analogies

It could take me quite a while to find an appropriate analogy to describe how difficult of a time I'm having finding a journalism internship, so for the time being I'll provide three potential candidates.

a)Finding a journalism internship is like trying to climb a glass wall with only your finger nails during an ice storm.

b)something in the vein of childbirth, etc.

c)I feel like it would be easier to travel through time by sheer force of will.

Terrible analogies.

I think everyone has some kind of skill, trade, or activity that they feel distinguishes themselves from all of the other people that surround them. And I think that this thing, this special characteristic forms a large part of the ego. If you fuck up in life, you return to that skill, that source of ego, and you feel better.

The situation goes something like this:

I got a B minus on that test, but oh well, I'll go hook up with some hot girl tonight because I'm really hot. Social skills compensate for academic weakness.

or

That girl at the frat party ignored me when I told her she was pretty, but check out my GPA - vice versa.

So it's a difficult thing for your ego when you realize that someone else is unarguably better at the thing you consider your greatest skill.

I'm trying to develop my writing. I want to acquire dimensions of meanings, shades of description. I want to be able to describe the world around me not only with near mechanical precision and accuracy, but with atmosphere and emotion. I analogize the process to climbing a mountain. So I write, and I write, and I write. I accept every article I'm offered, I read voluminously, and I try to learn from everything I do.

But all mountains have a peak, and some peaks are higher than others.

I'm climbing the mountain, but right next to me, someone is already proudly striking a pose at the summit of a mountain higher and more impressive than mine.

So this post, like all of my others, concludes with a question rather than a truth.

So what can you do when you realize that your mountain isn't tall enough?

If an artist can paint a masterpiece with the three primary colors, a journalist can be just as expressive while writing to an audience with an 6th grade reading level and vocabulary.

round the bend of 'late' and into 'morning'

I haven't updated this blog for about two months. I started this thing to write down my thoughts but I really haven't had anything to say. I actually haven't been thinking, preiod for about a month.

I've also been broke for about a month. But 'broke' doesn't really express my poverty with enough power. There's a really good word for it in chinese though, 'cheong'. It's a miraculously insulting combination of the words 'poor', 'screwed', 'loser'. I have cheong pretty bad right now. I'm at the point where you open your wallet and moths fly out. I don't even carry my wallet around any more because there is just no fucking point. Every now and then, I dig it out, dust it off, disinter it's pitiful contents(coupons, old movie tickets, straw wrappers, exhausted gift cards), and sadly reminisce about more fortunate times.

Being broke, or more accurately, cheong, is an eye the fuck opening experience. Everything in the world costs money. It makes life really hard.<--- can't believe I just wrote that sentence, what am I twelve years old?

write more later


7:55Am: Just got back from a night at Will's, and I haven't actually slept; it's the only way you'd catch me awake this early. Driving home as the sun rose was incredible, there are no other words. I like staying up late - but now I know that I've been an idiot.

How come no one has ever told me how beautifully the day breaks? How the sun peeks over the horizon, casting steady, hopeful light over chimneys spouting pale streams of mist into the sky? How have I not known this expectant quality of light, how a pure white glow on the horizon gradually bursts into blinding golden rays? How have I not experienced this silent serenity, this unassuming halcyon of quiet?

I wish had had my camera with me as I drove into the valley where I live. I flew hundreds of miles to get away from this place, but as I came down the hill and saw my home in the uninhibited glory of the morning, I realize - I live in beauty. I can't believe I've been sleeping the way I have - waking at dark, prowling the last bit of the night until darkness shifts impalpably to greyness, then crawling into bed and closing my eyes to this incredible vision of the morning.

It's a good feeling - or at least I think it might be - to wake as the earth around me wakes and sleep when it does. I feel sorry for nocturnal animals right now.

Another thing before I sleep. I'm getting old.

I'm turning 20 in about a month, but I don't mean that. I mean that I worry about my parents now. My dad is on a diet - salad and an apple - that's all he eats on the weekdays. Yesterday he was in bed all day with some infection; he missed Christmas dinner. I cook food - real food, meat, fried eggs - and leave it around so he'll eat it later in the night. I looked on him when I got back home. When he sleeps, his face is deeply lined and horribly drawn, as if his mind is tasked with some ferociously strenuous exertion. I wonder what my face looks like when I sleep.

