get my point across, and it's given me confidenc...

I've been thinking lately about passion. I've been thinking I need a passion. But what is passion and what does it take to have one? I often find myself thinking, "I want to fall in love with someone again; I want that fiery feeling, that thought-consuming sensation that is related to someone who has swept you off your metaphorical feet", but on more careful contemplation, I think perhaps I actually seek passion in general. With love, you become passionate about some body , but passion can be about things and activities and topics. What is a passion? Is passion that fiery, all-consuming sensation that one feels as in love? Maybe, maybe not. I would like to see passion as dedication squared. Like obsession, but minus the negativity of that phenomenon. If this is what passion is, then the fiery, all-consuming sensation need not necessarily be there, because dedication can be about discipline instead of about inspiration. I would like to see passion as based on ded...

I am 20 years old and black. None of  those facts define me in an essentialistic way, but they do make up parts of  who I am. The only essential is the "I", the me, the individual. The rest is happen-stance. I am 20, so I am youthful. I have all of life before me: opportunities, ambitions, excitements. Potentiality surrounds me in abundance and I bear the tools of actuality, ready to turn what might be into what is . The only 3 things I need are confidence, perseverance, and a philosophy of wisdom. I am black, which makes me a swarthy negro.  No literature tells of my beauty.  Nobody recognises it. I must perfect  my own imagine should I hope anybody notice it. I can't  rest on luscious locks and pale, fair skin. I am rough haired, smooth of dark chocolate skin, a creature of the earth more than the heavens. I am  easily despised by a culture that looks upwards instead of forwards, down, and around. They seek the whiteness of clouds and see in me...

There are a lot of crows in Scotland. I've noticed this now. On my way to university, as I walk through this area called "The Meadows", I'm almost always confronted with a crow-sighting. Also on the way back from an outing or on the way to one. So the crows have become a symbol of the transit from home to social spaces for me, and vice versa. What does this mean? Crows are elegant black creatures and they move with a curious intelligence. One feels like a crow is  aware  of itself and its surroundings in a way, say, a worm isn't. But despite the intelligence of the crow, I can't help but notice something. Crows are never awkward. They hop and fly about and live their little crow lives, interacting with the world and other creatures and things, but they are never awkward about it. The crow lives intelligently but also peacefully, not suffering by injecting what isn't there into his interpretation of his surroundings. Crows are never awkward. And as I cr...

What greater phenomenon to be observed but magic and miracles? Look around and tell me one thing that isn't magic or a miracle! No, think harder! Dig beyond the surface, Use your tools of rationality and get to the very bottom! Dig, dig, dig, and thud! You've hit it. There's the magic. Unable to be explained, undefined, only able to be comprehended -- the stuff of wisdom. At the end of inquiry lies the poets' object. But look here, the weirdest phenomenon! I am both poet and thing. I am composed of magic and miracles like any rock or any tree, but we find something further gifted (or cursed) to me; I am a poet! I am able to see in myself the magic and miracles; I can feel and comprehend it. I can see with crystal clarity that realm where our explanatory tools fall impotent; where structure ends, where structure is lost, where instead we find deep, black, endless depths, into which we may stare and phantom figures may rise and dance, commanding o...

Earlier this month, I wrote about what I have learnt so far, as I approach my 20th birthday.  Having written the retrospective, I should now like to write the prospective. Entering my second decade of life, what kind of person should I like to become, what should I strive towards, what has worked that I should continue doing? The first thought that comes to mind, which will probably trickle down and affect all other behaviours, is that I should  like to be more fearless. Having  reached 20, it becomes suddenly apparent that one only has 50 or 60 years of life left, or perhaps even less if unlucky. While this is the majority of one's life, one has to remember two things: firstly, as you grow older, time seems to pass more quickly for whatever reason. You begin to more solidly comprehend the blocks of time that are passing. On the other hand, you become more busy and are pigeon-holed into certain areas of life, giving you less liberty as the time goes by, as...

I'm far too tired to be writing this now, but I need to get my head cleared about how I spend time. Normally I would take care to present this so that someone who isn't me at the moment (e.g. a future me) can lucidly understand what's going on, but I'm really too tired, so I'm just going to get to the point. I need to spend my time better otherwise I will feel like I'm neglecting parts of myself and I will be deeply unhappy. I think I need to divide the day into four: - early morning reading time - academic work day time - evening creative work time - late night reading time In this way, I will be doing the 3 things most pertinent to my life at this stage. I get up too late to do early morning reading. I attempt to get up at 8am, but that rarely gives me time to do that early morning reading, save for on a Tuesday and Wednesday. Well, I'm fibbing: it gives me time to do reading on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays; only, I rarely wake up in time ...

