June 2014 – cejijunto

Paper Masks Melt and You Should At Least Pretend to Care

I have proven to be a very slow learner. One of the fools.

I have faith in the reactions of others.

There is a stubborn tendency in us to reach out for comfort, for solace. As children, we want to be held and nurtured by our parents. We want to feel the safety and comfort of arms around us and soothing voices hushing away our distress. However, as I’ve discovered through the years, with the help of persons who have kindly let me know they don’t give a fuck about my ache, the best and sometimes only comfort to myself is me.

There will a come a day when everyone will get tired of your problems, bored of your complaints. “What do you mean you miss your grandfather, didn’t he die over 15 years ago?” “That is not depression, you are just lazy and self-centered and if you went outside and mowed the lawn now and then, you wouldn’t whine all the time.” “Some people have no egg rolls for dinner and you don’t hear them bitching about life choices.”

And here is my response. Trying to find my way in life and questioning my choices at regular intervals isn’t a folly. I am not a whining, spoiled child of Western culture because I sometimes cry myself to sleep at night, wondering where I took a wrong turn and everything in my life turned to rhinoceros shit. Even as adults, we still seek comfort. We still want to be held and told everything will turn out fine in the end.

Except, not everyone is patient. There will be the rare few and enormous souls who will hold your hand at 4am and listen to you and watch you sob and not throw up at your feet from the sight of bleeding, emotional carnage. There will be the jerks who pity you. Some will act as though pain is self-made and therefore inexcusable.

To me, worse of all are the apathetic. The persons who don’t care to know, and furthermore can’t believe you still haven’t gotten over it. My profound mistake has been having repeated faith in other people. I have thought that if I gave of myself, if I exposed and demonstrated, I would gather the same soothing comfort from my peers as I did from my parents as a child. This is why a shrug and an indifferent grunt have left me distressed. Or why I was shocked when I confided in who I thought was a caring friend and heard, “You already talked about this last year. It’s boring.”

The lesson I’ve learned from these assholes, and several others like them, is to keep a very practiced mask on my face. Everything is fine, and will always be fine. I’ve learned that if I want a mother’s love I should call my mother. I have discovered I am a fantastic source of inner strength and thus should not seek solace from someone who plays with her phone in the restaurant during our entire meal rather than interact with the person across the booth.

Being your own strength is fine and easy for some and a few of us can even fool ourselves into thinking we’ve now a good bead on things. The problems for all of us begin when we find it impossible to keep the facade tidy. Or when we begin to feel like we’re absolute and alone in a planet that’s said to be overwhelmed with swarming bodies. Not everyone has the capacity to rely on their own instincts, or to continue doing so for long. Perhaps this is why our uncles drink with the lights off. The crushing sensation that no one cares about us is inevitably unbearable. Maybe this is why women come home on a Sunday afternoon and find their sons hanging from a beam in the ceiling, looking handsome and still feeling rather warm to the touch.

Wouldn’t you want someone by your side? Look, I’m the last person in the world to advocate hugging. Go watch Full House if you want bullshit tenderness and life lessons learned in 5 minutes. What I do ask is for you to look up from your book, Cobb salad, newspaper, electronic device or even crotch and just listen. Listen to the person in front of you. You don’t have to provide a solution. You don’t even have to kiss this blathering idiot who can’t decide what career he wants or what she needs out of living. Only listen.

What Feeds Me

In certain moments, when my head hurts in a way which makes me regret the way I behaved in the year 2000, my only pleasure is a long day of writing.

Why do I love to write? The question is not, why I love to write, but why I need to do so. It is that music, that music which guides my pen and makes it dance.

My pen upon the paper. Love, upon all my loves, how I need to write.

I must, I declare that I need to write. On the contrary, if I desist, my soul becomes a stagnant swamp, and every light I see is sourness.

My preferred method of writing is pen and paper, followed by typewriter. Who remembers, in this age of the automated, the meticulous task of handwriting? Or, the sounds of the typewriter keys, clanking like the pistons in your 1967 convertible and the little ding at the end of a line? O, the ding! Unfortunately, I don’t own my typewriter anymore. Now I resort to writing in a blank journal. When the rain falls so soft and sweet, or even better when there is a thunderstorm with the sort of lightning that makes you believe in the very existence of divinity. Mi greatest pleasure is to wrap myself in my red blanket and take my notebook in hand. My pen is ready to conquer. It does not need wartime strategies nor a battle plan, for I let the words guide themselves and I assert, the words command me and I merely obey them.

