from day 1, i’ve never been a fan of tumblr as a platform for long-form blogging. it just isn’t what tumblr was designed to do. also, i’ve never been a fan of the fact that you can’t have a friends-only blog - if you wanted a private blog, you had to password protect it, and people couldn’t view your posts from their feed. they had to literally go to the site and input in the password.
i was a convert from LJ because of the social aspect - my friends migrated towards tumblr and i wanted to still read their posts.
anyway, the point is that i am now exploring the use of WP for long-form blogging. how long that will last is QUESTIONABLE…but let’s experiment.
for longer and more professional (i.e. ones that discuss career, not just melodramatic romantic failures) posts visit:
for the first time in a long time, i feel relaxed.
we got this
i dreamt of you for the first time in years last night.
i wonder what your presence was trying to say to me?
the thing is…the MORE you try to fight my decision, the MORE convinced i am it’s the right decision. sent you some reasons last night and promptly went to bed…woke up this morning to see that you attempted to google hangout with me at 4 in the morning.
UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Someone once asked me whether I thought there was one trait that all successful entrepreneurs share. After thinking about it for a while I concluded that, in my view, that trait was paranoia. But I don’t mean it in a literal, or medical, sense. I mean it in a positive, healthy and NECESSARY way.
fuck
to the alum who suggested to me that i should sacrifice the long-term vision for short-term gain: i don’t care about money. i care about building something great, which means delivering the highest amount of value to our customers with integrity.
or let me rephrase that in words that you can understand: easy money today in the way you suggest will ABSOLUTELY obscure the possibility of enormous future gains.
ugh.
-
see, that’s what i miss about you. i miss that at such a fundamental level, you understand me and what kind of person i am and what i want out of life.
i could live very happily off of 50k a year. i don’t need designer clothes or a fancy car. i love the model s, but i don’t need to drive one to appreciate it. i love paintings, but i don’t need to buy a masterpiece for my own home when going to the national gallery on a weekend works just as well.
but like you, i need to do something great. great - not defined as what others think, but what i think. and what do i think is great? creating and building something of value, use, and interest. that does not happen to be what you think is great, but that’s fine. you understand the general concept.
i think about the future and i see it. i see california and i see my future boyfriend, who is nice and kind and is an engineer by training, with whom i can simultaneously giggle and have intellectual conversations, whose family is in tech, who my father will love.
and i see you a world apart from me. already, the chasm is too great to cross.
but i’ll miss that about you…i miss that about you already
responsibility
i’ll be turning 22 in a little over a month. if every year has a defining theme, i think this year (age 21) has been: responsibility.
for all the previous years, i didn’t have this immense sense of responsibility weighing down on my shoulders. i wasn’t 100% responsible for all the consequences. i was confident that no matter how badly i fucked up, someone else would clean up the mess - and that even if there was a mess, it was related to school or something inconsequential. i wasn’t responsible for other people’s livelihoods, as well as my own. there wasn’t a sense that anything mattered.
but now that everything does matter… the entire mindset of how to approach things is different. everything takes on a new urgency. because it’s not just fun and games anymore.
i think about why i was able to bite the bullet and just end it with him, this time. yes, my therapist has been helpful. but i think more than that was a sense of responsibility - to him and to myself. we couldn’t act like teenagers forever. i felt that urgency to just fucking do it.
JFDI.
is that the mantra of the year? that because my finger is on the trigger already, to just pull it? and to be okay that because decisions need to be made quickly, that not every outcome is going to be perfect?
what i’ve learned (or what i always knew, but temporarily forgot)
- i’m a survivor
last weekend was commencement. overall, it was happy. i graduated from penn and so did my cousin, so my extended family flew into philadelphia from china. i got to see my cousin’s new house (he is staying another four years at penn med), my parents, and all of my friends. obscene amounts of food and drink were consumed; obscene numbers of pictures were taken. aside from joe biden’s cringeworthy, xenophobic commencement speech (which essentially declared war on china), it was good.
it was also one of the toughest weeks i’ve been through emotionally due to work. i was working throughout. we had to fire someone. and this level of disorganization may have lost us one of our beta clients. the world felt like it was caving in on me. i just wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
i discussed the situation with one of my close friends. and she said something that surprised me: “the fact that you’re having this problem is a good thing.” it made sense when i compared it to the alternatives. would i rather be not working on something i loved? would i really rather be bumming in hong kong aimlessly? would i give up now, or keep fighting? get blindsided by the shit, or just keep going - fake it until you make it?
i went to bed knowing that tomorrow would be a new day, with endless possibilities to prove myself and turn things around. i was reminded of the lessons i had once learned my sophomore and junior years at exeter. if success is your only motherfucking option…
you have to survive.
- no matter how far you run, you can’t run away from yourself
i confided to my parents that my plan is to move to the bay area in a year or two.
my mother asked me why and i said it was for my career, which is only half of the story. how could i ask her to understand that i had just made the difficult decision to quit an intense four-year thing-that-wasn’t-a-thing cold turkey? that i wanted to put space, states, mountains between us? that i wanted a new life?
great, my father said. you can live in your uncle’s empty house in saratoga. it’s isolated, on top of a hill, but you can learn how to drive down it.
i pictured that in my head, but i couldn’t picture it. even if i ran away - would that fix anything? and i’m an expert at running away.
cool, i said. let’s think about that later, when it comes to it.
yes - later - when it comes to it - right now all we have is now - the feelings of now - the problems of now - and that is what i must toil away at and work earnestly at - the problems right in front of me.
(Source: betweenlegs, via yuetching)
