2013

Despite all my self-conscious griping about photography: 

2013 through (mostly) my camera lens, (almost) all in chronological order.

Apparently it was about people and different places.

And food. 

Though actually, the three all just different aspects of one, whole experience. 

setting a-sail. via plane. ahoy, France!

late-night tea and ketchup time with Diego and the host brother in franglish

Valenbici, Valencia

"majestic" comes to mind

te amo

soulful-sad coffee date with soulful-sad french girl who opened up to me about her soulful-sad things like it was no big deal

22nd birthday apple piecake in Lyon

Cristian in Granada. Those olives were somehow so delicious.

crazy-laughing with fellow Morocco-adventure-rs

bubble tea

amie de voyage

"the Eiffel Tower is magical because..."

rebel in London

a year of so many photobombs

but also of so many lovely photo'ed memories

"you have to look through the leetle viewfinder"

live, laugh, love,
and wink unabashedly

baguette-under-arm: check

two dreamers in Perouges

brunch fiends

La Grande Mosquée de Lyon

we can't help it. behind-the-scenes at a tapas bar in Montpellier

wine by the liter 2 euros, chit-chat about life and love, totally free

celebrating open hearts, open doors, being scared to death of things that turn out to be nothing, etc.
Montpellier

sunshine in Marseille

beer on a cafe terrace: we talked of movies I didn't know.

such unfiltered love for those leaves
Aix-en-Provence: "tu m'inspires"

fearless jaywalkers
Aix

"Comment savoir si c'est l'art ou pas?"
Nice, France

refuge from...homelessness.
It sounds like I'm dramatizing it,
and I am. hahaha
Nice, France

Strasbourg, France

Zuhause in Deutschland

unexpected friendships abound
Tuebingen, Germany

Lake Bodensee

bye bye sadness
Tuebingen

I am the master of picnic lunches.
Amsterdam, Netherlands

the most colorful, the most tragic

high spirits, whiskey appreciation
Edinburgh, Scotland

what was it about this trip that made us sit up all night and talk about things that made us
cry, laugh, question our existence?! 

hurrying amidst a sunrise
Edinburgh

so beautiful, but so lonely
Howth, Ireland

May sunshine in Virginian fields
madlee & isamee

"내가 명동은 좀 잘 알지 훗"
Seoul, Korea

reunion: family & country & feeling

미녀들의 수다, 3 generations in one picture
there are few things more beautiful than the wrinkled skin of my grandma.
Haenam, Korea

you are one of the best people I know.
frolicking in Busan, Korea

 

my "what is friendship?" friend
Myeongdong, our favorite touristy place in Seoul

reunion, our style. there was laundry and tooth-brushing.
Seoul, Korea

this will seem random but it is not: I need a husband who is good at not missing buses, trains, planes.
Korea

"Thank you." 

home sweet van
Charlottesville

Home is where the Binky is.
Charlottesville, US

mommy and me
Carter's mountain, Charlottesville!

diversity fdf
So thankful for yawl.
"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." -Proverbs 27:17 

ganstagrass!
The Jefferson, Charlottesville

bathed in fall sunshine
Carter's Mountain again

farmers' market Saturday

an unlikely trio
which is probably the best kind of trio.
At the Colonnade Club, UVA

it was a chaotically spectacular kind of night
when we felt like high schooler astrologists

Thanksgiving for Lobster.
I mean lobster for thanksgiving.
I mean,, what?

our room was the object of everyone's secret envy on that night at Clemons 3rd floor
exam season in style, so fourth year

her resolutions were on a hotel note pad and mine on an irregular-size yellow paper, but our goals incorporated numbers and things, and that's all that really mattered.

chin chin!

on: bWOston. on: the funny thing.

The funny thing about my (and most good, multi-children owning) parents is that they treat their two kids exactly the same. In all the ways that they need to do this. Such as in their reaction to the children holding up family vacations by taking too many photos: waiting so patiently and posing so graciously and offering more more more things for us to go clicketycrazy on.

They did this when I was guilty of it,

They do this now with my sister who has gradually caught the clicketycrazy bug. (She denies this but let's be real... I denied it, too, when I had it.)

Picture-taking is another funny thing -- something I've really come to think about in terms of audience, message, purpose, value. Mostly because my camera participated so actively in much of my life for a majority of the time that I was on facebook. I took and posted so many pictures, in the name of documentation, in the name of rememory, in the name of sharing experiences -- anything but the overarching reason: "for my facebook friends to see them." Which was probably the "biggest" reason, whether I meant for it to be or not, in that it is the one that encompasses all the other smaller truths of my reasoning. 

