Influence isn’t just a matter of copying someone or learning his or her tricks. You get influenced by writers whose work gives you hints about your own abilities and inclinations. Being influenced is largely a process of self-discovery. What you have to do is put all your influences into the blender and arrive at your own style and vision. That’s the way it happens in music—you put a sitar in a rock song and you get a new sound. It’s hybridization again. Hybrid vigor. It operates in art, too. The idea that a writer is a born genius, endowed with blazing originality, is mostly a myth, I think. You have to work at your originality. You create it; it doesn’t create you.
Jeffrey Eugenides, as interviewed by Jonathan Safran Foer, BOMB Magazine Fall 2002

the most passionate love affair of my life.

i love you. i mean it, i really do. and i want to be with you forever.

i never imagined that i would meet my true love so early in life. so many have tried to get to know you, to own you and truly call you their own; i never thought that such could ever be me. who was i but an admirer from afar?

we are so similar, you and me. we’re both stubborn, we won’t come out of our shell to let others get to know us unless we’re absolutely ready, we’re completely overwhelming and destructive when in the wrong hands. we’re troublesome, frustrating to deal with and often misunderstood, mostly because we pride ourselves on our deliberate incomprehensibility. yet when we are solved by kind eyes and open minds, we can be so inspiring and collaborative, and truly do great things. we can. we will.

despite the parallels, there still remains this innate curiosity that, when pacified, still leaves me completely mesmerized, stunned by your uncontainable beauty and power and truth. and no matter how hard i always tried to deny it, you just kept creeping back into my life with persistence and potential - could it be? could you be the one who actually pursued me?

either way, you stayed, changing me for the better in ways that i never imagined possible. you see, it was you who helped me realize who i am, who gave me an outlet for personal expression and artistic experiments and emotional breakdowns that other lovers had categorized as the root of my ruin. it was you who helped me make sense of this world and somehow find a place in it too. i don’t know what i would’ve done without you.

but now it’s my turn to cultivate you, to take care of you and invest in your potential, and against all odds and discouraging whispers – most passionate relationships don’t last very long, after all – i won’t let you down. i won’t waste this: all you’ve done for me, all we’ve achieved together so far, all the good that we really can accomplish in the future. we can. we will.

people ask me what love is, and they spend their entire lives looking for it. and some never discover that passion for themselves – the kind that they always hear about and see in the movies. i’m so lucky that you found me, and now that i have the confidence to truly call you mine, i’m never going to let you go. because to me, being completely yours for the rest of my life, without tangent or distraction, is the only thing that makes absolutely perfect sense.


What I’ve learned is simple: if you nurture it, it will expand, and it will nurture you in return. I have also learned that it is a kind of salvation. Sometimes it’s more than enough and sometimes it’s not enough—by that I mean one’s own creativity. If you can truly tap in to the creative process, you know it’s there all the time, and then you probably don’t need saving.

KIM ADDONIZIO, writer.

currently craving: creativity. status: unsatisfied.

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i spend so much time looking for more time that time flies by too fast and i’ve actually found no more time i’ve only lost time and every time i say this time i will find time i will make time i will do the time and time myself time and time again i tell myself that time is precious of the essence and i must be timely with my use of time and this time, just like every other time, i time out. there is no time to waste because all time has already been wasted all the time and i always need to be somewhere but i long to be somewhere else somewhere where there is no time, nothing but time is everywhere. where is this space? when will the time come to drop it all to find it?

no time to figure it out.
no time to figure.
no time.
no.