luck favors the prepared.

So.

I was surfing through the blogs of my friends, and I decided to imitate a post of Andrew. He has “published” his commitments on his blog for the upcoming AP World History exam that I am taking as well. However, unfortunately the exam is on this Thursday, so it is not a very appropriate time for me to come up with commitments for that event (it’s a little too late).

So, I have decided to create a list of ten commitments for the last few weeks of my sophomore year.

• Get rid of “Froot Loop” from the widget page of my macbook.
• Continue blogging (so that I won’t post everything on the last minute).
• Remember I have two more years to go (since it’s the end of the school year, it just feels like everything is over already).
• Write down homework for myself instead of instant messaging rest of the day to find out what the homework is.
• Go home after school.
• Start thinking (seriously) about my major.
• Sleep early. Wake up early.
• Balance (learn how to deal with both studying and hanging out).
• Remember that studying and grades are not everything. But realize that friends are not everything of my life as well.
• Try hard.

We always make commitments; and we always forget about them (it’s just a natural, inevitable pattern). I thought it would be helpful to “publish” them in front of a lot of people, because through the publication, more responsibilities follow.

Every human being continues to build a sandcastle for oneself, thinking that the finished building will define reasons of one’s life and existence. Despite endless attacks of winds and waves breaking down one’s hope, he or she never stops the attempts of constructing the castle. Piling up sand is the only task that provides a person reason to breathe. Beckett believed in the need of constant pressure and compulsory activity in order to sustain life. In his play, Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett well developed the image of life as a vain goblet full of absurdity and irrationality.

Godot whom Estragon and Vladimir wait for is a vague figure without rigid definition. Although Godot has amorphous feature, it being the ultimate symbol of hope cannot be denied. They say he will come; yet he never did and there is no such a promise given that he will. Estragon and Vladimir simply want to believe that his arrival will be made and force themselves to wait for. If Godot does arrive so, Estragon and Vladimir will need “another Godot” to wait; waiting for obscure light of hope is what they’ve figured out as a path to bear absurdity of their existences.

The presence of Estragon and Vladimir not only represents the meaningless struggle of the mankind but also shows how humans are interdependent on one another. Standing on the same earth, it is an unchanging fate of humans to share common air with others for breathing. A relationship named marriage bonds a woman and a man together as one group, eventually giving birth to a new social gathering, family. On the next step, families pile into a bigger community; and with accumulation of countless individuals, the whole universe gets into its shape. A man is always surrounded by other men, while he himself plays a role as a part of another man’s surrounding. A person is different from others, but he or she is never separated from them. Constant pressure forcing us to accomplish certain goal creates missions or roles for us to play in the universe; compulsory activities become vitamins that support our soul to survive. The only terminus of our waiting for Godot is death.

“You must write at least two blog posts every week,” said Ms. P, my English teacher, pointing her finger at me. “Okay. I have chemistry worksheets to finish, everyday quiz in Geography class to study for, AP World History essays to write, and now she wants me to blog. Twice a week. That’s great.”—this is how I reacted in January, 2008.

Let me confess (although the effort that I had put in my blog so far makes the confession quite self-explanatory). I did not take blogging seriously. I thought blogging was boring. I considered writing two posts a week as another burdensome assignment. Yes, honestly, to me, blogging was homework that I had to finish although I hated to do so. But please wait before you (a blogger who worships blogging) condemn me for my past ignorance; and realize how I used past tenses. I repeat. I thought blogging was boring; but not anymore.

It took three days for me to change my mind. First, I changed the theme. I took my time and chose the background design that I was attracted to the most. Changing the theme indeed brought significant impact. The visual attraction stirred up my attention for my own blog site. (I would like to call it as the “visual impact.”) Then, I began exploring blogs of others. Through wordpress.com I searched through people’s blogs looking for common interest; and I found one. I read a blog post title “Lost 4.10” by Billy Liggett who is “a 31-year-old newspaper editor living in Sanford, North Carolina.” He discussed about the tenth episode of Lost, the television series that I go insane about. (I am planning to write a reflection of the episode for myself, so let me set this issue aside.) Visiting other people’s blogs and reading their posts aroused strong motivations—motivations to write posts and to take care of my blog. So I brought such desires into actions. I wrote about subjects that I was recently interested in. People all over the world began responding to my visits. The cluster map soon started to exhibit red dots on various regions.

