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| 'Tis Christmas Eve. A year from now, I won't be at home on this day. Kind of a strange thought. I think it will be my first Christmas away from my family. Now that I spend most of the year away from home, these few holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's become all the more significant. Home really feels like home now.
Last year was a year of first's. As life continues to progress, the first's only seem to get bigger and bigger.
I haven't been homesick since last year in December, right before winter break. But for some reason I feel an impending onslaught of those feelings once again when I leave for Penn in exactly two weeks from today. Perhaps because this break is really way too short (stupid finals!) More likely, it is because I know that next semester will be really different, and it is always change that scares people. There's something called path dependency, where people just feel safer doing the same old thing because it's familiar, even if it is somewhat boring.
Deep inside, I always know that change is usually good. After all, it is change that incites progress, right? At this very moment, however, this logic doesn't work. You know when reason tells you something, and yet you can't bring yourself to really believe it? That barrier stems from emotions, I suppose. The only way I can think to reassure myself right now is that time will make things better.
Love Cornleef
P.S. Will you bring me candy for Christmas? Thanks!
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| not really, but i like to pretend. i'm a poser like that. last night i went to a muse concert. super intense dude. (muse, in case you don't know, since i certainly didn't -- is a top brit alternative rock band)
i like moshed and stuff. i must confess that i would have preferred to not to, as usually getting drenched in other people's sweat and getting pushed into one person after another is not quite my style. but it ended up being kinda fun. i just let the crowd push me around since i decided it would be kinda dangerous to resist.
the band itself was quite impressive. really put on a show. the lead singer not only writes all the music, but also plays guitar and piano (both of which he performed quite well). i really like the guy's voice. the drummer is supposed to be really amazing as well. dunno about the other guitarist. he looked cool. the music was nice too. the best part had to be the lighting that they did. it made the whole show really super exciting and fun.
and the crowd was wild. (since i was a member of that crowd, i took the liberty of applying the transitive property. if crowd = wild, and flo = crowd, then flo = wild!) i was on the floor near the stage, and everyone just kept pushing and moshing. only annoying thing was that once i got kicked in the head by a crowd surfer bc i wasn't paying attention. then, the next time a crowd surfer came along i WAS paying attention and the crowd threw the guy towards me. needless to say, he fell, but at least i cushioned his fall.
anyway, i'm really sore today but it was really a good time.
i had a moment where i felt like the guy in garden state. you know when all this stuff happens around him on the plane, and at the party, and he's jsut sitting there staring off into space, letting all this stuff swirl around him. i did that for a bit and just let the crowd surge around me. contemplating a bit. then of course i merged back into become one with the crowd once i got sick of being philosophical.
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| i'm drifting in and out of sleep right now. which isn't good because i'm still at work. just... half... an... hour... more... i think i'm gonna go to bed right when i get home. i'm like seriously completely and utterly exhausted. the end until i'm conscious enough to write a complete entry
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| i usually sleep well, but the past few nights i keep waking up in the middle of the night, drifting back asleep, only to wake up again. it's quite annoying, really. suffice it to say i'm always pretty exhausted after a long day of work. (whoa i sound old... complaining about work. ick.)
so yesterday after work at around 6:30 i went down to chinatown to buy a calling card and grab a quick dinner. the subway back uptown was late. the weather up here has been so hot recently that everyone is using their electricity to the utmost capacity in an attempt to cooldown. as a result, the electric utilities company ConEdison asked nyc to shutdown some routes for conservation purposes. so yeah, waited in miserable heat for around half an hour before the train finally came.
thankfully, there were a lot of empty seats. i slumped down into the first seat next to the door, plugged in my ipod, and closed my eyes -- it's really nearly impossible to truly fall asleep on the subway. so much noise, ppl getting in and off, jerky movements. but i've gotta say, i came pretty close last night. i think i was in snooze mode.
