i'm wondering why things have been the way they are lately. i note that i have strong anti-social tendencies, and want nothing more than to be alone, yet contradictorily, I also feel very lonely when I am by myself too long. I haven't started on work even though I've said I would in a long time, and am behind readings for English and Law. This is not completely atypical of me, but I'm afraid because things just feel so unsettling.

I can't rest enough because I don't sleep early enough. Maybe it's true that I do need to be guided or supervised. Oh well. Should I do the 30% optional assignment? I don't know.

The Wednesday of Wednesdays

No, I kid. There is nothing exceptional about this Wednesday for all intents and purposes, apart from the fact that it is the first in a while that I have had to myself. By which I mean, it's the first Wednesday in a really long time I haven't had to work. It's the saddest thing to be sitting in your own room, feeling like so much needs to be accomplished, but not knowing how to go about doing it, or what needs to be done. In more ways than one, this Chinese New Year has been sobering - no longer in that suddenly shocking sort of way - but in a rather inconspicuous way; I feel like I've gotten to know my extended family members so much better, understood the many dimensions to them and their experiences so that no longer are they mere faces I see once a year, but fully living and dynamic entities. I might be putting this a bit too strongly, I realise, but I never knew, for instance, that my cousin had been in gang fights, or that he had done insanely dangerous things. I know my writng is trite, but bear with me. I'll make a point in a while; I just need to be ceremonious and circumvent the trivialities, as has always been the tradition for me.

So, suddenly, I feel like the world has changed - except that it has not. Only my understanding of it has. My cousins remain explicitly and singularly unchanged in any way, except in the way I perceive them. So it's shocking, really, to see them in this new light - even more so to see them as a reflection of myself, and to acknowledge how markedly different we are as people. No, I'm not being pompous or suggesting that I am superior to any of them (indeed, I am not) - but to have lived life with such reckless abandonment, I believe, is a luxury, which I have never afforded myself. I have always found it difficult, while they have always thrived on the living on the edge. True, I am the only law undergraduate from this side of the family - but, perhaps, that exhausts the extent of everything that is unique and different about me. And, that, beyond everything else, is truly sad.

I run from invites to parties because I worry I might say the wrong thing; I get anxious about possibly becoming anxious, or not knowing what to say in return, so I recycle formal niceties and fixate on the evidently mundane so as to seem pertinent and engaged. If I didn't, I wouldn't know if I was following the conversation correctly. It worries me/scares the shit out of me to be amongst people with whom I don't believe I can speak/communicate, and this happens so much I should be used to it. But I'm not - I get more frightened.

I read copiously because it is the most innocuous way to engage with the outside world. A reader is infinitely wound up with the population of readers who have read, or will read, the same book, whose thoughts are led by the flow of this earlier writer. It is a written world in which readers become extensions of the same population, although it is true that we all read differently. Maybe, for me, this difference affirms something of an identity for me - which is why I love doing literature. It helps me believe I am unique.

And so, it is with this heavy-heartedness that I worry that the world has almost passed me by, and that if I let it, I will always be remembered only as the one who did law.