It's a beautiful night,
We're looking for something dumb to do,
Hey baby,
I think I wanna marry you.

Is it the look in your eyes,
Or is it this dancing juice?
Who cares baby,
I think I wanna marry you.

Just say I do.

To me, music is pure, unadulterated joy. It's the best thing about being alive. The best form of art. The best of everything in creation.

My roommate thinks I'm crazy, but there you have it. I read in my psychology textbook last night (I have final exams next week. Reading my textbooks is not something I do frequently. I feel like I should clarify this, lest I be judged) that young adults listen to between half an hour and one hour of music daily. This blows my mind. I listen to more than that just walking to and from classes. My iPod is playing something in my ears every second that it absolutely can.

Of course it's not just listening to music. I have to be able to sing a song (perfectly) as soon as I hear it. This is why I listen to songs on repeat until the play count has put them on my top 25. At which point my roommate bans me from playing them anymore. This is where the headphones come in.

My current favorite song is Marry You by Bruno Mars (go listen to it NOW). Again, Alisha thinks I'm crazy. She claims that the lyrics suck. She actually does have a valid point - the song is about impulsively getting married, and one of the verses contains the line "If we wake up and you wanna break up, that’s cool." Which is kind of messed up, but the song is so representative of how I feel about life. It's about being brave, and impulsive, and foolish. About seizing the moment (carpe diem and all that) and not worrying about making stupid decisions. Which isn't very intelligent, but doesn't a small part of every person want to live that way?

I dislike it when people try to comfort me. Comfort means feeling better, and there is no feeling better about something that will never get better.

My family used to be a whole.

I don't really remember what that was like.

I remember crying and screaming coming from beyond my bedroom door. I could never sleep through it, but I never wanted to get involved. So I didn't.

My father got to keep the house. My mother got to keep me. I got to go to a shrink. The shrink had a little sandbox filled with white sand on her desk, and the number on the front of the white building she worked in was 1109. Lots of white. It felt like black.

I visited my father on Thursdays and Saturdays, but a lot of the time I would call him and make an excuse not to go, because he would always make me sleep in my own room, and I was scared. On the days I did visit him I cried myself to sleep, because sleeping alone always made me miss sleeping between my parents.

When we moved away I visited my father during the summer. By the time he remarried and had two more children I only saw him and his new family for a few weeks every year.

They were a whole family. It was very pretty to look at, like a shiny Christmas present. But it wasn't mine. When I visited them I felt like a black speck inside a snow globe.

We try to call each other every weekend now. It's not something we succeed at. College keeps me busy, and even when it doesn't I don't feel compelled to call him. He doesn't really feel like my father anymore.

My family is broken, and a father is not something you can replace. You can live without one, but there is always an emptiness, and you can't know how that feels unless you've had to feel it yourself. So don't pretend to know what to say. How can you know what it's like to come from a broken home if your family has never been broken?

I have just spent the better part of an hour transferring all my old posts (pre-2009) to this blog. That's eighteen posts worth of copying, pasting and meticulously entering the original date and time. So please, do me a favor and read some of them.

I am still waiting for my life to find direction. I am still waiting for the universe to assign me meaning. I find it ludicrous that I am having my midlife crisis at nineteen. And yet everything is screaming at me, "Average, average, average," and I want something to tell me that I'm not.

Perhaps that is selfish of me. The universe has more important things to tend to. I am but a small sketch of a girl, too long of limb and big of heart to be much use to anyone.

I am a mess of all the colors it is possible to be, except the ones I want to be most.
I'm full of preconceptions.
I ignore what I don't want to see. And I twist what I do. My vision is misted.
I may not be truthful, but I am not cruel -
I have too many sides to assign me a shape.
Nothing but me separates me from myself.

New Notebooks

My math notebook just ran out. So now I get to start a new one.
...
So naturally I don't feel like studying.
To be fair, I have been virtuous and just done homework for an hour, and then I actually worked for the next half.
See? I get things done.
I finished all of 11.3 HW.
Too bad even if I finish 11.4, I'll still be behind.
Of course I'm still doing really well in math. This is the gift of the intelligent. The curse of the social is that they never study.
The intelligent social are really the best off, aren't they?
But I'm rambling...of course.
Anything to get out of 11.4, which has the longest HW list this semester.
11.5 has one of the shortest, so I guess it evens out. I should just buckle down and do it.
I will. I'm going to.
Soon.

