and hope you are having a good time, well into your 30’s—-knowledge and wisdom much further beyond… 生日快乐 happy birthday, rl… muchlovefromafar
Posted by 丫 | reply »生 日 快 乐
a not meaning to be so direct, yet, a surprise from the wedding batch, found within the files on your computer, an unknown photographer and an unknown boy, startled, staring you in the face, t-necked. make yourself a crown. 生日快乐。
today. you and we. happy birthday miss asuka
a year passes - 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 - the day whiles away… late afternoon, almost evening… more space these days for time, for thought for re-collecting, gathering, re-organizing, arranging, and you, ever-preparing for an unfinished moment, future, now in a box, the a-4 papers placed on top as they don’t fit, remembering in april to prepare for may, but when? after ten? after twenty? alas the archive! a year passes - 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 - the day whiles away… a day with the memory of you and your birthday, perhaps not so different from the year before just that we didn’t record or we didn’t say. so today we learn new things, we capture video, eat a good crispy jian bing, we wear things long forgotten, we receive a phone call from japan, do grocery shopping, cycle to the village, we watch dance, we buy more food in the village, apples, bananas, pears, peanuts mixed with raisins, two filled pancakes and an egg pancake, and we search for a picture of a birthday cake we don’t find, only the not so good one where the candle wasn’t lit and more food is visible on the table, while searching we collect other images, we stop for a moment, we miss you - a year passes - 誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐 - the day nears its end… miss asuka-chan, how was your day?
notes on love and writing, turning thirty again, obachans grin
To write is to permit others to conclude one’s own discourse, and writing is only a proposition whose answer one never knows. One writes in order to be loved, one is read without being able to be loved, it is doubtless this distance which constitutes the writer. (Roland Barthes)
::writing about writing, between shanghai and beijing, 2 December
today i become a writer. written self reading a purple journal like being in this airplane, oh i fucked up fucked up so many times, “it’s just that this year has been so full of small, stupid, non-descript disasters, not the big ones that could at least be identified as crisis.” sometimes in reading their words i describe my own surroundings, the small spaces around the page being written as we read others: (please fall in love with me). He is nonchalant about loose trivia on japanese aesthetics like mentioning the names of people he knows.
“The proximity of two differing individuals can become too intense.” (Arnold Barkus)
They are all your friends. And the more old friends that keep popping up in magazines, oh, we must be doing okay. And all the ones that don’t, that come up instead in cafés, in the airplane a couple rows ahead, on someone’s facebook friend list or just in my memory, well… we’re all sorry it turned out this way, we haven’t turned out at all, or against all, or we’re just turning…
so many things happened this year, i lose sight of the things that matter most.
but i’ll love you through the pages of a matte-papered magazine, and maybe that’s enough for today.
“30″, Binna Choi, from The Sole Proprietor and Other Stories, ed. Melissa Lim and Heman Chong:
Perhaps this sudden consciousness of my turning thirty has become entangled with my untamed anxiety, which stems from my own difficulty in being myself when with others. In other words, what mattered, bothered and concerned me can be summed up as my “relationality” with her, him, another me, different me, disappearing me or whatever, or the air, time, space or something. With her leaving and being. With him next to me or with him annoying me. With the density or stuffiness of air. With speed. With intensity…
I am writing about turning thirty, but in doing so, I could be seeking to deny or erase it. This piece is written in the present, about a somewhat unknown future that we are in the process of progressing towards. I hope that the significance of turning thirty will surface later on. You know, I will never be thirty - I will only be two thousand, two hundred and and seven years old next year, I bet.
Hence “writing about turning thirty” is a means of pulling myself out of the preconceived position one has as part of one’s culture or society. It is also a way for me to create an interstice for myself without deliberate avoidance of particular cultural or temporal frameworks. I am trying to prevent these aspects from governing me or my being with “others” within and outside of these frames. I want to take responsibility for my life or lives of others in mine, and ultimately grin — rather than laugh with sound — in the face of my struggles, strengths, delights - like that mad girl on a bus who glared at me as I stared back at her years ago.
Before I can reach this state that allows me to “grin”, let me pose a fundamental question: why do I write? I’d asked this same question quite a few times before, and I know that I have a problem with delving into it. Actually I even doubt that I had ever “written” in the most idealistic sense of that word. I reckon my fantasy is that writing for me is an opportunity to communicate in silence, to compose and liberate what is a part of me, be it my fascination, wonder, despair, concern, joy, beliefs, thoughts and so on — without being dogmatic. I want to believe that I make friends and love through writing.
writing having been written, between beijing and tokyo and los angeles and dallas/fort worth, 22 december
today, before leaving Beijing, it was written: “yes!”
