brimming with an experience I try to hold it in my hands, carefully. cup it so that it might stay warm, hot, brilliant. my hands hovering above my chest. walking across the pulaski bridge I raise my arms to the sky because I can't tell if I want to cry or laugh, and of course it's both, my heart, my tender heart that can't stand all of this beauty and gratitude and love. my heart.

what does it mean to be alive? tonight I have all the answers. tonight I have all the answers, the simple ones. it means to meet people, to connect and to commune, to know one's self, to sit in the knowledge of your truth, and to find an unexpected wellspring of being and groundedness emerging from your body. it means to love who you already are, and will be, and to let that emerge. it means to be them, and for them to be you. it means, it means, it means, it means, it means to love, it means to ache, it means to find beauty, such deep beauty in the midst of the world, and to be present, and to find that beauty allows for sorrow and sadness and joy and love, but also, that sorrow and sadness and joy and love allows beauty, and to find beautiful the sense of all things present, simply put, simply put.

내려놓는거래. 배워야하는 조급함자체를 놔두고. 놓고, 내려놓고. to place it down.

--

"this week I loved someone like they were my child in my past life, my sister, my brother, my parent, my friend, my husband, my wife. so many ways of loving. my heart aches at all these beautiful people who I get to intersect my life with momentarily, how beautiful a life is

what I really want is to shake someone by the shoulders, shake them silly, and say, laughingly, can’t you see?? can’t you see? this is it! this is It, the thing, it’s here and been here all of this time, and of course, that someone is me

my aching heart. tonight I walk myself home, so full."

--

I am loving. I am not in love. I am simply grateful and excited and hopeful and proud and thankful and amused and deeply impressed and fascinated and surprised and thrilled and exhilarated and curious and quietly confident simply excited for where this all might lead me. I am a big huge balloon. I am so full, so full of love, so with me already, that I feel wealthy, I feel so capacious, already full of myself. I go on a date tomorrow with me, I think, the love of my life, and we go out together, and so that will be, us and us, full of loving, and that is what we will do, and so it will be, and so it will be.

thank you. i love you. all this is is this. this moment, over and over and over again. I see, I see, I see!

--

Thanks.

somewhere in this, the task of living

hunger, this hunger. C sits next to me. she says in wonder, "I think this is it", and I hear the gravity in her voice, a marvel as large as a cathedral, and we sit together going seventy six miles an hour with the enormity of it all, the project that we call life, the kinds of adventures we're already and always on, the unexpected nature of it, the fabric in which it is woven with; I see it for her, I see it with her. am witness. she's holding gratitude, she says, and I see it, the way in which our lives lay out ahead of us, sprawling and long and complex and eternal, the lives and laughs and pains and deaths and hurts and joys ahead, the roiling rolicking infinite game of it all, the joy of play that could be possible, always, always, always

the questions that plagues me these days is: when do you know when the moment is right? is there ever a right moment, a right time, a right space, a right landscape? or are those constructs of our own making? am I asking myself to be present, or to move with acceptance, or to settle, or sit? where am I going, really?

--

I tell C some of the best advice I have ever given. I say: in joy we calculate the trajectory of projectiles in motion, orbitary planetary actors, projectiles launched into the air creating parabolas. a trajectory is a future-oriented estimation of what could understanding of what could be. but everything we needed was in the present. it's the present that entices us to calculate a trajectory. it's the possiblity of the trajectory that gives ourselves the permission to continue in the present. but what's relevant in the present is the present, not the trajectory, that we're always here, always already where we need to be;

I see you've found a ship, a boat, a floating cathedral, waiting to be explored, embarked upon, I say, I say. I see it.

--

here we are, here we are! here we are. enough perspective to look at humans, ugh, us rolling around smashing into each other, separating and combining out of fear and joy, desire, holding each other as we tremble. isn't that all we have, in the end?

and what about me and me, I ask myself. this feeling I get. could it just be me? or is it always us, us all? do you not see, I want to implore, but I also say, maybe we don't see, maybe this is it, maybe that's all we ever needed to be, to be present, unhappy, happy, sad, devastated, joyous, angry, holding this in our body, bags of galaxies sloshing around ourselves, pouring them out, giant waterbags of memory, inertia, spilling over the top, but here we are, this is what we do, this is what we'll be doing, you know, trying to reckon, trying to -

I still think about getting this tattoo, the predestined tattoo, in which if I get it it's the right tattoo to get, and if I don't get it it wasn't the right tattoo to get, because the tattoo is about accepting the possibility of an imperfect tattoo, sitting with what won't be, sitting with what haven't. in some way through this whole ordeal, the deep scars and wounds that have barely started to scab over, I see a tree changing direction, a river meandering leaving oxbows in its wake, tectonic plates smashing together; in the wake of it there's always life, nature finds a way, and I guess the quest is: are we in it for the infinite game? the game in which nobody wins or loses, where we're in it to continue the play, where we wink at each other in ostensible struggle because underlying it all is the joy of tussling with each other, meeting each other's edges, our bodies and selves crashing into presentness to say, here we are, here I am, I greet you, mash into you, this is the flesh, then the bone, a soft then hard limit, here is where I stand, here here here here here.

