Honesty

I've definitely heard of Sex and the Ivy before, but it wasn't until I took the time to read the post that I just linked to that I really felt... well, I don't know what I feel right now, considering I just finished reading that post 2 minutes ago. My first reaction is basically shock, the dull thud of a realization that seems distant and unfamiliar because it's been so long since you've felt those kinds of dull thuds that used to be feel like sharp knives.

I mean, first and foremost, I have to get past the insta-crush I develop on any girl who's capable of putting together coherent words on a page. And just so you know, the level of crush (from "kindergarten crush" as Will on Real World XX: Hollywood put it so aptly - dear God, why do I watch trashy reality shows, all the way to full blown "leave your husband and run away with me Tina Fey, pleeeeeaaase?") is in direct proportion to my perception of the writer's skillz. Without going into too much detail, Sex and the Ivy is about as close to that Tina Fey-love level as Hillary is to Obama in pledged delegates (close, but almost impossible that she would ever match it).

All my many issues with women aside, it's the writing that cuts to the quick. Maybe I'm just imagining, but reading the stream-of-consciousness in that post felt so much like being inside someone's head, able to predict the answers to their own rhetorical questions, that I almost lost myself there for a second, forgetting whether those were her thoughts or mine. I don't really want to intrude on her privacy, so I won't say anything else about her, but from reading something so honest and at the same time so aware of the impossibility of its own, full honesty, I could start to feel that nervous itch in my fingers, that urge to strike a keyboard and pound out the vagaries of thought and emotion (in that order or not) swirling from the back of my brains to the tips of my fingers. They're like tentacles that know precisely what they're looking for, and before I can even form the rest of the next word they should be spelling, they are already on the next sentence.

But what I'm getting to is this: I don't think I'm capable of the sort of honesty that she at least tried for. It feels beyond my grasp to even try that hard. As much as I think of humility as a virtue and am disgusted by those who fail to display any, in the domain of my personal thoughts humility has never been present. I mean, it doesn't seem to be a question of right and wrong, when you ask yourself what sort of person you think you are. You are what you make of yourself. But to frame the discussion (but who am I discussing with, myself and I?) in such a way precludes the possibility of change. By which I mean, if I thought that what I thought/did was always and forever the one and only true and absolute representation of myself, than for better or, more likely, worse, I would never change. Everything new or previously undiscovered would be amalgamated into the existing sprawl, swallowed whole into the dark mess of self that offers in explanation of this acquisition only that it was there all along and I had better get used to it.

Honesty (in this particular sense of self-honesty) implicitly acknowledges that the whole damn thing is a multi-party (or at least, two-party) system. If honesty is to exist and have meaning, it must entail a choice between two things, one of which is presumably what they call, the truth. In my current conception of self, there is no truth or falsity, only a kind of unquestionable, existential being. I am. But at least in my mind, that isn't so much a definitive statement, as it is question-begging -- I am... what?

The objective facts that I can offer up to that question seem woefully inadequate: I am 19-and-a-half, I am Chinese, I am an Ivy-Leaguer, I am single, I am a Computer Science concentrator (as of last Tuesday), I am a mediocre writer with delusions of grandeur, I am essentially CFO of a corporation in a dying industry, I am nocturnal, I am a poker player, I am a gambler, I am procrastinating. The next set of responses offer slightly more insight, but they mostly run as adjective editorializing of the first set of responses: I am immature, I am simultaneously too Chinese and too un-Chinese, I am a lucky bastard who doesn't deserve this curse of a gift, I am lonely, I am indecisively and hopelessly lost on whatever path of life this is, I am a whiny/neurotic bitch with a blog that might as well be a LiveJournal or worse - my old Xanga, I am a deceptively sincere but ultimately inept cog in the leadership of a rotting machine that no one has the manual to fix, I am anti-social to the point that I prefer the solitude this late-night/early-morning activity affords me over the bombardment of daytime interactions, I am a bad poker player, I am an addicted gambler, I am a lazy slacker. But it still sounds hollow, even though it seems all to be true.

Honesty is more than just the truth, then. If it does indeed involve a choice as I stated earlier, then the choice means something too. The choice to be honest involves something else, something not captured in the bare appeal of reality. For me, it probably is a choice made by my urge to know, and what's more, to be known. It isn't fame or notoriety though, but it is understanding that I seek, that I need. And before this gets too sappy, I admit freely that rarely do I return the favor, that most often I make no effort to understand other people. Not only is there hypocrisy in this, but there is also active deceit. Call it stinginess, but I want to get the most I can while giving the least. The way national intelligence agencies trade secrets, I trade half-truths and yesterday's news for gems of real value. It's a re-gifting of things I've already given out and won't miss, in a greedy bid for something new.

Or, in stronger moments when the urge for self-deprecating, emo bullshit doesn't choke me so tightly, I will admit that there are still things that I believe in absolutely about myself. I believe in the value of doing the best that you can, and I believe in the damnation of ones such as myself who either don't do their best or lie about what their best is. I believe in love, strangely enough of all things. I believe in love at first sight still, even if you don't know that that is what it is at first. I believe nothing can erase those first impressions of meeting someone. I believe that people are most honest to strangers and close friends. The ones in between are the ones you lie to the most, and the most often. I believe the hardest thing to be in this world is honest.

Especially when it's gotten you burnt in the past. Fried, roasted, and set ablaze. Burnt to a painful crisp and left in a pile of ashes. Too bad you weren't born a phoenix. Of course, the fact that it was really self-inflicted arson will often conveniently slip your mind as you go on angry/frustrated rants against those things that make you feel good that it wasn't your fault and was beyond your control.

