8.15.2007

Four long years of university have passed incredibly.... quickly. Many cups of coffee, late-night escapades, long tedious cramming sessions. Never mind the countless biochemical pathways and mechanisms of bacterial resistance acquired over these years, what feels most incredible is how much the rest of my mind and heart have learned through the many adventures encountered in the beloved city of Montreal. And in retrospect, all the insomnia, the stress the tears and the personal tragedy endured seem now, a distant past and only enhances the incredible depth and intensity of emotions and experiences that I've lived through as well.
In less than a month, a new journey begins. It will be a year of traveling and experimentation. Three months of training in Hamilton. Three months in New Delhi, India. Then another Montreal summer followed by a long awaited Eurotrip. 2008 September, hopefully Med school, Israel perhaps or Montreal, or New York. Hopefully. After a long hiatus, I feel it is time to electronically record the minutes passing once again.

3.30.2006

A story of parts.

Part 1

It is 12:30 am. And when the minutes pass midnight, I often sit down and write. I let words appear one after the other on their own, unconsciously.

On February 24, 2006, sometime in the afternoon, I’ll take you on the random musings of such a night.

Right now, all is quite but the quiet tapping of fingertips pressing down on little square buttons. My left hand feels numb, I have 8 grapes sitting in a bowl in front of me and the desklamp is casting shadows on the walls. There is wind howling at 50km/hr outside the window. Somewhere out there, I know, someone is sleeping on some empty street desperately seeking warmth underneath a thin layer of newspaper. The howling outside lights an image in my head: I see a pack of hungry wolves on a snow covered hill with dabbles of green pines everywhere.

Inside, I feel like a tiny school girl. Clutching her very first school bag, leaning in front of some pebbles, imagining lost cities and forgotten conquests.

Somehow, right this moment, I feel exactly like I felt on this day:

October 3, 2005

The afternoon has been spent catching glimpses of sunlit vesper through thin wisps of black hair, and the aroma offreshly cut grass inundating content nostrils.

There will never be much to rival the explosion of life inside one’s imagination.
Once dreamer, always dreamer.

Part 2

There is sunshine dust sprinkled in the atmosphere. The sky is clearer than I have seen in months and birds have started casting shadows on the brick wall in front of me. Right now, it is 9:20AM, probably 08 seconds in. She Wants Revenge is dancing inside the speakerphones: The crowd on the street walk slowly, don’t mind the rain.

Funny how the walls metamorphose.

Funny how suddenly bricks become roads and roads become dust. You and I are holding hands, driving past some deserted area in a gas-guzzling car, speeding faster than the flow of racing blood, throwing pebbles and sand underneath rubber tires. Sunlight stings our eyes and scorches our skin; life is burning inside but we like the pain because we are racing our own heartbeats.
Lean over and suddenly, we are expanding, we are exploding, we are collapsing into ourselves, black holes that we are, zooming into the other side of the universe.

There, you are lying beside me, in a ten by ten room, our hearts beating at the pace of clotting blood. It’s as if I can feel your every pores, oozing warmth, pressing against my own. Music is making my veins radiate inside out and my fingertips have disappeared.
I have never felt this peacefully alive before.

Part 3

My story starts from a clear blue sky, with a speck of blinding sun just like this one, stolen from a photograph taken on one of those first days of spring. It is Saturday March 25th 2006.

The city is just warm enough and you are wearing a black T-shirt and a 30-pound black leather jacket. Between your fingers, you feel the dull wood of a tiny baboushka doll while clusters of sunlight pierce through your eyelids. You keep your eyes closed but you see clearly inside: there are fields of white with thousands of black dabs and doodles. There, you search the patterns for hidden faces, sandy beaches, blueprints to a hidden treasure somewhere on a pacific island. For a moment, it’s all you need to see and all you need to feel, nothing really matters when the world is black and white.


But then, you open your eyes and you are sitting in an oversized and rugged crimson
leather chair with your arms placed palms facing up on a round table. There, you are in a circus tent, with baboushka-sized midgets in green polka dotted dresses dancing around you. At your right, there is an 300-pound bald Soprano singing Mozart’s Magic Flute. And at your left, a purple and yellow clown is doing mind-boggling handstands while performing magic tricks.

