Frustratedly happy.

I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my seventeen years and some-odd months of existence. Source? Hah, who knows? There's so just many things- so many people that make me feel like I'm lying in an endless mound of fluffy snow. You could say it's the holiday spirit; you could also say I'm crazy. But at the end of the day, who gives a damn? This. This is what I enjoy the most. Not money, not driving (though that is a plus), not good grades, not failing tests, not gifts, not giving, but this. Friends. In a way, they're all like giant, glowing lights- stars, even- and I'm just a mirror. They shine bright, so do I. If one were to ever believe in magic, this would be it. Everyone- all their significance- each person's impact on another's life, vice versa, their dog, their cat, their pinkie toe- all muy importante. Impact, that's what it is. It's all relative. Sometimes you look at a person and you say: "Well, they're not important at all," but then you've gone and lied to yourself because you've said that thing and that's what makes them important. You think you'll forget people, their faces, the sound of their beating heart, but you can't. It's there. Engrained. Like a scratch in your cornea, as some people theorize. Every image. Every sound. It's a fingerprint. A footprint. A strand of DNA and a key to a lock. Unique. Existent.

Fiction. That's what I'm good at. So who's to say that this isn't fiction? Oh, what a tragedy that would be! If this were all a figment, but again, who gives a damn? The price is nothing; the result is everything.

Job hunting sucks. Especially when you live in Cerritos because some Chinese and Korean people really fail at handling themselves like professionals. Instead of a "Sorry, I don't believe any positions are available at the moment," you get a resounding, "Oh, no no no no, we not hiring right now. Go away." It's difficult like this. No money; just juggling whatever I get. I wish I could find a damn job already. My car's broken. Again. That'd be priority #8; fix my damn car or get a new one. Priorities 1-7? College. PS3. Laptop. Computer. Movies. Games. Food. Okay, yeah, I fail with money, but my entire family does, so bite me.

Sometimes you wish you had everything. Sometimes you wish you had nothing.

And now for a short rant on some phrases I think are stupid.

1) "The value of a dollar" is a dollar.
2) "A penny saved is a penny earned." No, a penny saved is one that I found on the ground that happened to be facing heads side up. Then and only then will I pick one up and throw it in the pile of "change that I will not touch until the day far in the future when I go to a CoinStar."
3) "Don't judge a book by its cover." The cover has the title on it, and if the title is "Wuthering Heights," I'm not buying the damn thing.
4) "The short end of the stick." or "The short end of the deal." One, I didn't know one end of a stick could be longer than the other. In fact, I didn't know that the end of a stick could be measured. I didn't know deals had ends either, for that matter, and if they did, they can be measured?
5) "Cleanliness is close to Godliness." So... if I take a shower, I'm kind of like Jesus?

Hyperbole. Blegh.

Hypocrites. (School policy rant included, free of charge.)

My mom's a real jerk sometimes. Not just to me, but to my FRIENDS. That's just jacked up. I deal with all of her idiotic friends that butt in on our Thanksgiving. Everytime I ask her to give someone else a ride, her first response is "NO." Like "NO!!!" Like "NO WHAT THE HELL SHUT UP WHY YOU WASTE GAS MONEY?!" It's silly. People always give me rides everywhere. I've been asked for rides for the majority of high school, for Christ's sake! And SHE complains about giving other people rides like once every two months? That's like complaining about there not being any ketchup when there's a bottle labeled "tomato sauce" on the table.

Except today I busted out the "Sarah's dad picked me up and took me to get a new bike when mine got crushed under the evil force of a giant black SUV." That shut her right up.

Hypocrites in general are ridiculous. And I don't mean hypocrites that know they're hypocrites and feel bad, because that makes them a lot less of a hypocrite. I mean hypocrites that do it and don't give a damn.