--

and then, there will always be an and-then, because this is a moment of presentness, and then I will be flung into disarray, my face pressed against the television screen, the vibrant emotional matter of my being flaring up, tugging on me desperately. (you're alive! I say to C.) that too I know, and I know that when I will be there I will think that there is no out, the whole experience a kind of enclosure, ourobotic tautological encompassment, grasping the lever and pulling at the wrong thing, to try to fix to change to FIX to CHANGE, of course, the thing to do will be to let go of the lever, so then I'll try to let go and try to LET GO, that in of itself subject to neurosis, etc etc etc;

if you're reading, future self, it's that I think the place is to just be; towards noticing, not doing; it's also others, the joy of kindness, of well-intentioned care, networks of resilience that we all gradually build with each other, such as meta-communication around promises to not play mind games, to really look each other in the eye, really, really.

here we are, in any case, this darkening sky, by the side of the rode on eye ninety five, fresh off of an architecture review listening to students dream of the future and process the past, wondering where I am in the present, what the future could hold, seeing it lay out ahead, plath's fig trees and all, at least in this early summer evening, wondering what portends, what beckons, what arrives.

what is left, what settles, when everything is still?

these days, there's an insistent taste in my mouth, a memory: someone calling for dinner, someone calling for another. not much seems more resonant than the sound of someone calling another in, arms curling, come on over, sky darken, house warming. a house full of messy beds, closet full of sheets, pantry full of food,

words stick in my mouth like a fishbone in reverse. something I can barely let go, let alone fashion into words. even this writing is tedious, lumpy, slow to arrive. I can tell. could I edit what I write here? yes, but I push it through. these words right now aren't meant to be shared. a dog desperately digging a ditch. talking late until our voices are hoarse. trying to get at the thing we're always circling, trying to seek the thing amidst this all.

do you get it? do you see it, self? do you know what I'm talking about? could you name it for me? (am I trying to pin it down?) these rough hewn words are barely working, but I hope, I hope, if I keep on typing, it will emerge amongst this mass, spooling out an anchor, casting a net, letting it run, run, run, words finding its course.

is it here? it's always here. it's never here. sometimes it's here. sometimes the noise of music and conversation can drown it out; other times it can heighten it, the thing between us, always present. the texture of this thing is invisible and viscous, ladled in scoops and distributed, collected, skimmed, thinned, spread, buttered, frozen and chopped, diluted and drunken. hot glue, leaving the nozzle, sticky, burning, perfect.

what to do with it?

--

finding, finding. what am I finding. the clear obvious ones are: grief, sadness, disgust, anger, judgment, disappointment, confusion; surprise, resignation, perspective, sorrow; some double helping of resignation, the faraway trumpets singing gratitude, understanding, acceptance.

after driving upstate we arrive at B. I circle the space. drive back away, quickly, too casually. I suspect P can see what I can't say, which is the immeasurable density of memories past, the enormity of a community, the way things shaped us, "patted us into being", as she says. what do you do after a community ends?

I remember us sitting all together, in a circle, looking into each others' eyes with hurt, sadness, gratitude, and love. many offerings burnt, many lessons shared. "let's meet back here in five years", H says. some of us murmur our agreement at that moment. it feels right, then, even if we knew that it might not happen afterwards.

what do you do after a community ends? how do you pick up the pieces? what I learned there was to try to understand, to wade into, to seek, to ask questions. will these tools work, this time? every sun has its shadow, every current its lee, every tendency its difficulty. when to contend with the possibility that I may never understand? or worse, that I might? because the answers are simple, the age old ones, written in historical texts, the same stories playing out, milennia upon milennia, because after all, the bodies we have are the bodies we have; ecosystems and ecologies of emotions, galaxies, emerging under our skin, plankton, microorganisms, fish, insects, plants, a huge ecology developing out of the same body. do you not also have a limbic system? your vagus nerve? they too, years ago, were livid, hurt, angry, confused, disappointed, disgusted, sad. and also: fearful, excited, terrified, joyous, loving, caring, grateful, accepting, thrilled, anxious, energetic, hesitant, learning. they too will; so will we.

so yeah. what do you do? where do you go, I ask, knowing that, actually, the answer to the hardest questions are probably the easiest to verify, hard to solve. p != np, no sir, these questions run on non-polynomial time, non-linear progress, answered through struggle, verified through a koan. we're already here, actually, I could say. but it still doesn't tell me the answer to what this thing is, what this taste in my mouth is, this thing that tastes of a place, of a series of dates and addresses in my phone.

of the times you thought 'but I thought I still had more time left', of the ways in which we always do.