Back then,______________:

• anyone spending any amount of time with me would likely spend time with my camera, too.  An awkward third wheel crashing every chemistry party.
• experiences were annotated in my brain, first-draft captioned as the moment was being captured, like two reels of life running in my brain -- the one I was participating in with my body, and the other one I was planning to participate in (and thus, participating in) in the facebook albums-to-be.
• as much as I denied it, I was making it harder for myself to really be in the present, as I am naturally inclined to be. Which is a shame. But I did get a lot of great photos out of it. In the twisted and jaded mood of my current life, I feel like those days were "brighter" and "sparklier" than they necessarily would have been without all my photographing, because they were forced to be photo-worthy by virtue of being captured in concrete sheets of Memory. Whether it was the labeling and canonizing (woah camera pun unintended) that forced the moments to become necessarily photoworthy or the retrospective rose-colored filters photos seem to develop over the moments they capture, or perhaps a combination of the two, as always. 
• BUT I also did get a lot of cruddy, unmemorable moments memorialized. Is this necessary? Or, better question: Was my loss of that moment in real time worth the memorializations of those rather cruddy, unmemorable moments??
• my sister would be the one getting annoyed by the delay of life that would happen whenever she was with me.
• my mom would always be so patient with the delay of life that would happen whenever she was with me. 

Since I've broken up with the First And Foremost audience of my photos, facebook, I now haughtily criticize my sister for her photography-for-sharing. Feeling superior, but also less sparkly (see bullet point the third), and then grateful (see the fifth). 

And like I said, gratitude is the cure-all of temper tantrums. So ending on this emotion is a good way to stop being haughty/feeling depressingly unsparkly. 

And thank goodness for that.

bWOstn

 gloomy city

boston is european

 exploring rainy downtown

 dis is what I did at the historic libarry

the epickest!

 someone's in BWOStn

 on the way to the ballet

 inside the opera house. so glorious and ornate; makes you feel like a princess

even if you are a boy

 illegal picture taking
like, an usher materialized 2 seconds after I snapped this, to yell.

 cape cod

 winter sea salt is beautiful

 this is also beautiful

 cwazy

and then came home to write to the person left behind.

de end.
winter break je t'aime

Sunday Hyundai

Gratitude is the cure of temper tantrums.

And I know that's totally cheesy and vague and kind of a cliche if you think about it, like "goodness is good" except a wee little bit less self-evident, but a temper tantrum this morning made this sentence real for me. Okay let me take some responsibility for the childishness, eh hem -- my temper tantrum this morning made me realize this.  Or, maybe the experience gave birth to the sentence, spontaneously and necessarily, because the feeling needed to be expressed -- like how Alaskan native Americans (??? #citationneeded) have like a bjillion words for all the subtle variations of snow, because they have so many different experiences of it and have the need to express those subtleties of experience. Or maybe it's all this self-help stuff I've been reading manifesting itself in coherent and specifically relevant words in my head, lifted off the page and into life. Leap!

Or maybe it's both, like the circle (of liiiiiiiiiiiiiiife) or the chicken-or-the-egg? question.

But yeah -- let's read that again, just to clear the head after all that confusion about the kumbaya poultry: Gratitude is the most effective cure of temper tantrums.

I was driving (late) to church this morning, all in a huff and frustrated in a genuinely petty way (my mom had told me my outfit was weird...which is, unfortunately, a phenomenon that is topic-worthy for a whole post of its own. sigh), and just in time, Mumford and Sons came on via my iPod's shufflin' and like the whiny and dramatically juvenile (non)teenage girl I am, I turned it up up up, wanting to drown my sorrows in the soulful screechings of their banjo(s).

When I paused -- in the midst of all dat banjo --

To
Look at that dial I am touching
To control the music
Playing through the sound system of my (my!!) new car,

driving this killing-machine-personal-chauffeur(kinda)-bjillion-pounds-of-metal-and-engineering-GENIUS over which I have been given responsibility for good use, in such ABUNDANT and ABSOLUTELY UNDESERVED blessing of a gesture. Totally free, and freely given. Bestowed. To a good-for-nuthin, puerile and disgustingly ungrateful daughter who stomps for petty reasons only ALL the time and screams in capital letters about all the things she lacks. lackalackalack. (Wow. The language of grace comes so naturally, inherently Christian -- a reminder of our earthly parents' love reflecting the love of our heavenly father. Wow. It's basic and ingrained and generously repeated in copious Sunday sermons, but is always a little breathtaking.)

I have always wanted to use the word puerile in a real-life setting.

And then I started going through from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, wriggling whatever part was possible for safe wriggling, in my state of driving and all --

God thank you for my toes.
God thank you for my calves 
My knees
My booty, my everything.

The last line of which sounds like some parody of a hip hop-country song mash-up, but it was all very helpful in the realization of this

Gratitude is the cure for temper tantrums thing.

What a morning of grace via hyundai. ABUNDANT and ABSOLUTELY UNDESERVED and GENIUSly unexpected and totally random, though totally not, I know.


