Liljumper’s Adventures

I was recently hiking around the mountains here and thought about the first people to create the path I was walking.

It wound through a gorge, up a mountain, and down the other bank. It involved gravel, paths, steps, and wires. Even more than the sheer fact of having to bring all those supplies up the mountain and then put them up, the people who had to carve these paths.

How did they do it? How did they know where to put the paths?

I can’t even imagine how it would have looked before the paths, maybe like an impenetrable wildness.

I would have been terrified, I’m one of those people who likes the certainty of a path. And not having one, would have been terrifying enough, having to build my own?

I could get behind having to build my own, it would take time, but if I had time and needed to, I could see myself doing one. But that is more because of a necessity, not an explorer spirit, or a desire to go off the path and see where it takes me.

And maybe this reflects certain things about my personality, a desire for order and defined lines and boundaries. A preference for a plan. An established order of things needed and the chain of events that should be followed. Perhaps I’m not a flexible person, well I bet I’m not.

But there needs to be people in this world who are not me, those who have the courage and compulsion to build these paths.

I believe I can be an innovative thinker and make a path if I want to and need to, but it doesn’t stem from a compulsion.

But it begs me to ask the question, what other paths am I afraid to step off of, real, imaginary, or mental? And can I change? Do I want to? I have faith in myself, that if I need to or want to, I can summon the strength to step away.

I am sort of a clumsy person, I injured myself while peeling something and then the next day burnt myself steaming dumplings…and this wasn’t a fluke. It happens quite a lot.

Because of this, I look down while walking a lot, to make sure I am not going to trip over something. This does not have the advantage of being able to avoid running people or umbrellas, so it already has its flaws.

I am torn between looking forward and down in order to not bump into people or fall on the ground, and now I have a new one! I have been looking up a lot to avoid spiders.

I don’t want them to fall on my head.

I’m sure all of these directions seem quite stupid, who really is as clumsy and cares about spiders? Yeah, me.

But the other day when I was running through the parking garage to avoid spiders dropping on my head, I thought of something.

I never used to think about spiders above me, and still none dropped on my head. It has just been some recent worry of mine that has taken over.

But I can’t keep walking around looking for the next source of danger, because I won’t find it. It will most likely find me when I’m not expecting it. And no amount of avoiding parking buildings, or looking up will protect me from it. And that’s just the way of life.

I can’t keep looking out for the next danger because I don’t know what it will be. I’m not saying I won’t walk around thinking about it, because I will. But I’m missing all the things in front of me and around me when I’m worried about these types of things.

So while I wish I could say I wouldn’t care anymore and just keep my eyes ahead of me, I will be better at balancing where I look from now on.

For the most part, I feel as if I don’t have a clear purpose now. I’m not talking about a grand purpose like changing the world or curing the world of something, but any purpose.

I’m in a lingo state where I’m not sure where I’ve landed, where to go from now on, and what will guide my compass. What will be the guiding force and purpose in my life? That’s something I think about a lot.

When I was in university it used to have to deal with sweatshops and feminism, and now I’m not sure. I’m not content to have my life purpose revolve only around someone else.

But I want to feel like I have a purpose again. Something where I get up and think, that’s what this is for. Even if it’s long and, sometimes, hopeless, just a guiding force.

But I guess that’s also a part of growing up, figuring that out. Finding the path my feet should be on. Knowing what makes my heart sing, what I can’t live without doing. I want to be useful. I want the things I do to matter to others, to make a difference. I don’t want my actions to just for me. So in that sense, I do have a vague idea of where I’m going, I just want to narrow that down a little.

I don’t really have that many things to say in this, but just a general feeling of purposeless. But I am trying to slowly integrate more things into my life that might give my life a direction. When I get a job, I think this will settle down a little, but until then, I want to move towards finding a purpose, like the activism I did in college.

It’s hard to get back into the groove and to motivate myself sometimes, but I know I will find my way. I just need to tell myself that everyday and give myself the time and room to find the path.

I feel like the more ways that the internet finds ways for people to communicate, the more, generally speaking, impersonal communication becomes.

Catching up used to be something on the phone or in person, something that took a while. But now people are in surveillance of each other’s lives through facebook updates, instagram pictures, and tweets. They aren’t as personal as showing pictures from a trip in person, or calling a friend to let them know of their updates, or sending their friends post cards.

The ‘updates’ we get are less personal, they’re over for all the friends, but it’s not like getting a call from a friend with their news, to share and have a personal interaction. I know that as people move further away it becomes harder, and I know it’s hard because for me and my friends I am usually awake when they aren’t and visa versa. But I miss that.

