Starry Disaster

we are ordered chaos in

a broken cosmos: i dream of

starry disasters, meteorite

collisions 

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100 Books Reading Challenge

Started a reading challenge project mid-spring. The goal: read 100 books by summer in a year. I’m inching along, albeit at a slower pace than I’d like. Figured posting the list on my blog would hold me accountable–also, I get to share cool books!

So here’s a list of books I’ve reading; I plan to update every 10 books or so. If you have any book recommendations, I’d love to hear them! 🙂

1. One! Hundred! Demons!, Lynda Barry
2. James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
4. Here, Richard McGuire
5. Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks
6. Burned, Ellen Hopkins
7. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy Kaling
8. Walking Dead 1, Robert Kirkman
9. Walking Dead 2, Robert Kirkman
10. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelous
11. Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur
12. Partner Track, Helen Wan
13. Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
14. Kafka, R. Crumb
15. Project Jennifer, Jill Rosenblatt
16. Dignity, Donna Hicks
17. Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant, Roz Chast
18. Ginny Moon, Benjamin Ludwig
19. Autobiography of Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa Keji
20. Meow Meow, Jose Fonollosa
21. Beautiful Darkness, Fabien Vehlmann
22. Phenomenal Woman, Maya Angelou
23. The Skin Above My Knees, Marcia Butler
24. Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With), Daisy Goodwin
25. Sailing Alone Around the Room, Billy Collins
26. Future Tense, Paintings by Alex Gross
    
27. Why Not Me?, Mindy Kaling
28. Thirst, Poems by Mary Oliver
29. Global Street Art, Lee Boffkin
30. Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami
31. Vintage Cisneros, Sandra Cisneros 
32. Have You Seen Marie, Sandra Cisneros
33. Woman Hollering Creek, Sandra Cisneros
34. The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures, Sylvia Judson
35. Blue Nights, Joan Didion 
36. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
37. This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz
38. The Embassy of Cambodia, Zadie Smith

(Updated Sept 18, 2017)

The Time Junot Diaz Talked At Me

Two years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot Diaz stood in front of a packed auditorium and read to us a passage from his book, This is How You Lose Her. It’s the story where Yunior cheats on his girlfriend, Alma, who has a “long tender horse neck” and grew up in Hoboken, “part of the Latino community that got its heart burned out in the eighties”.

Diaz read slowly. Enunciated. And we were captivated.

Except I didn’t know who he was. Someone in the news room just said he was famous. I didn’t put two and two together to realize that this Junot Diaz was the Junot Diaz, author of Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. So the significance of seeing–being read to by–Junot Diaz in the flesh did not occur to me as I pointed my massive camera towards him. Click. He said something to me about him not doing anything particularly cool. So why was I pointing the camera all up in his face? (Hey, I’m just here with the newspaper) Looking back, though, he talked at me. 

Diaz talked about collective student insecurity. And fragmented activism, and what to do about it. He talked about a whole slew of things that I jotted down in Notes even though I wasn’t even the one writing an article about him.

I googled him later and then it hit me–he’d written the Cheater’s Guide to Love, the one I read in the New Yorker summer of 2013. The first time I read the story I awoke drenched in sweat and read it again and again. Some of the metaphors I repeated over and over, tucked into my mind, then toyed with for years afterwards.

I write this as I finish reading This is How You Lose Her for the sixth (or seventh) time.

A Letter “On Kindness”

Do you remember the time you were at Chipotle and you saw the lady with four children in tow and after ordering the food, four bowls total, she realized she didn’t have any money? And so you paid it for her?

And that was your kindness.

Obviously kindness, clearly kindness, without-a-doubt-kindness. As I read the poem by Aracelis Girmay titled “On Kindness”, I wondered about subtle forms of it, like when it isn’t just a hug or a peck or buying someone’s burrito bowls, but is, instead, your telling a wailing women you love her because she is yelling I want to kill myself I want to kill myself.

That love—that’s kindness too.

There are other forms of it that Aracelis Girmay writes about in her poem. The mail lady who says “hi baby” to you, and to the girl beside you, and to her cousin, and to her cousin’s best friend. The window that filters in light on a heady Sunday morning, reminding you have made it another day you’re alive you’re alive. The dog that comes panting up to you, looking overjoyed to see you, you, you—and that is kindness, too.

That’s Just The Wave

Feelings are much like waves; we can’t stop them from coming, but we can choose which ones to surf. – Jonatan Martensson

Attitude of Gratitude

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” – Eckhart Tolle

It’s been a minute since I’ve sat down and counted my blessings, been actively grateful for what I have in life. Ironically, I’ll do this sort of thing when I’m at my lowest. So it’ll be in fits of sadness or confusion or negative what-have-you’s that I’ll write out the things that make me happiest. Projects I’ve embarked on in the past three years: three good thing that happened today and why; 100 happy days; list of reasons to be happy, stuff like that. But when I am cruising on happiness and genuinely content, as I am now, and as I have been, I’ll do everything but. 

The daily quote by Tolle on Momentum, a Chrome installation, reminds me otherwise. So, in the spirit of acknowledging the good, and not just when it’s bad, here are 10 things that in my life that, well, bring me happiness. Or at the very least, that I am grateful for.

Art, Shells and Inner Worlds

Even though I see drawing and photography as, well, mostly solitary pursuits, ironically they act as ways I can connect with others. Or–if connecting’s too strong a word–at least sparking conversations with strangers. On airplanes, in libraries, in coffeeshops, on piers, etc. Sometimes we’ll talk briefly for two minutes–oh, what’re you drawing? or, I take photographs, too–and other times, for several hours.

For a while I worked on a photography project called the 100 Strangers Project. I’d talk to strangers (something I often do anyways), photograph them, then write about their stories on my blog. I guess it was a way of recording the conversations I’d had with so many different people, people whose paths I’d likely never cross again. These conversations were sprinkled across cities, across the country. Usually we’d bond over something small, or something that we shared in common (or maybe we didn’t). The person was an avid traveler and had visited my home country; they liked video games, too, and recommended one I’d play years later; we shared the same taste in weird TV shows, and their favorite was one that’d soon become my own. And like the quote that “everyone you meet has something to teach you”, I’d always learn something new about the person.

I stopped working on the project a few months ago–I’m notoriously bad at finishing what I start. Writing the descriptions also felt–what’s the word?–contrived, and I felt self-conscious, and so I’d have all these portraits and stories but I’d be too afraid to write them down. I still talk to strangers; I don’t take as many pictures, but I remember the few strangers I wrote about quite vividly. I remember their faces, the spaces where we met, the point in our conversation where you could tell they felt passionately about xyz. And that’s what I’d write about. Some of them emailed me afterwards, or vice versa, to say hi or follow up, to send links or snippets from their book.

A poet whose name I forgot wrote about how, without our inner worlds, we are merely shells. And we all have inner worlds. Sometimes we just get so wrapped up in our own that we forget, or simply don’t engage with, those of others–particularly strangers. We do it all the time. Talking with them and hearing their stories reminds me to peer outside my turtlish shell from time to time.