the thin line between fandom and batshit crazy

i'm easy to impress. maybe easy to the point where the impresser gets bored by the "piece of cake" situation.



however, this time the "impressers" have no idea if i exist, so boredom is out of question.



being a tv/movie/sports/music/pop/crap/ junkie, junkie of the junks, i have a ridicilously uncool standard of sophistication. pickiness level is like next to zero. never managed to be a overly sarcastic smart ass, an arts freak who finds every fuckin thing man-made is too shallow for his/her taste, nor do i ever succeeded in wearing that "coolest genious ever" costume, which may have granted me with some wisdom of speech to cross the line of just "wow"ing the shows i watch.



so anyways, "me likey!" is a random bubble floating above my head while in front of any monitor, tv or pc.



however, sadly enough, this likey!likey! situation has a twist. just like love in real life, appreciation, admiration, fancying and stuff can sometimes get out of hand.



a simple fan behaviour becomes a love affair. you can find yourself reading useless stuff about a celebrity, when did she gets a hair cut, what was she doing when she was 11, why did her last boyfriend cheated on her -- bastard! -- which shoe size? let me check her astro chart -- yay! we're compatible! --

stuff like that ruined many batshit crazy fans' life, so beware.

now, with all due respect to dr.phil, i'll put myself to test. if i score above 6, call security.



1. Shane McCutcheon (Katherine Moennig)

The L Word is certainly a mind blower. But I'm not sure it will still blow certain body parts, if Shane wasn't literally "rocking" the show. This androgynous beauty, reminds me of the popular outcast boy from colllege who constantly speaks in low tones, the emo with hangover make up, the cool girl who you wanna hang out and read NME while drinking beer from the bottle, the indie rock star who is always cute and kind to the groupies backstage but fucks and never calls back all the same and Morrison with tight pants and half closed eyes.

She is all in one. Wrapped up in a beautiful anorexic, dirty package in shape of boxers. Sure thousands of straight fans of the show drool over Shane and think they are becoming a lesbian. But no, wish this was real love sweetie, but i am not blinded enough to think that i drool over a sweet girl. This is typical, chicks dig rock stars. So i give myself 6/10 for this.



2. Seth Cohen (Adam Brody)

That nerd stream is getting old. But still i couldn't help myself to put Cohen on the list, for old times' sake. About four years ago this skinny sweetness confused me so much that, it took me like 2 years to figure out how i feel. Most scary part is, he is so vulnerable, silly to the point of stupidity, puzzled, in desperate need of attention and lonely that i found myself "mommy"ing in front of the tv, "oh, baby please don't.." kinda compassionate, mushy words were spilling out of my mouth constantly. My heart used to break when he wears that puppy look on his face. i madly want to hug him, stroke his hair, canoodle and let all of that stupid misery wash away.


But one day, don't remember when, something weird happened. I realized that he was actually a man! Not even a boy. A man! God, that rush of anxiety, that blushed incest shame.
Above and all, Seth Cohen was a pretty good looking, stylish, smart young man with a hot girlfriend. He can draw like heaven, he smokes pot, has a somehow free spirit and has a boat for god sakes! So for a considerable amount of time, i switched to an Adam Brody fandom. still he is cute, yes. but i won't stalk a cohen, no. So, our point for this part is a humble: 5/10


3. Jess Mariano/Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia)





Jess: Hi.
Rory Gilmore: Hey.
Jess: Hi.
Lorelai Gilmore: Hi.
Jess: Hi.
Luke Danes: Hi.
Rory Gilmore: I have to get to school.
Jess: Yeah, me too.
Rory Gilmore: Bye.
Jess: Bye. Bye.
Lorelai Gilmore: Bye.
Rory Gilmore: Bye.
Lorelai Gilmore: Bye.
Rory Gilmore: Bye.
Luke Danes: Bye. -Jess and Rory leave...
Luke Danes: What the hell was that?
Lorelai Gilmore: That was episode one of Rory and Jess: The Early Years.