My mom reads novels all day and dreams about winning the lottery and retiring when I graduate from college. I'm scared for her. and about what will happen when she retires. I want, with a sincere, honest desperation, for her to be happy, to thrive when she gets older and I leave home. What will fill her life? She has trouble at work - Tennessee will never accept a person like my mom, with her language trouble and fiercely Taiwanese ethic. Her mom, my grandma, is getting old, and always cries when she talks to her daughter on the phone. My mom's going to visit her in about a month.

My parents don't watch movies together, they don't go out to dinner. They live at home together; their only pasttimes are feeding themselves and going to work. The refrigerator always looks exactly the same every time I go home. Inexplicably, this scares me too.

Yeah, I'm getting old.

By getting old, I mean that I know what I want and I don't care about the things I used to any more. I used never think I'd get old. I used take pride that I was immature, that I was obnoxious and childish - but I don't care any more. My social life is settling down - I know which people I want in my life and I ignore the rest. I want to be myself, and I'm starting to figure out exactly who that is.

By getting old, I mean that in 5 or 10 years I will probably be the same person. Every year since I was young I would look back on myself and wince ruefully at the person I used to be. Every year I changed - but I think I'm done now.

This is probably a really boring post, and also too revealing. end and sleep

last few posts have been pretty preachy.

The first time I saw the Royal Tennenbaums at the age of 16, I stopped watching halfway through thinking, what the fuck? This isn't about tennis? (tennis magazine said it was a movie about tennis dammit).

The second time I watched it, a few days ago, I cried.

An angry inarticulate ramble

Today I'm angry about narcissism.

It's my sophomore year of college at UCLA. I love it; the independence, the possibilities, the opportunities I'm exposed to, the good people I meet, the experiences available to me - I wouldn't have picked anywhere else to go in the world.

One thing: Over half the people I meet or even see around campus deeply irritate me.

Listen, you silly california teenagers. Your life isn't awesome, it's fake. Wow, you might become a kayaking instructor? Wow you skateboard And you're a GIRL? You're in a fraternity sorority??? Wow, you went to THAILAND and partied at a RAVE with ALL the COOL TRAVELING young people??

How can you live like this? How can you construct your entire life, like some kind of idiotic, empty movie set, for the shallow purpose of impressing others?

I'm slowly becoming aware of this culture of narcissism - look how pretty I am, look how cool the people I hang out with, look how ambitious I am, look how many classes I'm taking. Everyone really wants everyone else to know how amazingly fuckin cool they are. And this...naked jockeying for approval, this to me disgusting blatant hunger for social status is pervasive, and even accepted as normal. It's like people don't even care about giving the impression that they achieved whatever achievement for a personal reason - It's simply, disgustingly "Hey you look at this awesome thing I did!"

I'm not making any sense, literally inarticulate with rage right now.

For me, if you live your life for the approval of the public eye than you must be the loneliest, most unhappy person in the world. When you speak, the only way you know that you've said something is if someone else responds to it. When you draw a beautiful picture, you throw it in the trashcan if no one pays you a compliment. When you listen to music, you get no enjoyment out of it unless someone knows you're listening to it.

You know nothing - feel nothing - are nothing - unless someone allows you to be. It's the difference between confirmation and affirmation...agreeing, and being.

There's so much shallowness here.

I'll say this for Tennessee. At least, people had dignity and pride in themselves. At least, people lived their lives by their own personal judgment and enjoyment.

I'm doing way too much.

I'm lying in an underground bed/couch in Powell Library, at the foot of a metaphysical mountain of work. I am tired - but that is such great understatement that it transcends literary forms and becomes actual, prosecutable, libel. More accurately, I am some combination of the words exhausted and dead. My eyes remain open only by the virtue of the moist direct contact on the surface of my eyeball provided by my contact lenses, and the two glasses of Mountain Dew I had this morning at breakfast, thanks to UCLA dining's strange crusade to provide soda at every single meal.


I'm taking four classes, each of which demands substantial time commitment to preparation and work. Econ requires about 12 hours a week, French 6 hours, History 5 hours of reading, and Math infinity hours of pouring over calculus and my solution's manual. Midterms, daily bruin deadlines, and papers converge on the same day. I haven't slept more than five hours in a week, and I drink Rockstar more than I do water.

fuck this

These days, it's not possible to simply pursue your passion. You have to knock it off it's pedestal, hitch it to a 6 figure salary and drag it through the dust, twist it, paint it a different color, cut corners off of it, and finally forget about it for a while. Then, at the end of the road and after a lifetime of jumping through hoops to reach that carrot tied to the stick, your passion is finally yours, if there's anything left of it - or of the person wanted it in the first place.

