Phew, that Nutang outage had me worried for a sec. I'm so glad it's back up! Although the outage did remind me that I really need to find a way to backup all my posts... this is over ten years of my life on this blog. That's like 40% of my lifetime! Seeing as I am a data hoarder and all, I get pretty anxious about the prospect of losing all that.

Second week of classes is going okay so far. The only class I'm really that into is my culture class, in which I had a surprising amount to say on Monday... With my other classes I've rarely felt that engaged, so I end up just sitting silently and sneakily checking Facebook on my tablet every once in awhile or doodling in the margins of my notes.

On Saturday I walked over to my therapist's office, but I forgot that we didn't actually have an appointment, so I just wandered around for a few hours and ended up walking 11 miles unintentionally. It was a nice walk, though, and it didn't rain on me. I only got one blister from it, and no real lasting soreness otherwise. Also, my landlady drove by me on my way back and gave me a ride to the house! That was really awesome and so very appreciated, because while I think I only had maybe half an hour left to walk, my feet hurt a lot at that point, haha.

Sunday I hung out with A. for a few hours, and we walked around and talked. I got a stupidly big root beer float that was way more than I wanted or needed, and probably worth 70% of my calories for the day. >_> It came with two gigantic scoops of ice cream in a cup and a bottle of root beer, and the ice cream didn't leave enough room for the whole bottle of soda. By the time I had managed to drink enough that I could empty the bottle into the cup, I was pretty much full, so the rest of it was a struggle. A. was... uh... "encouraging"... by which I mean he kept telling me that I could finish it... and then joking about me getting another one. -__- He also drove us to the area he lives in, and we walked around there a little. I asked him if he ever had the urge to just randomly kick things or destroy them, and he said "yeah, but I don't tell people" because he wants to maintain a semblance of normalcy or something. For some reason I had a lot of urges to just act kinda crazy and chaotic (not that I gave in to those urges) and I kept telling him about them, and he was like "I think you're secretly 4," haha.

I've been playing a lot of incremental games over the past few days. Right now I'm playing one called Critter Mound that... well, it has almost no graphics whatsoever and kinda just looks like a spreadsheet with a loading bar for the most part, but for some reason it's interesting to play? Sadly, it looks like the developer died last year, so it's not being updated anymore. I'm not totally sure what I like about incremental games-- maybe they satisfy some kind of need for multitasking I have, or I can feel like I'm "doing" something with my idle time because I'm making progress in a game.

The past week has been kind of... uh....... interesting at this house I'm living in. Last Tuesday this new guy moved into the house, and from the very beginning, he was causing problems... I have to share a bathroom with him, and he would pee pretty much everywhere but the toilet bowl. Like, it was on the seat, on the floor... really gross, honestly. By the third day I was pretty fed up with wiping up that nastiness and talked to my landlady about it, and she said that she had already talked to him on the first day because he left "a big bowl of shit" in the bathroom. This kid is like 18 or something, barely speaks English, and dropped out of high school in Taiwan (he's trying to do community college here now). I'm under the impression that my landlady only let him move in here as a favor to a friend, but she's vented to me like four times already about him, and he's only been here a week now. She's super nice and was trying to help him register for classes and learn how things in the U.S. work, but he was never grateful for her help, was demanding ("I'm hungry, I want to go downtown to eat"), and just... didn't listen to her. He has also been up really late (like 2AM and later) talking loudly in his room, and the walls are thin here, so he woke both of us up more than once. A little noise is very audible. A few days ago my landlady was telling me that if things didn't improve, she was going to ask him to leave, and well... things didn't improve. The final straw for her was yesterday night, when she was working on some important documents and was in her room, with her phone turned off. He had forgotten his keys, so when he came back to he house, he tried to message her but didn't get a response... so instead of, say, waiting awhile or coming back later, he started banging on things outside the house with a hammer until she came outside and let him in. Because, you know, that's definitely what sane people with manners do. So yeah, she's kicking him out, because she's had enough. She tried to help him, but this kid is so unappreciative, inconsiderate, and incompetent that it's too much for him. I guess I'll be getting a new housemate soon!

This has a little bit of a country feel to it, but I've been listening to this song a lot today:

"Tears for Affairs" by Camera Obscura.

