PuuPing

No matter how many good cops there are, there will always be bad cops that abuse their power. This is why so many innocent black people have been and are still being killed, and why so many innocent protestors have been attacked.

No matter how many "woke" people there are, there will always be people who are ignorant and blind to the feelings of others. This is why you can never find a thread on Twitter or Facebook where someone hasn't said "all lives matter," "not all cops," and so on.

No matter how many good protestors and rioters there are, there will always be those who join not because they agree with the cause but because they simply want to use the chaos as a guise for their own personal gain. This is why you see all the white out-of-towners looting the stores and destroying the already beaten down neighborhoods.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here. Between now and the times when I used to post regularly, Tumblr has died, and I realized it’s actually now a useful place for writing "public” rants, memos, and other things that no one will probably see.

Just a few years ago, I felt totally lost, unready, and incapable to tackle life and living as an adult. However, I was able to learn a lot over these past few years, and at some point I learned enough to where I began feeling like tackling life was no longer insurmountable.

One of the biggest things I learned was to be grateful, and not in the cliche way. After flunking out of undergrad and after literally splitting my head open, I realized that there are a lot of things out there that we can be grateful for, including super simple and accessible things.

A huge chunk of people nowadays are extremely sad, and they mostly feel that way due to a lack of fulfillment in their lives based on not having the nicest clothes, driving the nicest car, having the hottest body, working the most prestigious job, knowing the coolest people, hosting the fanciest wedding, etc. Of course, each of these is nice to have, but people nowadays have almost come to expect each of these things where, by not having these things that are all very difficult to obtain, they consequently consider themselves failures, inferior, and unworthy.

On the other hand, I love pizza. I also love video games. Being able to eat pizza and play video games is a totally awesome thing for me. Days where I can spend at least a portion of the time eating pizza and playing video games are good days. These days give me happiness and fulfillment in life.

It doesn’t take much to be able to eat pizza and play video games. Each of these is relatively accessible, and they’re sources of extreme happiness at least for me. Even if I don’t have the most money, have the biggest house, host the fanciest wedding, and even if I flunk out of school and end up working a minimum wage job in Houston, no matter what happens, at least I can probably still afford pizza and video games. That’s not too bad at all.

She understands my struggle in school, having to spend so much of my time studying.

I understand her struggle, trying to figure out which choices to make for her and for us.

I think a lot of people our age struggle with finding happiness because no one really knows what they want in life. I guess this is sort of ubiquitous to being a human, but so many people I see kind of just go through life doing what people tell them to do and then wonder why they’re unhappy.

“Just work hard, do good in school, and you’ll find happiness!” “You don’t want to end up working minimum wage all your life right?” “No, no, no, don’t do that with your life, you should become (insert “prestigious” career here).”

So many people spend time making other people happy, they never discover what makes themselves happy. And finally, when they get old and realize there was so much in life they wanted to do but didn’t, they start to push their dreams onto other people, repeating the process.

I want to be a lawyer. I fucking want it more than anything. No one told me to become one. Actually, people said I shouldn’t do it because there are apparently “too many” of them and I won’t find a job or be successful, and instead I should be a doctor or a doctor or even a doctor.

And I listened. And, wouldn’t you know it, I was unhappy. So unhappy that I couldn’t function, until I made the biggest decision of my life to not listen to people.

Suddenly, with my eyes set on becoming a lawyer, the most random things started getting easier, because I knew what I wanted and knew it would make me happy. I study hard, willingly. I take care of myself. I plan ahead. Not because I like these things, but because I am obsessed with becoming a lawyer and these things end up following.

Not only that, good shit is happening to me. I’m getting new opportunities. I’m about to enter my third session of interning at NASA. I got into my dream law school, UC Hastings. I’m getting great grades. Not because I’m listening to anyone, but because I want it.