I remember when I was 18 and I was just soaking up this stuff like a sponge:

"Critical Thinking" from QualiaSoup.

In retrospect, I feel very lucky that I got into the stuff I did at that age. Things could have turned out a lot differently, and I could have developed in ways I'd consider less positive. That's not to say I haven't messed up in various ways, and I've certainly made a lot of mistakes, but I feel like I started off on a good path. Could've done much worse than getting into rationality and starting to think more critically about the world and myself. Reconsidering my own beliefs and thought processes was pretty key to trying to understand other people (and myself) better, and if I'd never questioned things, I think I'd be... well... less receptive to learning than I am now.

It also helps that I was close to people who challenged me and my worldviews. Kyle figured into that first, and then Max. And my fourth ex certainly challenged me a lot, though it wasn't always in ways I'd consider particularly nice. Still, even if they were hard criticisms to take, I do feel like I grew from them. Trying to be a more reasonable person takes a lot of admitting that you're wrong about things and seeking a more informed perspective, but I'm doing better with that than I used to...

Was thinking about writing a letter which I may or may not eventually send, but I definitely don't feel ready to send something like that yet, despite how long it's been. It would just be an explication of my changing understandings and interpretations of things, and I don't know that the recipient would really appreciate it or care.

---

Working with my group for school this past quarter has been probably the worst group experience of my academic career as an adult. I spent most of my afternoon feeling enraged at one of my group members for doing a terrible job of her part-- she wrote it in unintelligible run-on sentences with hideous formatting with bizarre random capitalization-- and having to hold back from just losing it and lashing out at her as she texted me dozens of times and emailed me repeatedly about edits to the paper. I feel better now, at least, but ugh, dealing with this level of incompetence and stupidity was making me just unreasonably angry.

I went out and ranted to my dad about this girl and he told me a story about an extremely incompetent guy he had to work with once, who was just mind-bogglingly bad at following directions. I feel like my dad is really funny, but it's hard to translate his humor into words because it relies so much on gestures and expressions/tone of voice. He likes to make videos of himself building projects, but I don't think we have a lot of videos of him just... talking and joking around. He makes the rest of my family laugh, though.

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Me: I wish I could Photoshop away my blemishes in real life.
Me: Isn't that just using makeup?
Me: Oh wait yeah I guess so.
Me: Eh that seems like a lot of effort.

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"Hey" by The Blow.

I can see that now
I did this to myself
Your hair blew around
It was trying to tell me something

From its privileged position so close to your brain
It could see all the things that you couldn't explain
It warned me your smile might get carried away
Starting games that your heart didn't know how to play

You leaned over me and the V of your cleavage whispered
"I believe that you can see you won't get what you want from me
"You won't get what you want from me
Hey, could this not be what you want?
I believe that you can see you won't get what you want from me
You won't get what you want from me
Hey, could this not be what you want for me?"

I can see that now
I did this to myself
I threw my love around
I barely noticed if you returned it
And as I leaned ever closer you leaned more away
All that you wouldn't give I thought I could just take
I said, "Baby please show me everything"
"All the parts I don't like I'm just not gonna see"

"I believe that you can see you won't get what you want from me
"You won't get what you want from me
Hey, could this not be what you want?
I believe that you can see you won't get what you want from me
You won't get what you want from me
Hey, could this not be what you want for me?"

I think it's a good thing that I didn't discover this song earlier than I did, or it might have been unbearable to listen to. Now there's just a distant twisting sharpness to it.

Today I'm thankful for the Wayback Machine. In 2010 I found a lot of things that impacted me in ways I don't know if I'll ever forget, and this was one of them:

Only the Lonely

I was looking for something else, and I found this performance artist's site full of grotesque masochistic projects. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I was appalled, disturbed, and fascinated. I couldn't understand or relate to it at all, but the strangeness of it took me out of myself and gave me something of a break from my own troubles at the time. I looked at this specific performance page a number of times, because for one it was one of the more tame performances, and also because there was something weirdly comforting about the song to me at the time. I'm not into art that seems like its primary goal is to shock, but I felt like this project has... a lot of meanings to be unraveled. It's shocking, but that's not its central purpose, that's more of a side effect of it. This seems like the kind of thing I would like discussing with someone who could approach it in a curious and nonjudgemental manner. I wonder if I could talk about that with A.? We're getting ice cream tomorrow, so I guess I could tell him about it.

