Mattering.

I think its time to talk.

It was mid-September. There wasn't a single week since the summer in which there was a night that I didn't cry myself to sleep. Every day was an argument, a fight. He called me names I never imagined. While I waited to hear him speak again, he came and left and came and left. Midnight was punctuated with meaningless apologies. They say (and by they, I credit C.S. Lewis) to love at all is to be vulnerable. I was undoubtedly shed of every protection I ever knew. Parts of me were completely foreign; I made them up, so I could construct more love, more desperation. I expected weakness to become strength, but instead, it destroyed me.

I fought it. I begged. I have never begged before, but now, I was pleading on my knees.  I drew copies of Bone and Calvin and Hobbes, pictures of immortalized friendship. They are still tear-stained. I sent unreturned messages. Everything I did was through a blur of tears. I went to school every other day with my eyelids stuck, still swollen. At assemblies, I sat, immobile. Then I got up and cried in the bathroom. I begged, come back. Please come back. Then it was the only thing I ever heard. I sat in history, English, physics, math, hearing only one thing in my head. Come back. And all he said was go away. For every go away, there were a hundred come backs.

He said he was lost, lost without me. Lost because we used to know each other's deepest secrets, and now we were afraid to share. Lost because we could pray into each other's shoulders. Lost because after a long day, we were each other's light, a little comfort in this phony world. But boys are so dumb. We were lost a long time ago.

One day, I woke up, and I was done. In a split second, my heart closed. My emotions froze. I got up and smiled at my teachers' jokes and appreciated my friends' love stories. Slowly, I started throwing things away. I shoved clothes into the basement. These belongings were forgotten, because you do not belong in my life. The pain all but disappeared, because you no longer matter.

We talked recently. You shafted me, again. You said you cared; you said you wanted to be friends again. But in truth, I could care less. Do you remember when I begged you? I'm sick of you.

Here's what matters now. I'm also sick of relationships. I barely believe in love. There's no couple in this school or college or world who can convince me that something deep and genuine can result from romance. There is no man of any stature or intelligence or suavity that can steal my heart. But here's another matter - I love all relationships. Without so much expectation, they are so easy. My friends, a great deal of them, especially, hold a standard of the golden zero. Disappointment is replaced by careless acceptance. I find a great deal of meaning in friendship, in chilling. I am done lying and hiding.

Spaces

I was unashamedly reading Shob's old blog post today. It was called "corner" and in it, she describes the Big Sad.

Here is the thing with the Big Sad, as she put it: we are stuck because we know how to be stuck. Our gluttony and starvation and full mouthed binging and purging and maniacal wakefulness - all are an accumulation of something wholly familiar. I'll stop speaking for her now, but for every stomach wrenching year of sitting in the stench of disappointment, I know it all so well. I was afraid that I might enjoy the pain, but this kind of demented torture is just unrelenting sin. I regret it and I beg to be freed and forgiven. Still there is no relief, no victory, just as there never will be. I know everything about winning and losing and playing, and I hate everything about it, save for a few teary conversations.

And beyond the Big Sad -

Nothing feels better on a Tuesday morning than a good hour of punching the crap out of a 100 pillar of sand. Feeling my sweat slide off my skin and my body propel itself straight off the floor... seeing my knuckles peel behind the thick boxing gloves... There have been few times in my life where I felt such a restless anger. There have been still fewer times where such has been used so arbitrarily, yet in such a way that not a single person, not even myself, was hurt. If you have $60 a month to spare, check it out.

In Frozen, Olaf says this rather profoundly: "Oh look at that! I've been impaled." I'm afraid to impale someone. Well, cheers to cowardice and young perplexity; here it is, misplaced conjunctions and semicolons alike. I can't stand the way it perpetuates intimacy on such a shallow level. I can't stand our broken resonances that frequent side by side, clashing at every wrong period, every mismatched amplitude. I hate the feeling of disorientation until the moment I step away, the stumbling restraint that bursts forth and recedes into contradiction. The Matrix is playing in the background, so excuse this..sullenness. But let me make it clear that this is no result of love or infatuation, but some gross play of experimentation and thoughtlessness.

Until it isn't. And so it is that when that space can no longer be filled and the glass shatters, over, and over, and over again, the sparks still fly.

And for you, my dear readers, artists, friends - during this indomitable trek of loneliness, I haven't really been alone at all.

Closed.

He asked if I was disappointed.
What could I say, but that I'm a disappointment too. No one ever believes it the first time.

And you thought this would be another depressing post.
Oh wait.

In one sense, nothing has changed. Being admitted to the only college I could imagine truly loving did nothing for how badly I look at myself, how horrendous yesterday was. That insensible hope for a revolution vanished in last night's crawling self-disgust. But now, it hangs, useless, spent – no, it is not spent. I am.

At the same time, I'm so relieved. Those four B's didn't mean I was stupid. Dropping AP French was more than just an act of hot indignation. National Honor Society, WYSE, JETS, who needs those? I didn't have to be a DECA champion or a prodigal student. I could just be me. And some part of this ingenuity got across, and somehow, they accepted it.

...

The darkness really does hide a lot of things. That old vanilla twilight didn't have a single star... there were so many unfilled spaces, so few of those kind of whispers. But maybe this is the way its supposed to be. Maybe this way, I have no mistakes, past to hide. Maybe this way, when I'm hugging my legs to my chest and sighing at the princesses breaking out into song, I'm not thinking about roses and pillows, but a very lucky friendship.

But the darkness also creates closeness, and when the closeness becomes paper thin, shimmering like broken glass, its breaks against the rocks and rushes up the shore. And now, once again, there's no darkness to fill at all.

The Game

Something's going to change.

Senior year has been so upside down. Everyone's mixed up, everyone's entangled, and I'm so happy to have my friends.

Sometimes, when I listen to Bring Me the Night, I still wonder about what could have been. What could have been better, more beautiful, more peaceful. More tragic in some dreamily wonderful way. And the hole I promised them would still be here... it opens back up, for a moment, a vast emptiness gnaws at the past. I know that when I'm dreaming, we're dreaming, we don't seem so far. Somehow, you'll be here with me soon. You're calling me when you're sleeping beneath the same moon. I used to pretend they were still here, but as it got darker and darker, this desperate love slipped away.

Then we sit in front of each other, still smiling with shifting eyes, still wondering, still friends. Safe enough to know an entire childhood, an entire person, mysterious enough to find the delight in the wriggling lantern's lights. Something so comfortable that a foot away, what I see is a culmination of a million parts that I know deeply, parts that I pushed to kiss someone else, parts that I spent all of my attention to give to my best friend. Parts that make me furious and sink into hopelessness, parts that I've always adored and loved with all of my might.

All of these parts that came together. When I see them move into life, a surge of affection rises inside and settles in a quiet, crawling wave. Before, I said I wanted something different, but now, the quickened heartbeat, flush of laughter, helpless smile, and man... the cut. It grew on me.

Its going to change when college decisions come. T-minus 6 hours and 16 hours. Its going to change because it already has and broken hearts are all over. A couple things on that:

People don't change. Every girl wants a bad boy who will be good just for her. But there are so very few angels, so much fewer that have the power of God behind them.

Sex is unforgettable, intimate, deep, binding. It doesn't matter if you're making real love or stupid love, but nothing will ever take that away.

I thought everyone knew this one. Never make important decisions when you're emotional.

The song Payphone. One more fucking love song and I'll be sick. All those fairy tales are full of shit. The sun sets even in paradise.

Micro sleeps.

Well, here's to another day punctuated by micro sleeps and League games, although today's unconscious period of the day is going to have to go to that 3 hour nap from 3 to 6 pm.