(Gilmore Girls S03E08)




Alexis Bledel, the infamous Rory Gilomore is an angel. Well, Milo Ventimiglia plays Jess Mariano devilishly enough. So this alone is enough to impress me. (Told you i was easy)

This Jess character domianted my life for about a year. In realtion ofcourse, Milo Ventimiglia came into the scene. That crooked mouth, that sexy frown, little tramp moves he put on while flirting the lady (alexis and milo were dating in real life) all was dreamy.

Just when i was getting over him, after heavy drinking, excessive googling, faith takes its toll and bam! Milo becomes a superhero! just what i needed. More charisma, more attitude, pose, frown, buff, appeal, even more crooked than ever! That writer's strike was a life saver, Heroes was sucking the life out of me. You should guess the point now, still i'm not ashamed to write it down: 8/10



4. Ronnie "The Rocket" O'Sullivan


This Essex boy not only rocks out the snooker table, also puts an almost streetball style to the royal game. Even in prim and proper bow ties and vests, Ronnie manages to look ever messy. His eyes, even though, extremely focused, locked to the que ball with a hawk like gaze, are always hazy and far off. When i first watched him in the crucible years ago, ofcourse i immediately wiki'ed and found out that he has a bipolar disorder, various addictions, had a tough family life (parents with a criminal record must be hard). So again, the bad boy spot in my brain tickled. Every now and then, I closely watch every game and personal life respectively. A smile spreads on my face when he jokes about himself, when that depressed sarcasm slouch in every word and ofcourse when he scores a massive 147 in 7 minutes. impressive in all senses. deserves a 7/10.



Oh well, the level of love in this post fagged me out. so, the essential scoring, more drooling and worshipping will continue in a sequel.


But, even from the look of this, it seems i won't be able to stay on a note which will be considered healthy...

We'll see...

Me! Me! Me! Part-deux

egoism continues...

11. compassionate hairderessers: this is kinda sick. come to think again, to enjoy a stranger's touch is really sickly strange. but maybe because of apeish non-evolver kinds, one day i found myself smiling when a relatively kind hand was washing my hair. every now and then i pop into a spa serenity kind of mood when im in compassionate hands. aww princess...
im dillusional really, and yes, sick.

12. after eight: up until now, not once have i wondered where that name came from(now i know). yet, i like after eights so much, that it may be considered dangerous. i might live only with a box or a chest or a room or ok, an island full of "mint enrobed in dark chocolates"(wiki wiki). 3 things i'll take with me if i... ah, whatever you got the concept.

13. the screaming vocalist: i'm a poopoo emoo, i'm a poopoo emo..
how amazing, most of my favorite songs has a ridicilous, out of context screaming part. i love it when the lead singer just loses himself and starts screaming all of a sudden. and usually the words are so stupid that if you scream them in real life you will probably end up in a mental institute, or rehab, or maybe you're simply drunk and pissed of. anyway, don't scream things like "I FOUND A BOX OF SHARP OBJECTS WHAT A BEAUTIFUL THING!" in public.

14. laziness: this deserves the number one spot. laziness is the most precious part of life. it is luxurious, as the geniuses at diesel ad department once put nicely.
i'm thinking of marilyn monroe sleeping with chanel no.5 on, cat naps, hours spent purring on "the nook", a good book, chocolate, milk and all those beautiful useless things...

memory- "emo"ry- o'rly

somethings stick on me like flies on hellish summer nights.
somethings, i forget so fast that, maybe they've never existed.

the stickies are infectious. it is really frustrating not to be able to choose which memories to keep, which ones to throw away.

for example, i wanna throw away one moment recently, put it in a blue plastic bag, not even recycle.
let it rot away some place far far away. a shitty 17.15.
i remember every single detail of it. if a genie would come along, i would ask him for a chance to replace that with a recent one, which was warm, all smiles and peaceful in contrary.

but, no genies seem to answer the alarm call, so, Robbie's words from atonement rings in my mind:

ROBBIE (V.O.)