Peterson, for instance, is probably a blazing hypocrite. I bet she's happy in her quaint little office with her personal refridgerator snacking on celery sticks or Nutter Butters or whatever it is that people snack on these days. I bet she's happy when the other staff members present a cake to her on her birthday. It's not WE that matter to her, but how the school looks. The district must love a principal who enforces law in an otherwise liberal campus. It's not like we were engulfed in the chaos of a 16th century fiefdom. Student and administration conflicts were at an all-time low on all fronts, and the only overwhelming problem we had was a bunch of seagulls.

Don't you just hate people who think they're solving a problem when they're actually causing or furthering it? Then you tell them that they're making it worse, and they call you a rebel or naive or immature or whatever it is that we young'uns get called these days. There are always ways to resolve this issue. Let's review the facts:

1) Spread Alka Seltzer pills all over campus. Seagulls will be exploding in midair in no time and will be swept away in the winter rains. Easy as that. Okay, maybe a little gory... But fun, nonetheless.
2) Get clubs to clean up the campus. ASB seems to have no problem getting clubs to go to football games using club points. So why not campus cleaning? Key Club does it. Why can't everyone else? It's not that hard. I've done it.
3) Have SIAs do their jobs. This applies to the hall pass thing, too. If SIAs WATCHED people leave their trash on tables and all over campus, you'd think that they'd stop them or tell them to pick it the heck up. But no. They sit in their golf carts or in their office doing... nothing. Looking vigilant but in fact thinking about the programs they should watch when they go home. If you're going to hire new SIAs, you should probably use them. Get your money's worth.
4) If someone throws a cake and someone uninvolved gets owned, get the cake-thrower in trouble. Not us. If all isolated events were applied to an entire population, then America would live in holding cells wearing uniforms and having daily announcements from Our Great Leader telling us to Obey, obey, we must obey. We'd all be serial killers, rapists, burglars, larsons, felons, you get the picture. So apparently here we're all troublemakers, up-to-no-good, sinners, rebels, all that jazz. Well, I'll tell you what admin is. Unjust, unfair, overreacting, overreaching, and silly.

Positively silly.

Innocent until proven guilty, and not all of us are guilty. Punish those who have done wrong, and let those who have done naught be.

Washing, packing, packed, gone.

I'm going to miss Cerritos! I always claim that I don't get homesick, but this time, since not everyone will be with me, I'm supar sadz.

Thanks and love to Sarah and Melody for buying me the most bomb Christmas gift-in-preparation-for-the-frigid-trip-that-I-am-going-on-tomorrow ever. Now I'll only be REALLY cold instead of frozen on the ground like a hairy caveman in his loincloth.

I'll miss everyone, yes, everyone, especially Amy Chen. Wish you were coming with us so that I could hit on you and watch in delighted horror as you prance around your bedroom in underwear or a towel.

Still sick. Taking meds. Lots of 'em. Seems to be helping.

Love, love.

Ridiculosity.

Admin, thou hast gone too far!

Kay, agendas as hall passes? Stupid as that is, I don't even care that much. What really irks me is the whole "no birthdays" thing. I mean, really, you might as well cancel Christmas, New Year's, and Lincoln's birthday in the process. Cake is distracting. So are balloons. Well, no shit. So is a birthday. Do we no longer exist? Is the quintessential anniversary of our very being insignificant, not to be hallowed as it has been for the past umpteen years?

Nope.

Yes, we are no longer allowed to bring food to school anymore. Food is distracting. Eating in class is a mortal sin! So are pieces of rubber stretched out by internal force. Wait...

I won't go there. Really, I sometimes like to bring random confections to school as lunch, didn't you know that? I bake entire batches of brownies for a mid-day meal... of course, I eventually get full, so I hand out dozens of pieces to my friends and teachers. In plastic wrap. Individually. With ribbons and bows. Is there something wrong with that?

