this time around

This time I am going to do it right. I am not going to let fantasties overtake me. I am not going to do elaborate symbolic events. This time, I won\’t be emotionally charged.

There\’s so many ways I can take things, but I just don\’t take most of them. I always take the same path, Perhaps I don\’t realize it, but I end up failing myself again and again.

This time around, I am going to do it…right.

Ben imed me today. It was the strangest coincidence, because today was also the first time I had seen Tanner signed onto AIM. Tanner and I didn\’t say anything, but it was a coincidence. Ben. Ben and I never really had anything beyond a platonic relationship. I was supposed when he said that I made friends easily online. But isn\’t it easy to make friends online? The moment that two people agree to exchange communication…they are friends. Especially if there are no other obligations. Easy friendships.

I worry myself to death sometimes too. Today I worried whether I was pretentious. When I was a freshman, someone said that I was. Hello big ball of insecurity aka me. At that time, I didn\’t know what it meant and headed directly to dictionary.com I still didn\’t understand. To claim something that I wasn\’t, of bragging? Maybe I am, but I only say so to drop into modesty. A recognition?

Ben said that he felt…alone so often. That there weren\’t that many people around him since he has left college. He graduated and life kept going on. He couldn\’t keep in touch with everyone he knew in Madison. Only 3-4 people he could keep in constant contact with. And that\’s the way life is, isn\’t it. You choose who you want to stay in touch with and everyone else can disappear into oblivion–or into some aquaintance type later on.

High school sucked. I left without any regrets. There was nothing more than I could have done while I was at Acalanes. But at Berkeley, I feel like I am leaving, missing something. I have always tried to live life to the fullest, never missing an opportunity. And yet, I keep wondering always wondering that perhaps I closed myself to opportunities. My social anxiety and my limitations as a person kept me from doing some things that I wouldn\’t have. There are some people I met along the way that I have changed the path of my life.

We all know that one is Alan. These are the people who drastically influenced my choices in college. Marisol, oddly enough, has indirectly influenced so many things I do today. I had met her in the Yahoo groups. Then she introduced me to the Protag boards, which has now led me to be a blogger.l And she also introduced me to the mcb mailing list where I found my current roommates. One roommate introduced me to Alex, the ex-boyfriend. The other roommate introduced me to Sam.

And rescomp. In that, I was the one who made the choice. Maybe Alan influenced me a little to be more interested in computers than I needed to be. But I chose that path all my own. I became an intern because I wanted to be better than the rest. I applied…i got rejected, I applied again. And here we are, at the end.

Let me try to reassure myself. At the engineering commencement, I\’ll see Jason H., Anderson, Karen, Seth, Thomas, James, Chris…George…