This is a thing. I wrote this thing roughly a month ago. Things have changed a bit since, but these feelings bubble up occasionally.
Evernote FTW.
Updated Jun 20, 2013
I have been attending college for just over a week now. The culture shock isn't as much as I'd expected; the population is as diverse as diverse gets, and everyone has a decent enough demeanor. Nobody bothers or picks on each other, so long as said victim isn't being a huge prick.
It's just as the Internet said it would be.
However, what no amount of askreddit threads and yahoo answers about college could ever prepare me for is the horrible loneliness.
The loneliness that stems from not sharing common interests with almost anybody, leaving you, quite often, with no one to talk to; no one to freak out about things with you. I suppose that's the price you have to pay for possessing such a vast, diverse college student population around yourself.
That, and the dreaded feeling of you being deluged by the fresher flash flood. A sickening amalgam of the despair of drifting apart from the rest of the crowd, and the hopelessness of not being able to do anything about it.
There's so much change. It's almost too much to experience all at once, and at the end of it all, you're all alone. Floundering, gasping for breath in your own little puddle of misery and self-pity.
Whoa. It's been quite a while since I keyed in blogger.com in the address bar. Well, it has only been a little over a month, but :insert something here about time flying like an arrow blah blah:
Quite a few things have changed. I would like to write about all of them in vivid detail, but for now let's just leave it at that.
Since my last post on this blog:
I've gotten out of High School and into College. Which is as hectic as ever, but it has its perks.
We've adopted a cat from the animal shelter. It's been with us for over 3 months now, and it still doesn't have a name. Poor old no-name slob.
I visited the Andaman Islands.
If this wasn't the most unenthusiastic blog post in the history of forever, I'll be a monkey's uncle.
In Sleeping Beauty, the one fairy that wasn't invited to the ceremony gatecrashed the party and cursed the princess to fall asleep after pricking herself on a spinning wheel and remain asleep, until she received true love's kiss.
Wow.
"If any of my present buddies don't invite me to their weddings and their children's birthday parties, I will curse their first born children."
That sounds so messed up.
The fact that these tales we listen to as children, are in fact wildly inappropriate, not the buddies getting married and having children bit.
Well, to be honest, that sounds pretty messed up too.
And not to plunge myself into the endless circle jerk that is true love, but really? She's been asleep for her entire teenage life in a tower that's surrounded by a practically impenetrable hymen of thorny vines and the like. And the prince has never even seen her. He travels all the way to wake her and suddenly, it's true love.
If you ask me, that's borderline rape.
It's a large, white goat with big, droopy ears and eyes that can stare into your soul. The kind of goat I assume other goats would deem :normal:. It remains tied to a "No Free Left Turn" signpost, a few paces from my usual bus stop.
But it's not just some old goat. Not to me it isn't.
It's an all-powerful, all-knowing, bearded Gandalf-esque wizard goat.
I saw this very goat for the first time ever, on my way home from my first day of 11th standard, a fresh chapter in the book of Life and all that poppycock.
I happened to peek out from my auto just as we flitted by it and caught a glimpse of His Capriciousness Mr. Goat-Sama. It was just there, minding its own business, chewing grass. There was nothing particularly striking about it. Goat-Sama was extraordinarily ordinary.
I saw it again the next day. And again the day after that, and again much later. Every time I passed by the signpost, Goat-Sama was there.
This continued for quite a while. I often found myself praying that Goat-Sama's life be spared a while longer. See, there's this butcher shop right across the road from Goat-Sama's usual spot.
Not that he cared. To him it was all about the grass.
Eventually I forgot about Goat-Sama.
So yesterday, when I was returning home from my unofficial last day of 12th standard, having written my last board exam and all, I just happened to peek out of my auto as it passed by the signpost. Goat-Sama was there. Goat-Sama had always been there.
I don't know what I'm more happy about. The fact that my exams are all over, or that my prayers actually worked.
In any case, Goat-Sama is aliiiiive.
I feel like I've made a new friend. Goat-Sama is the Djali to my Esmeralda.
I'm not going anywhere near him though. He looks like the kind of goat that might bite your arm off if you were stupid enough to go pat him.
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Edit: I found this oddly hilarious. I DONT EVEN KNOW WAT:
Then again, it's 2am in the morning and I have been deprived of precious sleep for the whole of this month. I don't even know what I'm saying or writing anymore hGGFVBhfzHKjkbgl
Remedial Chaos Theory is probably the best episode of Community ever.
In fact, I would argue that it is one of the most glorious moments of television ever.
Maybe I tend to exaggerate things.
