Emo Shmemo

I just reread the previous entries of this blog and realize that I am seriously going down the emo route. Lest it stops, I will soon be found on internet forums proclaiming the brllliance of Garden State.

I think the real problem here is a kind of emotional malaise that permeats my life. I just don't care about anything. Dealing with problems becomes an exercise in perpetual numbness while I sit and wallow and try to mellow at the same time. Where is that spitfire?

Despite the vast overratedness of Garden State, I can't help but acknowledge the emotional numbness it manages to instill. While that may sound like a bad thing, what I'm trying to say is that Garden State illustrates that sinking malaise when you just don't know what you what. However, the movie thinks everything can be all cured when you meet that perfectly quirky, geek-fantasy girl, which is wholly unrealistic and plain annoying.

I tend to be more negative when writing than in real life. Perhaps this stems from my interest in probing the dark neuroses of my conscious or maybe I'm going for the "tortured artiste," which never quite goes out of vogue.

Anyways, resolution for the month of May: Be more positive!

Promenade Stand

It's the current buzz word. The word that manages to infiltrate every conversation, from polite hallway greetings to deep philosophical conversations to IM messages. It floats through the cafeteria, through classrooms, through the the infinity of cyber space. In the last few weeks, it has perhaps even managed to replace "study" as the most common word in our vocabulary.

I say "our" because it is not my vocabulary. The word is "prom," short for "promenade." Strange that one would chose a stuffy British word rhyming with lemonade to dub a celebration of teenage frivolity that bills itself as formal and adult.

As my friends fly themselves into a flurry in the search of the perfect shoes, the perfect dress, and the perfect date, I once again find it hard to muster much enthusiasm. Yes, there's the occasion flutter of my heart at the news of plans working out, and maybe occassional indignation with their frustation. But most of all I find myself lightly amused. Amused as one would feel when they hear a particularly juicy piece of gossip, or learn about an interesting bit of trivia.

It's the TV screen again. I observe the ongoings through that hazy screen without giving though to my own participation. The question I struggle with is whether I truly do not care about prom, or that I am constructing that indifference from my reluctance.

I like to believe that I do really do not care about prom. I don't want to bother with the frivolity of spending $200 on a dress that makes me look fat and will wear only once in my life. I don't want to bother with all the brainpower in planning and anticipating this "magical night." I just don't want to bother.

But then, is this reluctance borne of something deeper than laziness? Is this a remant of my anti-normal-teenage-behavior tendencies? Is there something fundamentally wrong with me has an adolescent if I don't care about prom? Why don't I enjoy indulging in this teenage stuff? Why am I always so serious? Why am I so bent on being adult and mature when this is the exact time to be childish and flighty? What do I actually want?

I don't know.

Family Square Part II

My mom used to subscribe to a housewife magazine (how else to describe it?) called Family Circle. The magazine, which I last cut apart for a 7th grade project, was filled cheery photos and cherry pie recipes, and stuffed with cigarette ads. As for the magazine itself, I've always understood the title to mean something along the lines of a family in perfect balance and harmony.

Forget a circle, I doubt my family will ever even vaguely resemble any equilateral figure. This reason I call my family "square" is because it is a seemingly perfect shape that is actually very odd. My frustations with elementary school math often came to finding the diagonal of a square, which was always a distinctly irrational number. I also see the squareness as in the sense of "Be there or be square." I don't think that this rationale actually makes any sense, but paradoxes only the heighten my own confused sense of reality anyways.

The additional family members, along with my attempted teenage intellectual rebellions, have contributed to the widening gulf between me and my parents. I find my conversations with them, especially with my dad, to the mandatory conversations of politeness. It's one of those conversations you feel compelled to have, yet neither one of you has anything to say.It also doesn't help that most of these conversations have to do with the one topic I want to avoid the most: college. While I know my defeatist attitude toward college admissions is no good, I can't muster any enthusiasm for the application process. My parents however, see this as the ultimate manifestation of their parenting duties.

My dad will ask me questions like "Tell me about your grades" or "Tell me about your extracurricular activities" with the air of a college admissions officer. When I reply that I am busy and do not wish to divulge such useless crap (in politer and less vitrolic terms of course), there is an inevitable outburst. Then, everything dissolves into a stonewall of silence.

