(i'm not exactly sure how to organize my thoughts at the moment; this is, i'm almost positive, going to come out sprawling and all over the place, and probably will not make sense to anybody but myself and be one of the worst - as in boring and aesthetically hideous and read like a pill - blog entries. oh well.)

i feel like with each new year, i place a new expectation on myself and my life. i'm one of those girls who used to map out and pinpoint exactly where i wanted to be at a certain age - age 13, i was going to have my ears pierced and my first boyfriend; age 16 was for dancing all night long and being the best dressed girl in school; age 18 was for melodramatic fights with friends, family, boyfriends, and general teenage angst - (and that's as far as i got when i was seven years old) but for the year 2011 when i was going to be 22, almost graduated from college and about to start my "real life", i expected to have everything figured out, to be mature and sophisticated with every hair and thread in place.

unfortunately for the big dreamer in me, my reality seems hellbent upon being the exact antithesis. i was awkward and lost at thirteen, wore nothing but baby tees and flared jeans that did nothing for my figure at sixteen, and though i had plenty of fights at eighteen, they weren't exactly what i imagined (more tears and snot down my face and insomnia, less happy endings).

2011 i'm still figuring out if i like or not. i like having literal new beginnings to start fresh with - something in my mind roadblocks me from being able to start fresh at, say, in the middle of an unremarkable month, or at the forty-second minute of an hour, or in the middle of a page full of cross-outs and scribbles - but the only consistent thing that 2011 has impressed on me so far is increasing self-dissatisfaction.

i don't read enough. as a result, i cannot write. i don't speak eloquently, my speech is still ridden with "like" and "uhh" and swear words. my mandarin is continuously deteriorating and i am too embarrassed to practice because of how bad it is (catch 22!). i am more caught up in celebrity scandal than world issues.

[ um, i also claim to have a relationship with god and judge others for their shortcomings but do nothing to fix my own faulty walk; spend too much money; am short with my parents; irresponsibly show up late to everything i can get away with; procrastinate and give too many excuses and spend more time with my computer than i do with my mother; but that's a list of complaints for another time. ]

i was in the middle of reading a literary dissection of the bell jar earlier, and after thinking "i did such a better job of interpreting this in high school" coupled with, a few seconds later, "i doubt i could do it now, though," the particular issue of not reading enough has struck me as one of my most terrible shortcomings, if only because i have always been such a creatively gifted (not trying to toot my own horn!) person that i feel like lately i have just been wasting it all away. broadcast has kept me writing consistently, sure, but there is such a contained, bare-bones formula to writing a story that is supposed to be only spoken for the news that it hasn't been helpful in trying to creatively think (and write).

in high school i was all about weird works of literature that i couldn't understand in the first, second, or even fourth time reading it over. william faulkner, gustave flaubert, virginia woolf (okay i hated her, but whatever), nora okja keller, jane austen, charles bukowski, shakespeare, isabel allende, sylvia plath - the more abstract the better, and i would be able to instantly take something away from it and draw interpretations that even my teachers would cock their heads at. i was pretty damn good at finding meaning in the seemingly nonsensical. it's from that where my love of writing stemmed, and with all those different authors and their different takes on the world and the intangible/tangible, writing was easy. writing wasn't anything i even had to think about.

and then i went to college, and slowly but surely my itunes filled up with party music, and my vocabulary - even online - became stilted to laymen terms, four-letter words, and the only books i read were for class. sleep, eat, go to class, party, procrastinate homework, repeat, and i still wonder where all my imagination and creative depth have gone. honestly, it's surprising i still even understand the bell jar at all since my reading material these days includes: w magazine, the first page of the new york times, and maybe if i'm feeling particularly smart and worldly, skimming the new yorker.

i'm not yet 22 and my brain is rotting. not reading is the root of so many of the other problems i have with myself: the inability to write, to speak the way i want, to know more about the world, maybe even the inability to improve upon my mandarin. i have both a fiction workshop and an asian american fiction class this next semester; i was thinking of dropping the latter, but i really don't think i should anymore. it will be good for me. as an addition, i really need to invest in both borders and the library, both of which lay not five minutes from my house. fuck being lazy, fuck tmz. i'm not placing all the blame on the mindless fluff of celebrity gossip and party music that i like because quitting cold turkey has never worked and it's all still a good way to blow off steam, but i really need to stop making it the center of my life. i turn twenty-two in less than a month, my hair and my wardrobe and my general ~outlook on life~, imo, emulate that fact - so i need to find a way for the rest of me to catch up to that as well.

there have been plenty of good things that have happened so far: the perfect new years at beta nightclub ending with a late greasy breakfast at ihop, plenty of time and laughter with friends, both eye and ear candy, more time with my mother. (and bad: almost freezing on new years eve and spinning out in my car, arguing and screaming and crying at my father, not being able to break my habit of waking up too late, staying up until the sun rises). i want to be happy with myself. i want to be immersed in creativity again, i want to enjoy heavy imagery and wild symbolism with a thousand possible meanings and figure all of them out, i want to write again. not to make this a terribly cliche ending (but unfortunately it looks that way, perhaps when i read a few things i will think up something better) but i hope that this little bit of self-improvement will tip 2011 into becoming an overall good year.

mood_ contemplative, listless
music_ take you down - jt? (omg i'm always going to like club music shoot me)
crave_ books, all of them

Labels: contemplation, figuring things out, new year, public declarations, reading, resolutions, to-do list, writing