Nothingness, To-do Lists, and Clarity

It's the beginning of Easter Break and I officially have nothing to do with myself. Strange. I'm always so busy, always looking to travel. But somehow, this time, I just didn't take the initiative to actually do anything. I could have gone home, but for some reason, I didn't. I really can't explain any of it. All I know at this point is that I find myself with 12 days of nothingness on this campus. As they say, idle hands are the devil's playthings.

I have many applications to fill out. It's like the world is laughing at me. "Ha, Valerie, you thought you were done with applications when you finished your university ones! Ha ha, you were so wrong, fill out 12 other forms now! Decide the rest of your life now! No pressure!". I feel like I am, in reality, simply filling out applications for adulthood. Like I'm filling out a list and trying to check off boxes to make sure I don't end up a homeless person after this place.

To-do list:
Choose a university.
Earn a regular salary.
Work on people skills.
Speak three languages.
Establish lifelong friendships.
Maintain a normal and mature love life.
Rent a Parisian apartment.
Find another (hopefully free) apartment on the other side of the world.

On the plus side, I've finished everything. All of my IAs, everything is in. It's anti-climactic. No one ran over and popped open some champagne for me and said "Congratulations, you managed not to give yourself a stroke while trying to pass the IB!". Nope. Just handed in some papers and moved on with life.

I think I am happy. I want to hold onto this feeling forever. It's much easier to have faith in everything, in destiny or whatever you'd like to call it, when my pillow still smells like he has just rolled out of bed, when I keep finding his clothes all over my room, when I am smoking his cigarettes, when I am still smiling and laughing about conversations we had. These are all clear, concrete things. It is just like when I came back from Uruguay. My head was so empty, my desires so obvious and easy. I want it to stay this way.

As I've pointed out before, idle hands are the devil's playthings. And although I have had fun succumbing to dancing with the devil before, I don't really feel like letting my hands be playthings for Satan any time soon.

Wow, what a strange metaphor. And what a strange week I have to look forward to. And what a strange life.

We Couldn't Bring the Columns Down

I have become so disillusioned with people that it has surprised me. I can't explain it. I've just taken to noticing a lack of humanity in the way we interact, the way we speak to each other. There are no lines that are not allowed to be crossed anymore; everything seems permissible. There are no distinctions between private and public life. People forget who they are because they are so focused on others. Perhaps we are too immature to simply leave each other alone once in awhile or, more frighteningly, perhaps we've just forgotten how to be compassionate.

On a better note, I now have a saint. It's beautiful, I'm speechless. I've only had it for a few hours and it makes me feel better already. Thank you.

Everything is just so...relevent at the moment. Except perhaps mock exams, which are quite irrelevent and annoying. But everything else. The music I find myself listening to, the things I find myself writing, the rose bush, the book I've just started reading, the conversations I've had recently. It all just coincidentally fits together. It all makes sense.

Fabula.

I'm writing again. Not blog-writing, not email-writing, not essay-writing. Valerie-writing. I'd forgotten how important it is to me to just be able to sit down and write for no one. And not necessarily write about my own life. It's not like diary-writing. It's writing for the sake of writing, writing because the world is intricate, writing because my fingers on the keyboard or my pen on the paper sound nice, writing because I can.

I'm not sure what I'll do with all of my written things. Stories are almost more important than diary entries. Stories tell a lot more about me and about my life than records of what I'm doing or thinking, because stories are uncontrollable. You set out to write complete fiction and only halfway through do you realize that you're not sure anymore whether the story is more fiction than reality or more reality than fiction. But at that point, it's too late and you have to finish the story, no matter how uncomfortable or personal it becomes.

Writing, in some way, also reaffirms my existence. Writing is the manifestation of my thoughts, my passions. Being able to write means that I have something to say, and having something to say is important in the general scheme of things.

Quote of the day, taken randomly from the wall next to my pillow:
"We do not have ideologies, we do not have theologies. We dance."-Libertad El Derecho A Atreverse

Possible.