--

I am trying to say, (to myself): listen, please? please, listen? to what's already here, you see?

--

from 10 years, 6 months, 26 days ago:

and there's just time, and change, and of course -- we will no longer be what we could be, but you know what? the most important-remarkable part is: _we will no longer be able to even conceive of thinking about whether 'we will no longer be what we could be'

--

letting it be.

july 10, 2004, almost ten years ago, a seventeen-year-old boy goes to india alone and stays with a host family:

lately I think, it is the desire, it is the harnessing of desire that is necessary. it is enough to want and to step forward to grab it.

and I (I, smiling to myself) am reminded of the ubermensch that raskolnikov dreams of. 'step forwards and grasp.' and I see the degree to which this is necessary perhaps -- not in terms of evading the law and killing your landlady but of a harnessing of desire relative to one's self, to be able to speak to the self and think of interest, desire.

or: what really matters to me is that I find it interesting and am able to talk about it because it is interesting to me.

or: I will be able to talk about it anywhere because it really matters to me because I find it interesting to me. within this ouroboros-like turning-inwards-ish introspective justification lies the ignition for outwards exploration. it is me, my interest, and for that I wish to share it with you. and so on. look look look look is this not amazing. look does this not change the way you see things. look does this not turn ___ on its head, to paraphrase marx.

and I think that it is necessary to believe with a conviction of firmness that this is true because these things are like self-fulfilling prophecies you know, of emotion, desire, spirit, energy, of one's attitude towards this all, of energy comes energy.

and in that way I am blessed.

something I wrote almost two years ago that touches me to no extent because the words are so so so ___, in the then:

something I thought about two minutes ago that touches me to no extent because it is me in the now:

all I want to do is to _______.

I want to write things and there but this site is being weird. Drupal fun.

- incessant urge to be looking forwards. or to want to do so.

the three most interesting things on the internet:

1) 4chan's /b/.
2) wikileaks.
3) Facebook privacy issues.

I mention privacy issues with a line through it because it's much more complicated than having private information be public; Facebook is just one step at the frontier of the reorganization of priorities of information, of the shuffling of hierarchies of accessible knowledge, of the de/re-territorialization of the boundaries of a 'social being' and the redrawing of the map of nodes that connects us all. If anything, it should be discussed in terms of order, experience, knowledge, openness, and maybe the first question would be something along the lines of "what does one mean by privacy?" and spiral out from there.

The introduction of the telephone into the private home, or openness in donation records, or the yellow pages, etc, are already outlets that leapfrog the suggested 'natural' order of information and its accessibility pertaining to a person. Moreover, this 'person' is really a stand-in word for a 'physical person'. That is, if there is a linear spectrum between public and private information, then I feel that the 'order of accessibility' of personal information is assumed to be tied to the person with regards to metrics based on physical proximity, vocal interaction, one-to-one conversation, and so on. For example: If I walk towards the physical you and start speaking to you, I am in order able to ascertain your: appearance (height/weight/age/race/etc) -> sex -> age -> external mood -> name -> external ideas -> gender -> emotion -> inner thoughts, and so on. Technology has contributed to the generation of various kinks or folds onto this order (based on physical interaction) and reorganized into different ways: with the internet, it's possible to know one's political affiliation and age with a name alone -- but not be able to connect it with a face/race, and so on and so forth. This is a new ordering, just not one based on physical proximity.

Thought of in such terms, I feel that the question of Internet/Facebook privacy discussed hotly lately is really about the reordering of these 'orders of accessibilities' and the resulting dynamics that arises from this reordering. What happens when you know if someone is liberal/conservative before you even talk to them? What if you know what someone ate for lunch but didn't know their gender? There's a rich loam of activities to turn over onto stagnant topsoil -- and most of these things happen anyways. Through a causal text message, I know where you are, but not how you feel. If I call you, I know how loud it is over there, but not who you are with.

