hello friends, starting in about a week i will be blogging directly at WordPress.
until further notice, i will no longer be posting here.

please update any bookmarks/RSS feeds if you'd like:

www.roseinmidair.wordpress.com

happy holidays.

sunrise after the rain.

From 1998 to 2001, I used plain simple HTML webpages to blog, and then from 2001 on I used Angelfire, then Livejournal, then the obligatory Asian-girl Xanga,  a few secret collaborative blogs here and there, then Blogger (which at some point became a skeleton of a site), then Wordpress for becoming.rosekuo.org (which I took offline) before settling back on Blogspot in 2009 and have meandered my way through entries here ever since. 

So, here's a really big change that I'm toying with right now.

Lots of things bugging me about the customization (or lack thereof) that I still have to figure out- this is the first time I have read over source codes and clumsily attempted to write lines of css and such since, well, maybe 5 years ago... but I'm sure I can count on Kristan to give me her opinion of moving platforms after so long. :)

It's-almost-Christmas-time ritual :)

Playing hooky (hiding from the world) to re-watch Love Actually with good company. and drinking hot tea while it rains outside.

i feel it in my fingers... 

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.

Bad news about my now-endangered beloved avocado toast. I guess I have to move to Mexico or Chile.

I am most certainly the luckiest girl in the world. No lie, y'all.

On my desk this morning:

In my office lobby:

and when I stepped off the train:

and of course, MORE chocolate babka appeared from the best place to get babka in NYC... it never ends. 

morning: experimentation with yolky eggs, sriracha, and a healthy dose of the xx and new d'angelo.

three friends messaged me within the past 24 hours about what i am doing for New Year's Eve. i found myself content with having absolutely no inkling of what i will be doing. more important: the frame of mind i would like to maintain on into the new year.

speaking of, i highly recommend reading this recent brainpickings issue, which discusses being alone and also a perspective on "waking up" to life- which is not only relevant to this time of day, but also a concept that i personally think about all the time.

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others... Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved.

and also, the thought that

presence is far more rewarding than productivity.

it's grey and overcast outside. but let's be present today and tackle the world together, shall we?

I stood up, because I needed to get in line to go home. The words tugged at me in that way that causes a struggle to pull my eyes off the page.

“I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare form heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.”

- Shantaram

With swelling heart, I look out at the city that belongs to no one.
You are that city for me.

I bicycle along your highways, I tap dance down your sidewalks. I finger your starlit skies. I do cartwheels in the grassy roots of your parks and run my fingers through the branches of your flowering trees. I nestle my face into the hopeless romance you offer while tacitly shouldering the heartache you require me to bear- because, as our hearts staunchly believe, surely it will be worth it in the end. I photograph your sunsets and breathlessly awake before dawn to catch the way the sun rises across the buildings lining your horizon. I search for meaning in the silences and the pauses while also fervently abandoning myself to the noise and constant movement.

I lazily drift in and out of you, by train or by foot or by air. I watch as you fade into a chorus of lights in the distance, and with this you wink at me cleverly.

And, finally, willingly, when I return as I always do, I fold myself again into you.

"I felt empty: the kind of emptiness that’s sad but not distressed, pitying but not broken hearted, and damaged, somehow, but clearer and cleaner for it. And then I knew what it was, that emptiness: there’s a name for it, a word we use often without realizing the universe of peace that’s enfolded in it— free."

- Shantaram 

“It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.” 
—W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

- Jack Gilbert 

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.

Because you are alive, everything is possible.

- Thích Nhất Hạnh

Sax underground

morning Rilke, for any Rilke is good Rilke.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

taking little sips of poetry to ready myself

"Reduce by small increments your worry about the nature of compassion or the chill of emotional identification among girlfriends, your wish to be held in the consciousness of another, like a person waiting for you to wake."

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, 1947

ardently
fervently
zealously
fiercely
vehemently


he works behind the coffee counter in the evenings when things are slow, when people are no longer thinking of caffeine but rather of wine and touching and winding downwards and dark corners and hushed candlelit hope.
he watches me walk in a few times a week.
today he spoke to me for the first time:

"you seem like a person who is full of fire."

"is fire a good thing?"

"of course, how could it not be? it creates warmth that spreads like wildfire."

he stood there, as did i, blinking with thought.

“Insomnia started early for me, but it wasn’t about not sleeping, it was about being full of other things, being too delighted to let go and drop away. I’m told that when I was little I would go to bed quite obediently, but then for a while I would sing — small person in under blankets and singing, happy to elongate the day and perhaps fond of music, I suppose, I’m not sure.”

—

A.L. Kennedy, "Insomnia"

it hasn't stopped raining yet.

it's n's birthday.
we painted the table he built.
he always has wine ready.
he readied me while i was standing at the precipice, wondering what to do with my life.
he spoke to me about two kinds of "passionate," and suggested he knew which kind i was.
then he casually poured some wine and mashed up some guacamole and let me be.

i awoke.
maybe it was the avocados. maybe it was the lime.

whatever it was, i dove.

and here i am, two years later. swimming with all i've got.

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.”

- Joseph Conrad

“Ms. O’Brien describes her young self this way: “I was ravenous. For food. For life. For the stories that I would write, except that everything was effervescent and inchoate in my overexcitable brain.” She desired, she says, to be “drawn into the wild heart of things.””

— Edna O’Brien, Seeking the Ardent Life. O, joy! To the wild, wild heart of things!

PS- it's really fun and sometimes melancholy to look back and see where you were and what you were doing exactly one year ago.

weekend. filipino peanut butter, hand-pulled noodles, and then an attempt at making duck bacon. 

it's winter, so butternut squash and/or yam in EVERYTHING. 

also, persimmon. every day i crave persimmon. 

then prosecco after three different types of tea while listening to cello concertos and heart-pounding flamenco guitar.

now THAT is what i call being well-hydrated.