2006 April « Changeable.net

Apr 30 2006

Recently

Thank you to everybody who has congratulated me about UCLA, either through this website or in other ways. It is very much appreciated!

On Friday, my friend Mary and I drove up to San Luis Obispo… it was very green, and so much more lovely than I remembered it to be. It was amazing. I spoke with one of the leading English professors and he assured me that I would fit in. The trip was very nice, but I was frustrated, because I was honestly hoping to go up and hate it, since that would make my decision easier.

I still need to make the same types of trips for UCLA and CSULB. Tomorrow I am going to tell all of the schools that I will be attending in the fall to literally buy myself some more time. It will probably cost me about two hundred bucks, but… I say that it is worth it.

Just so we all know though, I am leaning toward UCLA. Reading through the catalog and looking at the books I would get to read for two years gets me very giddy.

Something else that is interesting… if I go to UCLA, I will be setting myself for an incredibly long summer vacation. Seriously. From mid-May (about 2.5 weeks left!) until the very end of September. I wish I knew what Summer had in store for me.

There are various possibilities. I might take summer courses. I want to work a lot. I might get a new job (a bank?). I am waiting on certain confirmations about a trip to London or Cambodia (haha, since they are SO similar to each other, right?). I think I am taking a short trip to San Francisco with a friend whose friendship was recently restored with me in a few weeks. I want to go camping. I want to hit up the East Coast or the midwest. So many things I want to do!

These past two weeks have been some of the craziest ever. I have been so emotionally high and also the lowest I have been in a long long time.

Habits of fickleness and feeling guilty have returned, and it is proving hard to chase those feelings away.

It is hard to know how to feel in general.

I think for now I will continue trying to look forward hopefully.

Listen to my favorite song of the week!

Please pray.

Apr 26 2006

3 Comments

College, life in general

So about that school in Los Angeles…

Dear Esther:

Congratulations! It is our great pleasure to offer you admission to UCLA for the Fall Quarter 2006. You have been admitted to the UCLA College of Letters and Science with American Literature And Culture as your academic major.You bring an impressive array of strengths to your academic endeavors. We know that UCLA will benefit from your intelligence, imagination, and energy, and we hope you will choose UCLA for your undergraduate education. UCLA truly is a world-class university. Here you will have access to acclaimed academic departments, a world-renowned faculty, and distinctive research programs. The campus also offers a full range of social and cultural activities and organizations for you to explore. At UCLA, you will be challenged to confront, understand, and master a remarkable range of disciplines that are the measures of a cutting-edge education. Our students consistently remark how UCLA both fulfills their intellectual interests and enhances their personal growth, and we invite you to become a part of this extraordinary experience. The New Bruins Web site provides access to your next step: your formal acceptance of our admission offer. It also includes information about important deadlines and your housing application. To complete your housing application and to access additional university services, use your UCLA student ID as shown above. Additionally, please review your Admission Contract to ensure that you will continue to meet the provisions of your offer of admission. For now, enjoy this momentâ€”it is the beginning of one of the most exciting and memorable chapters in your life. Of course, you’re going to learn a lot about the world at UCLA. But more often than you might imagine, UCLA will be where the world learns about you. Welcome to UCLA!

Apr 24 2006

This is where it starts to get scary.

I need to decide where I am going to school next semester by one week from today. Oh. No.

My Options

California State University, Long Beach

pros: About ten minutes from my house, I can save a whole lot of money, I stay near family and friends. Perfectly good English program.

cons: This is my safe option. I most likely will not move out, I might regret not going elsewhere.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

pros: The best university in the Cal State University system. I might be able to have free housing (though probably not). Perfectly good English program. I get to have the whole “college experience.”

cons: Well. I believe it is over 200 miles from here. I leave everybody I care about here in Long Beach. Since I will most likely not have free housing… this will cost me about $10,000 more per year. I am scared.

UCLA

pros: It is UCLA. So much more prestige than my other two choices. Close enough that I can choose to live at home. I get to meet a whole bunch of new people and still be close to friends and loved ones. Good American Literature & Culture major.
cons: I am not sure that I want to focus American Literature & Culture. Though only 20 miles away, traffic in and out of Los Angeles would be the HUGEST pain to deal with. If I live in Los Angeles, this becomes my most expensive option. If I live in Long Beach, I still shell out a lot of money and time with travel. Oh yeah, the most important thing… I have not yet been admitted, and cannot be sure that I will be.

