hither and yon

unfinished entry from 2016-01-29 06:30 pm:

i just want to create something that i'm happy with and that i can be proud of. i don't even mean in an abstract way. like literally, i just want to draw or knit or make a mix that doesn't fill me with disappointment and/or self-loathing

maybe social work was not a good idea LOL hahahahaha

falls upon my own sword

i keep yearning for the world to give me value bc i don't really think of myself as having inherent worth lol. it's not something i can logic into or out of. it's a matter of belief which is always going to screw me.

i haven't angsted over this in a long time bc being in a program and feeling like i had a trajectory gave me the, like, confidence? to discard it as irrelevant. like what's the point of thinking about whether you're a good person or not? just DO things in life the best you can. but now i'm really questioning the program itself and it is accordingly collapsing the sense that At Least I Am Doing Something. and when i take away the feeling that i'm working towards something achievable & worthwhile, i'm only left with myself as a person WHICH IS UNBEARABLE. what am i good at? am i good friend? daughter/sister/teacher? i try an okay amount but it's not enough

Well, well, well. Fast-forward seven months later, after being fucked over some more by the program, which then gave me an excuse to Not Care and fuck myself over even more: SOCIAL WORK: NOT A GOOD IDEA. But I'm already on the path and I can't step off of it without going back into the abyss. Formless fog!!!!!

I had an epiphany a couple of days ago. (There's actually no way to tell whether I have already had this thought and promptly forgot that I had it, so I'm blogging about it to keep record.) I'm staying in this horrible position working at my mom's office for seasons upon seasons, because I already think that I'll be unhappy no matter where I go or what I do. So I'm just leveraging unhappiness - if I'm going to be and feel shitty regardless, I might as well do it in a position that will give me SOME satisfaction at things that are definitely important to me (feeling like I am helping my mom/family), rather than risking feeling more incompetent at something new and more abstractly important to me (Doing My Part in Society). Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

It's the perspective of, like, "everything people do has a purpose". It's just that sometimes that purpose has become maladaptive. Internal logic, cohesive realities. Two related quotes: The subject line is from Umimachi Diary. I watched it last night at our local ~indie~ theater. That theater always has really terrible timing, both in the releases and their showtimes. Last week, when my sister and my frand were both in town, they were only playing Cafe Society nonstop. Of course, the moment everyone leaves, there's like two or three interesting releases. Thanks for nothing, State Theater!!111 And the times are always at incredibly awkward times of the day (noon, 4pm, or 7pm).

In any case, I'm glad I watched it. It was a very lovely movie - almost idyllic at times, as everyone is so FRIENDLY, but pulled back from being out-and-out syrupy, especially by the performances by Ayase Haruka (who is so incredibly beautiful) and Hirose Suzu. It made miss all sorts of things - being at college when I watched a ton of movies at Melnitz, living with my sister, and the nebulous concept of being in Korea ~with my people~. I mean, I don't WANT to live in Korea, but the familiarity of some of the scenes kind of tricked me. Just that feeling of knowing, recognizing. We want so badly to connect to things and this impulse is never turned off. Anyway, it was a gentle look at people in real motion, filmed beautifully. On the theater website, the movie was was described as heartwarming, and I decided that my heart could do with some warming. Another apt description: "Miyazaki in real life" (from this review).

Paranoid worries of the day: Tomtom has fleas or ticks, worried that Melon has them too; Melon's hind paw is still infected :< ; Tomtom is so wild about going outside - gotta calm him down re: scratching at the window screens, how to block off the shed so he won't jump onto the fence.

In case anyone was wondering, I still love Jonghyun and I pray daily for him to change his hair.

(private locked→public; copy+pasted from twitter essay)

There's a part of me that always assumes that other people know more than I do about whatever they're talking about. (Because at the most basic level, Other People are obviously functional and I am not, so they know something I don't.) At the same time I'm always like 'I think you're right but I don't want to listen to you,' lol. I don't know, I wish I knew my own mind better. I think I've improved a little, but maybe I've just gotten more judgmental and impatient, and just TELL myself what I am? Leading to a boxed-in life full of limitations and squalor. :< Regardless, I second guess and doubt myself A LOT. Most thoughts have a 'but' or a 'though' or a 'maybe'. There are like eight such conditionals in this paragraph so far, haha.