This whole week has been a crap shoot. I remember last year, when I started gaining serious weight this month, descending into some unglorious pit of unhappiness, although this was more than often at the fault of relationship problems. At least, right now, there is so very little to hide. At least I feel the freedom of bringing my laptop upstairs every night to watch ANTM or Friends or HIMYM. At least one days like today, I can feel some small sense of progress as I write my eight page research paper... about sleep. For the first time in like, 9 days, I felt the tranquility of diving into a vast expanse of knowledge and carving out singular words for this painstaking assignment.

The obvious thing to do was to write about it. Obviously.

Anyway, the cold is messing with me. I'm determined not to fall so disgracefully like last year, but running is becoming a burden. I starve, but I binge, but I purge, but I starve, but . . . I can't keep it up. When I think about eating, I can't think about anything else. The images of myself are nightmares come true, some that chill me to my invisible bones. Also, I'm writing like those sleep journals I just read, in case you're wondering.

School has been inexplicably exhausting. Grades have been fine - I've broken the curve in Stats three times for probability; I've managed near perfects in Urban tests, 94's in Multivariable, B's in Physics C, even B's in AP Art History. Most classes average out to high A's - the worst is are two temporary 89's. But I can't focus. I've been feeling the hypagognic jerks in calc, the sleep inertia practically everywhere else. I still haven't wrapped my mind around line integrals or any of those Gothic churches. At math team, I couldn't simplify sqrt{-3/2} to i(sqrt{3/2}), which is not only appalling, but unacceptable. I need to sleep, but I just don't.

Oh, and I saw the camel this Friday. The awkwardness of what was left unsaid was overwhelming, but after a good cry and vent, its over. Possibilities are crushed, bitterness is confirmed. Is it like this that I'm going to lose the leaders I was always able to look up to? Is it like this that we will all separate, and I will leave the social group to which I never belonged? And isn't it so sad that, for the past two years, I prayed to part of them, to love them like they loved each other, and now, among them, I feel the most alone.

So easy.

To the people who think I'm scared - how could I be scared of something that might repeat itself? We fear what we don't know, what we don't know will happen, or not happen. Its not the feelings or the hurt, the disappointment or the worthless sense of betrayal... these are all known. This isn't a vulnerability that's worth fear.

To people who don't get it. I don't have anything, none of those feelings, no anticipation of hurt or disappointment, albeit a slowly beating pulse of betrayal. And a faint whisper of ideas and experience.

Don't you see it? Everyone sees because they want to see. They adore it, they manipulate it, but all that's happening is that they are being tricked. What's really cute. What's real. What's wrong. But who would believe me? I can't help but laugh with them.

I don't know who to tell. I miss feeling love towards my old friends. They're gone though, and so will the ones from this year. No more Tetris, LoL, PI+ jokes, adoration of our calc teacher. No more car rides, crazy runs, horrible physics demonstrations. No more history.

I fancied the idea of being wiped clean. But really, we're still the same people, same problems. Its just that now, no one can help us in the same context.

And this familiarity just makes it so, so easy.

Night Life

Today was the first day a teacher called me out on sleeping in class. I haven't felt so racked with guilt for a long time... so I went back later and apologized. In stats and physics and art history, I can always manage to laugh it off with several gulps of coffee and a reassuring look of squinting, dried eyes, yet to this hour, I still feel horrible for the disrespect I showed.

On the other hand, Watson is the most attractive 5'6" actor in the world. I think he's made me a fangirl. My quads, he's so cool. He's not afraid of the war... he misses it.

I finished my early action apps. My fate is out of my hands, except for not violating the Stupid Rule. Every time I study art history, I feel so stupid. How come I can't remember anything? How can everyone else? I remember feeling similarly at the worst of AP French and AP Chem, when I was hopelessly lost and too embarrassed to ask for help. In Physics C, its kind of like that, where all I have to say is jargon, like I'm some trophy girl with nothing intelligent to offer. I know people like that - I always sniveled at them, and now I'm one of them? I used to always be able to help people with their homework, even if I didn't want to. I used to do the set-up problems for fun, and now I'm fighting to stay focused on the problem. When was I so dumb. At least MVC has treated me well, although iterated integrals have been pretty rough so far, even on CalcChat. The conclusion? I'll have to sleep more... and work harder.

I've started living into the night now. I didn't really understand why people would do this to themselves. I never understand those people who slept until noon. But these past two weeks, I've been sleeping anywhere between 12 and 3, clicking the night away. I wake up at 10 to the fading glow of my laptop, eat some junk food, and click away some more. I don't have any butterflies or the nervous laughter. I don't have the old teddy bear fantasies or fireplace cuddlies. I just want to run, to go forward, to pull that infamous wink I used to fall for, to squint in the rushing winds, laughing.

I'd rather keep to Heisenberg, to be caught in an oscillating . To know position, but not speed, not position, but speed. To keep the obvious subtleties buried so deep into thought, to make horrible flirtatious allusions. To make faces... to sleep. To celebrate.

So why do I act like I want something different. Am I bitter that vengeance is all that's left to want? Or am I afraid, that after the involuntary smile, the sigh of submission, the inconceivable shift away of pleasurable embarrassment, there'll be just an emptiness left inside?

Remains

Conventionally exciting things are happening in my life again. This means I must blog about them so that my close writer friends will know how great it is to be uncontrollably confused and tired at the same time.

I'm not looking for anything. I'm happy alone now, surrounded by good friends, hilarious physics demonstrations, acceptable test scores. I didn't think about eating too much the past two weeks - I felt empty and content, not too cold, full of energy to run as I please, into the day and night.

But man, boys.

Seeing my past from this present perspective kind of sickens me. The sacrifices made for all of the unfulfilled promises, the emotional responsibility, the constant urge to take advantage of any time while living a life of lies right in front of my parents. The nagging lies that nothing is worth more than how special it feels to sense admiration. The distance from my friends, my broken focus, twisted priorities. For all the love that bound our tragic, our comedic romance, it wasn't enough to surpass our ages' maturity, our weakened faith, our inexperience.

Its been three weeks. With the exception of a week's worth of swollen eyes, the bloating feeling of overstuffing myself with pity is completely gone. People, events, objects - if they were meant to be together, then they would be. The scientific cosmos kind of dictates this absoluteness, but God is also sovereign. Whatever the answer is to predestination vs. free will, He is. So it is.

But its also been three weeks. The remnants of bitterness and anger remain. The expectation to be disappointed roars in my head. The constant reminder of all that's gone wrong tells me to stop. What do I really want? Not a repeated past. Not a future of flowers and math that will wilt with a hormonal drop in excitement. No sweet songs. No dinner dates.

Instead, a hollow, sickening feeling points itself to filling in the gap that was left behind. Some go-to satisfaction, something that can shelved and reshelved, distinctly. Something that can be killed in a button, but brought out in a wink. Something conventionally wrong. Something I hated before, before I knew how it felt, never forgave, and wanted so desperately to claim as my own. Something that can happen.

We ran tonight. The darkness did its job well - it hid what shouldn't have happened so quickly; it hid my utter confusion. It hid any desire, every bead of sweat. The sound of wheezing brought to life memories unwanted. We did run so much faster than I've felt in so long, like birds among trees, as if we were dancing in sprints. But I couldn't help it. Everything I didn't want presented itself. Everything I did want (with the exception of college, friends, food, badminton, family, overall well-being, and excellent physical hotness (just kidding)) presented itself.

I'm answering my own question. I know what I'm trying to pursue. But how could I tell anyone? How could I do this.

Rambling and whatever

I wrote my last post on the hotel floor, snuffing tissues and accumulating dust.
Things didn't really get better since then. At least, not for a while.

The beginning of senior year hasn't really been a celebration. It took me four years to finally understand what school pride really means, yet still I can't find the motivation to participate. The screaming rainbows and dancing pikachus were hilarious, but I went to art history, dried out and disappointed, hoping that class had to offer something more. I hoped that every class would offer more, and I find myself, even today, actually looking forward to listening to lectures about the art of syntax, canon of proportion, vector valued functions, and drag forces.

