Posts filed under 'Rants'
in the face of such revelations, i dont quite know what to say anymore. i’m often surprised that i’m still surprised, but mostly i’m just disappointed by my own ineffectiveness and lack of resilience. a don’t-care attitude would be so helpful in dealing with these hurtful and unfair events, but my application for one just keeps bouncing. i wish i could stop myself from feeling hurt, or caring, but i can’t. i wish i could erase history, or turn back time to go down different paths, but i can’t. this is that much of my life that i’m never getting back, in terms of time. this is also the results slip and the consequences of my very bad judgment when it comes to whom i choose to love and trust. it is some balm that i’ve only ever chosen wrongly this once, but evidently even one person can cause a lot of damage and tell many far-reaching lies. like my predecessor, i’ve been arduously wiping him out from my existence (no, despite what you might have heard, it’s not because ‘this is the only way we can move on with our lives’), but still annoying little traces remain. like last night’s events. like how my friends keep referring to this when making jokes about my judgment calls. like how i get stupid snippy comments on this blog from his friends who’ve only heard one (mostly fallacious) side of the story. like how i was priming my parents to meet Kafka, and told them he’s such a good guy – and they laughed derisively and said “are you sure? that’s what you said about the last guy too, and look how he turned out!”
i think i’ve paid enough penance, thanks, and would very much like all traces of ‘that last guy’ to evaporate. so please, if you’re a mutual friend or even a complete stranger who thinks you’ll be doing me a favour by telling me the most recent of his stories about me, please spare me. i’ve officially come to a point where it’s all no longer worth the anger. if you’re a friend of his but not a friend of mine, please exercise a little bit of reasoning or actually get to know me in person before you believe just one side of a story told by a highly dramatic person who has no qualms making collateral damage out of other people in his raconteuring. you hear some stories and you read a blog and then you think you know me enough to hate me, but really, how does that make you any more than a gossip who doesn’t think very much before forming an opinion? once upon a time i trusted him too, and have since come to realize that i very seriously misplaced that trust. that’s why i blocked him on facebook, and ban all of my friends from saying anything about me to him – because i dont trust him with anymore of my life than i’ve already given up in the brief time i encountered him. i guess it must be fun to talk a lot of shit about someone you’ve never even met, but take some time to think about how i never did anything wrong to you. i’m a real, actual, living breathing person with a life and loved ones. a blog is just a place i go to to pen the occasional thought. you’re giving this blog and yourself way too much credit if you think you can piece together a good idea of who i am just from reading some weekly writing and listening to some skewed stories.
i think what happens between two people, especially two people who trusted each other, should remain private and untouched by prying eyes or gossipy mouths. it’s a shame that not everyone i choose to love shares the same principles of discretion. a renegade blogger who called himself the vigilante of the malaysian blogosphere once wrote me an email to say that it’s best that i learn whom i cant trust while i’m still young. can’t say i disagree. i think i’m quite prepped for the real world now, and the real wolves of that place. but for now i’m thankful for real people, real friends, and real love. i’ve got a bit of a scratched up heart and a big crack in the part of it that’s used for trusting, but this is slowly healing, and so i’m also thankful for the godsend that is Kafka.
July 23rd, 2010
when i returned from Honduras earlier this year, i had a conversation with someone about the discomfort that dogged me almost every day i was there. there we were, a bunch of bright eyed and bushy tailed kids from an ivy league institution, descending upon the slums of Tegucigalpa and the sloping sides of Joyas, like crows so eager to help. we were but ten inexperienced children with some time during the school holidays, many swollen ideas of public health and what could be done to improve the conditions of these people, and our two hands. school taught us to think about these things- things beyond ourselves into which we could apply our strength and intellect, and do something good for people who didn’t have the resources or opportunities that we had access to. before the trip, we raised money for our own airfare and solicited medical donations from friends, families and doctors, which we would then bring to Honduras and delegate. when we got there, we were to assist in building sustainable structures such as latrines, septic tanks, ceilings, floors and stoves that would, we were told, change the lives of the villagers in Joyas, one family at a time. every morning we would gather and have a reflective talk about the magnitude of our presence and role in this project. i think we were all proud of ourselves and how we were doing this crazy wonderful thing called service work; that we could actually see the results of our toil, one layer of brick and mortar at a time. we took many photos, kissed the cheeks of the families we worked with, shared half of our PB&J sandwiches with the kids and even the stray dogs that would lick our toes hungrily as we ate our lunches amidst the labour.
