Carried Me Through Desperation

To the one that was waiting for me.

The past week and a half has been a whirlwind of sorts.  The combination of studying for finals, prepping for my cousin’s wedding and a two week trip to the East Coast, which includes trips to Philly, NYC, Jersey, and the DMV area, has left me in a state of exhaustion.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m stoked to be out here instead of being stuck in boring California.  But, especially during the Saturday of the wedding, the exhaustion caught up to me.

I had come to Philly Thursday morning running on 1.5 hours of sleep, and until Saturday night (technically Sunday morning), I had gotten less than three hours of sleep each night. The day of the wedding consisted of one hour of sleep, and an endless barrage of to-do’s prior to the ceremony.  Accompanied with the lack of sleep the whole week due to finals, all I wanted to do was die on Saturday.  I was pulled one way to help with the center pieces, the other way to help with a playlist that never got to play, another way to choreograph a dance, and another way to run countless errands.

In the end, I ended up missing the Gaye Holud at an ungodly 6AM, and the Baraat, which I made a playlist for that never saw the light.  I also missed the bride and groom’s entrance into the reception and didn’t eat dinner at the wedding.

The disorganization for the wedding was astounding; I never thought a wedding being run by a planner could be done so poorly, but I can’t even blame the planner.  My family has never been organized.  In fact, we are pretty much the definition of disorganization.  But you would think that if there was a planner, some type of organization would be followed. But somehow, my family managed to override the careful planning of a wonderful wedding planner and bring about a disastrously disorganized mess of a wedding that can really only be done through my relatives.

I have never really been the person to sit down, plan, sort, and think logically, despite my science background.  That is simply not the way I function.  It’s not necessarily the best way to go about life, but it’s worked thus far, and you know what they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

However, when I arrived Thursday at the ass-crack of dawn, instead of heading to sleep to catch up on some much needed Z’s from a not-so-hot finals week, I was immediately sent to run errands that should have been done weeks prior to the week of the wedding.

Now, this isn’t to say that I didn’t want to help with the festivities.  The cousin getting married wasn’t just my cousin, but she was the older sister I never had.  So, I put my feelings to the side because the most important day of her life, not mine, was coming.  And I was ready to do anything to help make this the best for her and her future husband.

I take that back, she is like my second older sister, right after my brother. 😉

But, despite my best efforts, my dysfunctional family always manages to disorganize everything and create huge messes of everything that don’t need to be messed with in the first place.  And they manage to start drama or rekindle the flames of old drama during the MOST inconvenient times.  As my generation of people try to put any and all beef to the back and try to bring about happiness for my cousin who has done so much for us, the older generation cannot stop their bullshit arguments for the sake of their daughter’s/niece’s wedding.  It got so annoying that I tried to avoid and ignore all the adults, including my parents, who I haven’t seen in months, at all costs.  And as always, all the drama that never should have been talked about in the first place caused an incredible amount of disorganization that all ended up falling on my cousin, despite how much we other cousins tried to keep it off of her.  She already has the tendency to take things personally and get emotionally attached to everything, which is why we purposely kept everything going on behind the scenes from her.  She cares too much about familial issues, trivial or not, something I don’t do enough of. My family is cuckoo, I don’t have the energy to care about the trivial shit.

But, despite the shit-show of stuff that happened prior to the wedding, the end result was a success.  The bride and groom enjoyed their time celebrating their love and matrimony, and we as the spectators watched lovingly as their happiness spread contagiously around the room and seeped into the hearts of even the emotionally unavailable like myself.  The alcohol was flowing, the music was popping, and two beers, three vodka cranberries, a green tea martini, and countless ratchets dances later, I was propelled through the wedding of two people who I care deeply about.

Because not even fucked up family dynamics can stop a love like theirs.

#curryfriedchicken

 

So If You’re Down On Your Luck

Then you should know just how it feels. 

Next week is the last week of my undergraduate career.

It feels weird to even be thinking of that.  For the past 17 years of my life, I have been subjected to the rigors of the educational system, endlessly being fed the history of the country, the inferior societal positions of people of color and women, the never-ending confusion of how to take the tangent of an angle.

And it’s coming to an end next week.

Four years ago, when I entered college, I already wanted it to end.  I was so fed up with school, and not only did I go to school in a place where I didn’t want to go initially, I was simply tired of being part of this robotic system of education that society wants us all to be part of.  I didn’t want to be in school; I wanted to travel and learn about the world.  But, from a young age I was taught that education is the only way to be successful in life.  And I was kept from wandering off on to the road less traveled, and kept on the path to college.

