Shelving memories

I'm wondering how much I can remember from each year of my life. If I were to try to extract all the memories I have from each year I can remember, what would I get? To help, school would be used as a framing device, since I know I'll be able to recall things better if I can remember what grade I was in and who my teachers were, and from there I can remember the names of my classmates and where I might have been sitting, and from that I can remember certain class assignments or funny things that happened then, and who my friends were and what things we might have done in elementary school. Some memories would easily fit into certain years, while others would kind of hover around in the area of "elementary school" or sometimes in "that time before I went to London for vacation, and after I became friends with so-and-so." If the specifically placed memories sat on shelves numbered by year, which themselves were stacked one above the other, I could draw the larger vertical brackets for elementary school and middle school and adolescence, etc. where the hazier memories could sit, and they could wait out there in the margins till I remembered what year they were from. Meanwhile the other memories would be packed in tight like socks in a drawer or spread out loose like a silk shirt, depending on what the number of memories for that year was, and if I guess the shelves were drawers instead, and if sometimes one large, thin memory covered the year pretty well.

But that would be kind of fun, right? If we wrote down all the years we've lived and tried to make notes to indicate any broad swaths of memory we've still got like that we played cards after finals in 7th grade with people we didn't know very well and it was surprisingly fun, then we could see all the blank patches and the times that were supersaturated with memories (I think colorful balloons for some reason). It's getting weirder for me to realize that when I remember middle school, I only have 3-4 overarching, go-to memories, and if I rely on those and think, right, middle school was those 3-4 things and a whole lot more, I'll forget the whole lot more slowly over time and then one day they won't really be there. It's weird that I know a whole year happened, probably with a lot of stress and anxiety and joy and awkwardness, and I can only remember one thing from that whole year of experiences, like somehow a year's worth of stuff was condensed into one memory, or bits from that year fell out until only that bit was left. I'm not sure if one averaged out memory or a random sampling of one memory from a year's worth is better.

Just now I was trying to review my Spanish, and one of the sentences I was supposed to translate reminded me of this moment in class, and it might have been Spanish class, but I'm not really sure. But it was a moment when I was sitting with 3 or 4 people, and we were supposed to be working as a group to do some I think holiday or unit-themed assignment that was slightly embarrassing. I think the assignment was to use the new words we had learned to act out a scene where someone is single and looking for a boyfriend/girlfriend, and everyone else is vying for their attention. For some reason someone in our group ended up volunteering us to present our scene from our seats and act out the dialogue. I remember I was supposed to convince our bachelor that I was the best choice, while my other classmate was supposed to present himself as the better choice, and he said something about how he made a lot of money because he or his parents were doctors, and then I'd said something about how money doesn't matter, and that I cared more, and the person who was choosing between us ended up being very diplomatic about it in sort of a weird way, because he spoke really formally, like he was weighing job offers. He said something about how he could see the advantages for both, but in the end he chose one of us (can't remember who) because (I can't remember why, but it sort of made sense. It had something to do with how because the other guy or his parents were doctors, they must ___, so he would rather ___ and so he chose __). I just can't place this memory. I'm not really sure it was Spanish class, because I don't think I knew enough Spanish to say that exactly, and I'm not sure my classmates knew enough either. But I just can't imagine in what other class or situation this might have happened. Anyway, maybe I'll remember sometime. I don't think I've recalled that memory in years, so there are a bunch of holes. I don't remember whether I was in middle school or high school, or who my classmates were, except by gender and generalized personality, or who my teacher was, except that she announced the assignment with joy and some people groaned, and she might have clapped her hands together to get our attention to announce the last assignment of the day.

I'm starting to think actually, that it might have been in this Chinese class I was sitting in on, because we might have known enough Chinese to go through that scenario. I also just placed the classroom and now the group and everything is fitting together, because we were sitting near the door and there weren't that many students in the class, and I'm pretty sure we had just learned majors and occupations and how to say that a job was lucrative. We definitely learned how to say doctor. Mystery solved!

Sometime, I'll do the listing the years and extracting the memories from each exercise. It could be almost like a bookkeeping thing, just for memories and for fun.

October 9th, some scribbling and a thought

our simplest signs from another day

Dear October,

It’s the ninth already. We’re moving so quickly! Yesterday, I got together with Tar, Rim, and one of our classmates, and we pretended to be 6 year olds, drawing and making posters for an imaginary lemonade stand as an ad campaign exercise for psychology class. It was surprisingly relaxing. I think it would be so therapeutic to have a six year old drawing session every week, just to de-stress and get out of our graphic design (and other college-major-imposed) mindsets. Even when we were just starting on our posters (our group was a mix of graphic design and illustration majors), we really had to tamp down the urge to sketch out the composition… Two of us immediately took out pencils and sketched for a few seconds until we remembered that we were supposed to be six year olds—unimpeded by hesitation! Maybe. So we went in with our sharpies and crayons and chisel-tipped markers, and it was such a relief to just let go.

