Self Sabotage

I turned twenty yesterday, didn’t feel good about it.

It’s my birthday I thought. I suppose people do things that make them happy on birthdays. Don’t like a birthday dinner with people I don’t know thus don’t love. Don’t want to buy a new coat or new shoes or whatever because when I get kicked out of this college dorm, they go nowhere but trashbin. Don’t even want to drink or smoke, which is weird. I could go see the buildings I thought, the so-called architecture. One doesn’t say oh I like beautiful buildings, no, the right way to put it is I enjoy architecture.

Bus Fiftyfifth and the Green Line, my old friends, took me downtown. Sometimes I wonder if my bus and train days will end: I get old and I get rich, the car days will kill the bus days. I also wonder if I live long enough for the wheelchair days. There are two kinds of wheelchairs, those that are motor powered and those that are pushed by human hands. My grandma is in her wheelchair days; she’s got the latter kind of wheelchair. Why am I writing about wheelchairs?

I thought about my last birthday: I was on a plane for Beijing. It was ten or twelve hours to Turkey, connection was eight hours, I slept under my coat on a row of chairs, then it was some hours to Korea, I remember practicing telling apart Chinese and Korean while waiting in the line for safety check. Last last birthday I was applying for college. It wasn’t a good time when you wake up at six in the morning because your mind was threathened by the thought of being seen as a failure.

Given that information, my twentieth birthday wasn’t bad at all. I was free from school or work, my brain free of thoughts and my heart, free of immediate hate and love. It was ten degrees below zero yesterday but I was kept warm in boots and coat. My body free of pain and illness, was happily obeying every command; the command yesterday was to walk: to walk from north to south and west to east, to walk down Michigan Avenue and into Randolph Street.

I was being shameless and slept in L’s apartment. Well, by shameless I mean I took the bed and she the sofa. L is an upperclassman here, I met her in a physics lab. Last night I went back to the house around nine, she was submitting grad school apps last minute. Her long time friend B was here, bought us Cosmopolitan and Margarita. We talked and drank. I said hi to B and asked what she’s studying, turned out she’s not in school. B asked me what I’m gonna do with my physics degree. I thought about it, but not for long (five seconds I guess) and said, I really don’t know. On television it was Forrest Gump playing; it’s one of those movies that I’ve always heard of yet strangely never watched. L had her eyes fixed on computer screen to fill in all that transcripts, statement of purpose, financial aids, dotdotdot. It was like a recurring nightmare, had to present, explain, and sell oneself to these distant, mystic judges who will basically, judge you. Nonetheless it was twenty minutes before the movie ends, I remember Forrest on a shrimping boat, L hit submit, then B pulled out a cake to celebrate. I didn’t say it was my birthday, don’t see the difference it makes, but there’s the cake, the drinks, and good company.

It just occured to me when I am writing this: this winter I am loved by my friends. This is my miracle. Why are they such amazing people, every single one of them? These troubled minds and precious hearts. How I wish hearts stay in human chests, not cast in mud and stepped on. If they shall be hollowed out from flesh, if they shall be cast, cast them not in mud but into fire, if that’s how things should end. Or else one has to adopt cannibalism and swallow them raw.

But to continue with the story. We ate and drank, but not to the point of drunk. L and I went to the fire stairs to have a cigarette. These three-story brick houses comes with metal fire stairs on the back, we were standing on these ugly, squeaking structures, and leaned against the railings. L said the following:

“I applied to only five schools. The “elite schools.” Say there’s 5% chance for each of them, still there’s a high chance I don’t get into any of them.”

I said well, I know someone who did exactly that, she’s my treasured friend.

“You know self sabotaging? This is self sabotaging.”

“The thing is I don’t even know if I want to do physics anymore. I can do a PhD for itself, I like the research. But then what?”

“You be a faculty or go to industry. As a professor you mostly mingle with people. I don’t want to spend my day writing emails and not actually doing science. In industry you get told what to do.”

“I don’t want to be told what to do, and I don’t want tell other people what to do. I want to create stuff. Now I like the physics I do, I get to create.”

“You know sometimes I think about why I’m so depressed and my life f**ked up the whole time. I wonder if it’s just me or it’s because I’m in my twenties.”

It’s definitely the twenties. I said there’s this one belief that I hold, which is we are terrible at predicting the future.

“Yes we are. If you say to me half a year ago that I can actually make tattoos with these artists that I admire, I would tell you f**k off.”

I forgot to write. L has got a lot of tatoos. She told me about not being trusted by the lab PI initially because of that, and she wore long sleeve shirts in lab during summer for a while. Before college L almost went to art school but back then she’s more drawn to physics. She bought a tattoo machine several months ago for fun and started designing patterns, post her works, and exchanging the favors with other artists. Now she had her favorite artists seeing her work and earns several hundred dollors for each work.

There’s more we talked about but the cigarettes died fast. It was too cold outside, and I guess people don’t smoke a pack in a row. There’s more we talked about when we got back inside, but what is there to write further? It’s all just youth talk, student talk, bus day talk. It was all drunk talk. As for this act of getting drunk, it’s only self sabotage.