Recently, on my TikTok for You page, I’ve been getting a lot of videos about the guy called Clavicular, who looks maxes. He seems really scary, but he is kind of valid. He has done tons of injections, and something called bone smashing, where he hits himself in the face with a hammer, and I thought he was just really psychotic, but somehow everything he has done has juristically changed his appearance. The second he reached his “ascension”, which is reaching his prime, he blew up. He was kicked out of college because of his looksmaxing, and even though his life felt ruined in the moment, he became successful for looksmaxing. His career is just based on rating people and trying to get his rating up, but I’m lowkey really invested. His next part of his ascension is his double-jaw surgery, and I hope it goes well and that he doesn’t botch his face.
I don’t think I’ve written more in my life than in the past few weeks. I had eight college deadlines on November 1st, and I decided to complete my work at the last minute. I just submitted half of my college applications, and I’m honestly done. I feel like the amount of work students do building up to applying to college is enough. Going through a tedious process of reviewing everything I’ve done with my life over the past eighteen years, with a word limit, feels impossible. I’m trying to manifest that I will get into lots of colleges, but I’m also not delusional. I missed one of the best weekends of the year, sick and doing college work, and I just hope that I get good karma from this. On top of all of this college work, I keep forgetting that I actually have school work, but that seems more like a tomorrow problem.
The thought of college is the only thing giving me the will to live, but actually doing the work to go to college is doing the exact opposite. I feel like the amount of work that students need to do to go to college is obscene. We have basically dedicated the past eighteen years of our lives just to get into college. Life feels like a never-ending cycle of doing work to be rewarded with even more work and responsibilities. After I finish college then I have to find an even harder job. I feel like I’m just not really a person who wants to have to do that. I’m sure that some people like their job, but I swear that the majority of people feel like it’s a little torturous. The world wasn’t made for people to be stuck in a strict daily schedule, but to live spontaneously and be free. Jobs definitely make people grow, but they also make people close-minded, a little brainwashed. I’m excited to finish high school, but really scared of the rest of my life.
This weekend I’m going to my friend’s homecoming, and I’m just really stressed out. I forgot that she had invited me two months ago, so I ordered my dress a week ago. It arrived yesterday, which is two days before, and I kind of hate it. I have so much work that I need to catch up on, and I feel like homecoming is just going to take over my weekend. I also have no idea what time the dance starts and ends, and I really don’t like not having plans. We are supposed to get ready with a group of girls before, and I have never met at least half of them, so that’s probably going to be awkward. Even though I’m nervous, I’m still excited because we are getting ready at our friend’s house, who is now in college, as her sister is having people over to get ready. My friends and I have already claimed to get prepared in our friend’s room, which is in college, because it would honestly be disrespectful if someone else who wasn’t us got ready in her room. I am manifesting that everything goes well tomorrow because I just see a lot of things that could go wrong.
I love reading so much. I have never loved a book more than the Throne of Glass series. I recommend that book to anyone and everyone. I am reading the Everflame series now and it’s good but I’m having a hard time finishing it because nothing could ever be as good as Throne of Glass. I genuinely got through the whole 8 book series in 3 months which is weird because I have never liked reading until now. There are literally no days that I don’t cry about Celaena waiting for Sam in the Assassins blade. Anyway, here are some of my favorite book quotes from TOG.
“I am Celaena Sardothian and I will not be afraid.”
“Once upon a time in a land long since burned to ash, there lived a princess who loved her kingdom.”
“This girl wasn’t like wildfire – she was wildfire. Deadly and uncontrollable.”
“You do not yield.”
“To whatever end, Fireheart.”
“Even when this world is a forgotten whisper of dust between the stars, I will always love you.”
“The world will be saved and remade by the dreamers.”
“It was all borrowed time anyway.”
“Nameless is my price.”
“She was fire, she was darkness, she was dust and blood and shadow.”
“You can not pick and choose which parts of her to love.”
After blogs after blogs of hoping for this, I really do think I’m on the up and up at this point. Or, at the very least, I think of a lot of the troubles I had before as rather silly now. I’m back to my nonchalance, go with the flow persona, so here are some things I will go back to doing.
Journal when I have time, not just whenever I’m in a cafe.
