i don't know. i really don't.
written: 7:42 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005

However, me being the lazy person that I am, I only got up at 10.50 a.m. HA HA HA HA HA. At 11.30 a.m. I turned on the laptop and proceeded to surf for Veronica Mars news because the anticipation for the second season and finding out who the hell was at her door that night was killing me. Bright side? I finally unearthed an air date for Season Two's premiere.

Down side? It's 20-something SEPTEMBER.

UPN, you really kill me.

Anyway, I told myself to get started on work after lunch but after lunch I sat down in the living room and watched the Spiderman cartoon with my bro. I laughed very heartily at the cloned Mary-Jane's voice actor though, so that was good.

When I finally got down to work it was about 3 p.m. After two bottles of wonderful Starbucks coffee (the vanilla is especially yummy), a few cups of water and an omelet sandwich whose omelet I fried with my very own two hands, and three and a half hours later, I was finally done with the stupid assignment.

My first draft had about 1200 words. The word limit is a thousand. I still can't believe I managed to cut out about two hundred words. I think as a result of that, though, half of my memo doesn't make sense, because I didn't put much effort into editing it and reading it over and over to make sure everything correctly represented what I wanted to say. In the end, it was like, Oh fuck it, I can't be bothered, I'm just going to upload this.

Ergo, I'm expecting to see a D- on my paper when I get it back. Bwa ha ha ha ha.

(That's extremely bitter laughter for you.)

Yes, it sucks major ass. One section made close to no sense and I really didn't know what to say so I forced my hands to type some words to loosely resemble coherence but I'm sure that my effort fell completely flat, because it wasn't real effort to begin with. Also, I used only like, four cases out of the seven...or was it three? Whatever it was, I didn't use all of them and the whole rule, rule proof and application thing confused the shit out of me. I don't think I made enough reference to the cases; but with the word limit imposed on me, I found it extremely tedious to incorporate all that I thought were relevant into the memo so I picked the ones that I could crap about most and plonked them in.

And that, in short, was my closed memo. Best of luck to me for my remaining time in Law school. I won't be surprised if I dropped out.

I AM SUCH A FUCKING SLACKER. I feel like the biggest slob EVER next to Rui. I wish I had half the amount of motivation she has and the perseverance to keep reading and doing the necessary work. Because I'm like, ten minutes after reading two sentences of a Tort case, I go out of my room and disturb my brother for fifteen minutes. My idea of drafting is cutting down words and keeping my half-formed "ideas" fully intact. And for the past two weeks, I can honestly say that my heart was not in any of the readings and assignments that I attempted to do.

I never thought I was this weak.

And then there's this other thing.

Before that, I had great fun at Mel's birthday party yesterday. I had fun laughing with Weilin at that crappy Rouge show, I had fun laughing with and at Glory, I had fun talking to Pei, I had fun meeting Mel's friends, the cake was great, the food rocked, Smallville was hilarious. It was all good.

I told Mel that the thought of her birthday party was the only thing that kept me sane for the whole of this week, and I meant it, and she said, We should have birthday parties everyday; let's take turns, and I said, Yes, let's, and I wish we could. A life filled with nothing but fun, no academic stress and darkly suicidal thoughts stemming from said stress, no confusion, no sadness, just unbridled happiness that infiltrates every single pore of your body and so you're invigorated.

And yet, isn't true that without sadness, happiness ceases to be? Aldous Huxley made his point in Brave New World, one with which I whole-heartedly agree. It is only when you experience a whole spectrum of emotions, both negative and positive, that you'd fully appreciate the positive ones. Love is nothing without hate, happiness is empty without sadness, peace is valueless without war.

I know all of that.

I just wish it weren't so damn difficult.

**

And then there's this other thing.

Here's what I tried to write this morning:

I wish I had happier things to write about, things that make me view the world in a myriad of pretty colours, things that make me so happy it's almost intoxicating, if not completely intoxicating.

But to do that I would have to lie. And nowadays, I believe that honesty is always the best policy, excuse the lousy cliche, even if it means stepping on flames to get through it to the other side.

I'm not sure where that other side is, let alone whether I've got there. If this is incoherent, pardon me; I am extremely tired right now.

Above all else I'm glad we talked. I surprised myself by getting about 80% of what I wanted to say out in the open; and I suspect that the ability of the person you're talking to to understand your English helps quite a bit.

More crucially:

We're still in a bit of a limbo. I don't know where we're going, if anything can ever come out of it. And somewhere in the midst of the conversation I realise that he's quite right; that I (still) don't have the capacity to handle a relationship; that what I thought I wanted isn't really what I can deal with; that the way he makes me feel has blinded me to some almost-sacrosanct rules that I've came up with over the years when it comes to matters of the heart; that I'm being selfish again, just like old times when I wanted a boy simply because it made me feel good at a particular point in time, because I wanted the momentary thrill of the novelty of being with someone new; and, plainly, that I haven't really changed all that much.

It makes perfect sense, everything is so logical that it's almost mundane, I know where he's coming from and upon further thinking, I think the same applies to me too.

And yet.

