"I'm not old. I still have my legs, my force, and my spirit by God's grace. And I use them everyday. So I'll never be old."
That's what my dad just said to me on the phone. He turned 53 today. He said as long as you live
He's actually pretty hot.
young, you'll never be old. And those who have fully functioning bodies and minds but are too lazy to use them are the old ones. I've always admired that about my father. We've had a difficult relationship and differences that run deeper than I can even scratch the surface of in a blog post (or care to, at that), but he's always possessed certain qualities that I find refreshing.
He looks at life with such a youthful, if at times naive, alacrity. Everything is an adventure waiting to be had, new territory waiting to be explored and new experiences waiting to be memories. He lives life hard, with passion. He's more active and engaged than most men I've met half his age and can probably even still drink them under the table. He laughs hard, parties hard and spends every dime he makes trying to ensure that he never lives a dull moment.
In that sense, he's the complete opposite of my mother. She plays by the rules, never daring to go where she's told not to go. She keeps to herself and only ever does what she has to do, as opposed to what she wants to do. And yet, for a split second, sometime decades ago, they saw something in each other that perhaps they wanted to see in themselves. In my father, my mother probably saw a spontaneity she secretly longed to have. And in her, he saw an impressive and awe-inspiring level of self-mastery.
And they came together and bore a Libra; a balance. A perfect coalescence of yin and yang. I like to think I'm the perfect balance of their opposing personalities, but I'm not. Not yet. I've struggled all my life with the two extremes. On the one hand, being too unhinged and unpredictable like father and on the other, too reclusive and inhibited like my mother. I've learned to tone down the wild side of myself but still struggle to ignite a fire in the tamer side.
"No one ever excused his way to success."
But my father is right. I've been out running and seen people three times my age pass me. I've heard people old enough to be my parents make exciting plans for the weekend while mine consisted of doing laundry and catching up on reality television. Life is for those who realize how much it's worth living. it only asks one thing from us and that is effort. We can sit around all day expecting our goals to be miraculously met, but that's not how life works. We have to get up and earn it. We have to take the initiative and stop putting things off. We have to go out and engage in the world, or as Chbosky would say, "participate." That's the only way to ever truly avoid getting old.
Wow, time's a bitch. It felt like just yesterday I posted here, yet it's telling me I haven't written a blog post since December 2011.
It also feels like just yesterday I moved into my dorm room freshman year of college. I remember how nervous I was, how I couldn't believe I had made it to university. A good one at that, on a partial academic scholarship. See, I'm the first in my family to accomplish this, so it means a lot. It wasn't written in the stars for someone like me, but somehow it was.
And on the first night, after my family left from helping me get nestled in, I sat outside my dorm on a bench. I sat there at 3am alone, listening to the Beatles and looking up at the sky, taking in every single element around me. The cool August night air, the drunken chatter of eager incoming freshman, and the bustle of Broad Street mixing magically with the music in my headphones.
That was the first and last time I got to savor it. I had no idea how quickly the next few years would pass by. All I knew was how badly I needed to experience this: college. A sort of halfway house between living under my mother's suffocating thumb and the big, bad real world that eventually awaited me.
What I didn't know was how real that world would be. You think you've got the timeline of your life all figured out and then you realize one day that it's never been yours to determine. Sure, you can be the master of your fate, but only to a certain degree. Someone else has mapped out your life for you and you have no choice but to take the blows as it comes. Your part is to figure out how to react to the blows. I just graduated college. Three months ago. Cum Laude. With a job lined up. I was on top of the world, right?
Not exactly. I had never been more miserable or cried more in my life. This was it. I was supposed to be ecstatic. Everything was supposed to be different; I would move to New York City and become the woman I've always wanted to be. All my hard work would pay off. Everything would fall into place. Everyone seemed to agree: my family, friends, colleagues and professors. With all I've accomplished, they said, there was no way I wouldn't have my dream job and be living large. Well, I'm jobless on my sister's couch, still freelancing and still looking for a full-time job.
But I'm okay with that.
Let me go back and explain. I was offered a spot in a prestigious teaching program in New York City and took it, feeling lucky just to have been given the opportunity. I thought I would teach, freelance on the side, leave the program eventually and begin working full-time at a magazine in New York. See, ever since I was a kid, when I first stepped foot in this country, I dreamed of New York City, but never made it past Silver Spring, Maryland until I got halfway there at Temple.
