06:33pm 31/12/2009   i will not kill myself because someone needs to look after my cat, at least for the next few days until my roommates come back. but here's a game for you: drink every time you don't know why you're alive. maudlin emo melodramatic bullshit. really, this is all my own fault.        Post       10:32pm 02/10/2009   it's been a while since i've written in here, mostly because i've been trying to avoid whining. but every once in a while i have a day that possesses great potential for the evening and so i don't do much during the day and then the plan for the evening falls through and i do nothing. and the evolution of feeling is angry and then sad and then nothing. i go inside myself from having been alone all day and then even when human contact returns i've gone too far in to come out that night. i've done nothing and there's no real time left to begin anything. and i kick myself for giving so much time over to the expectation of what didn't happen, which is mostly an extension of giving so much of myself over to another person. i don't want to get stupid again. i don't want to lose myself over someone who doesn't realize it or doesn't want it. i don't want to be as stupid as i once was. but sometimes i think that being with someone makes me stupid, or i let myself become stupid. and i thought that i had grown up beyond that stage of my life. sometimes i wish that i could go far enough in so i don't care whether i can get out or not.        Post       11:29pm 24/05/2009   it might be creepy, but i love hearing other people's heartbeats. maybe it's the whole womb instinct. but that is really quite close to heaven for me, my head on someone else's chest, warm, held, and hearing/feeling the heartbeat against my ear. a natural feeling i guess, of safety. i don't get very many opportunities for it, so it's always nice when one comes up, whatever happens afterward.        Post       08:41pm 15/05/2009   last day at work today. last final this morning. hopefully last night semi-sleepless over my academic fate. cleared out my meal plan and received $11.85. in process of cleaning my room. parents should land in Sea-Tac in 18 minutes. no idea what the schedule for this weekend is, really. english dept reception tomorrow morning. graduation sunday. move to seattle monday. but nothing feels particularly real. it doesn't feel like my last day of school. i'm scared of a future that i can't bail out of if things go wrong. back to packing.        Post       11:19pm 25/04/2009   book-it theatre, please just let me know that i'm rejected from your internship program. you know i am, i know i am, and all of the people who give me pitying looks and tell me to be optimistic know that i am. so let's just get this shit over with, yeah? lately i've been crying a lot. maybe i'm tired, or forgetting to take my prozac is finally catching up. but feeling empty and like i have no real future and what little things i've done that i was proud of were really pitiful and people were mainly trying to be nice when they told me it was good. job interview tomorrow with barnes and noble. they will probably reject me as well, but at least they've gotten back to me, as opposed to all of the other job applications i've filled out that have vanished into the abyss. i know, i know that's how it works, especially in this bad economy. i just want my rejection up front so i don't make things worse by hoping and then being gently reminded that i fail. time to go be nobody and nowhere.        Read 2 - Post       11:50pm 09/04/2009   'the house of flying daggers' is not, plot-wise, a very good movie. i know this. but still sometimes i want to be in love like that.        Post       11:13pm 07/04/2009   keep dreaming inconveniently. some people/things should stay forgotten but instead pop up in my subconscious and then hang around like ghosts for the rest of the day. i don't want to remember things that i can't do anything about.        Post       09:16pm 07/03/2009   i don't really know what i'm doing anymore. reread ataraxia for the first time since it was performed. good god i need to cut. i don't feel like i have a purpose.        Read 4 - Post   state of the union    11:31pm 13/02/2009   half an hour until valentine's day. had been meaning to write something about this for a while; timing is fortuitous enough so why not now. 2008 was more or less the year of me screwing up relationships-wise, which ended up just hurting other people and myself for the most part, and to be honest it really turned me off the whole relationships thing entirely. this probably isn't forever - more's the pity - but for now i don't feel there's any point in trying to pursue a romantic relationship with anybody, because as past experience has proven it's just more trouble than it's worth. for one thing, i just get pretty damn stupid and weak and overly trusting/paranoid; a lot of the times once whatever has happened has crashed and burned, the hardest part to get over is my own behavior. there are people i'm attracted to, sure, and maybe even cautiously flirt with, and i do get lonely and want someone. but even then it's more an abstract than any specific person, just because once a specific person gets involved things tend to go to shit. this is really coming off as pretty cynical and bitter, which isn't what i intended. it's mostly that, at this point in my life, what would the point of a romantic relationship be? i hopefully won't be spending too much time in ks after i graduate, and i don't know how much i'll see most of the people i know here after i graduate, even if we stay in roughly the same area. i've also become a terrible hermit, have