None of my problems have gone away, except that I lost a dude, who was inexplicably full of scumbaggery and deceit and apathy and defeat. I look forward to talking to people and run away anyway, spending open campus in the library, in a random store, dying to be alone, but not completely lonely. Also my writing structure has gotten better, except for in blogs, where its worse.

Let me ramble. Its interesting once in a while.

Initially, I lost weight because I was too busy to even think about food. From the moment I woke to the last hour of sleep, I was studying and excelling in everything except art history and maintaining relationships. Mornings were okay, and sometimes dinner would be my only meal. I ran with cramps and I ran with flourish. Sometimes when I played badminton, I would feel the life inside suck right from my core, and I would stand, exhausted that I would have to play on. I was weak, but I was thinning. I thought I was getting better.

But does getting better also involve a tear stained pillow, night after night, about the hundreds of promises broken and the feeling of being alone? For all of the new and renewed friendships that were almost figuratively blossoming, the sadness inside still kept me bent and broken. Although arguably, we are all bent and broken, always.

Time went on, as it does, and eating got worse. Time gave me more space, and I found relief in a jar of peanut butter and some good Masterchef episodes. No one understood, so I sat alone, as I still do, although now without the food, reading, wondering if people really just dislike me, if I could look better, and searching for the next America's Top Model.

I'm confused because I'm afraid of meaninglessness, but also college. I can't wait to be relieved of the crushing expectations, to finally celebrate with a genuine freedom, a new beginning that isn't as heavily romanticized as I just wrote it out to be.

Man blogging is hard now.

YSP Week 4: Overdose

I'm in Albany Andover now, on the Monday Tuesday after, so I'm writing some of this in retrospect. I'm sorry, but I had one too many corndogs the other day. I haven't had corndogs for a childhood.

If I keep living like I did this week, I'm going to crash. I'm going to be button-eyed rag doll, wasted in my own skin, with the highest highs and lowest lows, slamming myself back and forth between what I want and what I need. I feel like I'm acting on drunken impulses, hand picking my pleasures, only to have the gluttonous weight of my indulgence seize my body again.

And no, not PMS.

It started with food. It always starts with food. It was in no sane person's mind any sort of binge or purge or disorderly consumption of noodles, but it blew me into a swamp, so sticky and sickly, so guilt-ridden in spite of the beautiful, clean weather we finally received. It was cool outside, but I felt hot on skin. I felt like the food was burning into my arms and legs. I wanted to be a Wintergirl. The tall and short, thin and wide, dark and bright - they're all sick with disease. They have their own battles with demons. But at least the thin looked good.

I won't write too much about what I put through my body, but I spent my expected happy hours on Thursday clenching my backpack to my body, waiting for cold sweat to pass, sleeping away a fiery pain that arose in the bottom of my gut. Nothing explosive or wormy happened, if that's what you're afraid I'll describe. But I collapsed in bed, shuddering next to my heat pack, barely stopping myself from drooling, exhausted by wrenching pain inside.

Still. Managed 36 miles this week without running that day, which brings me to mention only briefly that I woke at 10 PM to eat a bowl of fried cabbage and seaweed while working on a hopeless Candy Crush design until 2 in the morning. I slept briefly and woke up to finish it. I refrained from donuts on the last day of YSP. I felt too horrible about sleeping in class to say thank you to Eldin. I ran 8 miles (it wasn't on purpose) on nothing but a couple slices of smoked ham and 4 dried plums. My dad asked me if I was celebrating, but every crying fiber inside of me screamed for a crueler punishment.

There were nights in which I slept wrapped in woolen devastation, feeling supremely alone, knowing God was sad, but being too weak to lift my eyes up (Worn by Tenth Avenue North. Don't tell me you can't feel the tragedy inside). There were the subsequent mornings, spent half-comatose, in which I stared at my drawings bitterly, still wishing for time and less impediment. I stayed red-eyed and ugly until I ran and ran and ate and ate. I didn't sleep enough. And I ran again, on Saturday, for 8 miles.

It was a gripping cold outside, but my previous confident stride was reduced to a meek shuffling. Nothing I had done made sense to me. Professor Sally told us that YSP was supposed to light our fire, but there was only a candle inside of me, and was certainly not for analytic math and not particularly invested in anything. I showed my sister the technicalities of Candy Crush (she's on Level 29 now, bless her) and drove glumly to Sunny's party, where there was an abundance of good chicken and multiple frenzies of hand washing. I fed my dehydrated lips and sat on the top of the corner of the couch, completely comfortable even in unnecessary solitude.

I had to write privately about everything else that happened inside my discomforted heart, especially because I don't have the strength to write it in code now, but I don't think I'm doing any readers any injustice. It was a very secretive sadness, probably more irrational than not when scribbled on the floors of the hotel room at 12 in the morning.

Art's Sake

We have to write essays soon. Last year, coming up with ideas for the graduated seniors was so easy, yet when it comes to myself, I trip over every other word. For the common application, I want to talk about running in 87 degrees that feels like 95 degrees in 70% humidity. I want to talk about how I can feel rays of cancer searing into my slippery skin. Its so easy to describe the literal ruggedness of Pioneer's broken forest, where the remains of the bull-dozed trees are crumpled in ugly juxtaposition with the ever-running river. There isn't a day when I don't remember the times when I run so fast that my face hits the gnats before than gnats can fly into me, and there isn't a moment when I won't forget they day's I'd have to walk, forcing my legs to throw themselves forward, exhausted, fatiqued, waiting for me to go pee.

But my mom wants me to write about drawing. Man, I love drawing. This whole week, I've felt like crap, full of turds, spouting nonsense, but in the midst of my dad's conservative air conditioning, I could find the last remains of my patience to draw. I mean, if you count that city scape as drawing. Its really more like using my ID card as a ruler and wedging my pen against it a hundred times over. I loved drawing those eggs and figuring out which expressions worked best to what scale. 

I don't know how to talk about it though. In this modern era of art for art's sake, art seems so existentially fraught (yeah, Augustus Waters and basketball hoops used this phrase first, forgive me please). I don't throw away too many drawings anymore, but I also don't archive much of anything. AGhh I already ran out of things to say. Here's what I wrote in my scholarship essay. The question was "What career goals do you have? Why do you want to pursue this career? Have you been involved in activities or certain academic classes that have guided you in this field?"

I want to create for other people, and the most realistic and personal application for this goal is to pursue graphic, architectural, or industrial design. When I first complied to the rules and regulations of the AP Studio Art drawing portfolio, I was young and overenthusiastic, eager to crank twenty four stunning pieces of artwork in 30 weeks. It took me but a fraction of those weeks to realize that I did not possess the detailing and adventurous passion to sculpt deep and lifelike motifs into the heart of the canvas, especially not 24 times in a row. I had no reason to do so, because my love for aesthetic qualities of space and time stems not from a desire to score a 5 on the final College Board portfolio or to feel a sense of capability and self-worth. I never wanted to work for my own benefit, to create a piece just to prove to myself that I held mastery over oils and graphite alike.

I need to create for other people. I felt the artist's equivalent of a rush of adrenaline when I drew a portrait for my badminton coach and painted thank you landscapes for my teachers. I was content to spend my entire spring break designing my badminton club team's tshirts and posters, to be full immersed in every pixel I could alter on Photoshop. While I would love to win a Threadless or shirt.woot contest and bring home thousands of dollars and shining new barbeque grills, I participate in these contests because I love to collaborate with my friend who had shown me these projects in the first place. It was the necessity inherent to the nature of these contests (and my own failing creativity) that brought two friends very close together in the least romantic way possible. I would love to continue to create for other people, to make  something that is not only beautiful but also useful to them.