As for balloons, well, some balloons piss me off anyway. The really pretentious bunches of balloons that fly in everyone's faces no matter where you are and scream, "Hey, bitch, it's my birthday! Celebrate me." Those are stupid. Singing balloons are lame, too. Still, balloons are sometimes considered gifts in their very nature, or at least a part of a gift. *gasp* Are we not allowed to give gifts? Gifts are distracting. Shit. We should ban those, too. And they contribute to littering! All that gift wrap sucking up space in our trash cans... goodness gracious. Them seagulls must love shiny gift wrap.

Admin has turned into a mass of Puritans. The office might as well be a nunnery, and Peterson is Mother Superior. Or rather, Mother Superiority Complex. I've never seen anyone more power crazy than this. Behold! As CHS turns into a clump of silent, dismal hallways and equally as silent, dismal students. The days of celebration with cake and balloons and glory alike are gone, replaced by the docile nature of our implicit Vow of Silence. Old Celebration was a tall chap, his slightly crooked glasses perched atop the bridge of his nose as we shaved his head bald and then shipped him off to the War. How he enjoyed freedom, and how Freedom enjoyed him.

Someone can kiss my asymptote.

A Duet

I keep hearing strange things in my room when I'm on that rift between consciousness and sleep. I think there might be a ghost in here. *shrug* It's honestly kind of creepy, but I'm so tired by that time that I don't care. Then there's the dreams. Weird dreams, too. If I believed in God, I'd say that he or she is trying to tell me something. Then again, if I believed in God, I'd also be more likely to have voted for John McCain and for Prop 8, so... nah.

There's something that I really have to criticize today. Welfare, health care, the like. So I'm sitting in the car, discussing le recent situation con mi madre (see previous post), and she says, "I'm getting on MediCal soon. You should get a new pair of glasses; they're completely covered." And for a minute I consider and nod in affirmation, feeling that it'd be nice... until I realize that I have a pair sitting on the bridge of my nose, and they already feel so a part of me that I can hardly see without them. So I ask myself... "What the hell?" A new pair of glasses could cost 200 dollars, and that's if I'm being picky about the price. Why the hell would I get a new pair, regardless of who's paying for it? "It comes out of the tax money I've been paying for 20 years." Screw your tax money; you evaded paying it for three years of my life, remember?

That money wouldn't be coming from my mother's taxes for the past twenty years; it'd be coming out of every person in America's tax money for the past year. The past botched up year. The past year that she keeps complaining about when it really wasn't that damn bad for us. I don't care what she says. I don't care if the freakin' glasses are bloody covered. Those 200 dollars don't belong to me. They belong to somebody else. Somebody who needs it more. THIS is part of why America's in the hole right now. THIS is what people meant by taking advantage of insurance. I don't care how much the government rips us off; when we try to take back, we don't take from THEM, we take from someone else. Sure, that someone else might be taking advantage just the same, or they might not even need it, but even the most infinitesimal percentile of what you don't use goes somewhere good.

Goodness gracious.

My fellow blogger who has spurred me into this spree of blogging has me thinking again. About the past. About the present. About what could be different. The pain that I felt was derived from hope- the hope that things could be right again. I haven't felt that pain in six months, but it's here again like a hangnail.

I went to my happy place today, as I sometimes do when my brain is clouded in a mist of negativity. Allow me to describe it, in detail. More than often, I am laying somewhere- a beach or a meadow of tall grass. There's always a light breeze; the kind that I enjoy. Sun's out, but it's not hot at all. Today it was the meadow, and the grass was greener than it had ever been. The tree kept fading in and out, but that didn't matter. I wasn't alone this time, and I didn't suddenly imagine myself chasing after someone but getting nowhere. That was nice. I'd like to find a real place like that someday, where I could just lay about all day half-asleep, as I am when my personal version of Beloved comes creeping about.

Stupid ghost.

What goes around comes around...?

