Okay, I'm writing again, I think.
I thought it would take a lot more alcohol to get me to feel this verbally expressive about feelings again. It turns out, it just takes a lot of shit to happen, and finally, finally getting a break from it all in the first instance of personal air conditioning I've experienced in the past year. Also, I read amany random journal I brought to college last year, with things from more than two years ago. How things change in that time... how many boys can be captured............................ just kidding.
This is probably not going to beautiful. Maybe only on principle.
Let's start with right now. I think I'm the CEO of a company of which I don't want to be the CEO. I signed something that says I have shares or something, but I really only care about making stuff. This summer started with four to eight hours of pure, fanatical drawing, every single night. If it weren't for showing up to my internship with two hours of sleep every morning, it would have been amazing. But... that's what I want to do - make stupid looking animations, draw hands, put shapes together on Photoshop. Spending almost the entirety of May obsessively trying to understand the components of the lower legs has 1) let me think, a lot, about how much I liked doing it 2) gotten me feeling regret... real regret, for wasting time on math and food and people who might not matter.
I've been to a lot of meetings and have done a couple pitches, but man, if that's what CEOs do, I'm out before next year. People in the incubator have been really nice about the rise of this mess of a 19 year old taking over for her overqualified 29 year old friend going off to work his real, important job, and for all of the initiative and resources given to me, I'm thankful. But I hate it. We might be pushing the frontiers of university networking, and it might be riding the technological pivot of the education industry, and its very beautiful, but I don't really care...... my mission is somewhere else
People keep telling me that I'm going to regret it if I give up an opportunity like this, especially to be able to learn about this crazy mess of startup business "when I'm young".
Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm just stupid through and through.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
???
We call it by different names.
Boredom. Depression. Loneliness. Insanity. Fatigue. Not to make any of these clinically inferior or equal to the others, but colloquially, this is what we call it.
It's not that I miss home - I do, but only as much as the average person. I miss real Chinese food, having a room and bed to myself, conservative-Asian heating, sleeping and waking without dramatic changes in my body temperature.
It's not that college sucks. Despite Cornell's atrocious administration and pricing, there's an unlimited supply of eggs and vegetables and the best ice cream in America. I can greet the badminton graduate students outside of the club. Grades aren't perfect, but at least above average. The plantations spread beneath us at sunset; the gym is a 3 minute walk away. Onion petals, Tumblr, Youtube, Food Network, laundry, apples, comics, supplies - I have all of it..
It's not that I lack deep and real love from friends and family. It's not that I don't have a soulmate, or a mom and dad who care with everything they have plus their salaries. It's not that I can't pull up Messenger and immediately get a dinner with someone on campus or catch up with someone back home.
It's not that I'm unemployed. I tutor for a higher pay than you'd think parents would give in pursuit of the perfect SAT. I draw 12 to 15 hours per week... as a job. I write dumb shit once in a while and use that money to get anything and everything I want and need at Target.
It's not that my roommate is intolerable. In fact, she lets me eat anything she buys, sometimes with great amusement of the passion with which I do so...
I'm not sure what it is, but it makes me seize up and panic and cry. It makes me become intensely bored with nearly everyone I meet. It makes me neglect conversations, eat alone, and walk to class only to fall dead asleep in ten minutes. It makes me hate the signs that say "Caution: No Winter Maintenance" and stop assuming the best in anyone. Everything seems a little bit stupid, a little bit shallow, overhyped. As if I'm not, or something.
How can I express this without sounding/being arrogant? Sometimes I think that the most self-aware and "intelligent" people are the saddest. This is obviously not an original thought, but it occurs to me often. I don't really want to call myself one of these people, but for the sake of expressing what I want to say, let's assume I'm "in touch," okay? I like to think that Satan sees what kind of powerhouses we would be if we weren't so incapacitated by the world.
Maybe.
Boredom. Depression. Loneliness. Insanity. Fatigue. Not to make any of these clinically inferior or equal to the others, but colloquially, this is what we call it.
It's not that I miss home - I do, but only as much as the average person. I miss real Chinese food, having a room and bed to myself, conservative-Asian heating, sleeping and waking without dramatic changes in my body temperature.
It's not that college sucks. Despite Cornell's atrocious administration and pricing, there's an unlimited supply of eggs and vegetables and the best ice cream in America. I can greet the badminton graduate students outside of the club. Grades aren't perfect, but at least above average. The plantations spread beneath us at sunset; the gym is a 3 minute walk away. Onion petals, Tumblr, Youtube, Food Network, laundry, apples, comics, supplies - I have all of it..
It's not that I lack deep and real love from friends and family. It's not that I don't have a soulmate, or a mom and dad who care with everything they have plus their salaries. It's not that I can't pull up Messenger and immediately get a dinner with someone on campus or catch up with someone back home.
