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
I enjoy deep thought a lot. The deeper the better. Thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking is like achieving a perfectly cooked steak. (Seriously, try it. Betcha can't get past the third 'thinking'.) As much as I would like to 'live in the moment' and just 'go with it', I find that lying in the subconscious are tons of wonderful things to stimulate the mind and really make you wonder about the purpose of all that's around you and the meaning that lies within your own existence. People always tell me I overthink things too much, but I have to disagree. I think having reasons for every aspect of what I do, what I feel, and what I believe, is important and useful because it gives me justification for my actions, it gives me direction and clarifies my goals, and it helps me improve myself when I focus on what I do wrong exactly.
Today is just a rambling, because my mind is quite tired at the moment from over six hours of this continual thought. I guess deep thought is only good for me in short amounts. Before I wrote these paragraphs, I wanted to talk about a great number of things, which I won't bore myself with now, but a rave is what I've decided to finally publish here, because I just cannot decide on one thing to talk about.
One thing that really saddens me is the fact that not many people out there are willing to get into a deep and meaningful conversation (a phenomenon my ex-classmates used to abbreviate to the term, 'DMC's'). Most people just like to stay with superficial chit-chat, which is not a bad thing at all in my opinion - just not my cup of tea. It doesn't sadden me because I think it's pathetic to discuss things that are shallower, it saddens me because I just don't know how to talk about things like that for prolonged periods of time, and it isolates me, and makes me different from others.
But I think that everybody needs to have DMC's every now and then, and it sort of compensates for my loneliness when people come to me to talk about serious things. I like being the one they can come to, and even rely on to sort out other people's problems. I may lose my usefulness once the conversation topic lightens up, but at least I did my part in bringing them past the thorny parts. And that's all I really want to say today. Goodnight.
Every few months or so, I get told that I think too much, that I'm over-complicating things and I should learn to just relax and let the little things go. My defense mechanism to counter these claims is substitution by alternative phrasing. Instead, I call it logical reasoning. I call it careful assessment of my situation. I call it elaboration. I call it attention to detail. I call it keeping a critical eye. I call it making an informed decision. I call it wisdom. I call it not judging a book by its cover. I call it an evaluation. I call it reflection. I call it effective writing. I call it a rant. I call it a simple train of thought. I call it the pursuit of clarity. And last but not least, I also call it my blog.
I call my obsessive-compulsive infatuation with specification by a great number of titles, all with the aim of shrouding my immoderate committal, my limitless passion, my exorbitant ambition towards the practice of rationality, due to which I strive to act in the most sensible, practical way possible, that reaps the most benefit with the least hindrance, but truth be told, I'm a walking, and way too often, talking, load of bullshit.
Because somehow, despite my incredibly analytical mentality, bad things still happen. Call it fated by the wrong pantheon of gods, call it rotten luck, call it the very consequence of my excessive contemplation - bad things happen to me, around me, because of me, anyway, in spite of the fact that I try so hard to avoid setbacks and tribulations and the other half of reality that doesn't go the way I want it to. And the only thing that seems right to do at this point, is to push myself harder, and harder, and harder, and harder, until the finish line brings a peace and harmony to my life that took years, and decades, what feels like my entire life to reach.
But that's not the way it works at all. The way it really works is one never truly feels completely matured. One never feels old enough. One never feels like they're one step ahead in life. One can never learn the ideal combination of life lessons that will allow for pure faultlessness of existence. We are forever young and inexperienced. We are forever surprised, and unprepared to face the obstacles on our journey. Just when you think you have it altogether, one tiny little thing screws up, and then another thing gets spoiled as a result. And then it's like the house of cards just came tumbling down, just as you were putting down the last 7 and King for its roof.
I feel like it's time to start all over again. But then again, it's always time to start all over again. There's always something going wrong, just as there's always something going right. There's always something to mend, and once you've fixed it, something else has shattered, something else fell off the table, or that first thing was vandalized after you had just cleaned it up. There's never any time to simply stop. There's never time to feel perfect. It's always something - something that makes you look and feel like an overly complacent idiot.
I wish I could mean it when I say that the trick is not to get too caught up with it all. But I don't think I, or anyone else, can perform that phenomenal trick. That is actual magic.