Shedding tears for affairs
I'm a stupid little thing
I can tell you this for nothing
You won't win

You had to try
-(I didn't want to)
Look me in the eye
-(I found it hard to)
Whisper don't cry
-(I had to whisper goodbye)

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I went to see a movie with my friend A. tonight because a local theatre was having a cheap movie night. After the movie ended, we walked outside, and he told me that he had been on acid the entire time and that it made for a very interesting experience. o_O I asked him what it was like and he just paused for awhile, then said "Yeah." So... I have no idea what he was seeing or experiencing. I was kind of concerned because he drove himself home while he was still... high? Under the influence of it? But he said he had only taken one and he would be fine... And he did text me when he got back, so I guess... he was fine... Kind of wondering if I should have checked first to make sure he was okay to drive, though. I feel irresponsible. I wouldn't let someone drive if they had been drinking, but I don't know how acid works or what it does to people, so I just let it go. He didn't seem to have any issues with coordination, but I'm not sure what his cognitive functioning was like, and that's still pretty important while driving... Ugh.

Well... the movie was enjoyable, at least. I've actually seen it before, but it had been awhile, so I forgot a lot of the plot. It was his first time watching it, and I think he had a good time. Usually I recommend it to people if they ask about movies I like, so I feel like it's pretty solid. I forgot that there were sex scenes in it, though, so that felt... really awkward for me. There was a good two feet of space between me and my friend though (the theatre had benches instead of normal seats), and I never get those "secretly attracted" vibes from him, so I didn't feel worried on top of feeling awkward.

This quarter, so far, has been somewhat better than the past two. Although it always starts off okay... I guess I'll have to see how it goes down the line. I'd still rather be home, despite finding some things to like about the area I live in now. That theatre I went to today was pretty cool, and I wish we had some like that back home.

A few fun things aren't really enough to motivate me to stay here, though. I guess I live in my head enough that I don't really feel like I need to go out searching for adventure and excitement. Sometimes I feel like that makes me look boring, but people tend to get the idea that I am interesting and just don't want to talk about it. When I'm asked "What do you do?", I just... don't have a lot to say? I mean, it's such a boring question to me, even though it makes total sense in a way. Theoretically, how a person spends their time should be indicative of their particular personality... right? So maybe it's just the summarizing that's the problem. Saying "I spend a lot of time on the internet" sounds almost intolerably boring. Like, what do you do on the internet? You could be looking at ancap memes for hours (just throwing that out there as an example because I discovered those yesterday and had a good derisive laugh at anarcho-capitalists for about thirty seconds before moving on). I'm not gonna pretend I haven't looked at memes for hours before, but I also won't pretend it's not a huge waste of time and totally unproductive. If I'm spending a lot of time on mindless entertainment it's usually because I'm not doing so hot emotionally or I'm mentally exhausted or something. Both are problematic situations!

No idea where I'm going with any of this. Sometimes I start these entries with a purpose in mind, and then I take like two hours to finish writing because I'm doing five other things at the same time, and by the time I'm done, the entry is... in a pretty different place than where it started. I kind of just write with minimal planning or editing and save my wordvomit here.

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I guess I gotta go back there
I guess there never was any other answer
And as the freeway hums
The cars go by
And headlights roll across the sky
I'm many miles away
And I can see them spinning through the dark

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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

Comment! (0) | Recommend!

Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

If you know it, enter it; or, ask me for it.

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I was looking through Brain Pickings today and ended up on this page:

Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Maximize Our Aliveness

Just thinking about this excerpt from the poem posted there:

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

In a sense, darkness does help me get going. While I primarily move towards self-improvement, that was spurred by initial feelings of deficiency. Remembering the worst times in my life inspires me to cherish the good times I have and maintain my life enough to avoid anything like the worst times again. If I let the darkness of my life fade, I don't think I'd have as much motivation to live fully.

---

I saw Get Out with Esther today at the theatre. It was pretty good, but we both wondered about a certain plot point and never resolved the issue we had with it. I was glad for the conversation we had, although I was pretty sleep-deprived since the movie was a bit before 11 AM and I didn't even come home until like 3:30 AM. We talked about racial politics and financial investments and relationships and how it feels when people objectify you with their pity. Later in the day she came to my house for dinner, and we made spaghetti and kofta together, then I showed her my ex keepsakes and some pictures of two of the things I've loved most in my life. There was some sadness involved in knowing that I'll never have those things again, but it was bearable. Still, I can't help but wonder if I'll ever smile again like I did back then.

I have hopes that the hard times won't last forever, but I have an unwavering uncertainty that good times will come back. I don't mean that I think I'll never be happy again, but I always wonder if my most realistic option is a life of minimized pain, rather than maximized happiness. It often feels like I have so much more to lose than I have to gain, and I feel very risk-averse as a result. How much of my life is structured around this idea?

It's almost 3 AM now, and I know staying up this late isn't a great idea, but this time of night always makes me really contemplative, and then I just want to write or mull over my thoughts and memories.

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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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