it was strange, but the whole time i felt quite angry at myself for having gone on the trip and allowed myself the unconscious prescription to an ego balm. what were we really doing there, if it took us three days to build one latrine, when one young strapping Joyas local would take only ten hours to perfectly complete the structure? why were we bringing bags full of Tylenol when the health afflictions of the villagers ran far deeper than headaches and stomach pains? why were we even building these monstrosities if some locals thought them useless, and would take them apart after we’d left, to sell the building materials in the market for some petty cash? it’s easy to feel helpless and deflated when you realize these things. we may as well have put the money that we spent on airfare into capital towards a small construction business run by the Joyas locals, or other such microfinance initiatives. to think that we were so proud at having dipped our hands in cement, when the locals were really just letting us have a taste of what volunteer work feels like. they were, at the very least, kind enough to give us warm smiles and watch patiently as we took way too long to saw planks in halves and mix cement the wrong way.
perhaps it is cynical of me to approach volunteer work from this angle, but i wished that in Honduras we could have done something real with our intentions and energy. it would be nice to know that time and resources were being optimized, instead of being expended unnecessarily and at a sub-optimal rate, just to… what exactly? i’m still not sure where the benefit lies– be it on our part, or that of the villagers, or that of the organization we traveled with. sure, we take away valuable life lessons about the importance of teamwork, service work and what it means to play a small role towards sustainable development, small steps big change etc, but what about the people we were told we were there to help? they get this brand new cement floor, latrine, ceiling or stove. that’s really nice but apparently they could have built it faster and better themselves. why did we fly all the way there to do it? it also seems that they may just dismantle everything to sell the scrap metal. further, latrines just weren’t their way of life, and there’s really not much point putting a small band aid over a large wound if other public health problems (such as the lack of clean drinkable water) weren’t first addressed. correct me if i’m wrong but the most valuable benefit seemed to have been taken home with us instead of being left there with them. how did volunteer work come to have so little real impact, and become almost self-serving?
for some time i struggled to understand our place and purpose there. during some nightly conversations with the team, i would carelessly and insensitively rain on everyone’s parade by expressing my slight dissatisfaction surrounding the aforementioned conundrums. who were we really there to help? how much exactly were we helping in terms of what we thought we were there to do? could we think of ways to be more useful? could we push the envelope a little further? can we address some of these questions before we clap on our proud arsenal of shovels and saws?
there are many ways to answer these questions that would make sense of why we went and what we did. some popular ones: (1) it doesn’t matter that we essentially went there to play in sand, as long as we show people that our intentions are good and that we care and are willing to take steps to help; (2) we take away the important lesson of understanding how small our roles were in Honduras, and it will push us to think about bigger things that we can do to truly make big and helpful changes; (3) our mere presence entails expenditure on airfare, accommodation, food, and building supplies that will directly stimulate the local economy; (4) we can bring back to New York the eyewitness account of an impoverished community, and spread awareness of problems beyond our borders; (5) some effort is better than none at all… and so on and so forth. while these responses are highly relevant ones, a quick glance and some thought will quickly reveal the problems with each, and how ultimately they just do not answer the question of why we went there to do what we did without actually doing what we thought we were doing. yes, residual effects are important, but so is the main task at hand, which was to directly improve the state of public health in the villages of Honduras.
