i think i've been reading too many of those modern, stick it in your head with one short burst kinds of writers lately. i noticed i've been unconsciously ending posts with one sentence standing by itself, and i'm really not that good at meaningful non-cheesy one-liners. so i'm putting myself on ending-with-one-sentence probation for a few posts. boo to one sentences!

here's a poem i wrote sometime last year. it's called A Change, which is strange, because i feel now like i did before i wrote it...i'm gonna have to come up with better titles. if it sucks, i'm sorry. schuck it long, and schuck it hard...just kidding! time to go back to my stat homework, which i can't do even though i have the solutions right in front of me. i guess i should drop my lifelong dream of becoming a statistician and stick to daydreaming about playing on a mountain with all the people who've ever meant something to me, while listening to A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton...from the Legally Blonde soundtrack! have i thoroughly disgusted you with the state of my life at this moment yet? who am i talking to? is this blogspot for me or for you two? anyways, in my head, the mountain looks like a cross between the mountain-lake in the beginning of What Dreams May Come, north Berkeley (the view driving up Euclid...and the whole area is so homey), and the mountain in The Silver Chair which Jill and Eustace find themselves on by accident and Aslan blows them off. I think it's the change in the air that's doing this to me, making me think about all these trivial things...everytime it gets warm it reminds me of the other 20 times in my life that it's gotten warm. Yes, I forgot that this post is morbid. On to the morbidity!


A Change, that's more of a creepy disconnected sigh than a change

I lost an illusion today,
A hidden one I never knew
But still I knew when it was gone.

(I think I’m clashing)
Love with the Wholes
Weep to despair and affliction of souls
Dangle from an endless rope
Be stricken by dear-held hope.

(My life comes from my heart
And who I am. – I yearn,
I long for God and valor,
I trip my way through filth and squalor.)

I believe in always
Unchanging and eternal
I believe in promise
Blood of soul, hope’s kernel
I believe in once
Dreamt before, seen tomorrow
I believe in never
Firmly planted, seed of sorrow

(My life comes from my heart
But my heart lives in a shroud -
Scared of light but not quite blind,
Meekly poking at Truth’s mind.)

I believe in deception
Search the path ever above
I believe in obstinance
Clinging to unordained love
I believe in sadness
Fall from the road, whisper a prayer
I believe in broken hope
Float endlessly through empty air

(I wish, I wish I had their love
I wish I could believe what I know
Before I unravel. – Taken apart,
My head is much closer than my heart).

But then in silence comes the stir
A whispered cry to end the night
I find belief in all things right,
Noble and true, lovely and pure.
These things were set before my start
They come on wings, invade my heart.
I float down gently to the ground
Once frozen, now with few seeds sewn,
Seeds of love to kneel around;
My God has not forgot His own.


yeah that last verse seems out of place, but what do we have besides hope?

ok i had this dream last night where i was traveling around with a bunch of my friends and at one point we were at this mall and we were throwing this football thingy around, but when i caught it it turned out to be like a barely alive cat, not like limp or anything, it was like it was stuffed, very stiff, but everytime i caught it it would start scratching and attacking me. so one of my friends was like, we gotta do something about this cat, so he stuck it in a microwave to make sure it would be dead! and he was like, i've done this before, the minimum microwave time needed is 5 minutes and 30 seconds. and i was like, oh no what if it explodes! but then i thought, silly me, it's stuffed, of course it won't explode.

well, time to go get gered up to watch mothman prophecies.

get it?? gered!

i just noticed i misspelled 'integral' in the subheader...how embarrassing. and on valentine's day too, that's not very sexy. so what's the most romantic thing i ever did? well once in eighth grade i rode my bike five miles through the pouring rain to give this girl a big bouqet of flowers...wait that wasn't me, that was bing to jessica chao! ok...i used to have a big crush on this girl so i sent her a valentine saying 'as you probably already know, i have a crush on you'. wait...that was charles to joan! eh...once me and bing got lost on the way to menlo park mall and ended up listening to shania twain's still the one over forty times on repeat. or maybe it was when me and jesse changed the oil for my car and we spent the day exerting ourselves half-naked with chests glistening. ok i just remembered that i told my parents about this web site. well...once me and juney drove down to monterey in the middle of the night and spent the next day rollerblading on the boardwalk and climbing up and down cliffs overlooking the pacific and driving along this incredibly gorgeous highway...

romantic sentiments always make me nostalgic for the more halcyon =O and carefree days of my childhood, which really have nothing to do with romanticism. like riding my bike through a park forest with my family or meeting lots of new friends at a summer camp in the middle of nowhere (ok it was piano camp. PIANO camp! ...in KANSAS! i don't care, i loved it.) or playing around in someone's backyard with my friends after dark. or any of the trips i went on with my family, driving up pikes peak and mount evans in colorado, or visiting the redwood forests in oregon, or the canyons in utah, or the blueberry mountains in maine, or the beaches in north carolina...i acted like a bored snobby little kid on those trips but i loved them, mom and dad, they are my favorite memories in the world and i dream about beautiful places all the time...my first memory ever is driving along this amazingly blue ocean in hawaii when i was two years old. maybe this is why i love nature so much...anyways, those were the most special times in my life.

i'll leave you with the words of one of the greatest love songs ever:

I was alone, I never knew...what good love could do
Then we touched, then we sang...about the loving things!
Long night, all night, oh every night
So hold tight, hold tight, oh baby hold tight!
Anyway you want it, that's the way you need it, anyway you want it!