So I don't know what to do. And I forgot what my initial point was. I hope this was enthralling literature for you nonetheless. For the seventh time tonight, I'm going to go to bed, and try and fall asleep.
So, it's always healthy to have a good rant. That's always been my belief. Forgetting about paragraphing and the proper structure of introduction-body-conclusion can be quite a relief, although, for me, keeping the spelling, grammar and punctuation will have to remain just for the sake of it. I have a lot of work to do over the winter holidays. I have around five pieces of work to do already and I probably will get three more. I have to go on holiday soon and I don't know what to do about my blogs, especially 'Do you hate it too?" I guess I'll ponder that some other time, but right now, it's about the rant. It's about raving on and on about everything that you just want to say but wouldn't say on a regular basis because nobody would actually care. Yesterday, I rearranged the furniture in my room. I made it more convenient for me to do everything on my bed. I like having my laptop beside me everyday as I fall asleep. I don't want to have two more days of school. It's quite taxing having to be at school. You know what I really want to rant about? I don't want my classmates reading my stupid blog. I should never have made it public to them because they actually know me but not well enough as some of my out-of-school friends. They know things about me through my blogs but they shouldn't because I really don't trust them. It speaks volumes that I trust a potentially worldwide online community more than the people I go to school with every single day. What they do is they read my blog, they go to school, they see me, think about what I said in my blog, judge me, discuss about me, go home and read my blog again. That's what they do and I'm so fucking paranoid about it and I hate thinking that way but that's the truth. I dislike the way my best friend treats me too. My alleged best friend. He seems to think that he can treat me however he wants to treat me but that's the case with all of them, all these darn people that I call my close friends. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know what to do. I don't know why it is that I'm continually drawn towards them even though I despise being around them and talking to them so much. I hate the way he thinks he's high and mighty and thinks that I'm nothing but a lonely asshole that has no other friends. He has to stop thinking that way, he has to stop it because i'm SICK AND TIRED OF IT AFTER HAVING IT BE THAT WAY FOR SEVEN YEARS NOW. Why can't he ever just be a little kinder towards me? Damn. Nothing good can come of ranting here. Classmates: hope you've enjoyed it. Especially you, He Who Trust Me The Most. You really are better off being with the others. You fit in that 'circle' and I find you despicable sometimes thanks to your low EQ. You never try to be closer to me. You never try to push me away either. Give anything a try and shock me before the day we leave each other. Best friend: you know, this is a term I've never thrown around. I call you 'best friend' because you literally are the one that's stuck by me the longest, but I've figured out that you only do that because you're the lonely asshole. I don't know what it is you plan on doing when I leave Hong Kong but damn it, I don't just throw those two words around. I mean it, and you should mean it too. Perhaps reading these blogs every now and then would serve you good and give you a true indication of what I really feel about you. You say you don't care about me so openly. I believe you. Bloggers: That's me, I'm an angry Asian teenager. Go on, give me your words of advice, whether it be I need to change or whether it be I don't need to change. Compliment me, critique me, call me names, whatever. The truth is, I may do either. You're all much wiser than me. But the moment I see any bit of goddamn patronizing adult-to-child crap... well, I won't do anything. I just won't take your advice to heart.
(update after realizing I got too angry the first time) Alright, alright, something happy, something happy. I like blogging, really. I think that some of the stuff people come up with educates me greatly and will benefit me in the long-run as I not only practice my writing on a regular basis, but I also will be able to consider other people's thoughts and philosophies more easily in the future. It's a good thing and I appreciate all the comments and I comment on all of your blogs too because it shows that we're all sharing this blogging experience together. I like a lot of things an I'm not just all hatehatehate. Even though I hate their behavior, I can honestly say that I love them. I love them to the bitter ends of the Earth. I just hate what they do and say sometimes and there are many good things about them that make me drawn to them (answering myself with regards to what I said above). I love television and food and genuinely long walks on the beach, although, it's the beach I like, whether I'm running, swimming, wading, digging or diving, whether they be long, medium or short walks, runs, swims, wades, digs or dives. I listen to any music that's mainstream and I prefer it to be hot and sunny rather than cold and damp. I have to go do something. I'll be elaborating on my winter plans in the next post.
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