Carelessly Optimistic

I'll be the first to admit that lately...things have not been so great. There haven't been any major disasters or tragedies (well...Prop 8 passed...) lately but I've been too worn down and tired to care. I had a monstrous headache monday - I was literally crying at dance practice. (I had to tell myself over and over that I am a big girl and that storming away from practice was not a good example to be setting - even if the drummers WERE annoying as hell). The sun hasn't been out as much. Nothing is on time, I have so many things to research, NSU is either on the verge of imploding or great success (ah, risk- taking), I haven't seen friends in a while, etc etc etc.

I've been feeling like something is missing and I don't know what it is...and I haven't got that fire lit under me anymore. And today wasn't all that great either, looking back on it:

I got up in the AM and stepped on my glasses. Strike 1....I had to skip my first class to get them fixed. Then I went to a restaurant and got lunch and I had some issues with my tongue - at first I thought I ate something I was allergic to. I decided to ignore it and went to class where I learned about the Umayyad Empire except not really. I stuck my headphones in and my ears hurt A LOT and at that point I realized....all this ear nose throat stuff is an EAR INFECTION. So I walked my butt down to Tang and got myself checked out - they can't explain my headaches or my mouth really but my ear is definitely infected - and then I got my flu shot. $25 please! Drugs at Walgreens cost me another $20 and 40 minutes of my time, making me late for my next lecture. Which made me mad because the lecture was REALLY GOOD. He said more about energy policy than my Energy and Society professor has said ALL SEMESTER!!

JA history was pretty interesting today. We talked about redress and reparations. I did the math and my family never recieved reparations because my grandfather died of stomach cancer/suicide a couple of years before redress happened =( We also watched a thing on the JLAs - soo sad and what was sadder was half teh class had never heard about Japanese Latin Americans that were kidnapped during WWII and used as human hostages against the Japanese during the war. After the war most were deported not to South AMerican but JAPAN and didn't get the same redress/reparations as the rest of the JAs. They were treated so much worse than Japanese Americans were, too. 

The other film we watched, "9066 to 9/11" drew all the parallels that I was already really conscious of. Seeing 9/11 footage, even though it wasn't the actual planes, hit me harder than I thought it would have though. It's so much more real not because it is in color but because I lived through it. It changed how my generation sees Arabic people, Muslims and Muslim-Americans, imperialism, the middle east, dictators, oil....yeah it cahnged a lot of things. It reminded me of what happened to myself on 9/11...when a classmate of mine asked me why I had bombed Pearl Harbor. I think that was one of those moments in my life that will always stick out. My friends actually laughed and didn't think much of it when I got angry about it. I don't think I ever felt more alone up until that point. I was the "other", America's "enemy" in that instant...and I was thirteen at the time. I thought I was American and nothing more. I knew about internment but at that point didn't know my family had been interned at Tule Lake. I didn't know a lot of things and I didn't have a clear sense of my identity, but that day whatever sense of identity that I had was shattered instantly. I didn't realize all of this in that instant though...all I could think was "how IGNORANT!" and get really, really angry. Angry at the kid who thought he was a smart ass for asking that question, angry at his parents who had raised his white self to hate on others, angry at my friends who didn't think there was anything wrong with the comment, angry at American History class, because it didn't teach Americans shit about any of the things it should. Now that I have a clear sense of my identity and I know a LOT more about the intricacies of JA and AA history in the US, I shouldn't care so much about that moment...but for some reason I still do.

Anyways.

Back to 2008.

Life's been going along in a haphazard manner, and all these stupid little things like getting infections keeps coming up and I just can't get ahead in anything. And I haven't been super positive. But tonight I am choosing...choosing to be optimistic...even though I don't have any really good reasons to. Because I don't have any really good reasons to be negative, not really, and negativity doesn't get you anything positive. I need positive. So. I'm going to be optimistic, even if it means setting myself up for disappointment.

I'm putting that happy record on, cleaning up all of my clutter, and hoping that someday soon I won't be going to bed early just to avoid my life.