I'd like to think of these as the growing pains of an online medium (internet, networked technologies) trying to jettison the fetters of a mindset dependent heavily on physical material. This happens in intellectual property issues, too -- what happens when the creation is no longer a one-off physical object and the act of 'stealing' is non-destructive? What happens when the gears of monetary revenue and singular objecthood are uncoupled? It's clear that in the music/gaming/film industry, new (and relatively successful) approaches are being found: iTunes/Amazon/Rhapsody/Gamefly/Steam/Netflix/Hulu are attempts to disregard the physical object and make the game about convenience: here, a one-click approach to buying music, or a free way to watch movies! (albeit with commercials), and so on. While the 'shareability' of the internet and the reorganization of accessibility orders has lead to a lot of great things for content producers, though (think Arctic Monkeys finding fame through Myspace), it hasn't happened yet for personal information, at least yet. The idea of 'Facebook stalking' is a somewhat guilty, shameful activity. Monetization (although that's not what this all is about at all) is only happening on the level of piddly apps, Farmville, ads, and so on. Nothing drastically interesting has happened that has changed our interpersonal interactions, at least yet --- and perhaps that's the strongest reason why these 'privacy issues' are met with the outcry that they are.

It's amazing and interesting, these reorganizations, and there's a lot of interesting things to be found in the midst of it all, and more than anything what we're witnessing is the birth of the new existence of the person, as we lose tails but grow antennae, change into hybrid forms, have our networked selves augment our physical beings. What Mark Zuckerberg probably knows is that if such a thing is to happen, it will mostly be waged on the war of the 'default setting' -- that is, the default privacy setting that generates the entire network of nodes and paths and connections and visibility, on an emergent level. It's only after such a pervasive openness (and such a pervasive default 'privacy violation' will the really interesting things start to happen in terms of thinking about who we are in relation to each other. Before that, we're just still thinking about ourselves as intact beings who use technologies external to us. How does the mantra go? "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

things of interest going on.

upcoming shows:

may 30, club ta, 3호선 버터플라이, 7pm, 15,000원
may 31, yogiga, 불가사리 - experimental noise, 4pm

exhibitions:

대학로 100번지
arko art center
http://arkoartcenter.or.kr/english/01_arko_on/exhibition_view.asp?exhibi...

오인환 개인전 "TRAnS"
artsonje center
http://artsonje.org/asc/

新오감도 ( -- jun 7)
2009 미술관 봄 나들이_미술관 습격 사건
서울시립미술관

A.L.I.C.E Museum 2009 (new media stuff)
Soma 미술관

Mobility Immobility (-- may 31)
Como Story (을지로입구역 4번출구)
http://www.comostory.com/mobility/main.html

THE PRESENT
--June 7
The Library - 건국공예가회 14회 정기전 -
--May 31
[상상 두:드림 CHOICE #8] 종이팥빙수 展_ 인간시장
June 10 --
Paradise Lost
June 3 --
Cloud, after rain
June 2 --
at: Sangsangmadang

landing on a better note than the last one; graduation really happened at a single pinpoint, standing on the top of a metal ladder, strangely still, feeling like a statue having locked the storage container shut. loose ends tied up, ends of ends done. I like this idea of having things compact, twisted together. life locked in a box, turtled away. I like the idea of portable disposable toothbrushes not from an environmental point of view but from a convenience/travel point of view. runners while running, throwing cups of water over their faces, tossing these cylinders away. maybe it's time to go.

I have an image of being a wound-up spring. which way? which way = these ways + the complement of these ways; the ways you don't think about but exist nevertheless.

I've got a bit of time, some time, a lot of time, an endless wealth. the endless wealth of youth.

the last week I had this thought while on a bus that the most defining mental characteristic of me right now is the fact that I do not understand that I will die, a currently constant and unchanging being-unconscious. autopsies seen -- ribs snapped, lungs dug out, human hearts held in the hand -- haven't changed this yet. you're wealthy, I want to say to myself, your wealth is being free but being free won't soon be free. hurry the fuck up and stop hurrying.

here's to an earnest start.

idea: single-line power devices, with line acting as both positive and negative, with a capacitor?

---[diode>]----| capacitor | ---------
-----< | LED |
---[

While waiting for a phone call from you I think about the nature of summer break and the sense of laziness dust settling interim periods that they convey. Here I am sitting in an apartment that creeps away from Seoul and crawls towards fresh air slowly, every few years or so, like some ex-terranean hermit-wizard lair moving eastward and future-ward, legs protruding, ground slowly swirling. The sense of time spent doing nothing washes by coagulated in the sounds of kids' voices on playgrounds and passing cars, and the progress of shadows as they swing from corner to corner pivoting at the edges of objects, bedframes, doorjambs. As I stand in the bathroom thinking about the sticky-heavy moments just before a phone rings I convince myself of the rejuvenating nature of these moments -- not necessarily therapeutic but some sort of marinating force, (ha ha cooking metaphors), like the end of a novel (probably paperback) closed with a content enough sigh and active retrospection for a piece of present-now-past held in the hands.

And so I'm here having come here, two years, constantly swiveling my head looking sideways here and there noticing things changed, turned. Coming back out of Jamsil station I notice another building completed, things busier, the line waiting for the 1115 bus still long as usual.