This message has (not) been approved by the Hyundai Motor Company.

ba-bump: sympathy versus empathy

"Rarely, if ever, does an empathic response begin with 'At least'."

I thought I knew everything there was to know about this empathy things, until she said that^. So (especially) if you think you know about empathy, you should watch this video-o-o-oh.

Empathy and Sympathy. Why were they named something so close, so easily inter-confusable? These are two not-the-same-at-all reactions to similar situations.

Inspired to humility. An up to a low -- these are the mysterious movements of life's rhythmic pulse. 

This is How: part 2

part 1: heaa

from: How to be Confident

"To allow yourself to be "yourself" when you are with others, you don't need to have years of therapy-polished love for yourself - merely tolerance.

When you're on a date or in a meeting or wherever it is you need to be seen as confident or wish you had "confidence," this is the tool to pull from the box and use: be where you are when you're there, doing whatever it is you're doing.

Engage with someone and focus on them, not on your own self, not wondering how focused you are or how much time has passed."

from: How to Shatter Shame

"Some people find it difficult - or impossible - to focus on what they're doing instead of the people watching. Some people struggle and cannot seem to let go of other people's opinions of them, whether real or imagined. That means they're not able to be themselves. Which means other people won't see them as confident.

This is a self-esteem issue.

The phrase "self-esteem issue" is a cardboard stage prop of a phrase. What does it even mean?

I guess I have a hard time believing that anything hyphenated could possibly be the deepest truth of the matter.

A lack of "self-esteem" really suggests a feeling of shame over being one's self.

Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else."

from: How to Get Over Your Addiction to the Past

"For many years, I believed that one's past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one's past and trying to gain understanding and "make peace" with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.

The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.

The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If not, what can you do to achieve what you want to achieve?

Denial of the painful events in one's past is the same as obsessing over one's past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power.

Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song - these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do."

more to come as I read on.

Winter break je t'aime.

life is a hiiiighwaiiiii

Being stuck in a car for 12+ hours with the highway, and someone you can't get through to sometimes leads to breakthroughs.

For so many years, I've been getting mixed signals - parents telling me that I need to have my life figured out in negative 4 years (aka since the beginning of college), and everyone in my American life (non-Korean professors, advisor, other adults, friends, mentors) telling me that it's okay to be confused and indecisive. It dramatically brings to mind that medieval torture method where they would use four horses, each tied to a major limb of the persecutee, and commanded to run in four different directions. Ouch & AHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhh (oh, it's called dismemberment.)

Obviously this is a huge dramatization because my parents are actually really gracious people, and obviously I want the latter party to be correct and for the former party to hop on the "this is okay" bandwagon. 

But I think I'm at that crucial intersection, point of no return, etc etc more more more road/traveling metaphors, of facing the fact: That these two parties will never be in agreement. My mom and dad will simply never be okay with the fact that I might not know what I want to do with my life even after graduation. They will not think it is okay with the slight(ly but surely increasing) chance that I might just end up working at a coffee shop for a little bit after May 17th, workin' that hourly wage and figuring out my career path or doing my grad school applications. They will be ashamed and worried, but more prevailingly, ashamed, because they know that I am not going to spend the rest of my life doing this coffee shop thing. They know that I know that I wouldn't let myself spend the rest of my life doing this because, of the many things I have yet to rule out as my life aspirations, being a full time, career-barista does not make the list. Not because it's not good enough or prestigious enough for me, no, but because it's just not what I was made to do on this earth, and even amidst all the uncertainty I know this. And they know me.

It's stressful enough feeling the pressure you put on yourself for these kinds of decisions, but I just realized that honestly, I am way less worried than my parents are about all this. And what I've been doing this semester is channeling their stress level and not realizing the dys-sync of this with my own level of worry and getting fat from it. Probably. Cortisone and all you know. 

Here's what I've been hearing from my parents and channeling, internalizing: "It is already WAY too late for you to be deciding what you want to do with your life. You should be on a track, no, should've been on a track we can ... track, and monitor, and watch and expect incremental and certain growth from. Points A to B to C. It was a mistake to let you grow up with so much freedom, we should have just insisted on a career path from the very beginning. You are so late, so slow. You are thoughtless. You are wasting your talents. You might turn out to be a source of shame and a waste of resources. Prove you won't be; please just pick something - now."

Here's what I truly believe about myself: "Things are going to be okay." 

So on that highway down homeward I resolved to stand up for mytrueself, cause who else will? It's useless to lament the state of things I cannot control right now and honestly, in my heart of hearts, am not truly worried about. I want to make my parents happy - but squelching out my own voice just because it says things not in agreement with theirs isn't the way to do this.

Things are going to be okay. Even if my parents don't think so. 

