Bleh

I have no discipline. True story.

Timestamp – 7:57 AM

Early Morning Alex – 09 February 2011

A little poem with no title. Also, no reason. Maybe.

I hate having thin skin.

No really, I do. I was playing LoL with a friend of mine, [MapleEmperor], and we were practicing a champion we’d both taken interest in, Lux. Despite being the one who asked if he wanted to practice with me, I had reservations about practicing against him. Not only is he a better player than me (in this case zoning), he has these runes that give him an unnatural resistance to magic damage; Lux does magic damage. Not only this, he picked a skilled called “Ignite,” which he would never use with Lux, just for the purpose of using it against me for early kills. I got fucked over by all these things and died first.

In LoL, you need to stay alive to 1) get exp and level up 2) not give the enemy gold. Dying, in a 1v1 practice, when LoL is usually played 5v5, means you’re not going to catch up. On my third death, I lamented this, but [MapleEmperor] thought dying early had nothing to do with learning the character. That to play Lux, a “skill-shot” character you just had to land hits, which he claims was the only thing he was trying to do. Without levels, he said, I could still practice with Lux.

Wrong. If I’m underleveled, I do less damage, have less life, and my skills are less effective. Even at even levels, he has those runes and ignite, and more gold = better items. It also stands to reason that two characters facing off have the same range. If I can hit him, he can hit me. So if I try, at all, to hit him, he can hit be back, harder. Which means I have play defensively, and not every really get to learn the character at all because he keeps “trying to land the skill-shots.”

That’s the arguement, but what pisses me off, is that, when I said this, he didn’t understand any of it. He duely noted that I was bitter and upset at this turn of events, but refused to empathize in the slightest.

I wanted to learn the character, I was hoping that the better equipped, better skilled friend of mine would jsut ease up when I asked him to. But no. That’s too much to ask for. That’s always too much to ask for.

This always f–king happens. Always. Something unfair happens to be, my thin, mental skin bleeds, and MY F–KING FRIENDS NEVER GET IT. Why are these people my friends? Because in fair-weather, when everyone is fine, then they are fine. We have fun. Smack talk is fine. Being dicks, on occassion is fine. But whenever I feel like I’ve been wrong, whenever all I’m asking for is a bit of empathy, I never get it.

I don’t want to hear your f–king automatic “I’m sorry.” I don’t. I don’t want to hear it, because you’re not actually sorry. You don’t actually think that your responsible for my pain. So fuck you, and I hope you fail your midterm you fucking piece of shit.

Timestamp – 1:22 AM

Early Morning Alex – November 23, 2010

Over the weekend I attempted to normalize my sleeping habits. The two weeks prior to that I’ve been sleeping at 4-6 AM or all-nighters. I managed to pull this off Friday night when I went to bed at 11AM. I then proceeded to entertain [Ozy] at my apartment over the weekend since he’s thinking of transfering to Davis. It didn’t bode well for my sleep. Oddly enough, this being Thanksgiving week, I’ve managed to not sleep early despite having no homework. Even tonight, I was up reading a webcoming knowing that work needed to be done. I realize that a lot of my posts about my sleep habits don’t really go anywhere, but at the very least I’ll need some kind of record of events so that I can more easily trace my descent into madness.

In other news, I’ve having a fun time being a college student, classes are kicking my ass, and I beat Final Fantasy XIII. Am I happy?  Time for a Paradigm Shift.

I’ve always been saving this particular bit of philosophy for a story, or more specifically a character to serve as my mouthpiece, but I have been actively trying to craft a situation to bust it out, but it hasn’t been sticking no matter how hard I try. So I suppose here’s a place now’s the time to finally put it down before I forget one day.

I do not want there to be an afterlife. Whether or not one does or doesn’t exist, or exactly what the afterlife entails isn’t what I mean. I hope that an afterlife doesn’t exist. I, for the most part, like being human. I believe that the human experience is one of the greatest things in the world, but it’s not built out of the best parts. Emotions, needs, and beliefs all wrapped up in the ever unreliable shell of memory. The key thing here is belief. What we believe makes the world work for humans.

I don’t mean religion, but it serves as my strongest visual aid. Imagine if your religion is wrong. Imagine if when you died, you weren’t in Heaven, Hell, or anything that you’d expect. What if the spirit world was like Bleach’s Soul Society? What if it was a water park? You have to come face to face with the fact that everything you believed was wrong. Would you want to? Remember, you’d be sitting on your false belief for eternity. Forever would your immortal soul know that you were wrong. If you spent your entire life believing in reincarnation, then all of a sudden you found yourself at the Pearly Gates (or Hell), you’d be pretty pissed off.

