I don't count my days on a rosary

I count my days by little blue pills

they're equally meaningless I think

seven more rows of little blue pills

and then what?

I can't feel them slide down my throat

so sometimes I forget if I've taken it or not

I don't feel much of anything, I don't think

or maybe I feel too much of everything

what does that even mean

I'm beginning to suspect

that I don't exist.

I think I may just be a shadow.

a collection of images and words put forth to float forever through cyberspace.

nothing feels real. not even me.

this is weird.

[angry post about gender identity and feminism and societal pressure to be either a feminist or a product of a misogynistic patriarchal society]

We're both in the same business, and I'm not embarrassed to say that it's about helping people somehow to sort out their deepest conflict: …In a nutshell, it all comes down to "what I want" versus "what’s expected of me."

- Psychologist Faye Miller on Mad Men.

(lol irony.)

EVERYTHING IS STRANGE.

I don't know what it is about the end of October, but I feel like I fall into a similar funk every year around the same time, and I don't think I'm the only one. Everyone is being all jaded and strange, everyone is withdrawing - like they're going into early hibernation or something. There's this pervasive mood that's just making everything feel weird, and I don't know what triggered it. I feel like I should do something, but I don't know what to do, or what to say, even. I don't know. Something feels off. I don't know.

I don't know.

comfort tunes

It's funny to me that I consider "comfort music" mostly to be music that would comfort me when I was depressed or upset when I was 17-20 or so.

When I was 17 and 18, I listened to a lot of Anna Nalick's "Wreck of the Day," Howie Day's "Stop All the World Now," and Missy Higgins's "The Sound of White" when I was upset. And a lot of Bruce, except now I mostly associate Bruce with being 18 and in love in the summer time at the beach, so that doesn't really count any more.

When I was 19 and 20, I listened to a lot of Mandy Moore's "Wild Hope," and I am so not ashamed of that. It was like...my barely-post-adolescent break-up album. Hahahahahaha. I was also really into John Mayer and Ingrid Michaelson. And Chris Ayer saved my life sophomore year, I think. Love him always.

Around then, most of that got replaced pretty quickly by M. Ward and Wilco. And since then, I'll usually just listen to whatever's tickling my fancy at the time. But some days, I get into weird moods where the only thing that satisfies me is this music that used to comfort me at very specific times in my life. I'm always surprised by how quickly it makes me feel better. It makes me wonder though: will I still be doing this 5, 10 years from now? Turning to this music that comforted me as a teenager? Part of me is like, "OH GOD I hope not." But part of me hopes I still do this - part of me never wants to fall out of love with anything, even if it's just music.

heroines

When I was little, I wanted to be Jo March, Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and my mother, all rolled into one.

I sort of still do.

I really hate overly demonstrative couples who feel the need to display a little too much public affection on the tube.

I am slightly uncomfortable with how much these couples irritate me, as I suspect not a little of this irritation is born of jealousy, and I would very much like to not want what these people feel the need to flaunt.

Fuck split infinitives. It sounds better this way.

My memory sure ain't what it used to be, but it's still far, far too long for its own good.

I wish it was easier to forget what I don't want to remember.

now what?

I want to know what happens next.

Existing conditions change moment to moment and things don't stay the same.

We make choices and what is meant to happen as a result, that is what happens.

We act and react and we move and shift, looking for the rhythms that bring us together and the beats that pull us apart, and we go on and on and on, adapting constantly.

Sometimes these changes seem to unfold naturally, appearing as direct results from small choices made, but at other times, I feel like these changes explode in an absurdly dramatic fashion, upending lives into states of chaos, as a result of a whole confluence of indirect influences. These explosions can catch you by surprise, but sometimes, I think you can anticipate their approach. Once in a while I sense this electricity in the air, this feeling of heightened possibility, that I refer to in my head as a feeling of "Things About To Happen." There's this sense of imminence. The universe is stirring, and something game-changing is afoot.

Usually when I get this feeling, it comes on quickly. I step back and see that all the natural, little changes that have been unfolding are a set-up for the explosion that's on its way. It's not unlike watching a well-played game of chess begin to draw to a close: suddenly, the game plan is clear, and everything makes sense. I'm starting to get traces of this feeling again, but it's more foreboding - something doesn't feel right. It's like the board isn't set up properly, and something is going to go wrong. The timing is off. Something isn't right.

