Hey you, take a breath and look around

Hey you, it's going to be all right

 

Let your hair down, take your jeans off and shed off the make up

Turn up the music and don't hesitate to throw your hands in the air

 

Hey you, don't look back

Hey you, it's going to be all right

For Gender studies, students are required to keep a journal as part of the final assessment. Already I am spoilt by technology and am very reliant on Microsoft word. The amazing ability of this software to track grammatical mistakes and vocabulary mistakes, as well as the keyboard which requires minimal innervation of the muscles. This journal has to be handwritten and I do not want to put my lecturer through the hell known as illegible handwriting and non-sensical abbreviations.  My hand hurts and it is what I imagine carpal tunnel to be like. It is also an unsatisfactory pain sensation because I know it was not from excessive masturbation.

 

I love the post coital state of mind and body. I love the aching muscles in my back and down the backs of my thighs. Sheer bliss.

 

*

 

After a 36 hour shift, I am a train wreck. I make my way to the bed in my room, already stripped bare of everything showing evidence of my life here and on the way, I drop scrubs, kick shoes aside, and my bag by my side, leaving a trail of carnage. It is ironic because it reminds me of the childhood fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel who left breadcrumbs on the path in order to find their way back home. I definitely do not require any markers to navigate my way out of my room to the toilet.

 

I drop my head down onto the pillow, and the sheets feel cold. Head is weary and my eyes are heavy. But my mind is still a whirl. Everytime I close my eyes, my mind wanders, expands and soars and I want to hold onto something, someone. It feels like I am drowning inside my head and I need a buoy. I need to break to the surface and breath.

 

I met with my landlord earlier and he brought a married couple to the flat I am residing in and they signed the lease agreement on the spot. I will move out of here next week. I have lived here for 2 and a half years and when I was packing my bags, I did not feel a thing. Maybe on the day I leave, I will look back over my shoulder and touch the walls, lie on the floor for the very last time and close my eyes reminiscing on how often I used to the very same thing after a long day and when pain was shooting down my legs.

 

For once, I am feeling particularly vulnerable and exposed. Raw, stripped to the very core and I need a buoy. I need to breath. It is late at night.

I have been blogging for 3 years or so now and in this time, so many things have changed. My entries have been sporadic and I have been flirting with the idea of moving on. This notion has been going on for an on and off basis for the past year, more so in the last few months especially because I have been writing articles on an occasional basis for an obscure female-fan based column which has a copyright agreement with me.

While talking to a friend last night, a majority of the conversation touched base with my blog entries which spurred me into re-reading all my entries today. It struck me how much I have changed as a person over this period of time. If you were to compare my writing style from three years ago to how I write now, you could draw a certain amount of comparisons. Personally, I thought that three years was just a short period of time but in reality, it felt longer than that and so many things have happened.

 

Somewhere in between growing older and more cynical, the naivety and the sheer innocence got lost in translation.

I ask myself questions now. Do I believe in love? Do I believe in romance? Do I believe in monogamy?

If I answered yes to those questions three years ago, I can now for sure those answers are redundant in this context.

 

I believe in love. But I know now that love comes in all forms. It is physical, it is mental, it is an essence, it is what makes me who I am, and it is what makes me see. It exists between a man and a woman, it exists between families, it exists between friends, and it exists when I walk down the street and see a mother hold a child close to her bosom, it exists when I go for a run in the rain and can smell the dew and soil, and it exists because it does. It is a multitude of senses interacting with each other, it is a complexity, yet it is simplicity. It works as a binary system.

 

I believe in romance. I believe in passion even more. I believe one cannot exist without the other. I believe the mixing of bodies is essential in keeping romance and passion alive. I believe love is parallel to romance and passion. May it be a touch a mother gives her child, may it be my heightened senses when the rain falls and wets the earth, may it be when I am perched on top of him, running my fingers through his hair and pulling his mouth towards my breasts, and smell our mingled sweat when I lie in the crook of his arm and bite his neck while listening to him breath.

 

I would like to believe in monogamy. When the topic of monogamy comes up, I find myself perched on the fence. We are humans with the ability to process emotions, higher cognitive skills. We built architectural marvels, we have fought in wars with the machinery and skills which have been improved with technology, in fact, we started those wars in the first place. I am using the term ‘we’ because I refer to humanity as a whole right now without any reference to our biological gender. Trace humanity back to the time of the cavemen and you realize we were frolicking around and incest was rampant. Men produce millions of sperm in their one life and therefore, have the ‘responsibility’ of impregnating as many women as they could. It was our way of surviving.

 

Sex is primal. It is our animalistic self. Morals and Marriage are institutions imposed on us only in the last few centuries as opposed to thousands of years of the existence of homo species. Throw me an argument. I have one right now. Humans are capable of higher cognitive skills and are able to understand emotions. That is what differentiates us from the apes and made us superior. Is that what you like to think? Are we really so much better than what they are? When in fact, we are suppressing what we were born to do. Procreate and copulate. Passion, Love, romance did not exist.

 

Oh yes. Acquired Immune Deficiency syndrome. Human immunodeficiency Virus. That is what ‘free-sex’ does. But remember this. These diseases did not exist until the 20^th century.

 

Does monogamy really exist? Is it just a concept socially constructed in relation to all these factors I have mentioned spurred by our higher cognitive skills and ability have emotions. Have humans really evolved and moved away from just procreation and copulation?

I believe….monogamy does exist in our world today. Having said that, it is my personal belief that it is in fact a romanticized theory. In practice, we are still part animal and respond to our primal urges. When you add marriage and morals to this equation, all you end up with is one fuck of a big mess. Infidelity occurs when an individual responds to this primal urges and is seen as morally wrong due to the social constraints and what is seen as right and wrong in the eyes of culture and is a breach to this institution we call marriage, relationship between two people.

 

Fuck it all. Humans made things complicated and we spend the rest of humanity trying to theorize our mistakes.

It would be great if I found that one person whom I could satisfy this primal urges with. Saves me having to fuck the other 6.9 billion people to find him (or…her). But once again, 21^st century concepts kick in and I think monogamy can exist for me if parallel to passion, romance and love in addition to Vivien’s personal qualities: the constant need to discover something new, be uninhibited, lower the thresholds and definitely do not have any products of copulation now and live. In other words, she needs to break away from her routines as pleasurable as they may seem to be. She needs to evolve from her current caveman state of mind and actually embrace… horror of horrors….human’s ability to have emotions and not just procreate from one caveperson to the other.

 

I find myself trying to correlate this entry to what I have been doing in Gender and Cultural studies, something I am doing in winter school at the moment. A subject I would not have gone near without a 10 foot pole in the past because my life has revolved around sciences for as long as I could remember. While I type this, I cannot help but feel the irony of it because something has been happening more frequently over the last three months or so was that people, most random people have been telling me to quit sciences and just write for a living. I mostly wave their comments off because I just know that I cannot write. When I write, I lack the cohesiveness, the fluency, the mentality to articulate thoughts into words.

 

At this stage, all I can say is that digression is what I do best.

Back to this failed attempt of correlation. What do I end up with? I feel confusion, ten fold no less. This blog has really gone off a weird tangent.