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.