i don’t regret the trip. it wasn’t the fairytale volunteer experience that i’d thought it would be, but it stretched my mind and my heart so far, even despite the realization that we hadn’t been all that effective as a brigade that championed public health. it forced me to reflect on every single volunteer work experience that i’d had, and to pick out all the plausible reasons why we did each one and why we were made to do it (big distinction). it was a clear lodestar towards what was important, and even further towards the understanding that ‘what is important’ isn’t something static.
ultimately, being in Honduras taught me that the best way to help people is to allow them the knowledge that our helping them helped us back more than we helped them, or just as much as. in that way, they have done us the big favour of gratuitously helping us even though we were originally there to help them. this, i think, empowers the Honduran a whole lot more than some latrine hastily constructed out of misaligned bricks. we may have done this one small thing of building one family a stove with a piping system, but they did us the bigger real deal of educating us. the crucial ingredient however is that they have to know they did us this favour, otherwise that potential is wasted. they have to know that they did so much more for us than we did for them in the short time we spent there. that despite being ‘impoverished’ and ‘uneducated’, they are equipped with the ability to teach and do many things better than these random americans who fell from the sky with secondhand clothes and free medicine. such knowledge, even if unfurling from a very small flicker of pride in showing the random malaysian volunteer how to mix cement the right way, can be so powerful if harnessed correctly. i only wish i knew how to convey this information to them at the time, but alas i think i was either too shy or too stupid to recognize what my real role in Honduras was.
there was a girl from the family we built a latrine for who patiently kept refreshing my memory of the spanish words she’d taught me earlier in the week. her husband showed us how to hammer a nail into a plank in 3 hits and smiled encouragingly when we kept breaking the nails. they shared their food with us. explained the religious script on their doors. the women of the sanitation committee first bore children at the age of 11 and then raised many more in the years to come. the young boys that moved like greased lightning on the football field could kick a ball harder and faster than any of us could. all so awesome in their own right– why are we the ones who get to say that we are ‘helping’? what exactly were we doing with our hands in Honduras that is worth more than what they know and can do? i still dont have the answers but for all the above gifts from Honduras and for the questions they inadvertently raised, i’m grateful that i had the opportunity to go, and that we did what we did.
we’re going to Panama this year, hopefully with a bigger and better brigade with clearer goals!
#1 putting the tin roof on an almost finished latrine
#2 laying the base for the latrine
#3 starting on a water storage tank
#4 an average Honduran water storage tank, where the locals store water for cooking, cleaning and bathing as there’s no proper pipe system in the mountain of Joyas. also a big contributor to mosquito breeding
#5 nino!
#6 the men of the house helping us with the cement, which they mixed 10x faster than we did!
#7 G working on smoothing out a cement floor. most of the homes in Joyas don’t have floors, which renders the family members (who often walk around barefoot) very susceptible to the fatal Chagas disease which is caused by parasites from the ground.
#8 stray chickens doing a run
#9 M and B making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us and the kids of the house. isn’t this picture super adorable :)
#10 playing games with the rest of the Joyas kids, who really love games
#11 young man with perfectly sculpted double eyelids, proud to receive a Superman sticker
#12 evening soccer with the boys, who run and play like superstars
more photos soon!
April 19th, 2010
i have a huge final paper due in exactly 24 hours, but i felt like i needed to talk about something, so here i am, feeling rampantly candid at this unfortunate time.
when i first moved my private blog to quaintly.net, i was a 17 year old girl who simply had a lot of things to say, and was very lucky to have a space to say it. as i was going on 18, i began to gain traction as a “blogger” and quickly learned what was appropriate and not appropriate in this strange, new world that was thinly populated but widely supervised by some of the most outspoken of society. there was a time when i frantically would say, no no i am not a ‘blogger’, but that quickly became counter-social. so by the time i was 19, i’d found myself quite by accident in a cozy spot of the world wide web, in which people would come to find me and read what meager things i have to say about my life and the world around it. i liked the camaraderie, the growing strength of my fledgling written word, the partaking of alien insights, and other tidbits that i would fortuitously find under this slightly larger canopy of my existence. this was also when i started to make a lot of money from blogging. by 20, i was getting advice on how to manage my blog and turn it into a business opportunity. this silly, pink thing which wasnt even a .com! remember, blog more about certain topics, less about the politics, less of the emo, more of the pictures, you all know the drill.