The story can resume. Our story can
resume. I will simply resume.

(...)

Dearest Cecilia, the story can resume.
The one I had been planning on that
evening walk. I can become again the
man who once walked across a Surrey
park at dusk in my best suit,
swaggering on the promise of life; the
man who, with the clarity of passion,
made love to you in the library. The
story can resume.


I will return. Find you, love you,
marry you, and live without shame.



but, no.

the story will NOT resume.

this useless "emo"ry will die. i'll keep on forgetting stuff like, what did i eat on sunday, when did i talk about my grandfather's perfumery, the main character's name on the tv show i liked some much... and the other's along with those daily junk, will be lost.

one day, i'll wake up and find myself completely blank.

and then, you will be able to write anything you like on me.

i will just tickle and giggle.

rly.

CUT

what a thrill ---
my thumb instead of an onion.
the top quite gone
except for a sort of a hinge
of skin,
a flap like a hat,
dead white.
then that red plush.
-- Sylvia Plath, “Cut”


You lie painfuly bruised on the floor. One arm dead on your side. It seems the pure bloody flesh can rot any time. You can smell the sickening stench of decay in seconds. It is something different now..
***

Self-mutilation or self-injury, is not just about self-punishment or past trauma, although grows mental roots there. We can say that, it is the creative reconstruction of satisfaction from “the unsatisfactory”. It is redefining your own body by immobilizing it partially, experiencing an agonizing moment of illusionary control over it. When asked why did she cut herself, a self-mutilator answers: “I wanted to test my limits”. A test of breaching the limits of being alive. It is your abstracted organ, free from the body that let’s you experience how to die. How to kill yourself, piece by piece, and yet remain immortal like “germ-cells” (Freud Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle) . However it is not a “suicide attempt”. The act of self-harm hardly carries an intention of ending life. It is just the language of the pain. The urge to speak the unspeakable. We can even say, it is a struggle to survive, by releasing the devastating load of the orderless “words” from your mind. Body becomes the text, where you can inscribe and mark the state of pain beautifuly. In fact, if we turn the phrase up side down like David Fincher’s Fight Club did (quoted in Zizek Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences), it is a “near-life experience”. Peta Malins elaborates on the notion of “textual becoming” of the body in a rather ironic way:

"My breasts are for whipping(masoschism), my mouth is for emptying my stomach (anorexia), my arm is a blank canvas (tattooing), my tounge is for dissolving a trip (raving), my veins are for transporting the drug (injecting) "


Now this unique and painful “language” makes much more sense when we look deeper into it in terms of Jacques Lacan’s controversial arguement “la femme n’existe pas”, or in Zizek terms, “there are no talking vajinas...” . The intention or “need” to self-harm is more meaningful when articulated through the feminine symbolic “non-existence”. While feminine “langue” struggles to find a subtle ground in the masculine symbolic order, it creates its own matrix to cope with the dominant mechanism. Marks of mutilation is not just a metaphor, furthermore a metamorphosis of that structure. The body is the re/de-constructed “canvas” searching for new meanings and waiting for a transgressing understanding of them. Let’s picture it through the shocking sequence of Adrian Lyne’s 1987 feature “Fatal Attraction”. In the middle of the film Glenn Close’s character is struck with the feeling of awareness that she just can’t leave without Micheal Douglas’ character, Dan. She starts acting peevish from the sourness inside her. She doesn’t want him to leave, doesn’t want to let him go back to his beautiful wife’s arms. But in reality, if they are to act like “rational adults”, she is expected to be cool about his marriage and face the fact that it was just an affair, just a fling which gave them both pleasure. Unfortunately things don’t work out that way. Her state is completely unspeakable, completely out of the language system we know of, which falls inadequate to describe the agony and rage inside her. So guess what she did? No suprises, she cuts her wrists. Not to end her life right there on the kitchen floor but to scream something to this man who is completely safe out there in an orderly rational, male world. Alex Forest (Glenn Close) used her blood to say; “You can not just fuck me and leave… That hurts, but see, I can give much more pain to myself and not a single hair on my back will move. This body is mine, and I can shut it out whenever I like. I can kill every single organism in and on it, so that you will see that I can die but yet survive forever. Although you may never truly understand it...” Alex may or may have not speak these exact words, it is the view from Dan’s side we can be sure about. He watches a live show of “the other” and will never have a clue about that feeling of release there.