I developed a rather introspective and wisdom-seeking personality ever since around 15 years old, so now, at 19-going-on-20, I have roughly 5 years of adolescent 'wisdom' so to speak that has aggregated and collected. I'm fully aware of the apparent paradox in adolescent wisdom, but I would argue it's only apparent, and that even an adolescent can begin to touch upon some of the most important facts of life so early in his own life. In any case, it will be interesting to look back upon, to identify my follies and my accuracies at a later age. Adolescent Wisdom Wisdom is a practical virtue, and as such things that contribute to wisdom should be things that are pragmatic and help you live a better life. The cliché about moderation is so accurate that it even applies to itself: moderation in moderation. In other words, as a rule of thumb, go for the middle amount, but allow yourself to deviate from that when appropriate. Almost everything about wisdom follows from t...

I hold a false belief that if I don't structure my days, I will still be able to do everything I want to do and feel satisfied as time goes on. Now, one shouldn't hold false beliefs, so I eject that right now, and I'm going to create my semester 2 schedule of equilibrium. (Note to myself: I should and probably will still use some of the time I allocate to 'free' for writer's duties). Monday - Sleep, 7 hours: (01.00-08.00 [ 7 ]) - Writer's Duties, 4 hours :(08.00-10.00 [2], 17.00-19.00 [ 4 ]) - Getting Ready, 1 hour: (10.00-11.00 [ 1 ]) - Study, 5 hours: (11.00-13.00 {free studying, 2}, 13.00-14.00 {Italian, 3}, 14.00-15.00 {Italian Lit, 4}, 16.00-17.00 {Anthropology, 5 }) - Free, 7 hours: (15.00-1600 [1], 19.00-01.00 [ 7 ]) Tuesday - Sleep, 7 hours: (01.00-08.00 [ 7 ]) - Writer's Duties, 2 hours: (08.00-10.00 [ 2 ]) - Getting Ready, 1 hour: (10.00-11.00 [ 1 ]) - Study, 7 hours: (11.00-13.00 {free studying, 2}, 13.00-14.00 {Italian, 3}, 14....

I think I may have fallen for her. My crush on H has reached critical, slowly but surely. She didn't have to do much at all. She has been herself, unassuming and down to earth, but so clearly Her at the same time. Her personality has fallen into mine like a corresponding piece and her smile and her eyes have won me over with no effort at all. My behaviour towards her is not subtle, but it's not explicit either. I am one short step away from telling her I miss her when I'm  not with her. I've told her I love her in that way one says it in jest; a spark of truth canvassed by layers of 'humour'. I'm not with her enough and my heart contorts when I see her face on my facebook app, in conversation with me. But I know I must stay silent. I think there's someone else in her life, some secret boy she never talks about, unlike most people who can't help but immediately reveal the status of their love life. She may have let it slip once, but either I'm g...

My eyes droop and my temples throb as I write this. I really ought to go to bed, but I've been meaning to write about this for a while and I need to stop putting it off. But how to write about it? Just honestly, I guess. Before returning to Birmingham for the holidays, I lost what I guess one could call my 'virginity'. Virginity is a strange concept because it connotes pureness, having been untouched, but I've had sexual experience before December 2013, just never successful penetrative experience. In any case, I had 'proper' (the scare quotes are shouted , if such a thing is possible) sex in the closing month of 2013. It was with a girl who here I'll call Flowertwig to protect her identity. It's such a curious thing, the fact that I had sex with Flowertwig, because I've seen her in that way for quite a while now and privately decided that I would if I got the chance. Now I'm not entirely sure whether it was by small, quasi-subconscious acts th...

This year, I will try, even when afraid.  I will accept, and thereby improve from, my failures and embarrassments - minor or major. I will work, even when I don't feel like it. Much better: I will see the bigger picture and learn to ignore short-term whimsies; I will learn that just because I don't want to do it now, it doesn't mean doing it now won't be better for me in the long-run. I will remember that the past is gone, the future is a projection, a product of the imagination, and that the present reigns supreme. I will let nothing bring me to breaking point. Every stumble will propel me further. I will experiment with being more truthful about small things, like emotions, without becoming frail. I will find happiness, but not as a heavenly end-goal; I will look at it more like an attribute of things; I will find happiness in the sun, in the moon, in reading, in writing, in girls, in caffeine and alcohol, in having the money to live comfortably and attend a ...

I recently officially became a  British citizen, which is nice. Finally, the papers match up to what I feel inside. It's a strange affair being born in one country and raise in another, feeling a much stronger connection for the latter, but legally being treated as though you are from the  former. But that's not what this post  is about, though perhaps it should have got its own. What this post is about is what on earth I'm going to read in 2014. I've never really made a battle-plan about the books I intend to read, but I've got such an ever-increasing back-catalogue of to-reads that I think it is time.  I've given myself a very modest target of  20 books to read this year, because in the past two years I haven't even broken that and it's quite depressing actually. Now, naturally I'm allowed to deviate from this list, but I'll use it as my main guide. And these are just books read from back to front, not counting the various shorter texts that ...