Graduation

With graduation looming, I've realized that my two greatest fears are heartbreak and failure. I know that they both sound rather primitive, but in the end, aren't we all fighting for true love and success? I'm not going to lie, I thought that at this point I would have had some sort of epiphany about my abnormal importance in my life, or something that indicated my 'uniqueness', but that epiphany never came. It really is true that individuals are a reflection of their society. Even with the combination of my youthful rebellion and early adulthood intellect, my primary aspirations are nothing more than typical. I know we categorize ourselves as "intelligent", but how could a race that is so predictable be so smart? I hope that after school I wont develop any of these robotic tendencies to follow the crowd. By that, I mean that I hope to stay true to my character and never cave to the overbearing pressures of society. After all, it requires very little skill to follow, but an incredible amount to create.

Whole Earth

A visual entry of my day at the annual whole earth festival:

Ended the day with a dinner with Moreia and her grandparents at Tuccos!
The stages = music, dancing, good times
Exploring the festival.
We decided to hold hands and frollic.
Trying to pose like the statue behind us.
Candid, walking around.
I was born in the yera of the dragon, so I thought this was a good photo opporutity.

Trying to decide if she wanted to buy the dress (she did).

Quote of the Day

"The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own." -Benjamin Disraeli

Up in the Air

For those of you who haven’t seen, “Up in the Air”, skip this entry because I mention parts that might ruin the story for you. I normally wouldn’t update my blog about a movie, but this one had quite a lasting impression on me.

The protagonist of the story, Ryan Bigham, makes a living off of firing employees for large corporations across America. His existentialist life “Up in the air” has caused him to lose grasp of all relationships and any remote concept of home.

He uses an ongoing metaphor of a backpack that figuratively holds all of the possessions and people in your life. He alludes to the emotional burden of relationships as weight tugging on the backpack harder than anything else. In a way this is true, the closer a person is to you, the more burden they will impose on your life. Possessions have a set value and are often replaceable. Relationships, on the other hand, cannot be bought or replaced; only substituted. All of our relationships, the emotional ties, the memories, negotiations, commitments, the love, they’re all directed towards an irreplaceable person, and that is why we devote so much energy towards preserving the ones we have. I never really thought about life in that context, but it makes sense - the pain of true heartbreak will always outweigh the loss of a possession. Maybe relationships do weigh you down. I mean at times they’re obviously beneficial, but the more you open yourself up to someone, the harder it will be when you lose them.

Moreover, as the movie progresses, you are tricked into thinking its a love story between Ryan and a business women he meets while traveling, Anna. Upon the realization that he wants to start a life with her, he flies to Anna’s home in Chicago, and is greeted with the harsh reality that Anna's life already included a husband and kids. It scares me how honesty and trust can be so easily misattributed to people. One of the reasons why this movie affected me so much is because it touches upon the agonies of everyday happenings. It successfully portrays the inevitability of emotional turbulence in life. Regardless of how hard I work, or how much I think I know someone, I will never be able to escape the element of surprise. In a sense, Ryan’s philosophy was crudely correct, there’s just no one that you can truly trust in this world except for yourself, everyone and everything else collaboratively serve to weigh you down.

HIS SPEECH:

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

Current Happenings

At my best friend's UCD Hawaiian dance club performance! (Congratulation Anna!)

COACHELLAAA....I made it and it was worth every penny and all the pain I endured walking around on a recently sprained ankle.

Trying my very first oyster in Delores Park, SF. I was pretty intimidated, but after my first gulp, I couldn't get enough of them!

MUFFIN. She's too adorable, if I wasn't friends with the owner, I would be tempted to steal her (Well, not actually, but the thought did cross my mind).

Sunbathing commences at the onset of good weather.

After finally making it to the gym, all I could do was laugh and take photos. Probably not the most productive visit but it's all about the baby steps.

I find it a little ironic that I held bazooka before even touching a real gun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A few Words of Wisdom From Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance:

"Society Never Advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts."

"What your heart thinks great is great, the souls emphasis is always right"

"Every man is an impossibility, until he is born; everything impossible, until we see a success."

"Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment."

"All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt...For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling response"

"If we look wider, we are all alike."

"Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fiber of the human heart....I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads of frost-work, but the solidest thing we know."

"Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees....Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find."

"Polarity, or action and reaction. We meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart. Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in every particle."

"The Essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. Plenty it does not need, and can very well abide its loss."

"The intellect is a whole, and demands integrity in every work. This is resisted equally by a man's devotion to a single thought, and by his ambition to combine too many."

I really want a pet rat.

If not a pet rat, then anything (non human) who can keep me company. Too bad I have raging allergies that cancel out about half of my options, but I'm sure I'll find something. I feel as though I'm going to need a bit of company once I leave school and start a new life of my own.

a random rant, consider this a study break.

Before I write this, I want to emphasize that this entry is not intended to be a personal attack or offend anybody, but lately I’ve been noticing that the way some girls carry themselves is quite bothersome. Maybe this realization stemmed from my recent engulfment in the “Real Housewives of Orange County” marathon, or maybe, as I settle into adulthood, I’m just becoming more exposed to this facet of behavior. Regardless, there are a couple things I need to get off my chest.

First off ladies, materialism does not equate class. I know sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in all the acquisitive aspects of society, but they shouldn’t be your first priority. I’m not trying to belittle girls with nice things, I mean they’re fun to have and I have my fair share of “splurge” items, but I don’t think these objects in any way, shape, or form should correlate to one’s self worth. The price of your belongings is not representative of the wealth of your being. This common misconception is what’s bringing the moral standard down. There’s an inverse relationship between the cultivation of good character and the judgment of yourself and others by such shallow and materialistic means. I mean seriously, there’s only so much that a symbol of wealth can indicate about a person.

Moreover, I will never understand the concept of plastic surgery. I know its naïve to say that looks don’t matter, because they do. But, I’ve always believed that someone’s personality can change the way they look. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve listened to girls’ superfluous complaints about their appearance. And sorry if this seems blunt, but if you can afford plastic surgery, it’d probably be a better allocation of your cash to go see a therapist, or buy some self-help books that will nurture your self-esteem. Not to mention, did these ladies ever consider the fact that it looks weird when they can’t move their face, or when their boobs remain perfectly perky in a low cut shirt with no bra?

I guess the point of this entry is to make clear that life is not a competition; there is far more to it than your appearance and your belongings. I'm sorry real housewives of orange county, but there's very little about your lives that I find myself envious of. Afterall, "Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever".

sucess

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

Quote of the Day

"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music." Angela Monet