This feeling is making me anxious. It's looming over my head, hanging in the air like the heavy humidity that comes before a storm, before the thunderheads roll in, when the sun has that peculiarly harsh glare. I don't feel like the explosion is in the immediate future, but I can feel it working its way closer. I'm not worried or excited, though, so much as I am curious. Something big is coming, and I don't think I care whether or not it's good or bad. I'm just eager to see, what happens next?

Insincere apologies are the worst.

same old story.

Ugh, I've been dying to rant about this for two days now. It's nothing new. I've gotten worked up over it a thousand times. I still hate it. And it's stupid, because I shouldn't. It shouldn't bother me. But I really, really hate when classes put me in a position where I'm forced to consider my "cultural identity."

At this point it's like, okay, you know what, I get it. I get that I'm the exception. I get that I am 100% Korean with an English-French-German-etc. mother and an Irish-Norwegian father who has an Italian stepmother. I get that I grew up in a predominantly white suburban New Jersey town from the age of 4 months on. I graduated high school with a total of maybe half a dozen other Asian kids (out of 450), except they were all from traditional Asian families. And nearly every other one of my friends was Irish or Italian American, or both. I had no idea that Catholicism wasn't the predominant religion in the United States until I was 17 or so, purely because most of my friends were Irish or Italian American.

It's just frustrating. I've been living against a stereotype, against an image, since day one. I've never, ever been that skinny, quiet little Asian kid who's freakishly good at math, amazing at piano and the violin, good at tennis, whose parents insist that I be a doctor/nurse/accountant when I grow up. That's never who I was. If you tried cheating off me in math class any time after seventh grade, you were shit out of luck. I never liked science. I quit cello when I was 12 and piano by the time I was 16 because I was tone-deaf and had no rhythm. I can swing a golf club but I'm awfully unathletic in every possible way. And frankly, my parents don't care what I do with my life as long as I'm passionate about it. I was that kid who sat at a corner of the lunch table and read through recess. I liked art, history, and English class and watching movies. I was serious about school but I liked having a social life too. I wanted to be a writer.

None of this bothers me, really. It's part of who I am, and that's cool. Whatever. What bothers me is that society's constructed image of Asian Americans forces me to constantly challenge what other people expect of me. I confuse people, and that's fun and all, but it gets exhausting, having to always explain what, to other people, is the conundrum of your existence. "Your name is Irish! But. . . but. . . you're Asian!?" And you know, having the physical characteristics of an Asian means I must know every other Asian in the tri-state area and eat cats. I hate going to nail salons purely because I hate dealing with the Korean employees who inevitably will make small talk with me about how I am Korean, and do I speak the language, and how long have I been in the United States? But I've ranted about this before...

I don't remember ever not being in the United States. I do remember being in Intro to American Studies in college (bear with me please), discussing an essay by a young woman born in Iran or Iraq - I can't remember the specifics - but she was raised, from age 15 or so on, in Ohio or somewhere else in Middle America. Though she retained some of her traditional culture through her family, she was fairly assimilated, and she considered herself to be a "daughter of America." And I was furious because most of the students in class - at least, the ones who were talking - didn't think that she had the right to refer to herself as such, because she wasn't born in America. Because where does that place me? Do you not consider me to be a "daughter of America" just because I wasn't born in the United States? And the worst part was, I had to admit that I understood if they didn't consider me as such, given that the federal government doesn't consider me to be enough of an American to be president. Thanks, Founding Fathers. I hated that, when I was little - "You can be anything you want when you grow up. You could be President of the United States!" Well no, no I can't. Because for the first four months of my life, I lived in a foster home in South Korea before someone wanted to raise me. This makes me un-American, apparently.

And because of those four months, people want me to identify myself as Korean, not American. When people - especially creepy gas station attendants - ask me, "So what are you?" or, "Where are you from?" I always want to say, "I'm human" or, "I'm American," and, "I'm from New Jersey." I had to mark on college and grad school applications that I am Asian/Pacific Islander so they could recognize that I'm not an underrepresented minority and hold me to higher standards. Cool, right. For UK applications, I usually defaulted to "I prefer not to answer," purely from confusion - I'm not British Asian, I'm not Indian, I'm not another Asian national, so what am I? "Other"? Awesome.

