Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

Here goes nothing... again. But for real this time.

Something to add to the previous post that I only just realized this morning when I woke up. Now, I don't know very much about dreams - why we have them, what they mean, etc... What I do know about dreams (and this might only apply to me) is that I can only ever remember them when my sleep cycles are short, i.e. naps or falling back asleep for an hour or so after waking up. And going through a dozing cycle this morning has made me realize something else about the way I experience homesickness.

Until this place feels like home, I'll probably hold off on doing the whole dozing business on a Saturday/Sunday morning. Naps are generally unavoidable if I'm too tired but I'm going to try to stop the "waking up on Saturday/Sunday morning, lie in bed, and eventually fall back asleep for another hour or so" cycle that I actually do almost every weekend when I'm at home. Because you see, dreams can be a little stressful when you remember them. They rarely make sense, after all, but usually, waking up from a dream entails a brief moment of "what the fuck is happening?!" followed by a sort of calm because I realize I'm in bed at home. These days, waking up from a dream entails a brief moment of "what the fuck is happening?!" followed by a sort of anxiety attack because I realize I'm NOT at home. All told, it's a shitty sort of price to pay for an hour or so of dozing.

On a completely unrelated note, I'd been listening to some Journey that isn't Don't Stop Believing and it got me thinking about what kind of songs artists write when they're solely associated with 1 song. And I don't just mean one-hit-wonders because one-hit-wonders tend to fade after their one-hit-wonder has its 15 minutes of fame. I mean the artists, like Journey, who wrote songs that are actually timeless, but no one knows anything about anything else they wrote. For example, whatever happened to Toto after Africa? Africa is, without question, a timeless song. Mayhaps I will go download some Toto.

So before I start writing my actual post, I just want to take this opportunity to mention something about my journey to Fort McMurray. Do you all remember when Vanessa Carlton first appeared on the music scene? This was a few years back - I imagine it being something like 2002 or sometime around then. She wrote this song called "A Thousand Miles" and in it, she wrote something like "You know I'd walk a thousand miles if I could just see you tonight." After driving a little more than twice that distance, I can legitimately call bullshit on that line. I know you're given artistic license when bragging about the extent to which you love someone but a. Vanessa Carlton would not walk a thousand miles to see anyone and b. "tonight" implies same-day accomplishment and by my math, you'd have to walk at 41 miles an hour for 24 straight hours to even accomplish the feat. Again, nonsense.

White Houses was a really good song, though.

Anyhow, for those of you who are interested, that was the thought I kept having throughout the drive here, when I wasn't busy listening to mixtapes.

What I really want to post about, though, is the idea of belonging as it relates to Queen's frosh week. I was originally going to post about the idea of homesickness, but realized that while I have thoughts on homesickness, I haven't conjured up a coherent thought about it. This is most probably due to the fact that I'm not 100% sure of what "home" means, which is, in turn, probably due to the fact that I'm not 100% sure of what "family" means. All I know is that I'm homesick and I miss my family. But that's not the point I'm trying to make here.

A few years ago, I was reading an article in the Queen's journal about the changes being made to frosh week. Or rather, now that I think about it, the article dealt more with offering an "alternative" frosh week for students who felt that the traditional faculty-driven frosh week was too centered around conforming to "Queen's tradition." The main point was that these students felt that the pressure to conform/do what everyone else was doing was stifling individuality and breeding too much inter-faculty hostility. I remember thinking, at the time, that these are points about Queen's frosh week that had never before occurred to me, but upon consideration, made sense if you particularly sensitive to this kind of thing. It's a rather left-wing stance on the civil rights spectrum and at the time, this objection made a lot of sense to me. Not that it turned me against the idea of frosh week - just that it made me think that maybe frosh week had some flaws that ought to be corrected.

A few years later, I think I've reconsidered my view, somewhat. Not that I don't think that frosh week has its flaws, but I've come to understand why it may be better to leave these flaws because fixing them might create bigger ones. In some ways, I'm hoping that this is a sign that I'm starting to come to a point where I can not only recognize the situations where left-wing views make more sense and also the situations where right-wing vies make more sense too. This is something that I think university students have to learn when they leave the ivory tower of the left-wing heavy university atmosphere.

You see, I was thinking about the nature of homesickness and why I experience it in some cases and not in others. And as I said earlier, while I don't have all the answers, there is one thing that I am sure is heavily related: a sense of belonging. Think about all the times when you've felt homesick. 10 to 1, you're in a situation or place where you don't feel like you belong - it's not a place in which you feel safe and it's a not a place with which you are familiar. But it's more than just familiarity; it's being unfamiliar with a place with which everyone else is familiar. To feel like a stranger - like you don't belong - when it seems like people around you feel right at home (people like store owners, insurance companies, principals, neighbors, etc...) is probably the main reason why most people feel homesick. I mean, yes, you can feel homesick because you miss your family, but I think that that feeling is enhanced mainly because your family represents a place where you belong; it's a place where you have a place, as convoluted as that might sound.

