Livin in a Dreamworld

For whatever reason, self-examination seems to be taking up an inordinate amount of my time lately.

How we deal with our problems can often define the type of person we are. It’s so easy to delude ourselves that we’re all out-going, confrontational bad asses devil-may-care types. Instead, I’ve come to realize that I’m introverted, passive-aggressive, and I very rarely let my emotions show.

While I haven’t been “unhappy” as of late, I certainly haven’t felt content. Much like I did in high school, I feel like Boston hasn’t lived up to my expectations. Where are my crazy college stories? Why haven’t I woken up in a stranger’s bed, smelling of a one night stand? Why haven’t I met my College Roommate who becomes one of my Best Friends? Why hasn’t a career path lit up in front of me that doesn’t make me want to jump off the 37th floor of an office building? And finally, why are people in boston so… lifeless?

In retrospect, its not all too suprising that my journey would take me here. After all, I put Boston up on this glorious pedestal and it was only time until I realized how much it has failed to live up to my lofty expectations. I’m not going to transfer or anything, and BU hasn’t been a bad university for me by any means. I had to see what the east coast was like. And now that I have, I want to head back home.

Yes, I’m ready to admit it – California is home for me. Right now I want to do something crazy, something insane, something memorable. Boston lacks the spontaneous craziness that California had in abundance. Oh sure, Californians has on average, about the most blindingly fake happy population on the earth. But at least they’re happy about something. There’s a coy self-awareness to the whole Californian mindset. “Yeah, I’m really not this chipper, but why the hell not?”

Boston feels so relentlessly adult, so constricting, so serious that it’s stifling. I know that I’m falling back on stereotypes ad naseum here, but everyone in Boston seems to have these BIG goals they’ve got marked out on their corkboards over their desks. Go to law school. Study, study, study so that you can go to medical school and study some more. The focus isn’t on the goal, but on the necessity of the goal itself.

I’m twenty fucking years old, and I have no idea what I want to do as a career. However, I do know what I want to do in my life. I want to live life along the fringes and experience everything and anything that comes my way. I want to stay up until 2 am with close friends having drunk mediations on the Deep Meanings of Life. I want to meet someone who makes me giddy just thinking about her. I want her to be vibrant, spunky, full of energy. I don’t want her to have big plans outside of the present. I want her to simply get me, how I work, who I am, where I’m going. I want her to be difficult to deal with. I want us to fight until the early hours just because we can. I want to throw her up against a wall during the vicious make-up sex.


I want something new. I want change. For the first time, I’ve begun to think… what if I had stayed in California, gone to a good but not great school, and experienced something else entirely? Would I be a different person with a different outlook? Would I be as deeply unsatisfied as I am now?

It’s been building for a long time. Instead of talking it out with someone close, I’ve simply put up my defenses and closed myself off. I desperately want to let it all out and just unleash all of these bottled up emotions inside of me. I feel so distant these days. It’s not just an isolation from others. It’s an isolation from myself as well.

In high school I felt like a big ball of rage nearly every day after school. I remember getting home and just ranting and raving about everything. About school. About friends. About girls. About politics. About anything that I had managed to invest myself in. Now, there are no rants or ravings. Instead, it’s taken me a week to scrounge up the energy to write this half assed entry.

Ambition’s a tricky thing. It can fuel you for years. But once you lose it… you drift endlessly across the great sea of indifference.