Wow I am such a people-pleaser.

whereami; whoami wah wah wahhh (a la kierkegaard)

Things I like about myself:

1. I have this little knack for languages. I love tasting their various flavors and feeling their different textures on my tongue and repeat things over and over and overandoveroenen in the shower, in the car, in my head because I get addicted to them and in this way, I learn.
2. I apologize for things like a spineless little puppy if I know that I am in the wrong. Okay sometimes it's more like an old, stubborn dog sighing an apology sorrrta reluctantly but in the end I do it. UGH.
3. I strike up conversations with strangers because I think it's beautiful and fun and fleeting in a nice way. I think this is courageous. I'll never run away from a stranger with a witty conversation opener, but will usually neevvverrr know if it's a pick-up line until WAY after the fact. Oops.
4. I like writing papers. mmmmm. Sometimes I get unexpectedly good grades on them, almost like magic. I'll typetypetypetytpe out a paper in the fi!nal! coundownnnn hours not really sure what I am typing, or, or, I'll write out allllllll these things not really sure where it's all going, but once the paper is finished and I turn it in, unable to read it over for wanting to hurl (from the speed, from the overdose of words), but then I'll get it back later and then even later I'll re-read it and think, "hey self...woah you ;) "
5. I have nice eyebrows, and am very good at curling my eyelashes. 
6. I can conceptualize most things easily, so I can have conversations about lots of different things I don't truly understand the details of and honestly follow along, convincingly nodding and mmhmm-ing. Re-explaining these things in my own words is another thing altogether, but still.
7. Sometimes I am expressive in a cute way that lots of people don't know. Weirdly, this girl named Sareum, who really doesn't know me that well, gets it. If she ever reads this, though, she might be confused.
8. I quit facebook like an alcoholic who just went cold-turkey and haven't ever really wanted to go back. Not that this is something to be paaaaaaarticularly proud of, but it makes me pursue deeper relationships through email and skype, and I like this.
9. I am a weak, weak, weaklingy small girl in a big big world, and for this I am grateful, for

"he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." 2 Cor 12:9

an incomplete and unedited list in no particular order except the one it came in, pop pop pop to my mind. 

time fo bed

how are you supposed to help someone who feels victimized by everyone and everything?

how do you keep telling someone that they are okay, okay, okay, doing just fine

how???? when everything you say means nothing; is never enough? cause they are up against the whooooooole world and he is just one person and you are just one person.



Just keep loving them,

is the only answer I've got.

and maybe tell'em to wash their face and tuck'em into bed
cause a good night of sleep does wonders for a melancholy body

love love love

morning

I wonder what it is about mornings that is so appealing. I know that poem down there lists a lot of good reasons, but there's something that feels so clean about the very beginning of the day. Maybe it's all the hope that the rest of the day holds - just the fact that you have no idea what's really gonna go down even if you know exactly everything there is on your to do list. What kind of people will you meet? What kinds of things will do [not] accomplish? What kinds of donuts will you eat at what kinds of coffee shops you'll discover? Does the last sentence actually make grammatical sense? Not sure, but chin chin clink clink, here's to the beauty of a personal blog.

t-giving chin chins

I just watched this tedtalk by Tony Robbins who is this self-help inspirational speaker extraordinaire ba-flaire bo-hair, and he said something about how there are only like six emotions - six categories that alll emotions can be boiled down to, essentially, among allll the subtle varieties that we feel - and lots of us tend to feel only one, given any circumstance. There are people who, no matter the circumstance, find a way to get angry. There are others, who, find joy or gratitude in all situations, bleak or beautiful.

I want to be someone who feels gratitude at the core of every circumstance. Someone who takes the inexplicable beauty of every single morning as a true, exaggeratedly sparklesome, and rare GIFT that it is, bed hair and morning breath all accounted for.

My beautiful, "breath of fresh air" friend told me about this zen thing she does whenever she finds herself getting annoyed at frustratingly small and petty things - she closes her eyes and goes from toes up to the her head, cataloging all the things she's thankful for.

"I am thankful for my toes, that help me balance."
"I am thankful for my feet, that allow me to walk."
"I am thankful for my calves, which have recently lost some size in girth. Hallelujah"

Those may or may not have been edited according to my personal takes on how I am thankful for my body parts, not quotes from the friend.

But edited or not, this is a beautiful thing to do! And to add a layer of giving credit where it's due (always a good thing), let me add these words of thanks to the creator of the toes, of the feet, of the calves, and of that loss in girth. Hallelujah indeed.

Dear God, thank you for this body you have made so wonderfully and fearfully. Thank you for my mind that accepts and formulates these thoughts, thank you for fingers to type it out here so I can keep these good records of grace.

Thank you for the teeny sense of accomplishment I will feel after pressing the Publish button, and thank you for the fact that my little sister is in love right now, and it is cute, and thank you that I can appreciate it as a cute and nice phenomenon. And not be jealous. Though honestly, this is certainly not always the case. (Aside: please let me always be able to step out of myself enough to ask "What?" when she flutters over and sighs in that contented in-love way, in that I wanna talk about my boyfriend to you right now way.) Thank you for your provisions for my family. Thank you for the fact that I grew up in the states. Thank you for this heart for your people. Thank you for tears.