It's like when a twelve year old looks up into the night sky and sees a satellite pass by, and thinks to himself, I want to be an astronaut. He's never meant that word "want" more emphatically in his whole life. He wants it with his whole self, and that hour, that minute, he starts doing everything he possible can to make that dream a reality. He doesn't sleep that night. The next day, his dad tells him, "Astronauts are some of the most well educated students in the world," and his report cards from then on are full of a's. "Astronauts need to be athletic," his mom says, and in two years he gains 20 pounds of muscle. His parents don't know what to do. They don't know how to tell him what he needs to know, and he just looks so incredibly passionate talking about how he's going to explore the stars. Every night for the next 6 years of his life, he climbs out onto the roof outside of his bedroom window and looks into the night sky and takes deep, expectant breaths.

Childhood ends, and college begins. He studies hard - physics, astronomy major - and spends his free hours training with the ROTC program on campus. At first, when his friends talk about what they want to do with their lives, he smiles, and thinks about stars. But he hears the tone of worry and anxiety in their voices. He doesn't understand it, but for the first time in his life he understands fear.His determination to achieve his goal becomes more than desire. He begins pursuing his passion with iron determination, ruthlessly cutting away the parts of his life that would interfere with his dream, hurtling towards it like a sleek torpedo. He still dreams of stars at night.

His physics professor, a former nasa scientist, watches the boy carefully, who he knows by the boy's constantly attentive eyes and upraised hand. The boy is a constant fixture at the professor's office hours, and the professor can't stand to see the pain accrue behind his shining, fearless eyes. "look," the old man says. "they only accept 5% of applicants every two years, maybe less with the funding from this administration You have to market yourself, get internships, start writing letters, shaking hands, kissing babies. They won't give it to you just because you'll be good at it and because you deserve it - life's not that way."

The boy doesn't know what to do. He hasn't lived his life that way for 21 years, and it's too late to start. He tries, because he wants it so bad, he can't let go of it, but it wasn't enough. With the rejection letter clutched in his hand, he looks back at his whole life and with a motion akin to closing a door, he throws it in a wastebasket. He should have known better.

He becomes an engineer, a successful one, and marries a woman he loves. They have children, and move to a bigger home in a better neighborhood. The father never speaks about his dream ever again, and every day he tells his children, "The world is a cruel place. Get ready." He is fiercely protective of them. In the bedroom over the bed, though his wife protested, though they couldn't afford it, is a skylight, through which on a clear night when the city lights aren't so bright, he can see the stars that he never reached.


yeah, got a little carried away. The inspiration was this guy at work Joey, who was in training to be a firefighter, but failed the test. He told me he still feels it when he watches Rescue Me and shit like Ladder 49. I guess my point is, I really have lost some faith in the world, or at least in it's benevolence. M

Maybe I'm naive and idealist, and maybe I just didn't see how things were going to be when I was young. The way I saw it though, was this: I was born and the world offered me opportunity. "You can do anything", it said, "be anything. Just want it badly enough and it's yours, on a silver platter, in a steaming mug, however you want. Happiness is yours for the taking. Welcome to the world. "

but maybe I don't believe that infinite possibility rhetoric any more. I want to be a journalist, and I want to tell stories. But looking at all of the hoops I have to jump through, and what the job is really like, especially with modernization and the 'internet journalist', I feel like it's not possible to pursue a passion any more.

Which brings me to the question, what kind of person am I?

It seems like there are two kinds of people in the world distinguished by two kinds of happiness. In one form, happiness is a foggy, indiscriminate haze of pleasure, like when you're watching a good movie, or have just had a good meal, or heard a series of funny jokes with friends. It's not that this kind of happiness isn't worthwhile. It's just unearned. You think to yourself, "man, this is great. I could feel this for the rest of my life, but then...what would my life be?" Some people can deal with that - have a life that begins when the clock hits 5pm at their desk job.

On the other side, far superior, is passion. It's like happiness is a nice picture - satisfying, but two dimensional. Passion is an emotion in 3D - it's as real as anything around you. When you achieve it, it feels like your heart is expanding fit to burst, you can't sit still, you can't wait to see what the next minute brings, the intensity of it makes you clench your hands into fists. You're full of energy, happy just to be alive and doing what you do. These people, who live off passion, change the world, and are happier than anyone.

So which one am I? do I care about my passion or just my prosperity? I don't know.