Is This Thing Still On?
Written on February 13th, 2018 by Tomás Zazueta
NOTE: This post is from my old WordPress archive. I first started blogging after graduating High School. I thought it would be a good idea to preserve some of these articles here.
Greetings, dedicated readers of my blog!
Ha ha, funny joke. As you can tell, I haven’t really updated this thing in a while. Not to say that I haven’t done anything worthy to write about, I simply didn’t put aside any time to actually write about it. Since my last blog post was a little less than two years ago, there’s only so much I can cover without losing my train of thought. So I guess I’ll try to be succinct.
In terms of my personal life, it’s been a series of ups and downs. I don’t want to get extremely personal here, but I can certainly say that I’ve grown as a person in the two years that have passed since my last post. I currently live in an apartment off-campus, with gives me a greater degree of autonomy. My list of friends hasn’t changed in any significant way, but I guess that’s a testament to how good my current friendships are. On another note, I finally got my driver’s license! But I don’t quite have a car yet. It’s still a nice achievement, though.
In terms of my academic life, I have been doing decently. I try not to procrastinate too hard, but the temptation doesn’t really leave. I did have the privilege to go to Princeton, New Jersey to teach high schoolers how to code in C++ over the summer. I didn’t like the location, but the job was rewarding. I’ve worked in office environments before, but I never really felt engaged to my work like I did in New Jersey.
Another perk of my summer job was the ability to travel. I visited New York City and Philadelphia while I was there. As an LA native, I thought I knew what a big city was. But when I first stepped out of the train onto 7th Avenue, I knew that I had never experienced a place as colossal as New York. Buildings surrounded me and stretched before me like canyons. Crowds of people rushed up the street, and crowds equally as large rushed in the opposite direction. It was hot, humid, and bustling. There were those classic yellow taxicabs stuck in a perpetual traffic, and food trucks selling hot dogs and kebab. The only places where I saw so much human life was at Disneyland, but nobody actually lives in Disneyland. This place felt extreme in every way. I still can’t fathom how this place is real, how much many people can be crammed into it and live their own personal lives. It was an amazing and intense feeling that can only be compared to one’s first plane ride or a child’s first glimpse of the ocean.
My only regret is that I only spent one day at New York. I got to see the areas around Time Square, the Rockefeller Center, and Central Park, all places that pictures could never do justice. I saw protesters in front of Trump Tower, and entire stores dedicated to Nintendo and Hershey’s Chocolate. I was wandering towards a random restaurant to eat dinner when I saw the ever-familiar Flatiron Building, a place that I saw in movies but I never really considered its existence. I only saw the World Trade Center and the Empire State Buildings from afar, but they were beautiful all the same. I never got to see the Statue of Liberty, so I guess I have a little reason to come back.
Though I would love to visit New York again, I could never see myself living there. I value my personal space far too much. I also don’t think I could really take anyone with me. It’s a place you have to experience on your own, and a place where you have to forgo any feelings of disgust or social anxiety. The smell was as loud as the streets where, permeating everywhere on street level. The crowds rushing on the sidewalks made me give up on the idea of a “personal bubble.” The one thing I did like was not having to wait for the crosswalk signal. Nobody in New York paid any attention to warnings.
Philadelphia was much nicer. There weren’t as many crowds and the weather was much more tolerable. I could see myself living there. But I only spent one day there as well. It’s not a lot of time to try and capture the soul of a city.
I might post more stories of my travels, but I don’t want to go all over the place. I just want to put the most essential happenings that I have experienced since I’ve been gone. It may not all be as interesting as New York, but I want to get everybody up to speed.
I tried a few different looks since I was away. I stopped cutting my hair shortly after my last blog post. I didn’t cut it again until December 2017. I wanted to have long hair like I did in middle school. Plus, being freed from my Catholic school’s limits on hair gave me a drive to experiment a little.
I wish I could say that it was a hit, but it was more frizzy than anything else. I didn’t give my hair attention everyday, and it showed. And even when it was complimented and I had good hair days, I never felt confident in my hair. Needless to say, cutting it really helped boost my self-esteem.
I also tried growing out my facial hair. To make a long story short, I’ll wait a few more years to try that one again.
I haven’t been watching as much anime as I did 2 years ago. I wish I could say why. It’s not that I don’t like anime anymore, its just that I don’t really like putting the time into binging, and I don’t feel as compelled to watch shows like I used to.
Neon Genesis Evangelion was a fantastic show that I watched in January, though. My initial first impression was quite high, but my thoughts on it have cooled since then. While I do enjoy discussing the show with my friends, I don’t think I could make a blog post about it. So much has been said about it that I couldn’t possibly add to the online discourse.
That’s my methodology with most of the things I write about. I don’t really touch on the more popular stuff, but I don’t go for the niche stuff, either. I like to go somewhere in the middle. I don’t do it because I’m arrogant and I want to write about things other people don’t write about. I do it because I’ve seen so many movies and shows that I want to talk about, but there’s next to nothing when it comes to discussion online because it’s not popular enough or it doesn’t have enough of a cult following. So when somebody wants to read up on some mediocre anime or movie that nobody else bothered to write about, at least they might come across a review for it by some guy who goes around calling himself Lord Stockton.
Well, I hope I can commit myself to keep this thing up to date and I hope I see you guys around. In the meantime, I’m giving up most fast food for Lent. So, pray for me ;_;.
