Graduation speeches almost always make me a little bit uneasy. Not the speeches by the older professionals who are invited, but the student speakers. Their diversity and high grade point average is very appealing and inspiring, but they deliver a rather elitist message that is all just for good feeling and hand claps.

The most commonly delivered message goes something like "we had so many finals, so many parties, so much stress, coffee, and finals, and ...finals, and friends and tests and...we just finished finals, while the rest of the world is off with their lives, we are just still studying"

It's not like the entire rest of the world is happily sleeping while we students pull all nighters. It's not like we all party our life away only to accrue all our work and dump it all in the very last minute to complete.

It's not as if the rest of the world is not struggling to sleep, to rest, to relieve their own anxiety. 

However, this year, I heard a great commencement speech. I can't remember her name now, but her motto (message..whatever you want to call it) was to always give back, alaywas appreciate. Nothing about how students have it so hard, when we really don't. We are given a blessing in the form of education and a scholarly environment, surrounded by peers who are striving as well.

After the main commencement (and the individual college ones! But that's not related to the aforementioned) I saw loved ones and my great friends who came to graduation, some with flowers (you guys are awesome). My parents had been rather accepting on the outside of my academic choices, aka my not having stuck with engineeirng and pursuing a different route. Thank you to all my friends who came out to graduation it means a lot that you made the time even though some of you lived far, were at doctors appointments, had to dip out of another graduation, thank you to you all. and thank you to all who said congratulations and all the support and happiness, both you who came to graduation and you who couldn't come 

To all of you who knew of my struggle, and were physically literally by my side, on the phone, in your prayers ( i know who all of you are as well...even the ones i told in passing), thank you, seriously thank you for being there even when I was a bit unbearable. 

I rarely ever reach a point where I feel like I'm goingt o lose all control, but this time what I learned was to let go. I can't always be in control or manipulate a situation

I still wish I could tell them about my fashiony stuff though, but I don't feel as if the time is right.

So on that note, I was recently published in a small magazine Editorial 

heah 

pages 75 to 79

and have a small picture in marie claire magazine with my friend Brooke Kao she s the one holding the orange purse, on the left page with the biggest picture like she deserves to have.

 

 

 

and happy birthday to the amazing @lovelybish

 

 

 

 College has passed, and I feel thankful for what I've become and chosen to continue to be and surround myself with, yet I've never been more unstructured. I have a job right now that my parents are happy with, but I still feel uncertain. I feel as if I was made for more and am scared that I truly did squander my time/talents away on something that my parents warned me not to pursue, yet I still am... 

As sturgeon reminds me frequently, "one day at a time. do what you need to get done on that day, and worry of nothing else"

I was never good at that, just waiting. I grasped at everything, every opportunity even if it didn't interest me. I'd go for all the programming positions for companies I wasn't really interested in working with and said yes to offers before I considered others. I'm afraid to have nothing, yet in the end I'll end up with nothing for wanting everything. Greed will eat us away

sometimes you just have to wait... 

Have very happy holidays, those of you who can enjoy it. For those of you who can't and are hurting, I hope and pray you heal soon. Don't callous your heart 

 

 

I can't remember very many good dreams. Actually, I can't even remember one... not even one. Most of the good ones I tell people are not dreams, but rather day dreams, ones that I can control, turn fantasies in to temporary reality. It's during the times of half slumber and momentary, full on consciousness that I can manipulate things in to happiness.

I've heard of lucid dreaming and the idea of taking control of the dream, like an adventure. Problem is, I know I'm dreaming. I think I'm more awake in these nightmares, or just normal dreams as they are so frequent and expected now, than I am when I walk around or day dream. I don't think my heart has raced harder than in these dreams, my fears exploited by myself or some other evil force attempting to make my heart erupt. 

There was a period in elementary school when I thought of death so often, from buried anger and the need to escape abuse. 

But in high school, these started to change, and the dreams became more violent. I dreamed of being the killer instead of being killed. 

In  college, they evolved to murder scenes, mass murders, or murderer chasing me. Sometimes I'd die, sometimes I'd be shot or punched, feeling the physical effects linger a few minutes after I can shake myself up out of the paralysis. It's frustrating though, because I always know I"m dreaming. I always know that I'm part of a mass genocide, or am being cut in to pieces, or am watching bodies decay in front of me. It's strange, it's as if I'm for some reason being forced to watch these things since I was little. 