But the teaching program proved to be more effort than I was willing to give it and, after many heart-to-hearts and tears and anxiety, contemplation and meditation, I quit before the first day. It was nearly mid-June and I had just joined the job hunt. The more time passed, the more anxious I became to find a job. There was no way I was going back to living under my mother's aforementioned suffocating thumb.
Watching my friends and peers get full time jobs, although I'm happy for them, I do not envy them. Many of them have fallen victim to the trap: mundane jobs that could mean less to them, jobs they undertake to avoid the stigma of "unemployed" and to pay back the student loans that got them in their position in the first place.
College is over now. Our bubble is burst and we're left trying to figure out how to adjust to the alien sensations that are surrounding us. No longer will our best friends be just down the hall or down the street. Gone are the days of seemingly endless resources and helping hands right around the corner. We've spread out all over the country, all over the world, and some of us are in new scary places alone.
But I hope we all eventually find what makes us happy and refuse to settle for anything less. I hope we always remember what we stand for and the legacy we want to pass on to future generations. And I hope we never forget the remarkably gratifying outcomes that can arise from working hard and keeping your fingers crossed.
I realize that I'm doing the right thing for me. I could choose to work with some big Fortune 500 company and be slotted into some generic position, but I won't. I'm staying true to myself and going after places that I want to be at. I may be shooting for the stars and it may prolong my search, but to me, the stars have never seemed that far away, anyway. Just a hop, skip and a leap of faith.
My title may have swayed your mind into thinking that this post is related to the movie, but it's actually about education. I've been seriously looking into Teach for America the past couple of months and it may have been because of my proximity to the Philadelphia education system. Since discovering something other than the adequate education I received growing up, it's been an issue that I've become more and more passionate about, leading to countless discussions and debates relating to the topic.
Today I had yet another discussion (albeit an accidental one) regarding education. This time, the discussion centered around a comment I made about education being free. Apparently, my counterpart had the idea that education is something that can only be paid for. I drew this conclusion by his statement that he was giving himself a free education by researching things online. I responded to this by asserting that most education is already free. He said he would need to research that and I told him that my point exactly is that not everything can be researched.
Some things you just have to experience to fully understand. I found myself explaining that the meaning of education is the acquiring of knowledge. Nowhere does it say that education must be paid for, therefore you can't refer to learning as getting "free" education. Anytime you're learning something, you're getting an education, regardless of whether or not it's free.
I've known plenty of people who didn't go to college but are still very smart and very successful. There are people who learn from the streets, from hard life experiences (see Slumdog Millionaire) or by simply being curious minds who thirst for knowledge on their own terms.
This just goes to show that you can take your education beyond the classroom, deeper. You're not limited to whatever reading your professor assigns you. You have the ability to seek out information for yourself, be it in a textbook at your local library or on Google. The Internet is literally knowledge at our fingertips, though most would rather spend it twatching or Facebook stalking.
Be a thinker. Be your own thinker. Share what you know, learn what you can, open your mind. xoxo
Drake said it best in his sleeper hit, "Same Mistakes" aka "Fall for Your Type." Love is difficult because you want it so bad that you fall into certain traps. Some people settle. Let it be known in this moment that I am not one of those people. But I suppose I can understand why that is. In the pursuit of love, we tend create our ideal scenarios in our heads and expect things to play out in real life exactly the way they do in our fantasies. These people focus more on the circumstances of falling in love than the person they fall for.
The other group of people do the exact opposite. We fall victim to is narrowly defining a "type." This is the guy/girl that fits all of our, usually vapid and pointless, criteria. We take pieces of different people and construct this "ideal" person, and we refuse to settle for anything less. Or we prioritize all the wrong qualities to begin with. We'd rather have him look like Ryan Gosling than be a complete gentleman. I'm no better. I'm a Libra and therefore consumed by my vanity. As much as I hate to admit it, looks mean so much to me. And it's not just the guy's looks but how he wears it, how he carries it.