On Reddit I found a social skills subreddit and from my brief glance around, I gathered that one of the common things people ask for help with is not being boring. I don't really know what it is like to be perceived as a boring person; perhaps erroneously, I've always assumed that boringness stems from holding back things that you might say, in which case you just need to be less inhibited, or having poor theory of mind and not understanding the level of detail that is appropriate to tell other people or how other people perceive what you're saying. I wonder if there's any research on the phenomenon of being boring? Just-- what is it, why does it happen, and so on. Maybe something to look into at another time.

Time keeps slipping away from me somehow, I feel like I blink and it's two, three hours later than I expected. :S I need to go to bed...

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It's not a happy song, but this makes me smile.

"What's That Perfume You Wear?" by Jens Lekman.

But she's gone forever
And however hard that might feel
At least it was real
If it could hurt like that

I guess just the rhythm and the beat and the energy of it make me feel good, despite the subject matter.

A. and I have been talking about more shows we could potentially go to! There are some things in May that look interesting, but that's kind of far off. There's also a late night movie showing at a theatre near me that I asked if he'd like to go to, and he said it looked fun, so we might do that after I get back from spring break. I like having someone to do fun things with. I guess that it helps that there are fun things to do here, haha. He just introduced me to a new band, and I like a handful of their songs, although apparently they're hated in Canada? I dunno.

I went to a focus group on campus today that was about the admissions experience and general school experiences, but it turned out that it was supposed to be for freshmen and they invited me by accident. I got free pizza out of it though, so no complaints.

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The show tonight was awesome! My friend A. went with me, and the show didn't start until like an hour after the doors opened, so we chatted for a bit beforehand. It was quiet enough that we didn't have to yell, so that was cool.

This girl I didn't know played before the main act, and her music was very slow and it was difficult to understand her singing. I felt so sleepy listening to her, and it seemed like it dragged on for so long, though I think she only did four or five songs.

There was a break between her set and the main act, so we chatted a little longer and made a few jokes about how we couldn't understand her singing. The only thing I could really make out was something like "I painted my house" and we speculated that maybe all her songs were just random strings of words.

When the main act started up I felt super excited, although he started off with songs I wasn't that familiar with. The first couple were kind of slow and acoustic and I was worried it was all going to be like that, but it picked up and he started doing songs with more of a beat and had backup musicians to provide more sounds than just acoustic guitar. It wasn't the kind of show where people go all crazy dancing, but there was definitely a lot of head-bobbing and that slight dancing where you alternate moving each of your shoulders back and forth while standing in place. The guy next to me got super into it, though, and was moving a lot within the tight confines of his little space bubble.

I felt really great during the set, the kind of enjoyment where you feel like your whole being is smiling. Really honestly just happy and excited. I kept wondering if my favorite song by this artist would be played, and was a bit disappointed when he ended without playing it... but then we all clapped and cheered and he came on for an encore and he played the song I was waiting for! So that was absolutely lovely. I actually jumped up and down out of glee. I think my friend was amused by it.

It was a fantastic live performance, not like those ones where they take a huge amount of liberty with the song and it sounds nothing close to the album version. I was slightly worried about how my friend would like it, because A. didn't know who the artist was before getting a ticket, and he apparently didn't look him up before coming to the show, haha. A. had a good time though, and he enjoyed the show, so I felt pleased about that.

---

I've been listening to a lot of songs by The Blow recently.

"Invisible" by The Blow.

And if you won't see me
Shouldn't that mean I am invisible?
Oh oh no
The whole world gets to watch as I go poof
Weird mouth and I'm unclothed and I slowly
Decompose

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Considering it's been 5+ years since I last talked to her, I had pretty much given up on ever talking to Casey again, but she messaged me on Facebook this morning, to my utter surprise. We caught up for a couple hours, which was nice. I had to leave to go to the comic con I got tickets for from school, though, so I'll have to message her another time. I wonder if I'm going to start having the dreams again...