Thank you for my toes, that help me to balance.
Thank you for my feet, each one with just the right number of phalanges and balls and heels.
Thank you for my calves that support everything else, and thank you for the everything else.

Ah. Thank you.

Morning

by Billy Collins

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,

the swale of the afternoon,

the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,

his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—

throwing off the light covers,

feet on the cold floor,

and buzzing around the house on espresso—

maybe a splash of water on the face,

a palmful of vitamins—

but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,

the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,

a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows—

trees fifty, a hundred years old

out there,

heavy clouds on the way

and the lawn steaming like a horse

in the early morning.

the strength of weak ties

[the title is] quoting again, from here this time: http://www.amazon.com/The-Defining-Decade-Twenties-Matter-And/dp/0446561754

source: here

This is kinda related to the love section of the previous post - expanding on the need to put yourself physically and metaphorically outside the 3-foot radius of your [geographic/cultural/racial/social] comfort zone for there to be progress in life.

We make friend groups and form communities because they are comfortable and comforting to us. That is their purpose and point, and the fact that all of these words sound soothingly similar - a lullaby of repetitive c's and m's - is no fluke: comfort, community, commitment, communication, commonality. Despite all the fuss over whether life is more like "birds of a feather flock together" or "opposites attract," apparently and ultimately, it comes down to things we have in common with each other when we pick the people in our lives to spend the majority of our time with. It's easier. You don't have to argue or explain as much. They just get you and it feels good. 

But then there is "the strength of weak ties" - the fact that some high percentage figure of people (I am so bad at remembering numerical details) get their jobs through the uncle of a friend of a teacher. And other statistics that no longer remember except as an irresponsible mass of fuzzy, hazy feelings that tell me that all this was very convincing indeed while I was reading the book, I promise you. 

Sorry about all that blahhhhrg -- but the point is that progress and comfort do NOT often go hand in hand. They're just inherently opposite and non-compatible things. Think of growing pains, stretch marks, the first time you learned with your skin cells that fire is hot yes. 

Sometimes it's the odd, not-really-actually-close-to-you-but-weirdly-feel-this-connection kind of frienquaintance that helps you realize the profoundest truths about yourself, about them, about humanity. Mmmm globalizing, generalizing woooOooooOooOhoo!hoo!hoo!

And is it weird that I feel more myself with this person than I have in a looooong, parched time, even more than I have in SO MUCH company of people with whom I have shared much more time and intense heart-stories and even hardships and faith things? 

Yes. 

But maybe no. Because the "weak tie" I share with this person is also a sort of safe space - thanks precisely to all the things we don't share. No friends in common to gossip about, no hobbies to get lost in, becoming Doing Friends (as opposed to Talking Friends), no history to reminisce endlessly, unproductively about, and thus, no expectations to fulfill or not fulfill. No disappointments, no judgments, just surprises and "oh! YOu think this way, cool!"s. It's a relationship brimming with the frontier feeling - all there is to do is the exploration of new lands. The contact and conversation that feels good cause it's a breath of fresh air by the very virtue of being unexplored and unfamiliar and un-common and un-comfortable. This person makes me feel so unencumberedly me. It's a good reminder of how life should feel more often: this feeling of being comfortable in your own skin with a person who you're totally, comfortably uncomfortable with. I wonder where this frienquaintence will go.

But not knowing the answer to this is the purpose and point of this post.

This is How: augustenburroughs

from here: http://www.amazon.com/This-Is-How-Surviving-Think/dp/1250032105

from: How to Feel Like Shit

"Real optimism is not the pep talk you give yourself. It is earned through the labor involved in emotional housekeeping. 

This means asking yourself questions like, are these negative feelings you're experiencing the result of something in your life right now? Or have they been simmering away in your cauldron of mental sickness for years and year? 

...

Sometimes, people avoid recognizing how they feel because they believe the feelings are a part of them, and admitting to harboring anger or jealousy feels like admitting to a physical flaw. So certain feelings are denied. Which is something like believing your house is clean as long as you don't peek under the beds.

But feelings, no matter how strong or "ugly," are not a part of who you are. They are the radio stations your mind listens to if you don't give it something better to do. Feelings are fluid and dynamic; they change frequently.

Feelings are something you have, not something you are. Like physical beauty, a cold sore, or an opinion."

from: How to Find Love

"Whether through movies or just a general, all-media fusion, many people believe in the concept of a soul mate. 

This isn't necessarily a dangerous thing but it can easily veer into that direction. If you're one of those people who is single and doesn't understand why, you might want to ruminate over this for a bit.

A belief in a soul mate is often accompanied by a belief that you will meet this soul mate "when I'm supposed to."

