Errrrrrr hi, this space! So foreign! Testimony to how negligent I've been!

An end to a relatively successful albeit a little disappointing (my goals were high) quarter met a start to winter break which I, honestly, was not looking forward to that much. Yes of course family but that was it. Winter break meant distance and solitude and grant proposals and internship applications--schools might as well have taken the liberty to place quotation marks around "break," just like that. Winter "break." "Winter break," "break, Winter," et cetera.

I also forgot that my family doesn't really celebrate Christmas. We're also not big on movies. So no, we didn't give each other gifts, and no, we did not catch the Les Mis premiere. Thanks, Facebook, for letting me know once again what I missed out on in life! Wouldn't be here without ya.

So tonight I am thinking about how much I miss the autonomous lifestyle I enjoy in Evanston, and how much I miss school, classes, the learning environment, and friends. I miss my room. I miss my speakers. I miss my clothes. All the clothes at home are from middle school and earlier, and they all reek of bad choices.

Tonight I am also thinking about arguments. How do people get into arguments, and why is it so hard to be the bigger person and say, hey, we're wonderful people and I love you otherwise, let's stop this nonsense and make peace. It's so easy to stoop to whatever level anger drags us down to, but so difficult to remind ourselves of our capacity to be lovely. Sometimes it's especially frustrating when you see a specific argument coming. You think in your head, please don't say that one thing I know you'll say. And when they inevitably say it, it's as if they punched some part of your body you just got surgically repaired.

Lastly, I'm thinking about cover letters. Absolutely abhor them. Also abhor requests for letters of recommendation. WHY must you make things difficult? Is commonapps for internships ever going to be a thing?

If it's not invented during my time I'll be insanely jelly and bitter

Guichanaso

RIP 1993-2012.

What does this make me think?


Mothagesso.

I generally had problems liking anyone more than liking them.
In hindsight, nothing I called love seemed to be love, and nothing aches me a bit.
Everything seems a little contrived. Commitment problems. Destroying to its roots.
No girl, no woman, no actress, no anyone really impacted, influenced, affected, altered,
or whatever, me, I'd say. Not enough for anything. This, not as a voice of pride, but tragedy.
But I can say, though, I do, really, really, really, really, really like Ann Hathaway.
Just, so, so, deeply, in, deeply, in, love.

Ugh.


Mothagesso.

Ridiculous 5.5 credit course load this semester, really no one will or should sympathize nor understand. Regret rather than celebration creeps up after everything, for not having learned as much as I can, just like all the other semesters, for not having lived up as much as I can, like all the other semesters, except this time around this I'm actually getting close to the end. This is scary. When did time fly, and what did it leave me? Classic dilemma. Anyway, really no use to being sad about the past. At least this semester I feel like I have learned a lot more about, about myself and about how to actually work hard. I am sad that these precious college years are being spent to learn what some others learned in high school or were equipped with when they were born, but it is what it is. A takeaway: work when there is work to do. Also: give at least 3 days for any paper more than 6 pages.

Here's to a better semester next year. Talk to more professors, make more friends, do more interesting things in my free time, indulge in my passions, moderate all passions, work out, participate more in extracurriculars, get a fucking internship, do the readings and turn in everything on time, write better, love my family more-- my sister and my mother, think and do something big, pick up interesting interests and hobby.

All this, assuming that the world doesn't end. I do hope there's some minor apocalyptic weather at one point just to thrill these people who were prepping for this.


Mothagesso.

"Ugh. All these conversations I have."

A particular lifestyle, a peculiarly satisfying appreciation. There seems to be some hierarchy. So good that I feel so convinced I'm better.

Mothagesso.

"In Scipio's dream, Africanus tells Scipio, that what you do, the political life you lead and honors of statesman you will get, will be rewarded by the contemplative life in the afterlife. You will learn the harmony of cosmos. And in the face of such eternity, the honors and riches of political life do not seem to be significant."

