As of lately, I have become a slave to the place we all call the learning grid. In this barricaded section of University house, students congregate to complain and procrastinate and then occasionally actually do the tasks due to either (a) overwhelming feelings of guilt/compulsion because you made the journey, (b) a lack of anything else to do. Hence, this is a good place for me, someone who is arguably borderline ADD to me when it comes to concentrating.
I enjoy motivating myself. This did work. It was finished. Not well, but still done.
On the whole though, I've been trying to keep myself more motivated in not just doing my work, but starting it early enough and doing enough background reading for essays especially. You lose the manic adrenaline that I used to hold responsible for being able to complete the task before deadline, but it's not really such a loss to take your time and not have to worry about it at all, really.
With my Bergman essay handed back to me and a not fantastic mark - not that I expected one, given that it was done on manic adrenaline and on the whole just not a fantastic essay - I believe my exact words were: "This is the biggest piece of shit I've ever written." (Grant, Laura. To Myself: Things I Say Aloud Wallowing In My Room Alone. 2012 citations have taken over my life dot com.) - and as a result, I decided to work hard on my history one. I started it early and did a fair bit of reading and research and to my delight, found it - say it with me now - a lot easier. (NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! Thanks guys.) Furthermore, I found it so much more interesting, and when it comes down to it, I'll say it: a lot of the stuff I'm studying is damn interesting. I'm lucky that I did decide to pursue this and picked a course that I'm in love with. I love learning. I love what we're learning and although sitting in a lecture hall at 9am when all I want to do is curl up and read a book is sometimes disagreeable and I'm still complaining, I still wouldn't do anything else. Man, I'm just really happy here, you know what I'm saying?
Now, on a completely separate note, I am returning home in one week today. I am still uncertain how to feel about this; I am on the whole, very excited. Hong Kong - although the younger sister claims the weather is current shit - is usually nice around this time of year.
You see, I've lately become obsessed with traveling and adventure. And by that, I mean moreso than usual. In a Sunday afternoon frenzy, I took my map off my wall, and pins flying everywhere, ripped off all the flyers on my bulletin, sticking my map there in its place and using the pins now spread all over the ground to mark places I've been. Some observations are that 1. Russia, Canada and Greenland are massive and it looks like I haven't been to that many places even though 2. I really have and a lot of people have commented on this yet I still 3. don't remember all the times and dates and get muddled and I'm pretty sure the dates I have are quite inaccurate but I'll sort them out over Easter.
I've also marked down where I want to go. And where I want to go back to. I'm obsessed with memories of places and people and things and the feelings you felt when you were in a certain place or with certain people doing certain things. And then you make the funny little associations and every so often, something tiny will jog your memory into collective overdrive and in flashes you see your past, (or your reconstructed past, but let's not ruin this illusion and go too deep into how memory actually works.) For example:
I can't see a poster of Charlie St. Cloud without remembering seeing the audition notice for extras on Gibsons in Vancouver. And subsequently then, that opens up all the memories of that seafood restaurant in the main town and the quaint ice cream store tucked in a corner and we'd always see people walking around in the afternoon with these massive scoops of all sorts of multicolours and then there was the rock candy I bought at the souvenir shop and the log-running competition we watched and it was just so funny and canadian and it's just weird to think I was there. And who I was there. That was two years ago and I was starting the IB and listening to a lot of Jack's Mannequin and I just remember getting off the plane and driving and I opened the windows and sniffed and it smelled so different and I looked at all the trees towering over my head and just marveled over how vast the world was. The fact that a place like this could exist at the same time and in conjunction to the contrasting places I'd been was stunning and suddenly I felt so small and I looked around at all these people I would never know and realised that there would always be places I wouldn't go but I made a note to try and go to as many as possible.And then:
Even the smallest things such as a stone can suddenly make me think of a different time. The stones in the Thai airports - I always think about them. The display with an ocean background and one palm tree and those stones, representing the Thai tropics with all their inanimate glory and I think about each time I've passed through that airport, one, two, nine times? More than that, surely. The people I've met there and gone there with, from the girl I made friends with on the waterslide at the place with the trapeze to running along the beach imitating the crabs with Catherine. And a lot of the time, I cannot separate all these events and they all fuse into one big memory of one place and I start to define this place by this memory and it's just wrong because I haven't seen or done enough to know the place: all I have is what I know of it, and a lot of the time, that's enough.
I don't know, I'm in a strangely prose-y mood today.
Just to finish, as this entry, whilst doing okay word count wise, is a bit short of actual content about my actual life:
(1) Esme arrives Thursday for a bit.
(2) I leave on Tuesday
(3) Most people leave Saturday
(4) I may be bored
(5) I'm scared I'm going to descend into a ridiculous spiral of loneliness and depress myself.
(6) Especially after how last term ended.
(7) Or maybe I'm just being silly.
(8) After all, I quite like being along.
(9) Lists don't work out too well for me. I'm too long-winded.
This is a funny point because I can't believe it's March already. My blog has bypassed it's one year birthday. And check it out, March 2011:
(1) This miserable post about me whining about my shit life and first world problems etc.
(2) Post about Innovation (The 2012 one has happened already wow weird.)
(3) That time I went to England March 2011 for my Warwick interview and fell in love and then I read my first John Green book which is weird because I just finished my 4th one this morning.
(4) Me panicking and thinking and writing about university.
The difference is bizarre. Maybe it's too many life-centric, thought provoking novels or just the time I spend awake by myself at night, but all I seem to do now is think. Properly think. About life and death and the connections and the people I've met and the people I haven't but want to and will. And i've come so fascinated by the idea of living and the fact that from now on, I really have no idea what direction everything is headed and that's both scary and exciting and my life has been reduced to a series of run-on thoughts and sentences and an overabundance of the word and because there's just so much I'm thinking about and - oops! - no way to eloquently phrase it all.
Regardless, we can deduce that:
(1) I shall be home soon.
(2) I will come into money.
(3) Thus will materially spoil myself because I am a bad person.
(4) But the main thing is that over this break,
(5) I would like to change the way I think about a lot of things.
And I shall leave you with that.
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