When I try to talk to them about something I do care about, there remains an atmosphere of discomfort and awkwardness. For example, whenever I launch into a long ditribe about film, such as Jeunet and Caro's idiosyncratic flair for visual tricks in Delicatessen, my parents listen politely and reply with a cursory nod or chuckle--hardly encouraging. The language barrier does not help either; how can I begin to talk about film in Chinese when words like mise en scene are far beyond my grasp of the language? Okay, I don't actually use mise en scene, but its the snobbiest sounding film term I can come up with on the top of my head. And my parents definately have no fizzle of an idea what it means.

I find no topics for conversation between my dad's college lectures and my mom's gossiping behind other's backs. Despite the mountains of advice boiling down to "listen to your elders," I'm not even sure I even want to.

Family Square Part I

After listening to Rand list the dysfunctionalities of her family, I couldn't help but think of my own. Several weeks ago, Mike Ryan asked me a question about the breakdown of the nuclear family as the result of polygamy. While I don't have any anecdotes of polygamy to offer, despite spending 3 years in Utah, I have plenty to say about the breakup of a nuclear family.

Let's just take my family, the only family I know and a family I often feel I do not know at all. I have to say that I never had a nuclear family: My dad left for the US before I was born. My mom left when I was barely one year old. It was not until I has two years old that my "family" met together for the first time.

Given these fractured beginnings, I suppose my family is surprisingly functional. Yes, for more than half a decade we functioned as any normal Asian family would: exclusively in the Chinese community. Despite this self-imposed segregation, we staked out our lives and I went off to elementary school. The second "breakup" was when my dad moved to Boston on his own for a job opportunity while my mom and I stayed back in Connecticut. I only remember this year and a half in fuzzy details; if it frayed our family ties, I didn't notice it then.

The real breakdown of my family came as I entered junior high. I suppose that such strains in the family are unavoidable with the existence of a budding adolescent in the house, but this was compounded by the birth of my brother and my grandparents' second arrival from China. Used to the reigning freedom of a single child often left alone at home, I viewed both of these intrusions with a great measure of hostility. Once, I was the crowning top of a family triangle, now I was relegated to the lowliest corner of a hexagon.

I was never an attention-seeking child, but I felt at once neglected and overobserved during that period. The neglect as all ears were attuned to the piercing screams of my brother; the overobservation as the number of eyes in my house just doubled.

Passive Voice

I'm more or less paraphrasing here, but Russell Crowe once said in a movie, "I'd rather regret what I did than what I did not do." I first saw this quote as someone' siggie on the oscarwatch.com forums, and pondered its truth briefly before moving onto the next thread.

I bring up this quote again because I think it applies perfectly to me: I am a passive person. I don't do things, only to lay in bed later and regret it. If I were to choose one word to describe the overarching nature of my personality, it would be "passive." I like to sit and watch and observe. I do not like to do. I believe strongly in the power of observation, in taking a step back to soak up the details. However, this is essentially like watching movie, isn't it? I observe the world through a TV screen, watching closely and patiently, but being a passive nonparticipant in the world that lies beyond, and living life through second-hand experiences rather than my own. Am I satisfied with that?

Of course not. To some degree maybe, but often not.

The word "passive" has such negative connotations, mostly tarnished by academic no-nos such "passive reading" or "passive voice." I do think that people are often too bent on action in this go-go world and forget to observe. Of course, I am the exact opposite and that is no good either. This blog is part of an attempty to rectify my passive nature and force myself to do something.

About a year ago, I signed up for the oscarwatch.com forums, and have been an avid and obsessive reader since then. I'll lay the facts out bare:

Number of months on oscarwatch: 14
Number of hours spent on oscarwatch: 500+
Number of posts: 0

Well, the first step toward correcting a problem is knowing you have one.

Conscience Matters

I picked up today's Boston Globe with a certain measure of gleeful schadenfreude. There, as the leading story, was the downfall of a promising literary career. My glee, if you can call it that, was not directed toward the occurrence of such an event; to put it straightforwardly, it was an unconscious manifestation of a personal vendetta.

