Sunday late afternoon

My mom is talking with our neighbor in the dinning room. My dad's cleaning the back patio with a leaf blower. Our cat's sleeping on the rug in the living room right in front of me. Orange light is coming through the cream-curtained windows like morning fog. I'm watching "Flip or Flop" on HGTV. They're walking through a house that has its windows boarded up because they share a wall with an illegal addition in back. I'm two weeks out from finishing the quarter. I care about a woman who recently broke up with her boyfriend. I'm a month away from traveling to China. I'm getting immunizations on Thursday. I finished my volunteer tutoring last, last Wednesday. I have a paid tutoring job on Tuesdays and Fridays. I bought Uncharted and Tetris on Friday. My car needs new tires. It's also leaking oil. My Pilot G-2 broke yesterday: it's nib dislodged and what was left behind cut into the paper. I wrote a poem about her family, and she said she liked it. My dad walked in and changed the channel to a soccer game in Spanish. My sister's iPhone is on the edge of the couch to my right. Our neighbor is so lonely ever since her husband passed away 15 (or was it?) years ago. She's crying now and talking with my dad about cookies. I'm wearing my pajamas. I put my phone into my pocket just in case she texts - but why would she? I wrote a poem in the computer lab last night about that guy I knew who died four years ago. Has it really been four years? I think its more like two years. It feels so long since anything has happened - so much has happened, is going to happen. My sister has got a text.

What do I like about myself?
Do I love myself?
Am I okay?
Why do I feel abandoned?
Why do I care about her but feel so scared to be with her?
Maybe we're not so compatible.
Maybe it'll never happen.
I should be okay with that, but I'm not yet.

She said she's going bar hopping somewhere in San Jose, gonna stop by Big Sur, meet up with her cousin in San Francisco. Our neighbor's daughter has invited people to a Fourth of July party at her mother's house. "It's not her house yet," she says in Spanish. Her daughter, her husband, and their three kids live with her. "It's not hers."

Trips

I'm gonna try to write this real quick because I'm supposed to go to class at 12 and I still have some homework to finish.

I'm currently writing a statement of purpose for a teaching internship to China this summer. It's through the school, and I'm paying a bit of money to go. Even though you can't tell by these related facts, I'm excited as all hell.

Something funny about this trip: this girl I like is going to, and I want to become teaching partners with her despite that I've more or less confessed how I feel to her and she's told me she has a boyfriend. There's a certain formality or numbing knowingness in our interactions, but she's a cool person, and I've taken to calling her "dude" and whatnot to get it into my brain that she's a friend.

She, like, kinda flirts with me? I don't know what's going on. Maybe I'm paranoid, but there's something to this idea. I think she does like me, but can't do anything because she has a boyfriend. But maybe she doesn't.  Sometimes I get to thinking and analyzing in my discursive, protracted way. I've gotten better about causing undue suffering to myself, however, by reminding myself that none of this really matters. i don't need her to be happy.

I've taken to repeating this mantra to myself to prevent myself from extra suffering in cases like these: "Consider what you want versus what you need." Meaning, when I really think about all that I have, in reality, I have everything that I need to be happy. Ancillary attachments are things that I want, in a false belief that they'll make me happy. I can be happy right now, if I remember that I have everything I need as of this moment: food, water, shelter, friends, work, hobbies, and family.

So yeah: going to China, filling out the application. It's gonna be a great time.

I gotta get to class soon. See ya.