There is no fear in that. No fear, no fear. Its beauty is impressed upon my skin as much as it distances. it was like looking again into the past. Every new realisation is also recognition of all that past in which you did not know it before! Linda didn’t get it at the time. Now she’s married and has dogs, surely she knows something we do not?
It was brought up again over dinner that that desire to cut off was as much the fear of being disconnected from. He cannot understand the difference between the cup there, or here, or there… And I thought we bought this salad. Well, you certainly didn’t buy me. But it’s the cup and the salad and the me and the you, and if we acknowledge no distinctions between any or all, how far can we go in attempt of love? Should we be left formless? Where would we go, and how would we know who we are anymore?
He reminds her that they are all connected. Of course, all these things are written into the body. Past is future is present, so just watch. I watch what i do not see: the big-eyed girl crying in secret, the small-eyed girl crying all day. I wish you could see more so that i wouldn’t have to explain anymore.
“Giorgio Agamben claims that the most important political goal is to find new ways to make the human body inoperative, in the sense that poetry makes language inoperative, to find new uses for the human body.” Would you want that I gave myself completely to you? Would you want that i agreed with everything you said, that everything that you wanted was what i wanted, too? I keep trying to think with those words, read from a monk when I was in Japan: “utmost reverence”. I try to say “yes!” too. But it’s not what I want. So please stop telling me everything you know about me. Because you don’t. And you won’t so long as your eyes stay wanting.
Posted by 丫 | more »You are watching. I am watching, too. We just don’t always see the same thing.
things we say we’ll do and never do | things we do and never speak of again
路路生日快乐…yeh-啦
happy birthday 生日快乐 gelukkig verjaardag, juffrouw van driel
een doorgeven - a passing on: wensten voor haar verjaardag van haar tante marijke. ‘tuurlijk. awkward 
pause. je ziet haar nog? longer awkward pause. 
umm…ja.
a sort of passive-aggressive general confession of not having the heart power to say it to you in person, those brief minutes that you came back, also out of guilty obligation, perhaps, to oversee the painters who actually would not come until much later.standing at attention. 
or sitting.slumped.just like not having the heart power to say the extent of one’s sadness to another’s face.the extent 
of anger.
we worry. oh, 
what a mean way to say happy birthday to a young girl!but within these marvels that lasted for days [the ogichan is sitting in a wheelchair at the end of the street], all of that happiness [the obachan bends over in front of him], sadness [unfolding the metal and rubber hinge of his chair], anger [picks up his feet, awkwardly if not gruff], resignation [and places them on the footrests], and love. 
[and love.] 
are wrapped up in me, wrapping me, and maybe the dutch say that’s just luck.so as you grow up, 
this day grown up,
it dawned,that,underneath that pervasive body of 奇怪 you were actually just a normal little girl dreaming of true love, playing dress-up 
and blowing dandelions. 
thinking of castles.but today there is some sort of certainty that it is the day you were born, years before…so a faraway thank you to your mother and father who helped you come into this world, and, yes, 
from another faraway and roundabout place, much love to you.the real world will never ruin you, like it has the rest of us. 
but you exist.
誕生日お目出度う happy birthday, aka-chan 生日快乐
today, on your birthday, i received a letter from els. inside is a photo of midas, one bent over with his head to the ground. he can see us upside down. we met before, when he was in his mother’s belly, and now he comes to me, future wonder, a photograph of a boy with berries and flowers on his trousers!the boy of the future of my past, i wonder about how many times we had conversations about nostalgia. (好俗，我知道！）and you are thinking about life ahead, please tell about it! yesterday it was your birthday, and as you become older, keiko-san cuts my hair for the last time，and i become younger. we think it looks cute. good, i look younger! aka-chan feels about the same as yesterday! what did yesterday feel like? about like today! so we can stop thinking forward and stop thinking backwards, today is your birthday, and we try looking next to one another. he says it would be better on that side. maybe. i miss you.i love you, spring moto-car! 不会感冒！
explosion inside your head makes almost no sound
walking by yourself, not sure if this is the right way. you asked the two older women but they refused to give you directions insisting that the place you are going to is too far to walk and that you must take the train since it’s getting late. you assured them that you will take the train (you didn’t want them to worry) and walked in that direction. but then turned right just before the entrance to the station. you were in no hurry. and you didn’t have anything else to do. or rather, you didn’t want to do anything else and getting lost in this new city seemed like a good idea. then you found the christmas market (the one he was talking about) and you wanted to go up on the wheel but there were all these children with their parents waiting in line so you just walked away. but you had gluehwein and asked if they could put it in a paper cup to take away. families and children and giant heart-shaped cookies. nikolaustag. your birthday. walking away from the christmas market, you looked at the driver of the small blue car that had stopped at the lights. you recognized the annoying photographer from the opening party. but even so, you smiled - it was comforting to recognize someone in this new place. and then you found the way back again; a way back.
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