You can probably understand, just from reading that paragraph, why I'm still not 100% sure about what constitutes a "family" or a "home" since none of the ideas I've presented above are necessarily (though they often are) tied directly to the same people in every scenario. For example, I consider my uncle's family in Singapore "family" while for other people, this might not be the case. But I digress...

And so, while you can take a negative spin on Queen's frosh week (as you can do with pretty much anything if you try hard enough) and criticize it for its "forced conformity," maybe that's precisely what a lot of first years need when they leave home for the first time. Maybe this conformity - this pressure to be part of Queen's and to do exactly what everyone around you is doing - maybe we need that so we can develop a sense of belonging. And I know it won't work for everyone but when I look around at first year students and Queen's spirit and I look at how big of an ordeal frosh week is for this university, I can't help feeling that for the majority of the students, this works, and that maybe "individuality" isn't what we should be striving for when we think frosh week. I'm not saying it's bad, nor am I saying that conformity will always be good, but during those first weeks, when you're in a new city, living in a new place, surrounded by new people and a new way of life... maybe doing the same thing as everyone else and going through those same ordeals is exactly what we need to help us feel like we belong.

Well, here goes nothing.

"I've been told that there's this way I say 'Oh. Well that's clever of you,' where people can't figure out if I'm being serious or sarcastic because I've used it in both contexts." - Jon Wong

"Well, were they *actually* being clever? Because if they were, you were serious. If they weren't, then you were being sarcastic." - Rachel

"That's what I keep saying!" - Jon Wong

Jon Wong on the difference between being satisfied and being happy.

I was talking to Lucia yesterday about the move to Fort McMurray and mentioned that the place I was renting out came unfurnished. On the one hand, that's kind of a pain in the arse because it means I have to hunt for furniture when I get there. On the other hand, Lucia suggested that it'll feel more like home because it's my own furniture opposed to someone else's.

Now, let me just say that that isn't true for me. I said that the 2 years I spent in residence (the definitive example of using non-personal furniture) felt a lot more like home to me than the 2 years I spent off campus, where the furniture was all my own. And I said that this was likely because I've never been able to tie my happiness to things like furniture, even though I wish I could. In fact, I often wish that my happiness was tied to something I could control; something like furniture or baseball or something that isn't people. Because as we know, and as I've probably said countless times, people are fickle. As much as we like to say that we can "always count" on so and so, it's never entirely true, mainly because other people have their own lives to live while my furniture pretty much just sits there.

This got me thinking about the nature of happiness as it differs from the nature of satisfaction. And I think I have reached a conclusion. I think that happiness can never be separated from the things in life that are important to you while you can find satisfaction in pretty much anything as long as something good/some success has occurred in that particular department. So really, when Grant and I posted our notes on "'Gemutlichkeit' or Little things that make life... ok," what we were really doing was posting a list of things in life that bring us satisfaction.

The more I think about this, the clearer the distinction becomes. I realize, now, why I never considered myself to be "happy" when the Jays win, or when I have a good day at badminton, or when I've executed a particularly good lesson. But in those moments, I have felt satisfied; satisfied that I have experienced some form of goodness, success, or accomplishment - just not in an area of my life that I consider to be of egoistic importance. And all of this is not to downplay the importance of being satisfied. On the contrary, I think most of us would sacrifice a lot in order to be satisfied when the things that make us happy seem too distant, impossible, or volatile.

Sometimes, it seems like some cruel and ironic joke that it always seems a lot easier to be satisfied than happy. After all, if satisfaction is simply success in the areas of life that are less important to us, it doesn't seem fair that success is so much harder to obtain in the areas of life that are. At the same time, though, I think we have to understand that we measure "success" differently when we're striving for it in areas of our lives that we consider important. For example, badminton is not particularly important to me - in order to feel satisfied, I need only succeed to the degree of having a good day where I'm consistent and play well. However, if badminton was important - truly important - to me, I would need more than that to feel like I've "succeeded". I would need to train; compete; win titles and championships, etc...

At the end of the day, I think that we can learn to be ok with our lives if we were always satisfied - if we could always find success in the little things. I just think that you might have moments where you feel unfulfilled. People have trouble with this all the time. You take stock of your life and you think, "I'm actually having a pretty good life, from all objective measures. There's nothing really to complain about. So why, then, do I feel unfulfilled? Could it be that I'm just spoiled and ungrateful?" Well, you might be, of course. I can't say for sure. But maybe you're just not having success in some part of your life that you consider important or central to you. And I don't think that it's helpful to panic over whether or not this is an indication that everything you've done is meaningless, because that's usually not the case.

I think we are able to find satisfaction because we understand, on some level, that "everything means everything." And as Grant says, that's really not such a bad thing, you know? Don't reduce what you've done just because it's not something that you find important, because somebody, somewhere, would kill to find the kind of success you've found in the areas of your life that you merely find satisfying. To me, delivering a good lesson might merely be satisfying. To a student, who knows? Finding happiness isn't really about finding meaning in that sense. It's about recognizing that meaning can be found in practically everything; it's just that for some reason or another, some things mean more to us, personally, than others.

And that's really not such a bad thing either.

I just accidentally wiped out some parts of my writing project. Thank God I had the foresight to email myself a copy of everything a week ago.