To My Ex: Fuck You and Thank You

Life is a bit of a whirlwind right now, and a lot of feelings are getting thrown in this volatile mix.

Self-reflection is my thing. I was about to write, "I've been reflecting a lot on my life lately," but it's not a "lately' thing if you do it at all the time (guilty as charged), so I want to say that after extreme moments of self-reflection, I came to this realization that I owe everything to my ex.

Even before we became involved romantically, I always told him he had this huge impact in my life. Meeting him left a dent in my soul, a dent that I sometimes proudly own as a survivor adorned with battle scars and at other times, a dent that makes me reel in agony and abject self-deprecation. How could I have screwed things up so badly? How?

There's no use in saying "what if" about everything. There's no doubt that we fell out of love and to continue being with him would've made things go way worse, but a part of me feels victimized nonetheless. Not that my ex was super mean or horrible when he was the exact opposite. I think the problem is he's human and I'm human and believing in love's promises is like building castles atop clouds: it just won't hold.

Even though the break up and the loss of a best friend gave me the impetus for change - the impetus to succeed academically, to make friends, and to take charge and responsibility for my life - it still left me longing at times for the girl whom I used to be. Now I'm just someone looking back at a faded memory - some worn out sepia photograph with hardly a semblance to its former glory.

So, to my ex: fuck you. Fuck you for leaving me helpless and dejected. Fuck you for telling me "my love for you will never change" when it in fact dissipated and eventually evanesced.

But thank you as well. Thank you for leaving me helpless, because I then learned to stand on my own two feet. Thank you for letting me go through this agonizing-at-times self-discovery. Also, thank you for telling me in the six years we were together that I'm a smart, beautiful, and strong woman. Even when we fell out of love you never stopped believing in my talents and in my potential.

Thank you.

Thoughts In Hard Times Cafe

When I need to study or do some editing for my internship, I always make the trip to West Bank for some coffee and vegan goodness in Hard Times. Something about the ambiance - the name-shouting, the eccentric array of vinyl music, and the background noise teetering on your absolute threshold - helps me focus.

I don't mean to seem like I endorse Hard Times. God knows they don't need any shout out from some obscure, student-run blog. Either way, just sitting there from time to time conjures up stories of its own, stories that indubitably make a substantial part of my college experience.

Tofu Scramble Garden

I always see the group of old men having brunch at Hard Times every morning - an affectionately loud group of seniors they are. Sometimes I see the occasional couple-on-a-date, or the friends who come because it is their spot, their un-maligned sanctuary.

I come because I can think in this place. It's one of those Twin Cities' gems specific to University of Minnesota students; specific to a culture which thrives on local taste and exploration. I almost want to write a poem about how I fell in love with Minnesota thanks to these tiny, tucked away spots. It seems the best way to deal with the harsh climate is to find your inner coffee-lover and taste the sights and sounds of what down the street can bring.

The Hypochondria of "Girls"

In the season 2 finale of HBO's Girls, we see Hannah wake from the nightmare of rupturing her eardrum to dealing with the morning-after wave of medical paranoia. In the cold, cyberspace hands of the omniscient search engine, she types in questions dealing with mundane health-related inquiries which the viewers can only construe as manifestations of Hannah Horvath's unanswerable anxieties.

"How does your body know not to stop breathing?"

In a way these arbitrary bouts of anatomical curiosity seem like pointless if not rhetorical questions. Obviously, it's a simple matter of looking into the autonomous nervous system and the other quotidian functions of the brain, but it doesn't take much effort to realize that Hannah isn't genuinely curious about how her body works. She is also not so much curious as she is nervous. She is nervous about her health because she is pushed to the crossroads of her liberal arts' dream. She is a twenty something forced to break free from her ennui and pass the obstacles of the corporate-infested world of literature. If anything, her unexpected and inquisitive bout of hypochondria can be generalized as the fear of being "unanchored."

Hannah Horvath has been floating in existential vagrancy of "struggling to find herself." For the past two seasons, we see her doing so and now her "self" (a socially constructed persona Hannah aspires to be) is presented in the form of an e-book deal. Of course, she can't take the bohemian Jessa's advice that the deal isn't her and that it doesn't change anything. She has to face it and grab life by the reins, but she can't. Instead she is riddled with the possibility of failure. Or worse, the possibility of succeeding ie becoming published as a name on an e-reader shelf only to be cast off as a useless scrap of obscurity lost in the merciless jungle of New York. Hannah is the ego unable to come to terms with a smaller-than-life existence.

No wonder the sudden OCD, the hypochondria, and the time-wasting queries on Web MD. In dealing with stress, she is caught right between the "flight or fight" response, dangerously being pushed to "flight."

"At what age does your body start melting down?"

