nathan > Recent Status Updates

There will always be something great and tragic to celebrate.

BLANCHE: Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

STANLEY: Liquor goes fast in hot weather.

BLANCHE: And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths — not always.

STELLA: The best I could do was make my own living..

fav lines:

Many of us have a secret girl living within our bodies.

To perform woman with full-throated sincerity.

His body was beautiful, and so was New York.

He was so black he looked blue.

You’ll remember what you did for every moment of your life, and you know why? Because you’re better than us. Because a robot never forgets.”

A sip of breath, a fissure of sadness, then he began to laugh through the tracheal crush because he wasn’t going to ruin this. The future was finally here. Cities sinking. Nations smote. Soon, those eyes promised, soon the meek will inherit the earth.

History was propaganda and tragedy was porn.

Such was the power and dread of the tiger, the English traveler Isabella Bird quoted a Chinese proverb in her book, “The Korean hunts the tiger one half of the year, and the tiger hunts the Korean the other half,” until the tiger was finally, during Japanese colonial rule, hunted to extinction.’”

Was it possible to love without this ache? He didn’t think so. His love for his father would always reek of cherry blossoms, searing a path straight to the cerebral cortex, where his whole world would light up with grief.

“Forgetting. A human brain defaults to intrinsic forgetting. It streamlines the process, you see. A robot has more room for faithful remembrance until it slows them down. By being part of the network, they can receive data but also give away, freely.”

“Do you know that feeling when one person is so real to you, everyone else is just shadows? They exist, but they’re only versions that appear in your head. This one person, though, they’re so real, they make the world feel less real. Everything else is an imitation. And now you’re with this person and the world is alive, like the sun is so close, the world is on fire. Do you know someone like that?”

“Color me in sepia,” Mars laughed. The future was nostalgic.

“Dreams,” David said. “The world is an integrated simulation, whether we’re awake or in virtuality.” “What do you think? Do you daydream?” “I process,” David said in a bored tone, “but call it whatever you want.” “Someone’s in puberty..”

Like robots, grief came with a bewildering manual. Jun had seen people mourn robots like they were beloved pets or lovers, or even children. He had seen owners move on in the only way they were told. Buy a new robot. Sometimes they’d adopt, which was nice but ultimately lip service for buying a refurbished robot. Everywhere, capitalism had become the language for grief.

By the church’s main entrance was the notice Please leave your robots outside. Robots, not having a soul, are unable to worship God and have no place in the Church.

Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman. The world made a promise to her: death is a problem that can be solved.

With this belief, she would wake, walk, and breathe with cosmic synergy, full of darkness and spinning lights, and her body, which broke down day by day, remained a solar system where all the stars would burst and burn, but until then, every quantum speck quivered bright with integrity.

She believed in the trillions of tenuous threads tying the self to the rest. 天人合一 . Heaven and Man are One. In Korean: 物我一體 . Matter and I are One. The grace of union so the swimmer flowed with the ocean, so the archer flew in the arrow, so the calligrapher bled from the brush.

In bed that night I asked him: When will we know if this was a bad idea or not? Should we already know? Because not it feels good.
No, now is too early, he said. I think when you get back to Boston we'll have more perspective.
I'm not going back to Boston, I didn't say.

I thought of saying: I don't want to go back to Boston. I want to live here with you. But instead I said: Put the sound back on if you're watching it, I don't mind.

Nathan was watching TV, but he hit the mute button when I came out. I got onto the couch beside him and closed my eyes while he reached over to touch my hair. We used to watch films together like that, and he would touch my hair in that exact way, distractedly.
I found his distraction comforting. In a way I wanted to live inside it, as if it was a place of its own, where he would never notice I had entered.

Nathan looked at me then as I knew he would. We were predictable to each other, like two halves of the same brain. Outside the restaurant window it had started to sleet, and under the orange street lights the wet flakes looked like punctuation marks.

I was having a lot of fantasies about you on the plane.

I look forward to hearing them. Do you want to pick up some food on the way home?

..as he begins to wonder if the other boy hasn’t drowned or disappeared but only turned while swimming out, turned without him noticing. Or even hauled himself out further up the beach. And he gets to wondering, and continues to wonder, to imagine, all the different versions, all the many possibilities, until almost convinced there had never been another boy at all.

He hates this girl. He hates her more than the boy, this boy who is of the earth: made from sweat and leather and blood. But in some way he hates him too, as he consumes her as a horse does miles of open country.

He has never felt so alone, cast adrift in the blue shadow of the moon.

Family is quaint, an animal thing.

“It’s not about what you get,” his mother replies. “It’s about what you do with it. You can make the best of it, you can be generous with what you have, or you can resent it and make nothing of what you’ve got.”