a slow pivot

currently listening to: john mayer's continuum
currently reading: wicked, the life and times of the wicked witch of the west by gregory maguire

two good things so far. can't stop listening to continuum, and i never would've normally considered john mayer. i think of him as the dude who wrote about jennifer love hewitt's wonderland body (barf, barf...) and is dating jessica simpson. talk about taste in ditzes. but this album is a little bluesier and very listenable. chill. sound musicianship. what can i say. it's like what under the table and dreaming was to me in high school, i guess.

spent seriously and literally 10 hours working on the copy for this catering packet. i'll be happy to never ever have to look up synonyms for 'service' and 'sumptuous' and 'delicious' and 'refined' again. i mean, i greatly prefer this to building tedious excel spreadsheets, but 10 hours of anything makes your eyeballs spin. tomorrow i go to my 'graduation' from the language program (read: need the certificate to renew my visa) and to meet 2 korean children for whom i am supposed to be tutoring english. how scary is that? parents are considering putting the english language future of their offspring in my hands. i'm afraid i'm going to be incredibly bored, like i usually am when i work with kids. i just don't get excited being around children. too many years of it, i suppose. either teaching them to swim, or watching them chase each other in circles and then cry, serving them food or wiping little butts, or helping them with piano. good lord. i've come full circle. i'm doing the same shit i was doing when i was 14.

so, the ennui (thanks, shawn, for my word of the day) i've been rolling around in for the past few weeks is slowly easing. can't say if it has to do with a break in the clouds of unemployment, or the fact that cyn and i have finally committed to going to vietnam (diving! rock climbing! pho! i can't wait), or if i've realized once again with the help of my friends that i need to keep a balance going in my life, but it's definitely lessening. gone are the feelings of worthlessness and now i'm just feeling busy and cursing the gods that created visas and passports. more on that later. i just sometimes want to fall to my knees in desperation and implore the visa gods to make me a citizen of the world instead of having to deal with all of these formalities and fees and unclear regulations. jesus. mah fan like you would not believe.

so in my directionless 'blue period' (picasso i am not, but it's a good phrase) i was almost reveling in my misery. it was like being a teenager all over again. you feel like shit all the time and heartbreak seems to come with every little disappointment, but it's almost a good pain. in my past, it was the pain that brought on an onslaught of creativity, so i used to almost welcome it. becoming an adult seems to mean that stability comes with a lack of creative madness. so many adolescent nights were spent writing in tears (oh, the drama!), but some of the stuff that came of it was pretty good. when i was home, i was digging through boxes of old writing and re-reading some of my things. there was talent there, at one point. i think it might be gone now, or in an alarmingly long hibernation period. what is it about angst and anguish that makes us our most poignant?

in other news, i finished my exams on monday (hence, the graduation. however - and surprisingly to me - graduation and passing are are not related terms). chinese is not something you can cram for, believe me. you either do your daily diligence and commit the 25 characters to memory, or you're screwed. i can't say i didn't study like that in college, but it definitely gave berkeley exams a run for its money, just on the difficulty of the subject alone. plus i had all 3 exams on the same day, which was crap bullshit ridonkulous. the stress of that i think helped jolt me back into reality, and out of my low-flying existence. we're all worthless to a certain extent. it's completely subjective, the worth of an individual. i don't do charity work and recycling in china is impossible, but i'd venture to say that my mom would disagree that i'm a pimple on the ass of humanity. the only thing i can say in my defense is that sometimes i think i'm a good friend, and i'm brutally honest (positive, in my mind), and i can sure sniff out a sale, even if can't even read the signs. this doesn't add up to 'contributing member of society' to most people, but i think that this value system, this commerce of human worth is a very western way of looking at life. it's the plague of the fortunate, to increasingly feel responsible for carrying a certain amount of weight in a very specific way. i'm not saying it's not a good philosophy - you should always strive to be fundamentally good in a general sense of the word - but because i've never volunteered at a soup kitchen or helped build houses in honduras... does that mean i don't deserve to be here? i don't feel particularly convinced by either side.