The Anti-Aesthetic

Boards with neon colors grabbing our attention, mine, maybe yours, with their symmetrical configurations, like Monday, the organizational tool. There are recognizable tendencies and patterns within the spheres of digital marketing and advertising, where one learns codified manipulation tactics to induce desire. Sacred geometry implored for diapers, a work out mirror, $3000 bedsheets.

I forget where the phrase “aesthetics will kill you” comes from.

The fight is on to see how far I will use these skills to make things better for the rest of the world starting with the women and young girls.

The men as well.

We will have to fight for them as well.

In another way. Not in the ways where we put ourselves second to their needs. What they must learn is how to come into their emotional intensity and to love themselves as much as they deserve.

Everyone deserves to feel good.

Not everyone knows how to get there.

I want to feel good while learning graceful ways of encountering pain.

Instead of being confrontational and arrogant as I can be, detached and emotionless, devoid of empathy. I turn it off to survive.

I too have my dark side. The shadows are there in sight for a reason. We all do. The places are worth going to and seeing for yourself. Everyone deserves to see Paris.

Do not let it burn before then please.

The tears must come at least once a day to feel the good things that will come after.

It doesn’t want us to feel fully because it knows it is in that sacred place, where no one really knows us, where only we know, and it, a relation, unavoidable, a glitch. Where we heal and stop being afraid of it; the “it” thing that is tied to ego. What we have been taught to care about instead of paying attention to; our individual journey is all the documentation we need to continue barreling forward.

If anything , it is our duty to illustrate the possibility of breakage.

If you don’t love me now you won’t ever love me again.

As we cross the bridge into Manhattan, it becomes another type of demon. This is why we blow our noses when we cry, to allow it access to leave the body. Or when someone sniffles, or coughs, it needs to escape or else it remains inside of us. We must learn to transmute it within ourselves, to turn the liquid into something else.

Teach people that they have what it takes to access their god within themselves and to start treating themselves like the gods they are without the things they want us to believe we need in order to feel good, to make us feel like we can start to believe that we are gods.

We can change the atmosphere of the vibrational frequencies when we tune into their external energetic scopes. The attention is penetrated and people are suddenly made aware of each other and our collective humanity that we are all implicit in complicity creating.

The connection is palpable.

To change the vibrational frequency I must not be afraid of the attention that comes with such territory of trust within the universe and what it has given and showed me and what I must not squander away on frivolous issues that distract from the work that must be done energetically.

The lady across from me gets up and people prepare for their departure.

To feel good about myself requires that I let go of my own fear of being who I am in public or anywhere else where I am who I am. An understanding of comfort and feeling the correct things to trust themselves above anyone else.

Speaking to the spirits that have joined me on this journey allows me to speak to the spirit gods above to speak to the people around and to always be in a state of love and light and to heal and not let the demons cloud my mind to make me believe that it is not possible when it is.

The Chinese man comes on the train and rubs his knees, messaging them with his palms, little strokes of love. “Thank you for carrying me places” I can hear him say. The camera eye tilted toward my direction and I look at it with the side of my eyes and cry.

Letting the nods and tears be seen. This is New York City. No one cares if you sob uncontrollably in public. This is why it feels like home.

To be seen through feels like plexiglass.

Thank god for this mask to catch my snot.

The unconscious decisions are dangerous.

We can all sense these things. We are all part of the greater place. Joy is my birth right. An affirmation that Kassandra speaks about in her Yin Yoga sequence that we did yesterday. To include the proper things and not wallow around in sadness. Log the silences and then dance and forget about them and if you want love then give it to yourself first and not let the thoughts cloud yourself. Always moving through it. Now I remember again what I must be doing. To let the good things flow. Protect my energy.

Broadway Lafayette has an interesting energy. The people are catalysts for an equal exchange; a peaceful way of life. They uncross their legs and I am not going anywhere – we know who we are and the asking of the questions are performative in the end moment to moment if I were to swing into this mode of being it will all work out and everyone we encounter matters – because we are actively switching around the bases of survival –

The orange walks onto the train and it feels correct the color is correct and the different things that we saw are coming true I cannot wait to meet you – in real life – in person – the doubt wants so badly to come in and take what goodness I have created and it feels like an infringement of my life and I am the most important thing to keep alive after my spirit of love that I have for Micah and the bubble I will create to take her with me wherever I go. The creature that is magical. I must go on a run today.

The three things you do when one moves to NYC. They start seeing a chiropractor, a therapist and a bike.

The chiropractor because NYC will show you just how out of balance you are, a therapist to listen to how out of balance you are and a bike to clear your head and have a reason to go to “a park”. Once you are at “park level” in NYC, you start becoming aware of how important it is to have a park. The whole of Manhattan understands this.

