Love lights up the world, so my fortune cookie proclaims.

This is the crap that came out of my fortune cookie.

So despite the crap load of screaming that goes on, the in fighting, the injustice, and the unnecessary drama of my house, my parents had a nice night out with their friends.  My brother and I got Chinese good, and as pictured, I got a very optimistic fortune in my fortune cookie.

I don't know if the universe is trying to play some cruel joke because I'm not the most optimistic person.  Nor am I the kind of person that takes fortune cookies seriously, except for a brief stint when I was thirteen where I recorded what every single fortune cookie I got said.  I wanted to see if the crap lined up with what was happening in my life.  But I don't order Chinese food enough to get the degree of continuity needed to really judge the outcome of that experiment.  Unfortunately, my lack of optimism is balanced out by a hopeless romantic trait.  No matter how many times I get hurt and declare men to be pigs, I somehow always end acting like a total idiot.

My fortune cookie read "Love lights up the world."  I'm not about to examine whether or not it's true.  I know it's true. Love makes people smile, laugh, and feel connected.  It makes people go after what they want. It helps people realize that maybe if they can't get what they want, they already have what they need.

Love is not lost in my house.  Maybe it's taken me some time to realize it because there's a lot of other stuff going on.  We're frustrated, we're crying, we're yelling, but the fact of the matter is we're so emotional about it because we do give a damn about each other.  Even if sometimes we say we don't and we try to cut our losses and move on because we think it will hurt less. We can't have the good without the bad.  If only there was so much less bad.

My dad has recently been talking about taking a big career risk and weighing the risk versus the reward.  But it's no bigger a risk he took than when he married my mother or when they decided to have children together.  Raising a family is a huge risk.  My mother lately has been talking like it wasn't worth it. My father said he'd never thought it'd be like this. I'm so proud of us for sticking it out.

Doesn't change my unrelenting desire to move out though.

He said that I'm never satisfied, that nothing's ever good enough for me.

So what?  It's a symptom of ambition. It's what drives anyone to go after what they want.  But as of late I've had some difficulty dealing with the fact that some things are just out of my control. My whole life I've been saying to myself that if I work hard enough I will have the things that I want.  But it just doesn't work that way with people and relationships.

I've discussed before how one can't save anyone else from themselves.  People have to want to fix themselves. I'm not talking about saving anybody else though.  I'm talking about falling and falling hard, and not getting caught.

People are complex, and they don't always know what they want. I can shake my head and look at my studies and my dreams and say that's good enough.  But I can't look at a guy that I can't win over and tell him I'm going to keep chasing him until he gives in.  That's insane.  That's some psycho drama drugstore romantic novel bull crap. On a side note, when a guy is overly persistent it's cute and when a girl does it's desperate.  That's some double standard bull crap. But I digress.

When this guy told me that I'm never satisfied, I thought damn right. He wasn't talking about himself in that context, but he may as well have been. I always reach for the best thing, whether it's in my grasp or not. I just have to take a step back because he's not an option. 

The only option I have is to better myself and look for things and people that make me happy.  And he's never going to make me happy in the way I'd like.  I should move on to someone who will.

Lea Michele's 'Glee' character said "Being a part of something special makes you special."

What about starting something special?  Every time I come to halt in my studies, my future career, and my personal conflicts, I come back to the same place. I come back to writing.  It's my thing, my only thing.  I refer to myself as a jack of all trades. It's not untrue; I can be great at anything I learn. But it's my home turf.

My seventh grade English teacher changed my life. I'd known before I'd loved writing, but he introduced me to a world of style, structure, and feeling that I'd been tapping into unconsciously.  He helped me to try to master it.  He was so inspiring.  I led my friends to a two year long venture of creating our own compilations of writing. The second year we almost started a website. I loved doing it.  I loved editing, I loved writing my own stuff, and I loved directing my creatives.

When we gave him the first compilation, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Seeing my teacher moved by just the gesture, and how compelled he was by our work and use of words moved me.  I want to move everyone else and I know the best way how.

On Glee when Rachel Berry says her bit about being special in the pilot, and then again and again throughout the course of the show, all I can think of is our meetings in the taco place on Northern Boulevard collaborating.  And it is those memories and that aspiration to be amazing at in on a wide scale professional level that make everything I face in my life worth facing.  Because I know at the end of the day, nobody wants what they want more than I want to do what I was born to.