And now here I am. I spent the summer working at the Seaside Heights boardwalk where international workers would ask me how I knew English so well and was this my first time in the States? I'm at an internationally renowned university in a masters program of 20 Highly Educated People who are mostly white, listening to casual conversations about how they didn't want to take a module over at one of the other University of London campuses because the high Asian population makes them uncomfortable. I'm listening to seminar discussions about the way Western and Eastern cultures are both represented in overtly Westernized ways in Bride and Prejudice, and how these students think the film is weaker for not committing to engaging in a legitimate discourse on the role of ethnicity and race in modern transcultural relationships, even though the source narrative's thematic focus is class structure. One guy is bitterly fuming about the way every Indian woman cast in the film is pale-skinned, about the way the protagonist complains about how the West doesn't want to see the "real India" only when it's convenient for the plot. And part of me wants to scream, WHY DOES IT MATTER.

I get why it matters, I do. I wouldn't be in the program if I wasn't interested in representation and identity. But on a certain level, I fail to understand how a discussion can take place over a filmic representation of cultural identity, when none of these Highly Educated People are willing to discuss the nature and role of cultural identity in real life, because no one thinks of it outside of the confines of artistic structures. You know, we can talk about Western depictions of Eastern culture all day long, but we all just get that no one wants to go to university with a bunch of overzealous Asian students in London, because we don't identify with them. But here's the humdinger: on another level, I identify with that, because at the end of the day, I culturally identify as white. And I hate these discussions, and all these aspects of my life that make me feel like I don't add up. Because really, why does it matter? It doesn't. No one cares. My friends seem like me well enough, my family loves me, and I'm just me. Why do I need to have a cultural identity? Why can't I just be me, and let that be enough?

I'm tired of being angry about this.

rocking out so hard alone in my room right now

I'LL BREAK THEM DOWN

NO MERCY SHOWN

HEAVEN KNOWS IT'S GOT TO BE THIS TIME

AVENUES ALL LINED WITH TREES

PICTURE ME AND THEN YOU START WATCHING

WATCHING FOREVER, FOREVER

WATCHING LOVE GROW, FOREVER

LETTING ME KNOW, FOREEEEEEVERRRR

typical Wednesday.

I was sitting eating a chicken pie and mashed potatoes at Gabriel's Wharf like I do every Wednesday now, listening to "Location" by Freelance Whales and rereading Linda Hutcheon's "A Theory of Adaptation." Then all of the sudden I realized there were tears in my eyes, and I don't know why.

I am starting to sense your location

in an old abandoned mansion
in a countryside of England
spirits trapped inside the linens
and you’re feeling quite at home there
also feeling somewhat lonely
no one sees you in your pixelated fishnets...

please give

Been thinkin' lots lately (again) about how all relationships are a trade: what I can give you vs. what you can give me. I give, you give. And that's all that really matters in the end, right? We can feel whatever we want, say whatever we want; it's what we do for each other that counts. The actions.

I'm trying to keep giving and let what I do for others be enough to make me happy. It's hard, here, for me to find ways to keep giving, and most days, it feels like that's all I have to really keep me going. I don't feel like I have much to offer, and I feel like I end up giving in weak, empty ways just so I can feel like I'm giving something, even though it feels like it's not enough. And then, sometimes I think I expect too much from others in return. But sometimes I also start to think, maybe I don't expect enough.

Back in June, one of my friends told me I have to take care of myself, and let others take care of me; I can't just take care of everyone else all the time. I wish I could. I wish I could sustain myself fully on giving to others. And I wish I didn't need to be taken care of, ever. I don't want anyone to feel like they owe me anything, ever, but I also don't ever want to feel like I owe someone else something. That's not how it works, right? Everything we do for others should act independently of everything else?

I don't want all of these ideas floating around my head any more. I don't want to be stuck in my own head so much any more. But if I'm such poor company to myself, how can I be adequate company to anyone else?

And why does all this kind of stuff seem so much worse late at night? I'll probably laugh at this in the afternoon. I hope I do, at least. I could use a good laugh.

save it for a rainy day

I'm a total dork for arts & crafts stuff. I have been since I was little. I go through phases with it - I'll get really into needlepoint for maybe a month. And then it'll be knitting. And then rubber stamping, and then scrapbooking, and then acrylic painting. It's a form of distraction that I miss. I've been going through decoupaging phases a lot in the last couple years, and during one such phase, I did a thin, plywood archival document box in purple and green tissue with pink and white flower prints on it. It came out pretty decently.