I miss calling up someone, having an actual phone conversation, not a text conversation, or a facebook message. I miss that genuine personal communication.

While technology makes it easier to get in touch, I don’t know if it makes it more personal. I guess even these blogs are impersonal. They aren’t tailored to anyone, they aren’t like a phone call, they’re more or less monologues.

But they aren’t like insta-updates. These are my real, honest, in depth thoughts. The type of conversations that occur when the small talk is out of the way and when the deep connections begin to occur, when our inner thoughts are on display, for share, for interaction. Some of these blogs are like small talk, and some bypass the simple update, and try to communicate what my thoughts are made up of under the surface. In that sense, they make me feel like I’m not just updating people, they don’t even contain that much personal data about my life here now.

But, what happened to a good old phone conversation? Now for me, these are just a good old skype conversation, one that lasts for hours and makes me feel like no time has passed, the rekindling of an old fire that never ages, but gets stronger as the light and heat passes.

When I graduated high school, I already felt like an older soul. I never went out to party a lot. I felt like people who were younger than me, or some people around me didn’t understand the privileges they had. Or how much their lives shouldn’t revolve around their phones.

But when I graduated from college I felt like I most definitely had an old soul. I missed all the things from my childhood, like encyclopedias, and cds. It made me sad that a lot of things were digital now. It makes me sad to think of a future in which my children may never answer a land line phone, or hold a book in person. They might never value the library like I did. They would be interested in instant gratification, liking something and downloading it, living lives on a virtual platform, forgetting the value of interaction without a medium in between.

These thoughts are still in my head and they do make me sad. I loved hanging out before smart phones, before instagram. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of things about modern society, such as skype and this blog and emails.

But I do sort of feel sad for my future children that they won’t get to experience the things I did that made my life and childhood so great.

I’m sure each new generation feels like this, as if the next generation doesn’t appreciate what they had to go through, and the things that the next generation have more freely. So it’s probably nothing new.

And that’s the nature of change, advancement, and progress. It means that we have to leave something behind, move on, and see some things are events of the past. To grow, we have to shed our old notions. It’s a process that requires some pain, some sadness, but growth. It’s a process that remains hopeful that what comes next will be something better. And it’s okay to mourn what gets left behind. It will all still be alive in our memories.

I loved High School. I had unbelievably great friends. I had some phenomenal teachers. I lived at home. Life was so good.

I wish I had seen that more when I was there. It seemed like every little bump was horrible and my relationship problems seemed to take center stage, but even they don’t dull how much I loved it.

I loved it because I was so close to so many people I loved in the world. And now I’m pretty far. Things were so spontaneous, so relaxing, so fun. I could just chill or hang out with my friends after school. We could walk around, thinking we were so cool, totally absorbed in our own world.

There was drama, heartbreak, fights, but we made it through them. I loved it and I miss it. Risks didn’t mean that much, the future seemed far away, and everyday mattered. Everyday was the most important thing, fight, breakup, or no. I loved, and still love, just hanging out with those friends, sitting on the couch, walking around the park, anything and everything was better with my friends around me. I miss having those people, who were so close to me, who I still care about deeply around me.

College was great too, I met some wonderful friends and what not which made it fantastic. But high school was something special. And they are friends which I have kept even now. High school taught me how to have friendships, what I wanted, what I didn’t, and I used that information in college to make some great friends.

My high school friends were with my from the beginning, and I am proud to say that many are still with me now.

If I could go back and give any advice to my high school self?

• You can’t change anyone if they don’t want to change, and if they don’t want to, you can never make them
• Don’t fret the relationship problems that much (knowing now that the relationship wouldn’t last, and, let’s be real, I must have thought that life could have gotten better than that)
• Don’t forget that feeling of taking everyday as the next

I don’t really miss high school at all, just my friends, seeing them everyday and hanging out with them all the time.

I have wondered a lot about what people would see if they looked at my Facebook photos. I know so many people say, be careful what you put on the internet. And I do. I don’t even put that many things on the internet now, except this blog, which has a certain level of anonymity. It’s clear to those who I have given this link, but I consciously don’t give out a lot of personal details.

But the other buzz issue is about how potential employers surf Facebook profiles to get a look at their future employees. I had been thinking about taking down Facebook photos, knowing that in general, the less I have on the internet probably the better. For instance, in the first half page of my google results, I only see 10 pictures of me. And I can’t really, or didn’t really, do that much about it. It’s just pictures that public places like my university or newspapers have published. I guess that’s just fame…ha.

