familial frustration.

nine days. nine fucking days until i leave for philadelphia. eleven days until my parents are out of my hair. i've always had a rough relationship with my mother who i know spoils me monetarily and loves me very much, but we've never seen eye-to-eye on anything. the past two years i've been trying hard to develop some sort of working / functional relationship with her, and i've been relatively successful but her latest attempts are genuinely pissing me off. it feels like my happiness means nothing to her unless it makes her happy as well. take for example, the current situation of me dating a non-taiwanese guy. i mean, i promised her that she could introduce me to nice taiwanese boys (more to appease her than anything) and despite an already disastrous attempt, she wants to try again. this time in our own home. i hate this shit. she knows how uncomfortable i am around new people. i'm anti-social and i've told her this, and yet she insists on this no matter my pleading and explaining how uncomfortable these situations make me. of course, she thinks i act the way i do to piss her off and embarass her in front of her friends, but really - i genuinely do not do well in social situations involving unknowns. i don't approach and talk to people i don't know well. i don't start conversations with them. i don't even participate in conversations - i reply to questions in one word and wait for the next. call me rude, but that's just the way i am. i am so sick of this - if being a 'good daughter' just puts me in situations like this then i'm done, i'm through.

back+forth.

i haven't posted to a blog in a long time, but i figure i'd start up again as i head into my third year of college.

as you may or may not know, i went to a private boarding school in claremontCA. like dancing, it was initially my mom's idea and i hated it. also like dancing, i ended up loving it while my mom thouroughly regretted it. but to get straight to the point, i didn't make friends in high school, i made family. my school became my home, and i went off to college feeling that way - i was homesick for a time and place that no longer existed and could never be re-enacted. to quote zack braff's character in garden state:

You'll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for you kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

while it was a great experience, boarding school left me with very high expectations for college and the friends i would later make. in that sense, my 'great experience' turned out to be a crippling handicap when it came to finding my niche. unless i felt that i could confide wholly in someone, trust them completely and consider them not just a friend, but family, i didnt feel it was worth it to even make an attempt to get to know them. thus i spent my first two years of college practically friend-less outside of my dance group. i wasn't unhappy or anything - i was content within my dance circle but i was closest with the then-seniors, which left me lost again when my sophomore year started. two other factors contributed to my general feeling of being a drifter my second year: a tentative, up and down relationship with a very busy graduate student, and living in a house with a bunch of sorority girls i hadn't met until i signed the lease.

this upcoming year however, i feel like i finally have a good grasp on my social life - i think i have found my niche (even it is among graduate students) and i think i'm finally letting go of that idea of 'home' that i've held onto for so long.