i never know what to do with sadness.

to interact or ignore or bury it in busy or just complacently sit with it, feeling

and i can’t really remember anything besides the forgetting. but i want to, i honestly do. i want to remember so hard that i can’t quite tell what i am making up

for now, this is okay. 

there’s a room at brown that i particularly like to study in. it has a yellow wall, orange sockets, bright lights, and no windows. i joke that i study in there because it looks relatively cheery, and never changes— there could be an avalanche, tornado, enormous natural disaster or riot or the world exploding all over the place and it wouldn’t matter. the room would be unchanged, and i’d still study because i wouldn’t know. i am not conscious of it. and for all intents and purposes, it does not exist.

this is how i feel about college, period. i have my head so stuck far up my academic butt (i want to use the other word for alliterative purposes but agh. curses!) that anything else is not even a speck on my radar. 

i can’t help but care about these things when i am at home, because this is where i am confronted with them. two people who work at my old middle school thought that the students were worse. and seeing how one of them has been at that school for definitely (at the very least) more than a decade, i’m inclined to believe this. so then i start thinking about the parents that don’t know what to do with their misbehaving kids and is it the media? failing of the education system, the getting rid of tenured teachers, maybe something changed with alternatives to kids just hanging out on the streets or jeez, i don’t even know where it starts and where it ends. 

i meet up with friend and find out one moved to a city that provided a better feeling of security because, yeah, your home should be a place where you feel secure. and i was flipping through my high school yearbook and came across the page dedicated to the classmate -honestly, he had a really swell smile- who died from a driveby on his birthday. and i read the news, the last homicide of 2011 in oakland was a five year old boy. 

it makes me angry that i can brush aside these things when i’m at college, but i also don’t know what to do with my caring.

one of my greatest fears growing up was to grow up. especially being old. i associated adults with the inability to wonder, because that’s what i saw in my parents— you go day to day and don’t stop to marvel at the sky or the sights or the small joys. like sometimes how it feels really good wash dishes because of the suds. or you’re eating food that you ate every day for the past who knows how long and there’s a moment where you pause, chew, and somehow it tastes new. 

and i kinda found that really frightening, to not have anything beyond what is exactly here and a precise routine. to have even the breakage of routine to be institutionalized and scheduled in new sights and vacations, instead of the odd wonders in the everyday. 

i’m questioning whether this is a given in life. it probably is not, but i still look towards growing older with some apprehension

• recognize where people come from, it’s important
• don’t expect to change anybody. it’s a terrible basis for any relationship (romantic or otherwise)
• things get jumbled up from mouth to mouth, drama is a huge game of telephone and you just shouldn’t play
• you can’t always unscramble where the messages got mixed up in telephone game drama, and that often isn’t necessarily the solution
• to-do lists mean productivity
• growing up isn’t freely given, you have to earn it. and, no, you don’t absolutely have to grow up. but the alternative is even more terrible
• fortune cookies don’t always tell the truth
• stop comparing stop comparing stop comparing
• although all who wander are not lost, you should at least wonder where you are. it matters. 

hi, 

i am the second best match in terms of bone marrow for this sixteen year old girl with leukemia.

which i think is absolutely nuts. not only for the chances— that would be difficult to calculate but they’re undoubtedly quite high— but just circumstantial stuff. in senior year of high school i was in this leadership/alcohol drug awareness/confusedish group that had small groups create and initiate some sort of community service thing together. and somehow my partner and i got around to volunteering at this bone marrow registry, to help a five year old boy with cancer try to recruit more people (especially minorities) into registering. maybe this isn’t such a nutty chain of events. but i kinda think so.

bone marrow donations tend to ride along (incredibly specific) ethnic lines, and the majority of the people in the registry are currently caucasian. because of this, caucasian people have about a 70-80% of being matched with a donor. if you’re a minority, it’s much lower.  [disclaimer: i feel like whenever you talk about discrepancies between ethnicities you enter this state of commenting upon the subtle oppressive racial structures in this world, but this honestly is by no fault of anything like that. it makes sense because america is majority white, but doesn’t mean that it still won’t suck to be a minority with cancer and have a significantly less chance of being matched to a donor]

but yeah. i was seventeen then so i didn’t register, but did after my birthday.

i think that if the first donor has whatever issues in donation and i do go through with this (parental issues), i’m going to give a heads up to anybody that had a part in the circumstances of all this

and in light of circumstances… you should register. seriously. who knows, you might be a match.

also, i’m proud of myself. finally a post that isn’t about missing home or some form of nostalgia, i’m a baby

i enjoy the concept of lullabies— that there will be something comforting, melodic, sweet lulling you to sleep. even the name is great. there’s the warmth that automatically goes somewhere deep and trickles outward

i think that there should be lullabies for waking up, morning lullabies. for people to sing to you, so you feel that security and tingling and coziness at the start of each day. when you need it

oh yeah, and i read some prose that i wrote about my popo at this asian american lit magazine release party. it was wonderful equally for the growth that always accompanies going out of your comfort zone and the proof of how much my friends are willing to support me. (thanks, guys.) i think that if i had stood in front of one of those dual microphone set-ups for a guitar, you could have heard my heart beat as loudly as i did

and also that i got this nifty little picture of me in the school newspaper