Pleasure attained by self-mutilation has a transcending quality. When we scan through what psychoanalysis said about the “pleasure principle”, we can see that pleasure gains its character from limitations. The illusion of pleasure is to “enjoy as little as possible”, thus, trigger the need to go beyond that prohibitions. However, beyond awaits pain, rather than pure pleasure. So the paradox of “jouissance” is the bliss of transforming pleasure to pain, and madly enough, feel the transcending satisfaction from it. The “becoming” process, the breaching of the limitations, following the path towards death like a fearless undead connotates the phrase, “playing God”. You interefere to God’s form (the body) and its limited structure. Body is invented over and over again by repetitive death trials. It is modified, even improved as pure subjective qualities attributed to it. The self-mutilator goes in and out of the womb again and again, a trip from inorganic to organic in front of his/her very eyes. In Samuel Beckett’s words, s/he yearns to “fail again, fail better..”.
The pleasure from this satisfaction is somehow necrophilic. The “undead- becoming” reminds the idea that, it is not just about the “death drive” or “excess jouissance” but also the otherness of the dead. The love for the stationary, desire to touch and feel the inorganic. Thus, the self-mutilator practises necrophillic homicide on the organ. So, the desire opens a passage to the corpse . Taking from the point where psychoanlaysis defines self-injurious acts as the need to return to mother’s womb, in parallel to the “death-drive”, we can go further to say that maybe it is just the seperated, abstracted organ not the “body” as a whole strives to go stationary in absolute darkness.
If we have found the body - the corpse- then, we can go looking for the murderer. As dead as an organ can be, it can be uncontrollably alive too. As in Zizek’s example, the self-beating scene in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) , the hand goes out of control of the body. It claims a character of its own while it is beating the hell out of Edward Norton.

"The self-beating begins with the hero’s hand acquiring a life of its own, escaping the hero’s control- in short turning into a partial object, or to put in Deleuze’s terms, into an organ without body" (Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies)


This “split structure” shows us the chosen method to scatter the wholeness of the body and the totality of it. By producing specter doubles, desire works through out the system, breaking the unity, thus freeing the pain. Silent release from the body gives birth to a masochist and a sadist. The sadist “hand” for example, tends to posess the needy masochist part. David A. Goldfarb’s reference to Deleuze can be of use:

"Deleuze defines masochism by its symbolic structure and sharply distinguishes it from sadism, in contrast to the traditional view that sadism and masochism are complimentary. Sadism, he argues, is driven by the desire for possession; whereas, masochistic relationships are constituted by pact and mutual initiation.. "