Sleep properly. I’m not going to sleep till 11pm because it looks like a reasonable time for most people. Not if I’m spending all day yawning and stretching, having heavy lids the whole evening, until I stay up till 11pm again just to catch up on what I needed to do before.
Use Soluna. It’s a mental health/self-improvement app that I’ve recently been recommended. It has mini motivational articles, options to reach out to coaches, but what I’m sure to use most are the tools they have. They have breathing exercises, white noise, etc. enhanced by visuals, which for whatever reason makes me feel more motivated to use them. Actually check it out if your in the 13-25 age range, it’s going to change your life.
Remind myself what I really have. Yes, I need to be cautious when considering my future and what may limit it. And plenty of people like to hammer that point in. But honestly, those who find that much of a need to eulogize me to my living face must be haunted by their own demons in a way. Either they are desperate for me not to have the same fate, or they seek to fill me with the same despair they have. So no matter what, I’m going to be whoever suits me best.
(This isn’t an actual letter I sent to anyone. These are just things I would like to say if they would be accepted)
Dear [no-name],
So far I already got into 4 UCs and one of them is a full ride, so please don’t tell me my only option is community college. Or that I was foolish for not applying to any beforehand. That, when I was worried about not being able to go to college at all, you said I was classist to expect what you’d gotten. And to be clear, I know you lied on the spot when you said you were smart enough to apply to community colleges at my age, since before you said the only colleges you got accepted to were UC Santa Cruz and Emerson. It would be a miracle if any community college were to reject someone like you, when they’re legally mandated to accept petty felons.
You might hope that you’d help me, but here are some ways I wish you’d help. I wish you’d understand that there are four years between the last time we actually lived together, and I’ve lived on my own the whole time. My high school experience has been much more open, you might even call it crunchy, than what you, our family, or even most of our people get to experience. That’s part of why I got different priorities than what you might consider natural. In fact, so many of my expectations on how humans work are shattered by the great people around me, because most people aren’t so Confucian that they deny themselves of experiencing joy or equality. They respect me and everyone else on the basis that we’re people. It’s not something that must be earned, and it’s not the opposite of preparing someone for the real world, or whatever you say to excuse yourself.
And since you tell me you never mean anything you say, then can you perhaps not take what our family and I say as personal attacks? Because no offense, but whenever you tell me I’m unprepared to be an adult, I feel you’re a pot and I’m the kettle in the situation.
Yeah I’m going there. I am willing as a teenager to express gratitude, and other positive emotions. Because dang it, we have no predetermined purpose and cynicism has been trending since Franz Ferdinand was shot. While there are many people who would like to make our troubles worse by complaining, complaining and complaining in their everyday life, I would like to do something more helpful to myself by, perhaps, being satisfied with what I have in life. So here is a nice and accurate, but not exhaustive, list of the things I love that my dad does for me, since I know plenty of dads don’t bother with the least of what he does.
He always drives six hours roundtrip to pick me up. It was only this year that he stopped taking days off work just to get me on Fridays, since his company didn’t like he was out of work so often.
He gets me the best snacks. My dad works for H-Mart. That’s the company that tightened its leash on him, so he’s not exactly flowing in cash. But what he is flowing in is coupons. My dad never lacks in giving me free treats, the sorts I can never find in most grocery stores nowadays. I always wait to refill my childhood memories.
He gets free Starbucks too, and always gives them to me.
He gives me strategies for growing up. My dad sometimes felt like the bad cop growing up, especially when my sister and I were used to our mom doting on us. But it turned out parenting is a balance between the old adage of “you can do anything you set your mind to” and telling your children about those who seek to take that away from them. My mom is the dreamspinner, my dad is the postwar cynic. Huh, maybe I have to give those postmodern critics some credit.
He has the oddest sense of humor. It’s not dad jokes exactly, but it’s hard to describe. It’s a little funky, maybe a bit something like out of a Taika Waititi production, which certainly explains my taste in media.
I’ve been worrying about what I could have left in the coming years. I consider myself an average, perhaps lucky person, but luck doesn’t run as far as it used to. I sense that if things were to go haywire there would be many fronts for “these unprecedented times” to attack me on, because I already see others being persecuted for those same things lol. But since half a person’s salt comes from their dad, I’m glad I have his principles and taste in comedy to weather the storm with.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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