Here now, we're kind of heading into the trouble. "When I'm supposed to," "if it's meant to happen," and similar beliefs suggest there is a paid employee overseeing these details of your life.

...

Early in 2010, Science magazine published the results of  study that analyzed cell phone data and declared that "it may be possible to predict human movement patterns and location up to 93 percent of the time" because most of the people studied "seemed to stick to the same small area, a radius of six miles or less."

...

Maybe you aren't even aware of how small a geographic circle you live in. But until you stretch your borders just a little, you can't say you've so much as lifted a finger when it comes to finding love. What you've done is wait for love to quit its job, apply for work as a FedEx driver, and put in a request to work on your particular route. 

...

If you're single and you don't want to be, meet more people. It is, in fact, that easy."

more to come as I read on.

Winter break je t'aime!

twothousandthirteen december twenty seventeen forty-nine shenanjoe cville va amurica world

This is the melancholy post. This is the taking-advantage-of-the-feelings-of-this-moment post, before the feelings diffuse away, end with the final chords of the emo song in the background, get forgotten. 

This is the melancholy post. The post fueled by a bitter mug of medium roast, drenched in this perfect pandora station mix that loops JohnMayerEricHutchinsonEdSheeran and has me swaying and singing along like I know what's up with pop culture, but pausing. all. the. time. Sit back.

Cause this is the melancholy post. Melancholy now, because I've been angry and I've been stressed and I've been so transparently childish - screaming in the car and throwing things around and wanting to starve myself in anger but never being able to because that's not actually how I deal with being mad or sad - and I'm tired now.

This is the melancholy post. This is the post yearning to make something productive of the melancholy -- not because I need to justify it or because I am a relentless busybee or because I want to get out of it, even (because admit it, doesn't it feel good to be endlessly steeped in your own melancholy? That's why they call it a pity party, right?), but because I just want to record these moments

in this melancholy post.

This is the melancholy post.

-------------------------------------------edit, 11:11pm--------------------------------------------

^ermmmmm. ugh,

s t r e s s

The verdict on stress-inducement of grey hair is inconclusive - apparently it does bring about premature greying, but only if you're genetically predisposed to that anyways, so it's technically not, but it technically is, kind of deal.

Stress-induced greyness or not, the truth in my life this semester is that I have been stressed and I have seen an alarming increase in the grey hair count on top of my head. As far as I'm concerned, I'm in need of a culprit to blame for the hairs, and stress will be it. And a culprit to blame that stress on... hmmm...

I've been so stupidly stressed this semester, it's hard to believe. Hard to remember the carefree, chill-is-my-default-mode girl [guurrll] I used to be; used to always sort of pride myself on being. All my brain remembers is the stress I've been steeped in - I feel like stewed apples, slobbery and mushy and distinctly, definitely no longer truly Apple in their essence. Their core. Har! There's something very sad and very wrong (but also very hopeful and cinnamony) about this metaphor, but I'm not gonna worry about it.

But yes. Stress is just another kind of pride and stubbornness. Not wanting to, or not being able to, let go of one's own plans and imaginings of how things should be and getting all messed up when the reality that plays out doesn't match up to the preconceived versions of things. Oh God, help me to let go. I am a sleep-deprived, eye-twitching mess, but I am letting go of the things, am holding onto you. Let me hold onto the right things and fling flang flung all the others. Like grey hairs. Or at least wondering about alllll the reasons how they might have gotten to the top of my head.

Woosh and woosh.

10000miles to california

Give people a chance before you decide in your head what you think they're gonna say - they just might surprise you.

I wonder how many people I have left to meet in my lifetime - surely hundreds, maybe tens of hundreds, although these are just words I'm throwing out there because I am really bad with conceptualizing big numbers. 10,000 miles? That's...like...to California, right? But yeah, I wonder how the spread of your meet-people statistics works out, over the course of a lifetime.

There must be a big crunch, an especially thick period of people connections and friendships and acquaintances, at the beginning of your life - starting with toddler/childhood when relationships are as easy as sharing a sandbox and a lollipop, and then through college, during which you're brought together by the forces of late night swirly-eyed library dates and other mysterious forces like music or course registration or alcohol. And then maybe it tapers off - you find your mate and you settle down into Mid-Life, and togetherly, have your Mid-Life couple friends and make relationships with kids you've made together. Oh, and then maybe you have another little peak, through all the connections through the connections of your offspring. Then, real middle age, then old age - during which you cultivate relationships that are already there. Not really looking for more, and other people around you around your age probably not really looking for more either, which is convenient. Except when it's not, which always seems to be the case.

So yeah. I wonder how many people I have left to meet in my lifetime. Have I already met the best friend of the next decade? Has my heart blindly friend-zoned the person I'm actually gonna marry? Has he noticed me?

I forget the train of thought that led me here.
It is 2 a.m. and I shall now start to read a book for fun, because it's winter break.