It's not that I'm unemployed. I tutor for a higher pay than you'd think parents would give in pursuit of the perfect SAT. I draw 12 to 15 hours per week... as a job. I write dumb shit once in a while and use that money to get anything and everything I want and need at Target.
It's not that my roommate is intolerable. In fact, she lets me eat anything she buys, sometimes with great amusement of the passion with which I do so...
I'm not sure what it is, but it makes me seize up and panic and cry. It makes me become intensely bored with nearly everyone I meet. It makes me neglect conversations, eat alone, and walk to class only to fall dead asleep in ten minutes. It makes me hate the signs that say "Caution: No Winter Maintenance" and stop assuming the best in anyone. Everything seems a little bit stupid, a little bit shallow, overhyped. As if I'm not, or something.
How can I express this without sounding/being arrogant? Sometimes I think that the most self-aware and "intelligent" people are the saddest. This is obviously not an original thought, but it occurs to me often. I don't really want to call myself one of these people, but for the sake of expressing what I want to say, let's assume I'm "in touch," okay? I like to think that Satan sees what kind of powerhouses we would be if we weren't so incapacitated by the world.
Maybe.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Hallucinations
One always finds one's burdens again - that's funny, right, because everyone here is completely caught up in school, in housing, in a web of semantics, and I'm sitting here, high on the communal Halloween candy, half asleep, half delirious.
In small group, their thorns are prelims and roses are prelims; every bud is about going to sleep. They ask questions to which they already know the answer - they talk to hear their own voice. But its not annoying. All I hear is the rhapsody outside the Donlon lounge and try desperately not to burst into uncontrollable, maniacal laughter.
Because its unimaginable, the pain and utter hopelessness that I feel for a couple hours every day. Because these fruit snacks and kimchi and carton of eggs can do nothing but send me on a quest for muffins and pineapple-topped bread cakes, and all I have left is another 60 to 90 minutes in the gym, fighting utter exhaustion. And yet nothing can touch me. I feel like Hyperbole and a Half, completely unfeeling, stuck in the world, but also the opposite of her, like the Oatmeal on magical grapey beverages - transcendent.
It's wild, because just as the shooting stars and precipitation patterns and freshman wriitng seminar books validate us (or is it the other way around for the books...), so there are the limitations that stop me dead. When I'm not supposed to be outside, I hallucinate. When I walk to class, I can hear bells playing I Lift My Hands. One moment I'm on the men's level of playing badminton, the next, I lose all mobility in my wrist.
But it all feels normal - all of it; every facet of this spiritual debacle. Everything is meant to be, the dropped jean sizes but the very same panic, the abundance of freedom and the resulting excess tortillas and bo burgers; the utter fatigue, the impossible discussions. Everything, everything, is in place. Its a war but one with a victor already decided.
They can tell. They can all tell. From all the small group leaders, the rest of the small group, the friends, the roommates, the acquaintences, the families... the friends, from Berkeley to UCSD to Harvard to UTA. Its insane, and more real than anything can ever be.
In small group, their thorns are prelims and roses are prelims; every bud is about going to sleep. They ask questions to which they already know the answer - they talk to hear their own voice. But its not annoying. All I hear is the rhapsody outside the Donlon lounge and try desperately not to burst into uncontrollable, maniacal laughter.
Because its unimaginable, the pain and utter hopelessness that I feel for a couple hours every day. Because these fruit snacks and kimchi and carton of eggs can do nothing but send me on a quest for muffins and pineapple-topped bread cakes, and all I have left is another 60 to 90 minutes in the gym, fighting utter exhaustion. And yet nothing can touch me. I feel like Hyperbole and a Half, completely unfeeling, stuck in the world, but also the opposite of her, like the Oatmeal on magical grapey beverages - transcendent.
It's wild, because just as the shooting stars and precipitation patterns and freshman wriitng seminar books validate us (or is it the other way around for the books...), so there are the limitations that stop me dead. When I'm not supposed to be outside, I hallucinate. When I walk to class, I can hear bells playing I Lift My Hands. One moment I'm on the men's level of playing badminton, the next, I lose all mobility in my wrist.
But it all feels normal - all of it; every facet of this spiritual debacle. Everything is meant to be, the dropped jean sizes but the very same panic, the abundance of freedom and the resulting excess tortillas and bo burgers; the utter fatigue, the impossible discussions. Everything, everything, is in place. Its a war but one with a victor already decided.
They can tell. They can all tell. From all the small group leaders, the rest of the small group, the friends, the roommates, the acquaintences, the families... the friends, from Berkeley to UCSD to Harvard to UTA. Its insane, and more real than anything can ever be.
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