Lost In Me

I've been neglecting this blog for much too long, but I've had a terrible dearth of material to write about these past couple of weeks, unless I resort to posting about my numbers and equations. It seems that with Drew, Lee, and Panna caught up in serious relationships, I've been spending more and more time in isolation, and since I observe the lives of my friends and glean what lessons that I can by interacting with them, these days there is little to reflect on. Which is not to say that I only live vicariously through my friends, but it's somehow easier to simply stand back and watch.

For example, I'm thinking back a few days to fall break... It was Mel's birthday and David somehow found it appropriate to invite Panna and a few other women apparently interested in him. Sitting quietly in a corner holding my beer, I watched the dynamic between Panna and the other ladies; their animosity whetted by their drunkenness. Panna complains to me about these "catty other girls" and their belligerent attitudes towards her. To me, it just seems that love is an emotion that makes people feel scared and vulnerable, and when we feel scared we often make up for it by acting small and petty. Big hearts, as far as I can tell, are just very rare.

After this morning, I'll be able to tell my students, "when I was in college, I had to walk a mile uphill through the snow to take a number theory test!" Nothing like their warm walks through pleasant weather for their tests...

I miss my students, and I think I miss teaching in general.

I showed up last night to a lab for my EMT class. The instructors had already set the room up for CPR/AED training... so what do I see arrayed before me, but a dozen mannequins; half of them white, and half of them black. This caused a brief bout of ROTFLMAO. Unfortunately, there were no yellow mannequins, which will perhaps irk Drew to no end. An instructor told me they do exist, but there were none for our class.

My first round of midterms ended well... and I'm looking forward to the rematch that comes in a month. I'm working hard trying to find my feet again, after the turmoil of the past semester and summer, and I try to spend more time thinking about the future and less about the past. And so I've been becoming more and more interested in my classes, and at times I even start thinking about grad school. Or maybe even med school. It's hard to know for sure at this point, although I suppose the questions I've had to confront have not needed as much soul searching as what Lee is going through.

So, I'm thankful (hopeful?) to be returning to my normal self, with a better sense for what I was meant to do in this world.

Dinner last night with Galwang and Panna was highly amusing. It was almost like becoming a counselor again... those two could have been my children, and the dynamic between them is something like that between adolescent siblings of similar age. Plus a little bit of flirting.

I felt bad that we didn't wait for Lee to show up, and slightly worse that the other two didn't see why. But I guess in this atmosphere everybody becomes wrapped up in their own work, and develop a kind of blindness for everything but their immediate goals and concerns. A homework set here, a paper there. So listening to G and P talk during dinner was like listening to two people with tunnel vision, except that their tunnels didn't point at even remotely the same thing. First time having dinner with friends in weeks, and I felt sort of lonely.

Not that loneliness is a bad thing, of course.

Galwang seems as frustrated as ever, but doing well in most other aspects. I'm starting to notice more the little idiosyncrasies that he might have picked up from me, and that's starting to become downright scary. Panna seems happy with her new nebulous sort of status with David. I'm glad for her.

On an unrelated note, while I was walking to dinner I was approached by two Mormon ladies, who asked me for my name and wanted to know whether I would join their church. I told them that I was catholic (a lie, shame on me), and that the two of them had talked to me a month before (not a lie). The shorter of the two cheerfully shook my hand and said "oh well, maybe third time will be a charm."

I'd be asleep by now, if it weren't for another late night drunken call from Emily. Two nights in a row, she must be having a rough time. Well of course it's a rough time, this age, that is. We turn twenty, realize we need to find a direction, then realize we're just sort of floating, and often start to panic to one degree or another. I know I've seen this in other friends... in a way it's a very typical sort of phase for people that age, yet I find myself quite sensitive to those feelings, even if I didn't exactly go through them myself. I hope she's doing alright and I guess I'll email to check up on her in a few days.

So I only started writing in this blog recently, after much pushing from Drew, but I've kept a diary for quite some time now. And although Lee might call me a narcissistic bastard for doing this, I occasionally like to read through my diary. It's easier to examine myself from a more detached point of view after time has passed, and that was what I was doing this evening, just before Emily called.

When I think of my feelings for Hanna, I sometimes worry that all I wanted from her was somebody to help me heal from the heartbreak from my past. And that, to me, sounds like a very selfish sort of love, and not the kind of feelings that should be cherished. But reading through my diary, through perhaps some of the most honest words that I have ever written, convinces me that my feelings for her do stand on their own. And I become more confident about the passionate feelings that I felt so unworthy of, as they start to burn again.

Now I realize that I'm awake at four in the morning, thinking about this... I guess I just miss Hanna. I haven't heard from her in 3 weeks. But now it's time for sleep.

It's a scimitar. It's troubling, those Arabs. If you've read Dune, it's just amusing to see the translations from real life, which is the cheap thing about sci-fi. See my blog for some reflections on Orientalism.

I haven't posted in a while. It's been a long week, and I ended it by sleeping for 14 hours. It would have been an impressive stretch if I hadn't been woken up last night by a drunken friend from high school, who I've rarely talked to since. It was actually an amusing conversation, since she was too drunk, and I too sleepy, to have any coherence.

It seems that my mind has a way of letting me know when I've been asleep for too long, by bombarding me with messed up dreams. This morning, I woke up after an intense dream of being stuck in some kind of video game, fighting the devil's pet with a curved arab-style sword. The devil's pet was a very abstract sort of creature, that took on whatever physical form it wanted to at any given moment. In our final, desperate round, it chose to assume the form of a giant apple pie that would simply grow bigger every time I clobbered it with my blade. I realized all was futile when it grew to the size of a small garage, and ran away.

If I were a superhero, my superpower would be having strange dreams.

Every morning, I wake up, hit the alarm clock, and after a while start my day with the pledge to learn something new and interesting, and possibly even grow a little. As for the former, the atomic physics I've been reading is interesting, but I'm not sure if I've done anything to the effect of the latter... forcing myself to do overdue laundry, I'm afraid, doesn't count. At times, it seems like that kind of a thing isn't something to be measured in the units of days.

I see a lot of Panna these days. I wonder why she is so unwilling to acknowledge that the human bonds she forms with those around her are important to her, in any way other than the superficial. She tells me that she enjoys being with David, sleeping with him, cleaning her house and doing her laundry with him, but that in the end he does not mean anything to her. It's frustrating in a way, being a friend to somebody who is so cold and distant towards everyone.

I spent some time this afternoon talking to Paul. It's unfortunate that such a bright and funny man is so shy that very few will have the chance to appreciate him for who he is. I don't know if I was successful at all in cheering him up; it's hard to change what somebody is thinking about at the moment, and even harder to change their brain chemistry.