Karma. Does karma exist? The essential answer is "no". Good things do not happen to good people all of the time, and bad things do not happen to bad people all of the time. Well, I suppose that part of this is because nobody is completely good or completely bad. Everyone has their own justification; their own purpose, no? Everyone looks right in the eyes of their own higher power. So... karma can't exist. Who gets to decide what's good and what's bad? God? The government? The people? It doesn't matter; anyone- any group who tries to decide that isn't going to fly with everyone else. Our world is one, big conflict; we are the soldiers. I am an army.

This is the part of my life called "financially dismal." Whatever future I saw before me is now a big blur, wiped of its clarity the moment my mother was laid off. Really, how does that happen? The single parent with one elderly dependent and one college-bound dependent gets laid off.

Let's review the facts.

My mom screwed up big time. She's been in debt since I was in sixth grade. Is she still paying off these debts? Yes. I can't even... begin to name the idiotic decisions she's made in the past six years. Attempting to save her dying company with her own money, taking loans from her own children... ridiculous. Pride and prejudice. War and peace. More war than peace, actually. It tore the family apart. My brothers might as well be named Howard and Buglar. Except there is no ghost in this story. The ghost is money. Money is silly.

We've never had the best financial situation, but have I ever looked at my future and saw nothing? No. But the sad reality is that without money, there is nothing. Money is everything. Everything is silly.

So the course plots itself. Financial aid. Scholarships, grants, loans... when I apply for all of this, I get the big stamp called "unemployed parent." Whoopee. What, they shell out a few extra dollars for my sob story? Sure. Am I good enough to get everything taken care of? No. I have me. I have... scraping by as a good prospect for the next four years. I have the will to be much, much better than this. Because this? This is silly.

"The training is nothing. The will is everything. The will to act."

The most beautiful sound in all the world.

Pitter patter.

Ah, how refreshing... I feel like the sound itself is just breathing life into me. Now if only I could go frolicking in it without catching pneumonia.

Curse you, human vulnerability. You know what I did today? I went to CVS and bought cough drops two weeks in advance for when I get sick at Chicago. Established fact: 90% of us will come back deathly ill. Flu vaccine? No, screw that, we're Asian. We don't do vaccines. We do herbal tea and some black stuff that could be the blood of humans for all we know. Now, one person I know might enjoy that, but what the heck? Yeah, millions of cures for diseases could exist in the rainforests that mankind is decimating, but if we still have to hold back a barf everytime we take medicine, the scientists aren't doing their job.

When I asked what animal I would be if I was one, I expected a lot of things. Tiger, sure. Wolf, whatever. Bull... kay. Sheep or ram for the zodiac, why not. A lion for a leo, even. But rhinocerus? Do I look like I have a big, freaking horn sticking out of my face? Are you joking? No, I don't think you're joking; I think you're an idiot. All things in moderation (even moderation), but at least be... mildly literal here. Mildly logical, even! I can't make a rhinocerus look cute. Not if I tried. Nothing is cute that has a giant horn threatening to shred you into two.

Speaking of cuteness, I looked in the mirror today...

Just kidding.

And the rain comes back again, as it does so intermittently because this is Southern California.

And I love it more with each passing cloud.

"And his Grace was so overcome with his feelings, he swallowed an olive."

What is love?

If that doesn't spur you into song, then I'm sorely disappointed in you.

That's the question, though, isn't it? I've been here, what, seventeen years? How do I know what love is? And I doesn't mean mushy gushy superficial attraction, I mean straight up true love. Learning the difference between love, and well... love, that's the hard part. I love my friends, but not that kind of love, dear goodness no. I don't support polygamy. That one special person, though, how do I know that what I feel is all that special? Is it the uncontrollable smile on my face? The fluttering of my heart? The sudden calm that overcomes me when he's around?

Learning the difference between love and love requires you to know yourself very, very well. Seventeen years isn't enough time to think about it in total, let alone intermittently.

I love days like this, when it's not raining but overcast outside. I love the rain, too, but only when I'm inside. When I'm outside, I like it overcast, with a cold humidity to the air. It makes the air... sweet, heavy, grounding.