I have such a striving not to be ordinary. Perfection is so boring. It draws you in, but it is monotonous.

Until now it is what I wanted. It is the only thing I know to work towards. I do not know how to become a passionate fireball, or a deep ocean.

I know I'm beginning to crack under the strain of maintaining the facade of perfection. Maybe that will be for the best.

My mother would have a heart attack if she saw my dorm room. There's a tampon wrapper on the floor; the garbage is overflowing, again. Dirty cups line my desk, and almost every item of clothing I own is strewn, unfolded, across the futon and floor. My towel is draped over the back of my desk chair, which is also serving as a desk for my laptop and a place to keep my many jolly ranchers. My books are either on the floor or sitting on top of the cardboard box of things I should have unpacked when I got here but didn't, out of sheer laziness. To complete the image, the floor is littered with candy wrappers, little pieces of paper from spiral-torn pages, and other miscellaneous debris.

I like to blame this mess on the small size of the rooms in Schroeder. It was really never this messy when I lived in Cobeen. The point being, don't let your parents near your rooms in college. At least not if you have any sentiments regarding their well being.

Mirror

Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

So my brother got a piano. Or to be more specific, his parents bought a piano for him. Huh. My parents wouldn't have bought me a piano at six. Considering we share one of these parents, this causes me considerable distress.

But that's a different story.

Anyway, a piano. Yeah. It's a real fucking piano. You know what that means? It has no power button. You can't shut it off. You can't turn it down. Hello, migraine. So nice to see you again. Glad you could make it.

Of course my brother loves the blasted thing. He repeatedly plunks out the three ten-second songs he knows with the greatest dedication and zeal. My best bet at this point is that he gets his finger caught in the hinge of the cover and declares enmity (the young are so impetuous).

But of course I love my brother too much to wish such misfortune on him. Continue, my little artiste. I have plenty of painkillers, after all.

The best thing about Chace Crawford is his face. Which is saying something, considering his abs. Or his arms. Or those pectorals...

I won't bore you. We all know how yummy he is. Which is why I am deeply disturbed by this...thing I found on the internet today. While I entertain the idea that the internet can be misleading, in this case I am inclined to ignore the voices in my head.

For those of you who haven't figured it out, this is Chace Crawford in high school. So not delicious.

I can't even tell you how disturbed I am by this image. You mean Chace wasn't always his mysterious sexy self? I for one never questioned that. Raise your hand if you're with me.

Okay, whatever. Moving on. I read somewhere that all your passwords should be different. And that you should change them every month. Right, okay. Because I would remember, lets see... fourteen different passwords. Don't even start on usernames. And that's just for one month. Who can do that? Noone. This notion of having different passwords is just sadistic, a cruel trick created by those who still use snail mail and keep their money under their beds. People like that don't need passwords. Let's get rid of them.

Always, always: my blog is my last friend. You don't catch me writing when I'm having fun, do you? No. Because when I'm freakishly happy, it doesn't occur to me to complain. Of course that happens rarely, but when I want to complain my first choice is Alishmish, being that she is my roommate; she generally has the same issue as me, and misery isn't really misery unless it has company. But Alishmish, unfortunately, is in America. How unreasonable of her, don't you think? She refused to fly without a passport. The nerve, leaving me alone here. So knock her off the list.
I suppose my next would be Niranjan, being that he is my boyfriend, and is therefore bound to love me unconditionally no matter how unreasonable I sound. But Niranjan has exams (what does he think of himself?) so once again, I have come up short. And so on and so forth for all possible candidates.
And I don't really feel comfortable discussing my issues with the way life goes with the people who are currently available.
I don't however have a problem spilling my guts to the internet, so here goes my repetitive string of complaints:
I have decided, after much contemplation, that I am in a rut. Again. Why do I feel thus, you ask? Such a simple question, my comrade. And yet I don't really have the answer, which is in fact the tip of the iceberg at hand. Confused? So am I. But I deign to explain.
My theory is, over the past few weeks, my brain has slowly leaked out of my head. This is a direct result of not having anything to use it on. Bereft of the many contenders for attention my brain normally has to deal with, it has melted in this Indian summer and slipped out of my reach.
As we all know, the brain contains neurons which, to put it simply, enable us to live. They absorb external data, make sense of it, and trigger appropriate responses. Now I, lacking these neurons, not only fail to properly understand the condition of the world around me, I also fail to respond appropriately.
Which means, concisely, that I'm acting like a very drunk, very stoned, or very hormonal person. Take your pick.