YSP Day 8: Calvin and Hobbes

I don't think journalling about YSP is necessarily the route to my trumpetting success as a writer. Not only is it uninteresting to talk about math, but I also make a lot of typos transcribing notes from my phone and chicken-scratch Staples pad. I will, however, continue to write as frequently as possible. I read the first parts of Eveline's blog recently, and I feel insufficient. She does write fiction though, which is hard for me to accomodate in my pea brain that latches onto only very personal writing. But then again, isn't the art that encompasses fiction a purer truth than any string of words man can speak?

...No. That's something stupid Aristotle or an old-timey philospher thought up while he (let's face it, it was probably a "he") was breaking bread across his toga'd lap. I know I made a terribly stereotypical generalization. The point was that nothing is that simple. I should try to read fiction that is not already transcribed in books.

So as I try to forget all of the math that I pretended to learn at YSP (we did Laurent polynomials on Thursday. I missed Friday for my consumer ed final, 81% final 95% semester grade WADDUP), I always become really sad. This is not to say that I'm not sad in other situations; I spend most of my time being sad, but math - this "real" math - seems to emphasize it. Everyone at YSP tries to hard to keep up. Everyone at YSP who isn't stupid already knows that the integers are an integral domain in which the positive elements are well ordered. I liked being proficient at finding roots of unity and proving that e^pi is greater than pi^e (diagnostic test material), but I guess there was always something in the back of my head that told me that this was step 0 of the introduction to mathematics. It could be the 6 hours of sleep in moody weather, but I've lost it. I would rather look at tshirt design platforms than prove that the lowest upper bound is the intersection of all ordered fields. That probably wasn't even right.

*I think I say the same thing on this blog a lot. You guys are allowed to comment and tell me things I'm doing wrong. You should also tell me what to write about, because I don't have any structure or reason.

Anyway, all of this sadness (not just the math induced kind) carries me to nowhere land. My runs have been spectacular bursts of stretching and walking. I didn't eat much. Like, I'm back to last year's weight, not just because of dehydration and certainly not because I run 10 miles a day like I used to, but because I just stopped eating when I could. One part of my life corrected itself, even when its ratification is a problematic creation in itself. Sometimes I'm so tired that the rush of blood blackens my vision when I stand. I had to bike instead of run twice. But my stomach's normal. My legs are... normalling. For the first time in a long time, I'd rather be skinny than muscly. At least, not that muscly. And yes, I know, I look normal, with a healthy BMI of 20 and am still sprouting with flowers and sweat. I feel better in one way. Worse in many more.

Most of the time, the fatigue travels through my fingers, and I start ignoring people on chat. It started this school year, and I dropped friend by friend. I used to care what they'd think about what I would say, and I would still help anyone without hesitation. Its just so easy not to care anymore. I want to watch Master Chef. I want to watch vlogbrothers. I want to read Mental Floss and Calvin and Hobbes and Zits and Foxtrot, snuggled in bed or slouching over a table, a pack of gum, a watermelon, and slice of lemon dangling in my water. I want want want want want want want. While I'm at it, I want to draw and listen to the Miracle of Swindon Town and Swoodilypoopers Strike Back. I want a break, and some Portillo's. It's 11:33 PM right now, so of all of those things, I just want to read myself into a comical and serious world of painted characters, so deep and complex, yet so resolute and truer than any person who's tried to hold a conversation with me.

I wish I could cartoon. All I can do is write about how great cartoonists are. They are all, in fact, great. Sparky to the Bills to Jim and Jerry. Artists are a friendly bunch, just not syndicates and merchandising businesses.

Well, at badminton today, we did forehand drop-overhead smash for an hour and a half straight. It was like plyo on steroids. Our butts melted. I lost my air. We were a happy bunch. I've missed being happy here. I've missed feeling invigorated by the possibilities, because now I don't have possibilities (and no, for anyone who judges me for my grades in junior year, they were not the worst, and you're terrible for assigning my academic value to B+s. I am obviously a stable academic. haha.). I don't love anything outside of the humanities. Where has my reason gone.

To the people I don't reply to (that is, all but three people. I've left monoloques hanging.):
Sorry, but I don't think I'm that sorry quite yet. Here is my pity card: I wake up wondering if I should eat breakfast in the stale and clogging air, or if I should run, and forget that breakfast is truly that important. I spend half of my days wishing I could try intermittent fasting, and the other half wishing I could run faster. I draw, but I know I'm not that good. I'm okay, better than you probably, unless you're Eveline or Elizabeth (I'm assuming no other artists read this blog), but I would still rather read Will Grayson Will Grayson. I would rather read about suicidal love that is not overly sexualized than draw a city scape. I romanticize everything, and everything falls short. I'll romanticize a great conversation with you, and it will fall short. I'll feel the need to run or draw in the middle, and I'd find something cool on Youtube or Pop Chart Lab. Let's go to Starbucks or Einstein's instead. I promise we'll catch up, no phones allowed.

YSP Day 7: Least Upper Bound

I keep titling my posts with what we learned, but I don't remember much of anything today. Today was special for reasons unspecified, but even without the cooling sun and thai pad noodles and even with my failing calves and softening quads, it was comfortable. Sleepy, tired, and very comfortable.

Here are some portraits I drew today.
(Left) This quiet white kid never moves. He's one of the few people who has already taken an analysis class, so he's pretty great at everything.
(Middle) Professor Sally. Apparently he's also the administrator of the program. And yes, he really does look like that when he talks. Its a side effect of getting old.
(Right) The back of Matilda's head.

YSP Day 6: Kauffman's Theorem

I never feel bad about falling asleep in Professor Sally's class because in all of my ignorance, I can hardly bear to pay him any due respect. I do feel bad falling asleep in small group though, even with gum wedged against my cheek and every interest aligned in learning more. I did contribue today though. I gave the forumula for a base case of a knot with two over crossings. Meanwhile, I did nothing for the rest of he day besides read Finding Calvin and Hobbes: the Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip and create several drawings for myself. Today's lesson was all presentations... unwittingly disinteresting. I'll share the drawings here to make up for a lack of better writing. The poo-dog was the camel's idea. :) 

A dead potted shrubbery:
our twisted society.

A sketchy camel and birdie

My favorite

Leprechaun dreamworld. My last attempt to regain sanity.

YSP Day 5: Completing the Rationals

Actually, we constructed the rationals out of the integers on Friday. Today, we proved that every finite integral domain is a field, aka every element has a multiplicative inverse. A and B are isomorphic as sets if there exists a function f: A-> B if f is bijective. The best part of today's lesson was the tangent one of the counselors showed us - determining pi using the Archimedes method. This philospher math physics dude was very often wrong, including his hypothesis concerning the five senses and elements or something, bu his estimation of pi using 96-gons averaged out to 3.1485. Too bad he was killed before he could do better. What we really did today was prove the existence and uniqueness of the Kauffman Bracket. I'll tell you about the presentation tomorrow if it isn't too boring.

I woke to the buzzof 93.4 FM singing across my room. I rolled out of my unused blankets towards my mirror. It turns out that I always look better on rainy mornings when the sunlight doesn't reach my reflection and when I'm half hidden in the gloom of travelling downtown for another day of finding ways not to fall asleep in class (chewing through peppermint Orbit gum today. Unsuccessful from 11:30-11:55.). I thought about what I'd be eating today and spent more time than I should have wondering what combination of clothes best suited our strange and fickle weather. I checked Facebook and stuffed calcium gummies down my throat. Christine ran in the morning... I'm so proud of her. Lol.

The food stand called Harry's at the train station sold apple fritters and banana nut muffins for $1.75. I wondered when I would have the courage to buy one for myself. I know its a bad deal, but I've always had a secret attraction to sparkly sugar and soft sweet breads. As for the people, well they must not be as noteworthy as the food. Everyone mostly ignored each other in hopes that they would be left alone as well. It was raining, but even the slap and smack of the raindrops was subdued by the hum of silent, waiting passengers. Such a weary silence was well-appreciated although quickly broken by the squeaking and clattering ruckus of the express train. I sat quietly next to a dude blasting crazy hard rock into his ears, wondering if my fat thumbs would ever be sufficient to take notes of the morning on my smart phone's memo pad. Apparently, they have succeeded.

