Also, one of the greatest motivational videos ever.

I’m sort of scared of growing up, of getting old and losing my youth. Growing up has its benefits. I like being independent and being in control of my life. But in some ways, I’m still very much a child at heart. I’m still kind of shy. I think just as I was starting to figure out high school social dynamics, I suddenly had to graduate and be thrust into the chaotic social environment of Cal, a school with 25,000 undergrads.

I’ve been hear for over a year now, and yet I still feel like I haven’t been able to truly connect with anyone. It’s like the beginning of high school again; it took me two years  to truly find people that I really enjoyed hanging out with. Even then, they were few and far between. Sometimes I just think that I’m too closed off and judgmental of new people… and yet I’m pretty sociable and quite curious about people. It’s been over a year at Cal, and yet I still don’t really have any close friends besides those that came to Cal with me from high school.

Part of it is surely simply a result of the social environment. Like Cody says, hanging out was easier in high school. You were basically stuck at school for 6 hours with these people, and you had time in between classes and even during classes sometimes to just hang out and talk. In college, it definitely requires much more effort to make a connection. You aren’t stuck on campus for 6 or 7 hours at a time; instead, it’s more like go to class, then go home and nap till next class.

But part of it also has to me. I meet people, I get acquainted… and then I don’t pursue anything more. I don’t bother to ask people to hang out. I don’t feel like I connect with people… like most of the time we’re just shooting the shit or making small talk, not actually having a meaningful conversation. So I get acquainted with someone, and then from there we’re basically relegated to being Facebook friends for the future.

I don’t talk to enough people. I really should make an effort to make more friends in class… I don’t really know why I don’t.

You might say, “But Shawn, you’re in a frat. What about your bros?” And to be perfectly honest, I don’t feel like I really know half of them at all. The other half, it’s not really much of a close friendship. Maybe I just don’t really belong in the frat. They’re cool guys, but there’s the key phrase again: we don’t really connect.

Girls are also kind of a problem. I see cute girls, and then most of the time I don’t ever go up and do something. The few times I have, it’s actually been relatively successful (I’m talking outside parties), but then I end up changing my mind and cutting myself off.

And there’s this one girl. I barely even know her, and I’m obsessed about her. It’s all shallow, but apparently I’m shallow enough to fall head over heels for a girl I don’t even really know. And I know it’s so stupid of me, but she’s so fucking beautiful that I can’t forget about her. From the first time I saw her on the phone at Foothill, I was floored.

I guess the only things I can do at this point about my problems is to try to meet more people and be more sociable. Maybe I should read Dale Carnegie again… it helped me last time I read it.

What are these distractions? I feel like things like Starcraft, Reddit, Facebook, K-pop, and general random Internet stuff that’s ultimately trivial and really doesn’t add much meaning to my life. Instead, they just distract me from focusing on the important things in life.

What are these important things? I thought about it for a bit, and here’s what I came up with.
1. Relationships. This includes family, friends, and girls. I hope to be able to cultivate more and stronger relationships and improve the ones I already have.
2. Grades. What I do now affects my options later on in life. This is the one important thing that I’ve been slacking on the most. Studying is hard and tiring, but it’s necessary. I need to take my grades more seriously.
3. Training. This is something that my focus and motivation hasn’t been lacking on. I started off just training to increase fitness and aesthetics, but I think my motivations have varied over time. For some time, I focused on increasing fitness so I could try a larger number of the physical activities (from martial arts to rock climbing to parkour to gymnastics) that are on my bucket list. While I’m still interested in these, recently my interest has taken a turn toward Olympic weightlifting. I really want to get the movements down and start training seriously. Perhaps I’ll be able to start competing in a few years… I don’t know. All I know is that training is important to me. In addition to lifting, I hope to improve my soccer skills too.
4. Self-improvement and growth. I guess this ties into both relationships and training, but I realized that I really haven’t pushed my boundaries in a while. When I read Dale Carnegie in fifth grade, I tried to apply its principles and felt like I really grew. Similarly, in middle school, I encountered a variety of new people and situations that made me grow. I felt like I stagnated for much of high school, and even freshman year of college was a relatively unproductive year. This summer, however, I’ve started to read up on a variety of topics, such as nutrition, exercise, and relationships. Either keep moving and growing or stagnate. I feel like I’ve started to grow again, to slowly push my boundaries and try to improve myself as a person.
5. Academics and life direction. I will need to declare a major soon and really start preparing for my possible career pursuits by doing things such as getting research positions. I wish there wasn’t such a short timeline for this, but end of sophomore year is the deadline for declaring a major. I hope to be more mindful of my interests and think about where I’m headed in life.

In the light of these essential, important things in my life, I feel like everything else is just a distraction. Movies, games, blogs, random Internet stuff all seem so trivial when I think about it. Yet it’s so easy to get caught up in them and just live your life around browsing the Internet and refreshing Reddit… I can only hope that I will be more mindful in the future about how I’m spending my time.

It’s sad that those times will never be again. I miss those days.

However, I didn’t bring my dream journal home for winter break, and I’ve been having some weird dreams I think I should record somewhere, and I decided to put it here. Some of these dreams may have some weird content, but don’t blame me. I’m not in control of what I dream. :/

So ever since I’ve come home two days ago and started getting much more sleep than I did at Berkeley, I find that I’ve been having some weird dreams.

