Timestamp – 7:57 AM

I can’t sleep.
I can’t eat.
I can’t lie,
I am weak.

I can’t run.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t see,
What I believe.

I tried so hard,
And I got so far,
But still too close,
To the start.

I can’t face me.
I won’t face me.
I should face me.
I won’t face me.

The world is hard,
So you can walk across,
But soft feet are soft,
And sharp rocks are sharp.

A coward,
Stuck,
Standing,
Still,

Waiting for,
Waiting for,

Waiting for,
Waiting for,

Waiting for,

Waiting for,

Rinse and repeat.

Timestamp – 4:42 AM

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

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

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

I cannot wait to move the fuck out.

Timestamp – 10:27 PM

I got to skip out on cleaning up though cuz I went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World with [Tofu] and [Ozy] today at Oakridge. That wasn’t exactly the smoothest outing ever. First, [Tofu] didn’t bring the free movie passes for he and [Ozy] to use, and second, [Tofu] showed up late and the tickets sold out, thereby making us catch the 7:35 showing instead of the 4:55. As a result, we had to have dinner at the food court prior instead of eating after. Walking around Oakridge and hanging out before the movie was nice though; there’s a new store there called something like Japanese Experience, that had like, Japanese houseware like the Daiso Japan of Eastridge, but they also had Gundam models and stuff. Was pretty interesting.

The movie itself though was rockin’, and in a literal sense since it does involve bands. Although, I do have to agree with this one review I read earlier that the movie doesn’t really make you care terribly about Ramona. She didn’t seem at all interested in Scott or as hurt/scarred as she was supposed to be by her exes. It was visually exciting, but I fear that one thing I read on wikipedia may be true: it’s a movie more for the attention-deficit youngsters. There’s not a lot of that movie that sticks and the characters, while having flashy bits, aren’t the most memorable.

Also, event-wise, the learning curve for Battle for Wesnoth is like staring down a cliff @_@. I lost again, lol.

Timestamp – 1:49 AM

Back in elementary, Beyblades were pretty hot stuff, although they waned relatively quickly. I was so tempted to buy 2 Beyblades and an arena thing, just for the novelty of it. You know this would be hilarious: Imagine you’re at someone’s house for a hang out. You’re tired of video games, and no one has any idea what to do. Then some pulls out the BEYBLADES! The surprise would be killer, haha.

I didn’t buy it solely on the case that I wouldn’t have a place to store it, but now that I think about it, it’s also not an easy thing to transport. There’s also the fact that I has not enough money : /.

Timestamp – 12:53 AM

Nana’s Everyday Life is just a series of f*cked up events that happens to this mistreated and mutilated girl/clone/science experiment thing. Some strips use black humor, but like, you’d have to be pretty freaking desensitized to all kinds of misery and violence to not feel depressed. The other strips are straight up just dark, not being played for laughes at all. In Great, this guy’s life just falls apart, and at what seems to be the lowest point of his life, he sees a commerical that tells him to change his life, me must first believe himself to be “great.” He sets out with this particualr mindset, but nothing ever works. Like, seriously, it’s his undying desire to be great that makes his life so goddamn miserable. Although he is financially secure at this point in the story, he still has nothing that he himself can be proud of, and everytime he sets out to get that thing, he’s just uncapable of doing it. It’s not like, some small misfortune that denies him greatness, not some devious trick or misunderstanding; he himself just can’t do anything great.

I mean, I’d like to believe in doing the impossible and seeing the invisible, but how many of us can say that we’ve done somethign like that? Well, I guess that’s not entirely fair, your average person isn’t put into a situation that they have to overcome like that, but we do go about our lives through small, unrealted victories accompanied by major losses. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel as though it’s so much easier to drag down a spirit than it is to uplift it.

It occurs to me at this point in writing, that I’ve somehow equated personal inability to being utterly trampled by the world. When I think about it, Nana’s Everyday Life is the world conspiring to screw with her as much as possible before death, and Great is more about one man’s desire to triumph in the world, but can’t. They’re both sad themes, but they aren’t exactly the same, are they?

You know, I don’t really understand my philosophy/motives. During the day, I don’t really think nor care about where my life is going, then on sleepless nights like this, I sharply remember that I’m afraid of not making it in the world. I make these promises to myself, act like I never did, then when I remember, I feel f**king terrible. That is, until the next time I sit down for some video games. You’d think I’d either actually do something or stop dreaming, you know? I don’t know, sure there’s all these arguements about why continuing to dream is a good thing, but just dreaming doesn’t feel good in the long run.

Maybe that’s why all my protagonists do eventually reach their goals? Oh well, it’s getting late, see ya later folks.

3:54 AM

You see, yesterday (the 15th) my mom had me start patching up a rather large hole in the wall. This involved using a electric saw (one that shook so violently it hurt my hands to use) to cut out a clean square around the hole, and fill in the space with a cut out piece of sheetrock. To our dismay though, our long-forgotten wall spackle/compound/whatever the heck the name of that thing that fills in holes in walls had long since dried up. Since we we’re working late at night, we had to, well, call it a night and purchase the “compound” from a hardware store the next day.

On this day however, my dad decided that the laminate wouldnt fly anymore. 1)  it would be just too much work and requires tools like a table saw that we don’t have. 2) the carpet is still good, especially in my room that oddly enough has the least wear and tear. That however, didn’t stop today from being an annoying day filled with vacuuming and heavy lifting. As it stands, [Enforcer]‘s furniture and my own furniture are all stacked atop one another in the backyard. There was also the annoying assembly of her Ikea, fullsized mattress. On a side note: the bedframe measures in at 62 inches by 77 inches, and it’s inside of a room that 120 inches by 120 inches. Yes, her bed takes up more than half of the floorspace of this room, hahaha.

By the time my mom and dad left to go to temple, my lower back and my heels have been killing me. As sone of you may already know, I have a history of an easily stressed lower back and incredibly flat feet, two things I never thought were connected. It actually took a combination of various things to help me bridge the gap. First of all, my sister [Big Bird] showed my these shoes called Vibram shoes. They’re like, foot gloves with just a minimal amount of padding to give you protection from like, sharp rocks while maintaining a sense of barefootedness. While I was bored, I checked out the website and explored it fully, coming across some interesting ideas such as being barefoot is actually better for your overall health due to various problems with traditional shoes. Ignoring the balance benefits for now, the website and a couple of youtube reviews explained that normal shoes have a thickly padded heel, which causes you to step heel first, and then roll off the rest of the foot. This walking style along with the raised heel spells bad news for your joints and posture, or so they claim anyways.

The second factor was [Enforcer]‘s consistancy in pointing out my terrible posture. The third influence was that after long periods of continuous standing or walking, my heels would be in pain, and not any other aprt of my foot or leg. Eventually, I put all these factors together and have come to the assumption that my super flat-feet are responsible for my bad posture, which as a result causes me to have the back pains that I do. I really want to try out these Vibram shoes, but as it stands, there most popular model, the KSO sits at a price of $85, which is a lot more than I can spend on shoes right now.

That’s all from me right now folks, I’ll tell you about how Rockband turned into Cheesecake Factory turned into meeting olds friends tomorrow, after it happens : ).

Timestamp – 1:43 AM