Tunnel Vision

15 minutes of infamy

Working on my thesis has made me realise how much of an aesthete I really am at heart. I would go to painstaking lengths to perfect my sentences at the expense of thinking about actual ideas which should really should be my main preoccupation right now considering that i still have quite a wide gulf to leap over before I reach the word limit but all I have are a bunch of pretty-sounding sentences. Actually, come to think of it, my sentences aren’t that pretty after all. There are only so many ways of writing about gender relations and drag and performativity and phalluses and transgendered people. The aesthete in me feels trapped. On days when I’m a little less jaded and more predisposed to flights of fancy I imagine myself as Andy Warhol living it up in his studio with his fabulous anti-establishment artist friends who wore suits and wigs to do their grocery shopping just because they could and who did just about anything just because they could. If someone asks me to paint a picture that represents my life right now I’d paint a silkscreen picture of myself as Andy Warhol trapped in a campbell soup can. Or maybe I’d do a modern 2013 version of The Scream and in that picture, I’d paint the exact same ghoulish bald figure but in my version, he wouldn’t have a mouth. He’d just be a ghoulish bald mouthless figure. There’s nothing to scream about now. Life has been doing all the screaming for me and like a henpecked husband, I just listen and take it all in like a (broken) man should. 

This is the Nonsense of love

I.
our kiss is a secret handshake, a password.
we love like spies, like bruised prize fighters,

like children building tree houses.
our love is serious business.

one look from you and my spine reincarnates as a kite string.

when i hesitate to hold your hand,
it is because our touch unlocks secrets

i’m not sure i want to know yet—
because to know is to be responsible for knowing.

II.
there is no clean way to enter
the heavy machinery of the heart.

just jagged cutthroat questions.
just the glitter and blood production.

III.
the truth is this:
my love for you is the only empire
i will ever build.

when it falls,
as all empires do,
my career in empire building will be over.

i will retreat to an island.
i will dabble in the vacation-hut industry.
i will skulk about the private libraries and public parks.

i will fold the clean clothes.
i will wash the dishes.
i will never again dream of having the whole world.

Mindy Nettifee

Eleanor Rigby

1. i’ve been feeling quite cavalier about graduation lately mainly because there really isn’t much to look forward to besides my Tokyo trip which has left a huge, gaping hole in my wallet but it’s a good problem to have I suppose. The contours of my future are a little too well-defined for my liking but the tragic thing is, despite all my flighty, romanticised notions that I harbour about a life spent drifting from one misadventure to the next, I wouldn’t trade the certainty that I have for anything. I’m such a failed bohemian. In the meantime, to delay my initiation into the disaffected middle-class, I shall dress like a boho and live in a tent in East Coast park. Yeah right, who am I kidding I’m practically married to my bed. See, further evidence that I’m a failed boho wannabe. In the future, when my all-too-predictable life starts to wear on me, I’ll look back and fondly recall how I used to have such beautiful, candy-coated dreams. It’s better to have dreamt and lost than to not have dreamt at all, no? I will of course conveniently gloss over my childhood ambition of becoming part of the  Backstreet Boys and at one point when I was a little confused about my gender, the Spice Girls. 

2. I’m addicted to Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles. I used to dislike The Beatles because I found their songs tuneless and sleep-inducing(strawberry fields forever still makes me sleepy but in a good way) but oh how wrong was I! One’s taste in music is most definitely an accurate index of one’s maturity.  

3. Chinua Achebe just passed on. Rest in peace. I’m sorry to tell you that I absolutely detest Things Fall Apart and I hate that you hated Heart of Darkness with such a bitter vengeance because it’s supposedly racist and Eurocentric and if I were to meet you in heaven one day we’ll have a heated debate about the merits of the novel. I’ll win for sure. I have long fingernails.

4. I’ve grown pretty comfortable with loneliness. No more raging against my constant friendless state and no more poring over instagram photos of my friends traipsing around Europe with hot boyfriends and feeling all bitter and envious on the inside. I do genuinely enjoy being lonely..most of the time. It gives me perspective that I would otherwise not have if I were attending a constant stream of parties every week and taking endless photos of myself with people I barely know to prove…what again? People become so much clearer to you when there’s distance involved. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’m lonely at all. I have books, movies and a tiny handful of friends and family members who genuinely care about me. 

5. I miss acting so badly it aches all the time. How can something that makes me so unhappy be the solution to my unhappiness at the same time? 

6. I’m starting to fall in love with writing all over again. I’ve been having a bit of a dry spell lately but I’m getting my mojo back. 

7. I’m craving for fried chicken and waffles even though I’ve never had fried chicken and waffles before. Anyone would be hard-pressed to think of a more divine combination. 

8. Gave a presentation on Graham Green’s The Quiet American this week and heard someone whisper “oh my God he’s damn smart” to the person sitting beside her. I have to confess that I put together the presentation in about two hours in a state of desperation and blind panic. Life has inalterably reduced my ego to the size of a molecule so any comment that would bolster anyone’s confidence just slides off my face like water off a duck’s back but thanks anyway, random girl in my class.