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Never Good Enough//The Dreamer

It’s been an Alice in Wonderland past couple months. I don’t think I’ve ever been so spaced out for such a long time. I feel like I’ve been walking through a dream world, and even more tired all the time than usual. Everything has seemed so bizarre and detached, like the things that I found meaningful before have stopped and become inverted. My motivation has plummeted and I don’t know how to regain that spark. Maybe the pendulum is swinging back from idealism to realism, or maybe I’m just completely losing it.

By all rights, it’s been a rather productive latter half of 2013, and I probably should be pretty happy:

  • I survived the John Muir Trail, which was absolutely stunning and an amazing hike. I really need to write things up, but knowing me, it might never happen at this point. Highly recommended.
  • I’ve somewhat acclimated to living in San Francisco. Despite the fact that it’s almost always foggy and cold and parking sucks and the 2-hour round-trip weekday commute makes me want to stab myself in the face, I’m slowly warming up to the city and discovering some of its charms and (shall we say) character.
  • I bought a house down in San Diego. It’ll be a rental property, and my dream of being a slumlord is becoming a reality.
  • I got promoted.

And yet, I feel this nagging dissatisfaction, which unlike most times, I think goes way beyond the lack of a girlfriend thing. Hard as I try, everything I do never seems to be good enough for myself. Which, fine: I know I’ll always be my harshest critic, and fundamentally, I think that being complacent is the kiss of death. I can’t help but wonder, though, if life really should be this endless struggle for betterment. Shouldn’t there be a point where we can call it quits and be satisfied with the results of who we are and what we’ve accomplished? Even knowing that there’s the next mountain to climb, can’t we appreciate the view from this one?

At some point in the past, I had a meditative refuge to where I could retreat. I don’t think I have that anymore. I feel perpetually restless. Sleep doesn’t reinvigorate me.

Maybe it’s this ankle that’s been sapping my motivation in ballet. It’s not that I can’t dance, but the soreness and weakness just makes moving so frustrating. It’s only tendonitis, so it could have been a lot worse. But I also feel like I’ve not improved much, if at all, over the past year or so. I told myself that I’d stick with ballet for five years, or would quit when I stopped getting better at it. It seems like the two are coinciding quite neatly right now, and so I wonder — after an especially frustrating rehearsal — whether it’s about time to move on. What do you do when it stops being fun, and yet you can’t quite seem to let it go?

There was this article about how Taylor Swift’s view on love has migrated away from the “daydreamy prince-and-princess place” (link). I think a little part of me died when I read it. A lot of my friends wonder why I like listening to Taylor Swift and other teen-oriented pop, especially given my otherwise rather pessimistic worldview. Notwithstanding that there’s no accounting for taste, I think that I’d much rather live in a world where there exist such dreamers, where people still believe in things like true love, and where there is such a thing as innocence. Even if I can’t be fully convinced of such things, at least others still believe. Isn’t that what life is about, pursuing the stuff of dreams?

Maybe the JMT has affected me more than I thought. After all, the first and lasting impression upon coming back to civilization was that so much of this is so unnecessary. We can live with so much less than what we have; and I’ve never been convinced that, despite all the good that technology supplies, whether any of it makes us any happier. And yet how quickly I returned to business as usual, my quotidian routine.

It’s always been a promise to myself that I wouldn’t get so caught up in the rat race that I would lose sight of my dreams and what really matters. Have I strayed again? Have I gone so far from my true self that I don’t even realize it? Or do I not even know what my true self is to begin with?

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Catch Up

It’s been a long time. All of this feels rusty; I feel like I’ve lost what little ability I had to craft sentences. So many thoughts clutter my mind that I’ve realized that I need to write, to organize some of this internal, maddening dialogue. So even though I feel like I should just keep a lot of this bottled up (most of you, much less the world in general, probably don’t care), I don’t think I can without my thoughts eventually crippling me. This will be lumbering and perambulatory despite my best intentions.

Where to begin? Let’s catch up since the last post, which was way back in May(!). There were many times this year when I told myself that I should just shut this website down, but here I am again. I guess it’s been quite an interesting year, mostly by my own design, but I do see my queue lightening up, with a semblance of a break after all the activities in September. Maybe I’ll have a relatively quiet end of the year after all the birthday bashes.

The BANDW show earlier in May I thought was the most challenging, and I can’t help but feel that my partner slipping was at least partially my fault. Although the floor was a bit inconsistent as well. BANDW was also the most intimidating because everyone else performing is for real. But I definitely learned a lot and enjoyed the experience.

The WB spring show went really well, I thought. It’s always an inspiring and humbling experience to see both the girls and the fellow adult dancers in action. Such an honor and so proud of everyone. Makes me think I should do Nutcracker this year, even though it’s kind of a long drive every Saturday for rehearsals. I really do miss Saturday rehearsals, though, odd as it sounds.

The there was the PDA show in June. Given that I only had like 6 weeks to learn the choreography, I’m so happy that I didn’t forget anything. I have no idea if I looked good or not, but I felt like it came together. Many people dislike the greater flash and bang of competition schools, but there’s some equally real talent among the guys and girls there, too. And I’m equally awed and inspired by this group of dancers as well.