The trains and buses are almost never packed, but they're always full. The lines are about thirty people long per car, 50 to 100 long for the bus. The city that is the four blocks around Union Station bustles like a city should. Policemen yell when buses approach. Escalators are jammed and stairs are less occupied by the leaner and more energetic few. A guy my age was reading Slaughterhouse Five, which looked suspiciously familiar to the one I recently purchased (Day 2). Mothers chatted (in Chinese. ha.). People slept. We were all bus passengers to the University of Chicago - how wild could our travelling habits be?

I do miss my usual summer days of wallowing in bowls of watermelon and scrolling through years of vlogbrothers, painting on whims and falafelling selectively, but writing helps. It helps me forget what I'm missing, and it helps me remember that amidst a lot of sadness and hurt, there is the complicated organism of love and its expression to keep me upright, still happy to wake up and reluctant to fall asleep.

YSP Day 4: Fields

I woke up still bitterly terrified of my parent, but I had an 800 page Chronicles of Narnia in my backpack with a 16 pack of Trident Strawverry Kiwi gu, so I was prepared to face my trials. I did so by falling asleep, a few chapters into Creating Narnia.

I stepped into the barn, previously drawn in Day 2, only to find that there was homework assigned yesterday, not that I could have proved that the set generated by the ordered integral domain of well ordered positive elements was also isomorphic.

I learned more from this morning's summary than I did from the entire lecture yesterday. Apparently, we've been learning structures. We started with a commutative ring with 1. "Atta baby," Professor Sally would crow. After C-ring with 1, we went into integral domains, the difference being that ID's have multiplicative cancellation, whatever that means. Ordered integral domains are.. ordered. I chewed through another three pieces of gum.

Now fields, fields are integral domains, c-rings with 1 with multiplicative inverses. They are transitive, symmetric, and reflexive, just like congruent triangles. I checked my phone for the 5th time. What a lonely class this was after all.

YSP Day 3: The Ordered Integral Domain and C-rings with 1

Alright. Its a holiday tomorrow, so I don't have an excuse to write poorly. Sorry for journalling the past two days. I still think its important for there to be a mechanical account of YSP because should another poor soul that doesn't like math that much like me want to take a course on analysis in a prestigious university, he or she should have a resource. My friends probably wouldn't care about whatever I'm learning. I don't even care about what I'm learning. Needless to say, I will provide everything I can for the world to read.

I took the train and the bus by myself today.  I don't remember if I drooled on the train. I was lucky to stumble upon a friend on the way, or I might have easily missed my stop. It turns out that I'm the only friend among many who is participating in uninteresting math this summer. I take comfort in that when I go into Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra next year, I'll know that nothing can be as bad as proving that x^2 is continuous.

That happened to be the first thing I learned. A function f: R->R is continuous at x(e)R if for all epsilon>0 there exists some delta>0 such that |x-y|<delta -> |f(y)-f(x)|<epsilon. This almost made sense, but our counselors got really excited ("You're gonna have to pull deltas out of your butt!") and started talking about monoids, defined by (delta, #, e) where e is a neutral element such tha a#e=e#a=a. Monoids, are of course associative, just like any other respectable operation except the cross product. Do I really know what I'm talking about? Not a clue. The point was that in the process of completing rationals (Q) to reals (R), analysis comes into play big time. Besides, naturals and integers are just equations (as if the other two sets weren't) and not that topographically interesting. Obviously.

Professor Sally blindly hoisted his prothetic-legged body onto the table. He assigned each of us a coordinate in the lecure room and cut off introduction.
"I have no legs, no eyes, no hair." The class tittered. "But I intend to run. you. to. the. ground."
"Jason!" he shouted. "Write. I will speak."
"ORDERED INTEGRAL DOMAIN." The class jumped to attention. I blinked, hoping that he really was blind so that he couldn't see my careless slouch. "(R,+,*) is a computative ring with 1 if and only if (+,-) are Internal Laws of Composition."
"Give me an example of a c-ring with 1," he demanded of 2-2, the coordinate next to me. The boy failed, as expected. The Professor turned to me.
"Do you know any c-rings?"
"Uh, like 3 times 5 plus 2?" The smart kids who knew real math turned to me.
"Integers," the smart girl hissed.
"Do you know any c-rings with 1?" the Professor demanded again. I decided that I was bad at thinking and caring.
"Do you want an expression?" The smart kids thought about how incredibly stupid I was.
"Integers," the smart girl hissed.
"No," I said firmly. "I don't. Integers?"
"SURE YOU DO," the Professor shouted. "Have you heard of the integers?"
"What? Yeah."
"Do you know the integers?"
"..."
"..."
"Yes." And I promptly fell asleep, ashamed, hoping against all hopes that we would solve some easier modular arithmetic and stop talking about multiplicative cancellation.

I had hot apple cider for lunch. I made $2.50. There is only multiplicative cancellation in n mod m if and only if m is prime. Be sophisticated, baby. An OIDR satisfies WOP if and only if for all S <- R+ and S is non-empty, then S has a smallest element.
Yeah, right.
I ran and turned in the rest of my Consumer Ed homework. UC is very beautiful. Perhap its loveliness will cancel out my nightmarish classroom experiences.

YSP Day 2: Intro to Knot Theory and Kauffman's Polynomial

I promised myself that I would write more because I decided that the math and sciences really suck, and that if I ever want to stand a chance mixing with the humanities flowers, I'm going to need to write frequently, so I can write better. Basically I want to be like John Green and other authors whom I have yet to read, but I'll never to go to a small liberal arts college. Instead, I'm going to review YSP, because no one writes reviews about YSP.

Young Scholars Program, University of Chicago
Advanced Geometry, Knot Theory, and Proof-Based Calculus or Something, Grades 11 and 12

I took the train with my father to the Union Station today. When I stepped into the city, I felt the rush of windy freedom, but mostly, I stumbled across a couple streets and fell promptly back alseep on the bus with Narnia grasped between my palms and my backpack. We talked briefly to a CS Major at UC and I pretended not to be interested in anyone so I could be totally ignored, left in peace to draw the classroom.

We were split into groups, and I was tested into the highest levelled one. It turns out calculus is good for something, or at least Mrs. Moore has done her students well again, even if I haven't done well for her. I ate too much, so I was uncomfortable and fell into my routine AP Chem 1:00 PM food coma, but no before catching several things about our Singaporean transfer counselor, Eldin.

"Who cares about knot theory?" he said, referring to the subject on which we will be spending two of the next four weeks. "Its not deep, not wonderful. Its just a testing base. If you want to impress people, tell them you're studying topological quantum field theories." He proceed to explain that we were studying projections, embeddings, but of course for all intensive purposes, we are studying real knots.
So heres the thing. Circle O is equivalent to the knot diagram of figure 8 (8. duh.)
"What the hell?" Eldin rhetorically posed. On the sliding chalkboards, he wrote in proficient and chicken scratch like letters: Kauffman thing. He paused.
Kauffman thing/polynomial, he added. That's what he meant. Of course the only term I was mildly familiar with, he forgot.
He explained the Kauffman polynomial ("What the hell, we mess the variables?"), and I pretended to care about staying conscious. I fell asleep after another high achieving mathlete applied the Bromian rings (it was denoted on the chalkboard: This is a good one. This is a thing. It should be easier.) to Kauffman. The answer, by the way, is a^2c^2+2abc+b^2c^2. I can't even type in LaTex.

Eldin ended with one last note on his opinion of math.
"You know the stuff they do in the other levels, with probability like that, blue ball, red ball, pick two blue balls? That's bullshit. PDE is where the money is at." Meaning we should all be partial differenial equation theorists one day.