So, as Turk once said, "lay some truth on him baby." Here's some honesty: I am a dried, shrivelled-up little ball of a person (and it'll be a long time before I'd use the word "man"), with all the outward appeal of a raisiny-looking old person like you'd find on Clearwater Beach in the summer, who's one and only hope for fulfillment rests in an avenue in which I am both unwilling and unable to pursue. Oh, and before I forget: it's gonna get worse before it gets better.

-------------

Nothing groundbreaking really. Still falls victim to that same tendency of over-analysis that distances him from the possibility of real, effective action. He seems to be very caught-up in the drive to explain and interpret, with little room or desire for "doing" anything. He never writes about what happens, what he's thinking, or what he's feeling; instead, he writes only about what he thinks about what has happened, what he thinks about what he thinks, and what he thinks about what he feels. Sometimes, it's even another layer (or two or three or infinitely many) up, of what he thinks of what he thinks of... what he thinks. Like right now.

How Do You Know If You Really Know What You're Doing?

There is something strangely unsatisfying about describing my life in the first person here, as if it is too easy to merely relate the things I did or thoughts I thought, and that if I were any good, I'd figure out a way to write something that wasn't directly about me but would remind anyone who reads it of me in some subtle yet illuminating way. I've come to terms with the fact that I do not possess that gift for writing that allows one to capture every minute detail of a moment that happened; now I am faced with the sad realization that perhaps I can't even inspire a mere brief flash of illumination of something more real. Maybe the only thing that ends up being captured within these words is the profundity of my confusions.

Two things come to mind right now, for no reason in particular. Both fall under the general category of musing about the path I've taken, the path I'm taking, and the path I'll take. One thing has to do with school, and the other has to do with my father.

The one that has to do with school, more specifically has to do with the third grade, which for me was really the fourth grade. As much as I hate trivializing an entire human being down to a few childhood events, skipping the third grade (technically, fourth grade), while obviously being something that put me where I am today, is also important because of the effect on my psyche. Not that I was ever all that social a child, but to be pulled up bodily out of the third grade class and placed into the combined fourth/fifth grade class is something at least as traumatic as transplanting a tree. But at least the tree doesn't feel younger, (and consequently, inferior) to all the other trees. It really is strange how even children recognize the importance of a year's worth of experiences, or even just a few months. Or perhaps it makes sense, when a year is so much of one's young life; what's the difference between 46 and 47? I remember learning the word "yeblow," from a fat Hispanic kid named Julio; I have no idea what "yeblow" means now. I remember buying my first football card for $1, a ridiculously high price for Chris Slade, a fairly mediocre linebacker with the Patriots. I remember lying to my parents about what I did with that $1; perhaps that is where the seed of my poker-playing/lying was planted. I remember the Miami-Dade County Geography Bee, where we took 4th. I remember people paying attention to me, because at least in a geography bee, I had more useful knowledge than they did. Life on the other hand, was an entirely different story.

And wouldn't you know it, after a year spent frantically alternating between hiding in social corners and scavenging for knowledge about the new world I was thrust into, we moved. Now, had we stayed in Miami another year, had I gotten the chance to stay in the same school, and stay in that combined fourth/fifth grade class with my old classmates from the fourth grade, who knows? Maybe I'd actually be a decent human being right now.

Move we did, to Pinellas County, to Larghetto, to Ridgecrest, to Mrs. Wall and Mrs. Smith, to my first D on a test, to my first-place essay in the Public Library's Writing Contest (whose topic was "The Far Side of the World," and since that's where I came from, it made sense to me that my story was a little more authentic, a little more detailed, a little more fake). Then to Seminole, to MEGSSS, to MATHCOUNTS, to Chicago, to missing the bus to walk her home, to detentions for cursing and awards for... for being me. And the whole time, I was an outsider trying to hide, trying to learn enough about the way this world worked so that I could wash away the marks of my foreignness.

Then it was high school, IB and TOK, HL, SL, and AP, dances and poker and skipping lunch and socializing in French and staying after-school and going to State's and ... and then it was over. And then 4 years of non-stop effort, of working my way into a hidden little niche of this world where I would not stick out, where I could belong, all that went out the proverbial window.

Then it was summer, it was China, and it was being alone. Alone like I'd never been before. If I thought I was alone before, it was only because it fit the pure dictionary definition of being just one person by myself. But now, now I knew what it was to not be alone, that when things fell apart, I finally saw how deep that particular hole went.

The other thing, the one about my father, I would really like to say it was about my parents. But it was something that only my father ever really believed in and talked about; my mother's responsibilities lay mostly in keeping my ass in line, for whatever a proper Chinese line was supposed to be. For as long as I can remember having my own memories, my father always told me this, that he trusted my judgment. His parenting, his teaching, his nurturing and his scolding, they were all supposed to generate in me an independent faculty within myself, to judge externally and internally. He didn't so much as tell me what was right, as let me decide what was right. In this, I now fear I've failed him.

I've failed myself.

I can't judge shit.

I want answers. I said that once, at a conference on gifted kids where they invited us "gifted kids" to participate. I said my gift was for curiosity. I wanted answers.

I would rather someone give me the answers.

I would rather cheat.

And somehow I'm here, still. Somehow I haven't fucked myself too hard, yet. But it has certainly been a mess. Looking back, the last year-and-a-half/two years have been nothing short of the beginning of a muddled, blind, half-stumbling, half-groping face-forward fall. My face has yet to make contact with the ground in that metaphor (though ironically, the same could not be said for my physical face and the physical carpet in the current Joline game room).

It's like slowly forgetting how to walk.

It's like waking up.

I ask myself what I'm doing. The answer I get, the only one I can get, is what I think I am doing. It is impossible to actually know. I think I am slowly choking myself. I think it's already too late.

I think it is already too late.

I will salvage what I can.

-------------

I know the only one for me can only be you.
My arms won't free you, and my heart won't try.