Butts are a very nice thing. Because it lets us get rid of our waste. It is an indicator that we have the ability to process. And the ability to change and move things around. Nice butts are a visual encounter. It can be an aesthetically pleasing thing to encounter. Or it can set us off into directions of chaos if we are unprepared for a visually attractive butt.

Attractive people make me become a better person because I am forced to encounter the shadows that arise when I see them. Attractive people make me become a better version of myself. I am forced to deal with my bullshit.

So attractive people already serve a purpose. We don’t need to go out of our way to dress them up in fancy clothes and make them rich right? It’s like okay, so you were born with long legs and a symmetrical face and your body type has been actively pinned against the rest of our subconscious on some level. So then feeling beautiful becomes this lifelong quest to eradicate the pent up angst that some of us have held onto while we fall back into the warm pit of who we are – to move at my own pace feels like a slowing down of time. Maybe the fairy princess from the HOUSE OF YES was reminding me to find my pace and keep to it. There is a slight chance that she might have said something different. cannot remember all of that night.

The structures that came before are helpful. They have been helpful in designing infrastructure, our roads, buildings, schools, hospitals, entertainment arenas etc. In our creation of language and logic, mathematics and measurement, hierarchy and time, we’ve managed to synthesize an experience into a symbol, a hyperbole, a price tag. The Trump supporters who stormed capitol hill yesterday showed us another glaring sliver of reality that should we choose to ignore, will, in its own way, explode in our faces.

In the in-between moments, consistency is the key that unlocks the different flavors. Consistency with the equal sign.

I do not make eye contact for that reason. Yet I feel very inhuman when I avoid it when I know that someone is looking at me. It’s like an active smothering of presence as if we can’t feel each other/ I am hungry and want the empanadas that are sitting next to me.

“Be your higher self to get the work done. Stop Forgetting. Remember why you’re here.”

This morning on Clubhouse in a room called “Breakfast with Champions: The Millionaire Breakfast Club”, I was listening to Brian Culhane, Myron Golden and Akemi Sue Fisher discuss wealth creation and brand management, where they draw inspiration from and other ways or staying motivated enough to do the work and to keep showing up. There were some gold nuggets that I wanted to share.

“God creates as speaks god – abracadabra -“

“Success and being inspired is about curiosity.”

“Write the Goals down. Set health, fun and family goals. Hit them and then find better goals.”

Therapy in the form of degrees. I was so traumatized by Singapore and unhealed mother wounds that I needed to get three degrees so that I would not feel like I was stupid anymore. I was such a terrible student and was called ‘stupid’ and ‘an idiot’ and that I was ‘useless’ throughout the years of 9 – 19. My step mother came from a very abusive childhood and didn’t learn how to claim responsibility to heal her trauma and passed that onto me and her children. I believed that we all internalized some of her inadvertently. When I chose to call her ‘step mom’ instead of ‘mom’ which was what she wanted me to do out of fear, (her ex-husband had sent loan sharks after her and she didn’t want her name passed around when we were out in public because she was in financial trouble when she started dating my dad.) As a child I would have done anything for a normal mother. My real mother was mentally unstable and there was a lot of running away and violence in my childhood. Shelters, homelessness, women’s homes…. She kidnapped me a bunch of times and there was not a lot of stability in my formative years. So when my step mother asked me to call her mom I acquiesced out of understanding and possibly desperation. However, I did not realize that in that moment of agreement, I had abandoned my own mother. I psychologically removed my own mother because she was unable to fulfill that role. The lack of clarity around that situation and how I actually felt towards my own mother, my new mother and a new older step sister from her first marriage has translated into a lack of clarity around my own mothering of myself. I am unsure of what I want. Three degrees later and I still struggle with imposter syndrome. I now own a business, lead an arts collective in New York City and have a New York City realtors license and yet I am still struggling financially and emotionally with understanding what I want. On the outside it seems like I have all this amazing stuff going for me but on the inside is a child that has not come to a full understanding of who she is. I still struggle with finding the goals that match what I want on the inside. Maybe I don’t want anything except to be on the road traveling. I am the happiest when I am traveling. If I can travel and cook, meet new people, share and write stories, find a beach everyday or a waterfall I feel like that’ll make me pretty happy. Oh, and also get paid for doing all that. While I teach Minecraft a few days a week while I’m on the road. I am not blaming my childhood for where I am now or what I am struggling with – I can see how my past was necessary in helping me understand the aspects of humanity that I have been put here to solve. These last few months have been a pivotal awakening into my higher self.