the truth is, i’d stumbled quite accidentally into this. i was growing up and learning how to find my own voice, yet i had to quickly learn how to accommodate as many people as possible in order to have the most effective voice of all. i know, i know — write for yourself and not for others. but listen to me. that’s not always the case. every now and then you have to write what other people want to read. sometimes writing what other people want to read is also writing for yourself. it’s the blogger’s theoretical win-win situation at its very best example.
my problem was that it wasn’t so easy for me. i knew the formula for becoming a popular female blogger — or even the most popular female blogger — and it’s not a difficult one, but it just wasn’t a place that someone as neurotic as i am could occupy. i worry about everything– what if too many photos of myself made people think i was ditzy? what if an excess of sentimental text bored people? what if i hung out with ‘top bloggers’ and they felt like i was only hanging out with them to get traffic? what if i linked a certain celebrity blogger and he thought i was only doing it to elicit a link back? how do i adhere to the formula without trading too much of my own voice? how does one know what the optimal balance is? why don’t other bloggers have this problem?
i know of very few bloggers who share the same problem as i do, mostly because everyone else takes a firm stand on which side of the fence they belong on, and we don’t. we try very hard to reside in both areas, thinking that a compromise is better than giving up one side, but we — or i — end up being nowhere. we want to maintain some sense of groundedness, but the competition of being a mainstream blogger is one that is so highly engaging. and so very, very sticky. i think most of the top bloggers can attest to how easy it is to get sucked into the contest, and how easy it is to feel like they need to start masquerading in a mainstream performance to gain more traffic or advertorials when their “competitor” or a blogger they “don’t like” starts doing better in those terms.
i’ve always had the philosophy that it is a beautiful thing when people are comfortable in their uniqueness, celebrate their little deviations, and resist conforming to the norm. which is why i am oftentimes sad and very disappointed when i look at what i’ve done with my blog so far. i stumbled into this, found a cozy number of readers in my hands, and had absolutely no fucking clue what to do with them. so for the longest time, i tried to juggle by playing two different tunes to two very different crowds. it was only very recently that i decided to exit the race, and just do what the lazy me likes to do, whatever that may be at the given point in time. putting serious effort into blogging and working hard to maintain an audience is for the pros, really. they are very, very good at what they do, and i can only watch and admire as someone who is not in their league and cannot pretend to be.
however, the effect of playing two tunes with one instrument has its lasting effects and these are sometimes irreversible, especially when it matters. even when it doesn’t matter, they can be irreversible too. i occasionally talk to my friends about a particular category of readers, which i don’t quite have a name for, but describe more or less in terms of- “when i first met her, she pretended that she didn’t know about my blog, but come on“. at the risk of sounding vainglorious, this does actually happen, and quite often too, because it is a necessary effect of the two tune, one instrument thing. i’ve met many, many people who pretended to not have ever heard of me or “oh i probably read your blog once a year or something”, but then i’d later find out from their friends or some other serendipitous source that she or he has been reading my blog for a long time, or reads my blog often enough to know about some things s/he alleged to not know. these things are easily proven, of course, and just as easy to fish out of an unsuspecting pretender who’s unaware that other people can pretend too. i am often asked if i get creeped out by people who approach me saying that they are fans of my blog, but i can firmly say that i love the honesty and friendliness of such people. i am so touched by their warmth. the people i do get creeped out most by, actually, are the aforementioned ones who prefer pretending to my face that they don’t read my blog.
