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I have refrained from writing new posts to honor my grandfather's passing and to give my words to him their appropriate place at the top. Five weeks have now passed, and the world has moved on. I just want to thank those who expressed their condolences. You were precious few. God grant the rest of you the little consideration necessary to express your sympathy for your friends' losses.

A lot has happened in the interim, and I would I know satisfy those gossip-thirsty among you with many juicy tidbits, were I so inclined. Unfortunately, I think gossip is poison and hold it very much in disdain and contempt. Yes, I am being pretentious, but I am done being politically correct about my views. I will not abandon my humility, but I am a coward and a hypocrite if I do not express that which I believe is truth. And in the meantime, if anyone wants to call me out on my pretentiousness, if anyone can find in my actions or thoughts a hint of hypocrisy, by all means slap me in the face with it. I am done bringing myself down for others, I am done being 'one' of 'them', and I am done investing all I have in people. I have spent the semester chasing after that which I cannot have, and it has cost me dearly in honor, pride, time, and resources. More importantly, it has cost me my own sense of self-respect.

Recently, something happened that could potentially change much of this. But my own incompetence and pathetic desperation will work to ensure that the law of inertia remains intact. So now, I have only my return home to look forward to; my 5 weeks of heart-wrenching yearning and the inevitability of impermanence and the death of many things both physical and sociopsychological. The great experience of the banality of bureacracy, the fetid corruption of my nation, and the rotting of its breathtaking innocence by the touches of greed and consumerism. If only you knew what it was like, if only you knew so that when I spoke to you of this you did more than categorize what I say into neat little emotion/personality slots you have deemed appropriate for me after your judgment of who I am. And yes, you have judged and categorized and made assumptions about that. I at least will admit that I have and that I am aware of it, and that I try to revise them as often and as accurately as I can based on everything I ever experience in my interactions with you.

But for all of that, the love of those I love, my love of the land and its bounty, my love for my home and its grace and its truth; these are more than enough to make me anxious to leave already. God knows I have not loved anything or anyone, or been loved, in two years of this cold land. I am too nice, apparently. Or too lonely. Or too serious. Or too unattractive. Or too intimidating. Or too opinionated. Or too different. Or too conforming. Or expect too much. All these (and there are many more) are real things that have been said to me. Or have been implied, when the culprit was not an individual but a larger entity such as a group or the community or even this whole culture. And the question then is, if so many qualifications and conditions are set upon one by the people of this society just for simple, honest, true caring, is that caring even worth seeking out, is it worth anything, is it even real? Love is most beautiful when unconditional, unreasoning, and instinctive. But what do you do when the real thing is not around? You look for the closest alternative, obviously, because there is nothing worse than having nothing at all. But what if you give all you have, and fail at finding even the crudest semblances, the faintest of shades? What does that say about you as a person?