Back Home

A lot of friends and acquaintances have asked me how it is to be back in my dorm room. I still don't really have a straight answer, and frankly, I have to say it feels a little strange.

When I left back in December for my residential "home", I felt like I was leaving the greater of my two homes. My dorm was truly a place of safety and comfort for me--my things and my life organized the way I pleased and desired. However, when I eventually got back to the Bay Area, my room back home felt like an alien environment. Like my dorm, it was my former place of safety and comfort. But when I returned, I had to rearrange furniture and return possessions that had been stashed for storage in the nooks and crannies. It was to say the least an annoying and irksome process of moving back in. By the end of break my room had become my home again, however only after a series of scented candle burnings and a fierce organizational overhaul.

My return to collegiate "home" was also a somewhat laborious process. After schlepping nearly three suitcases full of clothes old and new, my famed wooden hangers, and my menagerie of hygienic knickknacks, I had to unpack and recreate my environment nearly from scratch. From the second I walked in the room, it smelled stale and acrid. Glasses were left unwashed and the sheets were left unmade. Cords were unplugged left and right, by purported environmental conservationists. "Ugh," I murmured, as I washed my sheets and hung/shelved a seemingly endless array of clothing. My towels were pretty grody, too.

But as much as this may sound like a self-indulgent rant about superficial annoyances, I cannot stress enough what it really means to have "something to come home to." I realize now I won't ever be able to live some nomadic life, traveling whichever direction the wind carries me. I really need a home base--a nest I build with metaphorical twigs I gather and assemble.

Pieces of Humanity

As the coffee at the VW service counter wasn't sufficient, I found myself walking to Starbucks to enjoy my usual triple cappuccino. It was a very zen moment for me, just sort of sitting there doing nothing in particular, just enjoying my beverage and watching people walk in and out. It was then that I had noticed a woman with her coffee and New York Times in tote, who began to walk toward a table to sit down and enjoy her beverage and her paper. However, fate somehow intervened.

Apparently her barista didn't care to snap the lid shut sufficiently, and she thus couldn't avoid spilling a quarter of her coffee all over her wonderfully planned-out work outfit. And for a moment, I just watched her there, standing in silence. She just didn't know how to react--she didn't curse or so much as wiggle a finger. I felt guilty just watching this misfortune transpire, and eager to avoid being some kind of schadenfreude, I handed her the napkin on my table. That gesture was apparently enough to snap her out of her reverie, at which point, she unintentionally muttered something quite philosophical: "Could you imagine such a thing?"

And as inane and absurd this might sound, it fired up the synapses quicker than the cappuccino could. This woman somehow thought she was exempt from any kind of ill-fated morning misfortune, even though a coffee spill is pretty low on the hierarchy of ill-fated occurrences. And I think she's not alone in this train of thought. I have this idea going now that most people just couldn't stand to take a fall and endure so much as a scratch. Or worse, someone could think that they're somehow above everyone else, and thus are not subject to stupid choices and mistakes and folly. Infinitely worse is when they expect another to take the fall for them.

So could I "imagine such a thing"? Why yes, I could. I could imagine something like that occurring just about once, if not multiple times in a day to me. People are so incredibly imperfect, and for some reason that seems so painful for people to take. So you spilled your coffee. Go get someone to mop it off the floor, finish drying off yourself, and enjoy the rest of your coffee and your paper already. Can't you see you've got a life to live? Or better yet, "Can you imagine that your day has a greater meaning?" I mean it's people like these who account for the booming antiperspirant market...

Of Pride and Arrogance

I'm finally coming to terms with it.

My younger years were filled with bullying and bullies, fitting in, and heavyset adolescence. I was never good enough to get the girl and couldn't realize I wanted the boy. Constant struggles every day to fill the notion of what everyone else wanted--endless exhaustion and hurt. "You know nothing, You are ordinary, You aren't it." Secondhand sadness and the receptors underneath ignored and unresolved. Out of balance and harmony with the self, let alone the world.

