mood: testedmusic: 'rocket man' by elton john

the past few months have been a blur. a car crash of stress and sweat and fear and self-realization. months of moving and training, public relations faces for new naive faces. and still i find nothing more satisfying than the sound of a song, dragging its ass gracefully across my room to the curve of my ear.

i'm an RA now. my example leads 65 fresh young faces, new to UCI. and it is definitely work. not just sitting around telling people not to drink in the hall or not to be too loud. it's a job i liken to being a parent but with more moral ambiguity, since i uphold not my own values, but the values reflected in mesa court policy.

they've started calling me 'mama b', which is rather flattering since it means my residents recognize the parental dedication i think it takes to be a successful RA. still, what's with the gender fuck?

my life is rolling along and i get the feeling that it will keep rolling on no matter how ready i feel for the next step. sink or swim, i guess. i hate that term.

when my day is over, i still have to deal with the night, which has less going on, but more strenuous tasks. mainly getting these less than wise freshmen to learn quickly that there is more to true freedom than getting so drunk you wake up with 'BALLS' on your forehead. fucking kids. sometimes i don't understand how a person can be so ridiculous and shameless about it.

meanwhile, my philosophy degree continues to build itself. studying abroad suddenly comes into view again and looks damn good. nothing would be as gratifying as a couple months in denmark or the netherlands to myself for my studies. but that's all so far in the future, and i've got more pertinent things to handle. more dull and less exciting things to deal with. and plenty of things to enjoy and stress over at the same time.

does everything from now on have this strange duality? i get the feeling that from this point on most things won't be as simple as they were in the times i'm always nostalgic for. as easy as the joy from a good old song from my dad's music library, as the sadness for lost friends, as the pain from a stupid kickflip attempt. now whenever that song comes on it'll bring back another memory, just as sad as happy. those lost friends would have already yielded one true one, and the memory will have become bittersweet. and that pain would possibly be the only release there was left. i think it's gonna be a long, long time.

---Goei---