So I just read my last post and I thought, why am I always so negative? I know, I know, I'm such a bucket full of sunshine (bucket full? What?) that people sometimes forget I'm inherently pessimistic, but there you have it. I complain incessantly about everything. Reading my blog, you'd thing I was a starved Ethiopian child (although I do somewhat resemble one), when the very fact that I even have a blog is evidence to the contrary.
So anyway.
Life, surprisingly (there it comes, the omnipresent pessimism) is looking up. Isn't that weird? First of all, I have found my calling. Sort of. My newest life plan is to double major in Computer Science and English. I see this as fiscally responsible (for myself, anyway) because even if I have to delay going to grad school, CS majors make some money, right? Right. Don't argue with me. But then, when I go to grad school, I can study virtually anything, given my both aesthetically pleasing and efficiently businesslike background of language and logic (except science/engineering of course, and who wants to do that anyway?). Meaning that I can do law, business, animation, media, or AI. I said I could do anything.
But even apart from the mundane, good things are happening to me. My voice is coming back! Yay! Although I can't sing yet, I can talk (always a good sign) - and rehearsal this week is cancelled, nor am I singing next Sunday at mass, which means - get ready - I don't have to sing for another two weeks! My hope is that I'll be able to long before then (duh) but the point is, by some strange twist of fate, Life Is Going Well.
Next: Both my lab and my computer science class have been cancelled tomorrow. This means I have almost all of tomorrow free, which means I can go to Mayfair and The Queen of Hearts Ain't Even Pretty and finish all my homework for Wednesday. Amazing, isn't it?

What can I say, I have good karma. I'm going to go now before I jinx it.

27 February

There are only two pages of my blog posts. Although I do have three blogs. Or is it four? Why don't I know this? I am a pathetic, pathtic, blogger. Aren't bloggers supposed to have pages and pages and PAGES about nothing slash themselves? Yes.
Only when I want to type something will everyone go quiet. Fuck them.
I'm working at the library (hence the graveyard silence) and still wallowing in the muck that is my life over how I will never gain self actualization or even happiness if I don't find my calling, ASAP.
Scratch that, I know what my calling is. But singing doesn't put money in the bank unless you win American Idol, and nerves don't put you on American Idol (excepting "Top Ten Worst Auditions" which I'd rather not be on, thanks). So here I am, reluctant Computer Science major number 1! (To be enunciated like Megara). And while I can think of at LEAST ten other majors that I could be doing, I'm too gutless to major in something without a guaranteed paycheck as soon as I get out of college. That, of course, is the inherent disease of the world. That living is not viable without a job.
After work I'm going to take a (public, I hate them) bus to the mall to buy pink hair dye, and then I'm going to dye my hair (again). Then I'm going to race to Helfaer in order to rub my face in the fact that being a theater major is MUCH more appealing than Computer Science (I'm going to watch The Last Five Years. Come with me.). And then I'll come home, shove all my stuff off the bed onto the floor, and fall asleep surrounded by this mess.
Just the average day, you know. In the life of a reluctant Computer Sci...yeah, yeah, you know.

Can I Sing For You Brother?

So I just got back from the first night of Can I Sing For You Brother? - Stephen's capstone in performance. And for once, I'm not complaining or talking about myself. I'm talking about Stephen.

I have watched this play of his at least six times. And every time I see it, I fall more in love with it. I have never seen someone sing with such feeling in his voice. But tonight? Tonight I, who have watched him laugh and cry and sing for hours already, could not put anything into words when he was done. How is it that one person, one normal, regular person can stir such emotion in so many? You should have seen them all. Rapt until his very last word. And when I say last word, I mean it - until he had screamed "Come over here!" at Curtis, the pianist, and walked off the stage. And the applause - I won't say I thought I was going to go deaf, I'm not that cliched - but I got to wondering when it would stop; when I would be able to stop (I was clapping too, of course). Everyone was bawling, I heard. I know his aunt was, because I saw her myself. I would have been bawling, too, except I don't know what tears would do to the sound board and I don't want to find out.

Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds?

I feel like I should be keeping track of my blogs. I have too many, that's for sure. I'm going to settle down and just keep one, I think. Not that anyone ever actually reads them. The URL is enough to put you off. I myself have trouble typing it in right the first time (the first time? Try the 56th, the 84th time). In the end I realized I can just sign in to blogger and it takes me straight to my dashboard.

This, of course, is why I'm majoring in computer science. Because I'm so technically savvy, I rock my socks off.

Anyway. It's the 4th week of semester and already I feel like I'm dying. For some reason I'm always tired and never on top of my homework. Last week I signed up to be a sound engineer for the capstone class - 26 hours in one week. I do it to myself. If I was majoring in something that actually made me happy, it might be different. Who knows? I've never actually wanted to study. Lately I've been thinking journalism would be fun, but fun doesn't put food on the table yadda yadda ya. This type of fun would probably get me killed or something similar while I was covering a terrorist attack, anyway. I'd much rather be the techie who killed his wife, right? Right. Which is why I'm learning computer science from the most inadequate teacher in history. Where is the getMessage section of the program, you ask. Here is the exception class, he answers. His words swim completely over my head. I don't even think attendance counts towards my grade, but I have to go to class so I know when we have assignments and quizzes. Which is the worst reason to have to go to class, believe me. The entire one hour and fifteen minutes I stare blankly at the board and nod when he looks at me, and at the end I file out with everyone else and proceed to bang my head against the wall. Like I said, I do it to myself.

Philosophy, though, I have no control over. Lonergan and his levels of values and parallelism of thought and feelings can just go to hell, if you ask me. How is this helping my life, I ask you? Are you comping up blank? Lovely, I expected as much. How does one come up with a good answer to a completely pointless question, anyway.

I'm aware I complain entirely too much. In my experience that's generally the way we bloggers are. We are, you must remember, creating a website entirely about ourselves. And then we write lengthy monologues and get upset when no one comments on them. We are possibly among the most narcissistic people on the planet, after those who use twitter, of course. Are you shaking your head? Don't. The website is completely dedicated to your whinging, for god's sake. About how the shape of your eyebrows is messed up, or telling us that your mother coming to visit you next weekend. Honestly, if we cared so much, we would ask. If we don't ask to know every detail about your personal life, it means we don't care.

If you're asking yourself how I, the person writing thins whingey personal blog, can abuse you for using twitter, you're quite in the right. I never said I don't use twitter, did I? Although my sole tweet is Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

Whatever. Narcissism. Look it up.

I am a butterfly, but you wouldn't let me die.

Growing Up

Years have a funny way of sneaking past you when you're busy fishing the last cherry out of the jar, and they take that conviction that you know what you want right with them.

If only you had thought to get less absorbed with that cherry, eh?

Now I'm 18; I'm an "adult", whatever that's supposed to mean. Although I still whinge to my mother when I get a cough or a bad grade in a class, so I don't know what all that growing up nonsense was about. What I do know is that now, even if I still feel like the kid that asks her mother for permission to go out to lunch or skip the greens tonight, I'm not. I have a bank account, a conviction that without-the-condom-sex is better, and a bikini top. I eat alone, sleep alone, fly alone, and spend alone. I have a purse, for chrissakes.

But now that I'm all grown up, I've come to the conclusion that there isn't all that much to it. What they say about the "magic" of childhood yadda yadda ya is actually true. You grow up and boom, you're buying fat free dairy products because that bathroom scale has somehow turned on you. Lunchables go from a coveted break from real food to a ridiculously unfulfilling pile of pawns moving forward in the game of heart disease. And it's not just food - hell no, that would be too easy. Suddenly you have to wait for a sale so that you can buy anything without feeling like you've cut your fingers off of your hands and the light left on downstairs is somehow now YOUR concern. Nobody will tuck you into bed anymore either, so good luck to you if you never got over that fear of the dark...or the moany attic above your bedroom. Its just as well you don't believe in ghost stories.