That gives me hope.

I can't even tell when my own smiles are fake anymore.

When I was in the eighth grade, I started having issues with my schoolwork.  I started handing in assignments late, not handing them in at all, and ditching test days.  I even just handed in a blank test with my name on it once.  My parents were very concerned.  How could this be? My average was previously in the high nineties and now it was just all of a sudden going to have a 12 point drop?

My mother called the dean, because he'd been my English teacher the previous and had a prominent impact on who I am. I could speak volumes about him but he's not really what this story is about. He told me that everyone goes through their phases during adolescence, and it was good I was getting mine out of the way early.  And then he said to me, "Never regret, only ambition."

I've lost faith in this a little bit this week.  I've lived my whole life living forward but now all I want to do is turn back time.  I'm making so many mistakes and so repeatedly.  I've strayed from the few philosophies I have.  I've caused harm to people other than myself, I haven't taken responsibility or action and I haven't moved to change any of the things that have happened or even to apologize.

I'm not mature.  I'm not an adult.  I'm a stupid kid.  Oh look, there I go messing with another philosophy.  I just made an excuse for myself. Not all of my problems are necessarily my fault, but isn't it my fault if there's nothing I can do to fix them?

Not that they are all so insolvable.  Just the root problems seem to be without solution.  The other problems are mere symptoms. They've been searching for the cure for AIDs for decades.

Her mirror is just as bad as her villain.

She's booking it.  She needs to be faster.  She has deadlines, she has things to do.  She's getting undressed.  She needs to find her robe.  She sees a flash of flesh.  Who is that?

That's the girl in the mirror. The girl is laughing.  Taunting every misshape, scar, freckle.  Every little piece of blubber hanging over, and every stretch mark lining them.  Every single piece of food she's ever had just bulging out of her. And that face, that damn face.  Little mutt blood mix, who could tell definitively what ethnicity she was? Almond eyes, triangle nose, caramel skin.  So many things wrong.  So much laughter.  So much taunting.

Now she's daunted.  She doesn't want to walk out the door.  She puts on her robe and grips the dresser like it's the only thing that's holding her to the ground.  She thinks about what she keeps in the top left drawer.  She needed something quick to hold her, but maybe that wasn't it.

Her father would think it cowardly and pathetic for her to do it.  But her father would also be taunting her and not just for her looks.

So she left the knife where it should stay.  But her heart was still aching.  She races down the stairs and slams the bathroom door, locking it. Throws herself in front of the toilet and kneels.  Doesn't even bother pushing her hair back.  It just needs to all come out of her.

All the mistakes, the things that were wrong with her, inside and out. Every time she let herself be talked down to. Every time she was cheated, every time she cheated someone. Every day she watched her brother slip further and further into melancholic stasis.  Every time her father poured a drink.

Every time he told her she wasn't good enough.  Not smart enough.  Not pretty enough.  Not thin enough.  Not understanding or quick. Not a good daughter. Not good enough to live with him.  Every time a boy reinforced what her father did and said.  Every time she was left, lied to, wronged, forced.

She wants to puke how much of a turd she was out of her.  She knows she is no good for the world.

He likes a good freakshow and she likes a nice prince.

She just watches him really closely.  She's memorizing every expression on his face and his movements.  His silly grin. The way his shoulders shake when he laughs. The way he he shakes his head and dances because he's bored.  

He's next to her and that's all she needs.  They're laughing about some absurdity she has committed.  She's that weird.  That freaky.  That slutty.  But he doesn't judge.

He tells her about his hopes.  His dreams and nightmares.  She tells him, nothing he could do would ever be a problem for her, and nothing he asked her to do could be a problem.  She lives to make him happy.  She lives for his smile.  His laughter.  His comfort and ease.

Because she knows he deserves it.  She knows there's nobody else in the world who's better than him, and is so glad she gets to be in his life.  Even if it's not in the way she wants.

That's how she knows it's real for her.  There's no turning back, no question of reciprocation.  It's unending, unrelenting movement to impact him.  He deserves to be happy.