'But doesn't that go for philosophy as well? That honors of a statesman have not survived through time is no different than that thoughts of a philosopher did not survive because none of their texts survived. It's only by some freak chance these thoughts were passed down.'

'The fickleness of becoming 'eternal' to our collective human consciousness of something, that's merely by chance. But besides that, in the face of eternity, everything seems useless anyway. "What for, what for?" '

'Why do we long so much to be eternal? I think it's probably precisely because we are not, and probably never will be. We are mortal. Eternity is not what we can neither be nor understand. To fight that, I conjecture, we write, we think, we conquer, to be, in ways, remembered. Even if you didn't seek social recognition, you wrote to remember and to communicate. That's an attachment to memory and thought.'

'But nothing we write, we think, and we conquer will let us be eternal- because we are mortal. We will die, and what we have produced will only survive by chance, and then it will only be understood to less and less relevance as well as reverence as time moves on.'

'So what do we do? Mortals desiring eternal to no avail? Nothing that life has allowed us to know, nothing that life offers, is eternal. So how are we to, within our lives, attain or even deal with eternity, even the idea of eternity? How do we break out of our own very existence?'

'Creativity?'


Mothagesso.

A while ago, I used to wish that I would be who I was.

"This semester has been just, my general happiness level was never so higher. I was just happy most of the times, even when I'm sad. I would feel stressed out for a second, and just think, 'but hey, it's alright.' So I just always didn't mind."

"Listen to this song. It's just such a happy song. My mother likes songs like this, except it might be a little too bassy for her. She just likes simple songs. She says, 'I don't like sad songs. The world is tough and sad already, why would I want to listen to listen to something that will make me sadder?' She listens to simple songs. Simple happy rock from the 90's, Mozart, just piano and nothing else, ambient song you'd expect to hear ta Disney Land. She loved happy songs."

"Listen, mayne."

Appreciating is just a habit once you get your awe-switch on. Hah.
Sunny, jeans cold, shirts slacked, cigarettes, talks about life's and thoughts.


Who am I now?


Mothagesso.

My friend used to say, "get over yourself."

How frequently am I the only obstacle between me and my other self?

"Get the fuck over yourself."

Mothagesso.

I talk about my problems here. My moods change about the same damn problem I have had for a while, and it's pretty evident what kind of mood I am in. My writing is only really fully intelligible for me. I skip around. Uses the terms I used in my mind to make sense of things. It's essentially my own language. It's faulty.

One problem I didn't talk about is love. I am having an awfully hard time falling in love. Or falling in like, or whatever, for god's sake. Commitment problems come down to their self-destructive roots.

Mothagesso.

"I heard that manic depressives are naturally better writers. When they are manic, they write, write, write. When they are depressed, they become the harsh critics of their own writing, and edit, edit, edit. So their natural polarity makes their writings better."

For the things you don't like about yourself, naturally you make more comparisons with other people just to lucidate your inadequacy, and the shape of inadequacy only gets uglier and uglier.

But action and change is hard, to know how to change or what to change is difficult, not to mention the immense effort it requires. So do not take action to change, and rather just feel bad about the inadequacy until you decide to ignore it wholly, or comes to terms with some smart argument.

But they won't ever disappear. Other people will remind you. You will remind yourself. There are certain things that life seems to call for. The thing I feel like I should be doing. The thing that feels correct. These are things that, ironically, happen to be the best exercise for me, because I come up with elaborate explanations and excuses to refute the whole idea. Reversal of arguments, feigning knowledgeability, a sophistry of sort. But these certain things never will disappear and will one day like today tear off and burn down the thicket of smart arguments I have. Then there will be no excuses, like the last time this happened. Take option 1, ignore the perpetual problem and deal with the present. It might just be something I don't like, but not necessarily should change. It might be wiser to come to terms with it. Repeat until feeling better. Repeat again when the ugly inadequacy reveals itself and subverts the serene surface of the reservoir of consciousness and morality.