A few months ago, I read a Living Arts article on Harvard freshman Kaavya Viswanathan's debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. The enormous buzz surrounding the then yet-to-be-published novel was about her unprecedented contract: two books at $500,000--for a college freshman! I was slightly repulsed by the young woman: she was articulate, smart, quite pretty in her photo, and now halfway to being a millionaire when she was not even halfway through college. I immediately disliked her. I found the deal ludicrous, and I admit, my reaction was equally, if not much more, ludicrous.

The catty impulses of my sex kicked in. Obviously, my repulsion was borne of the petty throes of jealousy, which also explains my amused reaction to the front-page story: Viswanathan being accused--on pretty solid grounds--of plagiarism. I'm not that horrible of a person; I can't help a drop of sympathy. The poor girl's reputation is being torn to shreds as the leading half of a "plagiarism theme" by the mercenary-minded Boston Globe. Still, I wonder if Viswanathan had ever anguished over her crime before it was plastered as a headline. We are rigidly unforgiving of plagiarists, forgetting how easily we ourselves would do it if we knew we would never get caught.

But Rousseau got it right: La conscience coupable vengera l'innocent.

Oh, how the bright have fallen. And how I delight in it still. I have always been dogged by my underactive conscience: Do other people fake a certain empathy in order to conform the social expectations ? I often find myself working hard to muster up the compassion that others seem to have upon visceral reaction. Perhaps I am being too hard on myself as I do have a conscience and I use it plenty. My unhealthy dose of cynism just likes to take over sometimes.

File this as reason #317 of why I do not want to go to Harvard.

ETA: This must have been a Freudian slip: I originally typed the book's title as How Opal Mehta Got Killed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.

The Rules

After years of skipping from marble-cover journals to xanga to aim profiles, I have finally settled on a blog to carve out my own personal (and hopefully permanent) niche in cyberspace. Knowing my tendency toward laziness and inertia, I am going to set some ground rules that I will attempt to follow.

There are multiple reasons for this blog: 1. to practice my writing, 2. to provide a chronicle of the rest of my adolescence, 3. to rant and rave without bursting any eardrums, 4. and last of all to discipline myself. I am an unorthodoxly undisciplined writer (see that double negative there?) and planner. In a time when spontaneity and randomness is all the rage, I am simply searching for a routine. An anchor for my hectic--or more often, boring--life.

At the ripe old age of 16, I feel that it is time to put down some thoughts to reflect on in 10 years. Certainly, the Internet is a very unreliable storage center. The Internet is the most private of places, and also the most public. This blog will be accessible to millions by the click of a mouse, yet so anonymous and obscure that nearly no one will stumble upon it. It is here that I seek to write, unburdened by expectations or readership.

And finally, the rules:

1. Make some sense.
Call me old-fashioned, but I simply cannot stand improper grammar. The Internet has certainly been the bane of my grammatical skills and is at least partly responsible for my disappointing SAT writing score. Either way, I do solemnly swear to always use correct grammar, to the best of my ability without spellchecker.

2. Write, write, write.
That's what this blog is for right? I am obviously not the most talented of writers, but I wish to improve. At least one coherent entry per week.

3. No illusions of grandeur.
This is my anonymous space. I do not expect anyone to read this. I do not expect to make money off of it.

4. Make some sense. II
No links to stories of people being stuck on toilet seats or other econ article miscellanies. I wish to write about myself (as egotistical as that may sound), not about random occurings of the far-off world.

5. My ain true love.
Film. As I hastily head off to college and begin planning the rest of my life, am I seriously considering a career in film? This is the time to find out. Okay, so the actual rule here is: write about film.

6. Pretension, ugh!
Don't pretend to be smarter than you are. Big words only sound smart when you use them right, not when you drop them like hot potatoes. Who am I trying to impress anyway? Myself? Thank you very much but I'm already quite impressed with myself. Ha, I wish!

7. Be true to myself.
Again, who am I trying to impress? I will write everything the exact way I feel it, with all the insecurities and typos that may came out.

8. Exercise...
The right brain that is. I'm hopelessly inartistic and unmusical, writing is my last resort. Be witty, be saucy, be bitchy. I have free reign here.

9. Remember that thing called "life"?
Never lose perspective of everything else. There will be more important things, get to them first.

10. Have fun!I
It's the greasy, cheesy thing, but I know I want it.

Hello

Nice clean blank slate.
I can't wait.