Heart

It's coming to the end of 2009, so I think it's time to call this blog to a close as well and reflect on what exactly this thing called "heart" is.

Heart is different for every person. For me it's something terribly private and individual. It's something that requires I leave myself alone at night frequently until I come back and find safety in myself and the fork that leads in either direction to sleep. The journey continues on either or both paths. As sleep takes over the distinction blurs and I no longer know whether I walk on one path or two. Then I understand life more generally. Then, I wake up, and sixteen hours pass where my understanding of life decreases gradually, and my heart is the caller that aches for that understanding to return.

But sometimes I can't sleep so easily. This semester hasn't been so bad for that, except for the times when my stomach simply would not let me sleep. Yeah. I guess. Usually sleep is the cure, but sometimes it's not.

Why am I so tired that I can't concentrate on anything anymore? I guess three and a half years of concentration have gotten to be too much, much like they did four years ago, when I was applying for undergraduate schools. Back then the stress played its tune differently on my brain, though, and I just fell into a pit of depression that lasted through my college interviews. It figures that the only one that was any good was the one with a mathematics major. That guy was a student at Tufts, and I know who his advisor was too. Tufts was good for me, though, and I hope that I can magically find my way into the proper school for my brain and heart (and other parts) for grad studies.

This freewrite is drifting, much like cars on an icy highway. More like bumper cars on an icy highway, the crashes turned into bounces. With bumper lanes on the side like a round of kids' bowling. Thoughts bounce against each other, on a two-dimensional plane with no three-dimensional motion despite a three-dimensional existence. Let me jump within that third dimension.

I had intended to mention this thought since around the seventh freewrite here, but I never remembered to do so. Well, here it is... Okay. I speak two languages very fluidly, French and Japanese. And I know only a few words in either of the Philippine dialects my relatives know. Putain is a word in French that means "whore." クソ (Kuso) is a word in Japanese that means "shit." But put the two swear words together, and you get "Puso" - a word in Filipino that means "heart."

I guess that's my story. Very little more needs to be said. You put the moments together that you grind through and cuss through and obliterate yourself through even though you never intended to and emerge as something else that's still you, because you made sure to respect yourself all through it - that's heart for me. Coming out of it knowing that you respect yourself for all you can be. And not grinding yourself down simply because other people are grinding themselves down. But I've done that. Even through this most recent semester I was doing that the whole time. And how do I avoid that? I guess the wrong way to do that is to avoid it by refusing to acknowledge it. Telling myself not to grind too hard doesn't work when I don't realize that I'm grinding myself down anyway. This past semester I was doomed from the start with my schedule. Or maybe I was just doomed period and didn't want to accept it. Maybe I still haven't.

Well, the best thing I can do is forget and come back to it. That's the procrastinator's way, haha, but here it applies to something I've already done or felt like I've failed at doing. That thing I failed at doing is 2009. 2009 can go bye-bye. And it will. All I know is this: I've written a lot, and all that I've been telling myself hasn't told me too much. It's like an alternative rock album with nonsensical lyrics where every song is long. It's time to let it rest.

Let it rest, let it rest, let it rest.

-Alex
明けましておめでとうございます！