This is where I keep all of my correspondence from the last five years. There's not a whole lot of it, especially from the last year or two. Letter-writing has become a method of communication that requires infinite patience and a certain level of selflessness - it's no longer considered rude not to reply to a handwritten missive, and most people don't take the time to write back, even if they intend to. I've learned not to expect anything from anyone that I write to. It gets discouraging at times, but mostly, I'm okay with it. It's a small way of giving, but an unusually satisfying one. The majority of the letters I've received come from seven people, from very specific points in my life.

I have three or four letters from my one friend who attended the US Naval Academy. During his plebe summer, letters were his only allowed form of communication, and I wrote him frequently. He hates writing of any kind, so the fact that he wrote me back at all was some kind of miracle. Every note from him is filled with gratitude for the fact that I took the time to write him to begin with.

I have maybe a dozen letters and cards total from three of my closest friends from home, which were written throughout college - more from the beginning than from the end. One of them transferred twice and spent a summer away working, so hers come from all over the place. She had very few roots during that time, and I think that writing to me helped her feel more established when she got to her next destination.

I have a number of funny little cards and notes from my mother - she believes in random little acts of kindness, which is where I get it, I guess. I also have a series of letters from my father, who has written to me on "important" birthdays and at different milestones of my life. There is an unfathomable amount of love in these cards, notes, and letters. Sometimes I hardly can believe that they are mine.

Then I have maybe six to eight letters from my best friend, our freshman year of college. I suppose they're love letters. A lot of them are depressing stories about depressing things. A lot of them are encouraging responses to my depressing stories about depressing things. Every time I used to get a letter from him, I'd take it outside to the "amphitheater seating" in the Oak and Maple courtyard, no matter what the weather or time of year, and I'd glory in it - a whole delicious letter, just for me! He always wrote the juiciest and best letters.

When our friendship faded and the letters stopped, it was one of the things I missed the most. For a long time, I kept them in this purple and green box, and didn't touch them. Last winter though, I was having a hard time with myself, and one day I opened the box. And I reread literally every piece of post in it. It was amazing - here laid fresh perspectives of the person I used to be, seven of them.

I always forget this. When you write a letter to someone, you capture your perspective of that person in it, as much as you capture yourself. You give people a piece of themselves, in addition to a piece of yourself. In this sense, letters received are invaluable. They're the kind of thing you save for a rainy day, for the times when you really do need some fresh perspective.

I wish I had that box with me.

weather or not

I talk about the weather a lot.

Inevitably, I sound like I'm making the most banal small talk ever. That's unavoidable. Sometimes I am making the most banal small talk ever. But not always.

I'm one of those people whose mood is severely impacted by the season and by weather. Spring and fall are lovely; summer is hot and bad and winter is cold and awful. A moderately warm, sunny day, can't be bad. A cold, wet, blustery day is all the more likely to be miserable.

You'd think that this is something I'd have given more consideration before moving to London.

Oddly enough, though, it's been a gorgeous fall here so far. Not too much heavy rain. A fair number of sunny days - the past few have been bright and clear, 65-70ºF and beautiful - and mostly a lot of gray, foggy ones that don't bring any consequential precipitation. Those are my favorite. London is lovely when it's sunny, but it doesn't feel right. The city doesn't look as it should unless it's hazy and overcast, in my mind.

I know these days can't last forever, and won't, and I am seriously dreading the winter. As far as I'm concerned, wintertime is miserable everywhere. As much as the summertime humidity of New Jersey makes me claustrophobic at times, it has its own comforts: the closeness envelops you, and the air contains this full, drowsy tranquility, inviting you to breathe at your leisure. And when you breathe, you don't just breathe oxygen and CO2 - you breathe fragrant plant scents, and other life smells.

Winter is the exact opposite. After the leaves fall, there's nothing left. The earth dies, and it drains all the color, light, and smells from the world - except for the smell of hearth fires and the smell of cold. It hurts to breathe. The sky, which never grows truly black on summer nights, resembles nothing so much as fresh pitch, sprinkled with faraway white specks of stars.