This definition differs from the pychoanalytic view of sadism and masochism being complimentary. They are not, as the body and spirit are not. As being one of the definitive syndromes of the “borderline disorder” self-injurious acts’ intentions vary, same as the bodily structure. So, we can not conclude to a complimentary solution. One never completes the other, they even clash not to “complete” one another.
Self-mutilation resists conceptualization. It is not the subsitute of being loved in the form of being castrated. In that sense it is “de-oedipal”. The continous quality abstarcts it from the intentional engine of death-drive. The aim is not to kill, not to stop but to do it over and over again. Not to kill as a whole but to murder one by one, piece by piece. So, it is necrophillic as well as bearing “necromancerly” aims to animate it from the dead state. The Deleuzian model of “desiring-machines” can be useful to understand this fragmented structure. First the term "machine" favorably used by Gilles Deleuze, is like the alteration of pyschoanalytic "unconscious". Unlike psychoanalysis "schizoanalysis" takes the unconscious as something "based on production/formation, rather than representation/writing". Deleuze and Guattari has argued that the only way to deal with the -no-more-existing- binaries is to take one side of the binary and use it to cancel the other, thus crash the whole system. The “machinic” system is already fragmented, so we can no longer take the organs, the "partial objects" forming the desiring machine, as a full structure. So if the organs are instruments of imposed repression over desire what if there is no organs, just the body, --or what if there is no body?-- If this conception should work to de-construct the system of ordered organism, we will see that we are left with only the intensity of desire, not trapped by the partially related system. The "Body without Organs" which is a term coined out by Artaud in late 40s, can be taken as the pathway formed for the "desiring" flow. Antonin Artaud used the term “body without organs” in his manifestation entitled the Theatre of Cruelty, he states in a rather radical way that symbolically "the organs" which made the human body function, granted the men with something he did not deserve. The freedom lies in the "body without organs", which lacks the ordered functioning and resembles the "truth" of death in a way. This also addresses the idea that particles (organs) of the system are analogically the institutions that form the network of organism. They are carriers of the viruses. The parasitic.
If we take those approaches to understand pain, we can see that the origin of pain coincides with the mentioned aim to fragment the body and all it stands for. As well as being a pure subjective notion, it is also the thread that ties one to the real world. As Andrea Gutenberg notes clearly, “it helps the subject to situate itself in relation to the world: it works both as a world-constructing and as a world-reconstructing faculty”. Lacking an adequate vocabulary, “pain” strives to communicate, to find a satisfactory expression to let loose the bounds of silence. To do so, it breaks and smashes the limits of the symbolic order. The silence when any chosen “weapon” harms the body, is actually comes out as a scream. If we look closely to self-injurious acts, we’ll see that they are done in nearly absolute silence, counting little sounds of the cuts, burns etc. out. Even this can lead us to self-mutilation’s unsharable, unspeakable character by itself, since it bears the need of communication; a need to tear the wall of silence, which is the invisible boundary before the world outside. In almost all qualities mentioned the craving to breach, to transgress, to tear down is evident. The need is not just to hide, but to be “involved” at the same time.
For psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, this limit breaking tendency is the very cause of self-harm. He argues that patients are almost lost in a world where they can not relate whether they are outside or inside a territory. Also can not distinguish between memories whether if they are on conscious level or retained by the unconscious, as they are “too traumatic to speak”. Anzieu, observes some of his patients and concludes;

“He is uncertain of the frontiers between the psychical and
bodily Egos, between the reality Ego and the ideal Ego, between what belongs to
the Self and what to others (…) a confusion of borders and limits
as symptomatic of Western culture at the end of twentieth century (…) we no longer recognize definite boundaries..”

If that is the case, self-mutilator can not relate to the truth of the traumatic memory, as s/he is unable to draw a thin line between reality and phantasms on the unconscious level. Hence, the marks and scars on the skin serves as a “memoroire” for the integration of the body and psyche. “If damage to the material skin can be remembered physically, damage to the psychic envelope can be remebered physically.” This approach takes us back where the body is re-structured as a “canvas”. The point we should highlight here is, why the painful memories or traumas are objectified this way. As it is mentioned above the self-harmer has problems to interact with the world outside. S/he struggles to transfer the dark load, hidden in his/her unconscious, to the plane of reality. The ego is confused, as it is unable to distinguish inner and outer stimuli. The body then, needs to be transformed as a coping mechanism to let the inner disturbance out by making it visible. So the intangible pain is replaced by a concrete landmark of the feeling. A mark that serves as a subsitute, a codified word that lets the self-injurer interact with reality and the world outside. By inscribing such markings and signs a new identity is constructed. Thus, the performative existence is altered.
At last, it is not a pleasent art work but mutilation is still “artly”. The body is a diary, a portrait, a caligraphy tablette. Apart from its painful becomings and transformations it preserves the aesthetic subjectivity. It can even be considered literally as pure art, since performance artists like Stellarc mutilate their bodies in front of their audiences, films like Crash (1996) -or J.G Ballard’s novel- fascinates the watching eye. The age we live in even more tickles the need to immobilize the body partially, to transform it into a machine, modify it to become a cyborg by an operation without narcotics and sedators.
The words of a self-mutilator can sum up the sinking, itching feeling of this frustration:

“I used to feel like the world was going on around me but I was not part of
it. I interacted with it like a robot. The real me was locked up inside but I
couldn’t reach it. I was sealed off and I would get really desperate to
break out.”

