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ShadowyVikto
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Name: Victor
Birthday: 12/29/1987
Gender: Male
Interests: tossing blades of grass in the nooks and crannies of your hair
Expertise: frolicking through your room at night when you sleep to give you good dreams of hope and despair ^^
Occupation: Student
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  viktorthemur
Member Since:
6/28/2003
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| I was reading my anthropology (Making of the Modern World 1) material for a good couple of hours, trying to stay away all night so that I could reset my biological clock. The plan is basically to stay up until it's time to sleep again, then just keep a normal sleep schedule all week long.
In that time, I was able to see the white walls going from the warm yellow of our room lamp to the pale blue from the natural light coming from the turning of night into day. It was then that my roommate and I decided to turn off the lamp, and realized...
"Well, shit."
Another night just blew us by. | | |
| I just deleted a folder on my laptop entitled "HooliganzInc".
I haven't felt this empty since the fall (or fail) of 2007. More on that later...
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| My feelings about UCSD have changed a bit since last week. I wouldn't say the change was so much a dramatic shift as it was a rapid one. In the last conversation I had with some friends a week ago about being here, I pretty much found this place a social desert. Yes, people here are in a rush to get to their next thing, but where are they not? That's just the world at its finest. It's what I'd been telling myself for a long time, but only recently have I really come closer to accepting it.
So, I decided to tag along. As soon as I paid my membership dues to a certain club, I was pretty much on the same track as everyone else. Running around meeting strangers, getting to know people, and connecting with fellow transfers at such a rapid pace that I almost forgot I was going to Vegas the very next day. By the time Vegas did come, I was all warmed up for the trip, and I had a blast all weekend.
Then I came back to San Diego. I held back on my thoughts about how I'd feel coming back here so that I could take in the full experience untainted by biases. Surprisingly enough, it felt like a sanctuary. The first thing I said when I walked through the door of my apartment, not really to anyone in particular, was, "Home sweet home," and it really did feel like home.
And then there's the loneliness. It's not as bad as before. It's not so much that I needed to get out and join things--I already learned that from my days at PCC. It was more the need to be doing SOMETHING. And that something came in the form of learning how to maintain a solid academic and social life here. With my schedule, chances are slim that I'll be finding a job this quarter, and I've put a hold on attempting to graduate early just to escape the UC-wide fee increases for next year. Aside from the fees though, I really did want to just graduate at the same time as everyone I grew up with. Looking back on it, I realize that a lot of the most important decisions in my life were made out of the desire to stay in my comfort zones. Wanting to be with my friends was my main driving force for going to UCLA so many times over the years. Wanting to be away from my mom was my strongest motivation for choosing UCSD. It wasn't so much an ego issue as it was an issue of being with my closest friends. As we get older and start heading out in our own directions though, I'm getting more and more adjusted to the idea that we'll just have each other at a distance while we live our own lives. It's as Ruby said once approximately 5 and a half years ago, "Now's the time to grow and share together". I'm still working on applying that to my own life.
I've found a cubby for myself here. There are plenty of quiet places on the western part of the top floor in the Geissel Library where people like myself go to follow up on readings and lectures and to catch the view of the Pacific out the windows. Rule of thumb that I'll remember the next time I study all the way up there: face the east when it starts to approach sunset, lest ye burn your eyes out trying to dodge the reflected sunlight. It's actually kind of cozy just sitting up there. I think I'm going to try to make a routine out of studying-ocean meditating-studying. It seems like a healthy habit to keep up daily. There's a whole host of things I want to get done before I graduate from here, and I think that over time, I'll actually really get to like it here. I might just avoid catching "the LA Bug", as my South Africa professor puts it. I can already feel myself really mellowing out to match the atmosphere here. Maybe when the presence of school gets heavier and the presence of clubs lightens up, I might just follow the little flow of energy that goes around here and match up to it.
In the meantime, Victor out.
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| I'm about to head out soon so I'll save some for later. I've been back in San Diego since Saturday night/ Sunday morning, and I've noticed that it's a lot more livable this time around. The last time I was here two weeks ago, it was just me and my grad student housemate who had a full-time research job. That basically broke it down so that I was the only one in the apartment, but seeing as how summer school had just ended and everyone was back home, I'd never felt lonelier.
This time though, I'd come back from a roller coaster of a San Francisco road trip, and all my roommates were already here when I moved in again. Maybe it was traveling and getting away from LA for a week in San Fran, or maybe it's the fact that my roommates and housemates are all here, and they're all pretty cool. Whatever it is, this place feels a lot more relaxing now. Unlike two weeks ago where I went home after three days because I had nothing left to do here.
And then there's campus. The place is teeming with freshmen in every corner: in the dining halls, in the smaller food vendors, and most of all in the six colleges. All the events on campus for Welcome Week have so far been geared toward freshmen, despite promises from the Transfer and Commuters Community that those said events, like Freeze Tag or Ultimate Frisbee, would be transfer-student only type events. "Yeah, SD likes to screw with their students," said my roommate Ryan. I agree completely--this campus and the people who work for it love to mess with us transfers. It's not bad though.
So far I haven't been able to reconnect with any of my old friends here. I'm pretty lonely here, and as one guy told me yesterday when I asked him about the campus environment, "It usually gets pretty lonely during the school year" because everyone's just in a hurry to get their work done for school and extracurricular activities. I just asked him about the campus atmosphere, and that's the first thing that comes out of him. Great. Now at least I know it'll be like middle school all over again. As in I need to go out and fight the urge to sleep in.
And if that's the case, it's time for me to head out 
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| I've been wondering recently when it is that I'd explode and reveal every secret that I've been keeping with me, allegedly "to the grave", like we young people like to exaggerate so much. Like a timebomb, we're all bound to go off eventually, and when that happens, the usual result is panic. Total and uncontrolled panic.
Or, like the CIA, we can release 100% of our known information of one event at a time that we've kept in mind, and smoothly, but slowly, publish, eventually, everything that's been making it harder to breathe. | | |
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