i know the few reasons why it happens. sometimes they’re shy and it’s a personal choice to not want to appear like they’re taking an interest in a complete stranger’s life. this i take no issue with, and fully respect the decision of. but sometimes — and these are the creepy ones — there are those who simply don’t want to acknowledge to me, others, or their selves that they spend any time reading this insipid, self-centered blog of a 21 year old girl’s life, whether daily, weekly, once a year, or having accidentally clicked on my link once. sometimes i think it’s funny (”waiiiiit, oh my godddd, you mean youuuuuu are pinkpau?”), but most of the time, the dishonesty and the two-facedness sincerely scares me when i do find out about it. i start wondering if i really want to be friends with someone who reads about my life and my opinions, but asks me questions and engages in conversations with me as if they didn’t already know my thoughts and answers on these issues. or worse, if they’d also been going around proclaiming things like how a pink blog of a 21 year old is just too shallow! for their refined tastes!
a big reason of why this blog is still pink is because i’ve simply been too lazy to change the layout, but a tantamount reason is because i’m not particularly bothered to sustain the interests of people who hurriedly remove themselves from a blog just because it is a shade of color that they associate with things that are ‘beneath’ them. of course, not all the creepy ones have a pink aversion, but a significant portion do. it’s sad, but there’s not much i want to do about it. i’m sure there are many black and white blogs out there to read. in fact, i had an ex boyfriend who complained to his best friend that he thought my blog was … what were the words … moronic, pink, stupid. when i found out, he had a million excuses about how it was all simply an exhibition of male pride, but seriously, fuck that. if he couldn’t deal with a little color flush and some emotional writing, then that’s fine, don’t — but why hound me for the rest of the relationship over how i never blog about him?
likewise, random people who pretend that they’ve never heard my blog, and moreover, enjoy so much the crumbly judgment they find themselves so capable of passing about people they barely know — it’s fine if you don’t find my blog suited to your eggbox constraints of what a blog should be. but please, save me the big smiles and the faux friendliness. what, really, do you know about me? and what is this attempted interaction really about? you must need a favour. it shames me too that you once upon a time accidentally clicked on my unsuspecting link.
this has veered off into a somewhat angry direction. apologies- i’ve digressed. what was my point? that we live in a strange world where people lift so many assumptions over their heads. i was talking to a friend earlier about how easy it is to misconstrue a person’s entire constitution, especially with this very human habit of trusting in self-constructed truths. a tip: dream a little, live a little– not everything or everyone can be so neatly defined and understood, especially with faculties as imperfect and incomplete as ours.
and a tip to myself: dream a little, live a little– not everything or everyone can be so neatly defined and understood, especially with faculties as imperfect and incomplete as yours.
to the folks who have been reading for however long, people who have so graciously taken the time to write me comments and emails, and have come up to say hi even if it was in the middle of a meal or in the midst of a large education forum, and people who have been so kind to tell me they read my blog every now and then, i thank you muchly. an equally huge thank you to the people who hate the colour pink, but still find the tenacity to keep reading! (especially you men reading from the office, who write in so politely to request a color change– your emails make me giggle so! color change hopefully soon, when i become less lazy).
each time i log onto my quaintly dashboard, i am excited to write because there are people who think that the simple things i have to say about life and the world are worth the crucial currency of their time and interest. time and interest taken in something is such an honour for that something, so i thank you. how do i properly thank you? :)
December 13th, 2009
i had a veritably brutal midterm yesterday . it was the kind where you stare at the question and vaguely understand what concept you’re supposed to apply, but don’t exactly know where to start or what you’re really supposed to show, and before you know it, given time is up and you’ve barely answered two thirds of the exam. when i left the exam room, i felt like i wanted to die. i studied so hard for this exam, and i was (somewhat) confident that i would be okay on it.