The more recent years signify the beginning of something different. "It's out of the shell! Look, everyone! what's going on with him?" The new skin felt so different, so uncomfortable. While the others saw the evolution, I just tried to pick up the pieces of my shell and plaster them to the mirror--:"I just...I mean what's the difference? You don't mean that. Are you serious?" The hurt lingered and the missing pieces and what the mirror said...being better not feeling better.

All along, there was no missing piece and no shell to break out of and no mirror. I've just been me. And it's always been about what I've seen in the me I see. So sadly, the me I saw in me was the me they saw in me. The continuities needed to be broken and destroyed, the bridge burned. I am me, and will see me as such. I am human and I will never be the same. I am a human and I know what I am. I am amazing, I am beautiful.

But being amazing and beautiful means nothing. It means nothing, when the only thing I know to be amazing is myself. My family, however, is amazing. The friends in my life are also amazing. I have all the faith in the world that other people in my life will be or will become amazing. I'm so glad, and so happy today as I sit here and type these words. In this first experience of amazingness, I'm mad proud we can all be amazing together.

A Fruitfully Meaningful Day

This day has been quite a day, to be sure. I chopped up the family Christmas tree, which was quite a feat of blood, sweat and tears. It's very reassuring that I can do this though, and thus I'll add it to my list of tasks people probably think I'm not capable of. In addition to this task is fixing toilets and spa maintenance, if you're curious. I'm always out to surprise and amaze, I suppose. In addition, I saw a friend for coffee at my favorite little Venetian coffee house. We hadn't seen each other in at least a year, and it was amazing to see how we could reconnect so quickly, as if no time had elapsed at all. It's reassuring to think that coffee is such a uniting force, or in my case robusta in tazza.

Kylie Minogue has also produced an astounding amount of highs for me today. (I now look forward to driving and getting down behind the wheel.) I feel like my relationship with her is getting more and more amazing as I continue to explore her CD song after song. Everything seems to concern this perfect man that she's found, and I think I can really bond with her ideas, even though I have yet to meet the perfect man. I like to think the perfect man doesn't actually exist. If he did, he'd probably be pretty unattractive. I'll take burping at the table, bed head, and 5 o'clock shadow over some perfect Ken doll any day.

The next-door-neighbors to these ideas of the perfect man are the fantasies I have about what kind of relationship I'm going to have. I have all of these wonderfully serendipitous ideas about what he'll be like, and how things will all transpire, and how it will be so blissful. Commensurate to how wonderful these notions are, is the hurt that they entail. Anyone with half a brain can see how ridiculous these high expectations are. The future can look so appealing and promising, but the present is forgotten in the process. What a crazy idea it is to focus on what is happening, and not what I want to happen...

Hopefully I can just start living my life. I'm beginning to think life is a lot like a good cup of coffee: sip it slowly, don't gulp, and engage all the senses. You can spend your whole life imagining what the coffee will taste like, or worse, just down it too quickly to enjoy all it has to offer.

I suppose that's enough coffee shop metaphorical philosophy for one blog. Cheers all.

Life as a Trainwreck

Lately, people just seem to tell me about how down I'm feeling. I'm not sure if I'm actually depressed or if I just present that in my composure. It's frustrating because maybe I'm feeling happy, and I just can't get that across.

The bottom line is that this past week has been a royal wreck for me, between familial drama and amorous disappointments. I suppose as much as I hope to get out of all of this nonsense, it still is something I have to deal with and figure out. Despite talking to amazingly supportive friends, it still seems to linger like the smell of fresh paint. Maybe it's time for me to take a walk.

What obligation do I have to family to fix their problems? Do I need to let them figure it out or do I have to get my hands all mucked up in their dirt and fix them? And as far as the amorous nonsense goes, how can I stop setting up false expectations? It's in all of those great expectations that exist great disappointments, as unfortunate as that may be.

The New Year

As I begin this "new" year, I'm making the conscious choice to write more. The way I will go about this is to share the somewhat mindless, significant, and otherwise nonsensical details of my existence through Blogspot. Through reading this, one can undoubtedly gain insight into my thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, and hopefully in time realize why I see the paramount importance in spelling behaviour with an extra 'u.' While I can't guarantee anyone will enjoy this, it is my utmost hope and desire that it does more than just sit and accumulate internetical dust.