I keep making my decision and then backing out on it. I think I am going to try to drive up to SLO this weekend to visit, but I am so so so afraid of all of this. Opinions?

Apr 24 2006

So, two days later.

I made my last entry private. I feel guilty about having written it, and though I have some guesses as to why, I am not sure why it bothered me so much. Once I figure that out, I might make the entry public again.
I still feel very confused and kind of just… not myself. And considering that I am not sure exactly how I feel about everything, I feel bad about having put so many of my feelings here for everybody to read. I want to act prudently, and for some reason, I regretted having posted that information about my current situation. While I appreciated the support that I got from people because of the post, I do not like the way that I felt about myself because of it.

I am strange, sorry about that!

In other news, it was wierd to be back in school today. It was kind of hard, slightly boring, and just not too much fun.

Apr 22 2006

life in general, thoughts

Looking forward…

(I am disabeling comments for this entry. Feel free to email me, if you wish.)

So my spring break is drawing to a close, and… what can I say? Once again, it has turned out to be so different from what I expected it to be. Just like most years, I had hoped to work a lot to earn some extra cash, spend a lot of time with people who are close to me, somehow fit in some travel, and catch up on all of my school work so that the remainder of the semester would not be too harsh. Just like most years, it was impossible to do all of these things.

I am not to sure if I should really write about this here, but I am after all documenting my life through this website, so. Here we go.

The biggest thing that I did not expect to happen this week was to become single again. I do not want to go into the specific details of our conversation, because they are much too personal; it would be disrespectful to Freddy as well as to myself to include them here. They are something that I want to keep to myself. The whole situation has been a lot different than I would have imagined it to be; it has been very difficult, and it has only been a few days since the event.

I am not going to lie… it is going to take me a lot of time to get over this, or to even figure out what “moving on” will entail. At the same time though, I have a lot to be so thankful for. The past few months have been filled with many moments of pure bliss. So many good conversations were had and good experiences were enjoyed. I will cherish these things for a long time to come. I learned a lot from Freddy, and I think we learned a lot together. I do believe that I am a better person having spent time with him, and I have no regrets of any of the things we did together.

I should point out that he was not a jerk to me; there is no need for the men in my family to band together and plan to attack him or for my closest girlfriends to egg his car in revenge. Though I am sad that it came to an end, I would not be telling the truth if I said we should have stayed together. Because of all of the good things that came out of the relationship, it became so easy to rely on him entirely for my happiness, which at 19, is not an easy thing to know how to handle.

Perhaps the timing was wrong; maybe some weeks, months, or years in the future we will be ready for each other… this would make me very happy. Then again, maybe we have fulfilled our purposes, the roles we were supposed to have in each other’s lives. In either instance, it is understandable for me to be sad right now, but there is a lot more to be happy about. Honestly, this is what we had hoped and prayed for, that if it would be better for us to be single at a given time, that we would be able to break up before it got too difficult to bear. It has been hard to admit that this has been a blessing in disguise.

Emotionally, I am still in a hard place; I could write a whole post about how so many of my favorite things (activities, food, music, television shows) bring back a myriad of memories. I am choosing to try to be glad. Not everybody will understand this, but I think Freddy and I both know that God has plans to use both of us for big things, we just do not know exactly what they are. I do not know how long I will need to be single as I prepare for the future. I do know that we both have a lot ahead of us.

I am excited for the future, whatever may come.

Apr 17 2006

1 Comment

life in general

Cooking and cleaning and getting it all done.

Over the past year or so, I have taken cooking in general on as a hobby. At the time, I needed things to fill my time with, and so I found myself searching for recipes that would produce simple but tasty food. I started with small side dishes and whatnot, but overtime began to work with more complex ingredients. Some of the things that I made were total flops that I threw out after taking a few bites. Other foods I have made several times since then and have enjoyed them thoroughly.