i mentioned that? this semester i've gone out barely at all, and the reason for that seems to be mostly the same as well - more effort than it's worth. mostly i want to sleep or play video games (which will hopefully come to an end once i beat okami again) or work on peter pan, because it's not school work but it makes me feel like i'm actually doing something, and it's something that i mostly like doing. my housemates hang out at home a lot, so i can still be somewhat social... i just don't emerge from that bubble much anymore, because it takes effort and i still tend to get kind of uncomfortable in a lot of social situations. i don't know entirely what's happening to me, or if anything's happening to me at all, or if it's for the worse or better. probably for the better romantically, the worse socially. the world doesn't need more idiots falling in love and damaging other people and themselves in the process. will sleep soon. that will be good. i've been loving sleep more and more because i don't have to try to be anyone in particular when i'm sleeping. sometimes it's good to be quiet and alone.        Read 1 - Post       11:06am 28/01/2009   very tired. slept but slept badly, so woke up feeling stressed already. not a good way to start the day. might have mentioned before that i'm dramaturging a production of 'peter pan' directed by one of my best friends. we're working from an adaptation that takes the 'original' play by J.M. Barrie (he kept changing it, hence the quotes around original) and the novelization he wrote of it a few years later; what i want to do is add a bit more from the novel. we have permission from the children's hospital Barrie granted the rights of the original play to to add on more stuff from the novel; what we don't have is permission from the authors of the adapted script that we are further adapting (maybe). i haven't asked yet, mostly because i don't yet know how to contact them, but i'm doubting that we'd actually get it. which pretty much means either we just use the script we have, which vastly oversimplifies the story, or we write a new adaptation of the original. which is definitely doable, but we have already paid for all of the copies of the other script and gotten production rights etc etc. i probably just need to take a step back from this and relax. it's up to the director what we do, not me, and i have to make sure i keep that in mind even when he pretty much gives me free reign over what we do. right now i just want to sleep. i will be able to squeeze in a nap in the hour between the end of this shift of work and my next class, which will be followed by another 3 hours of work. oh joy. things are already stressful.        Read 1 - Post       12:19am 21/01/2009   yesterday was inauguration day, which was nice and inspiring and empowering blah blah blah. parts of it really were. but i can't help being suspicious. obama is just a human being, after all; but somehow in the course of the campaign, he became a symbol as well of hope and change and so on... all sorts of abstract nouns that nobody really bothered to define. which i understand for the sake of rhetoric, but how is that actually going to be converted into policy? i'm not anti-obama by any means, i'm just very wary of how much symbolic baggage he's now carrying, and which i am not sure as the actual president he will be able to continue carrying without fail. not out of any particular flaw of his own, but just the fact that nobody can live up to those expectations. on the colbert report, the interviewee repeated a catchy-sounding concept of 'choosing our own history.' which is all very well, up to a point. given how incredibly tied up the american political economy is with the rest of the world, however, i think we first have to acknowledge the history that is actually there, in both our relationships with other nations and the history of those nations themselves, to be able to function. and more has to be done than the blanket statement 'not everything we've done has been the greatest.' the world is going to change on specifics. i guess what really unsettles me is the sense of self-congratulation that seems to be going around, the unspoken attitude, 'we elected obama, we've done our part for 'change' ' (whatever that means). people keep going on about how his election represents 'how anyone can become president' and 'american finally got enough past race to elect a black man,' embracing these generalizations rather than looking at the specifics. obama is an extraordinarily skilled speaker and politician, having worked his way through many levels of high education; he's not just 'anyone.' if anything, george w bush was greater proof of 'anyone can become president' simply because he was so very mediocre in his credentials; 'anyone can become president, given the right connections and sufficient funds.' and then there's the racial issue: obama's not black, he's biracial. if we are going to continue labeling people due to their genetic heritage, we might as well be completely accurate about it, or finally admit that the word 'black' in regards to race really applies neither to genealogy nor culture; it's a myth, just like 'whiteness,' that we continue to allow to influence our lives. as for the self-satisfaction... the majority of americans who voted just fulfilled their civic responsibility by choosing the better candidate of the two. that's what voting essentially is for. doing it correctly isn't an exceptional virtue; it's a necessity for a democratic society. i'm scared too many people will think that they are off the hook for trying to fix the problems our nation faces because they 'voted for change,' and as such whatever improvements obama might attempt will fail because the public who voted for change will end up not actually wanting to do the work of changing. and then of course obama as the symbol will get the blame. enough of this, i guess. it's a historic occasion, and for once the good kind of historic. i just hope it doesn't become fodder for a nationalistic circle-jerk, as we celebrate what we have not yet done.        