But COMMUNITY IS SO FREAKIN' AWESOME OHMYGOOOOD
:Shamelessly plugging new favourite tv show:
Ignore this post. It exists for the sole purpose of there being more Community-related content on my blog. Yay.
And with good reason too; not just because that's the opinion of the Internet Hivemind, or just to piss me off (I use the Instagram app on my phone like it's nobody's business, taking pictures of ridiculous things.)
And maybe, just maybe, I'm starting to agree with him.
According to him, the only way people can enjoy a good meal at a restaurant anymore is through the cellphone camera. If you haven't taken a picture and Instagrammed it then suddenly your meal isn't worth it anymore. And what is the deal with taking a perfectly clear picture of anything, and then applying a gritty yellow filter to it in order for it to be artsy? It's ridiculous.
And the hashtag rape on all the photos. Ugh.
Sometimes I think he is the only sensible person in this entire household. Heck, I know it.
And the same goes with any of the existing forms of social networking that people use today. Everyone has turned into an all-out, unabashed social media junkie.
Not long ago, a friend of mine admonished me (via text) for not peppering my text messages with enough emoticons. Another time, I got yelled at by another friend (in person) for not 'liking' any of her deep, insightful facebook posts.
These are the things we complain about now.
I suppose every generation has it's 'thing'. The 70s had disco, we have Instagram.
Obligatory Louis CK:
Clearly, times have changed. Not long ago, taking photos was a somewhat meaningful activity. As far as my family goes, we only took the camera out only for birthdays, or when we went on picnics and long trips. And I wasn't allowed anywhere near it, of course. Rolls and rolls of film would be submitted for developing into photos, and out of all of them, only a few would make it into an album.
Now, well, we don't have to lug the chunky Yashica around anymore when we travel, but suddenly the whole sacred ritual of taking photos has become pointless. "Oh, look! A wonderful sunset! I'll take a picture of it with my cellphone, add a fake edit to it so it looks grainy and vintage, and upload it to Instagram." Thing is, millions of people around the world are doing the very same thing, so your meaningful sunset is gone, lost in an endless sea of meaningful sunsets. Not so meaningful now, is it?
To quote from an article I was reading while I wrote this:
"We're drowning in a sea of photos and I think our ability to filter the good from the bad almost disappears. Why else do I see people sharing photos of their dinner every day? There are only so many ways you can to take a photo of sandwich you and a billion other people had for lunch. Would anyone care?
The urge to share things comes from human nature, but the uncurated photos we send out every day make us all less interested in them. Sadly, this applies even to the ones which are worth the time to look at. We feel the need to 'contribute' constantly, so we end up taking hundreds of photos and sharing them on Instagram to fill the void and feel, just for a moment, that we’ve made an impression."
Instagram may be a pointless activity to a lot of people. But 'being pointless' never stopped anyone from doing anything, ever. I will continue to take pictures of ridiculous things. My brother hates Instagram, not me. But I do recognize that I have a problem, and I'll do my best not to get overwhelmingly obsessed with the whole thing. There are tv shows meant specifically for that purpose.
Hi. I am Snickerdoodle. I am a social media junkie. It has been 4 days since my last tweet and 2 days since my last post on Instagram.
Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way. Thanks to you, I'm much obliged for such a pleasant stay. To me, the whole of last week has been about overwhelming change; about transitioning from one world to another. I even graduated (And I will write a meaningful post about that soon), among many other things.
That's it. I've decided. "Ramble On" is the current theme song to my life. It perfectly describes my sentiments about the whole brouhaha that my mind has been for a while now.
Which brings me to the point of this post. It's 2 am on a Tuesday morning, and while I should be asleep like everyone else, I'm not. I usually make important life decisions around this time. I feel like I should do this right now, lest I end up changing my mind about it later.
As of today, "Fluorescent Adolescent 2.0" is now "Keep Calm and Ramble On." So it's a small change of name. For a blog, even. Why am I making such a big deal about it? Thing is, I started this blog sometime back in early 2007. Back then, it was called "The Suckish Life of a 7th Grader", and I used it to rant about school, math, and other people and things. Over the years, it changed to "Fluorescent Adolescent 2.0", and now I'm changing the name again. It's always been just this one tiny blog. So, in a way, this blog has watched me grow: from a precocious 12-year old ranting about anime and school, to, well, whatever it is that I've turned out to be today. I treat it like a sentient entity. It grows and changes as I grow and change. In some odd way, this blog is sort of like my Grecian Urn; even though all those rants have long since been deleted (And thank goodness for that), the memories still remain.
