Category: writing from college

I wonder if I have become discomforted by the concept of happiness itself. Like the freezing of cellular fluids within a frostbite victim, the sudden introduction of a warm point of contact would only permanently damage the existing frostbitten tissue. Instead, only a slow introduction of warmth is able to thaw a frostbite without incurring more damage.

But with tissue that has been cooled without frostbite — tissue that has not been exposed to a sustained arctic coldness for a significant period of time — warm water would certainly generate an immeasurable amount of pleasure. And so, in terms of how I should live my life, I wonder whether I have reached the point where I have been frostbitten.

That being said, some frostbites are untreatable and require amputation.

Good Mourning

Peace of Mind

Blue Skies

Dis-inte(rest)grate

True Love is Violent

Eating Snow

sparks are fly

Try, Try Again

Close, but not quite

Song of Solomon 

Sweater Weather

The Things Not Spoken

According to my privilege, at least.

During the school year, when I purchased a dark roast from Green Line Cafe every day on my way to my first class, I never thought much about the casual money I had been shelling out to finance what may be a caffeine addiction. I wouldn’t know; an addiction is defined by a negative presence an in one’s life, and I never considered coffee to be a burden. It’s one of the few things I consume that actually gives me life. But, when the summer rolled around — and I could no longer enjoy steaming dark roasts on my way to class — I settled into my phase of iced coffee.

For one, it’s sweet. Disgustingly saccharine. Fake coffee. Normally, I would be repulsed. Like the sight of jubilant children playing on a miserable day, I wouldn’t be able to accept the cloying liquid draining into my dry mouth knowing I only have the stomach for a bitter affirmation of a darker reality. Because, during the school year, the days seem to be filled with an empty haze. I would wake up an hour before my alarm to obsessive thoughts of rejection and missed opportunities. I would try to clear my mind and go back to sleep, only to find my mind consumed once again with jealousy and resentment. I would blink and find myself in the shower, where I am, once again, wallowing in the blood of the same metaphorical wounds I have, once again, opened.

Until, of course, I drink my coffee. And then I continue with my day. And so it goes.

I take issue with those individuals who do not experience crippling despair at every instance of consciousness — the people who can casually drink an iced coffee and enjoy it. I can’t understand. I choose not to understand. Because doing so would just be a stark reminder of the fundamental differences between in the limitations of our capabilities. I have, luckily, been born into a household that allowed me the chance to comfortably attend a private college. I have, luckily, been able to create friendships that have fundamentally challenged my perspective on the world. I have, luckily, been able to thoughtlessly purchase a coffee every morning. But I will never be truly happy.

Although my distaste in surrounding myself with naturally cheerful people started out ironically, I cannot help but feel as if my sentiments were grounded in some sort of truth. Because, to me, every day of living is a choice. The dark roast I get from Green Line Cafe helps is an example of me making a choice. I am making the choice to drink coffee; I am also making the choice not to die. And so, when I find myself casually picking out my iced coffee during my daily trip to Wawa, I cannot help but feel an intrinsic dissonance within my identity. My summer identity.

Because, during the summer, I forget. I forget about every email sent to me starting with “Thank you for your interest…” I forget about every girl who has broken my heart and every friend who has made me question my self-worth. I forget about the identity that I have cultivated for the last 20 years of my life because my life depends on me forgetting. And thankfully, I have had the privilege to forget. I have the privilege of going to sleep every night and not wishing that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning. I have the privilege to spend time with my friends without thinking about how happiness can only hurt me on later in life. I have the privilege to drink an iced coffee and enjoy it. For now, at least.

Until, inevitably, I cannot.

Ever see the vestige of a broken friendship in a bacon cheeseburger from IHOP IHOb?

It was my favorite restaurant: the International House of Pancakes on Lancaster Avenue. It was where I discovered my fondness for the profound sense of ease after eating the thin round layer of starch-based batter known as a pancake. It was where I have caught up with countless friends ever since I had gone to college, ever time ordering the same thing: the breakfast sampler with eggs over medium. It was where I have observed the progression of innumerable friendships throughout my two years of college.

But, within a few weeks, it will be transformed from IHOP to IHOb. All of those memories that I have created within the confines of the restaurant forever associated with the word IHOP will now be transformed into a less acoustically pleasing word meant to cater towards a greater market of consumers. Because the appeal of breakfast foods served at any moment throughout the day has been decided by a couple of company executives to be insufficient for marketing purposes. Once again, capitalism is ruining my life.

I wanted to visit the IHOP on Lancaster Avenue one last time before a couple of construction workers permanently disfigure its identity in my mind. The store sign had not changed yet. The round letters of IHOP still emanated familiarly in the afternoon sky. I pulled into the parking lot as I have done a myriad of times before, always taking the parking space at the end out a fear that a stranger might hit my car if I park too close to the parking lot entrance. But one day, when I make the same maneuver, I will look up to see a completely different sign. And when that day comes — it could take a few weeks, months, or years — IHOP will be no more.