Read 3 - Post       10:33pm 10/01/2009   tired. saw 'slumdog millionaire' today and it's very good. brought back a lot of being in india, which basically meant that by the end of it i was completely exhausted. my sister said, 'i could barely handle two hours of that, how did you handle 4 months?' and i couldn't really answer her. the entire experience is at once so close and so far away, it feels like part of it happened to someone else entirely. natalie asked me last night what my most definitive moment in college was, and i chose watching the sun rise over tiger hill in darjeeling, simply because that was the furthest i had ever been from anything i had ever done before, geography-wise, and a-lot-of-other-stuff-wise too. in some ways i feel so far away from that moment that it's almost like i've gone half-circle in that orbit - i've moved so far away from that point in my life where i can look at myself in it now face-to-face, almost completely objectively. coming out of the movie theater was culture shock all over again in a way. being completely befuddled at all the empty space that's out here, about what a luxury it is and how no one ever thinks of it that way. the luxury of a nation being so new that there is space in it. there is still in some places a clear morality that has not been compromised by the weight of people living there for a thousand years. and it is so luxurious that we do not even consider at what cost we attained this newness, which was basically by eliminating or ignoring who was there before. went home and slept afterwards and dreamed of india even more. then watched 'gosford park' with my parents. i had seen it before, years ago, and forgotten how fucking hot clive owen is. there's one really sudden passionate kiss in it between him and mary, the protagonist, and after it he half-laughs, catching his breath, and says, 'ooh. i've been wanting to do that since i set eyes on you.' i know my life is probably better without things like that happening to me recently. i'm obviously not responsible enough to deal with them, as previous experience has proven. but even more than physical intimacy i miss that honesty, that spontaneity, someone suddenly opening themselves to you and you to them. it doesn't last, i know, even if it's a hard ghost to shake. nevertheless... it's stuck in my head, the line 'there are dreams that cannot be there are storms we cannot weather' but still everything goes on.        Post       11:45pm 08/01/2009   every once in a while i get into certain moods in which every song that i hear manages to say absolutely everything about my life. or i listen to it and think about how it could be used as a soundtrack to my experience - a montage out of a romantic comedy, the bit where the hero/heroine thinks everything's gone to shit and is reflecting, just before something shifts and mr. darcy comes, the asshole. or the getting-over-it montage where the protagonist realizes their own self-sufficiency. or the music for opening credits, or closing credits. a little alcohol, a little weed, a little loneliness and night, that's all it takes. everything feels ... meaningful, i guess. so heartbreakingly apropos. a few of them that played when i was last there: owen mccarthy - stargazers are blind the national - patterns of fairytales glen hansard - once zero 7 - end theme (seriously, this is good montage music) lately i've been feeling like everything i've written has been so contrived, and i don't know how to get out of that. i have a stattracker thing on my blogger account that tells me how many hits i get, and i guess that's made me a little self-conscious. might have to go back to paper for a bit. learning how to write truly for no audience. also in a bit of a weird mood because over the past 6 months or so i've gained a little weight. 5 pounds about, which puts me around 111, which is perfectly normal for my height and body type and probably healthier than the level i was at earlier, but no matter how petty it's a little disconcerting. part of me liked being a little underweight, i guess, even though i know it's stupid. so many girls i know worry about their weight and body shape when i honestly think that they look great, and i can see how self-destructive and unwarranted that worry can be. our culture seriously has issues with numbers. but it's a pattern i fall into nevertheless. about one week left here. i don't know for sure when i'll be back here again, although every time i think/say that i feel like i'm in some way setting myself up for disappointment, or at the very least framing the situation as a matter of pride. i guess i'm just scared that if i move all my shit back here i'll never get the nerve or energy up to leave again. part of that's probably escapism. there are unresolved issues here that i can ignore more easily when i'm away, mostly with my dad. god forbid i actually properly address them, much less resolve them. that's a part of myself that i don't understand very well and am very unwilling to articulate, even to myself. which means that it's even more important to my own state of mind that i face it eventually. but i don't know where even to begin. especially with myself. buh.        