Somewhere in that blur of a performance schedule, I moved to foggy San Francisco. With the performances and other trips, I’ve not really had too many weekends to enjoy and explore the city, so my sentiment about this move has been mixed at best. The additional two hours of commute each workday has really worn me down, and I don’t think I’m really cut out for city life. That being said, this neighborhood is really quite nice, and it’s also nice to be able to more frequently catch up with friends living up here (although at the cost of less frequently catching up with friends in the south bay).

The big birthday came and went. I was planning a big birthday bash, but things turned out much more modest: dinner and karaoke with some good friends on Saturday, and then a mini concert and housewarming party. I could have wished the weather to be a little better, but overall, it was great to see a whole bunch of friends.

Then the week of July 4th was spent at dance camp. If you told me that I’d spend a week’s vacation to just take classes and dance in a weird suburb of Portland, I’d have thought you’re crazy. It seemed like a strange and ridiculous dream to sell: a ballet summer intensive for adults. Yet, somehow it works. It was definitely a physically tiring experience, but the most surprising thing was how refreshing it was to not have to spend a full day at work before dancing. The mental exhaustion from work really does carry over to those evening classes.

Of course, the best thing was meeting people as crazy as me. People crazy enough to take a week off work to just dance, who are as passionate about ballet despite most of us having no professional aspirations. It’s been a fun summer of dancing, and I’m certainly glad that I had it to balance out the rest of my life.

The past month has been spent in equal parts trying to prepare for and dreading the upcoming John Muir Trail hike. At some point earlier this year, this sounded like a fantastic idea. But now that it’s coming up in a few days, the thought of having to hike 220 miles is filling me with quite a bit of apprehension. And considering how much the Sykes hot springs hike we did a few weekends ago still has my ankle in bad shape, I’m beginning (a little too late) to question my physical readiness, in addition to my mental readiness. At the very least, after the umpteenth trip to REI and thousands of dollars spent, I think I’m about set on the gear front. The fun part (shopping) is over; time to get serious.

One day, I’ll try to understand why I willingly go on such grueling vacations. So many friends are in Hawaii right now, I feel a little jealous.

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Where am I?

For months now, I’ve kept hoping against hope that I’d have time to organize my thoughts in some coherent manner, but I don’t think that will happen any time soon. I’ve overcommitted to things (work and extracurricular) and haven’t had nearly enough downtime to process some of these long strands of thoughts that I really need to resolve. On the one hand, being super busy keeps the demons at bay; on the other, things just pile up and will come to a head eventually. Anyway, these thoughts will be quite incomplete and not quite the magnum opus of posts envisioned in my mind.

Yes, I am actually going to move to San Francisco on what has been a more-or-less spur of the moment decision. I know a lot of friends were quite surprised when I told them, and to be honest, so was I. It was an idea that I’ve entertained for years, but never thought I would actually do. This is going to majorly derail what I thought I was going to do this year: buy a place in the South Bay or peninsula and settle down. Instead of laying down roots, I will be upending a good chunk my current life. I hope for the better, but I have lots of doubts. To say that I’m not a city person is an understatement. And to follow friends into the city and become a part of (and in some sense, buy into) that false cachet of living in San Francisco life pains me to the core. We’ll see how long I can stand the hipster snobbery, and whether through prolonged exposure I’ll become one of them or not.

But it’s been clear that my life has been stagnating of late, and with the recent, all-too-evident failures to progress on certain life goals, some self-imposed shakeup is absolutely necessary. I must admit that my not getting the promotion has affected me more than I would have expected, even having been warned beforehand that it would have been a tossup at best this cycle. I really could use a spark of inspiration on the work front, because my current set of projects are draining me and leaving something to be desired.

And the fact that I still can’t talk to this girl for fear that I might fall for her again really depresses me to no end. It’s just so stupid that I want to cry. Also, the fact that I keep having these dreams/nightmares does not help at all — even when I sleep 8 hours a night, I don’t feel rested at all in the morning.

Wedging some physical distance from work I hope will help combat the doldrums I seem to be in, as well as enable me to detach more from work. A change of scenery and a change of pace will likely do me good. I am not too keen on the longer commute, but if I can get some work (or sleep) done on the shuttle, I hope the extra 2 hours a day will not be a complete loss. And as much as I will miss whatever reduced contact with my friends down here, I’m excited to hopefully see more often my friends up there (whom I don’t visit nearly enough, and who also never seem to come down here). And to meet new people, even though it scares and exhausts me to do so.

At some point, I will have to go through the exact logistics of what I will and will not be able to do after the move. I really hope that I can stick with WB, but I’m really unclear if performing will be a real possibility. Maybe it will be good to not spend all non-work hours in ballet, to have some forced downtime and to explore new things. But I will really, really miss the friends and the experiences it’s given me. A lot of things are in the air right now, which is probably a good thing because I don’t know who I am, and now is as good a time as any to go exploring and figure some things out.