But in general I want to be careful. But as I was thinking about this, I wondered what pictures I have mostly on Facebook and a lot of them are pictures of myself that I took, the ‘selfie’. Except I was taking tons of selfies way before they even had a word for it. I was obsessed with taking photos of my face. And I loved it. I got to take tons of photos of my face that I loved and I posted them for my friends to see, and they liked them and commented. It was a day when taking tons of self pictures, wasn’t seen as something so mundane. They were special days which I thought, I look really great and I want to remember this.

And so, so what if they see that? I was younger, but I was in love with myself, and still am today. If they see that, fine. I’m okay with that.

When I was younger, I don’t remember ever seeing a lot of Asian Role models. I really liked Lucy Liu, but that was it. I didn’t see any others really that I could even try to identify with. I don’t know if I realized, until now, how difficult that was for me, but it effected my subconscious, almost telling me the limits of my own potential.

The biggest way it effected me was to tell me that the beauty I had, wasn’t what people thought was beautiful. I  had this idea that I would never be beautiful enough. I couldn’t be. There were just some things that were impossible for me to do.

I didn’t realize how much I felt like this until recently when I was thinking about beauty. But I very much felt that others around me were just naturally prettier for many reasons. And it seemed to be confirmed to me by society. People found them prettier, asked them out more, had more friends. I guess, the friends part, is directly linked to my personality. But when I was younger, that didn’t really seem to matter to me. It seemed like everything in life was confirming what I feared in my heart to be true. I knew I was nice looking and beautiful, but it never seemed to be confirmed by society, only my friends and family. Which, as we know, means much more than confirmed by the faceless masses, but when I was younger, it didn’t.

I know it should have, because beauty isn’t just physical. But to me, society confirming this fact for me was all I needed to know. And sadly, this didn’t really change until recently.

Even now, it’s not like I am ‘cured’, because it’s a mentality for years you have to undo. It’s a slow process, and it can only happen if I tell myself everyday and work on going against what I observe, and still observe sadly to this day.

Happy Mothers Day mothers 🙂

My mother deserves all the praise in the world, for being the best mother I could have (realistically) imagined.

She is one of the reasons I am who I am today and I could never say thank you enough.

 

When I was in High School, I wanted red hair so badly. Not bright red, but a beautiful dark burgundy. Although I did want bright red for some time too. I tried my best to dye it, without bleach. It never quite worked out that well. It worked to do a strip or even the ends, but when I tried to do my whole head, it just gave it a red tinge.

I have never lost that desire, funnily enough. I always come back to it, and think that it looks gorgeous and always wishing I could find a way to do that to my hair. I know red dye is super high maintenance and washes out quite easily, so it needs to be done semi-frequently. And I have never got it done professionally (maybe my dream later on). I want to have it done professionally, but all the different techniques and shades I have done have all been practice, for knowing exactly what I want.

And I have been needing a change with my hair. I felt so stagnant, sort of just drifting and never changing. So I wanted to do something with it. I wanted to dye it, but it felt so…high school to me. It almost felt like it would undermine the image I have today and the style I have. It put me off dying my hair for a while and it made me sad each day to know I wanted to do something, but I had no idea what.

I don’t want to cut my hair, because I love the length. Maybe I could shape it, get some layers, but nothing dramatic. I used to keep cutting my hair long and short to give myself some changes, but I have grown it so long now, I don’t want to get rid of that.

So I finally decided to dye my hair. I don’t want my ideas of how people will perceive me to effect my own choices. I want to dye my hair, and I need to let that desire motivate my decisions, not about an image.

I think, perhaps, the reason why I associate dying hair with high school and youth is that in high school, when I was younger, I didn’t think that much about the risks. It was easier for me to jump full into the idea of hair. It didn’t seem as permanent. My image wasn’t something I used to be concerned that much with. I didn’t care if it made me look like something I wasn’t, I knew I would grow into it and it would become me. The decision didn’t seem like the big idea it is now. It didn’t seem permanent and it didn’t seem immature. It seemed like an experiment to see how I liked my hair, to change the outside, and the inside. When I dyed my hair it was because I was going through a change and I wanted my appearance to reflect that.

Nothing about that has changed. And I wish I had more of that mentality now. I’ve gotten fossilized about my appearance, thinking that a perception, an image, is very important to how I am perceived.

But I am going to dye my hair, in an attempt to gain back that attitude I used to have. The carefreeness, the ability to take risks, the necessity of change, and the lack of emotional interest in the weight of other’s perceptions.