Post       02:53pm 28/12/2008   yo yo yo, i've been realizing that i don't use this journal too much anymore and i'm using my blogger account rather more frequently, so here's the link again: http://4futurereference.blogspot.com/. I'll probably pop back to this one for super personal stuff, but yeah. meep.        Read 2 - Post   remembering    08:32pm 23/12/2008   i wouldn't want to 'eternal sunshine' anything away. but sometimes i wish that memory was like g-mail. i could delete the things that are better off being not there, that distract me, that take up space. memory spam. went through my phone today and deleted old text messages so i wouldn't have a number floating in there as a temptation. but the problem with deleting is that i have to look at the messages first, at least snippets of them. so i have to be reminded about things fresh before i can get rid of it off of the phone's memory. i can't get a handle on time. i really can't. on how people change... on how i change. on how people say things that were true at the time and then they aren't anymore. how reality changes, but part of it stays, in the head at least. i'm all smeared over time and space. i need to collect - recollect/remember - what has been dismembered. i need to be present and in the present and not strung out over the past. i thought i had been better about doing that, but, well. some things pack more of a punch than anticipated.        Post       04:31pm 14/12/2008   it is snowing very thickly and surrounding everything, very quiet and very persistent, and it is growing dark outside. snow is very beautiful and wondrous and graceful up to a point and then past that point it sort of creeps me out, how delicately inexorable it is in accumulating. anyway first snowfall of the year in tacoma, so people are pretty excited, but now i am more or less trapped in my house. whoops.        Post   things to do    11:20am 10/12/2008   Finish play (12/12) - about 1/2 done with revision, still stuff to write that I have no drafts of Spanish final (12/15) - meh NA Lit final paper (12/16) - have research, need to organize it (i.e. make copies of everything because most books are irrevocably due 12/12) and actually write the damn thing Clean up house, pack shit up, fly home (12/17) - meh Spanish final paper (12/19) - I have a topic? uggggg. I know I can do this. I just have to actually do it.        Read 1 - Post       10:18am 01/12/2008   break was either too long or too short, it's hard to tell. either way i do not feel ready to go back to work and classes. heinously hormonal today, so i feel fat and bloated and tired and ready to cry and it's not even 10.30. breathe deep. it's ok. did a little yoga for two minutes before i left for work, and i forgot how much it can help. i just need to keep doing it throughout the day, and unfortunately taking a break from class to do bridge pose is not yet socially or academically acceptable. damn gina my cuticles are in terrible shape. the deadline for scripts for next semester's student theater festival is this friday, so i'm aiming for that to be a rough due date for the play that i'm writing to be finished, although i don't think it will be in good enough shape to actually submit by then. i just want to be very clean and very quiet, inside and out, like cold water. but somehow i can't get the focus.        Read 2 - Post       01:48am 25/11/2008   melancholy, for no particular reason. ok, that's a lie. for a particular reason. just not a good one. i'm very tired of the way things are.        Post       10:43pm 19/11/2008   very long, stressful day today. went to bed last night a little sniffly, woke up sick. that's never a good sign. went to spanish and was able to understand absolutely everything that was said and somehow couldn't speak a word of it. in part because we were talking about the difference between male homosexuality and femininity and i've started realizing what a complex and generally undefinable issue gender/sexuality is, and there was a lot that i wanted to say that i just couldn't find the words in spanish for, for some reason. somehow my speaking ability recently has just been going out the window. i'm good at reading and decent at writing, but still. gotta figure out how to talk again. then went and prepared for the class that i've been teaching for a few weeks now and worked up my energy for it and was even somewhat optimistic that we'd actually get shit done today, and the one boy in the class burst that bubble when i asked them to have something specifically ready for the next class period. something along the lines of 'if you're not grading me why should i do the work, you're making me hate you because you are asking me to put effort into this class even though you are not a professor.' which is a point. he paid tuition to be taught this class by a professor, as did i, and neither of us are getting that. but this situation is what it is, we might as well make the best of it and stop fucking bitching and making this harder on me than it already is. which is selfish, i know. but we're stuck with it and so might as well work with what we have. and then freaked out because fire inspections were today and we had to move the cat and then it turned out that it wasn't too much to worry about really but at that point i hadn't eaten more than half of a piece of toast and was sick and tired and felt like just curling up and crying and dropping out of school forever, so i took a nap instead and felt a little better emotionally. and then kitty snuggled with me which helped more. but oh world, i don't want to deal with you tomorrow.        Read 2 - Post

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