First step to happiness

Trust is tricky because you can't really love without trust. Even after my mother catches me lying to her, the next day she still takes my word for where I'm going that night (though with more suspicion) because she loves me unconditionally. A love without trust is tainted, and an honest relationship of any kind is impossible.

I rarely believe in successful relationships after one of the partners has cheated. The other tries to overcome the past because "I'm still in love", but except in rare cases where the trust is fully regained after a certain period of time, there will always be a slight sense of discomfort regardless of how benevolent both people's intentions are. I'm not criticizing - I've been cheated on in the past, and though I broke it off, I always gave another chance. But I'm also not denying that it won't be the same. Every time I see him messaging a girl he's messed with in the past, I flinch. Every time he stays out past midnight, it takes a big effort to drive away the slight paranoia that won't let me fall asleep. Why bother, if it's such a big stress case? Because "I'm still in love". But after weeks of the same scenario I can honestly say that it sucks.

A relationship is successful if it continues to make you happy, and true happiness is a long-term sort of contentness. An emotional roller coaster of tears and ecstasy is all fun when you're, like, 15, but after a while you want something that brings you security. What I'm doing is about as antonymic of security as milk and Campari, and yet I stay. And here's a fun fact: I've been crying every night for the past week. Every damn night - about moving away, my parents' scandals, getting yelled at at the post office (yeah... seriously), being the emotional baggage girl in college, and how I'm losing this fight. I feel like I'm shooting myself in the foot when I tell him my insecurities, but that's wrong, because someone who truly cares about you won't love you less for your insecurities. Those nights, I feel helpless and can't think of a single step to take in the positive direction.

Then there are times like now, when I think I know what that step has to be. It is to trust, no matter how badly you want to keep your guard up. Either trust, or leave. I don't have much experience in love, but I think in the long term, it's better to be the person who puts themselves out there and gets hurt rather than the one who always lives in suspicion. Because pretending to be happy is about as helpful to you as knowing that tulips come from Turkey.
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The greatest lie ever told

I don't like talking to self-assured adults. They complain about their dull, banal problems and like to point out how much life experience they have to back up their arguments. What I saw back in Turkmenistan this summer was especially bad. The men took up the role of stoic-diplomat-on-vacation, walking around the pool with four cell phones allotted to their four different businesses while wearing very form-fitting underwear, and the women, when they weren't busy gossiping with each each other about what shade of beige is in this year (I'm dead serious), took precious minutes teaching their kids inverted morals to ensure that they grow up to be just like their parents. They all look hard for cliches and punchlines and idioms to appear intelligent to their aristocrat friends, whose brains just as equally epitomize degradation.

The greatest lie ever told is that life has meaning and adults know what it is. The problem is that by the time you realize this, it's too late: you've already spent your best years setting materialistic goals and slaving away toward a sugary future outlined by your parents (work hard in school -> work harder in college -> land a six-digit job -> success), and now you're thirty-something and no closer to enlightenment than you were ten years ago. Then you either end up with a special type of depression known as a mid-life crisis and desperately try to gain back lost time, or you can take your frustration out on your kids by letting the lie live on.

Does life have meaning, and does anyone know what it is? A popular opinion seems to be that we're brought into the world to find happiness. The problem with that theory is that it doesn't bring you any closer to being happy or to figuring out that which will make you happy. And if there are any adults worth talking to about this business, I haven't had the pleasure of meeting them.


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On art

Warning: do not attempt to read this post if you are excessively tired, sleepy, busy, impatient, or intoxicated.

Human longing! We cannot cease desiring, and this is our glory, and our doom. Desire! It carries us and crucifies us, delivers us every new day to a battlefield where, on the eve, the battle was lost; but in sunlight, does it not look like a territory ripe for conquest, a place where - even though tomorrow we will die - we can build empires doomed to fade to dust, as if the knowledge we have of their imminent fall had absolutely no effect on our eagerness to build them now? We are filled with the energy of constantly wanting that which we cannot have, we are abandoned at dawn on a field littered with corpses, we are transported until our death by projects that are no sooner completed than they must be renewed. Yet how exhausting it is to be constantly desiring...

This is from a book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, and I will probably be mentioning it a lot in the near future. Besides being hands-down the best book I've ever read, there are so many thoughts and ideas to take away from it. It continues to teach long after the last page was turned. I thought this was the perfect passage to start things off as it introduces the very reason I choose art - and I mean all kinds of art - as my career choice and lifelong path. I'm going into a political science major, but all for the sake of reporting on it using words that can influence, sentences that are crafted in a way that hits all the right buttons. That's art. Why is it that we are happy to read something really good, and we marvel at the writer's talent for so effortlessly lightening our mood?

...We soon aspire to pleasure without the quest, to a blissful state without beginning or end, where beauty would no longer be an aim or a project but the very proof of our nature. And that state is art. When we gaze at a still life, when - even though we did not pursue it - we delight in its beauty, a beauty borne away by the magnified and immobile figuration of things, we find pleasure in the fact that there was no need for longing, we may contemplate something we need not want, may cherish something we need not desire. In this scene before our eyes - silent, without life or motion - a time exempt of projects is incarnated, perfection purloined from duration and its weary greed - pleasure without desire, existence without duration, beauty without will.

For art is emotion without desire.

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The beginning of the end

And here I go again.

I'm definitely planning to continue the blog during college - how else will my old friends know the agonizing details of the big fat crazy booty-shaking adventure that is life at NYU - but I feel like those posts will belong to a world entirely different from this one. Before I take that last step, there are still some entries left to be written. They'll be succinct and probably random, just like my last thoughts about all the years spent in Palo Alto.

The reason I've been MIA for a month is that I've been vacationing in Russia, but that's not why I haven't posted in such a long time. The truth is that there are so many things to say that I can't even start talking. Hopefully they'll come out bit by bit over the next few weeks because as I've said before, writing helps me deal with whatever's wrong, and yes I KNOW I shouldn't be complaining because I'm going to a great school in one of the most exciting cities in the world and yada yada, but since I'm saying something's wrong I must have a reason, right?

All I ask of you readers is that you don't dismiss my reasons. "You'll forget about it in a few months" sounds dandy, but at least consider the possibility that there's more to it. There may be more to it than the routinely cold feet or my habitual overthinking or, as Mr. Daren liked to say, my "teenage angst" (how strange to think that I'll never have to answer to him again). Or there may be not. Mr. Pandich, my old history teacher, liked to remind us of the kiss principle - keep it simple, stupid - whenever we wrote anything, long or short. So I'm keeping it simple and unedited. This is me, this is the end of a huge chunk of my life and the beginning of another, and this is how I say goodbye.

After I get the obvious out of the way, it gets complicated.




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