At least one of them should be.

So I know I just said not to do it and I'm still doing it but...

...yes, I'm still procrastinating.  But I can never shut up on my pretty little blog.

I need a break from this town.  It's full of old schools, old jobs, old boyfriends...it's just full of exes. Things I don't want to talk about anymore, things I don't want to see.  Things I don't want to follow me around for the rest of my life.

I walk down the street and I can see the spot where I had my first kiss.  I walk several blocks in the opposite direction and bam, my first job.  I'd have to take a couple of buses to get to my elementary school, but my middle school and high school are within the mile.

Life is full of firsts and some of my happiest times were the ones where I wasn't thinking.  The moments of spontaneity, of unadulterated easiness.

But some of my more recent spontaneous moments were moments I regret.  Moments that I can't shake the memory of, moments that won't let me sleep.

Like the moment I decided one of my most influential mentors needed to be cut off.  Despite all blood relation and responsibility for sperm that made me.  That's definitely one that won't let me sleep.  Or the moment I got a hickey that received some unwanted attention.  That's definitely one I regret.

I used to really live in the moment.  I really didn't care about what happened to me or what happened to the people around me.  I was a total hedonist.

Now living forward has a different definition than living in the moment.

I wasn't happy when I lived so freely though.  I was just extremely well distracted.  Now my problems have strutted through my doorway--red feather boas and all--and are begging for my attention and dancing for my cash.

First midterm in less than eight hours.

I was sitting in the cafeteria, an hour before class with sixty pages to read and four pages I'd just printed out.  Those four pages were my writing and my friend had just found two major grammar errors.  In a paper due in the next hour. It had taken forty five minutes to correct on behalf of my teacher's comments and  half an hour waiting to print it, and it had taken three seconds for her to find what was wrong with it.

Procrastination is a horrible but all too common problem that is not unique to college or work or being a person.  It drags people down to the point where all they want to do is nothing.

I have a midterm in less than eight hours.  Actually, even less than that since I stopped writing this blog post a while ago to buy the online study course.

Remember all the things I said about my ego?

I still got this. I had two extra large D&D hazelnut coffees with cream and sugar.  That's all I need to survive.

If he blames it on the alcohol, I will deck him.

Sometimes people really piss me off.

"I was drunk" is like the best get out of jail free card for some of my friends who like to party.  It's kind of funny, because for drunks "I was drunk" is literally the one thing you can't ever say.  Because then the gig is up, you admit it to yourself and your family can do something about it.

Some people are very stubborn to admitting that they have a problem and don't realize the damage  they cause while they're under these influences. But god forbid someone close to them does, and World War 3 starts.

I'll admit when I tried point out that this person had a problem, I wasn't doing it in a nice way.  But my brother didn't grow up in a nice way and I'm sick of this pretending.  When we were arguing and my brother walked into the room, I had to fight every urge to start screaming at this person and to punch them in the face.

I'm sure the poison is the where a lot of the blame goes, but some abuse is too much to just point a finger at lax judgement and motor skills.  I get to ask about the things that messed that precious life up.  But they don't get to ask about my life.  Not anymore.

Some things that are said can never be taken back.  They ruined my brother and I will never ever forgive them for it.  And they ruined any chance of me forgiving them for what they did to me.

In the immortal lyrics of Mr. Billy Joel, Mama if that's movin' up then I'm movin' out.

I'm not a rich kid who takes a year off to travel and experience the world but I am a realist.  I believe in making the best of what you have.  Despite my realism, my ego is totally haywire and I believe what I have is better than what anyone else has.  I have drive, I have capability, and I have hunger.

However, I also have limited funds.  Deferring a semester has been a debate I've been having with myself, my parents, my friends, and my teachers for the past year.  My mother thought it was a total mistake, that I would forget everything I've ever learned and that deferring would make it harder on myself.

My friends and my teachers seemed to think it would be a good idea though, to start in the spring rather than the fall.  I happen to agree, now that I'm basically halfway through the fall semester.  I still live with my parents, they still want me out, and I still want out.  So clearly, this was a mistake.

The only reason I did stay was to watch my brother.  Because despite my earlier posts about how I can't save anyone that doesn't want to be saved, I really want to save him.  And for all of the reasons to defer for the spring and start again next fall, I still really fear falling behind in my studies if I do.