Everything expansive about the warm months - the people outside planting in spring and raking in fall, the children playing in sprinklers in summer, the dog-walkers - they retreat. No one spends a single second outside longer than necessary, and everyone keeps to themselves. Gaps grow larger the way water expands when frozen - with scientific precision - and we grasp at poor ways of closing them.

Oh god, and then comes the onslaught of holidays designed to shrink those gaps - Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, Valentine's Day - in my mind, they're the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as far as holidays are concerned - and they always manage to make things worse. Thanksgiving is nice, and I'm all about Christmas, but in recent years, the joy that an innocent child experiences at Christmas seems more and more impossible to recreate as we get older, and no matter how much of myself I give, I always end the day feeling hollow. And the latter two...not going there.

There's really no way to twist it. Winter is a dead, lonely time. I suppose it must be, in order for the promise of spring to bring so much joy. But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, and I'm more than a little concerned about how I will manage it here.

One year.

It's funny how much things can change in such a short period of time.

One year ago today, I was going to the birthday party of a person I hardly knew. Getting my ass handed to me in a game of Civil War against strangers who are now friends. Pulling other friends out of back bedrooms. Being asked to run interference between someone's exboyfriend and a chick he was hitting on, without knowing why. Getting dragged to the apartment of a friend I was terribly angry with. Watching someone literally bow down on the floor to an empty whiskey bottle. Standing in the rain under a novelty umbrella listening to a distraught friend that everyone else was too wasted to pay attention to. Playing one-on-one beer pong. Going to another party in the 1st quad by myself, only to run into the one person I was trying most to avoid, who told me he liked my kicks. Dance partying in the 3rd quad with a coworker who was so drunk that the next day, she didn't remember seeing me. Hanging out on the balcony of 21 at 2:30am while everyone else smoked, and having it feel like the most normal part of my night. Crying for half an hour in the parking lot at 3:30am because no one could hear me.

Six months ago today is blank in my mind. I don't remember it. I don't remember what happened. I was supposed to go to MoMA and I didn't. I don't know why. There are a lot of gaps in my memory like this, in regards to last spring. It's slightly disconcerting.

Three months ago I was working because the day before, I had gone up to school for my boss's going away party, I had hung out at Moe's for four hours, and I had tried to see The Front Bottoms in Montclair but a lot of unfortunate circumstances caused me to miss most of their set. And the next day I was set to go to a hat tournament in Sussex which got rained out, and I went to a graduation party where I felt so beyond awkward, it took 2 hours of beach therapy and a sunrise to feel properly myself again.

One month ago I was being awkward and getting lost in Monmouth County.

Today I slept. Now I'm going to forage. And get some work done. And go out to Kew Gardens in the morning. And photograph a lot.

Change is good.

It makes me sigh; I do believe in love.

Sometimes I forget that I've been in love before.

That sounds really dumb, I know. And I mean, okay, I was 18, 19 years old. And of course it sounds silly and ridiculous now. And of course in retrospect, it seems unreal. But in the moment it was real. He was my best friend. It was innocent and pure and all that. You know. The kind of youthful first love you can experience once but never get again. That kind of thing.

I was recently recalling one of the stranger moments of our relationship. We had spent the weekend together hanging out at home, and I was driving back to school on Sunday evening. Mile 112. I hit the rumble strips next to the right express lane, jerked the wheel to the left to get back in the lane, and lost control of the car. Hit a mile marker. Turned into the swerve. As my car 360'ed counterclockwise across the express lanes toward the median, I thought, "There is no way I'm surviving this. I hope everyone I love knows that I love them."

And then, I was coasting up the left side of the left lane. Shaking violently, but alive. A car in front of me had its left blinker on, and pulled onto a strip of pavement on the median. These two sweet older couples from Pennsylvania. They were fine. I was fine, but terrified that someone else was hurt. They reassured me that everything, everyone was fine. They had hit a mile marker getting out of my way, but that was all. My car mostly just had some dents and scratches. That's it. A very impatient, very bored officer came and lazily wrote an accident report. Just before I called my parents, my phone vibrated. One New Text Message. "Are you okay?" Weird. I had just left his house. He knew I wasn't due back at school for another hour, at least, and wouldn't reply while driving.