The comic con was... crowded. It was so crowded. And I spent money I really shouldn't have and got a bunch of socks and some comic books. I don't mean those wispy little single issue ones though, I mean the heavy duty ones that are like dozens to hundreds of pages long. My shoulders hurt so much from the weight of my bags when I finally got back to my room! But I don't regret any of my purchases, at least. It's pretty rare for me to regret buying comics, unless they're single issues that aren't very good. When you're paying $4-5 for just a few pages that aren't even that enjoyable, it feels like so much more of a waste.

I walked through the exhibitor tables on two floors of the con before deciding I'd had enough and leaving. On my way back I bought myself a chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream and shredded coconut on top. I really like that combination for some reason. My favorite cupcake in San Jose was that kind, too. I did feel a little bad about buying it after spending so much at the con, especially since I don't like to "treat" myself if I don't feel like I have a good reason. It doesn't feel good to needlessly indulge. But... it was a good cupcake, haha. I was surprised that I actually liked the frosting a lot. Usually I prefer the cake and feel okay at best with the frosting, but there wasn't an overwhelming amount and it actually balanced the not-super-sweet cake pretty well.

Let's see... school was serving one of my favorite dinners they have (grilled swordfish with olive butter, "brothy beans", and roasted green beans) in the cafeteria tonight, so I ate there. The swordfish was kinda fatty, but mostly good, although there wasn't as much olive butter as I would have liked on it. I also had a chocolate cream filled cream puff, which in retrospect was a bad idea since I had a cupcake earlier, but... ah... too late now. I think I should probably exercise more or eat a bit less... I'm almost positive I've gained fat and I'm not happy about it.

---

Last night I had a pretty candid talk with a few of my classmates about some issues we have with one of the professors. That prof has been acting rather unprofessional and making us uncomfortable and we think she needs to take time off to deal with her own problems. I also opened up a little to one of my classmates about how it feels for me to be the only asian person in our cohort and how I am constantly aware of my minority status in relation to just about everyone else. I mentioned taking some time off this quarter and she said "I'll miss you," but later in the conversation she seemed like she had really thought about it and said "you know, I said I would miss you, but I don't even know you" and looked like she felt... troubled by it. This cohort has been pretty weird, everyone immediately acted like we were already close because we have to be together for two years, but I don't feel like we really know each other that well at all. I barely know anything about a lot of my classmates, and I haven't jumped on the "we're all such great buddies!" bandwagon because I don't feel comfortable acting that way when I honestly don't feel close to any of them.

Maybe I'm rationalizing this (since I have a long history of shyness), but I feel like certain formalities just don't fit with my values, so I don't observe them consistently. I do sometimes ask people how they're doing or how their weekend was, but it's often more out of a feeling of obligation than anything else, and if I'm not feeling particularly awkward that day I might just not ask, because well, I don't care how someone's weekend was if I don't know them and don't have a desire to get to know them. I feel like that sounds bad or unfriendly or something, but I just don't want to get to know everyone I come into contact with, and I don't want to spend energy talking to them when I don't care. It feels dishonest. And like, yeah, I know there's that whole "WHOOOAAA, YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT EVERYONE????" thing which for some reason is shocking to acknowledge, but I guess I feel like it's better to just be genuine in my interactions when I can get away with it. And maybe I've always felt this way. Like I didn't see the point in writing thank you notes for gifts I straight up didn't like or didn't want when I was a kid. That one was resolved more by learning to appreciate things and realizing what a difference it made to write someone a thank you card vs. just say thank you to them in person, but still. I know we have these formalities for a reason, and I can understand that there's a value and purpose in phatic communication, but I guess I don't care enough about engaging in the proper social signalling to bother with some things. Or maybe I'm just lazy and rude, who knows.

Really didn't mean to write so much about this, whoops.

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