So the question is, if I didn't have all these external factors unrelated to my education, would it still be a good idea to defer?  My mother makes it seem like I'll suffer terminal brain injury.  She says it gets harder to go back the longer it gets put off.  Which honestly, again my ego has gone haywire,  and I don't think anything less than an Adonis could make me brain dead stupid.  The problem is I don't know anyone that's deferred a semester to work that has actually gone back to school yet, and I don't want to get stuck in a job and an apartment with three roommates to keep working to live.  If I'm not careful, that could turn into what the rest of my life looks like rather than something temporary.

Is deferring a rudimentary mistake for an education and a career?

Us neo-max-zoom-dweebies have to stick together.

Like I said before, my life isn't an eighties movie.  My idol didn't write it.  It so follows my high school lunch table was never a princess, a basketcase, a criminal, an athlete and a brain.  It was basically seven different versions of brain.

They did carry different other elements of that core group though.  Our princess brain was a very typical high headed, high maintenance girl with a killer drive to get what she wanted out of school. She had a very high strung mother.

Our athlete brain wasn't driven by the negative reinforcement as the princess was.  He was driven by his want to help himself and those he cared about.  Then there were sub variations of basketcase brainiacs which ranged from the edgiest to the saddest of all of us.

Then there was me.  Which honestly, I have no idea where I'd put myself.  I was never stereotyped by  my friends, even though they constantly offensively did it to each other.  But it didn't matter.  We weren't the Breakfast Club.

After high school, sometimes people struggle to find things they still have in common.  Sometimes it's lack of time, or  just a huge distance.  In New York, it's a bit different.  Unless people actually dormed in another state, most of us were either commuting or dorming upstate or on Long Island.

I asked my dad if he stayed in touch with his friends from high school.  He says that if people are important enough to you, it doesn't matter how big the distance is. You'll still stay friends, even if you don't talk often.  When real friends see each other, they pick up right where they left off.

I was really worried that after the summer--that I made all about work and a boy--they would stop wanting to hear from me. I mean, a week after graduation I heard other kids talking about how they had already cut a lot of people off.  But now I know who my real friends are.  The princess still calls, and we still help each other with essays.  I still can call on one of the basketcases when I'm in tears.

Ironically, the athlete doesn't even make conversation with me when I'm on his cashier line, despite the fact we work in the same shopping center.

Like I said, we're not the Breakfast Club.  Our story doesn't have an end yet.

Ferris Bueller took ten days off in his senior year of high school, not his freshman year of college.

I wish my life was like an eighties movie.  I'd have great hair, awesome musical numbers for no apparent reason that were admired by Olive Penderghast, and great friends.  I'd also have the ability to hack into my school's database and dial down the number of absences I've had.  I'd also still be in high school, so skipping class wouldn't be as big a deal.  Or, I would be in a fraternity, so I probably wouldn't care one way or the other.

But in the words of Miss Penderghast, John Hughes didn't write my life.  Even though one of my aspirations in life is to write a coming of age movie that outdoes my idol's life's work, it doesn't mean my own life actually is as cute, as funny, or as conclusive whenever there's a big social, romantic or family issue.  Also doesn't mean the fact that I've skipped cultural anthropology five times now or political science every single time except the first day can be made out to be cute or have a happy ending.  It just ends with me in tears, because I screwed myself over.

In a previous post, I said I loved my academic independence. I'm not so sure I deserve it anymore.  But I'll work with what I've got left. Like it or not, I have all the way until the end of December to take the classes I have now.  I should do well in them, at least pass them, being that I did pay for them.

Which is why I'm taking away my lax attitude.  I've been way too comfortable with my schedule and not following it.  I'm going to schedule study time, project time, and follow my class and work schedules to the letter.  Since positive reinforcement clearly isn't the best way to get through to myself, I'm going to start taking things away from myself.  Like I'm in the third grade. But what will I be taking away?  What will it mean?

It means no more Netflix binging until I get myself together.  No more House of Cards for me.

It only took ten minutes.