While my definition of good-looking is not one-dimensional, I do have a tendency to, every now and then, want what every other girl wants. This guy will be the heartthrob, the guy that girls do stupid shit for. The guy that knows how hot he is but will never actually admit that he does, thus leading you to think that he's so humble and sweet. But you can't hold on to this guy. He'll never belong to you. He doesn't belong to anyone. So after he's swept through your life like a hurricane and left his mark, you're left shaking your head, thinking to yourself exactly what Drake says in his song. But you do it all over again, don't you? Stop.
It's over. It's really over. But I'm left wondering: "What now?" Sometime before this journey began, it never occurred to me that this would be a lifestyle change. I never thought about what it would be like afterward. But somewhere along the way, as I miserably counted down the days until the torture was over, a thought crept in my mind that I couldn't be doing this for nothing. I couldn't spend two of the most crucial weeks of my college career cutting out something that abnormally meant so much to me. Otherwise, I would have wasted my time and yours.
So maybe what's next is finding a happy medium. Looking back, I'm appalled by how much water I've wasted over the years. But believe me when I say: it is physically and scientifically impossible to take 3-minute showers for the rest of your life. Admirable, yes, but there's something morally corrupt about it in the end. So what I really want to do next is find a reasonable shower time. I'll have to do some digging to find a satisfactory answer, but I'm sure I can find someway to keep me happy and still be respectful to the environment. I'll keep you guys posted.
So I ended this thing off with a bang. One of my favorite Disney movies growing up was Mulan. This movie meant a lot to me for several reasons. It was awesome to see a Disney movie moving beyond the norm and speaking to topics such as Asian culture and male impersonation. Also, it was the first time I realized my love for Asian men. Shang was a cartoon, yes, but that doesn't make him any less of a man. I was putty in his hands when he vowed to make men out of the gentlemen at the camp in the song "I'll Make a Man Out of You." Oh, you know you love it, too.
Well, this is embarrassing. It's been quite some time since I have updated this, but to tell you the truth, I was exhausted and it seemed a bit redundant. So I go about my busy life and then take 3-minute showers at the end of the days. So what? I apologize for that. I guess I'll fill you in now.
I'm in the middle of finals and so the past week has just been study, study, study. This 3-minute challenge has worked both for and against me. When you study up until 4 in the morning for an 8am final and you're a person who can't help but take long showers, you waste minutes of precious sleep time. In this case, I was in and out. It was almost miraculous to me that I was out of the shower by 4:08.
The downside to this is that my shower used to be my sanctuary, like a pampering car wash. I'd run there at the most stressful of times and just unwind without a second thought. Now it's more like a quick trip to the gas station when you're in a rush. It's just hit me, though, that I only have to do this for one more day.
This means that Monday will be a great day for me: I'll take my last final, turn in my last paper, and take a real shower. Sweet victory.
Meanwhile, one of my songs over this week was Rock Mafia's "The Big Bang" aka the theme song for that "Mob Wives" show. It's actually been out a lot longer, but I just discovered it. Don't judge me, I had no intention of watching this show. But it's actually pretty entertaining. And, save the ties to Disney channel stars like Miley Cyrus, this song is actually pretty damn good.
I tweet now. Yes, that's right. I am officially on Twitter and it all started with a dirty word. My best friend, Kenny, tweets everything I say. So today, she said something gross about fellatio and I sought vengeance. The only problem was that I didn't have a Twitter. I threatened to start one but I've been saying that for months and had yet to do it. And I was bluffing again, of course. So she pretty much started it for me.
I never cared to tweet before, but my Advanced Magazine Writing prof, Erica, suggested it was a great way to generate story ideas and create a network of people and ideas. The more I heard that, the more I was convinced that Twitter was not just a tool for young narcissists to brag about all the "cool" things they do and feel like people give a shit.
So my song choice for this shower was Rihanna's "California King Bed." I'm not a huge fan, but I enjoy this song and the fact that her vocals have shown tremendous growth. I used to hear Kenny play this when Ri-Ri's album first came out and I kind of liked its swagger. It's 4:12 but I was washing my face for the first minute or so before I hopped in the shower. Also, I was talking to my fellow e-board members today and realized that my showers are obnoxiously long. I may be in a state of mental anguish but I'm kind of glad I'm doing this thing.
Oh, one last thing: Larry Stains came to my class this morning, gave us copies of his taxes, shouted out my 3-minute shower challenge and newfound popularity (not really), and then shook my hand quite fervently. Oh, Larry.