In the past month or two, I have started experimenting with recipes that call for alchohol. I was hesitant to do this at first because there has never really been alcohol in my household and was not sure how my parents would react to my requests for various wines and hard liquors, but none of us have been dissapointed. So far, I have been pleased by a tomato-cream pasta sauce made with vodka, filet mignon made with a cabernet sauce (very decent wine for only 2 bucks thanks to Trader Joe’s!), and tenderloin steaks made with the same cabernet as well as brandy. These have all come out so delicious, and have become some of the best dishes I have ever cooked. It has been fun pairing the meats with good side dishes, and… I don’t know, I just like this new aspect of cooking a lot.

I know it sounds silly, but it makes me feel a lot more sophisticated to be cooking like this. I even got to hold a burning match up to my steaks tonight and catch them on fire, and it was all pretty exciting.

What of my old hobbies, you ask? Interior design is another hobby that I have dedicated a lot of time to over the past few days. Though it can definitely tire me out, it is very soothing for me to rearrange furniture, put together new items, and just change up the way that things look.

Reading is another thing that I have been able to do a lot of recently. Being a lit major definitely means reading a whole lot, but I am still certain that this is what I want to do. It is pretty fun to know that the bulk of my assignments involve reading a good story, play, essay, or poem, and that the discussions are not a bore like the ones in high school were.

As you might be able to tell by my involvment in favorite activities… I am on spring break right now. My school’s break was scheduled more than two months after the first breaks were starting up, which is insane. It sucks because not that many people have their break at the same time as me, but… it has been nice because I have been able to do things that I enjoy a lot, but normally do not have time for.

That is all for now.

Apr 11 2006

1 Comment

College

2:05

After trying to sleep for about 10 minutes, I decided to write my persuasive Voltaire paper now instead of waking up early to write it.

FranÃ§ois-Marie Arouet deVoltaire used his writing as an outlet for various frustrations; his satirical comedy often became the platform from which he shared many of his ideologies with the world. Candide is Voltaireâ€™s most acclaimed tale, famous for the many controversial views that develop throughout the story. Some of the more popular ideas discussed within the context of Candide have been excessively analyzed through the centuries, namely those related to optimism. Optimism certainly is brought up and satirized throughout Candide; however, its inclusion within the original title of the work makes it a painfully obvious topic to discuss. One equally (if not surpassingly) intriguing theme that Voltaire explains within the story is what Skye Schell describes as the â€œtransienceâ€ of money (2). It is through the events at the utopian city of El Dorado (as well as those that take place after the protagonistâ€™s departure) that Voltaire illustrates the problems associated with money.

My thoughts:

Maybe I should do more thinking around this time every morning.
I hope that I can keep this persuasive crap up for five pages. I hate sounding so arrogant!

Apr 09 2006

â€œThere is melancholy in the wind and sorrow in the grassâ€

Recently, some of my friends have shared with me heartbreaking details of the situations that they are currently dealing with. Though I have tried to be strong and reassuring as the details have been shared with me, I am literally brought to tears when i think about the stories of two of my coworkers. I am blown away by the things that people who are my age (or even a little younger go through), and how hard they must be working to keep up their faÃ§ades that everything is okay. These are people who I would not expect to be going through hard situations, but they have some of the saddest stories that I have ever heard.

Maybe it is relative to an extent. I mean, my friends are not starving to death or being discriminated against because of physical factors that they cannot control; those types of situations are probably the kind that really are the most sad. The thing about these friends of mine is that they are in rough situations that probably terrify me the most. They are situations having to do with family and with romantic relationships, both gone terribbly bad. The very things that they felt gave them the most security taken away from them. The very people who they loved the most turning away from them. The only thing that I can hope is that they might be able to realize who they can put their trust in, who will always love them, and who will really give them the security that they need.

You know?

I hope I can somehow help them find that.

The other thing that I have realized recently that I was somehow blind to before is that while these situations are sad, they are only two girls among the many that I know. How many more among the ones I consider my friends are struggling from true heartbreak? And forget about just MY friends… it seems like in the past week I have heard sad stories about so many people, ones I do not even know.

At the very least, all of these stories have helped me to once again “count my blessings” and realize how fortunate I am, which is something to be thankful for. But I want to do something more for all of these hurting people. I do not want to just stand back and think well that sucks for them, glad I came out a bit more lucky, I want to actually do something that will produce results, something that will make a change.