Winter break, je t'aime.

familiarity engineerity

There are things that make me drool in awe in familiar ways, such as this:

unfortunate frame, but this is Sarah Kay on TED!

By familiar, I mean reaching into well-worn corners of my heart down oft-trodden roads. Feelings I'm used to feeling, inspired by thing I'm used to being inspired by. Things in this category include: KMaus's Shakespeare lectures, learning human lessons through unexpected/old literature, my mom's compassion for the randomest (sometimes, in my selfish opinion, undeserving) things, Binky staring lovingly and meaningfully at the twinkling lights on our Christmas tree, and spoken poetry. See above. These are things that often and expectedly and familiarly tug at my heartstrings, by virtue of the fact that I am emotionally-inclined (rather than logical), that I am a big-picture person (rather than details), that I am an English major, etc. etc.

But then there are times when the odd engineer will truly, seriously inspire me. Not just through vicarious excitement through their excitement for a science-y, tech-y project of theirs, but through genuine (if shallow) sharing. Really taking the time to explain to me what, when, how, and why they do the work they do, what they are learning in which obscure- and scary-sounding course this semester, and how these things will change the world.

Then I realize (again and again and again) why we are meant to live in society; how we are such inevitably social creatures. Because one person can't handle all these fantastic and confusing things alone; one isn't enough to figure out the mysteries of the planets and intricacies of the human psyche and be a mad poet (usually) - we need each other, to access these unfamiliar corners of the wonder that is This World, given to us wrapped in a great big red bow of Christmasesque cheer, not corny, just true. 

cause sometimes, engineers will surprise you with the kind of poetry they Favorite on youtube.

a project:

To write here once everyday, starting with the short-term commitment of winter break (12/16/13-1/12/14),

cause I think it would be a healthy sort of rediscovering my writer's voice, and a good airing of some thoughts that fester, or dissipate, whoosh, smoke. Hopefully a lot of thought organization and flowering and entertaining blah-blah that makes thinking out loud easier.

Feels like it should be a New Year's Resolution, but Love of Arbitrarily Significant Dates isn't a good enough reason to put off healthy impulses for even half a month.

Winter Break, je t'aime.

"it is the rain that will strengthen"

I dunno what it was about the moment, but these different things came together just now and imploded (boOom...) into unselfish tears free-fallin' down my face.



1. http://lapeaudourse.blogspot.com/2013/11/mille-tristesses-decoulent-de-linstant.html

2. Cela fait "déjà" 7 ans que j'ai perdu mon grand-père, mon "second papa". Il me manque beaucoup, malgré le temps qui passe. Voir souffrir et s'affaiblir une personne que l'on aime, cela est une épreuve que le temps ne peut malheureusement pas effacer. Mais ce sont aussi ces épreuves qui font "grandir", qui nous permettent de nous ouvrir aux autres, de leur dire à quel point on tient à eux. Elles redonnent un sens au mot "vivre", nous ouvrent les yeux sur la vraie valeur des choses. La vie continue, mais différemment. Je suis de tout cœur avec toi.

---------^it's one of the comments to the post in 1. I'm gonna try to translate it. Not cause I think lots of people will be outraged by the lack. Not even to share the exact sentiment I felt cause of it, because translations are slippery with feelings, anyways. Not because I think it's astoundingly artistically wrenching in a literary, aesthetic way, but just cause it's what I was reading when the first tear plopped out. I'm gonna try to translate it so the few of you who read this don't think I'm a showoff uppity aloof French-speaking person. -----------

"It's "already" been 7 years since I lost my grandfather - my "second dad." I miss him a lot, despite the time that's passed. To watch someone you love suffer and wane, that's an ordeal that time, unfortunately, can't erase. But it is also through these hardships that we grow; that we learn how to open ourselves to others; tell them how precious they are to us. It is these hardships that remind us what it really means to live, that open our eyes to the true worth in things. Life goes on, though differently. My heart goes out to you."

3. http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=czFgKa7YcIQ

4. Writing a paper that feels like the culmination of a semester. Academically and emotionally. And feeling so out-of-the-blue humbled.

5. And in the sneaky way that end-of-term papers and final exams (and ends of terms in general...and emoish folksy songs on repeat...) tend to have, just reflecting from this tail end of the semester back on what's passed thus far and how I've grown and how there's such a long way to go, still. But for a moment, closing my eyes to future things and past things, too, and letting eyelids sqeegee out tears that are just there and enjoying all the intricate little fragments of this implosion.



Hm I think I've just figured out that this list is in reverse order of significance.

Sometimes,

all you need to do is reach out and tap on shoulders and put those listening skills to rest.

It's crazy how admitting that things are very not okay starts to make them feel much more...okay.

Dear self,

Ask for help. 

Be honest. 

Use shorter sentences.

And stop this "dear self" stuff, too. It's more than okay to be not okay.

