Thesis

The funny thing about starting my thesis is I thought I would have some idea what I was doing by now - but I don't. 

Does everyone else feel this mild sense of panic all the time? Is anyone else procrastinating by dabbling in new cooking (the Moroccan lamb was particularly good) or closing Facebook only to find you've somehow opened it back up again ten seconds later and are scrolling through the same shit, someone's sunny holiday making you jealous, stupid ads which you don't care about, but you stare at them anyway. 

A month ago I didn't know where to begin, and now I have almost finished collecting my data, does that mean in another month I will be deep in writing and actually know what I am doing? I hope so. 

Somehow I feel like I will be just as lost, writing words, unsure if they are what I meant to put down, or simply my fingers scrabbling uselessly for something, anything to say.

My head is above water, but I am slowly drowning. 

The Door

A door within a door
Who lives there anymore?
A home, a house, a castle on a hill
No walls, no words, all now still
And where once a kingdom stood
There remains a single piece of wood
No roof no floor, a home no more
Simply - a door within a door

The Illusion of Separateness

The illusion of separateness. A book I finished yesterday whilst lying in the grass in the sunshine,  marveling at how lucky I am.
Its still rattling around my head and I thought that made it worth talking about.

Its about the intersection of lives over time and through the war, and it's such a perfect mix of sadness and beauty that it left me feeling both lucky and devastated.  It left me with a perfect mixture of but what if...  and if only.

A mosaic of beauty and tragedy and emotion, of fervor and grief that left me reading over and over the same lines as they struck me so deeply.

It is perfectly encapsulated for me in this one paragraph:

He had never loved anyone so much. But it was something he could never admit to her. It was a truth anchored in his heart so that her pain might be less, so that she might find another, get married again, have children,  watch them grow,  make their lunches, see them off, visit them in college, get old herself, plan retirement, give away all her jewelry to grandchildren,  regret nothing - even forget, even forget the boy she was first married to, who took her picture at Coney Island, then was blown to bits in his B-24 by anti-aircraft guns over the French coast, escape impossible. 
The book of their love would be a chapter in her life. 
A digression that ends in a rain of metal over wet fields.  

..... behind her, the people on the Ferris wheel and the roller coasters were screaming too. You could hear them up and down the boardwalk,  lost forever in that last great afternoon of their lives.

Home

Home is  funny place, which I am simultaneously trying to escape from and return to. My heart longs for home, even as my feet wander farther still.
What am I searching for? 
And what will I do when I find it?

Homeless

Homeless
such a strong word
brings to mind images
of cardboard boxes, and dirty streets
drifting through the world
fitting in
but not belonging

Home was a room that's been sold to strangers
there's no space for me now
only memories.
I'm welcome back,
but not welcome home.

Home.
I think first of my childhood bedroom
and then the people I love
then nothing
blank spaces.

They say home is where the heart is
- but I just feel lost.

Night Sky

The thing I miss most about home is the stars.

People forget, in the cities. Life is so busy, so fast.
We forget to stop, to glance above, and even when we do, the world is hidden by a smog of industry, vaporous glimmers of our own making, so much lesser than the ones above.
I have been into the dark county, I have looked up and seen the lights above me, bright for the first time in so long. I have held my breath, struck by their beauty, but then filled with disappointment at the empty spaces, the aberration of their patterns.
This is a strange sky above me, and it only reminds me how far away I am from home.

Lying on the grass looking up at them fills me with a loneliness these people around me cannot fill. Nothing is familiar, in this strange world of mine.
There is no sense of belonging stronger than when I lay on that other dirt, and everything felt right.
I was home.

These are not my stars, I am alone.

Racisim

'I''m not racist but...'

I hear those words so often now, in my head I simply wait for their next sentence to betray them.
 Preceding your racism by professing not to be doesn't change or excuse the fact that you are.
Perhaps it's because I'm in the unique position of being welcomed into people's homes; within their their walls, sitting in their living rooms, it is their word, they rule.
They are safe in their castle, and perhaps it is due to this that they are so veracious. They are away from the public eye, even though they are admitting these things to a total stranger, and worse, an immigrant, one of the very people they are talking about.
But for some reason I don't count as one. I stand in the middle, not English (perish the thought!) but not a threat, not a true immigrant in their perspective. I hover in the in-between, belonging nowhere.
I speak English perfectly, my accent is fairly unobtrusive, I'm not from (and let's be honest, here is the real reason) the Middle East, and my skin doesn't mark me as different.