5 ways to identify happy people

dictionary of thesaurus defines happiness as, a) satisfaction b) eternal rest c) blessedness d) ecstasy e) lightness in spirit ... and so on...

all of these words, being so fancy and all, hang loose in mind. for me, happiness, like laughter, is an uncontrolable urge. like the giggle loop, it grows, it conquers, it tickles and tingles.

i'm kinda indecisive about one thing though; which one is easier? to identify a sad person or a happy one?

maybe sadness has its dark clarity, while hapiness shines. apple of the eye won't lie.

so, as far as my attitude shows, these are the silly things most happy people do when their mind tickles:

1. Smile

Not a laugh but a sunny smile, accompanied by a translucent light twinkling in the eyes. this smile mostly enhances to the point of pointless stupidity. think of how you look from outside, when you walk around with a dumbass smile on your face.

but the big difference is, when you're geniunely happy, you don't care about how you look, or what people will think. you don't have a random joke popped up on your mind all of a sudden. you're happy! yay! so who cares...

2. Clapping

Maybe not all happies clap to every exciting thing they hear. i can't imagine a 50 year old happy executive clap cheerfully when he learns his company stocks hit the highest notes. but for me, and maybe for most of the 16-year-old- girls around the world, clapping shows happines. if you realize that the person in front of you acts like this:

"Really? that's great! (clap clap)"

"OMG that'sawesome! yay! (clap clap)"

"Aww that's the cutest kitty i've ever seen (clap clap)"

"i've bought new shoe laces (clap clap)"

":) (clap clap)"

know that she is happy. but keep in mind this kind of a happy clap is not an applause. it's performed with the tips of the fingers. kinda like a hello kitty move.

ah, cuteness is like candy, it nauseates after a whole three packs.

3. Earthly pleasures

happiness comes with a boost. an undefinable, coming out of nowhere hunger towards pleasure. it is logical, since "the happy" had tasted the cheery piece of life, she won't stop until she gets the next dose. whether if you're happy because of love, work, family life or money, you seek to accompany that with earthly pleasures, like tasty food, beautiful clothes, hair products, fruity lipsticks, fun fun fun movies, exotic alcoholic beverages of sorts, upbeat songs, kittens, playsation, youtube, bubble bath, sex... all kinds of its and bits the world has to offer. go little happy go. the world is a magical place. go play!

4. Chatterbox

this is kind of a side effect. the happies are rattlebrains. they are selfish too. not a pleasurable combination. they tend to talk on and on about how happy they are. how life is great, how the sun shines, how the rain falls beautifully, how the snow flakes hit the window, what his/her boy/girlfriend said the other day (oh, how sweet), how he/she responded to that sweet gesture, then how he/she answered back, then how they hugged, kissed and make out in front of the fireplace... ok, sorry, im losing myself here. so anyway, happy people talk. la lal lalala.. shiny happy people, blah blah blah..

5. Beauty

"happy people look more beautiful than sad people." this is the cliche of all times maybe. but kinda true. if you believe that emos are beautiful, i wont argue at all. because the universe knows that they are fuckin happy IRL.

this happy glow im talking about, is not something paris hilton sticks on her face. it is not a fake smile, or a mac concealer... it is the inner light. (god, im so cheesy, i could die)

but, seriously, when you're happy, you wash your hair more often, you blush when you smile for no reason, you wear clean shirts, you smell nice, your eyes brighten...

as solid as that.

(clap clap)