But as my undergraduate years come to and end, I realized that I had a change of heart over the past four years.  Yes, I do wish that I was able to go out every weekend, befriend more people, and live the life of a business major (stereotype, but most business majors I know are major partiers).  Instead, I decided to be a science major, and slave over endless lecture slides of electron pushing mechanisms, biochemical pathways, and oxidation-reduction reactions.  I worked all four years of college, and decided that financial comfort was more important to me than going out bar hopping in the Mission.  After all, these student loans and San Francisco rent ain’t gon’ pay itself.  And, I don’t regret the decision that I made.

Throughout my years, I went through some tough times outside of class.  My mom was diagnosed with cancer, my brother was arrested twice and survived a car crash that should’ve killed him, I had to kick roommates out of my apartment for various reasons, my grandmom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and my parents moved to Colorado.  All of these affected my already fucked up mental state tremendously.  My grades slipped in crucial times of the semester, and ended up lowering my GPA.  But, I haven’t dropped below a cumulative GPA of 3.0, and although not what I wanted, it was good, considering the shit I had to endure.  Yes, I know I have it a lot better than most, but considering how privileged I was to grow up the way I did, this stuff was hard.

It is true that many of my classes required me to memorize a shit ton of things, but when I was taught, and not lectured at, I learned.  Instead of memorizing the glycolytic pathway, I learned the purpose of the pathway is to create pyruvate, which is subsequently used in the electron transport chain, oxidative-phosphorylation, and ATP synthase to create the energy we use, ATP.  I isolated alkaline phosphatase from a K-12 strain of E. coli, and studied its kinetics.  I learned.

Initially, I hated the idea of going to college, but it was the only path I knew to take.  Now, I am thankful for my education.  Whether or not I use it in my career, I am thankful.  I learned so much problem solving and, surprisingly, creative thinking from all of my science classes.  I learned that I am capable of success if I work hard enough.  I learned that I work best under pressure.  I learned that although I am not perfect, I am a succeeding work in progress.  My grades are not the best, but they aren’t the worst.  I could’ve done way better if I applied myself more.  But, college is hard.  I let things get to me when they shouldn’t have.  My work and volunteer experience brought about a new understanding of the world I wouldn’t have experienced had I not gone to college.

So as my undergraduate career comes to an end, it’s a bittersweet feeling.  I’m glad the seemingly never-ending lecture notes, the bad lecturers, the terrible tests, and pretentious classmates are in my past.  But, I’ll be stepping outside the overbearing system I’ve been sheltered by for the past 17 years.  And I’m still clueless as ever about my future.

And although graduate school is still in my future, I need to figure out what I’ll be going there for.  So, for the time between now and grad school, I’m scared.  This chunk of time is so crucial for me to not disappoint my parents that I’m getting anxious just typing about it.

I don’t know if I had any direction in what I wrote, I’m literally going off the top when I usually write things down prior to posting.  But, the main takeaway is this:

I’m scared.

 

What You Want Me To Do, I’m Sorry

I’m back. 

This past weekend, I took the 5.5 hour drive down to Southern California to go to Harry Potter World at Universal Studios.

I guess I also went to visit my sister.

LA is a cool place, and there are a lot of exciting things to do there, but I don’t really wanna live there.  Most of the people I’ve met from LA are incredibly shallow and superficial, and I ain’t about that life.

I mean, don’t get it twisted, I like me some Nike’s too, but shit, the world doesn’t revolve around looks.

*Robert Freeman voice*: All the money I spent on them damn Nike’s?  You better just do it.

The Boondocks is one of my top 5 favorite shows, I can’t help the references.

And not to mention that damn traffic in LA.  Like, no.

But it is nice to get out of The Bay every so often, and even if it’s a mini vacation to LA, it’s refreshing to get away from the stresses of being home every so often.  It has been my dream ever since I was little to travel around the world.  I’ve been blessed in life to have gone to many different places around the country, and have also had the opportunity to go outside the country.  These opportunities left an urge to travel imprinted in my soul.  Since 2008, money has been tight in the family, and with three kids in college, my parents have neither the time, nor money, to go on extravagant trips to the Caribbean or India as we did growing up.

So I want to take the monetary burden on myself, and travel when I can.  I don’t have the time or money right now, considering I’m still taking a class and am definitely in no financial position to be traveling, but in the near future, I want to be able to go to a place I’ve never been.  Embarking on the solo drive to LA has reignited my travel flame, and I want it to continue to burn.

That is why I haven’t made a post in the past couple days.  I’ve been enjoying my time away from home, and wasn’t on my computer the whole weekend.

And I enjoyed every minute of it.

But I think I’m ready to get back on this grind.