it's only love
My life lately: snow, among other things
As I listen to the echoes of my boots in the dim, empty streets, I think of how there is something that I love about the East Coast. California is a dream, but I have always fought to plant myself in reality. The harshness of the cold, the cling of the summer. All those pillars and red autumn leaves.
Labels: ♡L, dessert, East Coast, pictures, snow, winter
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
But once you knew a girl and you named her Lover, and danced with her in kitchens through the greenest summers
More pictures!
Santana Row
Left Bank Brasserie
bleu, Brie, & goat cheese fondue
raw oysters...delicious
my car
j.'s car
San Francisco
Labels: ♡L, drunkenness, Emporio Armani cafe, fondue, food, Left Bank brasserie, pictures, raw oysters, San Francisco, Santana Row
The past increases, the future recedes.
So last week, while I was on a break from the MCAT (like I am now, har har) j. and I met up in the evening. We went to this late night HK-style café that had really cheap and delicious (not being sarcastic) offerings like "Ice Cream Sunday" and "Mi Ni Ham Macaroni Soup."
"I love mussels!" Just say that out loud.
Mi Ni Macaroni Soup was delicious! Do people really eat this in Hong Kong?
Afterwards, we went to Q-Cup where we proceeded to terrify all of its patrons.
We were trying to be fobby... but it just...
Moon power!
Don't you just want to hang out with us? Like right now??
P.S. Why I love
Weeds:
“Silas, look,” says Uncle Andy. They’re squatting in Andy’s foil-insulated drug van. “Life is just blah blah blah. You hope for blah and sometimes you find it. But mostly it’s blah. And waiting for blah. And hoping you were right about the blahs you made. And then just when you think you’ve got the whole blah-damn thing figured out, and surrounded by the ones you blah, death shows up. And blah. Blah. Blah.”
Labels: ♡L, late night dining, pictures, Q-Cup, Venus Bakery Cafe, Weeds
Rien ne se passe jamais comme on l'imagine
Truthfully, my school isn't so bad when it's not completely kicking my ass. The only problem is that most of the time that's exactly what it's doing.
So, to counter the gravitas of my last post- cameraphone pictures from the East Coast:
my campus in the wintertime, when the snow isn't too icy or dirty, and it isn't so cold that I wish I could remove my bones so they would stop aching
we're known for crack and crabs (literally, crabs)
how nerds say hi to each other
Tapas Teatro... I love white chocolate
Inner Harbor
So at research, my postdoc performs fatal cardiac punctures on the mice before it's my turn to eviscerate them, hearts still beating. Kinda cool? Kinda sad? Mostly cool, except when they piss themselves out of fear, but by the time I get to them they're almost dead anyway.
ahi tuna at Ruths Chris, which is some of the best I've ever had
pretty much sums it up
The Charleston (French & southern fusion), where my friend and I spent $100+ each on dinner
view from my old dorm
And one from California!
amazing rolls at Ninkimono Sushi... plus j.'s boobs
:)
Labels: ♡L, East Coast, pictures, school