But it could be otherwise. It could be that I should take the bitter medicine, face the horror like you used to long time ago, and rejoice in learning and overcoming. The ugliness only worsens if not dealt with. Changes are slow but sweet. They are the small berries from day to next, the small motivation accumulating that causes changes.

Both of these are arguments come and go, take turns and switch, as the mood frequency hits its apex and falls to its trough. I love myself, I hate myself, my life is great, my life is undeserving. A perennial vicious cycle that gets less vicious every time, because I learn how to be less affected by it as well as become better at move on and not get bogged down. That's one thing I'm good at, becoming more constant.

Never upset. Always conceding. Mostly happy. Rarely a downer.

If you give enough time, this trick itself goes under scrutiny. The fact that I'm more stable is great, no it sucks I'm just being lazy, it must be my natural temperament, no it is being practiced excessively, excessively. And it tears down my mechanism of defense, knocks on my door and tells me,

Shape of happiness that breeds unhappiness or affects further gains is an incomplete one. Nothing but a few things are 'who you are', everything is at best 'who you are now' and it being a temporal symptom, you cannot use it as the unchanging basis point. If you do, then you will become stagnant, weighed down with its own set of burdensome excuses, drowning. Most things are just 'what you feel like doing', and such inclinations are not 'who you are' but simply distractions, 'who you could become'. As I said, only few things are 'who you are', and such is when the soul is arranged properly with what was there and what was found. Keep on searching. Go out and find things to align your soul.

"He used to get really upset about feminism and stuff. He was angry that he could never possibly be a true feminist, given that he is a male, grown up in a certain way, and whatnot. He would be depressed, he would stay in bed, just distracting himself from the bad mood." No will to be productive or anything. There was no creativity engendered by pain. There just was pain. It wasn't a helpful disease.

"I was jealous that he could feel so passionate."

Nosce te ipsum.

Mothagesso.

I sometimes hate myself. "People here are smart, we're funny, smart, witty, nerdy people. Like my friend once said, there are 'wholesome' people here. But that means we're not necessarily academic. We're intellectual, but not academic. We've got too many other things that we're interested in. Too much fun, too many good people, too many good things to be cherished that we explore less in a way. It's possible also because we're in Maine. Fucking Maine, not in the middle of the city or at a university where people know what they are doing and they're really aggressive. We're just bunch of lost kids, all together, figuring out what we want to do. A lot of us at least." I feel inadequate. I'm 3 out of 5 smart, 2 out of 5 committed, and I might be totally misdirected right now. I might regret the whole thing although that seems impossible given the amount of fun and happiness I stroll upon here. "See we are all smart enough to know how we would be as smart as possible. We know what our perfect academic semester would be like. All of us. Wake up early, review class materials, have meetings and lunches and coffees with professors, participate in class, turn in essays two days earlier, take notes, review notes, recreate notes, we'd be all Rhode Scholars." I sometimes hate myself. Everything I do seems like the wrong decision, the unimpressive ones, the indulgent, the despicable one. I always look back to find  my past self so foolish. I might just be doing the same thing soon enough. 'Fool.' 'I didn't know anything then.' It has always been what it has been. It is what it is. Can it be something else? Can I be someone else and should I be? Do I want to be? As schizophrenic as I sound, I shizophrenically wish I am more like this, and simultaneously wish I would just be peaceful and well. Low frequency waves. Low frequency waves.


Mothagesso.

I don't know what I want to do anymore. I don't know if any of the things I'm doing now are things I'm exceptionally good at. I can't say for certain that there is anything I'm better at doing than anyone else. I've lost conviction in myself, belief in my talents, and all I seem to have is just some baseless learnt confidence in what I have the potential to become. Reiterating thoughts like this dramatizes the issue, yes. Yet this is perhaps the one time in my life where I really feel asking for advice might be necessary. Friends of the world, share with me your thoughts. I'm not equipped for this.

Nothing feels more disorienting than the illusion of direction.

Guichanaso.