plus i had extra time to study for it. the midterm was supposed to be two days ago, i.e a full day before i actually took it, but on the morning of the exam in the midst of some last-minute cramming, i got the worst panic attack i’ve ever gotten. it came while i was doing a practice test, and i realized that i couldnt remember anything that i’d been studying. that truly frightened me, so i closed my eyes and randomly picked a question. i couldnt answer that one either, or the next five questions i randomly picked after that. so i tried to go over my notes, but nothing was sticking in my head. i felt like a sieve — a very confused, scared and jittery sieve. two days ago i’d gone to a doctor for muscle pains, and he took a look at me and asked when did i last sleep. i said not for about 32 hours, and he nagged me about it despite protests that i was going through midterms. he gave me some pills, and i made him promise me that these were non-drowsy pills. i asked all the nurses outside to verify that these pills wouldnt induce sleepiness, because i had to stay up all night to study. i swear i felt like a complete lunatic, being so obsessed about drowsy or non-drowsiness.
so on the morning of the exam, i panicked, and realized that i just could not take the exam. i cried for about two hours because i felt so disappointed with myself, partially for being so stupid and partially for being this affected by exams, grades and percentage points. i’ve never been like this before coming here for school, most definitely not in high school and definitely not when i arrived here in my first semester. i used to be all about colorful skirts, beads, good fiction, moscato and jazz, lazy afternoons, baking brownies and forcing people to eat them — now all i care about is getting a 4.0 GPA. i feel so grounded in this world that i can actually feel the discomfort in my blood, yet i keep telling myself that this is only temporary, and once i finish this assignment, i’ll chill out for a bit. but of course the exams, papers and assignments just dont stop coming.
i ended up going to my professor’s office in tears, and cried and begged him to let me take the exam tomorrow. he said yes, but made me promise that i would go for counseling. counseling — that’s really what it’s come to. so i took the exam a full day later. right before he gave me the exam, he told me that several people had already emailed him to ask if they could drop the course because they think they failed the exam, and that i shouldn’t worry if i find the exam difficult, because there will most likely be a huge curve in the grading. he was right- i did find the exam bloody difficult. i was so buzzed from caffeine and taurine that accessing information in the correct pockets of my brain was becoming hard. for a long 20 point question, one of the intermediate steps was to find the directional derivative, and i was stunned for a moment that i couldnt remember the step because it was a very easy method. it was like yesterday morning all over again. so i had to abandon the question and lose about 12 points. the security guard at my building saw how sad i was after the exam, so he gave me a short talk on how one day i’ll see that exams are just one small thing in our lifetimes. i couldnt really respond with more than a half-hearted smile.
i fell asleep for about 12 hours after that. i woke up and the first thing i thought about was the math exam. suddenly i could remember all the stuff i’d forgotten, and i realized that i knew how to answer every question that i’d left blank, including the directional derivative, and the continuity problems, and especially the epsilon delta limits. it was like… putting on contact lens. that wet and clear feeling. but omfg. despite that, i woke up and felt so good. so what if i flunked an exam? so what if i behaved like a complete lunatic in front of my professor? it’s just an exam. i’m pretty shit at math anyway. my best friend used to jokingly say that my utter inability to do math was not a bad thing, but a blessing, because all these smart math guys would want to help me with my homework, and that’s how i’m going to find my soulmate one day. :)
that’s what’s important. soulmates. best friends. the fluffy Michael Learns to Rock songs that i’m listening to right now. the Joshua Radin concert that i’m going to this week. the irony in the fact that i typed Radian instead of Radin just now. that my roommate Piglet will be coming back from her field trip in an hour, and we’re going to be having Chipotle for lunch together in our suite, and i’ll get to hear all her hilarious drunken stories from last night, and how someone peed in our bathtub during our suite party a few nights ago. right now i am so happy.