This is the way of shadows. These relationships remind me of how I do not want to end up. I get to pick and choose what I want to take and what I want to leave behind without shame or guilt or doubt or fear and the decision to pick death over life lies with those individuals who continue to bring others down so that they can feel right about their choices and justify what they have done by refusing to claim responsibility of the abuse that happened. I am no longer looking for an apology or an acknowledgement of my pain, because there is no need to revisit those gates of hell. There is a rainbow unicorn land filled with glitter and sparkles and yummy free food with clean streets and exercise stations with amazing music and cute fluffy things waiting on the horizon for me and it is my one and only duty to manifest what has been shown to me.

To engage with trauma by intellectualizing what happened is abstracting the events in a way that does not necessarily make space for transmutation. I cultivated emotional distance from what happened and used language as a way to bypass the lived experiences that clamored their way through my psyche. Writing gave me time away from the performative. It demanded that I stay silent and still for extended periods of time. The work became more internal and serious. The politics of life – my own and the environment that I continued to put myself in. Three years ago I was sitting in the bathroom recalling events and I started crying and shaking. I realized that I had not shared my music for all these years because the unsealed sounds would tell me how terrible I was, she would barge into my room and tell me to stop playing music. When I was soothing myself in the bathroom I was soothing my hands, loving them back into being, telling myself that I was a beautiful singer. I was naked and sobbing on the toilet seat.

I found out today that while I was listening to the Millionaire talk on Clubhouse, that my song BIRDS, produced by Mike Tierney about a month ago with Brooklyn based drummer who I met while I was a dishwasher at Bassanova Ramen, (thank you Nate Harris) and guitarist from North Carolina, (Evan Harris) played on the radio in Singapore today. I also found out that my song got chosen for the CATCH THE MOON LIBRARY which means it is going out to Partners from the Sync world which means it now has a chance of getting picked for commercial purposes. Also, I played my first live show (I was really just practicing and knew I needed to get better at performing live cos I get too nervous and my hands get sweaty) on IG last night and made $7. I’ve never made money from music before. A stranger thanked me for “the kind concert.” I love these beginnings. These are the seeds, the germination process of something beautiful that I know is going to happen one way or another. Making music is my purpose. It took 17 years before I allowed myself to heal from the trauma in my childhood, of taking responsibility for my life by healing the wounds that were never mine to begin with. What’s trippy is how we’re all connected and that whatever I went through was necessary, again, for me to understand abuse so that I will be able to relate to the people who I will serve in the future. When I was teaching Robotics in the Bronx, I always found it strange how the kids found my jokes funny, like we were cut from the same cloth in some ways. Now I understand why.

Ezekiel 1:20 is a reminder that we are all one.

Ease into ambiguity.

Take The ACE Quiz — And Learn What It Does And Doesn’t Mean

Psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera Uncovers Ways to End Your Self-Sabotaging Habits | Women of Impact

On Raising Your Frequency, Letting Go of Anger, and What To Do If You Can’t Meditate…

Dear meat and plastic producers,

If you cared about us, you would stop serving meat and plastic immediately.

You would close the slaughter-houses, you would end plastic production, create new ways of sourcing food – not having “organic” be a category because that means that the methodologies of creating non-organic food still exist. (find a way to determine best practices of agriculture – historical – farmers almanac – are we in a different natural rhythm with Gaia? Explore this with greater specificity), end cigarette and alcohol sales, actually shut down the industries that contribute to the war on water – encourage each other to go plant based – the path to veganism confronts many inherent embedded tunnels of social, moral, ethical, spiritual, mental, emotional, psychological modes of oppression that have been historically rooted in slavery, anti-semitism, torture, slave-labor, (explore difference between slavery and slave-labor as it pertains to our modern world of cheap labor in factories vs. the lynching and eradication of a race -) Prostitution of all forms – I would count the feeling of dread one feels on a Monday morning as an invitation accepted to prostitute oneself into oblivion with the occasional cigarette break – what is the difference between the sex worker and the office junkie?

Movie to watch this weekend: Finding Joe.

I don’t know who is reading this or what they get out of these posts but I believe in myself and the work that I’m doing. I know without a doubt that one day all these posts are going to be re-visited and my 16 views will be 600,000 views. I will get paid to write these blog entries and get invited to travel and write articles about places and people, because what I have to offer is valuable. I’ve always been someone who shares my ideas and I’ve always been unafraid to share them. Sometimes the people in your life who you expect to love you unconditionally will be the same people trying to tear you down. Shine anyway.

The rest will fade as the dragons get slain.

Here’s a little slice of joy

And another.