不知不觉的心碎了
My life lately:
It always feels like there are two sides warring inside of me. There is the part of me that knows life is a gift, and that I am lucky to be alive, even if I did not choose it. Because life is beautiful, and because we only get to live it once, I want to make every day the very best it can be. I always try. The other part of me is more bleak. Why bother? Why try? What if nothing will ever satisfy me? (I am saying this according to my personal beliefs.) One of the greatest existentialist crises is that is that we did not
choose to be born, and the necessity and process of defining our own meanings in life leaves us lost. I am lost.
That we can choose our own meaning of life is both liberating and debilitating. Life is what I shape it to be, but how do I know what I choose as my meaning will make me happy? How can I tell that it is the right, the best decision to make? My friend said to me: "It's called picking something, and not looking back."
True. But that doesn't make it any easier or make me any happier. It does nothing to quell the conflict of my insides, and each day is a battle.
As I wrote in my last post: everything I have achieved, I worked for it. Literally, my blood, sweat, and tears have gone into everything that I have done. And it makes it bigger, better, brighter, more real, that much sweeter - not easier.
But how could I ever forgive myself, if I did not try?
To borrow a line from the song the inimitable j. just posted:
Oh it's not fun to be so blind
To be so blindLabels: ♡L, existentialism, life, pictures, reality, the future
When age and forgetfulness sweeten memory
This ad last year:
The ad this year:
I'm not really sure what incited this change. I thought it used to be pretty funny; it was one of the city's defining ads, both tongue-in-cheek yet sadly appropriate. But what is the Mona Lisa supposed to imply? Whether or not I'm the father is wonderfully and titillatingly ambiguous?
For some reason a lot of my favorite ads have been replaced this year, ineffective clichés like "Marriage works" or the bewildering "I'm not giving it up and I'm not giving in" with a hideous girl plastered on the image. A nearby church used to have an announcement board saying "Thou shalt not kill" but, sadly, they've changed it now to something less simultaneously provoking yet applicable.
Knowing that this is the last year, the last time for everything, lends everything overtones of cloying sweetness. This is the last fall, the last September, the last Monday, September 22 that I will ever experience in this place. And through this feeling I have become a little more in love with my school, more able to see the good as the bad takes a bad seat. This place has been good to me and has given me what I needed and for that I am endlessly grateful.
Lately I have been developing a sense of self-preservation. Whenever I am confronted by shadows of the past, past mistakes that hinder my present, the realization that everything I do and everything I have done have an irrevocable hold on my future makes me stop and think a little whenever I take action now. Why be good? Why try?
Because you will always have yourself, whether you like it not. You can't mistreat it and then avoid it, trying not to see the mess you made, because that mess is you.
The other day I was at a café (adorable place near campus, with gourmet chocolate truffles and Asian fusion cuisine and the most delicious tuna tartar) with a friend whose opinion I have the utmost respect for. We were discussing a passage from a book she's been reading from her politics of good and evil class. There will always be people that make you feel appreciative of the opportunities you've had, and people who have immeasurably more than you do. Yet it's not about what life gives us, which we cannot control, but what we do with it. Life is short and you never know what will happen, so all you can do is strive for the best and try to be the best person you can be, every day. And in this way we have no regrets, we find happiness.
The sky was beautiful the other day:
If you have ever really talked to me then you have probably been subjected to one of my obsessive discussions of what is the best for me and my future. Sometimes it makes me unhappy, everything I have done wrong, and what I may potentially do wrong，but I have never wished I tried less. Recently I've been under a lot of stress because of some significant decisions I've had to make, issues about my future that I needed to confront. But I've come to a conclusion and taken a breath, and looking at it all, I'm pretty happy. My life is kind of really sweet. I'm in a good place, and the fact that I worked for all of it makes it that much sweeter. It's
mine, and because of everything that I have done- the world is pretty much my oyster.
Labels: ♡L, dreams, East Coast, life, pictures, reality, school
梦里梦到醒不来的梦
I am someone who gets creeped out very easily. I don't believe in ghosts, but ghost movies petrify me. Running solely accompanied by your breath and something more sinister from people popping out of closets, hanging from ceiling fans gives me nightmares for weeks.
Back in my old house, I used to rip out articles, comics, and pictures that I liked from my favorite magazines. Literally every wall of my room was covered, including the ceiling (pictures on
aphasia, under "room"), with faces of beautiful people, beautiful stories, lessons and quotes. Enormous photographs from
W, Richard Brautigan's "Love Poem" ripped out from
i-D, articles from
Newsweek, an editorial from the first edition of
Vogue China.
I worked on those walls for years. Eventually I had to decide if things were meaningful enough to put up, if it was poignant enough to merit covering something else that I had previously found striking. My friend told me it all reminded her of something out of
A Beautiful Mind, and wondered that all those eyes didn't frighten me at night. Upon reflection, I could see that it might be creepy, but it never unnerved me. Every inch meant something to me. One of my favorite articles was the
speech Steve Jobs gave at the 2005 Stanford commencement. (Can you spot it in the photographs?)
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ...
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
His speech appeals to the romantic in me, but I am not all romantic.
When my parents sold the house, the realtor told me to take down the papering because he said it would "frighten off" prospective customers. "It makes your room smaller," he smiled, which was untrue as the omnipresent cluster of faces, if anything, gave a sense of a lack of dimension. My parents threw most of it away, but what could I have done- taken them apart and reassembled them, these pieces that I chose for the way they looked next to each other, the way they fit into each other? My room now is bare. Usually I am at home maybe two months out of the year, and even though I'm home this summer, I haven't even bothered unpacking. I picked the coloring of my new room- light mint green with cherry red hardwood flooring. It matches, it's simpler and less haphazard, but still, I miss the sense of meaning all around me.
Back to Steve Job's speech. How does it match up versus something like this, that I can't say is right or wrong in comparison?
In [art, music, etc.], the few top get tons of money while the rest get nearly squat. And what's more, if you're at the top, yeah you've got your life made. You're doing what you love and you're earning big bucks.
But guess what? If you're doing what you love, but you're earning barely enough to pay your next apartment rent fee, and don't have enough to sustain a family and eat out every now and then (and not even own a new car), you can't say that you'd still be "Oh so happy to be doing what I love". In fact, I've seen tons of those people just wish and regret that they became doctors/lawyers/businessmen, etc.
There's a fine line between reality and fantasy. But cross it, and you're screwed, and time doesn't turn back. ... How many people in the world have jobs that they love? A crippling, minor percent of the entire 100.
The reality is, jobs end up serving as just a means of earning money so that the worker can do the things he wants to: this is how it ends up for most people. ... If you have a passion for becoming a Tolkeinist, and end up becoming someone who studies a made up language all your life and love it to death, but earn just as much as the guy flipping burgers at McDonald's, your daddy won't talk to you because you won't have a phone that you could buy.
That's reality.
(5000 points if you know where this is from.)
I've been thinking a lot about love and what it really means. I know that it counts for something, but I'm not sure how much. I am not particularly idealistic by nature and I question things over and over again, every day. If I love California, does it mean I should stay? If I don't love my career, does it mean I should change it? And if I love someone, be it romantic, platonic, or familial- does that mean I should be with that person? That love is the only justification needed?
I don't think so, but I don't know how much it counts for.
Labels: ♡L, 2005, California, career, collages, commencement speech, cynicism, death, decorations, dreams, idealism, life, love, moving, real estate, realism, reality, rooms, Stanford, Steve Jobs