At what age do the senses fail? The crux and appeal of Girls lies in watching a bunch of woman-children wear their grown up clothes and constantly trip on the long hemline and unable to grasp things with the long sleeves. They are photo ID wallet-sized portraits trapped in a spacious, over encumbering frame. What they do with the space they are given, with the fabric they are left with is up to them, and it keeps us on the edge.

Are you like Jessa? The typological rebel who tears the lace so decoratively placed on her skirt? Are you like Marnie who wears 5-inch heels to compensate for her lack of stature in wearing her business suit and business skirt? Are you like Shosh, who admires her grown up clothes, her over encumbering frame from a distance and thus living an unlived existence (only to have it come in bursts of an insatiable sexual curiosity and hunger for stability)? Or are you like Hannah, the quirky and crude anti-heroine, staunchly and failingly feminist, seeking recognition from a world who refuses to acknowledge her?

That is the lesson to be learned from the end of Season 2 (apparently). At twenty something, you don't have to have it figured out. You can be presented with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities only to realize that you still need a safety net, a dream of having a prince charming rescuing you, or even that when there is no where else to turn, you can say fuck it all and leave. Isn't that what Hannah hypocritically accuses Jessa of in the end?

The hypochondria presented to us is this: "I don't have anything figured out. There is something wrong with me. Therefore, I will live life manifesting the things wrong with me." It's a little bit like: I am broken ergo I exist.

I think one of the biggest flaws and failure of Girls is the lack of a synthesis. We see a problem; we see them tackle it; but they only fall back. Hannah insists she deserves a better boyfriend than Adam, but she inevitably falls back into his arms because she cannot stand on her own. She would much rather subject her existence to the safety of his, "re-purposing" him into her life as the backdrop for her self discovery. It's a practice so self-involved and so depressing, and I hate to think it will go on ad infinitum in television. You'd think after gems such as The Prisoner, a late 60s flick completely different in genre but similar in the general underlying motif of self assertion, Lena Dunham could construct a realistic, quirky comedy not showing the viewers the "answers" to life (which is the typical girl and guy get married and have babies in a suburban home) but instead giving her own answer to life.

I almost wanted Hannah to tell the editor, "Fuck your book deal. Fuck your fraudulent, parasitic corporate rape of art - my art." But she didn't. Instead, she cowers and drowns in an abyssal ocean of self-pity, waiting to be rescued by the heroesque mariner who can't resist a good damsel-in-distress-type tempest. We are then left wondering when the tale will end; when will the heroine realize that to grow up, you must eat your disgusting vegetables and sail into the open sea in Camusian-fashion - unseeing and constantly waylaid but keeping on nonetheless. That's for season 3 to answer...

A Blog of One's Own

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf expounds on the necessity that is economic freedom - the very bread and butter for any expresser of self-expression. Of course, her essays were more about how it pertained to women, or more specifically, how the idea of "economic freedom" is not at all accessible to women in her time.

Now in the twenty first century, these social boundaries have dissolved into more relative, ambiguous issues. The uphill struggle is inherited by any (unfortunate) descendant of the oppressed, and though there are many, vacuous rooms to have of one's own, we still have the problem of letting others in and letting ourselves out. The doors are left ajar, but we awaken to the harrowing reality that our neighbors are quite disinterested if not completely disconnected. What is an immensely indebted, female college student to do in the very fast, very ruthless world of Twitter, graphic design, and iphone vs android debates? How am I to put a stamp on anything if everything is driven by saccharine, audiovisual competition?

"Fuck it."

For those of you who don't know me, Hi I'm Lia. This is a blog of my own, and I've had many before it. I'm a body full of whims, coffee, and genetically modified foods college students are bound to binge on. The world has turned its back on me, but I refuse to abandon it. I will yell at it, swear at it, and cast all the stones I can at it. Only until my hands are tired, seared with blisters, will my macbook air be relieved from having to translate this verbose vitriol. I'm a New England cynic exiled to the Midwest, resting on the crest of the Twin Cities...

You might see some wonderful stories about that quaint coffee shop, or the thrift store where I happened to not be so thrifty. Perhaps you'll find me ranting about how no one compares to Bergman (as unfair the comparison may be), but rave the very next moment about a b-rated zombie flick. Expect the same treatment with books. On a side note, I fucking hate Twilight and Hunger Games. I'm sure the former is expected but the latter surprises you. I'm also not-so fond of Harry Potter (hard as I tried), but I can tell you I was once fluent in Quenya while fully capable of quoting some phrases in Sindarin (Elvish from Tolkien's Lord of The Rings). Grade A nerd and not-at-all a misanthropic. I can assure you...

I'm just Lia. I've got a blog of my own.