It's not like I've ever SEEN that much violence, except in video games. But even mortal kombat didn't really show as much as I dream up. Maybe it's the medical videos on youtube? Surgeries and gruesome things that I've long before accepted as just carbon and oxygen and other molecules linked together. It's an image of death which is the only reason why it would bother our consiousness. 

I remember in college I had a period where I got absolutely no sleep. It wasn't even just two, three, four days of no sleep, it extended to nine which had me obivuosly in the hospital with a severe infection from my throat and lungs. Thank God my friend was nearby my house that night and drove me to the hospital, since my parents thought I was being overdramatic.  Of course, I had to pull more all nighters since I skipped a week of class recovering/being hospitalized. 

During that time, I had thought that one of my dreams took place in real life. It was the only time I could not differentiate between reality and slumber, since my mind was losing its touch with reality, severed by the lack of sleep. The dream was just death, demise, despair. A friend died, and a family murdered. Yet I woke up on my bed. And it all seemed normal..it seemed as if I was there.

Of course, I realized a few weeks later after I was able to recall everything that had happened during my zombie-like state, that it was in fact a very, very real feeling dream. And I had complete control, but it was the first time I did not realize it was just a dream. Everything was real, every smell, every stomach lurching image, every tear.

Recently, my dreams have taken on a more haunting turn. I think I've become acclimated to death and torture, to despair and defeat, to not being able to be in control, that the dreams have in fact been more and  more reali, involving experiences in my life. One was a tree in front of my house that was only recently cut down (IRL). But instead of being made up of wood and bark and branches, it was constructed from bodies, from groping, dripping, twisting body parts. Arms, fingers, legs, torsos, all squished together and moaning for recovery, for an end. It had to do with my dad, we were shaded within the house form the looming tree blood/hair/head (instead of branches and leaves). The windows were smeared with blood, but it was normal for us. I felt little shock, more internal, learned fear and imprisonment.

It's strange, these feelings seem so normal now, as if I have lost my drive to escape and have accepted ....well, accepted something. Violence perhaps.

The most recent happened last night (12.6.2012). It was the end of our orchestra rehearsal and we had to drop off our instruments so that they could be transported for the next day's performance at a museum (this part was pretty real, since that actually happened in April at my GSO concert). A cellist and I missed the cart that wheeled the instruments in to their compartments, so we intruded in to the auditorium during a performance and I saw a door cracked open, about to be closed but stopped it with my foot and asked the man if he was in charge of stowing away our instruments. He smiled, a smile that made my stomach hurt, and told us to follow him. 

You know when you play one of those video games and you have to follow someone but they seem for some reason to run quicker than your characfter can move, and you just know something is going to happen? This guy was like a bullet.

The cellist and I went through the door he did and frost covered us, we saw stairs covered in ice, and saw two doors. He let a woman in one, then locked the door, and walked toward us, beckoning us to go with him to the closed door.

It was completely iced over, and it was then he turned a bit blue, like death blue. The room smelled like formaldehyde and rotting flesh. I think my brain was so shocked that I could not quite perceive the scent. He took our instruments and started freezing them over, flash freeze, so that the wood wouldn't melt and that they could be frozen in time. It was eerie, and strange. He then wanted to give us a tour, and

I'll speed things up

He pushed us in to a carved out portion of the ice and proceeded to freeze us over, but i moved as much as i could to create friction then the ice melted

but it wasn't just the ice over us that melted, ALL the ice started to melt. It was so perfectly frozen in the room that any exorbitant amount of heat would break the atmosphere and crack the ice. Suddenly body parts started oozing out of the pores of the ice, fingers falling out, entrails, eyeballs, heads, hair, full bodies, all blue purple and bruised from the cold. 

And I can't even classify this as a nightmare, the mudslide of broken, distorited bodies, because it didn't make me fearful. It just made me quiet, and accepting.

It's strange how my reactions in my dreams have changed, from waking up in sweat to now a silent surrender to these thoughts

I don't think it affects the way I treat people, I obviously havfe not been going around cutting people up or freezing people nor do I have any remote intention or need or conscious desire to at all whatsoever...but I just keep wondering where these images come from

I know their origins and from what they manifest. But I refuse to think that it's something telling me to just accept the abuse, violence, hurt, torturous feelings, and physical ills that I have to keep quiet from the public.

 

I think I"ll try to get back to posting normal soon, this is for a future reference sort of thing.