i’ve also just broken up with this guy that i’ve been seeing for awhile. yesterday we had a really long and angsty conversation about how we’ve been doing since we broke up. it’s a long and convoluted story, but i was just finding it hard to be happy. the point though, is that i’m on my way to being happier as i slowly peel away all of the rahula that i’ve inadvertently found myself so wrapped in. as i woke up this morning and quietly answered that 20 point question in my head (and then wrote that one-line post below), it occurred to me that all i had needed was just some sleep. if i had stuck to my guns and continued being the utterly lazy person that i am, i would have partied over the weekend, and all of the sleep from the hangovers would have helped me more in my exam than four straight days of forcing into my head stuff that i already was familiar with. but no… i just had to try and be hardworking, pretend that i’m someone i’m not, and end up screwing things up for myself :)
i’m not saying that it’s not good to be hardworking. it’s just that people exist in such different ways, and sometimes forcing a change is just so futile and possibly damaging. one of my high school classmates told me the other day how he thought i’d changed so much from the person who used to have a 40% attendance rate in school, and who would walk into class halfway into the school day, happily wearing pink scrunchies and a uniform skirt that was 4 inches shorter than what it should be. he also told me that he was talking to another of our classmates, and how she simply didnt believe that i’ve become so intense about my academics since i got here. i rolled my eyes, and said, yeah, she never has anything nice to say about me. but he shook his head and said — ‘no, right after that she said “but then su ann is the type of person who doesnt have to study hard to get good grades”‘.
i think once upon a time that was true. but then i got here, this wretched university, where everyone was top of their class, valedictorian of their high school, wants to take graduate or PhD level classes, is aiming for summer internships at the biggest and baddest firms — and no one ever stops to help. we were all so used to being the best and the most talented, but now that we’re here and everyone is just as good or even better, we get scared and start clawing our way hard to be ahead of the curve. it’s so exhausting. i liked it at first because it was challenging, but now i detest it because it’s changed me into someone i cant even recognize. it’s changed me into someone who went to see a doctor for muscle pains not because she couldnt sleep properly, or that she was worried about her health — but because it was affecting her ability to write fast for a time-constrained exam. i dont want to worry about where i am relative to everyone else. i dont want to feel suicidal after every exam. i dont want to have the answer key to problem sets, but refuse to copy it because i ‘want to learn things the right way’. i want to be lazy hazy and rainy. i want to flake off and borderline flunk out college. i want to major in something that has no ‘market value’. i wanna take advantage of this amazing city! and see everything! i wanna fly to london on a whim. i want to go to pittsburgh. there are so many things to do and so little time. do perfect scores in problem sets answer any real questions in life?
right now, i’m excited for Chipotle lunch! and the holy grail of all happiness, for me, at this point in time, is a Mac-compatible version of The Sims 3. :)))))))
from Nottingham, during a very popsicle, long flowy skirt, grocery shopping period of my life:
November 14th, 2009
so this was supposed to be a very special post about museums, chance encounters, an endless cycle of winning and then losing, and birthdays. it was going to be about birthdays. but then i didn’t write it because i didn’t have time, and i was exhausted and nervous. do you know how nervous i was? i was positively shaking as i walked down the twisting and turning hall, juggling a balancing act of walking slowly but quickly enough, keeping the fear out of my face and removing the quiver from the forced conversation i was having. then i heard the bellow, and i thought, yup, i made the wrong choice. but trundling on, right, because what’s done is done? anyway the point is, i was tired and really scared. so i didn’t write it. i thought i would write it now, upon coming home, because i would have time, and i’d be feeling so much better after a nap. but no, now i’ve decided that i won’t write it at all, because it is likely to end up lame, bitchy, stupid, and above all, moronic. at the Tate four months ago, i met someone judgmental. i met someone more puerile than anyone i have ever known. i met someone who can’t look beyond his own superficiality and can only see the world in black and white. so as i sit here now, i am exhausted and scared. the past four months have drained the life out of me. i find it so strange that i can no longer look happy in photographs and that i have to force the smile into my eyes now. what have i done? truly, what have i done? constantly, i tell myself that i should never judge books by their covers, but increasingly, i find that my visceral reactions are always the most accurate. i can’t be someone i’m not. i can’t be so pretentious. i can’t say stupid things like, “i like thunderstorms because they have character.” i can’t apologize for having said, “… and shit like that.” i just cannot. what do i now? i feel like a hypocrite. i want to swallow everything. all the time traveling… i want to swallow it all.
April 26th, 2009
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