The first one I remember is really random. Emily was a gamer for some reason, and she was apparently really into Counter-Strike: Source. I think she was even in a clan or something. Anyway, I remember looking at her Steam profile and seeing like 150 hours on CS:S, which is quite a bit of playing time. I thought it was really cool that she played games, and I decided to introduce her to what was obviously the best FPS of all time: TF2. I told her I was gonna have her play a game, and she booted it up and then said “Hey, this is TF2!” I have no idea how she didn’t know what it was before booting it, or how I got her to play a game without actually being physically there. But anyway we were on the same server, and I was just going around trying to puff and sting people and showing off my obviously 1337 TF2 skillz to her. I think I called either her or the other players noobs. I have no idea why I dreamt this, but I did. >_> Anyway, I woke up in the middle of the dream and was like, “WTF Emily playing video games? I wish. She doesn’t even understand 90% of internet memes.”

Weird as that dream is, I’ve had far weirder dreams recently that have also been slightly worrying. I’m referring to two dreams, one from yesterday night I think and one from tonight (that I just woke up from about 30 minutes ago). They’re both nightmares, and they both revolve around the same character. They’re like one of those recurring dreams, because they were pretty similar in content. Both dreams had me hearing some girl who sounded scared in our porch (at my old house in Irvine) calling someone and saying that she wanted to report an assassination. In both dreams, I poked my head out of the door and, I guess out of my trusting nature, assumed she was a good person since she seemed scared and was reporting a murder and asked her if she wanted to come in. Now, this person wasn’t just some ordinary girl. She looked fucking freaky. She had black eye-makeup all around her eye area, and she had jet black, messy short hair. The rest of her face was pale. I don’t know… I think she was based on the girl from Blade Runner, which I watched about a week ago.

This girl:

Fuck that shit. Anyway, I don’t remember what else happened in my first dream. In my second one, though, right after I asked her I began to feel some fear, as if I couldn’t trust her. I immediately closed my door after she declined and locked it, as well as tried to close the shutters on the windows without making it obvious. She started shining a flashlight through the window, as if she was trying to see through. Apparently I was living with some really tall white bald dude (I know, random), and I immediately called him. Also, I started crawling on the floor to avoid her seeing me through the windows. The white dude came down and apparently figured out that she was a murderer and had set up some sort of trap to murder us both. I don’t even know why… it’s not like we pissed her off or something. Apparently she had distracted the police too by drawing them to the local church somehow (probably the assassination report), so the police couldn’t come help us. By this time, I was fucking scared as hell. However, I somehow realized that it was a dream, and I decided that I didn’t want to have a nightmare and woke myself up. Yes, I know that was really anticlimactic, and you’re probably like “WTF Shawn, did I really just read through all that to have you wake up and not find out any action in the dream?” Yeah, you did.

That’s the second time I’ve had a nightmare (and they were both pretty much similar) in two nights. I hope this is not going to continue. :/

It’s probably just a phase, and I’ll get over it soon. But it’s pretty annoying.

I’ve been pretty much apathetic today. Napped for about 3 hours after I got home, wasted 2 or 3 hours on the computer, played piano for almost an hour, worked out for a bit, took a shower, and only started homework at around 10:30.

Meh. I just want to know where I get in for colleges. That feels like the only thing that really matters right now.

Also, the art place next to the restaurant is pretty amazing. The paintings are so colorful and bright. I went in and was amazed by the quality of the paintings. Michael Brandon’s, the new suit place, has some pretty nice suits. I wanna get one of their sportsjackets or coats. Maybe more than one. But they’re all like $160.

We tried to watch Avatar, but the time we wanted was sold out and the other ones were too late. So we deliberated for an hour over what to do, and eventually we decided to go karaoke. WHICH WAS AMAZING. Harry is a pretty legit rapper. Anyway, there’s something about singing that just everyone loves. It was the most fun I’ve had in quite a while.

Winter break… I’ve still got a lot of work to do. I plan on doing them early and then being able to relax for whatever time I have left.

Also, my parents are being really annoying lately, on a variety of things. I don’t feel like going into detail now.

That’s the best way to sum up my current predicament.

I don’t know why, but I’ve been feeling empty/unmotivated/almost bored for the last two days. I don’t know what it is, and I’m trying to break out of it. This is the worst time to get stuck in a rut. Next week promises to be the busiest week I’ve EVER had in my life thus far. Dinneen assigned a huge election project yesterday (Friday) and we have posters and campaign speeches due on Monday, as well as other stuff due Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I’ve got art history to read. Notecards to do. A test on Monday. I just finished Hamlet. Got to do Hamlet lit journal. Have to read lots of Crime and Punishment by Monday as well… something like 60 pages. Stats homework, as usual. Next week, in addition to having the election project all week, is also print week. Holy crap.

Yet, I feel empty. Unmotivated. Searching for something greater. Something more meaningful than this.

Relief from the emptiness is only brought by music. Whether I’m the listener or the player, suddenly some semblances of meaning and emotion flood back into me. When I’m playing piano, I’m fully engrossed in the music. Eternally pursuing perfection. Trying to fix that little mistake. Practicing over and over again. Then, I feel determined. Then, I feel motivated. I don’t think I’ve ever quite appreciated the importance of music before now.

You know what makes me feel again? Hearing Alicia Keys belt out “NEWWW YORRKKKK, CONCRETE JUNGLE WHERE DREAMS ARE MADE OF, THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO. NOW YOU’RE IN NEWW YORKKKKK, THESE STREETS WILL MAKE YOU FEEL BRAND NEW, BIG LIGHTS WILL INSPIRE. HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORKKK!!” There’s so much love for her home city in these lyrics. It’s amazing.

Ehh… I guess I’ll just have to trust I did an okay job. I asked him some stuff about the college, and from what he said it still seems like an amazing place.