Ode to Sprinkler Head

Ode to Sprinkler Head:

The garden,
Where you've long impersonated a fountain
Defiantly spurting and bubbling like you'd
Completely forgotten your purpose in the
Garden, where you're there to keep the plants
Refreshed and satiated, not submerged nor drowning
Today is the day when you will be reprimanded,
Rehabilitated and returned again to
The garden

Baggaging Family?

I don't want to return home this weekend, like before. I feel that I've reached a point in my creative commitments that I want/need the alone time and would like the opportunity to remain in Berkeley to develop them further, to read and write and to enjoy the potential spontaneity present here.

At home, too, I feel so pressed to commit to many activities that I only partially enjoy but that my family always desires to include me in, so I know that my creative life will need to take a backseat. I still want to preserve a sense of community with them, and they are very important to me.

And I miss my brother even. But we inhabit different worlds. I read, write, draw, play guitar, garden, cook and etc. And they don't do much of this at all, absent one or two of them. They watch excessive amounts of tv, and I desire only some part of it, if at all. oh well.

But, as with many times before, I'll most likely reluctantly go, in spite of what remains here and for me to enjoy, to learn from, to take pleasure in. There is so much already.

Prudish Prudence

Talk about reproducing sex-unfriendly social habits and assuming that human beings just can't stand publicly admitting they have any part in reproductive or procreative habits. This Prudence lady gives weird advice, again and again.

http://www.slate.com/articles/video/dear_prudence/2013/07/dear_prudence_video_raunchy_upstairs_neighbor.html

Onwards!

Unfortunately, as of yet, I don't inhabit a world where I can read and write all day, but instead, I have to commit myself to jobs and other occupations that are not necessarily in line with interests but provide me a level of subsistence. Oh the future I look forward to...

Personal Time

Perfunctory or brief posts may as much be evidence of time alloted as of focus or interest. One can only do with the time that one has.

Infatuation and Compromise

I see people engage in relationships around me all the time, but I have a deep sense that I'm incapable of them, and I say this not to incite or compel sympathy but to admit to myself and my viewing public, whoever that may be, that being uncompromising might mean being lonely.

I empathize profoundly with Benjamin here, who, time after time, found human and economic relationships troubling and hampering of his own work, compelled on, again and again to produce and to hold responsible the exploitative system of relations characteristic of capitalism.

Again, a post that is far too personal for any to view...

Sublimating Sublimation?

Lately, I've been worrying about how sexist I am, and about whether others who share these tendencies are just better at covering them up or sublimating them.

I wonder what this says about how I respect women. This is what concerns me, and what confounds me as well. I wonder about the prospect of seeing another sex, or another general group as the object of sexual affection/interest and what this says to relations of power between such groups. Is it possible for equality and sexual relationships to coexist?

A professor once suggested otherwise, or they did insofar as they related stories about the figure of the female in Greece. They argued that, in a world in which sexuality implied or expressed ownership, the homosociality of men living among men prohibited any kind of sexual relations because this would subvert or undermine the power equally shared and exhibited among them and over women and others in society. This is why pederasty had to be hidden and concealed but simultaneously why it was permissible that women were the objects of sexual interest, as they didn't hold the same status in Grecian society. But this only has to be the case when sex is ownership; but how and when was this changed, and was it? Can mere practice and ideological reformation change these relationships?

I wonder if I'm experiencing this same feeling, and I wonder to what degree the figure of sexual objectification and ownership has been lost from myself or from the communities from which I come. I wonder and worry about whether I have respect for someone I sleep with, or, put another way, is if such a relationship inhibits a sense of equality in ability or capacity.

There is no doubt that my own opinions, sensibilities and predispositions to those around were fashioned and formed in some part in and during my childhood, to take a Freudian stance. Although I consider myself progressive and even revolutionarily so, in the sense that I entertain the thoughts of new and different kinds of relationship configurations, every now and again, I notice my own conservatism, and it sometimes temporarily paralyzes me with questions of implications.

I think this is the small town boy in me, coming to terms with the radically different conditions of an urban world. These generalizations would surely not stand up to too much or too thorough of testing, but in general, I'm skeptical of many practices, even though I feel myself more at home here, in this atmosphere. But I feel, still, that I'm constantly fighting myself, that Freud was right, that we are, for the most part, broken, uncertain beings that are constantly coping with competing urges and finding ways to fit those to the strictures of our environments. If only we took him more seriously...