I had a random thought today, while I was absentmindedly tearing a few layers of paper scraps on my desk in studio. I’d cut pages of my book draft out of the center of several sheets of paper, and all that was left were white floppy frames. I kind of absentmindedly tore these frames into segments as I talked to friends in studio, and there was this strange tactile quality to the slow and steady ripping that made me wonder what it would be like if I spent a whole year ripping this one segment of paper. When I finally pulled the two pieces apart completely, would I feel some sort of relief? Would it feel surreal, to suddenly have ended something that I’d been working on for so long? I don't know why I was wondering this, because it seems like there's no point in wondering about it, but I just couldn't let go of that thought.

song of the day: Tell Me What You Want From Me by Good Old War - a good, upbeat song from the Kodaline concert (Good Old War played too) I went to, and super fun to sing out loud in a crowd

Indigo

Happy New Year!

I'm alive. High school is busy, as usual. Happy 2010!
I have no new year's resolutions, so I'll make some right now.

1. Get all A's.

2. Sleep earlier.

3. Stay in contact with everyone.

There we go. Ok, so I was thinking. When I was 8 years old, I thought I was going to be a normal person. Go to a good school, another good school, and then another good school. And then I would get a part time job at a cafe and serve coffee to people. I always thought that was an awesome job. It looks fun. The only problem is that I can't handle situations with people, but I figured that I would know how to by the time I got the job. And then I would do everything else as a hobby. My plan kind of stops after college, simply because I didn't really know what would happen after that.

So now I'm thinking, if my 8 year old self could see me right now, would she be happy or surprised or confused? I keep changing my answer, but at the moment, I think I would be kind of bored. Everything is pretty much the same. I'd be happy to know that I survived middle school. I think I'm stranger than before too. And then I would be annoyed because nothing amazingly interesting happened between then and now. Nothing like, I learned how to play the clarinet, or I actually learned Spanish and Chinese and could speak it fluently! I hope that in 10 years I'll know how to speak both easily. Or almost as easily as with English. Although I'm horrible at explaining things in English, so that might be a problem.

Also. I've been staying up until 2:00am almost every night doing homework and sometimes even working ahead a tiny bit. Or finishing some art that I had been procrastinating on before. And I tell myself that I'm preparing for the future, so I can get into a good college and then a good job and all that. But then when I do get a good job, I'll keep preparing for the future. So I'm afraid that I'll always be preparing for the future, and never being in the future.

And everyone is preparing for some kind of future. We save our money so that we can use it when we need it later. As a kid, I ordered cafeteria food. I always left all the best stuff for last, but just when I started to get to the good stuff, we had to go, and I had to throw away all my wonderful food. I kept doing that, just because I'm stubborn with those little things that can so easily be done another way.

Anyway, the point is, the future never comes, right? It's like how everyone thinks about the past even though its all over. And then everyone thinks about the future even though it never comes. And it feels like we never think about the present sometimes, because it's over in an instant before it goes into the past. But if you pile up all the times you think about now right now, do you think it would be greater than the piles of future-and-past-thinking? I rarely think during the moment. It's always a little afterwards that I remember it.

I frequently think, "Record this moment." because I feel like I need to stop and absorb everything sometimes. Because this time, you can tell yourself, I know my mom's presence is over there, and my friend's presence is over there, and I'm sitting here, in my room right now, and it's cold. And then maybe if I want to recall something later, I'll remember it better. It works though. I remember a bunch of random times when almost nothing is happening because everything is normal.

Of course, you have to close your eyes when you do this. Because it's too easy to just think, "Record this moment." all the time and then forget it all later. At least with closing your eyes, there's some kind of risk involved. People could look at you funny, for one. Same with wishing. When you wish on something, usually, you don't have forever to do that. So by closing your eyes, it's almost like a little bargain. If you open your eyes too soon, the rest of the wishing time is gone. If you open them too late, then the whole wish doesn't count because you were being too greedy. Or something.

I've forgotten the whole point of this post. Oh well. When you start going off on tangents(I learned that word from my English teacher, because we often go off on these during class.), a lot of times you forget what you wanted to say originally.

Oh, and one more thing. Thinking. I think thinking is when you talk to yourself in your head. When you think actual words. Usually I do that when in doubt. But sometimes when you're undecided, your head is completely quiet. And most of the time, I guess we just do everything silently because it's instinct or routine or something. So if I just gave you an excerpt of my thoughts, it would be like:

Agenda.
Uhh.
Math-no-two hours.

in a span of 2 hours. It's weird how when you sing along to stuff, you don't think the lyrics in your head while the song is playing. It just comes up out of nowhere, all the words in succession. Same with reading and emotions and stuff. And talking to people. So not much word-thinking, I guess. A lot of times I wish I could just print out a script of my thoughts so I can see them all clearly. It's like when you draw things from life, but it's harder because only one point is in focus, but when you draw other parts, you focus on that part. And then since we have 2 eyes, lot's of times a line or shape changes if you close one eye. So taking a photo and drawing that is way easier cause you can't change it by looking at it.

Alright. I'm done.

And I am listening to The Saltwater Room by Owl City. I like that song right now.