I visited the bookstore and the medical campus later. Mostly the bookstore. I bought Slaughterhouse-Five for $7.99 and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for $4.95. The day, in all of these senses, wasn't the worst. Spirit wear is still too expensive.

YSP Day 1: A (P)Review

I thought that students who went to the University of Chicago did not go to kill fun. Fun did not die, because learning was fun. People would sacrifice fun to learn, but they never would have to do so. UChicago was beautiful, but only in its bubble. UChicago was a private liberal arts school. UChicago was basically the best, with foreign exchange students flocking everywhere, brilliant minds floating in the city's veins of wisdom and history and culture.

Then I went to the school. Actually, my dad drove me there as I slept with a fat Designer's Convention book caught between my legs. If I knew anything about architecture, I would say that the buildings were beautiful and majestic, draped in climbing ivy with thick irony, because UC is technically not an Ivy League. But I know jack about architecture, so all I can say is that UC is nice. On the outside, it looks a heck of a lot better than UIUC. The great majority of students don't look like smokers. Intellect oozes between the heavy set doors of inquiry based learning. The school colors aren't orange and red. It disappointed me that Eckhart Hall was equally as depressing as Noyes Lab, brown doors and tiny desks alike. I was sad that Huffington Hall was analagous, if not worse, than the Illini Union.

The diagnostic test was okay, since I remembered to use L'Hopitals on part d of a question concerning series. I met a lot of dorky people who love math a lot more than I do, and I met a lot of people who wouldn't stand a chance of making it to UC for real. The boys needed to wear deodorant, and I needed to get away. One professor wore an eyepatch and was wheeled in a chair because he had two prosthetic legs. He demanded respect in a whisper, although after he rolled away, I wished we'd have a real Professor Moody. Mr. Eby was great, and if Mr. Pearson didn't teach English, he would be amazing too. Our other professor was equally sharp and complicated. He knew everything about over and under 3-foils, but he spoke too slowly about Russian history and didn't bother to teach anything that was more than trivial. Then again, how can I determine what is or isn't trivial? It's just that I don't see how the renaming of Leningrad makes anyone a better person.

One thing worth noting though. Robert Lee Moore established three rules of IBL (inquiry based learning). The second step, called Step 1 (preceded by Step 0) is to send students out with scripts into the desert to work. Since we don't have deserts (the theory was developed in Austin, TX) in Chicago, we're going to have lectures in the barn, which is actually the 3rd floor of another math hall or something. The professor said this as if it were funny. The only humorous encounter I've had was gaining a profit from buying a $3.85 sandwich with my $5 coupon.

Design, a temporary confession

The pile of SAT and AP prep books stacked in the corner of my room is the size of a small child. The idea of making critical thinkers with a step-by-step guide is worthy of bonfire destruction. I did enjoy the Barron's APUSH book, and I suppose Barron's AP Chem and Physics B were relevant, but what a waste of money. What a waste of worry.

As this year has progressed, I became increasingly dispassionate about the subject matter of my classes. Last year, biology was ruined for me because the teachers were the worst. I can't blame them; teaching such a complicated subject at such a basic level must be frustrating, especially with such assuming, gpa-oriented students, but now I'd hate to be a doctor, and not only because I get tired of people really easily. I got a B in Chemistry twice, so that's forever terrible. Plus I never understood buffers. Physics dried up really fast as well. While quantum mechanics are incredibly bewildering, the technicalities of electromagnetism and thermodynamics squeeze the enthusiasm out of me. I spent my last 100 minutes in Physics B today on Facebook and eating my friends double egg sandwich. There's calculus, but even with the best teacher in the world, I can't help but feel overwhelmed with impatience and tedium in class. Even when I understand redox or apush or integrals, there's no sense of joy.

Is this kind of college prep a monopoly? Or am I just short-sighted? Or do I have no idea what I want to do? When people ask me about my future field, I always reply with applied mathematics, or architecture, or something stupid and generic like engineering, but in the back of my head, I'm still thinking that if my parent's would let me, design. Maybe its the struggle to do this that will make my work passionate enough to be worth it. I go to school with an impending doom to tolerate seven classes. Still I feel the most free, the most happy, when I'm on the computer, tirelessly scrubbing away a tshirt cover.

When I watch vlogbrothers, browse dftba, the Ellen shop, read Redbubble's FAQ, I always think that if I could work the ropes like David Karp (he's the creator of Tumblr. If you don't read the link I gave you, you must not be a real blogger) did, wouldn't that be okay? To keep creating for a greater good than spending my entire capacity on computer programming. I can't imagine myself as an engineer. It always felt so wrong to say out loud, to think inside. Is this time the I face it? Because I don't think anyone else wants to do so with me.

Here's a video about art. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nDwTjPsG4b0
It makes context very romantic. I think John and Hank are going to change many worlds.

Class o' '13

Because of AP Testing, I have done nothing in class for the past two weeks. I have gone to school with a folder and purse, armed with nothing but a pencil and a smartphone.

Smartphones have proven to be useful for several reasons:
1. The entire text conversations are shown, so I know to whom and what message I'm "RE:"ing. This also makes me less frustrated and more condusive to wasting money on texts. It also allows me to have a more wholistic concept of what my friends are thinking, so this function is kind of a social advancement. As Eungee said, I'm moving up in the world. Thanks sir...
2. Candy Crush, Ruzzle, 4 Words 1 Pic. When I'm sad, I play these by my lonesome. Candy Crush, by the way, is an extremely well-designed game. Its animation is very sophisticated, and the organization of its levels is complex enough to basically never get bored. Its employment of "lives" and tickets sells well in the gamer's mind. It gives us a sense of self-control, but not really. It also isn't necessarily based on time, which puts a lot of frantic smart people at ease. Its a lot better than games with basically the same objective, like Fruit Smash and Bejeweled Blitz. Kudos to King Games.
3. Youtube. The school network doesn't block the phone app, so I've spent many physics and chemistry classes watching the Ellen Degeneres show. Sidenote on Ellen - I was browsing the online shop. I didn't know men's underwear was so tight. Isn't that uncomfortable? If anybody wants to buy me something, I'm size small, but I'll accept men's mediums for a friend of mine.
4. Camera. I can now take pictures at will and put them on Facebook and Instagram. No longer do I feel the necessity to debate bringing a camera to special events. Plus, I can check myself out using the reverse lens in case there aren't any mirrors.
5. Wifi. So I can chat with my friends in my room while I pretend to study for some ridiculous test.

But anyway, since AP testing gets us out of six periods every day, I've spent a lot of lunch and health periods not particularly participating in lunch and health. Mostly, I curled up in my seat and almost cried because I felt lonely... just kidding. I didn't cry. But all of the seniors have left, which makes my aluminum grip on this school's networks the most powerful influence. Compared to the day I first stepped into North, I'm a lot less scared of people, and God and everything, and wow the trials, but now I've lost every generation of people that I looked up to. I understand the flaws in the year above me; a lot of them are actually really terrible, but I still have a wholehearted uplifting respect for my elders. Or maybe I've just heard too many "suck plairs" in my year to take them too seriously.

But it is our turn. I just got my senior photo appointment, and I'll be applying for parking soon. We'll get fliers about senior brunch, senior celebration, open campus lunch, hypnotists, and tshirts. We'll drive to school, talk incessantly about college, and regret lots of bad grades. I'll apply to big schools and make one or two schools of which I had never heard when I first dreamed about college.

Its okay though. I might end up with the camel after all.                                                                                

Raindrops

I should probably wait until the weekend is over to reflect on it, but its 11:06 PM and I slept 4 hours on the bus and almost toppled over during the award ceremony, and now I'm awake, still writhing with self-hatred, wondering when on earth the constant fear of looking bad will ever go away.