11/12/13

It's November 12th, 2013 today. That's 11/12/13, which is a date that I really like because I like dates like 11/11/11 and 01/23/45 and like 3/8/38 etc. etc. because I am a selective sucker for certain superstitious things like making wishes at aesthetically pleasing time stamps (11111111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and the wearing of pajamas inside-out in hopes that it will somehow make the cold sky precipitate snow.

But today's specialness feels different and unfortunately uncelebrated, cause the only reason that made me really pause and take in its 111213-ness is the Christmas wreath I saw hanging, all smug and sparkly, on the sign at the entrance to the mall that I pass by on the drive home.

Christmas?! On... 11/12/13? That's way more than a month of Christmas season, Fashion Square. I'm no opponent of making the world go around via healthy economic transactions but at moments like these it's hard not to cringe judgily at the monetary greed that drives decisions like these - decisions that are distorting our conception of how long a holiday season should be, how much of what things we need to have, the immediacy of what Truly Important Things are.

This is depressing in more ways than just the one described in the paragraph above (get ready for the m e t a paragraphial of this post) - the even more pathetic thing, the compounded sadness of this whole realization is the fact that all this was my train of thought at the reflection upon a Christmas wreath + the reminder of a special date, this almost mid-November day of 2013. Yeah, I feel effectively...old.

This feeling certainly isn't an unfounded one, for I am older on this day, at this moment, than I ever have been before. heheh

But beyond the obviousness of the oldness, it's something I've been feeling a lot in daily life lately. That I feel old and worn-out sometimes these days, and just not as sparklyshiny as before. There could be many reasons for this. The fact that it's fourth year, and it's a regular fourth year thing to do to be generally confused/lost/worried cause I'm living the last year of my institutionally pre-planned life. The fact that there are some huge homelife adjustments this year that are revealing huge sinfulnesses in me that are all ugly and hard to look at and deal with and live in. The fact that school feels manageable and good and enriching right now but grades are pathetically not reflecting this inner truth. Maybe even the fact that I'm back in Charlottesville from a whirlwind year of being all over the place and I'm secretly going through reverse culture shock (though...I doubt this last one. Who knows, though. I did get lost on the buses again today. Hm).

The fact that I just went through this "There could be many reasons for this" thing as opposed to waxing poetic in a wordy, nerdy, adjectiveful paragraph about the state of the sparklyshiny, which, honestly, is what I feel like firstyear me would have done.

The fact that I feel like I can't write those kinds of first year blogposts anymore, full of feely swirls and late-night droopy eyeballs soaked in high-pitched Ingrid music because frankly, it's not even midnight yet and it's been a few hours already since sleepiness started setting in. And because frankly, even as I read my own old posts, I have little moments of shameshivering (just in tiny bits like after you pee and you suddenly feel cold cause of all that body-temperature liquid having left your body), at my own foolishness and self-consciousness that I can see firstyear me shivering with, as if she (I?) could feel me (she?!), fourthyear me, looking back and judging.

hehehe @_@ indeed.

I recently had an insightful conversation with a fellow same brainwave rider that was challenging and helpful. Challenging cause it messed up one of my stock Life-Defining Phrases; helpful because it messed up one of my stock Life-Defining Phrases. Which is was "full-circle experiences/stories/______", usually in the context of how wonderful they are and how much I love them and how grand and useful they are in narration.

But this friend kinda furrowed his brow at this and wondered at the validity of this whole thought. He asked if a truly full-circle story/experience/whatever is really worth anything, if you're coming back exactly to the same place as before, and I couldn't do more than defend the aesthetically pleasing shape of a perfect circle. Blah blah. So I offered up the solution of a spiral - a swirl? :) - eloquently put by another friend, Christy.

So okay. So we grow up and grow around and grow spiraly-swirly and feel like we keep coming back to the same rut of things (sometimes even yearn for the sparklyshiny familiarity of those things, and of ourselves) but it is not such a tragic thing to grow up and around. Around and up.

Like going back to Skyline for the fourth time, to stargaze with a consistently chaotic and random group of people for the fourth time, watching the unfolding of midnight skies and forever friendships, as it unfailingly happens, every year. For the fourth time.

But realizing that this time it's our class kids driving up that mountain, younger ones in tow, that now we make gentlemanly gestures in search of keys on top of those mountains cause we are able and we are willing, that we don't pretend to be sparklyshiny when we don't feel it and we share woes about feeling blog-blocked because we're just too old and tired to keep pretending to be things we do not feel. Just honestly and unabashedly enjoying the fact that we loiter in lots after late-night movies "just like in high school!" and delight in God's creation of plant leaves that feel soft like lambs' ears, standing around and sharing these happinesses and woes all together.

And of course, acknowledging the continuation of things in ways that aren't necessarily bad - like the cliched sign-off to the old blogpost by meta-talking about its beginning at the end.