My name is Michael Rivera and I am a Filipino-Chinese, 18-year-old student living in Canterbury, but originally from Hong Kong. My parents divorced when I was two, and when I grew up, there were two sides of me: the wild, outdoorsy, gutsy side, and the conservative, intellectual, scholarly side. I spent two years living beside a beach in the countryside. It was then that I learned how to swim, how to fish and how to ride a bike. I love the outdoors, especially when having barbecues and hiking. Outside of that time, my more studious side of me reads, writes, and has a great interest in a broad range of subjects including: television and film, travel, anthropology, human cultures, linguistics, food and drink, psychology, philosophy, literature, forensics, Greco-Roman mythology, European history and politics, South American culture and geology. My deepest love goes to, well, my best friend. But the love that exists just a tiny fraction below that amount of love goes to television series, beautiful beaches, lime margaritas, and books considered classics.
Feel free to e-mail me if you have anything you want to share, suggest, criticize, inquire or comment on! :D
So, today, I got five essays back. They averaged pretty well, but as you can tell by me not divulging the exact details, they weren't stellar either. For some reason, I generally believe that I'm chilled about school and grades and that stuff, but when it comes time to actually take a look at what marks I received, it genuinely elates me when I achieve well, and when authoritative figures compliment me, and it truly upsets me when I see a grade that's lower than I expected, and an evaluation that dresses down my effort and the quality of my work.
My best friend and I always say that these things don't matter to us, but from my perspective (don't know about him), I know I'm sort of in denial. I really would like to appreciate the finer things in life... generosity of spirit, the beauty of nature, the love that stems from family, the sacred bond of friendship, the splendor of the great, wide world...
But cash in my pocket, numbers and letters on a sheet of paper, and loud, techno music playing in clubs full of drunken girls and preying old men, actually evoke feelings within me. I care about these things, even though I know it's not that 'spiritually'... 'up there'.
Well, it's been a very long day, but I have nobody to blame but myself, because I chose to wake up at around two in the morning. I could've gone back to sleep, but instead, I decided I would finish off my new blog, get a Twitter account for Do you hate it too?, one for myself, and also create a fan page on Facebook. I also did some reading on conducting ethnographic research in past civilizations - it proved to be difficult to stay awake, but it's now more than eighteen hours later, and I'm still here.
For most of the day, I was feeling scared inside.
I am scared about how I will feel after I announce the launch of all those things, I don't know what I expect - if I want a lot of the attention, or if I might get freaked out by it. I was certainly freaked out when I found out that people were writing reviews about me without telling me. (I hate it when people read my blog but don't tell me.)
I often ask myself if I want to be recognized. I ponder it all the time, because it takes a lot of guts to be a person with a widely known name and personality. It takes guts to devote so much time to something like blogging, instead of doing something else that might be practical and productive. It takes guts to self-publish a book. And it takes guts to pour your thoughts, your memories and your feelings out on a public forum where just about anybody can (and actually is everybody that) reads it.
I'm not always sure I have the guts. Most of the time, I like to give off the impression that I do, but those who truly know me, know that I have a lot of fat question marks, sitting on broomsticks, flying around inside my head. I know I doubt my own ability. Worse yet, I doubt my own potential. All I can feel comfortable with admitting are my mistakes, my downsides, the reasons why not.
I wonder why that is. Maybe it's just the way I was brought up. My mother and father, if my memory serves me right, never really gave me impressionable advice on how to live my life. It was always something about what I did wrong, or what they did wrong, or how not to live my life. Don't point at strangers, don't use that bowl to microwave food, and don't ever get married. And maybe that's why that is the way I see things, I am always accustomed to seeing things in contradiction, my moral compass consisting of a giant list of double negatives.
lol. I chuckle at my own words. I admire my own phrasing. One positive thing about myself that I'm quite happy to admit is that I'm funny. Another positive thing is the fact that I'm good at writing - at least for my own entertainment. Sad, I know, but how often have you gone back to read your own written words and found it entertaining, huh?
Oh, Michael. Too often you look at yourself like you're another person, whenever you get depressed or high or tired or drunk.
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