ever just feel content?

I don't mean happy because happiness has the implication of being at a high point and the only direction to go afterwards is down. I'm talking about that feeling of contentment that comes with satisfaction with where your life was, is and is going to be. Things may get bad in the future but that isn't a present concern. It's that feeling when all feels right in the world and it will continue to be. Where you feel like you can truly let tomorrow worry about itself and your whole situation is exactly where you want it to be. You are where you want to be and you couldn't ask to be anywhere different. The music you're listening to contributes to that kind of beauty. The work you're doing, the people you talk to, the people you're surrounded with, just everything around you is good. It isn't perfect in the sense that everything is going perfectly but contentment I feel is what perfection feels like. Just because things aren't perfect, doesn't mean it can't feel perfect. It feels like perfection has been achieved through the situation regardless of how imperfect the actual situation is. There's something beautiful about the moment and it can only be broken through distractions of the mind. But even with those distractions, one can still be content.

Happiness is almost like a mood, it changes when you get bored or angry or distracted. When you're content, you can be content without realizing that you're content. Children are often content and only realize it as adults. A lot of children don't realize how good they actually have it until they become adults. Adults point out how good children have it and don't relish in their situations. Contentment has to do with that relishing. Eating a good, hearty meal with some good conversation, good music in the background and things to think about after. That's contentment to me. Contentment is living a life of thankfulness for everything that you have. Some people have it good, others have it better, others have it bad, yet others have it worse. Contentment perhaps is a relative thing but its finding that era of perfection in your life, holding onto it and trying to sustain it. It's not a moment when the light hits a scene just so that a beauty is captured in a snapshot of one's memory.

Life isn't about snapshots. It's a huge long video. Why would you only want snapshots of happiness? I'd rather a looooong video of pure unadulterated contentment. Is it easy to achieve? Hell no. People make it seems to easy by reducing it into words of "I did this this and this." They can say it was hard, but even that "It was hard." reduces how difficult that journey really is. Contentment isn't about a destination. Life never was, yet people treat it like it is. If you think about it that way, people are really just striving to die. Their destination is death. It's like the stages before death. School. College. Work. Family. Promotion. Kids. Grandkids. Death. Kind of makes you wonder what's the point of it all, doesn't it?

Irritated

Ever realize how little you know of a person?

Or worse, when you realize how little a person knows you? I mean it's fine with people you've just met or people you don't expect to know you, but sometimes, the disappointment of being misunderstood by someone who should've known better is both sad and irritating.

Books

It's weird. I feel like I go through seasons of "intellectual" hunger and then of wanting to only read what's considered to be more superficial reading. At first, I was totally in love with books that had wordplay that would go into the nuances of language and culture with witty and self-deprecating characters (The Elegance of the Hedgehog) but now I'm all for the somewhat deep yet simple plots of The Mysterious Benedict Society. Maybe I just have too much going on in my life.

[edit]
Or perhaps I just needed to get into the swing of things. I still like The Elegance of the Hedgehog I've decided.

Bored at Work

Well really it's writer's block. I can't think of what to write about next and I'm sick and tired of the restriction that I have (I have to use 30 vocabulary words in a page and a half of writing). I mean once you get used to it, it isn't that bad but it's still a mental strain. And for me, it's just getting restrictive and annoying.

And the clock is ticking. I have 7 more stories to write in 2 days (using the last day for revisions). BLEH

Restless. Can't wait to be done working.

My Future?

Travel.
Study.
Work.

GEEZ there's too much going on. Seriously. And what do I do? I do what I do best. Procrastinate. I realized that a lot of the time, I don't really make sense because I'm in my own bubble and I don't know how to explain things to other people. Is that why I like writing so much? It seems that perhaps through writing and constant revision, I can finally get people to understand me.

I wonder if my thoughts are more coherent in writing. Sometimes when I try to do stream of consciousness in a semi-coherent manner, my thoughts and writing pretty much don't make sense, even to me. I suppose I need to work on that.

Literature

I think part of the reason I like reading books that have a different cultural background than America or England is because of the idea of identity. I think that identity is so completely played out at least in the Asian American sense of "I'm neither here nor there, I'm neither white nor fully Asian" blah blah blah.

I think that I like the kind of literature where the cultural aspects are taken for granted (like Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami) because then you get to see the people beyond just the culture and the lens of culture molding the person's entire character. It's about individual struggles just with a slightly different background. I feel like those kind of books are more timeless than those "Who am I? What's my identity?" type of books. But I realized that a lot of these types of books are in translation and so it's obvious that those things are going to be taken for granted. I wonder if a novel by an Asian American where the novel doesn't address identity at all is possible. I'm sure there's good literature out there but I haven't read enough Asian American literature to really know.

At any rate, I like that divorce of culture and identity because even in real life, people look at other people for their culture rather than who they really are. I get bored by that. I mean it's cool learning about different cultures ("How does your country do it?") but there's definitely more to people than their country (or at least I like to think there is, right?). I dunno. What makes a person three-dimensional? Their interests? The quirks in their personality? Our seemingly individual emotions that everyone happens to feel at one time or another? Or are we all just definable by our race, jobs, religion and personality traits that we closely relate to though it doesn't define all of who we are?

"Define yourself in one word." I guess I could, but I prefer not to. "Define yourself in three words." "Happy-go-lucky. Eccentric. At times, boring." I dunno, if you really think about it, no one is what they "define" themselves to be all the time. Right? I can be happy-go-lucky but honestly, the pressures of society are definitely getting to me. It's dumb I think. But I can't help it. So does that make me "serious"? I don't like those associations or being pigeon-holed into such definitions. Break all the boundaries and all the rules, I say! (or try to at least)

Meh.

So it goes.

On a completely different note, I realized that whenever I think to write something (or blog it), it never quite comes out the way I envision it to in my head. It's weird (and annoying) and sometimes I feel like I wrote so much or something at least with a little bit of profundity to find that it's actually quite short and worse, not really all that profound. As it says in Ecclesiastes (I think), "There is nothing new under the sun." I think some author quoted it too. But it's true and sometimes everything I say, though the emotion is new to me, still seems played out in retrospect. That sucks man. I wish I could be more original that I really am.

Meh.

Such is life, I suppose.

Reading

I realized that reading for me is like talking to another person or really just listening to another person tell me a story. There are always different voices and when I start reading a new book, it always takes a page or two (or an entire chapter sometimes) for me to adjust to the author's voice.

I don't think I ever noticed that until relatively recently.