Quick Update

I know I've been gone for a while. Haven't found much to write about, though I could if I really tried. I guess I've been "stuck" again. But sleeping won't make your problems go away and your life won't suddenly change after you get out of a hot shower. Time to go. Tomorrow is Sept 1st but I'm treating it like a New Years. The first day of starting over.

I've learned that...

We are complex beings. We are complicated organisms designed with forces simultaneously pushing and pulling against each other. If I had to sum up what I learned about life during this last trip, I would say that the point was to order all those energies into one direction, and plow through without fear or regard.

The decisions will not end. The unanswerable questions of "what if" or "what could have been" will not cease at any particular time, but rather life is about having confidence in your decisions and living with the choices we make. I suppose the hardest part is truly realizing what you want or where you "should" be. Yes, there are always the signs, but in the end, we create our own fate. WE are the ones that decide which path to take. Those seemingly random occurrences only guide us there. Ultimately, it is our decision to listen or not.

So this trip has really been about two things: Choices and sacrifices. With each choice comes a consequences and going through life is simply an intricate balance of knowing what you want and measuring what choices will get you there and which ones won't. The heartbreaking revelation is that you can't do it all. Sooner or later life splits your passions and aspiration into separate paths. You have to give one up for the other. But I guess that's the beautiful ugliness of it all. You benefit from the sacrifices of yourself and from that, I think, is how parts of you literally help yourself grow.

I can't say I've felt productive these past 5 months. In fact, most of the time was spent agonizing over which decisions to make, where I was going or where I could have gone. Contemplation over lost time is truly the biggest mistake of my life. But they say misery is a fire that destroys and purifies. Somewhere at the end of all this there is a lesson to be learned. And I have to consider myself lucky. I've had the opportunity to realize this and still have enough youth and energy to do this thing right.

There is always time to do this thing right.

Dancing til the sun comes up

Sometimes you don't have to have style, you don't have to move to the rhythm, you don't have to have perfect technique. Sometimes you can dance around like a fucking idiot and things will be okay.

I don't think I'll ever learn.

I can't ever seem to leave Pandora's box alone. Curiosity really does kill.

Let It Burn

Two days before I left on this trip, a good friend of mine called me in a frantic panic, warning that between the dates of April 28th and May 7th, I would meet someone that would either make this the best or the worst experience of my life. Now I’m not one for superstition, but for those 9 days, I restrained myself to redundant routine in deliberate avoidance of meeting anyone new.

“Safe”, I thought to myself as the miniature black border outlined the 8th of May on my electronic calendar. What I didn’t foresee was for her to get the dates wrong. I also didn’t expect that it would be someone I vaguely knew from my past. But most of all, I didn’t anticipate that the determination of my experience would be in my own hands. I guess what they say is true. You do create your own destiny.

It ended up sparking an intense reflection of my entire life, from my past and present career choices to the many buffoonish fumblings with the opposite sex. It became an agonizing circular comparison of what my life could have been and what it is. At times the regret paralyzed me in a state of stagnant contemplation. At times it was downright painful.

I helplessly clung onto the few memories of ecstatic happiness I had retained; yet I still found a way to reduce them to times of just getting caught up in the moment, paltry instances of misinterpretation, or an oversimplification of happiness. I somehow manage to ruin everything for myself, even the times that have already passed.

But I still contest that what I felt during those times were real. That smile, that revival of hope that the world is still a decent place, were in fact sincere. What I’ve come to realize is that genuine passion expels so feverishly that it burns. For me, it's has just been so infrequent that instead of learning from it, I let it engulf me. Hence the product of my life: unstable occurrences of the extreme ups and downs. I still haven’t learned to control or bring them out from within. I am still reliant on external factors. I am petty, just like everyone I said I wasn’t like.

I’ve foolishly extended this trip multiple times, despite the fact that I’ve been longing to go home since almost the beginning. One part of me says the pain will always make you stronger, but realistically, the other, much more trivial part of me, is just waiting in vain hope that maybe some stroke of burning passion will present itself again and this time, I won’t be foolish enough to let it pass me by.

Sometimes I think too much. Sometimes I dwell too long in those dark corners of regret and remorse and I fretfully scurry over what parts of my potential I can still salvage. But fuck it. I’ve decided that should that moment present itself again, should I be lucky enough to recognize it, and most importantly, should I be brave enough to embrace it, I’m putting on my shoes and dancing my way right into that fire, even if it burns me up in the process.

Somewhere in the middle

Sometimes when you wander too much, you lose sight of who you are. Sometimes you need to be grounded in order to figure out where you need to be. I never thought things could get this bad when traveling. Dazed and confused. It's time to come home now.

one and a half hrs of sleep was all i got

Have you ever looked back at your life and analyzed every single trivial detail, then just wish you could go back and rearrange it all? You wish you would have went that way instead of this way, chosen A instead of B, courageously pushed through instead of cowered back into the safety net of comfort?

You know, I used to think I was different. I kept thinking it was society, not me that was dysfunctional. Blame it on structural oppression, blame it on media brainwashing, blame it on how people are, whatever justifies your fear from grasping what's out there. But for every pointed finger, there's three pointing back at you.

I know fantasizing about building a time machine and reliving those lost moments can be just as much of a time drain as any other flashy media gimmick created in the modern day. I know it's best to leave the past behind you; thinking about it too much just takes up time that should be spent on the present, and then you go back and regret that lost time as well. But you know, it's a lot easier said than done.