perception&perspective

Since high school I’ve never been quite content with my body — I always thought I was “too heavy” and the thought of getting healthy and losing weight was always at the back of my mind (including now). Going through old photos on Facebook, I’ve come to the unfortunate conclusion that I was in fact, not fat at all, but pretty darn skinny. I had a great figure, even. Alas, if I could tell my eleventh-grade (and even twelfth-grade) self that, I would have saved myself a lot of time spent worrying about my weight and how I looked.

It was strange, because looking in the mirror and even looking in pictures back then, I couldn’t really tell at all that I was fine. This realization, of course, only comes when I look at pictures of myself now and think, “Man, I used to be so fit. I should get in shape so I can look that good again.” It’s a little scary, actually, because I remember thinking the same thing to myself this time last summer, when I was a lot more in shape. The problem is that this revelation only comes whenever I start looking worse. My mum has always been on my ass about this, since as long as I can remember. It’s nice to know that despite all the twists and turns life throws you, some things never change. For example, I was about to eat a Fruit By the Foot today when my mother, out of nowhere, appears and berates me:

“No… you can’t eat that.”

“Why not…?”

“…well, I don’t want to say it, but… just don’t.” (translation: you’ll probably throw a fit if I call you fat, but I’m going to thinly veil what I mean so you get the picture.)

The solution is, of course, to not give a shit and eat my Fruit By the Foots anyways.

breakpoint

I’ve thought about this several times, but lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Tonight, I spoke with an old friend from back home who will soon be entering college, and he recently met several people at a conference, one of whom just came back from a two-month hitchhiking trip across New Zealand (you can’t make this shit up.)

Sometimes I’d really like to do that: just take a break in life, uproot myself from everything I know, and do something without really making a plan. As I told him tonight, I really can if I want. There’s not much stopping me; Harvard would easily let me take a semester or two off if I asked, and if I made enough money in the coming months or year, I could potentially do it. The only thing stopping me is a fear — fear that I will fall out of my plan for life, fear that my parents will be unhappy, fear that I wouldn’t know what’s coming next. But it would be really nice just to come up for a breath of air. 

But lately, I’ve been kind of feeling a thirst for that. There’s probably a name for this feeling — that burning desire to take flight, to depart. People always write about a sense of connection to their roots, but what about the desire to sever those connections, if only for a little while?

EDIT: I guess the closest term I could find while Googling was “wanderlust”, incidentally a German word. It still does not adequately describe the innate desire to sever connections, though.

"Son coeur est un luth suspendu; sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne."

de Beranger

“His heart is a poised lute; as soon as one touches it, it resounds.”

After I pulled an all-nighter to write this essay for Gothic fiction, I was very struck by the quote. It’s the epigraph from Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. It connotes a sort of loneliness — a beautiful loneliness — and longing. (7 am musings)

John Steinbeck on Falling in Love →

Transcript of a short letter John Steinbeck wrote to his son, who had written to him that he had fallen in love at boarding school. Such beautiful writing — eloquent, simple, and yet very wise. If only I wrote letters that sounded like poetry as well! 

Two lines in particular:

“First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.”

And another:

“And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

“quelli che cadono, cadono”

The name of my Tumblr is the above Italian phrase, which, in making that the name of my Tumblr, has made me a complete hypocrite. I always wonder why people get tattoos of Chinese or Japanese characters that say “love” or “strength” or “power” instead of just inking the word in English. Perhaps it’s the exotic appeal of the foreign language, because I’ve never really seen anybody tattooing a giant “LOVE” on his or her shoulderblade. But then again, the name of my blog is in Italian and I like it better that way, just because it sounds and looks better than its translation, which is Those things that fall, fall. Essentially, I’m a sheep and aesthetics trump principles.

Its inspiration has its origins in one of the most irritating Facebook groups I have ever encountered, the Harvard Class of 2015 group. But while perusing it this summer, I found this gem that really stuck with me:

Once, I was also teaching a three year old Italian boy the English names of colours by making him fish for colourful paper fish I’d cut out using a rod I had made tipped with sticky tape. He went for the red fish but it fell from his rod; I … got all panicked and was about to run down from our perch to pick it up from the ground. He, however, stopped me by holding out his small fisherman’s hand and, with great dignity, pronounced “Quelli che cadono, cadono” (translating as “Those things that fall, fall.”) I left the fallen fish. Children are ace.

I mean, I feel like this should be the inspiration for a movie or something. I almost can’t believe this actually happened in real life. Either way, the phrase made me think for some time and it really stuck with me. It’s quite simple: “Those things that fall, fall.” I’ve thought about it throughout this past semester especially, since I’ve been trying to put my priorities in life in order and figure out what I want to do with my life.

It’s quite nice, though, to remember that shit’s gonna happen, and I’m probably going to lose some things that are/were very important to me at some point in life, be they friends, items, job positions, grades, boyfriends, etc. But rather than spend too much time bemoaning my loss, I should probably just… move on. Pick up the pieces, be sad for a little while, and realize that some things are going to fall in life and that I can’t keep being upset over every little thing not going as I plan — hard as it is. 

Advice easier given than followed…