It’s so easy to be alone in university that it is actually amusing. Practically everyone I see carries a laptop, or a cell phone, or an mp3 player, or all three of them, and they walk around alone, or throw their friendless bodies in the direction of the nearest power socket and connect themselves to the rest of the world. And god, I’m hanging out with two really cute bimbos right now (a pity I’m no lesbian), who talk small-minded talk so shallow that I can’t even drown myself in it even if I desperately want to. Chitter chatter about make-up and clubbing and guys and the approaching tests and assignments and girlish laughter from wide open lip-gloss-lined mouths and shiny white teeth and I slip, slip, slip, into a little bubble world.

Well, there’s always the smartie pants geeks who talk about the New Critics and Plato. Sure, let’s talk. Let’s talk about what we learned- Affective fallacy, intentional fallacy, metaphors and similes... What? You don’t know? How can you not know? It’s so basic. About as simple as eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. Oh and lest we forget Erwartungshorizont! Such pompous jargons unnecessarily flaunted, so their meanings, or rather, their purposes and functions, are lost. Don’t know it, to comprehend it. Know it, to shove it down throats. Use the names of the dead, from Barthes to Sartre, and throw them around to throw everyone else off balance. The words are so big I can’t even bite them in half to swallow them down.

I hate this competition. I hate this pleasant atmosphere where everyone is so sugar sweet and quietly seething and nothing more. I feel like I am waiting for the dentist, and I am sitting by myself at the reception area with the floor about to break beneath the weight of my feet.

I know there must be so much more, if I could just find a razor blade to cut the cold surfaces of faces open, so they bleed, hot and sticky blood, and they speak. Here is my defence mechanism. Take it. Where is yours?

I want something more, something different, but I can’t seem to explain it. Until I am able to understand it, to put a name to it, to claim it, I am neither here nor there. I am as good as gone. It’s like this entry, a chunk of words without a title to it. You don’t know what I’m talking about, and frankly, I do but I don’t either.

Man. I am soooo emooooo.

Anyway, I dreamt of the very first guy I had a crush on recently. In the dream, he was in the same school as me, and we had a very casual conversation, yet internally, I was scolding myself for feeling so nervous without reason. So weird. And it’s interesting how he could pop up in my head like that when I completely forgot about him. In fact, we didn’t even spend a lot of time, unforgettable time, together. Maybe 3 months? 3 months and 3 dates to be exact. We don’t even keep in touch anymore and he’s on the other side of the world while I’m stuck here.

My sister will roll her eyeballs and tell me that he wasn't even good-looking. Heh. But he’s the one person who taught me so much about who I was and who I wanted to be. I learned to make the people around me feel relaxed and comfortable, to be genuinely interested in people, to be honest, to accept people as who they are and not judge them, to talk to them as though they are on the same level as me, and not up there on a pedestal, or put them down. Because they were everything I did not feel when I was with him. (What a jerk right. Haha. Oh my gawwd me can do bimbo talk!) Never had I felt more stupid and flawed and lousy and out of control than when I was with him. The torture I subjected myself to! Argh.

And then there were the things I picked up from him unconsciously and shockingly (because they were not all good stuff) or am still trying to cultivate- the taste in music, the unbreakable sense of self-confidence, the annoying optimism, the diplomatically formal speech and the drastically informal easy manner of speech which covers up all gaps with a deceptive veneer of intimacy, the ability to talk in circles about everything and everybody else except what matters most, so that you reveal something but never disclose anything truly significant, and the drive to just, go on, no matter what.

And the thing that I learned most from him- the boy with the sunshine smile dripping with charisma- was how to let go. So it is, that with each new person I let in, I struggle with the necessity to keep an emotional distance and the blind impulse to open up and more crucially, to get them to open up, so that when they leave me or when I leave them (because nothing lasts forever and people come and go), at least I can say that I knew them well enough to keep a piece of them with me- a word they frequently employed, a gesture, an ideology, a silly memory, all deeply tattooed within.