Goals

I hate being guilt-tripped into any charity. I hate feeling remorse for moral quandaries that shouldn't pertain to me, but are somehow thrust into my own responsibility by people whose agenda it is to shift blame and moral duty. I'm not a huge advocate of life-changing events or flashes of ephemeral righteousness that last no longer than the time between meals, but there was something about this site that made me think twice.

The oldest is 9, not going to school. The youngest is less than 2 years old. They lived in [a] severely polluted area. [Their] hands and faces were always dirty.

I would like somehow to earn a vast income, learn Mandarin and bring over 10 kids every year to educate. I'd like to start a school for those disabled kids or just kids living in gross poverty who have been abandoned and forgotten.

I would find that very fulfilling.

I would also like to know why that kid is wearing a Shroud of Beijing shirt.

Dealbreakers

Lots of things have been happening lately, but at the same time, it feels like nothing is happening. This is, of course, a result of the level of value I place on my daily goings-on.

Learning to appreciate the seemingly mundane is certainly a daunting task, and while the tempo of my life has hardly changed, it is definitely not the same everyday. People will complain that they have nothing to say, that their days are filled similarly and repetitively, yet I am compelled to believe that life is impossibly novel each moment.

Maybe our lives just need a different lens.

Or maybe I'm just looking for something that isn't there.

Heh. There may be something there that wasn't there before.

Talks

I just had a talk with a friend. It was 10 minutes of genuine conversation, which is much more than I can boast for a lot of other people. We were discussing our personal views on relationships in general with regards to his situation.

Without going into further detail, I'd like to bring up a constantly used, if not outright cliche, metaphor: the half full/empty glass.

The glass being half empty means a person has a pessimistic viewpoint, while half full indicates an optimistic person. All is well, until my friend brought up the point of someone seeing the glass as overflowing.

A person who claims the glass is overflowing is a cynic, and probably a melodramatic or at least hyperbolic one at that. What others see as a good or bad scenario, the cynic sees as good, but probably bad in the long run.

Take for example a break-up. While some view break-ups as a learning experience, others a terrible misfortune (full, empty, respectively), the cynic would say, "Yeah, it could be a learning experience, but it probably shows how incompatible I am, and love doesn't exist."

Personally, I hate those people.

That's because I think that the glass is always empty. This puts me in the category of the cynical optimist. It's empty, life sucks, shit's gonna happen, but it can be filled, this glass.

Probably not, though. The glass is always empty, and we just have to deal with it.

What are you?

Hard Palate

Today I had two dinners, one with one of my roommates and an almost roommate and one with some old fraternity brothers. Both dinners found me eating faster than I normally eat, and both were interesting in their content.

I found that my habits are slowly changing, possibly for the better. I can't sleep too late anymore, usually. Obviously, tonight and the last night may have been an interesting exception, but I feel as if I am finally making strides with what had once been a goal of self-discipline.

I am also now a vegetarian. To be specific, I am an ovo-lacto pescatarian, meaning I eat eggs, dairy products and seafood. I made this choice spontaneously. For those of you who don't know, I had already tried this diet for three-fourths of a year before I enrolled in college. However, upon seeing the dietary option available to me at the time, I chose not to continue that lifestyle. Now, though, a year removed from a new dining venue at my school, I feel that I have now been given an opportunity to pursue my previous lifestyle, just to see how it pans out.

I might start with eating meat only on Fridays, so as to keep myself in irony with the Catholic church, but after awhile, I might go full-time. We'll see.

I've been doing a lot of soul-searching, too. That is, I've been thinking a lot about what I want exactly and specifically. It has led me to some dark paths upon which I didn't really want to tread, but more importantly, it has forced me to think about myself, a pastime from which most of you now well know I will never shy away.

It's late, now, almost 6.

When I was younger, it would be just another day, but as it turns out, the combination of alcohol and good friends (and bad ones) has forced me to think further about my place in the social circle as well as my own public solitude.

I've learned a lot about myself.

Like when I'm hungry and tired, there is a very likely chance I am going to get hungrier and more tired trying to decide whether to eat or sleep.

Good night, dear friends. Nom nom.

Have No Fear Johnny Muir

My campus is located in central Northern California, in Stockton. It boasts a high crime rate and nationally recognized high foreclosure rate. It is consistently considered as among the most miserable places to live in the country.

However, in this hellhole of a city, there is a fairly isolated paradise.

I have yet to find it, since I'm stuck on campus.

Regardless, within the confines of my university's campus, there are numerous trees. In fact, just recently as I was driving on an overpass into the city, I got a good view of the skyline. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed to find that the city is extremely green. There were trees as far as I could see, which I thought was wonderful not for the environment but rather, for the pure aesthetics of the city.

Anyways, within this city is our campus, and our campus itself can claim ownership to hundreds of trees. Small as the University of the Pacific's campus is, its tree to area ratio is higher than most campuses I've visited.

Among the trees on campus is the redwood tree. Some know them as sequoias, but redwoods are a bit more distinct than the typical sequoia, even though they are in the same family. Sequoias are the largest trees on average, but redwoods are the species with the tallest trees right now.

But it isn't their height that makes the redwoods my favorite trees. It is their location. Redwoods only grow in coastal Northern California and a tiny bit in Oregon. They do not grow anywhere else in the world.

And in our humble campus, there is a copse of redwoods trees upon a forested foundation, with a few picnic tables and a large statue Mobius Strip statue, about three times the size of an average person. At first glance, this copse may seem random, and admittedly, in the context of the rest of the campus, the basketball court-sized area is strangely contrasting when juxtaposed with the rest of campus.

However, it is my favorite area on campus. All around it people walk by, and it's almost as if no one really sees it, like an isolated area within an isolated area. And these trees are as high-reaching as any trees can be.

A lot of our campus has gone through renovation. The lamps all have a certain look to them. The other day, though, as I walked by this particular copse of trees, I noticed that the two lamps there were different.

They were much more old-fashioned, and their light had a yellow glow, as opposed to the more "modern" white glow of the other lamps. I am certain that these two lamps are the only ones of their kind on campus, and there are dozens and dozens of lamps on campus.

It just further made this area unique to me, and along with the redwood trees, is just one more reason why Northern California will always be better than Southern California.

(Also, on the back of our state quarter is John Muir and Yosemite Valley, not SoCal beaches. So suck it, SoCal bitches.)