I've been home since 9:13pm, and now it's 9:23pm.  Within that time period, my emotions did a somersault from:

1. Confused - About boys, and about how they expect girls to be mind readers.  How they have no idea how they want. And about how girls are exactly the same way but insult boys for doing it.
2. Relief - All duties for the day were attended to.
3. Alarmed - My mother was already asleep, so something happened in my absence.  Probably my father, my brother, or my father's treatment of him wore my mother out.  Or all of the above.
4. Annoyed - Because my mother's angry nap was starting take validity because what the patriarchs of the house were doing was now directed towards myself.
5. Tears - Because I fight like Tiger Woods' wife and I work with a passion and a blindsided goal like Jay Gatsby, but Tiger Woods' wife is no Joan of Arc, and Jay Gatsby is no Jeff Bezos.  Which leaves me at less than strong enough and less than good enough.

Disney screwed me over.

So this happened a while ago, and I wrote about it for my writing class.  I thought I'd share.

 My brother and I used to got to the park together to be free. We needed to escape the dissatisfaction, the dysfunction, and the misery our father burdened us with. We would grab our Razor scooters and a basketball after being asked a thousand time why we aren't star athletes and just go.

The swings were our happy place. Bowne Park was quiet and we could talk, or we wouldn't talk, and it would be just as nice. It stopped being so nice though. As we got older, I'd be on the swings and he'd skate around me. Later I would take my scooter and swing along. My brother stopped wanting to come. He wanted to play video games. He won't even come out for family dinner.

So I stopped with the swings, because other children would see me and stare blankly as if I shouldn't be there. I went down to the artificial pond and sat under my favorite willow tree. I loved that willow tree. It reminded me of Pocahontas, and though the story was wildly inaccurate, she was my favorite Disney princess. She was beautiful, colored, and she stood for something more. I took my notebook, my iPod, and my gum. I would try to forget and write fantasies where I'd be saved.

I thought eventually I was saved. I started bringing my boyfriend when I was fifteen or sixteen. I brought Matt to my special spot because I wanted to share it with him. We talked for hours there and we didn't have to do anything more. Superheroes were sort of our thing, and I claimed it was appropriate because he saved me.

I should have known better. I wanted to be Pocahontas, not Snow White. I could never return to Bowne Park after he left me for a pretty Caucasian girl who was neither smart or cool. She was plain and ordinary.

Pocahontas would have been strong enough to return to the park; at least the Disney version of her would be. But that's not who she really was. She was a teenager whose livelihood was traded like property. Mine was so damaged it was abandoned like a pair of shoes.

Starting from the bottom again: The Freshman

My first day of college was a bit unsettling.  Putting my butt in a seat for three hours to hear someone squawk is a very primitive way to learn.  And honestly, so was attendance being counted and being penalized if I didn't show up without an excuse more than three times.  If someone missed three classes, it was their problem.  It was their tuition being blown.

I'm making it sound worse than it is.  Doing forty hours a week (which honestly seems so easy after doing sixty over the summer) makes lectures seem like the easy way out, and also the easiest way to catch up on the work.  It feels so much better without someone breathing down my back every five minutes checking to make sure that I get it, and now they're just assuming I did.

It's also not like there isn't a way to get one on one attention in college either.  Some of my professors having office hours, and there are math and English centers within my school.  Basically, I'm not mandated to get extra help because everyone is mandated: I can choose to.

I'm really loving my academic independence.  I just wish I could get some freedom from my workplace.  It's starting to feel like it's a second home.  I'm on call on my days off and it's stifling, because how can I say no?  I'm not doing anything to warrant a call out.  I don't see any of my friends anymore.  I used to think that if friends were important enough you'd make the time after high school to see them, but I'm starting to doubt that now.  My best chick friend never calls me or texts me anymore, and it's not that she doesn't pick up or reply whenever I get in touch with her, but she's distant.  All of my friends are distant except those that I work with, of which there is one, because my workplace is run like a high school and they all gossip and talk crap about each other.

I don't get it.  I felt such a bond with my friend, as if we blood related.  No, that's also inaccurate. The people I actually am related to don't always treat me half as nice as she used to.  I took a week off of work.  I put in for it about a month ago, because my parents insisted we needed a family vacation and that we were all going to go and be happy and skip around in sweater vests like a bad after school special.  The week comes, and we've planned nothing.  My dad made a stink about how nothing gets done unless he does it.  Because despite the multiracial and liberal house we live in, he claimed nobody else including his working wife is capable of doing such a thing like planning a vacation.

