Summer 2017 Bucketlist

So far, summer has consisted of me learning how to live like an adult and adjusting to working life.  But I also want to make sure I carve out time to fulfill more personal and frivolous goals.  

a dark side of journaling

I reread some of my old journal entries from last semester, and the intensity of my preserved feelings shocked me.   They were so raw, uncensored, intimate.

My journal entries are startlingly frank because they hold nothing back: as my private outlet, there’s no self-consciousness for conventions or melodrama.  So there’s something terrifyingly real about them.  It’s like I dipped my heart in ink and rolled it around the pages, and the imprints are just as fresh and poignant as if written yesterday.

For the first time, I wished that I hadn’t amberized that time in my life.  

Emotional Containers

This past semester, I felt locked in a post-you era.  Even though, after you said those fateful words — “I’m not looking for a relationship” — I stopped liking you and even stopped hurting for you, I failed to restart, like some stuttering obsolete computer.   I felt like I couldn’t, not without some sort of signal to transition.  I wanted to flip over the page to the next chapter of my life, but it felt like the same chapter kept going on and on — even though different stuff started happening, even though you stopped being a character.  I guess I wanted to look up at the night sky and see the stars aligned in the words: THE END.  I wanted a sign.

But now, the semester is over.  There is no boundary as definitive as the beginning of sweet summer.  I brush the dust of you and my leftover feelings into the container called Freshman Year and seal it off for good.

Relationships

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what even is the point of having friends, family, and lovers.  Especially since — if you think about it — the definitions of these things are so abstract and bendable sometimes.  After all, isn’t a group of friends like a found family — a beautiful little eclectic clan brought together by chance?  And doesn’t a family sometimes feel like people who you’re expected to be friends with for a lifetime?  Isn’t a lover just a best friend that you also sleep with — or are friends just lovers that you don’t sleep with?  I guess the confusing thing is that the word “love” blankets all these categories — sure, you can add modifiers like “platonic,” “familial,” and “romantic,” but our clumsy language includes that baffling universal solvent: L O V E.

Summer Plans

Hey!  Some exciting announcements.

After my last final exam of freshman year (!!!), I’m flying straight to Amsterdam to visit my sister, who works there.  Then I think we’re visiting Budapest and a few other places before meeting my parents in Spain.  We’re seeing Madrid, Seville, Granada and Barcelona.  

Monthly Me (April ’17)

Aside from some personal melancholy moments, April is perhaps the most lit month so far.  Formal, Spring Fling, general late nights.  Things fell in place as summer housing and study habits aligned themselves.  Now I gotta buckle down and study for finals…

Ben Franklin bridge

Loneliness

The close conversation had reached that point where we had run out of superficial, cheery things to say.  I wrung my hands as a thought forced itself into speech: I had been afraid that saying it aloud would make a tentative idea more real than it actually was, but I couldn’t help it, it had been haunting me for too long:

“Um, I don’t know,” I began slowly.  “I think, more than anything, I want to be in a relationship.  I know that’s a lame thing to say…I believe in feminism and independence and all that, but…it’s true.”

I lowered my head and blushed as my friend reassured me, but I couldn’t help but taste the aftertaste of a remark that was not articulated finely enough.  Because, in truth, I enjoy being single.  I like going to concerts and kissing strangers without worrying about someone back home.  I like quiet moments by myself.  And I see people constantly holding hands, constantly spending the night in each others’ dorms and I think: I don’t want that.  I don’t want all of that, at least not all the time.  

But I definitely want something.  

Oyster and Balloon

It was a late college night, and a girl and a boy and I were sitting around a table talking about feelings.

“That’s why I prefer more open guys,” I said to Fiona, shaking my head.  “Like, so many guys are emotional clams: you always have to fuckin’ rip them open just to talk.”  I aggressively mimed an invisible round oyster in one hand and a knife in the other.  “I can’t spend time forcing people to open up.  My arm gets tired.”

Monthly Me (Mar. ’17)

March!  I’m glad you’re finished.

I saw Regina Spektor live!

Glimmer of Hope

For my school newspaper, I was covering a panel about reproductive justice.  One of the panelists said something that changed me a little.  She said, “One of my priorities is to consistently and unapologetically be proactive on my word.  Just because the political climate changes, doesn’t mean that my goals and my values change.  Regardless of who’s in power, regardless of who my constituents are.  What I need to do as an organizer is to change conditions to make sure that happens.  We forget how powerful and impactful people power is.”