Across from you, at the other end of the table, there is a black haired girl in a little red dress, drawing your future on your palms. She is speaking but you can’t hear her. Her lips are moving but only the bald soprano’s voice is resonating in your brain.

Part 5.

The dome of St-Joseph pierces Montreal's first May day, evoking talks of clutches and crutches and shrill fear of heights.
Mondays are always the deadliest. The sun is blinding and the air is stuffy.
The circus has suddenly disappeared. The jugglers, the clowns, the sopranos and the contortionists have packed their belongings into black garbage bags and left on three-wheeler mini-bikes to get kidnapped in the depth of South-American countries. All that is left is a long lane of gravel, sand and dust with random candy wrappings, neon-coloured straws and occasional bloodstains from ferocious brawls.
Amongst the rubble, you are digging for lost treasures, perhaps chunks of gold that a circus monkey might had ingested on a trip to Peru and carefully excreted into the warmth of Montreal soil. Or maybe you are just looking for a handprint eternally conserved in concrete. You don't really know: the heat seems to have-melted your last chunks of working grey matter.
With a flash of a sunlight, a homeless man stinking of whiskey and piss runs towards you, brandishing a metal construction pole and screaming "CHAAAARGE!!!" on the top of his lungs. You are scared shitless but you keep your cool and elegantly inflict one of those westling moves (those precious ones inherited from grandpa) on this lunatic and manage to bring him down cold.
Immediately, a luminous sense of pride imbues your entire body as you realize that you were destined to be the best wrestler the entire universe will ever witness. You feel yourself metamorphose: your muscles pump up,your veins pop out, your heart rate shoots up. The only womanly aspect of this transformation is a tight spandex suit that skims your enormous new frame. But then again, it is black..and red, which is never short of awesome.

1.30.2006

Water, wine and coffee.


January has been a month of tastes and sounds, of late nights and early mornings. Of excursions, of dancing and of drunken exchanges with strangers.

It is Monday morning. The Graduate soundtrack is playing on the record player and for the first time in nearly a month, I sit in front of my computer just writing, alone with thoughts. And somehow it almost scares me as it has been many years since I have unknowingly (and perhaps even unwillingly this time) escaped from self-awareness for weeks on end. As usual, my brain recollects memories in bits and pieces of visual and auditory flashes, here I see some skinny shaggy haired boy and a wild curly haired girl throwing hands in the air at the sound of Clap your hands and say yeah, I see my roomate’s beautiful Raspunsel blonde hair flowing with oldies music, I see a geeky character awkwardly clutching his bag at the Green Room promising vehemently a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, I see Fred the snowman, abandoned this sunny Saturday at the Botanical gardens, and I see myself dancing with cc in a dimly lit reading room.

Among the chaotic mumbo-jumbo of lab reports, readings, and academic papers, I surprisingly found a clearer picture of many projects I can look forward to conquer after graduation. Life, currently, feels amazing.

12.29.2005

2050

The depth of 2am sees friends express deviant love for each other, pissing away in the wind, kicking hideous architectural designs (*cough* ROM) and reminiscing past infatuations. Talks of absinthe and romanticism have polluted the very last breaths of air this year has to offer. And semi-schizophrenic DMN impersonated Juliet and yonder lights, pirouetting on the shimmering stars of uptown Bloor, to the sheer horror of virgin ears.
Half an hour later, a subway ride home, ethanol enzymatically metamorphosed, the brain starts bathing in vague lucidity of the after-hours: the mind tries to encapsulate a year into a few minutes, labeling the days, annotating the faces, sticking the yellow footnotes onto filled pages.
2005 will be remembered as a year of uncertainty and indecisions, of very highs and very lows, of letting go and letting in. It will be a year remembered for taking chances.
There will be no more of what if 1984 had been 1948.

12.25.2005

21 now. Le ciel me tombera sur la tête.
Clap your hands and say yeah, I'm listening to Elvis.

