Looking From The Outside

This is the first year in four years that I haven't done SPCN. And although the immense amount of free time for updating online journals is nice, the feeling of being the outsider makes me a little sad. Which is really strange, because my role as Retention Coordinator pretty much integrates me within Samahang as deep as you can get. But the connection you make with the SPCN community, especially now with runthrus every day until the show, there's nothing like it.

It's funny because in many ways, I feel the same way about my family. Having discovered a bunch of my family's online journals, I guess you could say I vicariously live my family life through their entries. This past weekend my uncle's family had a housewarming at their home in Union City. A few weeks ago another uncle had a party in Vallejo. And every time, the entries described how much fun they had bonding with everyone, feeding off the energy of their extended family, seeing some of the small ones running around creating havoc, reminding all of us of the time when we were that age not too long ago, doing the exact same thing. I was so immersed in seeing what was here at UCLA that I didn't even notice how far away I was, but reading about the family at a time when I'm beginning to think about life after college reminds me that college is a temporary thing, that family is forever, and I don't see them enough at all. Again, I'm looking from the outside.

Part of me thinks this outsider thing is genetic. Both my father and his father displayed these outsider mentalities. I remember when I was little I would see my grandfather sit by the windowsill, watching the outside world go by, even though it was a quiet street with maybe a car or two passing by every 10 minutes or so. When my sisters were looking for a picture of my dad for his birthday cake, they had a hard time finding one because often he wouldn't be in the picture; he'd be taking it. And when I'm in the mood, I love just sitting and watching people go about their daily rounds on Bruin Walk. There's that serenity that comes when you just take yourself out of the world and be passive, and just absorb everything around you. Let others around you be, and bask in the beauty of their creation. But now, I realize that if you stay passive for too long, it's like you reach a high, where the world looks almost ideal without you. But at that point, it becomes hard to re-insert yourself again, for fear of ruining that ideal, that ideal world and that ideal feeling. The "Glass Menagerie" Complex. If you aren't familiar with the play, go read it. Tennessee Williams, good writer he is.

So that fulfills my philosophical moment for the day. Time for work.