A list of things that happened this week:
2 physics finals, 1 particle physics test (is weak force really the weakest force??? I am confounded.)
1 chemistry final (I have a B+ forever)
1 APUSH test, one APUSH debate (our opponents insulted our race, my teacher said I was pathetic, but he was nice about it, so we ended up agreeing that gpa is stupid)
Badminton sectionals (I got 2nd, which means everyone now continues to look down upon me because I'm not the best, which means they will continue to expect more but actually less, which means I just have to work harder)
A friend (a "friend", they say) threatened to hack my accounts, is now "so done with me", and tells everyone that I'm a terrible person, which is probably half true
Caught up with a couple friends
A timed writing, but by the time I found out, I could care less
Math team state. We did collectively poorly.

At some points, I remember reaching distinct euphoric moods- those of pleasure, what once I felt, I thought I might chase forever; those of friendship, companionship, of praying side by side, still allowed cry, esepcially since I just sounded like I was sick; those of exhaustion, the simple depletion of everything my body has left to give. Three times, three seconds - a rush, a wink, and sigh, I saw something more than dread for the next school day.

And no, I'm not in love with any of those things, even though they're what I'm left chasing at the end of a cold and starving chemistry class. Lately, I haven't felt anything but a deep and restless fatigue, accomapanied by the senselessness of waking the next morning to find out how mediocre numbers have made me become. Math team is over, but in the past month, I only got out of bed to check if my body had returned to normal, and if it hadn't, I would stumble downstairs, disoriented by ugly my reflection seemed to be. I would stay angry, still bitter of the sin that has flooded in and out of my life, bitter that she was a dying, unfreed speck and that we looked forward only to the end, because the present holds nothing but a standardized grip on our hunch back necks.

Laura Story had it right though. What if our blessings come in raindrops? They did, they do, not just because school was closed on a rain day without rescheduling finals. It was the rainy day that quieted my hearts in a cold and sniffly basement. It was when I was alone, still before God, still surrounded by pure motives. What if our healing comes through tears? I think there have been enough tears to just pass this through. I've trembled a lot this week... its been tough. What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You're near? I guess I still have 800 more nights. What if my greatest disappointments and the achings of this life is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can't satisfy?

Yellow Shoes

Since saving my life week by week, Elite team has quietly acquiesced into bundle of sparks inside of me. Stephanie, Ailynna, and I accepted our Pokemon qualities, mostly those of derpiness. Duck-walking became an exercise of pride in place of a means to twist off our kneecaps. Footwork was the only interval training that made sense. Hundreds of suicides, thousands of lunges, tens of hours of raging came and passed, all for the feeling of flying around the track, the knowing glimpse of a rolling birdie across the court, sure to be caught in a second.

Pools of frustration still gather at my broken feet, and I can't deny the periodic, cancerous bulging of my recovering body. In irking, I still swing too hard and kill so poorly; out of sloth, my cuts are too soft and my blocks are too slow. Still I watch the rippling quads, the flexing calves, and I know with every backhand clear and with every cross-court clear, Coach has done us well.

I knew it again when he walked into Hinsdale Central, greeting his students with a Cuban kiss, settling to support his number one. She won, and we sat together, with only the expectation that all of us would always be together. My character has always been more or less quiet, spiked with awkward noises and giggles, but to turn to see our final team member standing on the foreign courts threw me into the only memorable fit of genuine screaming in which I have ever partaken.

Regardless of injustices, I love my school team for its composition of friends and hilarity, but it will never have brotherly acceptance, or for that matter, work ethic, that the green dusted floors possess.

I have never known such a family.

Tuesdays with Morrie

As of the past many months, the idea of forgievness has been relentlessly pressed upon my heart, and not only because wrong has been ritualistically done without a single regret. Coincidentally, subsequent to GraceCon, church, and lots of Tumblr posts, we watched Tuesdays with Morrie in health.

A couple aphorisms from Morrie:
We fear aging, out the many fears of death, failure, and sickness, because we worship youth, yet if we find a greater purpose in life, there should be no fear in losing time that we have rightfully owned and now must relinquish.
You must love or die.
The tension of opposites - explained poorly, but so very beautiful
Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
"Forgive everyone, everything. Many do not have the chance like I do. I will die in peace, surrounded by people I love and who love me. We learn as much from people who hurt us as we do from people who love us."
Death ends a life, not a relationship

But the forgiveness. In my experience, and in my leisurely viewing of dramatic but reflective episodes of America's Next Top Model and Glee, people wrong each other all the time. The beautiful gay couple is thrown in the trash, rock-slushied, and crowned prom queens. Raging hot females are pitted against each other because of their own arrogance and perceived shallow character flaws. Kelly Cutrone shows no human empathy in her facade of the adamantly self-demanding respect. Puckerman banged Quinn and gave her a baby, and Finn kissed Mr. Schuester's fiance. People are full of bad decisions, and as far as I know, only the men in these shows have been capable of some perceptible genuince forgiveness. Are all women ego-centric, scrabbling desperaux of pride? They say men struggle with pride, but I can without hesitation attest to my gender's faltering insecurity.

I have rarely seriously judged other people's darknesses. I used to complain about white people, but since being broken by the tearing of my fragile innards, insensitive insults, mocking stabs, and superiority complexes became only directions to the bearer's heart. I have loved to read and listen to the cries and struggles of sin and regret, and still each day, I can feel myself opening more to true empathy. I hate attention whoring, rash emotional decisions, and butt-kissing small talk, yet I so feel the motive behind each act. I have been in such a dungeon before. If I have every been wronged, I have understood and forgiven with little hesitation. I love to understand more than I love to hold a grudge. I would love to love more.

As can probably be deduced from the past four months of posts, however, there have been repeated spouts of the said act of forgiveness. Since understanding the wretchedness of cyclical binging and starvation, I have seen the cataclysmic wreck of sin into which Satan has so tempted mankind. Out of obligation not to condemn that which I see as an embodiment of the broken heart, just know that I don't want to focus on the criminality of the said bittersweet conflict, sweet being an selective, sunny way to describe the enjoyment of such gratification.

I am sick to be so cheated with so little empathetic retrospection. Forgiveness is some form of letting go of resentment and bitterness, and this I can surely do. Detachment has never been too difficult after intimately knowing my self-inflicted pains. Help me to do the impossible, is Matthew West's lyrics, and I know that God is on my side, our side. The impossible can be done. Forgive, for we have been forgiven.

Along the lines of loving the unlovable, still there is trembling pain in the forgiveness. Consider our God, who weeps for how we wrong him day by day and how He still forgives us. While we are forgiven for our sins, some consequences can't be escaped; though we may not be forsaken and banished to Hell's inferno, we are disciplined by the law which God has dictated for us. My body is an engravement of my suffering. Sin must be cut away, yet for our lives, we will bear it, not understanding, but fighting.

Still in this case, I believe that the indulgence of a friendship stained grossly with immorality is wrong. There is a point when the presence of sin necessitates separation, especially in the individual, spiritual growth of partakers in any type of relationship. I'm unconvinced of cleanliness in the presence of such alleged comaraderie and dependency. The immobility of the value of sacred creation is not my problem, even though I abhor the glorification of experimental sex. My problem is this, that what is currently in place is the settlement of cowards. I am so ashamed.
.

Insanity.

Reality? I got a B on a calculus test on which everyone got an A. I earned a solid B- on my first organic chemistry test. Inconsolable madness frequents about two to three times a week, usually on 8-person practice days. Even smart people think relationships are worthless, but apparently believe in some higher value of sex buddies. Science isn't as good as writing, and math is okay when I'm not careless, so it is successful 10% of its occupation in my current circumstances. My parents enjoy the frivolous pursuit of 36 on the ACT even though this is one of the least indicative standardized tests created by not even the profit loving College Board. Some girls are even more desperate than me.