12.23.2005

No mindfuck.
No Great Expectations.
All meant genuinely.
End of story.
***
////
Ma chère Baby sister,
It’s the fourth year I’m spending another Christmas and birthday without you. And for that, I am sad.
I am always amazed at how different we are or have become. And yet, you still understand me more than anyone in the world, because you peel off the layers of bullshit I wrap myself around. You see me, as lame as crazy as silly as I really am. To you, I will always be the girl you sang Backstreet Boys with at the top of your lungs and danced to old Mariah Carey songs in some barewalled room. Simple. Silly. So me.
Gone are days when we would secretly down a bottle of wine hiding underneath blankets. I’m amazed I still could cut the cake properly…
Gone are days watching idiotic shows and keeping the lines busy for hours on end.
Gone are tears that came when we recoiled against closed doors.
I wonder if I could still be able to play that Hungarian violin solo you gave me then. Time has passed and the fingers have stiffened.
You’ve been there, and you’ve heard it all; the insecurities, the petty meanderings of the mind and the truly nonsensical monologues. And even if I can still get your birthdate confused (January uh...5th? 9th?11th?..), you somehow still love me, think of me and praise me like a queen. And for that, I thank you.

Love,
Big sister
...growing a wise white beard. I wish.

Gorfwhompgoo, I want myself back.

I think I’ve changed but I’m just a gerbil in a cage running as fast as I can…someday, I’ll get…nowhere. I have been trying to take the world by the inches it can give, finally willing to approach a new relationship with as much truth as I can give… and yet, I still feel something odd, a hairy monster of a lie…still as if I’m squeezing emotions out of an empty toothpaste tube. Some days, I still feel that way.
Then Explosions in the Sky will radiate out of those speaker phones oozing magic into my four by four room with sunlight peeking through those red curtains and CC’s arms wrapped around me. We play those silly games, catching pictures in the shadows of falling cloth, inventing absurd fairy tales and drawing out endless futures. And I realize that you can never deny the intimacy of naked flesh and the wordless communication of living moments. Something always goes beyond the limitations you set yourself to have and the conditions you think yourself to need.

12.19.2005

They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.

12.09.2005

"The Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder brain shows abnormalities in the basal ganglia, where part of the sensory information is coordinated. OCD patients become chronic doubters and cannot trust their own senses.
...
Probably the most impressive demonstration that OCD is a physical affliction was unwittingly carried out by a 22 year old man who compulsively washed his hands hundreds of times a day. This made his life so unbearable that he decided to kill himself. Remarkably, he not only survived the self inflicted gun shot wound to his head, but cured himself of his compulsion. Apparently he had blown away the diseased part of his brain...."- Chemistry of Drugs

This made my day. How sickeningly funny.

12.06.2005

It’s funny how stressful attempting to study really is. There are definitely more coffee stains on absolutely illegible notes. There are two or three, maybe even four, more pimples on the forehead. I have decimated an entire box of cereals: just me, myself and the beginnings of an ulcer. And I’ve been pacing around the apartment like a mad Beethoven on his 5th Symphony.

Except this is still the extent of studying I’ve done. But be amazed! there IS a title at the very top! Glucose:Glycolysis, Glycogenesis, Gluconeogenesis.

Now, I totally redefine productivity.
There are after all 134 new music files in my computer.

***

12.01.2005

Today, I need to escape subtlety.
Subtlety is a nice way to hide one’s foolishness until it comes back and gives you a taste of its own medicine.
Down with letters to no one. Posts addressed to a postee that can or can not be addressing me. These spiraling lies make me nauseous because we are people running in fear, making stupid barriers, reinventing dull reality, trying to break away from daily routine.
Maybe one day I will meet you and it will be nothing like words. No magic, just reality. As dull and uninteresting as it can be or as full and interesting as it can also be.
And even though the you may seem as elusive as ever, you know who you are. I can’t be any more obvious. Well I can, but what fun would that be...
And I confess, I was and am intimidated as hell.
And there is only so much electric impulses can communicate.
It's always amazing to see how subtle my "unsubtlety" is.
Tired of the absurd? Today we escape.
Next chapter, please.