It was not blogging itself that was boring. It was me. I was the one who made everything tedious. I was a boring blogger. You may think blogging is fun, and you may think it isn’t. But you should remember: you are the decision maker. You have all the authority to make blogging as the most incredible way of expressing yourself or to make it as the most irritating homework assignment ever.

I am a sixteen-year-old girl. Movies, TV shows, and songs are always busy praising the age of sweet sixteen. What is so sweet about being a sixteen-year-old? I am not a young child anymore, but I am not a full grownup at the same time. I am expected by the world to be changed, to make progress, and to move forward, but I am still forgiven when mistakes are made. I would like to call this period of my life as the “intermediate era.” During this era of rapid alternations and transformations, various explorations are possible and allowed. However, once I graduate from my little-fairy-tale-happy-lala-land and enter the real world, I will then have to face a new strong flavor: the bitterness of life.

Life, so far, was sweet, I would say. I lived in the safe zone and stayed under the roof created by my parents. Instructions given by parents, preachers, and teachers have guided me through certain paths so far; yet now I encounter a large wilderness presented in front of me. There is no map, no road, no tour guide, but me. I have the invisible pen and the transparent paper in my hands to draw a new map. I have my feet to leave footprints that create a rough, new road. Finally, I get to prepare myself as the new tour guide of the future.

Life will become bitter, people say. You will face hardships, people warn. Yes, I am scared and worried about my ambiguous future. Nothing has been solidified, and no vision has been constructed. I am afraid to face changes. However, worrying about it brings nothing practical. No matter what I want, I will become an adult and graduate say goodbye to the safe zone. Life was sweet so far. But I have tasted nothing but the sweetness. Let’s suppose that life that I will have to have as a grownup tastes bitter. Well, at least, it’s a new, different type of flavor. Am I ready? Not really. Am I excited? Absolutely!

Neither a person nor an accident gave me a serious physical-injury. Again, no “physical”-injury. Yet I once received a severe mental-wound by a keen blade of words. The sharp edge came out from my best friends’ mouths and hacked me into pieces.

I had attended a small middle school with little number of students in each grade. Being in a group was everything and staying next to friends was so crucial. For sure, I had belonged to the group in which each of us was too afraid to be independent. One day, unexpectedly I heard two of my best friends disparaging me—they didn’t notice that I was hearing their conversation. Cursing and swearing, they were talking about my rumors that made nonsense. I felt ridiculous about their stupidity—how could they not think of me hearing their conversation by any chance?

I never told them that I heard the conversation. Although they didn’t show me any negative attitude toward me directly, I still felt dreg of anger from their betrayal. I stopped myself placing myself between them. At first, I was extremely angry at them. However the feeling slowly transformed and became an intense grief. I had put faith in them, but they betrayed my trust. As a young naïve girl, I felt my heart getting torn down. I cried so much and I felt an extreme “loneliness”. I was afraid to feel that.

“Loneliness”—people seem to be afraid to possess such feeling. We all do. We all try to fit ourselves in a safe zone—a boring safe zone where we can loose our peculiarity, characteristics, and identity in order to blend with others.

The term “loneliness” does not mean something negative to me anymore. The time of being lonely was time for me to learn how to stand up independently.

I had lost two friends yet earned myself—what a happy ending.

Who are you? No, I am not asking for your name. I asked who you are, not what your name is. Why are you here? Why are you born? Why are you sitting down in front of this computer looking at the screen displaying my post?