It seems like my instinct to become passionate about something is finally kicking in. I hope I act on it. I do not want these feelings to just be a passing phase.

Apr 05 2006

3 Comments

life in general

True story.

I have curly hair. Sometimes people straighten it when they are bored and on some rare occasions, I ask people to straighten it for me. Because I have never been interested in wasting an hour straightening it (I suck at it, my arms get tired, it’s terrible for my hair, etc.) I have never purchased a straightener.

Or so I thought.

Today I was looking in this basket where I have random appliances (blow dryer, curlring irons, old chargers… random stuff) and realized that at some point, I bought one. I do not remember buying it! Nobody has ever brought one to my house nor have I ever borrowed one, so I know that it is mine, but… it’s so wierd. As little as a month ago I went to my friend Melissa’s house to have her straighten my hair, when all along I had one at home.

Good story, huh? Blows my mind.

Apr 02 2006

2 Comments

life in general, thoughts

01:02:03:04/05/06!

Earlier tonight, my dad pointed out that on April 5th in addition to it being my brotherâ€™s 23rd birthday (happy birthday, Daniel!), at two minutes and three seconds after one in the morning, the time and date would be 123456. This made me smile. I think I will take right now to say hello to my dad. Hi, Dad! I am not sure if my mom reads this too, but yes, it is true! My dad has visited this website on occasion, and I think this is pretty cool.

Things that have made this weekend a delight:

Improv Everywhere: I heard about this from a random NPR broadcast, and I actually heard about this â€œmissionâ€ of theirs. The whole idea behind it is pretty genius, I think. I have since been looking over some of their other missions, and it all seems like good fun to me. Check it out.
Ikea. Really, do I need to say more? Though not yet purchased, I looked at and put on hold the solution to my clothing storage problems.
Work. Over the past two weeks I have worked more than double the hours that I normally do. I have now gotten to work with almost all of the 17 people who are employed at the same place that I am (one of them was sick) within the period of a week, which is nice, because I was starting to miss everybody. Alsoâ€¦ more than double the hours=more than double the money in my next paycheck!
I got into UCI. To be honest, I do not really have plans to go there, but it was nice to know that the 40th best school in the country accepted me. Now then if UCLA accepted meâ€¦that would be a bit cooler, at number 25.
I am looking forward to â€œfreshâ€ episodes of Gilmore Girls in the near future.
This weekend marks 4 months of sweetness with my fellow nerd. Mmm good times!
Every single item of clothing (even bedsheets) has been freshly laundered.

It should be noted, however:

I probably should not brag that one of the highlights of my weekend was to do ALL of my laundry.
I am so tired. Never before have I lived for the next shot of Espresso as I have this weekend.
I am behind in my studies, and writing this entry is not helping.
My eating habits have definitely been TERRIBLE this weekend.
You should never visit Ikea on a Saturday. Just forget about it. Oh, and the very things that I was the most interested in were out of stock! What is with that?!?
I am not yet sure if I will be transferring to a university this fallâ€¦ depending on some unit/financial issues that will be discussed at a meeting on Wednesday, I might be staying at my community college for an extra semester. I would actually be fine with this.
Dude, what is up with Season 6 of Gilmore Girls?!? I tried to deny it for a long time, but Alexis Bledelâ€™s voice has gotten more high pitched, the show has gotten so much less believable, and there have been some obvious budget cutsâ€¦ the hand camera action is not my idea of innovative cinematography. Oh well. We all know what I will be doing at 8pm on Tuesday night, regardless of all of this. The season may soon redeem itself!
I am kind of dissapointed with myself, at various things that I have done at work and in my personal life, mostly attitudanal (I do belive that I just invented that spelling of the word). I realize that it is time for some more changes, but I also know it is up to me to make those changes. â€œBe the change you want to see in the world,â€ right? Yes, at least to some degree!

I hope that my entries become less sporadic. I also hope to be buying a new digital camera in the near future, which should make for an enhanced website experience!

Oh yes! Also of interest, Snow Patrol singing about Sufjan Stevens! Thank, you, Stereogum!

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for the fickle at heart!

Posted in April 2006 …