A tinge of sadness all the same. Some form of regret. Hindsight is always 20/20 and that rule never fails you, and it's exactly that right now. If only I hadn't done fill-in-the-blank, then maybe I wouldn't be faced with this predicament that's quite honestly the most emotionally-draining thing I've experienced this year, because it is so insidious and subtle that you think you're over it, but when you catch yourself heaving wistful sighs and pining away for something that could maybe have been, the potential of what you never had, what you don't have, what you may never have, hurts even more than it would otherwise. If I hadn't gone to Clarke Quay that Saturday night, would things be different now? Would I be happier, more focused, less derailed? I wish I'd never met him but if I'd never met him I wouldn't have experienced truly amazing times with him.

I wanted so badly to walk away, close the door on him, saunter out of the wide open field and back onto well-paved roads again; it seemed to be the only way by which I could live like old times, before he happened. I even wrote out what I thought I was going to say, things like "I can't see you anymore because it hurts too much to", "I can't handle being non-priority", "Why should I wait for you to finally feel like moving along when I can go out with other people", and then I saw him last night and I just couldn't. Maybe it's excessive sentimentality on my part; more likely I'm not half as cold as I hoped to be, and the cavity that I thought masqueraded perpetually as my heart never quite existed. It's not about other guys, it's not about not being placed on the top of his priority list, it's not even about assuaging the hurt; it's, simply, I can't bear to let go. Letting go would hurt so much more.

You ask yourself, what's the point if it keeps hurting the way it does? But maybe, just maybe and this is a very tentative maybe, it will hurt less from now onwards because now I know exactly what not to expect. It was my inevitably inherent expectations of us leading to something more that did me in. And to be very honest, I don't even remotely understand, truly understand, why I was expecting something more.

Before July all I wanted was a fling with some hot guy that'll last for maybe two months and that'd be it. No strings attached, no commitment, precisely because I'm a complete train wreck when it comes to relationships and the whole commitment issue that scares me half to death. I've walked down the same path twice, I knew I didn't want to do it again, when he came along I thought maybe I could, but I thought about it some more and I realise, I don't want to hate him, I don't want to be completely indifferent towards him, I don't want to cease contact with him after it's all over. The things I felt (and still feel) for him made me forget; what immense stupidity.

I guess that's my intrinsic weakness and fallibility as a female.

Or maybe that's an inherent short-coming of the human heart.

**

I tried writing the entry early this morning despite being almost knocked out by a tiny amount of maybe 0.00000001% of alcohol I consumed at Mel's place. (Persecute me for not liking drinking, the seemingly requisite university mode of social interaction of choice - one that is highly overrated and rather silly, too, if I may add.) Because I was really knackered, when the computer clock flipped to 2 in the morning my brains completely shut down. But I thought it was important that I wrote. It always seems crucial that I wrote when something major happens to me, especially events concerning the heart, as if the attempt to capture my thoughts and feelings were a matter of life or death.

It isn't. Not even remotely. Would it matter in the long run? Probably not. But I've always been short-sighted and thus cherished things that I could see right before me, things that are tangible and not only conceivable because they exist only in a vacuous near-future, far-future.

The now. Carpe diem.

Carpe nocturne. And that's how it was last night.

Between 11.30 p.m. last night and now I think I've felt remarkably better. Maybe it's because I had that closed memo to do which took my mind off things; nevertheless, I'm taking it better than I thought I would.

Still:

I fault myself the most because I know I could have avoided it. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to ignore someone, how not to reciprocate, how to keep yourself at a distance, in the name of safeguarding yourself. The wall around the core of my heart.

It sure didn't take too long for him to knock it down.

Gah, why is that? You know all these rules and yet you continue committing the same mistakes. This weird game we play with each other. Why is that? Right now I'm kind of glad he pulled back before anything really happened; otherwise, I can't even fathom to guess what kind of mess I'd be staring at a few months down the road.

And yet, I know all of this and yet, I wish things didn't have to be this way, that they'd managed to turn out differently. Why do we yearn for things that we know will break us? What is it with the warped human condition that invites Hurt to saunter into one's home by holding one's front door wide open like a fucking retard, and still smiling and thanking Hurt for gracing one's home with his magnanimous presence after he's sullied the welcome mat, the carpet and the damn curtains?

Sigh. Just grow up, Yelen. Just grow up.

**

So are we friends now?

I told him, I can't be friends with you 'cause I can't be friends with guys I'm attracted to.

I forgot to add a qualifier: "For now."

For now, I don't know. I still like him; for now. Right now. Whichever's more grammatical, whatever works.

I guess we'll just wait and see.

In the meantime, I shall attempt, once again, my conversion to permanent Nerdhood.

**

This entry is awfully incoherent. Didn't help that I cut-and-pasted 40% of it.

Too bad.

before sunrise // before sunset

Previously:
- - Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2017
I'm moving. - Sunday, Jul. 11, 2010
In all honesty - Tuesday, Jul. 06, 2010
What I want for my birthday... - Sunday, Jul. 04, 2010
On Roger's behalf. - Friday, Jul. 02, 2010