"I'm an immigrant here too" I point out, smiling awkwardly. "oh yes of course! But that's different." They say, laughing and brushing it away. Why? Because I'm educated? Because I'm white? Or because I'm not Muslim.
'Don't go to that area, it's full of immigrants now. Yes, but they take our jobs don't they! (but do they really?) Well, you have to worry about terrorism now don't you? Lucky we live away from the big cities, I wouldn't feel safe there anymore' (they cluck their tongues and shake their heads at the state of London nowadays)
It all comes back to this feeling, this righteousness tangible in its certainty - they really aren't racist, but... and then quite suddenly they are casual racists, even though they can't see it themselves.
These middle class, white people who profess to be so open-minded, so progressive, are in truth, anything but.
They are well-meaning, offering you cake and tea and smiling all the while, but their very perspective colors their actions, and in turn our society, subtly poisoning it against immigration, against change.

They are afraid, and when people are afraid they look for someone to hate.

The Internet

Today I was thinking about social media, and the power it plays in our lives.

Within the internet we often create an alternate personality, and in so doing, we can feel dissociated from reality - or our actions online. In itself, perhaps this isn't so bad. People - like me - can vent or speak about issues they don't dare talk about in real life, and we can only do so through the feeling that our identity is protected.
However, this disassociation can also have negative connotations. I would like to compare it - in the extreme - to the infamous 'Milgram Experiment' which occurred in 1961,  the scientist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of tests when one test subject would administer electric shocks to another test subject in another room. Each time the second test subject got their answer wrong, the shock voltage went up. The test subject being shocked would begin to complain, scream, then bang on the wall in protest, then finally, go silent. Although the test subject administering the test would begin to question the experiment, with assurance from the one administering the test, they would continue to what would be fatal or at least very worrying levels. Of course, the shocks were not actually occurring at all, but they didn't know that. Although this experiment was to ascertain the power of authority  (a reaction to the question of guilt in the Nazi trials that were occurring at this time) I also believe that it was in part due to the powder of dissociation. They could not see their 'victim' only hear him. In a way, the internet is the same -it allows you to see only certain reactions, certain parts of a person. You do not see the reality, and thus you can ignore it, continue past the breaking point because you don't actually see the direct consequences of your actions.

Perhaps the link is too tenuous.

What about isolation due to the internet?
We are so often so busy talking to our friends online, we ignore those right in front of us, or miss opportunities completely. I think most of us have had the incredibly annoying experience of visiting friends and them having them distracted, too busy checking their phones to properly talk to you.

I think I see it most when travelling. When I first started off, full of my parents stories of the people they met on their travels, the conversations struck up in youth hostels, buses and coffee shops, I was full of hope for the travel companions I would meet.
But on my travels I was met by an almost imperceptible wall of silence, broken by the clicking of technology, the invisible messages sent to and fro, the communications taking place across countries and continents. And surrounded by all these people, I was alone, facing a wall I didn't know how to break.
How sad that we are surrounded by humankind, yet so alone. What experiences are we missing, simply because we don't look up?

No-one can argue that this isn't the way of the future, and to shy from it is to fall behind, but I don't think we fully realise the power in this invisible world, nor the impact it has on those who grow up surrounded by it.

Technology is a beautiful thing, it offers us opportunities we couldn't have dreamed about thirty years ago, and it is growing exponentially, like a living thing. I can't imagine life without it, nor I suppose, would I want to. But I think it's important to realise that everything, even the most beautiful of things casts a shadow, and the internet is no exception.

Destruction

Why is a child's first instinct to destroy?
They see a bubble and want to pop it, their big sister does a drawing and they want to scribble on it, they see a tower of blocks and want to push it over, they see a bird and want to chase it.

How far does this extend then? Is it inherent within all of us? Society teaches us to build, but beneath it all are our baser instincts, and perhaps it is those that drive us time and time again to war and death.
We want to be the master of all, to conquer what can be conquered, and destroy what cannot.

Is it humanity's nature to destroy?  

Snowflakes

Where do they go
These creatures of snow
On their whimsical dance
Falling by chance
Like fireflies
On a path only they can see