Days like this are great in these times. It's like... a break from the world. Everyone's so... I dunno, uptight. I profess: I don't know everything, and I can't empathize with everyone. After all, I'm only applying to five schools, and I only have to do three applications. Aside from that, though... isn't everyone in the same or a really similar situation? Doesn't everyone have a bunch of homework, Beloved hanging over their heads like a nightmare, and senioritis creeping up like a bad cold?

Together we stand, divided we fall. Then... why does it feel like everyone's drifting so far apart? If we could, I don't know, look into each other's minds, feel what each of us feels together, wouldn't it be easier? None of us are Atlas. We can't bear the weight of the world on our shoulders. We are people. We are human. We need each other, so for goodness sake, let's fulfill our needs before we go sprinting to our wants.

Seriously.

I fail at blogging. Anyway...

You know, I think I'll only post when my life has anything interesting involved in it. Otherwise, it's quite moot.

Life kicks you in the butt sometimes. As someone, I forget who, puts it, "Life sucks, and then you die." But kicks in the butt usually help to adjust your perspective on things. I got a huge kick in the butt this week, and I was about to overreact, as I'm prone to. Luckily, I have people who keep my feet planted on the ground at all times.

Honestly, though, how far can a single person be pushed? It's like testing how far you can walk into the ocean while keeping your mouth and nose above water. Similarly, when a wave comes in, you get swept up unexpectedly and end up underwater anyway. Then the tide goes as it should, and you end up just waist high. That's a somewhat accurate description, you could say; I like to call it "barely drowning". Then the big kahuna comes along, and it's game over.

I have the funniest visions while sifting through my mind sometimes. For instance, just now, I imagined myself scooting along the ground with my forehead to the carpet. That's actually common for me to see, no matter how odd. No, I'm not hallucinating. It's sort of like... a single-frame interruption in the film that is my life. If you've ever seen Fight Club, it's like those really short instances where you see Tyler pop up on the screen. But less creepy.

I don't know if I've written this before, but I'm really good at non-sequiturs. Er, bad. Er... screw it, you know what I mean. I kill conversations like bad pie on a Sunday morning. That could be because I just sort of say the first thing that pops into my head. I mean, the first thing that pops into my head usually involves cheese, the number eight, or shoes... What any of these have to do with anything, I don't know.

Hm, for a bit of serious, I have to say that I don't like how frivolous people are being these days. Everyone's going out to eat every other day; it's a nightmare! It makes my home-cooked meals taste bland and green. (Green's not even a taste.) I mean, I've spent my fair share of money recently (I'm going to have to ask my mom for 600$ this week... maybe more.), but I feel BAD about it. Worse than bad, I feel terrible! But everyone's going out to concerts, eating at ridiculously expensive restaurants... I'm not targeting anyone in particular, because a whole bunch of people are in on it! And none of them show remorse for their twenty-dollar meals. I could puke just thinking about it.

I always manage to make Christmas weird. Hopefully not this year. My gifts... whatever I attempt, are going to be more about self-expression rather than last-minute budget breakers as I normally pull off. I wince at the thought of how I've failed miserably these past Christmases. I've been getting better at it, though, so hopefully... Ugh, more wincing while I remember.

Feels like my brain is rolling over in my skull.

Double published in a Facebook note, in case you read that one.

Whacky day. Completely bipolar weather and mood.

Today's anecdote:

You can consider my mood for the past couple weeks exceedingly happy, hyper, and... ecstatic. Weird? Yeah. I haven't felt so happy in more than a year. Then I walked out to practice after school, put my stuff in the van, and proceeded back to the blacktop. That was when I felt a giant black hole eat up my insides. My smile stooped into a confused grimace in record time, and I laid down on the old, green bench to collect my thoughts. I'm not sure how much time passed while my eyes were closed, but when I opened them, I felt no different than before. I sat up and buried my head in my arms, utterly possessed by the deep darkness that had overcome me. I felt empty, hollow, cavernous; all those fancy synonyms you can think of.