I asked a friend who I haven’t seen for quite some time, mostly by choice. Awkward, yet uncomplicated, histories tend to propel individuals apart regardless of perceived intimacy. The menu read IHOb. She ordered some eggs with turkey bacon. I didn’t order the breakfast sampler. She wore business casual because she had just gotten off from work. I wore Bermuda shorts and a distressed t-shirt. And there we were, talking about more-or-less the same things that we had when we were two vulnerable freshmen coming into the next chapter of our lives. Some parts of our lives have changed, as they should. Some parts haven’t.

My consciousness wandered to some parts of my mind that I have archived and encrypted since the abrupt end to our amity. Perhaps it’s a reminder of the past of a chapter in my life I have long wanted to forget. It’s every love scene from The Room — a cringey moment unexpected the first time but seems to recycle itself throughout the rest of the movie. And regardless of what direction (or lack of) the plot seems to go, any remembrance of the entire movie seems to revolve around the same couple minutes of repeated footage of Tommy Wiseau miserably attempting to make his co-star (not) uncomfortable.

I ask myself if I am a different person from the person I was two years ago, beyond the superficial aspects like the increased number of wrinkles on my face or the tattoo on my right pectoral. I ask myself, beside the shedding of my skin and the turnover of my red blood cells, have I changed as a person? Because if I haven’t changed in a significant way, I wonder if I am questioning myself enough. I wonder if I am allowing myself to live with too much comfort. I wonder if all these past months of attempting to live with more intention is considered to be living at all. Because, without change, what does it even mean to grow?

Perhaps it’s a few slips of the tongue. A phrase so evocative it violently fractures the walls containing the sealed memories of another time. A promise to keep things normalized, detached. Then a couple of intimate words shared. A memento of a long-forgotten dynamic. It’s a reminder of a reminder of a reminder to forget. A part of a long string of other occurrences that seem to lead up to series of blissful and morose moments that I wish that never happened. A flashback to a more emotionally immature version of myself, when I found solace in listening to Lana Del Rey and venting to high school friends who have since moved on in their lives.

I yearn to stop time, to keep my problems from becoming more and more complex. Because, even a mere year ago, I conceived of a brighter world. It was a place where problems had solutions, where questions had answers, where streaks of darkness had been considered an anomaly in life. It was a time when I had the power to help others before myself, when I could hold still hold onto the sense of safety high school afforded, when my problems could be generalized into some cheesy songs about unrequited love and ignored the greater privileges that I have afforded in life. It was a time when IHOP was still IHOP.

Such is the taste of IHOb’s classic bacon cheeseburger —  some words left unsaid, some sentiments left unaddressed, and some messages left on read.

Maybe it was when I was seven, when I realized that age meant slowly inching towards a gloomier and emptier perception of the world. Maybe it was when I was 12, when I first realized that I had not accomplished anywhere close to what I had wanted to accomplish. Or maybe it was 15, when I started to realize that the doors of opportunities to change my future were closing one by one. I don’t want to ruminate.

I remember the birthday party I had in second grade. It was the only birthday party I ever had. I invited about 10 friends from a school I had just transferred into to hang out in my basement, where we played Super Smash Bros. Melee until we couldn’t open our eyes anymore. It was a time when 3 a.m. had been considered the latest we had ever stayed up. But I stayed up because it was one of the few times that I could ever play video games in my childhood. I don’t recall having any aspirations back then. I never thought about who I was or who I wanted to be. I had day-to-day goals like anybody else, but I don’t remember ever wanting anything for myself beyond Pokemon Emerald on my Gameboy Advance.

Years passed. I had been promoted to the “big boy school,” where a clump of insecure, pubescent teenagers navigate their existence relative to “romance” and “achievement.” It was also the time I discovered the password to my account on my home computer. My responsibilities didn’t increase, but my awareness of myself did. I still practiced two to four hours of violin per day, but I no longer practiced for the sake of practicing. There were objectives underlying every moment of my life. I wanted to win competitions and get into prestigious orchestras. I became aware of the concept of college. And sometimes, I would look back at my elementary school report cards in my desk drawer. Each time, in the category of “Demonstrated Attentiveness,” I received an unrequiting “N,” meaning “not at this time.”

I made some friends. I lost some friends. Life goes on. But at the time, it seemed that I had been inadequate in navigating the reality I had been accustomed to. The concept of contentment seemed to evaporate. Nothing seemed to be enough anymore. My grades weren’t enough. My friends weren’t enough. My personality wasn’t enough. Because, behind every failure was the understanding that I wasn’t enough. Little by little, a possessive dichotomy formed in my mind: the contrast between the person I had wanted to be and the person that I was. While aspirations serve to be a driving force for self-improvement, it also serves as a reminder of the limitations of my existence. Unlike completed aspirations that are forgetten in the face of new goals, unfulfilled aspirations only remain in the corners of the mind as a parasitic emanator of suffering.

