Thank you

I have a list of things to do. Among them are to write about 8 thank-you cards and send them. And my father's day card is essentially a thank-you card. So to get away from staring at the mound of thank-you cards like a mound of obligations, or the roof of my black laptop like a black hole sucking in my mind like a vacuum with a mind like an ogre, I'm about to make a list of thank-yous. Just like when you go to church and then you say thank-you, except you don't even think about meaning it.

· Thank you to my friends, who have stuck with me and been there for the past 4 years, or the past 7, or the past 17 - wow.
· Thank you to my family, who do a lot more for me than I will ever acknowledge or understand.
· Thanks to my teachers, who have done the best they can to educate me and to prepare me for deeper questions to be posed in the future.
· Thank you to nature, nature ever uncertain, for comforting me with sunny, lazy days and buffeting me with snowstorms to make sure I'm awake.
· Thanks to the people who've applauded me for work I've done or music I've performed. It truly means a lot to me.
· Thank you to those who have given advice, even if it went unheeded or it wasn't sufficient.
· Thank you to those who understand my skepticism, and even more thanks to those who understand my happiness.
· Thank you to people who aren't afraid to open their mouths and be called stupid, unless you do it on autopilot all the time.
· Thanks to those who have taught me to be myself, to learn things myself and how to do those two things.
· Thank you to Iowa City for being so welcoming and encouraging when Boston is not.
· Thank you to Japan for opening up your world to me. No thanks to Paris, sorry, except my host family and buddies from there.
· Thank you to math, for providing me a path to continue exploring and keeping my mind open and challenged.
· Thank you to Tufts, for being an institution where I was allowed the room and time to explore myself and what it means to be somebody in this time period and in this body.
· Thanks to the spirit out there that comes into me and leaves me from time to time, for allowing me to see a world beyond the restraints of logic.
· Thank you to music.

Thank you.

Someplace for my head

During a break in the rainfall, and before I realized I don't care about abstract algebra, I was outside, walking beside the Latino Center, when I caught the scent of some pine shrubs enjoying the glory of hydration. I stopped, turned, and walked over to confirm my nostrils' message. Exuberant pine needles, ever green. I kept walking, recalling to mind that my sense of smell seems to have heightened. Smell is the sense most securely tied to memory; it's as though my body is searching for some memory here to hold on to, some lingering, irresistibly fragrant figment of my past to lure me back into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' common scene. Maybe it's that. Maybe it's not, since it might be my hormones making me search for pheromones in the air, which the blossoming plants give off unashamedly, while eligible lover men and lover women decline to betray even the slightest hint of enjoying the presence of one another. Maybe it's both these things.

I mistake a bird for an airplane, and then an airplane flies in a linear fashion above the clouds, as if to tell me that nature escapes too easily and one has to chase it whenever one can, without tiring. Another airplane flies above, when I look back.

The needles on the pine trees all point straight out, convinced of their direction. But they all point in different directions. Some of them are pulled by gravity, drooping. Some of them have fallen, still green. Many of the brown, faded, remain. The rain has stopped again. Somewhere, someone is running. Less people today because the weather isn't as kind. The others roam inside searching for someone to be kind to them. A man drinks a smoothie at Hotung Cafe.

Tufts - the end is near. Life will go on as usual. Four years from now, a new train stop will appear for the Green Line on Tufts' campus, and it will be a hassle to walk to the gym. Parking of the kind I sometimes enjoy, legal or not, will be a distinct impossibility. Tufts will continue to increase its reputation, maybe developing a reputation equivalent to Ivy League in time for my retirement. And I will be an alumnus, at least.

I will probably be somewhere else. But Somerville, I will miss you.

The linear transformation

I don't know what a linear transformation is. I still don't know (I can probably give a shitty guess) after I was supposed to 3 years ago, and even if I guessed what it was, could I prove some map was a linear transformation? That's basic math for people like me who are supposed to be mathematicians.

My story at Tufts is a linear transformation.

Hopelessly in a single direction, but valiantly fought. I look at the picture of me on my Tufts ID card, taken when I was a freshman. I look so innocent, with that nice, warm polo jacket that I lost somewhere, and that green t-shirt that I got in Japan in 2005. This break, I left that shirt at home and came back to campus. Symbolic enough, but home's not far away enough. This is an awkward transition stage from my past to my future. And I have to move further physically in order to complete it.

So I will probably go to Iowa for five to six years. Five to six years! That's a lot of time to spend in one place. I don't know if I can handle it, but I know for sure that I'm fed up with Boston and can't take any more of it. People here are just... so not me. And that sounds like a shallow, flamboyant-ish statement that I'd ordinarily not permit to escape my mouth, but it's true. I don't feel at one with anything here, especially not me.

Why not with me? I've changed a lot, really fast. Perhaps the transformation isn't linear. But we act like all transformations are that simple.

But I was at an on-campus LGBT party tonight that sucked, and it sucked because I didn't dance with anyone who I didn't already know. Que sera sera? Fuck that.

I was told to beware the phrase いい加減にする: to leave things halfway. That's what I've done on this journey. But I can't make it alone, and so I haven't had the push to get me where I need to be, to cure my pure ignorance of how to do these things. I've started an online dating profile but I haven't messaged anyone in a month, ever since I sent some guy a message and we went on a couple of dates and it didn't work. Why do I get discouraged so easily? I hate rejectionだから (that's why). And I don't get rejected frequently enough, so the natural dose of rejection just isn't there and any little bit is an overdose. Can't take it.