Yes, a little more than four hours later, I'm feeling fine, but certainly not as fantastic as I was before. I suppose there's a monstrous list of factors contributing to this sudden dive. Stress would top the list, yes; I don't know what I was thinking doing four APs all over again. The apathy involved in academics nowadays is hilarious and yet somewhat depressing. I have a 2.86 GPA after a couple of weeks and don't seem to mind too much. This would contradict the notion that I'm stressed, but honestly, I am giving an effort to work hard. My brain just isn't following suit.

Then there's those words that were drilled into my mind on Saturday. I keep looking back on it and asking myself if I could've resisted the temptation of walking a couple of meters; if that slight relief from pain was worth it. Still no answer has resolved itself unto me, but it has forced me to admit that I will not attain my dream in my final year of running. This was probably the most depressing point in the day. My knee is simply too far gone, my body already at its peak for this year, and my mind too tired. I won't have a varsity letter, experience CIF, or even run varsity once, most likely. I'll be watching from the sidelines, at most. Still, a large part of me still wants to chase the dream, to make it somewhere, to be something.

Worst of all, I seem to be setting myself up for a fall again. It seems to be my tragic flaw (Hah, literary terms!) that I place myself in a rather high place and look down, slowly leaning forward until gravity carries me off and to the ground. It's almost the same feeling from last year but so much more complicated this time. There's so many more obstacles now, and many of them aren't in my control. What is in my control is to forget about it. My feelings may as well be cast to the wind; there is no chance here.

I have gotten somewhere, though. Yes, I am running faster than before by a wide margin, but I'm also connecting to people in ways that I never thought possible. I'm making new friends as time goes in leaps and bounds, and I find myself talking more easily with people that I thought I'd lost in the midst of woe. The journey that I set about in my previous note is by no means completed, but it can be considered that I've made quite the progress.

Hopefully I'm just in a funk. Hopefully. Dream to hope; hope to dream.

Emotions

So, I was going to get straight to the point until my grandma called me out to pack my breakfast for tomorrow. She only needed me to determine how much rice I wanted (I hate having too much.), so I figured it would only take a couple seconds. Then, as I was scooping my rice, I noticed how white it was. I always thought rice was somewhat dingier, but this rice was... pure white. Like hard, cylindrical, refridgerated snow. Random thoughts aside...

I sometimes don't like to have emotions. Happiness is all well and good, but that's about it. You have your basic "I wish I didn't feel this" emotions, like sadness and pain. Then you have the sort of things I don't like. First off, I hate... hating. Does that make any sense? I've said it before, but I honestly don't like the feel of that emotion. It's just so... dark. And yet, it's so human. Everyone hates. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. No one is so saintly, save for Jesus Christ, and that's assuming that he's real (Reference: I'm agnostic.).

But most of all, I think I don't like to love. This is where it gets abnormal. Yeah, consider this typical teenage angst, but I say... love sucks. I have the worst luck with it, I swear. I feel love for people I don't have a chance with. Don't just take this in the lovey dovey sense, either. I mean friends, in general. There's so much of a sense of ridiculous caring inside of me for people that don't even look at me twice. Okay, that might be an exaggeration. People know me, yeah, but most of them don't give a lick. I suppose it's selfish of me to say that, but hey, it's how I feel. Deal with it. Don't even get me started on guys. That just worsens it. I also love things that I'll never get anywhere at. Or at least, failed a dream at.

I guess you can say that I don't like to be disappointed or anything that can lead to disappointment. Happiness can never disappoint you.

On a whim.

Today, I found my brain completely scrambled. How scrambled, you ask? Imagine your eggs being overbeaten, overcooked, and then served cold. That's how scrambled. I felt thousands, maybe millions of thoughts and ideas raging up again a giant dam in my brain; there was just no outlet to let them through. So this is it. This is my outlet. This is me. And my mental disasters. And my turmoil. And my splurges.

Congratulations, it's a girl.