This current crisis of needless self-inspection and insecurity is because I had forgotten how HORRIBLY INFERIOR I feel when I see a certain type of person. And it's for very shallow reasons... like, the person-template is: "very thin pretty Asian girl with a solid sense of style and make-up and who doesn't talk a lot or go back to expand on anything she already said and is very talented at drawing/writing and also is my age or younger." I am still in middle school in my heart!! I NEVER grew out of feeling like a fat sack of shit in comparison to these girls.

That I care about weight annoys me in the particular. Because I am really thin right now too and I don't like it, but seeing this type of girl where her weight/body is in context with all these other things, then I'm not thin enough or thin in the wrong way. hashtag worst.

It's not exactly that I want to be like (the idea of) these girls, because they don't seem particularly happy or funny or comfortable to me. But what makes me so envious is the idea that they know themselves. They know what looks good on them, they know how much they want to say, they know what they like. The asian-ness and the artistic talent are incidental factors that make me feel like I should relate to or be like them somehow lol. It makes me feel like I could be them, or could have been them, so then I feel like I have lost potential that I don't know how to regain or utilize well. Wah wahh wahhhh.

Finishing an old entry on impulse. Really really long ramble about narratives, trying to change, and RPF. Completely unreadable, pls don't feel obligated AT ALL to go through it lol.

( endless wonder )

Inadvertant week long break! Everything about this entry is too long!

( personal blather )

( kpop/SHINee blather )

Sometimes I am honestly amused and like, enamored? of myself? Like sometimes I really enjoy who I am and the stuff I think is funny and what I'm able to appreciate and whatnot. (Which is weird and self-reflexive, especially wrt humor -- I think what I think is funny is funny itself? Why do I think that? idk.) And I think that it would be fun to meet someone like me. But then that always gives away to EXASPERATED ANNOYANCE. It used to be brutal self-hate and disgust but I think I'm over that. HOW DO I GET OVER THIS? LOL I want to be able to love myself without reservations. Not because I've become someone worthy~ of love, but because it's human to love and be loved, and I should be able to do that just because everyone should be loved. No one should live with someone hating them constantly, a poison inside the body. How do I do this for myself? On behalf of a promise to myself that was given with life.

It's a struggle. I think a lot of my life will be this stuggle actually. This thought used to exhaust me, but I also used to hate myself a lot more forcefully. I've grown up a little, I think. The question of "why don't I like myself" is also tied implicitly to the question of "why don't other people like me." I know that's not a helpful question to be asking, but it's the question that's been in my heart~ forever since I was a loner little girl in elementary school. I've spent so much time trying to become an entity unto myself though, to make it look like I was alone by my own choice and not by uhh circumstance. I feel vulnerable in public so I gotta suit up and protect myself. I don't know the trick of looking approachable, and I DEFINITELY don't know how to approach anyone. What's my point in this paragraph? I'm just thinking about work today and how I was preoccupied with how I looked like a stumpy elf in these stupid boots (WHY DID THE WEATHER REPORT SAY IT WOULD RAIN I NEED TO GO BACK TO WEARING NORMAL SHOES) and how I much I liked Library Guy and how I would LOVE any kind of conversation like that again and how I don't know how to just start talking to people and being properly integrated into their group conversations. But I've also made progress in that I look at people a lot more instead of hiding my dumb face away in shame and I'll make comments sometimes even though they're dead-weight and dead-end and dead dead dead conversationally.

Still hungry.

This girl sitting a few seats away from me in the computer lab keeps sneezing and saying "excuse me" to no one in her deep voice. People as a whole are so endearing sometimes. Why are so consistently dumb and just fucking awful when we have this capacity to be... not that?