The other thing is, I'm not a freshman anymore. That party tonight was replete with freshmen who were all up for just having a fun spring party, and probably had lots of social connections in case they ever wanted to go to bed with someone. Well, I don't!

But I've changed. Had I never done pushups, situps, and gone to the gym last semester, my body would've looked like a freshman's. Right now I'm somewhere between muscular and cute, but it's an uncertain state - it just doesn't work. Yes, I think like this, all the time. It's inevitable. That cute, shy, unconfident freshman in the picture is still the shy, unconfident man, but he's no longer fresh and he's no longer the same kind of cute. All you can take from all this is this: there's a map taking me somewhere else, and I wish to God that someone would show it to me!

He's not willing to be flamboyant. He never fully was. いい加減にした。(I left it halfway.) Freshman year was the closest I ever got to being flamboyant. And yet there's room to go back and try to be who I can be in a form that everyone can understand - maybe then they'll understand something about me. I don't think anyone else who's gay understands, though. And that's my own fault.

I have to be honest. Sometimes I wish I were straight. But then I don't because I know I wouldn't understand anything about the world.

At least I can admit to myself that I don't understand anything about the world. That's something that a straight Alex wouldn't have been able to do.

Oh, to clarify: I waited until people started leaving to hit on someone, and it failed. That's what happens when you use the move PROTECT too much in Pokémon. Eventually you get hurt. But here there's a time limit; Pokemon doesn't have that!...

But I do.

All I can say to you is this: I, Alex, have tried to be the best I can be and not best anyone else. But all I have done is best myself. Beset myself with this all.

It's a lonely night in Somerville... yet I don't feel so bad about it. It's certainly not the alcohol; that never worked before. Because I know there is beauty out there, and it's in music.

This story is too fucking epic. Just like some things are "so fucking metal." I've got to win here before I get out of here.

In between the useful and the unused

That's where I am. Sitting at my desk pretending to be a diligent little math boy with his pencil and his pensive mind, scribbling in his head before scribbling on the paper, I pretend to be the fully self-trained, self-motivated scholar who knows what he's doing. Useful.

The thoughts stop occasionally, like they did just now, and they sit and rest, bubbling around in my head. What has gone by this week and how can I apply it? Then again, unapplied, what is the pure essence of these thoughts?

I've just spent the last 4 days with my life 50% filled up by the crisis that my friend is going through. Given the wrong diagnosis, she's been on antidepressants since the age of 13 when really the problem was that she's bipolar. But they found that one out just a little too late. The latest antidepressant and consequent necessary withdrawal have sent her into wild mood swings, driving her from maniacal, unfocused highs to hysterical, suicidal lows. Her mind 100% controlled by the medicine. I think what I did to help her saved her life. I wouldn't have done otherwise, however. Who would've acted differently if they were me? Who would've?

Details can be spelled out later and in other venues, but she's in a psychiatric facility now. However, I'm not the only reason she's alive and well & where she needs to be now. She also is. This can't be ignored. On Friday when none of her friends were around campus the medicine drove her into a low deeper than any before, and she started drinking, and saw the pills on her cabinet, and thought that if she just took all of them this would be over real fast. You know how she convinced herself otherwise? She reasoned out of it with her knowledge taken from her classes as a psychology major.

Maybe some things aren't so useless (as reputed) after all. Only unused.

Epic story short this has given me more than a bit of perspective about life. And my future. And her dad's a math man who got a Ph.D at Brandeis with a thesis advisor from MIT but who's currently unemployed. You know why? Because he couldn't teach. I can... and he even still studies every day, his wife doing the work that keeps the family going. Reminds me of a good Murakami novel. No, two. Norwegian Wood and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I think my heart can rest easy. But my mind won't. I know she might be in that room, screaming right now, another night of 5 hours or less (or none) of sleep... like k-os repeats in that song about "I can't really make you love me," I'm haunted.

Why?

I saw

When I was in Vancouver, on the SkyTrain, I saw a guy who looked like he might be really ugly. His clothes were a mess from what I saw outta the corner of my eye, and he might be homeless I thought. Well, bad look. I looked again and saw that he was normal. Except his face looked really emaciated. And it was him that the alcohol breath was coming from. But holy shit. He should've been so beautiful. He was one of the best-looking guys I had seen the whole trip I was there. Or at least he should've been. The alcohol and the drugs killed that. Why is that? Why the fuck?

I identify with him. When I look in the mirror after I have one of those sleepless, depressed nights after I get rejected or something, that's me. The drug addict. Addicted to the lack-of-sleep high soothing my sorrows. Refusing all other cures. Knowing that nobody would ever look at me if they knew what kind of sorry state I fall into when my emotions get destroyed.

And yet I told myself (jubilant that day. I was in Vancouver after all!!) that I shouldn't look back at him - encourage him to get over his problems, rather than looking at him as though maybe I cared. For him.

It doesn't make sense.

Proof

At this point in mathematics, most of my problems just deal with proving why things are true. Then, when I come across problems where you actually have to find a solution, things become really intimidating.

A good metaphor for my life.

Fucking dancers

Fuck them.

They're better than me at one of the few things I want to be good at but I'm not because I haven't had the opportunity to be it, and they take my heart and leave it for shit. Fuck you. I make your music.