I bet that you couldn’t give a clear, true answer to these consecutive questions starting with a word which makes everything so complicated: why. Certain things have reasons for its existences. A clock is there to tell people time, a pencil is used to write things on papers; a phone, to communicate. However these are things that are made by people to perform specific roles. Clear reasons have not been defined for existence of things in nature: the sun, the earth, the animals, and humans. Scientists have been trying to determine how the whole universe is formed at the first place. Some people eased themselves from this problem by simply assuming that there is higher force above them: gods (wait, then, where did the gods come from?).

I have no idea about the whole universe, yet I thought of the one reason for the existence of human being. A human is born to find out why he or she is born. As the time flows, a person handles many different tasks with various goals. Equal chance of experimenting with ones own life is given out to everyone. Live your life considering it as an opportunity to realize why you are living.

With a romantic melody flowing, two half naked boys, full of passion, were holding each other. Sweat covered all of their bodies; gasping for breath, the two seemed inseparable. What are they doing? I asked myself, and the only answer I could think of was them making love. The very instant when I assumed them as homosexuals, a man who were watching the scene removed his headphone. The amorous song ended, and no more romance existed. Instead, loud cheers of a crowd filled up the speaker. An utterly different angle provided an unexpected image. No, they were not making love. They were two wrestlers struggling to defeat each other.
The situation was created by the company trying to sell their new mobile phone with an mp3 function. “Our company makes a cellular phone with great music which can change your way of viewing things” is the basic message that the advertisement delivers. Yet what penetrated my mind was not the fresh machine’s arrival. The advertisement itself with its astonishing way of destroying the viewers’ stereotyped image felt fresh. Breaking stubborn stereotypes hindering people from facing the truths that they are suppose to see—this is what I want to do. I want to become a thinker, speaker, writer, viewer who can remove colored glasses placed in front of eyes of people.
I want to be a person who is capable of showing the same image from an opposite angle and still convince the audience. The commercial with two naked boys which is supposed to be funny and humorous altered my life. Obtaining ultimate purpose of life from a laughable advertisement: isn’t this happening itself smashing the stereotype?

The origin of ones life itself has no cause, I believe. What I mean by a “cause” is an actual cause of life, not a cause of pregnancy (which is a simple mating).
No one earned their life. An opportunity to see the light of this universe is not a granted matter that a person deserves; it is something that is already given to a person without his or her will. Whether the one desired for it or not, he or she still has to pay the cost of receiving the chance by living given life. As humans carry on their burden of existence, they eventually face absurdity of life and realize lightness of their subsistence.
Why was I born? What am I breathing for? Although no one can answer them, by nature, to bear the lightness of ones being, humans unceasingly struggle to place themselves in a position where they can defend reasons for their existences. I, as a member of the species, constantly try to justify that I am worthy living. Yet life provides no ceiling to touch. We push ourselves up the endless stairs called greed toward the terminus named final achievement of aim, when actually no terminus point exists in life. Study to get all A’s, go to Harvard, graduate with GPA of 4.0, struggle and compete with others to get a job you want, work hard for higher annual income, work harder and harder, then maybe after 10 extra years of working, try asking yourself a question: “Wait, so why am I working so hard?”
Why do you study, work, and live? If my heartbeat stops right now, nothing actually changes. Yes, my mom will cry and my class will have one student missing in the room. But so what? My death won’t even tickle the universe. The earth will still rotate, the sun will still rise, and others will still continue breathing. How light and trivial I am.
Seeking for a meaning and loading weight on what I consider important in life neither offer a reason of my life nor cancel the encounter with the unbearable lightness of being. Instead, too much burden on shoulders would suppress me down, placing my soul in the bottom floor of the stairs and making myself suffer bitter reality of emptiness.
Despite its lightness and absurdity, my life is full of meaning. Being able to breathe in this universe itself is a privilege; being no other one on earth, but being me who is unique from all the others is a special gift. The opportunity of being able to continue the heartbeats constantly transmit unlimited chances to struggle to find meaning in my life. Living in this universe is a worthwhile attempt.