The world is still not a wish granting factory. Becoming not fat is a great feeling and leaves more clothing options. Parents are stupid and care too much about money. Vectors are hard. Online shopping is unexpectedly enjoyable, but shipping is more expensive than anticipated. Praying in the morning is a blessing. Badminton is good, smashes are crying, clears are flying. I have adopted camel parents and a real camel.

I have technically completely 6 weeks of Insanity now. It hurts a lot more than running, and I can't pass by the world and appreciate the sunsets anymore, remaining oblivious to the whip of the winds and the trickles of might-as-well-be nonexistent snow. I miss feeling so fast for so long, the idea of being able to go on and on forever.

Despite these losses, the physical pain, for one moment, takes away everything else. For one hour, I don't have water to spare for tears. Insanity is the one workout that has made me sweat like I'm on Elite Team, staining the carpet over and over. Anger packs a good punch.  Switch kicks and hurdles each claim their own victims and demolish the very ideas of stupidity, impulsive, despereaux, desire. Never have I felt so exhausted and physically helpless as after a full circuit of power jumps, in and outs, and suicide squats. Never have I felt so relieved to, as Shawn T so enthusiastically terms it, escape reality and enter insanity.

I feel it. The strength focused in a single kick, then another, and then another, is empowering. When I return to practice every week, I can feel the energy surging through our first ten laps. Another two hours of freedom. Another two hours away from feeling as if everything is totally not okay.

Douleur

I don't even like French that much but the Chinese word for pain is dumb and all of the old folktales and idiomatic roots I've heard from my culture are stupid and about respect and honor and they have nothing to do with real pain. So French will have to suffice. At least Les Mis captured the suffering in love and poverty and bread.

John Green has been profound a thousand times, but I just read the Fault in Our Stars again and it makes me extraordinarily sad and angry and appeased that someone has so eloquently penned the grievances of humanity.

"‘Pain is like fabric: The stronger it is, the more it’s worth.’ Is that true, Hazel?”
I wasn’t looking at him directly but at his reflection in the mirror. “No,” I shouted over the music. “That’s bullshit.” 
“But don’t you wish it were true!” he cried back.

If it is so unfortunately a load of bull, then I hate the world. I hate the world for making everything okay because okay, in John Green's words exactly, implies forever, and nothing is forever or for ethereal subjects' sake okay. The pain is so bad. It has never been so bad before.

Chichen Itza

The first of the seven wonders of the world that I visit is not the Great Wall of China, but Chichin Itza. I have no complaints. It also occurs to me that if I had the opportunity to visit the Taj Mahal, the swallowing of pride to accept the offer would be extraordinarily painful and ordinarily impossible. Today, it is impossible, and I think its a good time to give John Green and David Levithan their appropriate credits for keeping me from having a mental breakdown. The approximately 8 hours spent on the bus was a convenient, if not forced time of rest, reflection, and a deep squirming to be as physically far as possible from people and family in general. As per usual, reflection turned into the following...

I had long thought that I was a mild enough person to be able to forgive anyone. When I become angry with my parents, I shut up*. Sometimes, I coped by reading books about oppressed children, occasionally shedding a tear when all is resolved and the Korean daughter goes to Yale by her own choice and play violin because she loves music and her parents don't love money to death (Good Enough, Paula Yoon). When I wish I never had a sister, I make a couple insulting remarks about her existence and cruelly hope that she will not be as academically or athletically motivated as I have been. I am not, in fact, torn between wanting to kill myself and killing other people (will grayson, David Levithan). Getting over problems was not the big deal.

In a sense, this is like my s'okay post, where everything but one thing is okay. Everything is always okay. The problem is still the elephant because it crashes a lot of cocktail parties, and even when I hate small talk, I'd still like to enjoy a party, a cocktail, or two**. There is always a point when I'm in the middle of sleeping and waking that an incessant desire to curse overcomes my entire chest. No matter how hard I work out (INSANITY), I can only enlarge myself so much; there is only so much room I can make for all of the "fuck you"s that I can't say***. Also it felt strangely difficult to finally type that, so I imagine that verbally expressing such a phrase would be either immensely relieving or evil-inducing. I guess I can't have it both ways.

I don't think anyone really sees how undiminished and overbearing this anger has been since the day I missed two vocabulary questions on the PSATs, but I am still, still, undoubtedly seething and, on the long and  unusually straight roads of Cancun, lamenting that I will be the one who gives myself away, and never the other way around.

It is possible to isolate this stage of grief as the point where I project how much I hate myself onto someone else, but if this is true, I can assure you that it doesn't feel any better than anything. In some ways, its worse, because there will probably never be a time or place where I can kill someone without being kicked off of some academic team, and I am helpless to do anything else moral or self-respecting. Sometimes, I wonder if its worth my self-respect, and then I realize it always is. But its noteworthy that I have never considered hurting myself (and consequently, I would assume, select others) more.

On a brighter and literally warmer note, the run has saved me once again. Run to live, live to run.

* “Also, I feel that crying is almost--like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever-- totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 
1.Don't care too much. 
2. Shut up. 
Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.” 
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

**“NO. No no no. I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It's so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it's the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!” 
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

***“i will admit there's a certain degree of giving a fuck that goes into not giving a fuck. by saying you don't care if the world falls apart, in some small way you're saying you want it to stay together, on your terms.” 
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Oh, and Chichen Itza? Absolutely astounding. The math, physics, astronomy, power, education, observation, everything, everything behind its building and civilization was beyond my understanding. This occasion was one of the first times I appreciated the minute knowledge graced upon me by AP World. The enormity of these people (but not height-wise) made them real, and for once, I had some remnant of appreciation for the foundation of the Americas. The Mayans were truly what the world deemed to be great.

Luxe

There has not been a day this year in which I have felt more uncomfortable and sickened than today. But then again, today is January 2.

Family vacations have always been an excuse to exchange a couple thousand dollars for the most tense and stressful days of the year, and by its own nature, stir a previously unfounded anger towards the waste of school breaks on stretches of complete and utter sloth. Food is presented by the platter and bucket, travel is executed with footrests and please and thank yous. I encourage manners, but travelling for the sake of travelling is taking it too far.

Normally, I would not and should not complain that I'm crossing international borders whilst being safely exposed to the world's cultures and traditions, all expenses paid by my parents who have worked very hard for the salaries that they've made and used to pay for this trip. There are many people who will never in their lives be able to travel beyond a few states; there are many people who would cherish even one evening buffet through which we casually passed and ate because it was the only option that didn't require walking out of the hotel. 1225 pesos, 99.8 american dollars.

But see, I don't care about money, and I will hate myself (more so than usual) when I do. I am not really thankful that I can experience these luxuries every year, whether it is in Mexico, China, Japan, anywhere. Luxury doesn't do anything but spoil people who aren't careful, and no one is careful. This hotel reeks of drunken gratification and I reek of sleep... because in my own fit of dissatisfaction, I have found escape in the occasional strawberry and long doses of unconsciousness.

So here I am, more than slightly angry at the fortune my family has made, feeling the sauces and cheeses of Mexico slowly crawling down my stomach. Today was not seized.

Out.

Its good to get out again.
It took six hours of slowly overheating in a room of farts, poo, bad music, and barking, but finally, finally, some weight was lifted from this satchel of grey area in the back of my head.  Its not to say that anything is less stressful, besides friendships, which actually, I think I promised with not one, but two fingers, to be more committed, but if anything, someone gets it. Someone knows. Someone can be here when no one else is.

Although I was barely conscious for any single sermon given during Grace, mostly because I have certain reservations about speakers who script their casual and formal speech, the one session that was mentioned frequently during testimonials was that of Job, the man who grieved and suffered despite his innocence. For all the arguments and convincing his friends tried to employ, the most precious comfort they gave Job was 7 days of silence, simply out of respect for his mourning (although I think there were times they just didn't know what to say). And so it is silence, now, that brings me the most expansive peace. God is so good. I am so in debt.