I’ve tentatively created a new WordPress.com account with the site address http://littlefatkitten.wordpress.com. I’m not sure if I will start blogging there or move back to Blogger. I haven’t touched my Blogger account since Amsterdam so I’m not sure what I will do. Xanga remains my primary blogging site for now, but feel free to add me on WordPress.

A picture my friend posted on Google+ made me think of the sublime:

We’re afraid of tomorrow so we can’t live today. I think I’m always afraid of tomorrow. So every single day I’m afraid of the next day. I am afraid of failure, I am afraid of living a purposeless life. It’s a paradox because the fear becomes paralytic, so that all you really want is death so that you don’t have to live in fear anymore. 

You’ve heard of those experiments where they give rats access to either heroin or food. Given the choice, the rats would choose heroin until they died. If the drugs were taken away, the rats would hit their heads against their cage until they killed themselves. I always wonder, is it always a blessing to have experienced something so wonderful only to have it taken away from you? Is it possible to learn to enjoy abstinence from all or any physical pleasure? There are many religions that attribute the sense of being with having no wants and no needs – to really nullify everything that seems to be the drive for living. So in essence, they learn how to enjoy death while being alive, or being alive while dead – although dead is really kind of a bad word to use since it suggests that it’s a negative thing. Maybe you are more alive when you have nothing and want nothing. 

I always find myself so tangled up in thoughts of the past or anticipation of the future that I hardly find it possible to live in the moment. I should re-read Eckhart Tolle.

Dear Professor,

Hi, my name is Student. I sat at the front of your class for Calculus this quarter, attended every single class, took notes attentively, and did not slack off at all during the quarter. Our final is coming up very soon and I am writing to ask that you please refrain from making the final too hard.

I know you enjoy making difficult questions. You have a PhD degree and I know that you probably don’t use it much daily. In fact, this class is probably your only outlet for utilizing what seems to be a relatively useless skill. Maybe you spent years and years being terrorized by other great mathematical intellectuals during your graduate school years only to wonder “why am I here? what am I supposed to do with this degree?” Maybe you suffered a lot of criticism for your research work or maybe you realized that you’ve reached your intellectual limit when you were about to graduate and your colleagues had no respect for your work at all.

Well, I just want you to know that I understand. I have two degrees in English and as much as I love reading books and writing, I don’t particularly enjoy teaching. I especially don’t enjoy teaching literature or writing to students who have no appreciation for the respective author’s literary ingenuity or genius. I’m the type of person who can almost cry after reading a great poem or a great book, but it is painful to see that other people cannot appreciate the subject matter as well. I don’t think you will cry after seeing a Fibonacci sequence on your broccoli as you eat dinner, but please, try to understand that as a student, I’m not taking this class to spite you and your life’s passion or work.

You see, I want to go some place in this life. I left someone I loved in another country so that I could make something of myself at home. Taking this class is a step towards that goal and it would be horrible if my grade and my dreams were ruined because you can validate your own existence by making obscure and theoretically difficult questions on the test. If that is your life’s goal and dream, I suppose I cannot stop you from doing that, but I know you must understand that people have dreams and goals to get somewhere. Maybe you can find an outlet for your mathematical genius elsewhere – like making Youtube videos, or starting a math blog, or…well, maybe doing any of those things can help you find other people who are excited about your work and can talk with you about it. Maybe you can get people excited about your work by explaining it in an accessible or entertaining manner like Vhart!

Sincerely,

Disgruntled Student

I just found out that one of my good friends broke up with her boyfriend. I don’t know why, but this worries me. She’s 6 years younger than me, so sometimes, even though I don’t really feel the age gap, I feel like she is a younger version of me. We have a lot similarities…I just worry about her because in a way I feel almost responsible for her. I think we’re both very spontaneous and we don’t really know what we want. I feel like I want to prevent her from making the same mistakes I made.

Tests are coming up and I’m very stressed. It’s so stressful, that I can’t even make myself begin to work. I’m breaking out and my eyeballs are bloodshot and slightly jaundiced from a combination of studying, staring at the computer, and drinking to make the stress go away (I have a problem with self-medicating when I get too stressed out). The stupid thing is, all of this stress is intensifying because I can’t get myself to start working. I can’t start working because I am too stressed out. Does this make any sense?

It’s the same thing with being overweight. When I’m depressed, I tend to get hungrier, so I eat more. When I eat more, I gain more weight, which causes me to be more depressed because now, not only am I depressed, but I am depressed and fat. I get more depressed, so I continue to eat beyond what is a normal amount for me. It’s a cycle that can’t really be ended because I was always depressed to start with.

The only solution for me is to drink a moderate amount of alcohol because it regulates my stress and abnormal hunger pangs. Do you ever experience cyclical problems?

The last time I got over someone I really loved, it took me 1-2 years. Why does it always take so long for me to stop hurting over the past? My mom always said I was stubborn, and I guess she is right. I am stubborn about letting people go, letting emotions go, or accepting fate. I force things to be the way I want them to be, even if it’s inconvenient.

But you make me so angry. I can never forgive you. Not until the day I die will I ever be able to forgive you.

When I read that Xanga was shutting down, I immediately started thinking about all of my old entries on Xanga and what I should do with them. I’ve been on Xanga since high school – that’s more than ten years ago. This was before college, before my first pseudo boyfriend, before my first kiss, my mom died, etc…it seems like this blog started way before my life really began.

I originally thought I would download my archive and keep them somewhere like an external hard drive. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it would be better if I just let it all get deleted. I don’t need memories of a painful past. My life up to this point has just been a series of painful major events. One major sad event takes many years of faintly happy events to wash it out. Your saddest events never go away in the end either- all that happens is that you feel less and less as you age. As you get older and older – things affect you less and less. Soon we can barely remember what true love feels like, or what it feels like to talk to your mom about something that’s been bothering you…things like that just fade away. Like life. We just all fade away until we’re nothing but ghosts and lost memories.