Temporal madness

Dreams and other seasonal melancholy.

Many things have changed in the past two months.¹

spring is beautiful in the bay, again

(Two months you say! Of course your state of affairs will be different, but let me continue.) I regularly slip into a habit of monotony over the course of 16 weeks. Yet as this semester passed, I found myself encountering more and more absurd occurrences that summed to a rate far greater than what I anticipated for an otherwise, expectedly, turbulent junior year of college. A bit of Nausea, a bit of Invitation to a Beheading.

But what DID I do this spring? I moved apartments, had an awful time looking for summer research (everything turned out to be fine, I should tell myself 没问题 more), met many interesting souls in my upper division classes, somehow did not fail the most dramatically run biochemistry class in my university’s history, listened to “Catching Feelings” by Oberhofer over 130x times, took a lot of graduation photos, and said goodbye to my senior friends. Eventful, to say the least.

girl what

The following post includes some things I have been pondering on between my last update and now.

C1. To begin this on a more humorous note: for someone who rarely dreams during the academic year², I find that I can only chase these phantoms in a semi-lucid state between naps and other unrestful attempts at sleeping. Here is a list of dreaming spots that I’ve compiled:

Places that hold my dreams: 
* DJUNGELSKOG 
* A beige pullout couch 
* The floor of my apartment 
* Your left shoulder 
* Jocelyn’s black futon 
* My lab desk in IGIB 210
* Shotgun in David's car
* The I-5
* In the Davies Symphony Concert Hall
* The F-Bus, on the Bay Bridge home
* A couple different PÖANGs
* The U.S.-101
* A grassy knoll behind the West Crescent lawn

C2. To be young is to be malleable to change.

I’ve had this conversation with friends in two or three forms. All of them summarize to this one point: young adulthood is a turbulent period, but there is reason in why this becomes a common motif in everyone’s life. This is an attempt to articulate these conversations in a written form:

In order to experience the requisite emotions that will shape how you construct, perceive, and confront the next decades of your life, there are necessary blunders you will encounter in your early 20’s. This is not to qualify that emotional growth reaches its peak at this age, but to establish a vague net over its general area. Why in your 20’s? I think about how the pliability of your environment, and thus the people you encounter, builds a testing ground for the start of your adult life. What makes you content? How do you find people that represent who you are? Where can you feel the most whole? While we are ingrained to view that this decade is to be solely dedicated to building a career, I want to think more about how these internal endeavors prepares for your life at large.

Here comes my point: one cannot experience select emotions in isolation. The wholeness of being alive requires that you cannot avoid emotional failures in hedonistic favor of perpetual happiness.³ You will fail to meet your dreams, encounter egregious errors, and sure, experience the caustic sting of heartbreak, but this is in the pursuit of building immunity and recognition of how you live in this world.

To attempt to shed these human relationships out of fear of change—because perhaps the one thing that will never be impermeable to change is a person, the tangible, a physical connection—is to bar yourself from becoming whole. You cannot be unhuman, and therefore you must participate in the human condition. You cannot reject the responsibility imposed by your existence and personhood. I think it is comforting that your youth is the perfect testing grounds for being part of the human experience.

I’m trying not to live this life too passively. With the coincidental timing of my birthday and the start of school, I’ve come to realize that the passing of the school year lines up incredibly closely to the passing of the 1/2xth fraction of my life. The end of one full academic year rounds out another year of my life. A frightening conclusion to another year of college and another n+1 to my age. Such is how time passes.

C3. Sometimes I imagine my thoughts as a fly flitting to and fro in a room; I do not know if it will remain here or escape through the open window. I can never catch the exact same fly again.

I hope I’m not waiting to lose my sense of self. My only solution has been journaling to avoid the gaping feeling of forgetfulness. A little bit of forgetfulness that may be indicative of something greater? Let’s put a bookmark on that for now.

C4. This summer, I will be back in L.A. while working a big adult job in the city. It’s a bit scary and quite honestly, I’m nervous about the next 8 weeks.

Even so, it’s nice to be home (or rather, at one of my two homes). I will be experiencing the other side of this metropolitan city life in the context of an adult. I am dearly looking forward to the slower pace that I have come to associate with Southern California suburbs. Still, there will come a time where I will begin to miss the coolness of Berkeley’s summer fog, the damp smell of eucalyptus trees in the evening, and the ritualistic white peaches from my weekly farmer’s market trips knowing full well that I am to return in 2 months. It simply comes with being a sentimental person.

osmanthus in the air – night-blooming jasmine – steam rising from the pot – evening laughter – wind chimes hiding in the leaves

It’s somehow summer again.

1. I put off wrapping up this Substack post for so long it has been a month since summer has started. I think the rest of what I have said still rings true.

2. I WILL get 6 hours of sleep a day this break! I promise! When Nietzsche said “And avoid all those who sleep badly and are awake at night!”…yeah, he might be right.

3. Is this…the thesis and antithesis?