anyway, by the second subway stop, i suddenly awoke to something dropping into my lap. i looked down and saw it was a piece of paper. i immediately looked around to see who it was, but the person had already left. i didn't think much of it... i assumed it was some random advertisement.
but then i looked down again--
it was a portrait of me sleeping. the guy must have been sitting directly in front of me, and drawn it in two stops with just a simple black marker. it was so random, and it made me smile. i looked around at the other people in the train sitting around and they were all smiling at me -- they must have all been watching as the guy sketched me. i just smiled back. one mother leaned in to explain to a curious daughter what had happened. then i stared at the portrait for a while. i couldn't help but smile at it (yeah i smile a lot) and wonder who had drawn it and why. finally i decided i had enough of looking dumb so i folded the portrait up and stuffed it in my bag.
yet for the rest of my long subway ride uptown, i couldn't stop thinking about the portrait.
one thing that has bothered me during my stay so far in nyc is the impersonal nature of it all. i love the convenience of getting around, and always having something to do. but with over eight million strangers surrounding you all the time, suddenly you can't help but feel as if you don't know anyone, and that nobody cares to know you. i have this theory that because texas is sparsely populated (in comparison to nyc of course) texans tend to value each and every stranger more. you never see anyone new (or at least very rarely), so when you finally do, you're so thankful that you unleash all of that southern hospitality and friendliness you kept suppressed thus far. on the other hand, in new york city, pretty much everyone you see is a stranger, so there's no novelty anymore. you take having other people around you for granted, thus paradoxically isolating yourself within a larger population. and creating the coldness that big cities are stereotypically identified with.
but it only takes
one small, simple thing
to shatter the ice
all it took was a bored artist with a sense of humor to spontaneously create an instantaneous bond amongst a car full of strangers on a Q train in downtown Manhattan.
i dunno, at least i think it's something special
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| i know i always think a lot. i may never get over this tendency. sometimes i wonder if its detrimental to my mental capacity. but then again it's not necessarily a bad thing to think a lot. indeed, i think it's crucial for me to confront any and all issues that bother me, and thinking is the only way to accomplish that.
i must confess, however, that usually i'm just going overboard, and there's no point to my thinking -- i'm just wasting time (yours as well as mine) and valuable brain cell resources.
there are things in life that are purely rational... say a math problem. for these things, thinking will definitely be productive. at the end of the day, you'll (hopefully) be able to find the solution to a math problem through rational deductions. yet there are many more things that unfortunately cannot been placed in the purely rational category. everything else is corrupted by some layer of emotion.
take history for example. it seems like you can logically reason through how this or that event leads naturally to another, cause and effect is pretty rational... but history itself is recorded by man, so any emotion that an author has about the subject naturally seeps into accounts. also the historical events themselves are nothing more than human interactions -- and there's no way I'll argue that human actions are rational all the time.
the two things that currently preoccupy my mind are both doing so in utter futility. they will never be resolved by me banging my head against a wall as random what-if's swirl incessantly within. there's no such thing as a resolution in these cases! no simple answer that you can derive by punching in a few numbers into a calculator. and yet i persist. the one time in my life when perseverance is dumb, i get the bright idea to pick it up as as a side hobby. i disgust myself.
my future? obviously laced with emotional elements. it's the irrational stuff that makes life unpredictable, and makes living risky. i can think all i want about whether taking a particular finance course instead of a philosophy class will have gigantic repercussions on my personal well-being in the future. but truthfully, there will probably not be any effect whatsoever. my own mind is just dramatizing these tiny events because it has an odd sense of humor. even if there is an effect, how can i possibly predict that, and structure my life accordingly?
and relationships? the very act of rationalizing what you are feeling destroys the purpose of having a relationship. there's nothing rational about why two people want to be together.
i think too much because i want to place everything in the purely rational category, even when clearly, not everything belongs. sure, things would be a lot more simple if they could all be rationalized, but they would also be that much more dehumanized.
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