That's the way i want it...

here's a little something i typed out on june hye's computer once when we were studying. there's no point or anything really.

I used to have a cat named Tiger, who got killed in a fight with a raccoon one day. Actually his name was Tiger II; that reminded me of Tiger I, who got run over by a car. That reminded me of my dog Casper who was an American Eskimo; I once chased him around the neighborhood three times before he got hit by a garbage truck. That reminded me of the time I had a fish, which flopped out of his tank as I was carrying it across the street once and got squished by a car. That reminded me of the time that I adopted a kid, because we had a lot of pets together. The End.

i think i'm feeling an identity crisis coming...maybe not crisis but lament. dammit, i wish i was more articulate, i wish i was the first to say the sweet and provocative phases that are so common now. (i think this is a side effect of post-modernity - the awareness of being aware - it's cheesy to say 'you look wonderful tonight' but it's not cheesy to say 'as eric clapton once said, you look wonderful tonight' or 'as tony bennett (or sinatra) once said, i love the way you look tonight' or 'as styx once said, we're just a bunch of men attracted to each other' - it's dangerous, because what happens when you aware yourself into paralysis? cycnicsm eats away at our originality and creativity. even this little side note was mostly borrowed from Umberto Eco (eco, eco, eco....=)). we can't ever be sincere or simple because we know too much and everything sounds rote coming out of our mouths.)

anywaaaays the two of you reading this are making me nervous! i haven't thought with purpose in awhile...not just with purpose, i mean with elevated purpose, as in the kind of thinking where right when you begin you know you're gonna feel a lot better later. it's weird, cause i've had too many changing mindsets. for example, in the summer i actually stayed up late at night reading ts eliot and letting Little Gidding sink into my imagination, and i haven't read anything since. freshman year i was all into becoming the best guitarist in the world and i don't even know how that phase died away, but i'm worse now than i used to be, which is kind of sad because i used to think 'i'm improving pretty fast, i wonder how good i'll be in three years or so' - of course in less bland and more snobby words. soph year i was into being a good christian, a typical asian college christian, if that makes sense - who knows everybody in all the fellowships, is respected and stuff. now i guess i realize that even spirituality and faith can be more of a hobby than an identity if you're not careful. i forgot to be as shrewd as a snake when it came to evil and i'm still trying to learn humility. i'm not a poet but i write poems, i'm not a musician but i play music..the thing is, i've been going through the post-modern mindset, buying into it more and more, becoming more self-aware until i'm too scared and cynical to assume anything.

this year i had what many people are horribly longing for, a committed very much in love relationship, which is still true. but even we fell into being post-modern, into being cynical and overly surfacey and analytical. it was hard because we were and are so close to breaking through that, to forgetting everything that's been fed into our minds and instincts and letting the relationship build from the ground up, no assumptions, hopes stronger than fears. it wears you down knowing that the other person is gonna examine every word out of your mouth, instead of trusting the words. i wish we could rattle off thoughts at each other nonstop, no inhibitions...i loved every moment spent with her, or maybe i should say 'this is gonna sound cheesy but i loved every moment with her', the joking, the hugs, smiles, sighs, questions, pauses, even insecurities. i could say something like 'well i'm touched cause the fact that she's insecure means she thinks that much more highly of my opinion than other peoples' but that's not the truth. i really can't find much objective good in insecurities, just that they're part of her, so i embrace them. now the question is, how much of this am i writing for myself, how much for people to read, and how much for her to read? i'm gonna try not to think about that, but this is for you, i love you juney...you taught me a lot about the characteristics of real, irrational love. i don't care how unoriginal or cheesy i sound, i'm pretending i'd never heard these phrases before and i'm the first person to ever say them, to ever feel them enough to express. alrite...back to stat homework. sorry i ranted so much on post-modernity, i don't think i understand it that well, so you can kinda ignore what i said...aha! it creeps out again. ok, thank you and good night.

quote 4 from the BHOT:

pete: it was one of those things that looked good from a distance but got uglier and uglier as i got closer
jesse: you mean like the singer from the cranberries?

quote 3 from the BHOT:

steve: ...i'm not a mormon...
janet: steve, mormons can't eat beef
steve: yes we can

wow, that post written on 1/29 was really long with too many big words and not very fun to read at all. everyone in this room is now dumber for having read it. =)

i had a weird dream about the author of the book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius last night...he had written a mini-journal of the first 20 years of his life and i was going through the highlights in fast-forward. everytime something weird would happen, this random guy would pop up and together him and the author would lose an eyeball and it'd be rolling around on the floor but their sockets would regrow them, so by the time i woke up they had each lost six eyeballs.

quote 2 from the BHOT (an old one):

korean girls, to jesse: tee hee!
jesse, to the korean girls: jesse scores points with the korean girls! aww yeah!
pete, in the background: *shakes head in disbelief*