The weight of failure slowly piles up. By high school, I had accumulated a hefty sum of rejection and failure. Although there are healthy amounts of failure that everyone should experience, it constantly seemed that I had experienced more failure than I could handle. Individually, each failure does not add much burden to the idea of waking up in the morning. But, unlike the hulking scar tissue that forms after a particularly wide cut, the wound of failure does not leave tissue stronger than it had been before. It serves as a point of vulnerability. It dwindles in its magnitude as time passes, but it does not leave the mind the same way a tick leaves its host after it feasts until its fill in blood. It stays. I only wish that I could say the same about the superficial conception of happiness I had when I was young.

First, I became aware of my existence relative to myself. Then, I became aware of my existence relative to the rest of the world, especially in relation to the concept of structural limitations. While I have probably experienced less structural hurdles than most people, I cannot help but become more disillusioned with the principle that I could plausibly achieve what I want. As the result of the accumulation of all of my life experiences, it seems that I had definitively closed the door to a life that I wanted. There are plenty of interests that I cannot pursue anymore because of some mistakes in my past. I didn’t want to study computer science because I wanted to avoid Asian stereotypes, but it seems now that I cannot even take a CIS class without finishing my other majors in time. I wonder if this one mistake would limit me from a career in data science.

I still have opportunities in my life to strive towards goals that I am able to achieve. I am thankful for that. Most of my limitations aren’t structural in nature, and it gives me hope that I do have some power in controlling the future that I want to have. If I really wanted to learn computer science, I have countless resources on the internet to teach me enough where I could learn the rest through personal means. I could say the same in regards to most other aspects of my life. I constantly have room for improvement, but can’t help but also wonder if the same hope that I have for myself is also the main source of suffering in my existence. Because, sometimes, hope only serves as an amplifier of negative emotions. The chasm of negative emotions that opens after failure is never quite as intense without hope to fan the flames.

And when I reflect on my existence, like I do on my birthday, I cannot help but be dissatisfied with all I have accomplished my entire life. I cannot but to disagree at the celebratory sentiments surrounding the reminder that I have not achieved as much as I wanted to achieve. Like mathematical principles and metaphysical assumptions and other certainties in the universe, there will always exist aspects of my life that aren’t optimized, and it exasperates me in knowing that the true cause of disappointment in my life is no one but myself, structural limitations aside. While reflection is generally considered to be a positive trait conducive towards self-awareness and growth, to me, reflection only serves as a reminder of the what-ifs in my life. And what better time is there to reflect than on the specific alignment of the earth on the day I was born?

And so, I wish I could forget my birthday ever existed.

I opened my eyes to a low hum of an engine.

Frustrated, I close my eyes in an attempt to fall asleep again, focusing my thoughts on my rhythm of my breathing. Breath in. Hold. Breath out. I take in as much of the shallow air into my lungs as I could, but the metal texture seems to become more prevalent with each incoming breath. I gag at the thought of the hundreds of millions of bacteria that swarm around my body at every moment, and there is little I can do to ease my discomfort. The air around me becomes watery, like a reflective pool of gasoline on a warm street, and like the air, a sense of heaviness descends over my thoughts as well. Whatever lessons in meditation I had learned in the past couples of months seem to be ineffective my state of delirium.

Over the years, I have become familiar with the effects of looking out the window to the sight of blue and white for hours at a time. At first, the clouds offer a sense of amusement. But once the dusk arrives, I can only see a patterned beep of red in the darkness. Only when I am truly free from the distractions afforded to me by the advent of technology am I able to access a degree of honesty previously inaccessible. Because, although a season of melancholy constantly envelops over my life, I can still operate with a degree of shielding from the needlessly negative thoughts that would otherwise overwhelm my existence. But here, within a pressurized metal tube where my phone does not offer me the distraction I crave, I am at the mercy of my thoughts.

My sleepless frenzy allows me to reflect on the countless meaningful conversations I have had in the past year, but above all, it tells me of those hopeless souls I wish would pass through my life once again — the people who have long exited my life with no avenues for re-entry, yet still pass through my thoughts now and then. I cannot help but let my thoughts gravitate towards those what ifs in my life; even a glance at the white screen before me causes me a state of intense nausea, and the book beside me is far but within my optimal allocation of attention. My insomnolence, paired with a profound ennui, seizes whatever autonomy I have over my own thoughts, and I am but helpless to let my thoughts drift without restraint towards those recollections I have tried long to forget.