¿Quieres leerlo en español?

Lo Que Me Nutre

En ciertos momentos, cuando mi cabeza duele de una manera que me hace sentir pesar por mi comportamiento en el año 2000, el único placer de mi alma es una larga sesión de escritura.

¿Por qué me gusta escribir? La cuestión no es por qué me gusta escribir, sino, por qué lo necesito. Esa música que guía mi bolígrafo y hace que baile un danzón. O un mambo. Tal vez una samba. ¿Puedes bailar samba? Yo no, pues mis muslos y mis pies son protagonistas de una cochambrosa batalla. Pero, mi tinta sobre las líneas. Amor, de todos mis amores, cómo necesito escribir. Debo, mantengo que necesito, escribir. De lo contrario, mi alma se estanca y mi luz se amarga.

Mi método preferido de escritura es tinta y papel, seguido por la máquina de escribir. ¿Quién recuerda, en esta era de lo automático, la tarea minuciosa de la escritura a mano? ¿O el sonido de las teclas de una máquina de escribir, y la campanita al final de la línea? Ay, la campanita. Por lástima ya no tengo mi máquina de escribir. Así que ahora lo que me encanta hacer es escribir en mi cuaderno empastado. Cuando la lluvia cae muy suavecita o de preferencia cuando hay una tormenta con relámpagos, de los que te causan que creas en lo divino, mi placer es acurrucarme en mi cama con mi cobija roja y mi cuaderno, y mi bolígrafo listo para conquistar. No necesito estrategias bélicas, ni plan de batalla, pues solo dejo que las palabras se guíen a sí mismas y te digo que las palabras mandan y yo les obedezco.

Read this in English.

Be Ambitious

Be ambitious.

You don’t have to sit in that cramped little cubicle that smells like your sister’s breath. You can arise, you can attain! To this purpose, you keep on the lookout for new and higher positions where your typing skills will shine. Clack, clack, clack, clack. No one can clack that fucking keyboard like you. Even when other colleagues show a higher intellect and are obvious candidates for advancement, you don’t let that deter you. Instead, you seek to make them feel comfortable. You are not their competitor. You are their faithful, discreet confidante. For instance, you told that woman in Accounting with the lumpy skin and bad posture she was your favorite coworker but it’s not like you meant it. So what if later you went behind her back and told the big boss she made fun of his toupee and said he reminded her of garbage soaked in sunshine? So what if it was really you who made those comments? That has nothing do with him firing her and you getting her job. Everybody in this world knows that to get what you want you must have allies who will happily throw themselves on the office carpet for you as you walk on their backs to a better and brighter future. That promotion will be yours and you will get your very own office with your very own toilet. That’s all that matters.

We are trained from childhood to achieve, accomplish and surpass each other. Get the grades, go to college, buy that ornamental degree and be impressive at that interview so you can spend all day in a fucking cubicle wishing you were walking on a beach in Maui with your stomach oily and your feet licked by the waves.

Suppose economic survival depended not on physical power or mechanical ability but solely on whatever sustenance of ideas your brain delivered. My brain behaves as an unemployed, overweight, 48-year-old man in boxer shorts who sleeps on his mother’s couch. How do I arouse his interest and thus promote a confident activity? The answer lies in fear: the fear of continuing along a road of nothing and decaying into the very pus of failure.

I am not gregarious enough to engage in prostitution. Nor am I inclined to serve as Chancellor of Germany. Therefore, it would seem my current chance at attaining a stable source of income depends on my ability to gather and retain trade knowledge and the opportunity to apply said knowledge in corporate activities that will eventually leave me frustrated and unable to articulate coherent sentences.

So how do I survive? How do I manage to use my fantastic acumen of living in fear to obtain more than $10 in my wallet? The choices are numerous and I could attempt them all. Except, to my body, this means I would have to get out of bed in the mornings and put on pants.