I don't know what I think about humanity anymore. I'm irritated with everyone and think most people are legit stupid, especially me, but it doesn't really depress me anymore. idk if that means I've accepted it or I don't care anymore or I've grown up or all three. I don't know what to do with bad news anymore either. I saw a screenshot of that diplomatic car in Egypt just RUNNING over like two dozen people and I know that's not the worst of it by far, not now, not there, not ever. This capacity we have, an endless capacity for unkindness. It's so human. Fuck now I'm pretty sad.

And that's the other thing, how do I get myself to the next step, ie feeling sad --> doing something about it? It's not even that I myself want to make a difference, but I want to be able to do something and to want to do something. Rouse myself out of complacency and all that. But I can't even talk to anyone and I can't even want to do my reading properly so I still have a ways to go.

In terms of physical appearance (lol I'm shallow and self-obsessed) it's kind of the same thing as uh what this entry started out as. Sometimes I'm like, I like ur face gurl, cheekbones, eyes, etc. and then I'll be all OH GOD HOW COULD I HAVE EVER THOUGHT THIS WAS OKAY. I guess it's the same kind of insecurity, like people don't like me!!! They must be able to see something about how I am on da inside, like it manifests in my physical appearance, like an INABILITY TO PROPERLY BE A PERSON. So it's not even that I think I'm ugly necessarily, just that I look WRONG and unacceptable. Disordered as a person, disordered as a body. Et cetera. Also more straightforwardly, I feel so fat and fug next to my sister who is slim and long and gorgeous without any effort because of her inner light. I'm cheesy, whatever. I've really been comparing myself to her for too long. I should stop but I depend on her so much in general. It's hard not to see myself in relation to her, and how others see us and will inevitably compare us. Sometimes it feels like there's no point in wanting to be happy with myself because I'll never be who I really want to be. The best is all circumferenced by who I fundamentally am: lazy, stupid, depressive, disproportionate, face full of nothing. Like, it feels like I should rage against accepting this fundamental terribleness. But that goes nowhere good and I need to stop thinking that way, etc. Ah, life.

Don't know how to end entries, so I'll just uhhh stop.

I've been listening to U2's Lemon a lot lately. That is a damn good song. I love that piano steppy thing, just so much.

( only for the board )

Bleh, I just fell off the wagon and bit off all my nails. Ooh, baby, tell me more, amirite?

I'm hella obsessed with my hair. I don't know what to do with it, it's never been this long with this texture/haircut before. It's not a gr8 look. And I know it's getting longer but it never looks longer. It's just gradually trailing out and down. My sister said it's like a ~mane. Bafflesome!! And irritating!!

I am boxing myself in. It's like to test myself if I can still breathe or not. Sometimes, sometimes I really feel like I can't live with myself anymore. I don't know how to change though, I'm all dull and crumbling. The reasons I give myself are not strong enough.

Cheer and jocundity, eh? I revived my last.fm after almost two years. My profile there severely misrepresents my actual listening habits. For example, it says that Tori Amos is in my top 3 most played artists. WTF? Lord knows what that thing would look like if I had kept ~scrobbling~ all that time. 

I am the most boring person alive.

It's like this, you want to DO something but you're too scared to even start the things that you are actually required to do, things people will see and grade and judge. You secretly pull your punches with every shitty thing you say about yourself. You don't really believe them, not yet, but you know you can. It breaks you whenever someone so much as breathes near one of the thoughts in your head. "Yeah, I thought you would handle it worse." "You need to get your act together and focus." You know these things are true but you had hoped they weren't. So when someone said it out loud to you, you couldn't handle it. You're scared shitless of it happening again.

Replace all the you's with I's of course. Some people are really bugged by second person but I really like it, it sounds pretty natural to me. If only because I am virulently committed to disassociating myself and shirking responsibility whenever possible. In high school I used to default to second person all the time. From then to now I've gained more of an understanding that as much as I want to, I can't just watch myself and call if life, but with the increase in first person, I think it's also racheted up my egocentricism. And it just means that I use the passive voice more. I've picked up all the wrong points, probably.

SIGH! I'm cleaning out my Personal Junk desk drawer. Too many throwaway things written on too many papers.