I see that I’m not really doing a good job of explaining, but bear with me. Think about your relationships. Think about who you love and who you hate. Why do you love them? Why do you hate them? For example, let’s say you hated X because X wronged you in some way. In the afterlife, you’d be outside of time for the most part, and then you’d see that X didn’t wrong you, you misunderstood. Or you loved Y, but then Y turns out to be utterly destable. Now you may be thinking, that’s not possible. But think about misunderstandings. Think about ignorance. You take path A instead of path B. In the mortal world, you don’t think about path B unless path A turned out to be shit, but if A was good, then you’d maybe entertain path B, but the bottom line is, you’d never know. You’d never know what path B would be like if you walk down path A. In the afterlife, you’d know. You’d know if things were better or worse. And there in lies the problem. You judge and value your decisions. Everything your life was built on becomes better or worse than something. “I shouldn’t have gone to law school.” “I shouldn’t have married that guy.” “My dad never hated me after all.” And so on.

Regardless of how happy I am, I am who I am because of where I’ve taken my life and where life has taken me. But if there’s an afterlife, I suddenly become aware of who I could have been, how much happier or worse off I could have been. And I don’t want to know that.

I’m afraid of it. I don’t want to see how wrong I’ve been. What if I got better grades? What if I had still been friends with him? What if I hadn’t gone to that party? What if I had gone to that party? What if I didn’t try hard enough to be a better person? We don’t have to think about the what ifs as much while we’re alive, because there are more important things to focus on. But if there’s an afterlife, what else are you going to do? I don’t want to be at peace with everything in the end either, because that means I’ll have transcended who I am and become something not at all what I am now.

I don’t know if it makes any sense; putting it into words I see the weakness of if, but that in itself helps explain what I mean. I’ve internalized this belief, then when I’m dead, “Haha, man you had a shitty take on life. Let’s go never worry about anything ever again because we can’t have any more defining conflicts and characteristics.”

Timestamp – 6:41 AM

A very special type of pain

In a nutshell, the reading for my creative writing class nicked me across my heart. Specifically, my Vietnamese-American, first generation, recently-left-the-house heart. Although I read Gish Jen’s short story “Who’s Irish?” by mistake, one of the other readings, “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter” by Divakaruni wouldn’t have let me avoid the scratch.

In both stories, a grandmother from China and India respectively each live with their families in America, and find it difficult to live in their new, Americanized setting. How their ways clash with the “American” ways of their children and grandchildren becomes the focal point of each story. And reading both made me hurt because it hits so fucking close to home, I can’t even laugh about it.

In Jen’s story, the granddaughter misbehaves and the grandmother wants to spank the child, while the parents consider spanking as causing confidence issues or some other bullcrap. Note that I say say bullcrap here; I was happy when the grandmother does decide to spank the girl, and it f*cking worked. The kid stopped taking off her clothes and throwing them around. The grandmother does things her way, always commenting about how no kid would ever act like that in China. This way is my way too. My parents hit me as a kid for punishment, and I learned not to fuck around with them. I love them, they love me, but I was a fucking nasty little kid, and I’m glad they got me to grow straight up.

But it’s not the way of the America portrayed in both stories. An America that is just as real as the rest of the stories. In Divakaruni’s story, the Indian grandmother flies out and lives with her son and daughter-in-law only after her husband dies, and I’ll be damned if that wasn’t the right thing to do. At one point, the daughter-in-law says that their neighborhood is not the kind for, and brace yourself now ‘cuz this is outragious, hanging out the laundry in the backyard. Yeah…

At the end of that story, the daughter confides to her husband (the grandmother’s son) in what ways she feels like the house is not her home. The differences in laundry, cooking, dealing with children, and etc are just too much for her. At the end of Jen’s story, the married couple decide that the grandmother cannot live with them anymore due to her “harsh” handlings of the child.

I feel bad for my parents. These stories hurt me because my parents are in the same damn environment that these grandmothers are in, the only thing that makes things better is that my (most of)siblings and I grew up while embracing most of my parent’s Vietnamese ways. But I am/was a pretty asshole of a son. It hurts to think that my parents had to deal with the same damn tribulations, that feeling of frustration and shame, and I contributed to it. Respect your parents, do what they ask, and let them have their way. It’s simple yet not.

Two siblings still live with my parents, one brother and one sister. They do not respect my parents. My parents ask them to take out the garbage or recycling, they say, “I will” and then hours will pass before they unpeel their eyes from the TV/computer. If my parents get fed up, do it themselves, then remark about it, the siblings lash out , “I said I was going to do it!” Yes, you read that right. They will get angry at their own parents because they didn’t do what they were told to. They’re both lazy, stupid, and have this strange sense of entitlement despite the fact that they live and eat by the graces of their mom and dad. “I paid for the computer” which Mom and Dad pay the electricty and Internet bills for. “I set the table last time,” the food which is cooked by Dad everyday, with care in mind to include a dish that my ignorantly picky sister can eat.

I was going to continue ranting about those siblings, but this is about my parents. I’m happy that I’ve learned what they had to teach. Well, most of it anyways, but still, I can’t help but feel bad for those Grandmother’s and my own parents who dealt with these troubles

Timestamp – 2:49 AM