So out of guilt, we went to some historic sites in Sleepy Hollow which I loved.  My father and my brother hated it.  With a burning passion for all things seventeenth century.  Sucks.  It sucked, that whole week.  I'm well rested now sure, but my family is falling apart.  Just like it was at the start of my freshman year of high school.  Except now instead of me being crazy and trying to desperately to come up from eighth grade slump, my brother is two steps away from dropping out of high school.

It really does feel like deja vu.  I'm sitting in the back of the room again with my head down in almost all black.  I'm breaking things and saying things I don't mean, and I'm stuck here trying to save people that want to be defeated.  They're losing against themselves.

I'm still being asked to get a better job and move out.  I could never forgive myself if I left my brother high and dry.  He keeps pushing me away.  I made a move, I got him help, and I did what I could. But I can't make him want to be better.  I can only stick around to help pick up the pieces.  I'm just doing damage control.

He's so lucky. I left the only person who could help me, and that person hasn't spoken to me since.  I can't believe I thought I was on my own last year.

The next time I say that will be when I move out.

So here's the thing

I've lost a bit of my way since...April, since apparently that was the last time I posted anything up here.  So to get everything up to speed, after April, I took the AP Lit exam in May. I haven't even checked how I did on it, since I'm that sure I flunked it.  It's not that I'm inept in English class, I just seemed to be inept at trying at that point.  Which bites, because I paid eighty bucks to take the damn thing.  Then there was no senior trip, because the student body was a collective personification of randomness.  We did, however, manage to get our act together for prom.

My prom experience was not so great.  I spent about eight hours getting primped because I thought I needed one night to be beautiful.  I looked perfect, don't get me wrong; there are no better pictures of me than my prom pictures.  But when I finally got there, I was early and I waited with a teacher for my friends to get there.  When my friends did get there, we seemed to be at a lull.  What were we all doing?   We'd all seen the after school specials and the TV and rom-coms versions of this night.  There was drama and broken rules and cliches abundant.  None of that at ours.  Half of them left early because they just seemed mad at each other.  The half I hung out with I was guilted into hanging out with and then regretted it, because apparently after prom was code for let's-talk-sh*t about-what-people-did-at-prom.

Because what the hell did I get all dressed up for anyway?  I had no date, not that I needed one, or so I proclaimed.  It didn't matter.  The only guy I wanted to impress wouldn't dance with me and was ignoring me.

Not that that didn't change, a few days later.  He started doing the opposite of ignoring me and I loved it.  And the following week at graduation, my grandmother gave him the biggest death stare, silently wondering why I couldn't find a nice Filipino boy.  I guess she thought I would break my parents' multiracial stigma.  She was so overly traditional, snobby, and racist.  But I'm getting away from the point.

Graduation lasted three hours for a class they had about sixty names they had to call onto stage.  They turned it into a damn concert and had extra extra speeches.  My class valedictorian ended his speech with "May the force be with you."  Had I not been under an influence and had it not been the last day we would deal with these people, I might have stuck around to protect him from getting his ass kicked. But nobody who would have kicked his ass was graduating with us, so it really didn't matter.

I spent my summer doing sixty hours a week doing three different jobs.  Nope, sorry, that was inaccurate.  Four jobs, including trying to be the best girlfriend in the world while trying to support myself and my goals.  I wanted to be perfect, to have everything right in the world.  And I did.  Being in love makes everything right in the world, it makes all the exhaustion worth it and I wouldn't spent my summer any other way than the way I did.

What I do regret is convincing myself I could make it work with a guy who was dorming who I was never going to see.  I wanted so badly to be with him, to stay with him, but I was driving myself nuts trying to figure out how to do it and how to stop worrying he was going hurt me or himself or that I was.  So I just stopped.  I cut two of my jobs loose before the start of the school year, and I broke up with him on my birthday.  I was doing it for him, because as much as he said he was fine with the way things were, there's no way he could be.  And I knew that because I wasn't fine.