Paradoxes

The more you give, the more you gain.
The more you try, the less you get.
The less you give, the faster they go
The more you keep, the more they leaked away
The more you plan, the more often you modify
The more you don't plan, the less you change

So all I can think of is:

Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow

Because life is full of paradoxes
From the cradle to the grave
From ashes to ashes

That is what we are
Like what the Kansas sings: 

'dust in the wind, all we are is dust in the wind'

Eponine and her unrequited love

Eponine is my favorite female character in Les Miserables. I am not really impressed of Cossete's character, the angelic blonde beauty whom everyone easily will be sympathetic to. 

Eponine depicts the pains and wounds that I, and perhaps millions other women around the world, shared together. Many women have their own untold, unspoken love or admiration to someone who falls in love with other woman whose beauty they cannot compete with. Just like her story, she, who falls for Marius, but Marius seems to see her as an equal friend, a comrade, and instead fall in love at the first sight with the pretty Cossete, and tells her everything about the other woman delightfully, while she holds her sorrows inside. 

She is the realization of women's platonic love, hidden feelings (though the love is not worth to die for, as she does in the play). Platonic or non-platonic, this kind of story shared the same quality or message: the unrequited love. 

Eponine, perhaps, is more a victim rather than a bad person herself. She's a victim of a bad upbringing, bad parents, which reminds me of the quotes from Sissy, a fragile female character in Michael Fassbender's movie, 'Shame'. She says something in the last scene of the movie: "We are not bad people, we just come from a bad place".    

Eponine also somehow, characterizes my heroines in the old days kungfu movies when I was a kid: who possessed high level of kungfu skills, smart, but are not the ones selected by the main male characters of the movie because, well, they're not as delicate and as beautiful as the beautiful, small toed, unskilled (not having kungfu skills) ladies. In-short: they are not not angelic, not fragile, strong, a bit tomboy, not having a real lady's or princess' qualities, not someone that the male characters can exercise their protective, masculine, dominating attributes. 

Meanwhile in the real life, many of my female friends are often blamed by their family for being 'too selective' in looking for prospective partner because they are not married yet until their late 20's, or 30's or even 40's, -most parents and society are frustrated indeed, looking down and pitied at them as the leftovers, the losers of the 'wedding market' competition. I keep on wondering myself: are they really the ones to be blamed?

pic from: http://godsofart.com/les-miserables-portraits      

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On My Own

On my own
Pretending he's beside me
All alone
I walk with him till morning
Without him
I feel his arms around me
And when I lose my way I close my eyes
And he has found me

In the rain the pavement shines like silver
All the lights are misty in the river
In the darkness, the trees are full of starlight
And all I see is him and me forever and forever

And I know it's only in my mind
That I'm talking to myself and not to him
And although I know that he is blind
Still I say, there's a way for us

I love him
But when the night is over
He is gone
The river's just a river
Without him
The world around me changes
The trees are bare and everywhere
The streets are full of strangers

I love him
But every day I'm learning
All my life
I've only been pretending
Without me
His world will go on turning
A world that's full of happiness
That I have never known

I love him
I love him
I love him
But only on my own

[- From: http://www.elyrics.net -]

Mid rainy season day dream

"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” -Michel Foucault

..and that sentence describes well what DREAM is: the situation that you were not but you would love to. In other words: the gap between reality and what you wish for. Like, for instance, people who grew up in small tropical village, who dream of leaving their village, travelling all over the world to see more landscapes and towns, mountains, oceans, seas, hills....to embrace strange and faraway lands, to meet strangers and learn their habits and cultures..to feel the nervousness and uneasiness of encountering strangers in their homelands..to inhale and exhale the subtle, different aroma of the air in their strange lands: different woods, fragrance, grass, coffee..to feel the chill of the southern and northern four-seasons country's wind penetrate one's flesh and bones. To feel free. To have the freedom of movement. Where no one stares at you from head to toe, just simply because you look different from anyone else. 

*I suddenly wrote this because I was so aggravated yesterday being asked by a male stranger whom I was pretty sure has bad intention when he said 'Hi, where do you want to go' with the misogynist villain look,  I wished I have slapped him right away. Then I suddenly remember that in this society, most people are curious of what and who you are, whether you are married, alone, single, have money, good looking, ugly, have children..or not. Like they can't sleep if they don't find it out. Unfortunately, that curiosity stops at finding something about someone else, not about anything else -which might push them to become researcher..instead, they ended up becoming bunch of pathetic grumbler. Everyday I tell myself that I can cope with it. I sometimes lie. I can't cope every time. Most of the time I wanna punch them, right in their pathetic faces. And then flying somewhere else. Mountains, seas, hills, towns, paved streets....anywhere else but here.. 

Then I find this quote:

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.” 
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose

Do Agree, Mr. Wilde.