I take solace in the blanket of anonymity offered by the darkness. My eyes — the only windows to my gushing torrent of obsessive thoughts — cannot be observed except as a reflection of the white light of a screen. I pull out my phone to look at some of my old photos in an attempt to distract myself. I smile at some screenshotted snaps during the school year when academic and professional stresses permeated every layer of my thoughts, only wince when I scroll too far up to see some pictures of a warmer time. I put down my photo to take a sip of coffee. The cup’s label read: “United / Taking Premium Coffee to New Heights.” A pun, I thought to myself. The coffee tasted fine, but nevertheless, I heard a gentleman behind me complain about the quality of the coffee to his wife. Funny. I didn’t hear him complaining about the General Tso’s chicken.

I envision myself in the third person — a gloomy visage illuminated by a sterile light and surrounded by hundreds of strangers never to be seen again in a couple of hours, ruminating on occurrences that will be forgotten once consciousness is lost. These musings do me no good, but I have long stopped believing that I could optimize every aspect of my life. I tend to think of them as a defining feature of being human: the helplessness that follows an imperfectly constructed brain. It reminds me a bit of Zen meditation — the passing nature of my thoughts — except, unlike institutional practitioners, I do not seek to detach my body from my thoughts. Nothing about my stream of thoughts is deliberate. I wish I could push my thoughts to areas that were more productive to my growth, but I suppose there is little I can do to fight my nature.

So I look off into the distance and let my thoughts consume me.

This piece was written on my phone on my flight to Switzerland.

I suppose I could fight circumstance. I suppose there could be some sort of meaning in the struggle of swimming against a river with seemingly infinite current. Isn’t it easier to give up… to not hope for the better?

Because hope only has substance when it ties a story together. Without an ending to pain, hope only causes needless suffering. While humanity viewed hope as the only good sentiment expelled from Pandora’s Box, I put it together with the evil.

Hail,

midsummer snow

Cigarettes after Sex

staleboat

Dinner for Two, Breakfast for One 

broken string

Re: Purport 

Kaylee the Quail

campfire cries

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE PARTHENON

call me when you get this

I woke up this morning to the sound of my phone vibrating. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let the call go to voicemail. A few minutes later, I learned that my dental appointment tomorrow had been canceled.

I closed my eyes again in an attempt to go to sleep again. The windows had already illuminated my room with a soft blue hue, but my alarm wouldn’t go off for another hour. I felt some liquids draining from my eye. I wiped them with my pillow. For some reason, I didn’t recognize the feeling. Pulsating waves of catharsis, I had always described my tears in my journal entries. But these tears were unfamiliar. I could not pinpoint a definitive cause like I could with other feelings of sadness in my life. I couldn’t identify feelings of trauma or heartbreak that could possibly evoke any sort of sentiment within me. It could be the result of the underpinning melancholy in my life, but it didn’t feel quite the same.

I had been in love in my dream. It’s ironic because I had never experienced romantic love with anyone in my waking consciousness. I don’t quite remember what happened in my dreams, but I remember it had been profound. I met someone with a degree of complexity as any other person I have met in my life, and we ran away together somewhere far away. She had black hair. She laughed like a butterfly. I don’t remember her face. I don’t remember her name. But somehow, we lived a life together. Similar to the cloud of memories in our lives, I could not recall every moment unless I direct my consciousness towards them. Nevertheless, I accepted their existence.

The feelings of attachment were eerily similar to some other feelings I have had during other summers of my life. I wouldn’t know if my feelings had merit. After all, it is hard to describe colors to a blind person. One moment ago, I lived another life. While dreams exist in all sorts of durations, my world seemed like another equally real existence. I had friends and ex-lovers with as much personality as I have in this life. I slept in a bed where I could distinctly recall the color of the fabric or the hardness of mattress. I distinctly remember the view of Beijing I had outside the Airbnb where I lived. The next moment, I am living in a different world with seemingly less advanced technology and a less interesting plot arc.

My feelings will fade. My recollections of the dream world will fade. The complex world that I had effortlessly created with a couple of chemical reactions in my brain in my sleep will stop existing because I let it fade into nothingness. I deliberately choose to let such existences fade. I had stopped writing down my dreams about two years ago because I wanted to stop attaching myself to realities that did not exist. Regardless of what accomplishments or failures I have had in another world, I still have only one timeline that I perceive as real. I could consider my dream world to be real (since I did, after all, create it), but in the end, it still exists in a lesser plane of reality.

Even so, I sometimes remember some aspects of those countless worlds I have created in my head. I could be taking a shower and letting my thoughts wander to whatever corners of my mind they wish to go, and I would suddenly be overwhelmed at the discovery of another repressed world I had created in my head, a world where there seems to be a cohesive string of events. Saddened by the prospect of another timeline of my existence, I return my attention to the only reality I have truly come to know — the reality where I can perceive the warmness of the water against my back and the stinging of the shampoo in my eyes.

Yet, in my mind, I still hold my dreams and memories in the same light.