An hour and a half later, I was at home on my couch, incapable of movement. Incapable of thought. I realized I had to answer that text. So I called him. He saw my home phone number come up on his caller ID, and immediately asked why I wasn't back at school, was I okay? I said I was fine. I spun out on the parkway but no one was hurt. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Why had he texted me? It turns out that he had just been overcome with a sense that something bad had happened to me. He just "had a feeling".

This is one of the most unusual things that has ever happened to me. I don't think about it any more, really. It used to make me feel lucky to be with someone who cared so deeply about me, who could intuit these kinds things about my life. Now it mostly just makes me wonder, will I ever be lucky enough to experience so deep a connection with another person ever again? The idea that the answer might be "no" is something I don't want to reckon with.

So I don't think about it. I don't think about what it was to be in love, to have a connection to someone that resonated with a richer timbre than the squeaky whimper of more shallow attractions. And I forget that I'm one of those people who doesn't "believe" in love, because of course I believe in it. I can feel very little conviction but still speak the words and know that one day I'll feel what I say. When I meet people who really have forgotten the face of love, or who perhaps have never seen it, I sympathize with them. I can pat them on the back and attempt to substitute sincerity in place of the inherent patronization of the only hopeful response - "some day" - even if I don't fully believe myself.

Very rarely, though, I will come across someone in this sad state who makes me realize the sadness of my own state, someone who makes me believe that I can believe in love again. And then, I don't have to try to be sincere when I tell him, "some day," because it seems I may have reached that day myself. For a moment, I'm grateful for this person who has unintentionally made me believe again, and I want him to believe, too. Then I feel an acute ache because I realize: he hasn't reached it yet, but when his "some day" finally comes, I won't be able to help being jealous of the person who makes him believe in love again.

fortnights.

I love that word. I wish people still used it.

• One fortnight ago, I was on my way out of Jersey and wishing I wasn't leaving.
  
  
• Two fortnights ago, you couldn't have paid me enough to stay another second longer, and I was dying to escape from everything that I believed was causing all these feelings I didn't want to feel.
  
  
• Three fortnights ago, I was in the moment and loving every second of it.
  
  
• Four fortnights ago, I was wishing the earth would swallow me whole, because it felt like that would be the only way I could get enough distance from everything to stop me from feeling anything.

Funny how things change.

For the moment, I'm fairly content. I'm still lost, upset, happy, terrified, and still screwing up my life in some pretty big ways. But I'm also learning a lot, and not just about this city, this culture.

---- I'm learning that you can run away from everything that you thought was making you feel the way you do, but you can't run away from yourself. When there's nothing and no one left to hide behind or hide from, all that's left is yourself - and that's terrifying. The only truth is in how you choose to react, and that's scary too.

---- I'm learning that distance lends itself to clarity. When you're too close, it's hard to see things for what they are. Distance over time and distance over space. They help you see the big picture more clearly - they help you see the important stuff more clearly, be it people or things.

---- I'm learning (again) that you need to take care of yourself first. No one else will. No one else can. Other people can be indispensably helpful, but the only person you can fully rely on is yourself.

---- I'm learning how to see which relationships are the ones worth working to keep. Convenience of location makes a lot of friendships easy to maintain - or hard to dispose. Here, geography works against everything. I'm finding that I can distinguish what I am capable of and willing to give people, and what they are willing to give me in return. And I think I'm going to find it easier than I expected to let go of the ones who can't give me what I'm looking for.

---- I'm learning, in that same vein, that distance can bring you closer to some people. I'm learning again how I can be there for people who are far away. Unfortunately, it's mostly only through words, and I feel like mine keep growing weaker and even less adequate.

---- I'm learning how to have faith in people who love me. Apparently it isn't all some cruel joke and they really do love me! I don't understand it, but I am grateful. I'm appreciating other people for what they do for me, and learning that others appreciate what I do for them - "Maybe it’s not important [to know who you are]. It’s about what we do for each other, isn’t it?"

---- I'm trying to learn that there are some things, some people, that I can't understand, that maybe I'm not supposed to understand, and that all I can do is try to accept them and let them roll off my back. I am having trouble with this one, but I need to find a way to come to terms with these things fast - I can't afford to keep being so preoccupied with things I can't understand and can't change.

---- Oh, and I'm also trying to learn film studies. I guess maybe I should be focusing more on that, since that's what I paid to come here and learn...

This is long. Oops.