Mom told me that "maguro" is not tuna
<Mom says it is tuna>
Dad: Maguro? Maguro is Japanese. Tuna is English. (after downing 2 shots)

The role of expectations
"The door ate the sky loudly but would not drop the ocean."
nerv. sys. sets limits of our perceptions
- color seen only in certain range
naive realism

better living through learning <--> better learning through living
What is algebra exactly is it those three-cornered things? - J.M. Barrie
How can we know the dancer from the dance? - W.B. Yeats
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view? - Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Examples of why The Daily Bruin is a useless joke.
blurb that takes up a good fifth of the page: "[SPEAK OUT] Members of the UCLA men's soccer team were asked to state their favorite thing about November. Here are their responses."
W. T. F.
letters to the editor regarding some column by a Kelly Bowers called "Sarah Palin changes face of modern American feminism" which started off by saying "I am not a feminist." Oh, and it only got better after that. Keywords: whining, promiscuity, bra-burning. The letters are pretty ace though. "For a woman at this university (who would presumably be pleased with her equal opportunity that just a few decades ago was unavailable) to so proudly proclaim that she is not a feminist makes me even wonder why she is even here." I KNOW: because the world has a raging hard-on for douchebags. Why did this useless pedestrian piece of shit column get published in the first place? Come on, was there no one who could say the obvious? "You are an asshole and an idiot. We're not printing this. Don't let the door hit your ass on your way out~"

I had all this shredded cheese so I said what the hell and dumped it in my pancake mix. Now I'm eating the pancakes with canned mushrooms and Ikea lingonberry jam. It's pretty good. I'd like to say that it's college life~ but to be honest if I were at home with all other amenities, chances are that I still would've done this. I'm so LOL why not!? about food. Our whole family is. We're always eating expired crap. (Pancake mix: Oct 25 2008).

Right then, that's enough for now.

My leg hurts like a motherfuck whenever I change its position. My calf muscles mostly. Calves... muscles? It looks strange in the singular.

One of the things I regret a lot is acting like a brat on Thanksgiving a couple of years ago. It's good in a way, because I've learned since then that I do have a temper problem and I do let things spin out into a huffing passive-aggressive bitch fest. I think I'm better at managing anger/annoyance now. But I still regret it. It was the Thanksgiving when my cousin's dad died, and my behavior that morning was so petty and infantile. It doesn't matter in the long run, and it's presumptious to locate my behavior so closely with the memory of that day, as though it was just THAT important, but, I still regret it. The regret is inherently selfish. I want to apologize to my cousin, but of course the apology would be for me.

In general my egocentricism really bothers me. Sometimes it flares up into spikes of true hate. On the other hand, for example, that paragraph about my cousin's dad's death. It is all about meee meee meee, but I don't have a huge issue with it. Like how most of the time I don't have a problem with writing in this LJ, which is also all about meee meee meee. I want to write about what I'm comfortable with, and I don't feel like I have a right, or anything meaningful to say, about my cousin or my uncle on that day. I have my memories and that is what I know. In my mind that's okay. I don't particularly like guilt associated with WHAT people think about, especially in times of overload. What else are you supposed to think about? Your mind goes where it goes. I think it's okay. 

The problem for me is the choices I make based on what I think about, either the real-life decisions I make or the decision to pursue a train of thought. Something weird comes to mind; I don't feel guilty about that. It becomes reprehensible if I choose to keep thinking about it even if I'm supposed to be doing something else (like paying attn to lecture) or if I know that it'll lead to something bad, like a self-pity party or the equivalent of watching scary movies when I KNOOOOW I will be freaked the fuck out later. And it becomes reprehensible when I know that I'm just using the thought to escape, or because the alternatives are difficult, or to otherwise justify shitty behavior. 

So blogging swings between those two things for me. Most of the time I think it's okay; I'm just writing down what I'm thinking about and the expression of those thoughts helps me through the day. Every once in a while I start thinking that this is all pure self-indulgence, it feeds into me being self-centered instead of helping me manage that self-centeredness, it enables me to CHOOSE inaction and complacency, etc. Who knows!    

I am now officially late to my TA office hour!