okay last year I was watching one of jbdazen's liveshows at 4am and being stupidly ecstatic

This is the song that was in my head the next morning.

So Charisse talked about this: (yes, I still read her blog but we're not close friends I feel like such a stalker)

cynicism, low-hanging fruit
Every time I reread The Importance of Being Earnest I discover something new.

It's perfectly easy to be cynical. You don't gain anything from it either except a self-righteous stroking of both the intellect and the ego. Yeah the weak little ego that most likely had to face the cruelty of the world and couldn't take it.

I'm tired of people being weak and refusing to face up to the fact that sometimes you just have to face up to the world.
You're not being romantic when you say you wish the world was all fairies and lollipops growing from christmas trees, and that since it isn't you're just going to hide your teeny little head in the sand forever. That's just plain dumb and guess what, you can have a reasonable facsimile of a world like that if you wake up and create it for yourself.
I'm tired of whining, but not because I don't care. It's because I know how much better it could be for you.

Seriously why why why can't people see that giving up short term pleasures for long term happiness is the only way they can achieve the latter? So much for homo economicus.

Delay your mindless self-gratification and wake up your idea.

About short and long-term goals, sometimes I think I have to think about it myself.

Right now, I don't have any long-term goals.

I do have Dreams, though, which are very unlikely to be fulfilled, and they are:

a) Going to a liberal arts college and after that doing an MFA in film. I don't know what I'll do after the MFA, but I (hope) will be very happy doing the MFA.

b) Majoring in Biology in university, with a concentration in Ecology and Evolution. Spend lots of time at coastlines, wet bogs, or coniferous forests. Die happy.

c) Majoring in Anthropology in university, and spending equal amounts of time talking about gender studies and uncovering skeletons at field sites in Morocco. I would feel clever talking about feminism, and I'll meet a cute girl in the GSA, and we will write for autostraddle together. We'll live in a cute loft and fill it with lots of books, and she wouldn't mind my vegetarianism, and we will go to Tegan and Sara concerts. When I post outfits on chictopia she will be my model or photographer as she feels like, and I will make short films starring her. We'll listen to indie music and dance and not care who is watching. Replace "girl" with "guy" as necessary.

You see in all of those Dreams everyone says I will have no way to feed myself, and there is no talk of this abstract concept of a Career Beyond University, hence they cannot be long-term goals.

My short-term goals are to get enough money to go to LeakyCon and to not get disowned by my mother until she stops funding my education.

Sometimes I get so sad I lose sight of my Dreams and think they will never ever come true unless I was born 50 years ago or 50 years in the future. So I pull out my short-term goals and they make me stop feeling sad. I don't have any long-term goals at the moment because I do not understand the abstract concept of a Career. All that I care about in the next year is whether I go to LeakyCon, and whether I'll get to move out of the country. Quite frankly, I don't have an inkling of what will make me happy in 5 years time, or when I am 30. Also, I have very little faith in 1) my Dreams becoming true and 2) me still being satisfied with them when they do come true. I am additionally intensely afraid of being exceedingly sad for long periods of time. Therefore I find it hard to "give up short term pleasures for long term happiness".

Many people say that The Real World is shittier than school. From what I've seen of The Real World, I'm not even sure the other people and I are living in the same World.

I wish there was a reblog function or something with yingling's blog. I could put this on tumblr but I won't look back on it, and people who read my tumblr don't read chinese >( so here:

就只剩下三天了.
很快的,考试将到来,
彻底把我认识的世界颠倒.

其实害怕的并非考试,
而是考试过后.
虽然大家嘴巴说很希望考试赶快结束,
然后就有大把时间玩了休息,
但是大家也明白这次大考后,
意味着大家已经离开了简单的校园生活.

以后,犯错误是没有回头路的.
以后,你的成功失败都不能以简单的A和F分出.
大家很残忍的被推入着可怕的世界,
有的只是怀胎九月(就是大考和上大学的那时间)的时间适应.

这次的考试就是我们最大的辅助.
若考得好,
以后的日子也会顺一些;
考得不好就得拐个大圈,
生活更艰难一些.

虽然说一切都会在死亡那刻化为乌有,
但是生活着,总希望一切比较美好,
少点痛苦,多一点快乐.

所以大家的压力越来越大,
希望考试能助自己一臂之力,
而不是起反作用,
害得自己没好日子过.

真是烦啊.

the other day I put my mp3 on shuffle, and it turned up a bunch of spring awakening songs. I was singing along to Left Behind, and I started crying.

Even after all these years, SA is still so resonant.

okay I remember listening to this in march or february. I remember it being really poignant because at that time I was sad about something but now I can't remember what the HECK I was feeling sad about. -_-

Does anyone know? not that I expect people to keep track of my moods, haha. But I want to know WHY it feels like it means something but I don't know what it MEANS.

Also, it's officially a year since I saw amanda palmer live.

I would like to think that so many things have changed, and it has, really. I don't know, maybe she started everything. I've really liked this past year, all things considered. Sometimes in my head change happens overnight, but I keep forgetting that growing up and moving on is a continuous process that takes time, and is only as fast as the effort I put into it.

Not that I want to grow up quickly. Or do I? DUN DUN DUN.

I want to improve myself, definitely. i.e. get better at talking to people, and at chatting to people I don't know in real life. this is something I didn't really have to do very often before, but now I realise that it is advantageous to have Connections (and also fun to boot) so it would be a good idea if I got used to this.

I think I'm also comforted by the fact that I'm more optimistic and less desperate that I was a year ago.

or am I just trying to convince myself that I've changed?

I feel like I've changed.

I look at last year's blogposts and I think that I'm so different from the person who wrote them.

I feel more secure with myself, if you know what I mean. I also feel more sure that everything is going to turn out right and things are going to be okay. I'm less uncomfortable with who I really am. I'm less afraid of being myself, whoever "myself" is. Still trying to figure that part out, heh.

I don't know. I like the person I am today more than I like the person I was a year ago. Or this might be just egoism at work. I think I'm more able to kid myself that I'm adept at communicating with people. And then I realised that "confidence" just involves a lot of bluffing yourself, and hoping that the other person will be hoodwinked as well. When I'm chatting to someone really well, I tend to pretend that I'm the ideal version of myself? Let's call this tumblenc. When I'm in a conversation and everything is going well, I pretend that I'm tumblenc. And naturally socializing would involve a lot of pretending.

But sometimes pretending is tiring, or I don't have any energy to pretend, and then I don't really like talking to people much. Trying to be tumblenc is tiring, more so than I perceive. It's like I can be out with someone for, say, 4 hours, and all that time I'm tumblenc. I only realise when I'm tired when I'm alone, like in the bathroom. And then when I stop focusing and my brainspace starts becoming my own, I realise that I'm really actually tired. I enjoy being tumblenc, but sometimes it's exhausting. Sometimes I discover that I don't have enough energy to be completely tumblenc, and things don't go the way I want them to. And then I get exhausted. Sometimes I get really exhausted and I don't know why, because I haven't been doing anything physically demanding. Maybe I can attribute it to the pretending.

When I get really exhausted, and I feel my brainspace is reaching its maximum capability, I decide that I can't really handle meeting anyone that week and shut myself off. I don't know yet if this exacerbates the problem or resolves it. But lately I've just been really tired and overwhelmed, sometimes stressed. Sometimes I'm really uncertain about the future, but I try not to think about it because it makes me sad. Today I was wondering why I was so sad when I was in sec 3, and for the life of me I still cannot understand why. Whenever I think about that, though, I think that what I'm going through now cannot be worse than what I went through before, because in my memory it was really bad.