For once in my life, I am frustrated by possibilities. Usually, possibilities comfort people. They like wondering if they have something to look forward to, like thinking that something might happen, like keeping the hope alive. I, on the other hand, have no patience for possibilities. I want things to happen or not to happen, simple as that. Now, I'm not promoting a black&white way of living, because by this point we should all know that I would rather life within the shades of gray in between. But shades of gray are not about possibilities. Shades of gray are about nuances, small things, moments. But possibilities? They're just about waiting, wasting time, wondering about things generally because someone doesn't have the self-assurance to just give you a straight answer or say something to you themselves. I am completely and entirely fed up with "possible".

And now I'm convinced that this entire post was possibly all misunderstood. Ha. Possibly.

Al Fin Del Mundo

You know, I wrote that Kate Chopin quote on my birthday. And I found out the day after my birthday, the day after I decided to use the quote, that Kate Chopin and I share the same birthday. If that's not fate-filled, I don't know what is.

It was at the end of the world. Misty and foggy and surrounded by water on three sides. It was full of my best friends and good champagne, pretty wooden floors and strong coffee. It's a place that's in the middle of nowhere in Norway, a country that is already in the middle of nowhere itself. And so far out there, dancing salsa and reggaeton and merengue until way too early in the morning, then waking up way too early to sit around in our sweatpants and drink coffee and listen to Jack Johnson....all the way out there, with all those strange things in such a strange place, all of that juxtaposition....and I was more happy than I've been in a long time. And no, not just because of the champagne. Because I was dancing with people I adore, because I was toasting my birthday with my best friends, because my Spanish has finally reached a conversational level, because it was debauchery at its finest.

Beautiful presents (I finally have a Spanish-language copy of "Love in the Times of Cholera"), beautiful food, beautiful wine, beautiful clothes, beautiful scenery, beautiful friends. I am content.

Another year.

"I never dreamed of her making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. But, when I found out what she was up to, the play was half over and it was then too late." -Kate Chopin

Stars.

I am again annoyed by the lack of respect for other's histories. This time generally because it seems as though everyone thinks that their "problems" are so much greater than everyone else's. They are not. And if you think that they are, then you don't know other people well enough. And this advice applies to me as well, and therefore I will not pain you with a list of all the things that were frustrating today. Because they are small, they are only events, they are not moments of living.

It's days like today that make me realize how incredibly lucky I am to be at this exact moment in my life with these exact people. Today was horrible and stressful and ominously prophetic of what I can expect for the next month. And another me, a younger me, would have gone and crawled in bed and cried. But this me, the now me, ended up okay. Ended up strangely happy, even. That is due mostly to the people I have, the people I care about. The people who make the endless meetings enjoyable, the people who make me smile with an offhand comment at lunch, the people that bake me cakes when I finish my political movement in Extended Essay form (those last people would be my roommates and they deserve specific naming because of the cake and because they are them).

I am too stressed to have a birthday. My mom told me to suck it up and deal with it, because apparently "adults" are always too stressed to have birthdays. Or they just stop caring about them. But I feel like birthdays demand special thought, special attention to meaning and detail. They require nostalgia and evaluations of years past. Birthdays involve philosophy. And I am just far too stressed to do justice to all of that.

Closure. I've realized what it is this time. It's walking away mid-sentence, closing the door, and not actually opening it again to finish the sentence. It's leaving in the middle but forcing it to be the end. It's not pretty, it's not romantic, it's not novel-worthy. But it is still closure.

On that note, I'll end with song lyrics. They're story-like and good enough to justify reproducing a large piece of them. They feel very central, very important. Enjoy them. Great love in realistic form is always an important thing.

"Juliet, the dice was loaded from the start. You promised me everything, you promised me thick and thin. Now you just say oh, Romeo, yeah I used to have a scene with him. Juliet, when we made love, you used to cry. I said I love you like the stars above, I love you til I die. And there's a place for us, you know the movie song. When you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet? I can't do the talk like the talk on the T.V. And I can't do a love song like the way it's meant to be. I can't do everything, but I'd do anything for you. I can't do anything except be in love with you. And all I do is miss you and the way we used to be. And all I do is keep the beat and the bad company. And all I do is kiss you through the bars of Orion. Juliet, I'd do the stars with you any time."